Piers Anthony - Chthon

Malice lay exposed, arm hanging down, legs gently spread, astonishingly lovely. Her breathing was regular, her eyes closed.

Where was the villain? The airlock had borne the unbroken seal of the proprietor. There could be no third party here, not on an isolated airless asteroid, pressurized only upon their entry. There could be no secret monitoring device, no remote-control threat. Privacy, above all else, was what the proprietors sold. YOU CAN DEPEND ON PRIVACY AT THE SPOTEL, the company advertised, and it had the means to protect its reputation.

Malice lay passive. The mystery was deeper than that… and he could not bring himself to perform an act upon a mannequin. He was baffled.

His mental censor balked. Memory would not go further. Relieved, he returned his full attention to Misery.

Her hair, in the candlelight, was brighter now. This woman, if he understood the signs, was learning to love him already—and all he had done was to aggravate her. Suddenly he felt remorse, felt warm respect for her suffering.

Misery recoiled.

This time he had neither signaled nor spoken, yet she had reacted. The minionette was telepathic! He had suspected this before; why had he forgotten? She could read his thoughts, or at least, his emotions, and was responding to these, not his words.

There remained one oddity.

Aton gathered his mental forces and sent a blast of emotional ferocity at her, hate and fury as sheer as he could make them.

Surprised pleasure lighted her features. She bounced up, caught his shoulders, pressed herself against him, kissed him passionately.

Her emotions were inverted! His hate was her love!

Things fell into place: the villainy of the little man on the road, the response to any male irritation. And Malice—she had been most affectionate when he was angry or miserable, and cold when he felt romantic. No wonder she had been impossible to get along with!

Misery was close to him, her hair brightening by the instant. He hit her. She rocked with the force of the blow, smiling dazzlingly. He grasped her flaming tresses and brought her roughly to him, smiting her with hate. She leaped to meet his savage kiss. He bit her soft lip, hard, to bring blood; she moaned with pleasure and did not bleed.

Aton locked an arm over her neck, pinning her securely. Then he brought to mind an image of gentle fields of hvee, the waiting love overflowing, selflessly desiring an object.

Misery twisted and struggled, her face a mask of pain. “Yes,” he said, “it hurts you, doesn’t it? How much more would it hurt if I were to love you, yourself, not just the hvee?” A strangled cry broke from her.

He held her still, though she was very strong. “Don’t you see, Misery—I’m actually being more sadistic than you can imagine. I know it hurts you to be near love—therefore I hurt you most by loving you. And you must return with joy the love of the man who hurts you most.”

She ceased her struggles and looked up at his face with confusion. She could not understand his spoken words, but the mood behind them was devastating.

“I will have mercy on you,” he continued, not releasing her. “I will spare you, as my darling did not spare me. Because I cannot directly feel your emotion, not in the sense you can feel mine. Because you cannot comprehend the paradox of your make-up. Because I know the sincerity of your intent, and the necessity of your widowhood. Because I want to make you happy in the brief time available to me. I shall reward you by taking out on you all the fury I feel for what your sister has made of me.

“I’m going to kill you, Misery.”

He took her head in his powerful hands, hooking his fingers in her ears, and twisted. She smiled. His muscles jumped as he wrenched, trying to break her neck, but slowly. She gave herself up to the luxury of it. She was like a doll, limp, pliable, unbelievably tough underneath. Then the fury took him, and he drove her head against the mattress as though to tear it off and bury it by brute force.

It was a long, long time before, exhausted, he realized that bare hands, no matter how capable, were insufficient to kill the minionette. She was a creature of punishment; she was made for this; she delighted in it.

Aton rested, defeated, her body warm against his, caressing him, loving him. He had not been able to expunge that which was in him.

Would a knife pierce that seemingly fragile flesh? He was afraid to find out. The whip, well worn, had left no sign on her body.

But there were other mysteries. All the minionettes were cast from a single mold; all responded to the sadistic love inversion, while the men appeared to be normal. But he had seen no old women. Could they all be young?

“How long do you live, Misery?” This time the signal.

She tried to answer him. “There is no limit—”

“You are immortal?”

“No.”

“How do you die?”

“When there is pain, too much, it kills.”

And our love is your pain, he thought. As long as a man hates you, you live and grow more beautiful and your hair flames. But when he is kind to you, when he loves you, you die.

Yet it had been Pink Rock who had died, not his woman.

“Do you know the meaning of love?” he asked her.

“Oh, yes, it is my being. I love—”

“Did you love Pink Rock?”

“Yes—he was good, at first. But we had no son. Then his mind became twisted, and he hurt me. I might have made him love me again, if they had not taken him away.”

Of course. The minionette was tough. She would not expire in simple feminine helplessness. If a man began to “hurt” her, she would try to cure the pain by recapturing his original attitude. She would, in fact, do everything in her considerable power to make him, by male definition, hate her. The men of Minion could hardly allow that. The line between love and hate might seem narrow to some, but it could also be appallingly wide—wide as the chasm of Chthon. For who could say in what manner that terrible emotion might manifest itself, before it settled on the intended object?

The men of Minion were wise. They understood the devastation lying stored beneath the careless torch of uncontrolled emotion. They took the necessary and merciful step, and extinguished it before the minionette acted. They were kind, in their fashion—they tried to give the man back his natural hate before he died, to take with him to his spirit world.

The civilization of the greater galaxy was not so wise. It envisioned mercy as abstinence from death. It recognized the inherent danger of the love of the minionette, but preferred to ship the victim to the eternal prison of Chthon, rather than perform the execution directly.

But even Chthon could not contain the evil of that love. How many there had died?

Why had Malice come into the galaxy? How? What had made her seek him out? Why had she enticed his young love, love that must have tortured her from the beginning? She would have been better off without him, secure in her position in the Merchant Service. Or on her home world, where men understood.

His brain knew the answer, but would not yield it to consciousness. She had told him, there at the—

“Misery—was Pink Rock’s love stronger than mine, before he changed?”

“No, Stone Heart. Your love is the strongest. More than any man.”

Because I am of the galaxy. Because I am a member of a species not conditioned to the minionette. What a rare treat, when a woman of this planet escapes into the galaxy, where every man feels his feelings with naïve strength. Where, unaware of the telepathic linkage, his every confused nuance of anger and pain sears his imagination.

Yes, my emotion is strong. The sensitive hvee responded to it and grew for me in my childhood, and Malice understood that potential—and something else—when she encountered that little boy on that pastoral world. She made her sacrifice and cast her fine net over that boy, and sent him away before the burgeoning sensation became too much for her. She knew that my love was not for her, not then, though it tempted her sorely. I was then a harmless dalliance, a moment of anticipation, not ready for harvest.