Chthon

4

The cavern passages went down, down, twisting wormlike through the stone. Hot lava had honeycombed this structure long ago, and been folded under, again and again, and powdered out at last to leave the endless passages.

Can all this really be sealed off, Aton thought, when the wind booms through so readily? Surely this hot blast comes from somewhere, and seeks its freedom somewhere. And where the wind escapes, so may a man.

But Tally’s strong, narrow back, half hidden by the waterskin, was unresponsive. No use to inquire there. Even in this buried prison, mention of the minionette brought fear and hate. Safer not to bring up the matter, below.

At the lowest level a guard sat on a great flat slab of rock. A heavy rope was anchored beside him and tied to a large basket. Tally spoke sharply and the man stood up. Together they strained and ground the stone aside, exposing a sunken hole: this was the orifice leading to the nether prison.

Tally tossed the basket in, letting the cord writhe after it. Aton climbed into the hole, gripped the rope, wedged his book between his thighs, and handed himself down into the other world. A final glance at the peering face above: Will I ever see you again, you superstitious high-brow? Not likely.

He went carefully, unbalanced by the full water-skin and the book, unable to look down. Was there a landing here, or had he been tricked into a descent into a furnace? Had he been a fool to trust the man whose girl had—

Thirty feet below the hole he touched the floor. Rope and basket whisked up the moment he let go. The slab of rock ground over again, and for the second time he was isolated in an unknown hell.

There was light, at least—the same phosphorescent product of the walls. There was the wind, too; he had fought it on the rope without even thinking about it. The lower caverns were, after all, habitable.

“Garnet here. Take it.”

Aton spun to face the speaker. This was a large man, topping him by three inches. His body, though running slightly to fat, displayed impressive musculature, and he shouldered a heavy double-bitted axe. His bushy hair and beard were brown.

Aton raised a hand to catch the glistening pebble tossed at him. It was a red translucent crystal, rather pretty: a garnet. He waited.

“You’ll be working Garnet’s mine. Any trouble, I’ll settle it. Bossman. Come on.”

So this was the farmer Tally had warned him about. Aton followed, watching the motion of the man. He did not appear to be in condition to fight, at least not Aton’s way. Perhaps his reputation had made him soft. Or his axe—how had he managed to bring that with him?—might have provided a foolish security. There would come a time to make certain; but for now Aton planned to stay well clear of trouble while he scouted the situation for himself. Information was far more important than physical triumph. Knowledge, in time, would become mastery.

And—escape?

The wind abated as the passage expanded. A woman squatted to one side, a hunched monstrosity; but it was only the distortion of the water-skin on her back. She was sorting food into piles—rough bread, salted meat, other staples relayed from above—and wrapping each in a long dirty cloth for protection. Sanitation was not a concern, in Chthon—there was no illness here—but dehydration was. She stood as they approached.

“Man for you,” Bossman said. He turned to Aton. “Give Garnet your stone.”

Another time, he might have smiled. He held out the stone and Garnet took it, studying him intently. She was a solid, supple woman, too hefty to be good-looking. In a good light her hair might have been blonde. She picked up one of the food packages and gave it to him.

“That’s how it is,” Bossman said. “One garnet, one package. ’Denser’s over there; you grind your own,” indicating a spot down the hall. Aton made out the machine in a recess. “Time’s your own, too—but don’t mine anybody else’s territory.” He ambled off.

Garnet beckoned, and he followed her to an offshoot cavern. She ushered him to a section of wall, well scarred and pitted. She left him there.

Aton looked about him. Men and women were working down the line on either side, chipping at the face with bits of broken stone. Some were sifting through rock dust with their bare hands. Others slept. Two were sitting together, eating and talking. The pace was hardly frenzied.

He studied the wall. No garnets were visible. He thought of pounding loose large chunks with a heavy stone, then realized that this would probably powder any garnets in the way. It would be necessary to go very carefully.

He found a niche for LOE and his lunch, picked up a sharp stone, and tapped the middle section of his mine experimentally. He was rewarded by a choking puff of dust and grit. How many had died here from silicosis? He held back his head and tried again. This time it was difficult to see what he was doing. He could destroy a valuable stone before spotting it. This mining was not the easiest of tasks.

In the next mine downwind a small wiry man observed the proceedings, a faint smile tugging at his features. “Got a better way?” Aton asked, frustrated.

The man came over. He borrowed Aton’s stone, held it to the wall, gently tapped it with his own. The surface began to scale away with a minimum of interference. He leaned over and blew out the dust, careful to keep his face upwind from the cut. He returned Aton’s tool and went back to his own domain.

Aton stared after him, suspicious of this act of instruction. Were these the fiercest of humanity’s prisoners? But he experimented with the new method, gaining proficiency.

After an hour of fruitless chipping he retired to eat his meal. The food tasted uncommonly good. He went to refill his waterskin, then came back to attack his mine again.

Several hours passed. He excavated a fair-sized hole, but found no sign of a garnet. The scattered pocks left by the removal of earlier garnets mocked him. He resented the facility of the unknown person who had succeeded where Aton was failing. He began to understand why the other miners did not bother him: the business of making a living was too important. This was grinding, mind-deadening labor, cramping his forearms, tiring his legs. When he shut his eyes he saw a vision of the blank, pitted, pitiless wall; when he opened them, they smarted and blurred.

At length there was a general exodus, and Aton followed, picking up the routine by observation. They went to Garnet’s office, where she was handing out new packages. The men and women formed into a rough line, each in turn offering a single gem in exchange for the meal.

Aton, of course, was empty-handed.

Garnet accepted no explanations. No garnet, no food. “Don’t cry on my shoulder, Five,” she told him irritably. “You’ve got to learn to work down here, newcomer. You don’t get nothing for nothing. Better go look for a stone.”

Aton left, tired and angry. His hands were raw and blistered, his lungs choking from the dust. He was hungry, but the vacant wall offered no hope.

His little neighbor approached: coarse black hair, bright black eyes. “No food?” Aton nodded. “Look pal, she won’t never give you nothing to eat ’less you got a stone. You got to have a garnet.”

Aton was unimpressed with the news. “I know that,” he snarled. “I forgot to pick one up.”

The man dropped his voice confidentially. “Well, look, see, like if I was to do you a favor, would you be my pal? Name’s Framy. Like if I was to give you a stone…”

Aton studied him, not certain of the gist. What kind of proposition was this? The man was cringingly eager. If he were a pervert…

“No, I ain’t!” Framy exclaimed. Aton made a mental note to be more careful of his expression. The man’s petulance seemed genuine. What could he want, then? Company or protection? Was he a pariah? Was his friendship dangerous?

Aton’s stomach growled. The man might very well be useful, if he had garnets. Protection was a useful commodity. “Maybe,” he said, and introduced himself.

Framy poked a dirty finger into his mouth and popped out a glittering stone. Aton concealed his surprise. How else could a naked man safely store a semi-precious jewel? “Here,” Framy said, proffering the moist garnet. “I got an extra. You take it and get a package. Then you come back to me. Remember, I done you a favor.”

Aton accepted it. Moments later he turned it over to Garnet.

She took it and examined it suspiciously. “Well, I guess you got one,” she conceded reluctantly. She kicked the last package over to him. “You can have what’s left.”

He moved off, tearing it open hungrily. The cloth unraveled and fell free, empty. “There’s nothing here,” he said, showing it to her.

“I forgot to tell you mister. You came too late. Food’s all gone.” She turned her back to him.

“But my garnet—you took my garnet!”

She didn’t bother to look at him. “Too bad. No refunds.”

Aton fought down the urge to grab the tangled mat of hair and drag her through the coarse gravel. The incongruity of the situation struck him: here he was, quite naked, facing a similarly unclad woman—and his most immediate ambition was to knock out her teeth.

But he didn’t dare. He could not be certain that Bossman would meet him alone, in case he were to offer careless resistance to the crude hierarchy. Massed force might destroy him. Escape was far more important than immediate satisfaction.

He could not take vengeance physically. But there were other weapons. Many times would Garnet regret the enemy she had made this moment.

5

There was a certain feel to garnet hunting, a talent that permitted some to discover the stones easily, almost intuitively, while others strained all day (Chthon definition) only to finish hungry. Framy had it. He seemed to smell the precious quarry, and his appetite for riches was insatiable. Aton developed a fair talent; he did not go hungry again, but his reserve never grew large. Each man maintained a private cache, and Framy, at least, labored regularly in the mine more for the sake of appearance than need. A man too quick at finding garnets could become unpopular, and he and his cache were in danger from the hungry ones. Framy had done well to befriend a man like Aton; this was soon apparent.

There were many types in the lower caverns. Not all of the inhabitants were wholly sane, but once their idiosyncrasies were known life was compatible. One fought when one had to, never for amusement; one yielded upon occasion to unreason and stayed clear of trouble unless one wanted it.

One man stood out amid the steady grind for garnets. He was notable because he was a nonsurvival type who managed to survive nicely. This was the grossly obese Hastings: intelligent, knowledgeable, cheerful, quick with his hands, but with a complete vacuity of talent for mining, and perpetually unlucky. He survived as an entrepreneur. He won his garnets from men, rather than from stone.

“I need a blue garnet as I need Laza’s love,” fat Hastings expounded during a break. The others gaped at him, rising to the bait.

“Hasty, Hasty—you know what a blue garnet is?” Framy asked incredulously. “You know what a blue garnet’ll do for a man?”

The other edged in, anticipating a show.

“I know what it’ll do for a man,” Hastings said. “It’ll kill him so fast the chimera wouldn’t pick up the pieces.”

The “chimera” was the cavern name for a deadly predator of the fringe caverns that no person had ever seen—and lived.

“I’ll take that chance,” a man said. “Just gimme the garnet.”

Aton was curious. “I’ve never heard of a blue one.”

“Oh, Fiver,” Framy said, dusting himself off in the center of the group. “Lemme expoun’ to you the facts of life. You know how the little ones we find are red, and maybe a brown one once awhile? Well, there’s other kinds too, we don’t latch on to often. Worth more. Like if you got a black one, you tap ol’ bitch Garnet for a week’s chow, maybe more. And if you got a chunk of pure white jadeite—well, ol’ man Chessy upstairs is hard up for the stuff, and he’ll pull for you something awful, you sneak him a message. ’Nuff of that stuff, you don’t have to mine no more.

“Well, these’r little fish. You ever grab hold a blue garnet, it’s your ticket to freedom.”

Aton’s interest abruptly intensified.

Framy was enjoying himself. He scratched his hair. “Yep. They’ll let you go. You won’t be punished no more. Free as a bird in the big outside.”

The others nodded agreement, sharing the dream. “But you’ll never see one,” a woman said.

“That’s right,” another put in. “Ain’t none of us seen a blue garnet. Ain’t none never will. Ain’t none.”

“That’s a lie!” Framy screamed.

“Don’t call me a liar, you little liar!” the woman said angrily. She had sharp features and black hair winding down her back. Few of the women in the lower prison were pretty, but this one was; she still looked deceptively young and soft. “I’ll poke your beady little eyeballs back into your dirty little brain,” she continued.

Framy cringed, then came back boldly. “Not with my pal Fiver here, you won’t. He’ll get you good.”

It hadn’t occurred to Aton that the woman’s threat might be literal. But it was; she had nails like talons. She now eyed him speculatively. “I reckon I can handle him awright,” she said. She inhaled to make her fine bosom stand out. “How about it, mister?”

This too was literal, and not entirely unattractive. But not now. Aton attempted a return to the subject. “What’s so deadly about the blue garnet, Hasty?”

“So your last name’s Five,” Hastings mused, as though he had just discovered the fact. “They call that the pixie number, you know. Dangerous. Only name I ever heard that translates into itself.”

“What’re you talking about?” Framy demanded.

Hastings held out a fleshy palm.

Framy fought his curiosity and lost. He spat out a small garnet and handed it over. Hastings considered Framy his prime customer.

“Science of numerology,” Hastings said, and the people around settled back comfortably, listening. “Every number from 1 to 9 has its vibration. You add up the vowels—A is 1 because it’s first in the old English alphabet, E is 5 because it’s fifth, and so on—you add them up, and add again, until you have a single number. Each one has its influence—1 is the beginning, 2 is slow, and so on down the line.”

“But how does 5—?”

“Spell it out. F-I-V-E. That I is worth 9; the E, 5. Add them up to make 14. That’s too big, so add the one and the four to each other to get your number: 5.”

Framy’s face lighted. “Five is 5!” he said, delighted with the discovery. Someone snickered, but he was oblivious. He would be translating people to numbers for many shifts to come.

Suddenly he sobered. “You say 5 is dangerous?”

“Full of surprises. 5 can bring a fortune out of the blue—or sudden death. Really has to watch his step.”

Aton steered the subject back once more. “You were talking about the special garnet.”

Hastings settled his belly back comfortably. He waited. The others chuckled: it was Aton’s turn to cough up the stake.

“Well, take a look at it this way,” Hastings said after the transaction. “A blue garnet is valuable. So valuable that a man might bribe his way to freedom with it. That’s a commendable price. Perhaps there are no blues, so the authorities believe they’re safe; or it may be their subtle way of telling us that there is no such thing as a reprieve. But if there is such a thing—a blue garnet, I mean—it is certain that it is a lot more valuable than a prisoner or a principle. Now all of us here are criminals—”

“I ain’t!” Framy yelled. “I ain’t no criminal. I was—”

“FRAMED!” the group chorused.

“Well, I was,” Framy said, hurt.

“…Criminals, imprisoned here for the rest of our unnatural lives. There isn’t any one of us here who doesn’t want to get out more than anything else he can think of. There isn’t any one of us who has a chance at all, unless he wants to take the Hard Trek. Except for the one who happens to uncover the blue stone.

“Now if I had a blue garnet right here in my hand, like this—” he extended a closed fist “—and I said, ‘Gentlemen, I have found eureka and I’m going to leave you now…!’ ”

The fingers of his hand slipped apart a little, accidentally, it seemed. A touch of blue showed through. They watched in shocked silence.

Hastings made as if to rise. “Well, freedom is calling me!” he sang out gaily. “Be seeing you—never!”

Three flying bodies crashed him to the floor, as two men and a woman launched themselves simultaneously. One grabbed his outflung arm and wrenched the hand open with cruel force. A fragment of blue cloth fluttered out.

They turned him loose silently, the avarice in their faces fading. Hastings heaved himself upright, rubbing his arm. “Maybe you get my meaning now,” he said. “You can’t go free unless you make your garnet known. And when you do…”

Garnet was hard on Aton. She reviled him every time she saw him, and lost no opportunity to make him miserable. His meals were difficult. Garnet claimed that his offerings were too small or had flaws, or merely denied he had given her one, thus forcing two or even three for a single package.

Aton took it. He never argued with her, always thanked her for the food as though she were doing him a favor. He stood silent while she yelled at him, simply looking at her. At times he would come to her for no apparent reason, just to sit and listen to her scream at him.

Framy couldn’t understand it. “What you want to hang around her for?” he inquired incredulously. “There’s lots better women’n her. Nice bodies and soft tongues, and they got the eye for you, Fiver, oh, my, they do. Like that sexy slut with the black hair. Why fool with the biggest bitch in the pit?”

Aton didn’t answer.

Garnet grew progressively more violent. It was not uncommon for her to strike him with her fist, or to kick him. Something was driving her to fury. Aton accepted it with equanimity, sometimes even smiling.

There was no night or day in Chthon, but the prisoners tended to slip into a typical cycle of labor and rest oriented on the regular meals. Most worked in company, though the mines were fiercely individual, and retired to private caves to sleep. Aton chose his own hours, and so happened to be working alone when Garnet came upon him as he was chipping out an unusually large gem.

She began cursing him immediately. “Keep working, you dirty bastard,” she shouted, as he stopped to give her courteous attention. Aton only smiled—in the caverns, strictly speaking, everyone was dirty. Washing was done by the action of sand and wind. The standard epithet referred to more than physical status. “This ain’t no vacation.”

“I know, my dear.”

Her mouth fell open. Speechless with rage, she scooped up a stone and bashed it against the gem in the wall. Aton glanced at the ruin and took hold of her.

“It seems you have taken your payment,” he said, a new note in his voice. “Now it is time for you to render service.”

She struck at him. He knocked away the stone and took her down on the cavern floor. He was far stronger than she, as his genes were derived from the modified stock of the heavy-gravity Hvee colony. Quick blows to selected nerves made her stiffen with pain; shock made her passive for the moment, though she retained full consciousness and sensation.

Then realization came, and she struggled violently, but there was nothing she could do. No broken song stopped him this time, and Garnet had the protection of neither clothing nor experience.

It was over at his convenience, and he let her go. She stumbled away, cursing in a whisper and not knowing how to cry. He knew she would never speak of the matter; her shame was not the forgotten role revisited upon her, but the fact that he had been the one to master her, in every sense of the word.

The image of Malice was in his mind as he brushed away the blood-red fragments of the shattered garnet. I had no pleasure from you, he thought, not even that of conquest.

6

“Five, Fiver, you got to come with me right now!” Framy was more excited than Aton had ever seen him before. “You got to come, you got to see it, you got to.”

Framy was a high-strung individual, but this was something out of the ordinary. Aton went.

Framy led the way upwind, far outside the habited caverns. “I been exploring,” he explained breathlessly. “I been looking for something…”

He had been looking far afield. Aton was glad for the chance to scout the outlying area; he had not had a pretext before. The strength of the gale increased as they went, and the heat blasted into their faces fiercely. They paused often to gulp huge quantities of water.

The journey seemed interminable. For more than an hour they plunged into the furnace draft, fighting mounting pressure. At last the little man stopped.

“Around that corner,” he gasped. “Put your head around, careful, so you can see it.”

Aton obliged, gripping the ridged wall as well as he could. The heat and wind intensified, and his eyes burned and blurred almost immediately. He wondered, fleetingly but not for the first time, what possible origin there could be for a subterranean holocaust such as this. He’d probably never know; the secret was protected by its own temperature.

The cave ahead was like any other, with a high ceiling and an opening at the far end from which the wind howled ravenously. The luminescence from the walls was brighter here, and of a different texture. The greater heat and agitation might be responsible—except that the glow had been decreasing up to this point. Aside from this mystery, the scene was not distinctive.

Something caught his eye. Aton studied the ceiling. There, from long corrugations, water was dropping and evaporating into the rushing air. This was where the moisture came from, for the condensers. That evaporation probably also exerted considerable cooling power. It might be the only thing that made these caverns bearable at all.

“The floor! Look at the floor!” Framy was shouting in his ear. Aton forced his bleary eyes to focus and looked.

There, at the far edge of the grotto, on the verge of the tunnel beyond, was a single glowing blue garnet.

They withdrew to relative shelter to consider the situation. “I saw it,” Aton said. “I saw it. But remember Hasty’s warning—”

Framy was practically dancing with excitement. “I don’t care what Fatsy said. I got to have that rock.”

“It would be better just to leave it alone. You’d never make it out of Chthon. That gem is death.”

Framy turned on him fiercely. “You want me to leave it so’s you can take it yourself. You want to get out worse’n anybody. I know you—”

Aton stared him down.

“I’m sorry, pal,” the little man said. “I know you wouldn’t do nothing like that. But look—I just got to have it. I got to.”

Aton said nothing.

“Look,” Framy began again, desperately. “It ain’t like I was a criminal like everyone else here. I don’t mean nothing against you, Fiver. I don’t know what you done. But I was framed. It ain’t right I should be down here. I got to get out.”

You fool, Aton thought, don’t you know that you are better off here than you could ever be outside? Your own mind has framed you into suicide.

Seeing his companion still deep in thought, Framy spoke more rapidly. “It ain’t as if—ain’t like anybody’d know I had it. I’d hide it in the skin ’til I had a chance to smuggle out a message. Tally, upstairs, wouldn’t cheat—”

Would you offer your heart to the chimera? thought Aton.

Aton came to a decision. “All right. Who’s going to fetch it?”

It was a good question. They huddled against the wall near the bend, increasingly aware of the enormous heat rushing by, knowing how much worse it would be on the other side of the water-drip. Already their drinking supply was low. It would take a strong man to reach the garnet and return.

But Framy was undismayed. “That’s why I needed you,” he admitted. “I’da told you anyway, Five pal, but—I figured it I run for it I can make it to the stone. But in case I don’t make it, I got to have someone to pull me back. Remember, I done you a favor—”

You should not have done that favor. The wage of carelessness is death.

“I think I’ve heard that reasoning before,” Aton said. “But if you’re fool enough to try it, I’m fool enough to haul you back. We’d better get on with it before we fry.”

“Thanks, pal,” Framy said simply. He plunged ahead immediately with a bravery that belied his reputation. Aton saw him rocked back against the wall by the hot gust. Framy shielded his face with a forearm and forced his way onward. He was out of the full current, driving along the side wall, but his progress was still agonizingly slow. He was leaning forward against the pressure, feet placed and braced most carefully. The skin of his arm reddened with the heat.

At length he reached the edge of the far tunnel. Here the draft abated, missing the small pocket formed by the projecting rock surrounding the opening. But Aton knew that the channeled flow would be ferocious directly in front of the tunnel. That was where the garnet sat, trapped in a minor declivity. It must have rolled there from the room beyond, perhaps many years ago.

Framy put a tentative hand out into the blast and withdrew it quickly. Here it was really hot. The drops from the ceiling vanished into the wind several feet below this spot. Then, gathering himself for a final effort, Framy dived for the garnet.

Aton saw the man’s body caught by the current and hurled sideways. He felt the terrible pain. But one hand was on the garnet, gripping it tightly. Framy had his blue ticket to destruction.

He rolled with the wind and struggled to pull himself out of it, into the shelter to the side. But his efforts were weak, haphazard, disorganized by pain; soon they ceased altogether. He was unconscious, and would soon be dead.

Aton charged into the room. He too was caught by the power of the air and tossed back against the nearer wall. He dropped to hands and knees, ducked his head behind his shoulder, inched toward the prone figure. He knees skidded against the smooth surface as the center stream took hold. It was hard to breathe.

Aton lowered himself to his belly and heaved forward. He no longer tried to look where he was going, as the wind buffeted head and body; human eyes could not endure the strain. He concentrated on his blind direction, his head cleaving the holocaust. He did not know when he reached the body.

Realizing that the thing he was crawling over was an arm, Aton took hold and tried to reverse. His eyes smarted painfully the moment he opened them; it was better to be blind. But he was unable to turn around while hanging on to the arm. He sat up.

The blast of wind caught him again and flipped him over. For one brief moment his eyes popped open, bringing him a tormented but perfect picture of the cavern beyond the garnet’s spot. Then he was on his belly again, feet in the wash, toes blistering, hands dragging a pinioned arm as he wriggled, like a sightless, dehydrated worm, away from the kiln.

He found himself emerging from the hell room, unaware of anything that had transpired since the vision of the far cavern. He must have been only partly conscious himself, dragging on by instinct. He twisted around to sight along the arm he clasped, and discovered that Framy was still attached to it. Framy’s other hand still clutched the garnet.

Aton gulped water feverishly from the water-skin that was propped in an alcove, then put both hands to his mouth to stop the invaluable fluid from spewing out again. His bag was now empty; he found Framy’s and forced the last of that supply down the man’s barely conscious throat. The need was imperative—there were blisters and bruises all over Framy’s body.

Why didn’t we think to pour all the water into one skin, and use the other for a shield? he thought, too tired to be angry.

Framy revived at last. “We got to get out of here,” he rasped.

He clutched his treasure and leaned on Aton as they stumbled down the passage.

Both men regained strength as distance eased the sirocco. Once the wind diminished and cooled, their progress was better. They could afford to let it boost them along. Half an hour saw them well on the way home.

But it was not over yet. Framy skidded to a precipitous halt. “Five. Look!”

A small monster barred their path. Animals were few in Chthon, and almost never seen by man, but they did exist and were invariably formidable. The chimera was the worst, but there were other terrors, too. This one was a nine-inch lizard-like creature, red as a garnet. Deep-set and evil eyes glared burningly; a wrinkled jaw opened and closed with spasmodic intensity.

“Salamander!” Framy whispered.

Aton had heard of them. The miniature fire lizards inhabited the upwind caverns. They were fast and vicious and could leap high, and their tiny jaws secreted deadly poison. One scratch, even one squirt of it on blistered skin, and it would be over.

“We could outrun it,” Aton said.

“Where? Back there?”

The salamander did not allow them time to discuss the matter. It charged, fat little legs scratching on the rock. Awkward it might appear, but it was making a good five miles per hour against the wind.

They wheeled as one and ran back up the passage. The wind seemed to strike with renewed force, pushing them back. The lizard followed with grim determination, losing ground, but grudgingly. It was evident that it could maintain the pace a lot longer than the suddenly exhausted men. The feeling of strength engendered by downwind travel was illusory.

Ordinarily a man could outrun a salamander, since its cruising speed was limited and largely independent of the wind. But Aton and Framy were trapped in unfavorable conditions, and had neither space nor strength to make an escape upwind. Yet it would be foolhardy to wait; bare hands and feet were no match for a creature that could jump and bite at will in close quarters. The passage was too narrow; the weapons impotent. Oh, for Bossman’s axe!

Framy ground to a halt. “I’m beat,” he gasped. “I can’t go no more.”

Aton tried to help him along, but was too fatigued himself to do enough. The salamander was gaining. The adventure in the cave of the blue garnet had taken too much out of both of them.

“No use,” Framy said. “Just one thing to do.” With a supreme effort he held out the garnet. “You got a good arm?”

Aton didn’t argue. He took the glinting gem, hefting its two-ounce weight carefully. He fired it at the oncoming lizard.

His aim was low. The stone bounced on the floor directly before its target and cracked into two pieces. One of them sailed over the creature’s head; the other caught it in the middle of the body, skittering it sideways a few inches. Stung, the salamander pounced vengefully on the fragment, jaws clamping in a vicious bite.

They did not stay to watch the result. There was little question what a garnet fragment would do to a set of clamping teeth. They hurdled the thrashing monster and ran on down the passage to safety.

“It wouldn’t have been any good anyway,” Aton said when they slowed, knowing the emotion Framy felt at the loss of his prize. “It had a flaw. Garnets don’t break like that.”

“We could’ve used the skins,” Framy said.

This was the second time Aton’s mind had betrayed him under pressure, the second time proper use of the water-skins would have reduced their risk. Throw one at the lizard, bury it, if only for a moment—what had prevented him from trying that?

Now the garnet was gone. The blue garnet that could never bring freedom, except in the most devious way. The caverns would riot if they knew of it; no integrity was secure in the face of such a lure.

“Best not to tell—” he said.

“Who’d believe me?”

The secret would be kept, for a time.

And what of the larger secret? Aton asked himself. The one that could generate such chaos as to destroy both worlds of Chthon? Am I to tell them what I saw in that one brief glimpse of the far cavern, as the wind flipped me over?

Must it remain unknown: an entire passage lined with lustrous blue crystal?

Four

“Machinist Five to Hold Seven, Cargo. Emergency.” Aton shut down his machine and grabbed his shirt as the foreman waved him on.

“That’s the Captain! Take priority routing.”

Why should I jump when the Captain calls? Aton thought I’m not in the Navy any more. Three years, and they taught me two things: machinery and personal combat. Now I’m twenty-four years old and still looking for my woman—the darling bitch who charmed me so easily in the forest. I don’t have to jump for anybody, except for her.

He stepped into the nearest trans booth, fastened himself inside the waiting capsule, punched the code for Hold Seven. As the vehicle began to move down its track he hit the PRIORITY stud and hung on.

They made me a machinist after all. I had to have a trade to travel in space, and that meant taking what the Navy offered. I had to wait through that enlistment, with that love burning inside. But I learned how to search for a camouflaged woman, oh, yes.

The sealed capsule popped into the vacuum tunnel and accelerated. Its internal relays clicked as it plotted a course through the labyrinth, flashing past intersections and other traffic. It was a miniature spaceship, traversing this hidden network as the Jocasta traversed the hidden network of the stars. For this capsule, the walls did not exist; it could reach any outlet in moments. For the larger ship—

The § drive—more properly called the F.T.L. (Faster Than Light drive)—whose discovery dated man’s novalike fling into space, was more of an effect than a science. Professor Feetle, the smiling legend said, had discovered it one day as he eased himself into his villa pool. As the water rose to accommodate his descending corpulence, an apple flew over the roof and bounced on his head. His poolside recorder, triggered into action by the key words “displacement” and “gravity,” faithfully monitored the ensuing harangue. In due course this excerpt was transcribed by the robot-secretary, who made tasteful substitutions for frequent blasphemous expressions and references to neighboring juveniles, and forwarded the product to a technical bulletin whose robot-editor printed the report verbatim. Fifteen free-lance research companies attempted to construct the device outlined. Twelve gave it up within a year, two discovered serendipitous side effects and forgot about the original specification, and the last had a diode misconnected by an incompetent robot-employee and came up with §.

At first the device was not recognized as anything more than a perpetual-motion machine. It was bald and corpulent and tended to run around in circles while emitting angry squeals. An inquiry to Professor Feetle brought a furious suit for character assassination. Tested in space, it accelerated from an initial impetus of something less than an inch per second to something less than a foot per second in the course of an hour. During the second hour it attained a velocity several times as great. Eventually it caromed with such vigor that only instruments could track it. Finally it disappeared: although it had never left its self-determined orbit, it was gone.

Almost gone: the instruments picked up strange trace radiation—Cherenkov rays, the wake left by an impulse that exceeds the speed of light through a given medium. In this case the medium was a virtually perfect vacuum.

Professor Feetle withdrew his suit and took an active interest in his creation. But after that, the legend continued less benignly, censorship cast its mantle over the proceedings. It was rumored that the § device, once activated, drew its power from some unknown source—some power limitless in nature; that ships were constructed around large § devices and sent into some limbo that light itself was too coarse to penetrate; that not all of these ships returned; that there were malignant ghosts in far space, or nonspace.

Out of all this emerged the standard § ship; a full-sized vessel with a crew of thousands and a drive that could take it anywhere. Such a ship was the Jocasta; her velocity was governed by logarithmic ratio. The number of hours in which she accelerated could be taken as the exponent of that power of 10 required to express her speed in miles per hour. Thus when the ship’s § clock registered 2, it meant that the drive had been functioning for two hours and that the speed of the ship relative to her starting point was 10², or one hundred miles per hour.

Oh, yes, Aton thought, as his capsule banked and spun, the § ships started slowly. But 8.83 on the ship’s clock was faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. Thirteen on the clock represented a full light-year per hour, and 16 was the signal to begin deceleration, since the drive could not be disengaged while any number showed on the clock and higher speed would fling the ship out of the galaxy.

A day and a half, objective Earth time, could take such a ship anywhere in the galaxy.

The capsule slowed, bringing Aton’s mind back to practical matters. It pushed through the seal, re-entering normal pressure. His journey, whether of rods or of lightyears, was over.

Five

Captain Moyne was waiting impatiently for him. He had never met her before in person, but it was not possible to mistake her. She was a handsome woman of indeterminate age, sleek and severe in the merchant service uniform. Her lips were almost colorless; her hair was bound in a tight skullcap and hidden under her helmet. Her face showed no trace of the ravage of twenty-four years in space. She was cordially disliked by the crew: a dislike she cultivated assiduously.

Why was she alone? An emergency should have the officers of the ship Socking impotently about her. And what was she doing in an obscure cargo hold?

“Five,” she said without preamble. “Seven’s refrigerant has broken down. We have thirty minutes, no more.”

Aton followed her to the hold. “Captain, I think you ordered the wrong man. I’m a machinist.”

She broke open a locker with practiced competence and removed a set of space suits. “I have the right man.”

“Look, I can’t fix a cooling system with press and die—”

The Captain whirled and caught his shirt with a slender hand. She yanked the fastenings open, reached inside, flipped out a thin booklet hidden in an inside pocket. “Is this not an illegal copy of the ship’s lay roster?” she asked.

She had him. Prosecution on that score would net him two years in prison and a lifetime proscription against space employment. The lay roster of a merchant ship was a classified document.

“You’re the captain, Captain,” he said.

She flung a suit at him. “Put this on.”

He hesitated. His heavy coveralls would not fit inside the light suit.

The Captain caught his thought immediately. “Strip. We can’t spare the time for modesty.” Matching action to word, she stepped out of her own uniform, the scant underclothing revealing an astonishingly well-proportioned figure, and climbed efficiently into her space suit.

Aton followed, still uncertain what was to be required. She did not leave him long in doubt.

“Our margin may be twenty minutes, but we can’t take the chance. We’ve got to move this cargo in Seven over to Eight, where the cooling mechanism is functioning. We’ll work together as long as possible; then I’ll cover you with the hydrant. Don’t waste any time at all, but don’t shake up the caskets any more than necessary. Let’s get to work.”

“Cover me with the—what’s in that hold?”

She picked up one of the boxes and marched out of the room. “Turlingian Aphids.”

The box in his hands quivered as her meaning sank in. The Taphids! The eaters of spaceships!

Captain Moyne explained the situation in snatches as they worked. “They’re insects, grubs. Considered a delicacy on a number of planets. Have to be shipped live, but the low temperature keeps them in hibernation. When it warms, they begin feeding. First their own casing, then the cargo. Then anything else, including the crew. Can’t stop them; they’ll bore through metal, in time. Have to keep them cold and quiet. Clock’s at 13 now. We can’t bail out.”

That was a considerable understatement. It was not physically possible to leave a ship traveling beyond the speed of light. The outside universe simply did not exist for it. Five hours deceleration could drop them into sublight—if the hunger of the Taphids could wait that long. And the economic and political consequences—

“Is this a legal cargo?”

“Don’t be naïve. Why do you think I sent for you?”

Why, indeed. The Captain, it appeared, was a ruthless businesswoman. Strictly speaking, no interstellar commerce could be considered illegal, since no planet could enforce its laws beyond its immediate sphere of influence and no jurisprudence existed formally on a larger scale. But a certain body of common law had grown up and gained steadily in power, and individual policies were similar enough to encourage travel and trade, particularly among those planets which took pride in reputation. Sector law and the sector police force existed in name only; the idea of such power alarmed the fiercely independent colonies far more than that of criminal behavior.

But violation of the common-law code was apt to blacklist the offender on many prosperous worlds. No merchant ship could afford that. The Captain had reason for secrecy.

Half the caskets were moved without event. Then it began. The box Aton was carrying bulged. Pinpricks speckled the surface, then nail holes. His heavy gloves transmitted unmistakable motion from within; then horny white maggots spewed out. The Taphid menace had awakened.

Aton stared at the sandpaper-surfaced arthropods for a perilous moment, then dropped the box. It burst open immediately and foamed with slimy bodies. The maggots sensed him unerringly and advanced across the floor in a white wave.

“Faceplate!” the Captain snapped behind him. He fastened it barely in time; a stream of freezing foam was already on the way. She had turned the hydrant on him. Now he understood the reason for the suits. The foam would have killed him in minutes if it had caught him without protection.

The creatures on the floor curled and subsided, reflexing into hibernation. But already the remaining caskets were writhing. “Hurry!” the Captain’s voice came in his earphone, over the sigh of the suit’s air circulation. “I can only cover one at a time.”

His mind and body recoiled from the contact, but Aton understood too well the consequence of delay. He picked up the burst container and carried it into the refrigerated hold. The Captain stood in the doorway and sprayed him intermittently with foam, alternating with shots at the stacked boxes in Seven. The Taphid was not dangerous while frozen—but the margin was thin. If the hydrant failed—

Aton hurried.

He cleaned up in the Captain’s apartments. He could not afford to be questioned about the nature of his duty at Hold Seven, and his uniform, forgotten in the rush, had been soaked in foam. There were also certain other matters to discuss before they parted company.

He emerged from the lavatory to discover the Captain reclining in a simple dress. Her hair was unbound and hung in dull-brown tresses. She looked young, too young to be capable of the nerve and power he had seen. Appearance was illusion; she was tough, and there was a battle to come. It would be fatal to let her pose undermine him.

Aton evaluated his assets: he had done her a service that could very well have saved the ship, and he had information that could force her resignation from the merchant service. But she was still the captain, with a captain’s powers, and had similar goods on him. Stalemate, unless one of them made a mistake. Or lost his nerve.

“Sit down, Aton,” she said, indicating a place on the couch beside her. Her voice was soft, almost musical. She was, he realized with a start, playing up to him. Was she in search of more than a handyman? Or had she coolly elected to use sex appeal to improve her position? What were her limits?

“The lay system,” she said, beginning the fencing, “is a most convenient method for the arrangement of equitable remuneration for the members of a merchant voyage.”

It was. The system had been borrowed from the practice of ancient whaling and sealing ships on old Earth. The members of the crew received, in lieu of pay, a certain share of the profits. Fiftieth lay represented one fiftieth of the total, and so on. Even a two-thousandth lay could come to an attractive figure, if the voyage was good. Every crewman had an interest in the economic welfare of the enterprise.

Aton nodded and applied the precept of best defense. “Shipment of Taphids must remunerate well indeed.”

She smiled. “The owners, of course, take second lay—half the profit.”

“What lay does the Taphid take?”

The Captain refused to give way. The Jocasta’s lays go on down to four-thousandth for the recruit crewman—”

“Two-thousandth, for experienced machinists,” Aton said, moving closer. “But sometimes there are hazardous duties—”

“Fractional lays have to be figured at every port—”

“And the refrigeration checked—”

“In case a crewman resigns and demands his share—”

“Or his next-of-kin demands it—”

Her eyes were gray, almost green. “Therefore the lay roster is a comprehensive manual identifying every person on the ship.”

“And all legal cargo.” Her hair seemed brighter, coppery.

“Possession by unauthorized persons is felonious—”

“As is shipment of the maggot,” Aton finished.

Her lips were firm and close. “However—” she said.

Aton kissed her.

He moved into it shrewdly, conscious of his power over this woman, prepared to complete the tacit understanding by whatever token was required. He knew that something more than mutual liability was in order; neither one could allow the other to go forth with damning intent. But this was no more than the intellectual machination of survival. On the emotional level his heart was weighed by the disappointing search for the minionette—if, indeed, she existed as such. The Captain interested him only as a complication, not as a woman.

But a strange fire took him as his lips touched hers. What had been calculated art became guileless reality. He wanted her as the woman.

She twisted free. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

Aton suppressed the frustration of sudden rejection and chose to interpret the question as business. “The lay roster? Call it the same reason you smuggle Taphids.” The debate had no interest for him now. He was angry, angry that he could be aroused and cut off so readily. But what he had said to her was the truth: their understanding did not require that their deeper motives be advertised. The two of them had a balance of a sort. It had to remain.

She leaned toward him, applying the lure again. What was the matter with her? He had to admit it was effective; already the yearning for her was reappearing. This was no woman to trifle with. He had never been subjected to such a campaign, never been susceptible to it. He declined to play the game, this time; he would not kiss her again.

“What is it that you wear,” she asked, “in your hair?” There was a slight pause in her question that disturbed him. She had been intending to say something else, or perhaps to say it in a different way. He had assumed that the slight affectation in her speech was a function of rank—but she was not playing Captain with him now, and it remained.

He took down the plant. “This is my hvee. It lives on air and love—its love for its companion. If it were to be taken from me, it would die.”

She lifted it from his hand. “I have heard of the hvee fable,” she murmured, studying it. “Charming.”

Again Aton was angry, unreasonably. He had thought the Taphid a fable, until this day. It was not surprising that others did not give credence to the unique property of the hvee. “I’ll demonstrate,” he said, taking it back. He set it on a table across the cabin and stepped back.

The hvee held its bloom for a moment. Then its leaves began to wilt. Aton returned quickly and picked it up, and strength came back to it, making the plant green and fresh and whole again. “No fable.”

The Captain’s eyes were bright. “What an enchanting liaison,” she said. “Your mother gave it to you.”

Aton’s jaw tightened. “No.”

She touched his hand, smiling. “I hurt you.”

“No!” But beneath her understanding gaze, he felt the need to justify himself.

“My father,” he said, “married a girl of the Family of Ten. She lived with him two years, and the hvee flourished as never since. She was kind and she was loving and she died in childbirth.”

The Captain kept her hand on his. “I do not need to know, Aton.”

But now he needed to tell her. “After that, Aurelius went to space. His cousin, Benjamin Five, acted as caretaker of the farm, so that the hvee would not die. Aurelius traveled to far planets, trying to forget. His ship put down for emergency repair on an unidentified planet. He—associated with a native girl, and he took her with him when they left. He brought her to Hvee.”

The Captain gazed into his troubled eyes. “It is not necessary to—”

“She stayed with him just one year—and deserted him. I suppose she returned to her backwoods planet. Aurelius did not travel again; he farmed the hvee and brought me up alone.”

“But she gave him the strength to continue—”

“She did not love him!” Aton shouted, casting off her hand. “She left him. No Hvee daughter would have done that. And I had no mother, real or step.”

“Perhaps she left him because she loved him,” the Captain said. “Could you, could you not understand that?”

“No!”—raising his hand as if to strike her—“If I ever meet that woman, I will kill her. And I claim my lineage from the Family of Ten. From the woman that was worthy. Ten!”

“So vehement!” But the Captain changed the subject. In thirty-six hours I will show you where the Taphids are delivered. Now go, quickly.”

Aton left.

Six

Four shifts later, in the cargo hold, Aton and the Captain loaded the Taphid caskets into a planetary shuttle. “No one else is going?” he inquired.

“No one else.”

Aton completed the job in silence. This strange woman would tell him what was happening soon enough. Apparently she had cleaned up the hold herself in the intervening period. The damaged caskets had been repackaged.

The little shuttle cast loose in the shadow of the mother vessel. The unwinking stars were visible through the shuttle’s port. Aton idly studied them while the Captain handled the controls, trying to guess what part of the galaxy they were in. “When I was a spaceman,” he said, referring to his recent years in the Navy, “I learned never to look at the naked stars. When you stare at them too long they are apt to burn holes in the retina.”

She snorted. “When I went to space, I learned to tell fact from fiction.”

Aton laughed. The shuttle came around the ship, into the sunlight. A hood slid over the port, protecting them from the more severe radiation and leaving only the internal screen for guidance. The Captain piloted the little ship down from orbit, into the traces of atmosphere.

“This is the Xest outpost,” she said.

“I still haven’t learned about fact and fiction. You mean there are such things as Xestians?”

“Xests. Everything exists, if you travel far enough,” she said. “They seldom communicate with human worlds, but the Xests may be the strongest nonhuman influence in our region of the galaxy. They happen to believe in live and let live, and they don’t need us. But this outpost is so much closer to human trade routes than to their own that they elected to do business with us. The Jocasta is one of several merchant ships handling private orders.”

“And they eat the Taphids!”

“They may. They may raise them as pets. We don’t know. At any rate, they ordered this shipment. They pay well and their credit is excellent.”

Aton shook his head. “Every time I think I’m used to space, it amazes me again. Yet if so many myths are true…” He left the sentence unfinished, thinking of the minionette.

She glanced at him. “There is one problem.”

“Naturally. That’s why Machinist Five was invited.”

“The Xests are nonsexual creatures. They have great difficulty comprehending the human system. Traders have succeeded in a partial explanation, but misunderstandings remain. They believe that two beings, one male and one female, make up the composite human entity.”

“Don’t they?”

“The Xest mind misses the nuances.” She frowned. “As Captain, protocol requires that I visit in person. But to them—”

“By yourself you’re only half a captain!” Aton slapped his knee. “Grievous violation of etiquette.”

“Precisely.”

The Xests were small by human standards, under a hundred pounds if scaled by Earth gravity. Here, however, weight was only a quarter Earth-normal. Eight delicate appendages sprouted from the aliens’ globular bodies in phalangidean symmetry. Communication had to be by galactic signs; they had no conception of sound.

Protocol further required the entertainment of the human for a specified period and the exchange of gifts. The Xests were semitelepathic, able to respond directly to emotion but not meaning, and believed that the honor paid to the visitor was automatically appreciated by the species. Captain Moyne presented them with several cylinders of emergency oxygen—a commodity as precious to them as to man—and in return an artisan contracted to produce a portrait of the human.

It was not long before the Xest spokesman got off on the favorite riddle: the binary nature of man. “Two species to make one Human?” it signaled.

“One species, two sexes,” Aton returned.

“Yes, yes—Male of one species, Female of other.”

“No, no—male and female of same species, Homo sapiens.”

“Of same unit?” the sexless creature signed.

This would be another term for their conception of blood relationship. “No, too close,” Aton began, but gave it up.

Captain Moyne watched this exchange with a half-smile, but made no comment.

“Will never understand,” the Xest finished, perplexed. “Fire and water mix to make Human. Inevitable destruction—but that is your problem. Let us talk of trade.”

The hosts understood the need for occasional estivation. A generous accommodation was provided for the Human: one bedroom, complete with bathroom fixture, kitchen fixture, appurtenances, bed.

“All right,” said Aton. “Who gets it?”

“I do,” the Captain answered firmly.

“Don’t you think it should be share and share alike?”

“No.”

“Should I make a complaint to the innkeeper?”

“Protocol forbids. You may absent yourself while I prepare to retire.”

“But where will I sleep?”

“When you return you may make yourself a lair on the floor.”

Upon that return, he found her sitting up in bed clad in the filmiest nightgown he had ever seen through. The game, it appeared, was not over yet, and she had certainly come prepared. The surprising rondure of the woman behind the uniform was once more evident beyond any reasonable doubt. She both intrigued and frustrated him, and he was not entirely pleased by the suspicion that she understood this well.

Aton sat on the edge of the bed. “What is your secret, Captain? You have the body of a young girl—a mature young girl—yet you must be fifty, at least.”

“The years in space are brief,” she said. She retained the skullcap; no trace of her hair showed.

“Not that brief.”

“Leave a woman her secrets, and perhaps she’ll leave you yours.”

There was an implication here. “What do you know of my secrets?”

She leaned forward, letting the sheet drift to her slim waist, letting the nightgown pull tight. “The lay roster. You’ve been using it to search out every female crew member on the ship. You are seeking a woman.”

She knew. Suddenly he wanted very much to talk about it, to lay bare the secret that had driven him from planet to planet and ship to ship for four years. The enormous futility of that search, that difficult seeking through stolen passenger lists and pay rosters for an imitation siren, that almost certain disappointment, brought a crashing misery about his soul. It was too much to bear.

He became aware of himself cradled in her arms, his head against her beating breast. She held him closely, stroking his hair, while the sorrow and pain of his memory flowed from him. “I’m in love with an illusion,” he whispered. “A girl with a song played a game of love in the forest, and I can’t rest until that song is complete. I have to find her, even though I know—”

“Who is she?” the Captain asked softly.

Again the agony washed over him, a sea of despair he had dammed back too long. “She called herself Malice,” he said, “and I suppose it was allegorical. The name of a siren, a minionette, who lives to torment man. In that guise she gave me the hvee. If she exists, I am lost; if she does not, my life has been a dream, a tender nightmare.”

She bent down and touched her lips to his with the tingle of fire. “Do you love her so much, Aton?”

“I love her! I hate her! I must have her.”

She kissed his cheek, his eyelids. “Can there be no other woman? No other love?”

“None. Not until the song is finished. Not until I know what no person knows, what no text reveals. Oh, God, what I would do for love of Malice… only to have her with me.”

She held him, and in time he drifted fitfully to sleep, still fully clothed. “It was so sweet, so sweet,” he thought he heard her say.

Negotiations for additional trade were completed the following day, and Aton and the Captain made ready to return to the Jocasta.

“We thank you. Human,” the Xest spokesman signaled. “We now offer our gift to you, our portrait of yourself.”

They brought forth a large covered framework. Aton wondered when their artist could have done the work, since neither he nor the Captain had posed. Unless the technique were subjective…

The portrait was unveiled. It was, after all, a web-network, colored threads woven across the hollow frame, passing each other in intricate parallels and skews and slants, touching and tracing three-dimensional patterns in a kind of gossamer fascination. It signified nothing, at first; then, as his emotions began to respond to the sense of the design, lured inside by clever signal-strands, the whole crept into focus, a weird and vivid picture of a forest scene.

Two people were depicted, coming alive through the alien magic, human, similar, yet oddly opposite. One, a strikingly beautiful woman, her hair the texture of a raging fire. The other, a small boy, a giant book in his arms, naked wonder in his face.

Aton stared at it, hypnotized. “This is—the two of us?”

“Our artistry is not easy to explain,” the Xest conveyed. “We do not understand the true nature of the Human. We have fashioned the portrait of you as you saw the two Male-Female parts of your being, when first you came together with comprehension. We hope this is of value to you.”

Aton turned slowly to Captain Moyne. He saw the tears glisten in the depths of her deep green eyes.

“Perhaps she had to hide,” she said. “The—the love of this man would cost her everything, in conventional terms, everything.”

Slowly he put his hand to her tight cap and pulled it free.

The billowing fire cascaded down around her shoulders.

Aton touched the living hue of her hair. “You!” he said.