Piers Anthony - Chthon

Aton opened his package.

But the little man was still puzzled. “That ain’t no cause for her to be doing me no favors. I ain’t no woman’s idol. Why don’t she give you no chow for free?”

Aton explained carefully so that the other would understand. Framy was incredulous. “You mean she don’t want to show how she’s soft on you, so she takes it out on me? ’Cause I’m your pal and don’t know nothing anyway?”

“Close enough.”

“It just don’t make no sense. No sense at all.”

They brought the half-eaten corpse in for everyone to see. A man had wandered too far out alone, downwind. He might have been searching for superior garnets, or perhaps for an exit from the lower caverns. The chimera had come. Help had come ten minutes after his agonized scream—but he had been dead ten minutes. Stomach and intestines had been ripped open and eaten; eyes and tongue were gone. Long dark streaks showed on the cavern floor, they said, where he had been found, where the blood had flowed and been licked up.

“Remind me never to go on the Hard Trek,” Hastings said sickly. “I’m too tender a morsel to be exposed to that.”

The black-haired beauty gave him a sidelong glance. “I hear there’s worse ’n that downwind on the Hard Trek,” she said. “Ain’t no one ever made it out. You can hear the howls of the beast-men that once were people like us, before they got caught.”

“They live?” Hastings asked, obligingly setting up her punch line.

“Naw—but they howl.”

There was general laughter. It was an old joke, and not without a suspicion of accuracy.

This is my opportunity, Aton thought. Now—while it seems natural. Feign uncertainty, but get it out.

“I’m not sure, but it seems to me I heard about someone getting through,” he said.

Framy took him up immediately. “Somebody got out? Somebody made the Hard Trek?”

“There must be a way out,” Hastings said. “If we could only find it. The chimera had to get in somewhere .”

“Maybe them animals never did get in,” the black-haired woman said. Aton had never picked up her name. She had been subtly interested in him since that first discussion, but refused to make an overt play. Possibly she was afraid of Garnet or just smarter. She certainly interested him more; she was able to fling her hair about in a kind of dress that hinted at the sensuality of clothing. Nothing, he had discovered here, is quite so sexless as complete nudity. “Maybe there ain’t no animals,” she continued. “We never see none.”

“I seen a salamander—” Framy began, then cut himself off.

“Salamanders, yes,” Hastings said. “But that’s about the only one a man can see and survive. That’s why we speak of the ‘chimera’—that’s what the word means. Imaginary monster. But we sure as Chthon didn’t imagine that .” His eyes flicked toward the corpse.

“It was a doctor,” Aton said judiciously. “He was quite mad—but free.”

Heads turned in his direction. Conversation stopped.

“A doctor ?” Hastings breathed.

Aton held out his hand for a garnet, and everyone laughed. “About five years ago, I think. They never found out how he managed to escape. They had to put him in a mental hospital.”

“Bedside!” someone cried.

“He swore he’d get out.”

“That means there is a trail.”

“You sure about that?” Hastings asked Aton. “You remember the name?”

Do I remember the name I pried so carefully from the prison librarian, knowing that this was the word that might free me? “It wasn’t Bedside,” he said. “Something like Charles Bedecker, M.D. Of course he lost his license when they sent him down.”

“Yeah,” Framy agreed. “They defrocked him.”

“I knew him,” Hastings said. “I had almost forgotten. We never called him by his real name, of course. He stayed about a month; then he set out with hardly more than his doctor’s bag. He said he’d make a trail for the rest of us, if we had guts enough to follow. But he was such a small, mild character. We knew he’d never get far.”

“How come you let him go?” the woman asked. “Him a doctor—”

“No sickness down here,” Hastings pointed out. “We’re sterilized—by the heat, perhaps. And death is usually too sudden. And he was a bad man to offend. Small, but what he could do—”

“That’s not surprising,” Aton said. “Didn’t you know what he got sent down for?”

Hastings put him off. “You remember a lot, all of a sudden. We never ask that question here. That’s none of our business.”

“But there’s a trail,” Framy said, savoring it.

“A trail to madness,” Hastings pointed out. “That’s as bad as death.”

“But a trail…”

The magic word was out. Aton knew that it would spread like the hot wind through the caverns. Proof—proof of a way out. They could never be fully satisfied now, until they found it.

Ten chows later Bossman called the meeting. Since the meals were distributed every twelve hours or so, governed roughly by the schedule of delivery through the elevator above, this meant five days, outside time. Aton found the distinction pointless; short intervals were measured in chows. Seven hundred chows came to about a year.

“Must be something big,” Framy said as they gathered. “Awful big. We never had no blowout like this before.”

Aton ignored him, observing for the first time the full complement of lower Chthon. There seemed to be hundreds of people, and many more women than men. Most were from other garnet mines—people he had never seen before. Tall, short, hirsute, scarred, handsome, old—every one an individual, every one condemned both by his society and by his fellow prisoners. Here was the ultimate concentration of evil.

Every person was unique. Aton had become adjusted to a smaller circle, as though this were all there was to know of cavern society—but the people he knew had been selected by circumstance and not decision, and were representative. Bossman, Garnet, Framy, Hastings, and the black-haired one—bitter and violent, yes. But evil?

If there is evil here, he thought, I have not seen it. The evil is in the minionette. The evil is in me.

Bossman strode to the center of the spacious cavern, double-bitted axe over his shoulder. He stood on top of a small mountain of talus. Above him the intersection of a half-dozen ancient, gigantic tubes traced the history of the formation of this violent nexus. How many times had the rock been rent to form this jumble? As many times as human sensitivity had been rent to form this group. The wind eddied from several tunnels, now and again stirring up little dust devils which were in turn sucked screaming into the mouths of others. This room reflected the essence of subterranean power. It was a fitting meeting place.

Bossman hallooed, establishing his claim for the attention due the leader. The call reverberated across the passages and mixed with the sound of the wind. Once more, cynically, Aton sized up the man. The chatter stopped.

“They’re giving us a hard time upstairs,” Bossman said without further preamble. “They want more garnets.”

There was a general bellow of laughter. “We’ll give the bastards all they want!” someone shouted derisively.

“All they have to do is trot down and fetch ’em!” a woman finished.

Bossman did not laugh. “They mean it. They’re cutting down our rations.”

Now the murmur was angry. “They can’t do that.”

“They can,” Bossman said. “They are. Each one of us got to give three stones for two meals to keep up the pace.”

“They ain’t that many stones!”