Piers Anthony: Chthon

Tally was grim. “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

Aton kept a wary eye on the two other men. He knew their business, and he recognized one of them. “Because Silly made a pass at me?”

“Partly,” Tally said with candor. “She shouldn’t have had to do that. But then you turned her down.”

“I wasn’t making any trouble.”

“No trouble!” Tally exploded. “You damned outsider! You made me the laughing stock of Chthon by proving my girl wasn’t worth taking down. Teasing her so you could really make the point. You could have told her No at the beginning, if you didn’t want it; but no, you had to—”

“It wasn’t that. I wanted her, but—”

Tally’s eyes were calculating. “ ‘But—’? What were you afraid of? Nobody outside will ever see you again. You live our way now. There are no ceremonies, no two-faced rules. She wanted you, and I told her to have her fling. You can’t spawn any bastards down here, not in this climate, if that’s what got you. It just doesn’t take.”

“I knew that. I—”

“You cost me face, Five. There’s only one way I can get it back.”

“There’s something else—” Aton began, but Tally had already signaled, and the two men were closing in. They were brawny; one was the member of the original greeting party who had struck him. They had taken off their skins.

Aton saw that there was no reasonable escape. He licked his lips, not bothering to remove his own water-skin. Had he really wanted to explain?

Timing. Coordination. Decision. Aton sprang. The first man had a naked foot buried in his solar plexus before he realized it. He was hurled back, collapsing bonelessly. Before he struck the ground, Aton was on his companion, wrapping a trained hand in the man’s shaggy beard, jerking the original lunge into a headlong stumble. The calloused knuckles of Aton’s free hand made a dull crunching sound on the other’s temple.

One semiconscious, retching helplessly. One dying with a fractured skull. It had taken perhaps four seconds.

Tally stared down, amazed. “Spaceman,” he said.

“You wanted it the hard way.” Aton knew he had won the man’s respect. “I tried to explain,”

Tally got the men out and came back alone. “All right. I can’t square things with you that way. Only one man I ever saw that could fight like that, and he’s not… available.”

“Spaceman?” Aton asked with interest.

“Krell farmer.”

Aton wondered. The members of the guild that farmed the deadly krell weed had developed the ancient art of karate—kara-ate, the unarmed striking—in a different direction than had their spacefaring cousins. Both struck to disable, maim, or kill; but there was murderous power behind the spaceman’s blow, lethal science behind the farmer’s. Which school was superior? The question had never, to his knowledge, been settled. “Where is he?”

“Name’s Bossman—down below. It isn’t worth it.”

“Nothing’s worth it.”

Tally changed the subject. “I’ll take my loss and forget it. But I want to know one thing, and it isn’t much of my business. I’ll make a trade with you.”

Aton understood the significance of the offer, in this place where information was more valuable than property. “I want to know something, too,” he said. “Honest answers?” He saw immediately that the question was a mistake. The person who cheated on information would not live long.

“Let’s match the questions,” Tally said. The bargaining was on.

“The real Chthon setup.”

“The reason you passed her up.” Belatedly, Aton understood why Tally had cut off his explanation before. He could not accept free knowledge. Easier to settle the grudge first, untangle the threads later. Here was an honest man, Chthon-fashion.

“You may not like the answer,” Aton said.

“I want it straight, all of it.”

They looked at each other and nodded. “Seemed too quiet for you here?” Tally asked rhetorically. “No wonder. This is only part of Chthon—the best part. We keep only the model prisoners: the harmless neurotics, the politicos, the predictable nuts. We have a pretty easy life because we’re selected, we know each Other, and we have the upper hand. But below—well, there is only one way to get down there, and no way back. Anybody we can’t handle gets dropped down that hole and forgotten. That’s where the mine is; we ship food down, they ship the garnets up.”

“A prison within a prison!”

“That’s right. Outside, they think we’re all one big unhappy family, fighting and mining. Maybe that’s the way it is, below. We don’t know. But we like it quiet, here, and we have the same hold on the pit as the outsiders have on us: no garnets, no supplies. We get first pick of the food, and we don’t have to work much, except to keep things running smoothly. We can’t get out but we have a living, and not a bad one at all. Every so often a new man comes down, like you, and makes things interesting for a while, until we get him placed.”

“No way out,” Aton said.

“Our caverns are sealed off from below. That keeps us in, and the monsters out. Below—no one knows where those passages end, or what’s in them.”

Unexplored caverns! There was the only hope for escape. It would mean facing a prison even the hardened inmates feared, mixing with men too vicious to accept any moral restraints. But it was a situation he could exploit.

“About Silly,” Aton said, taking his turn, knowing his course. “It wasn’t her; it wasn’t you. She’s a good girl; I would have taken her if I could. But something stopped me, something I can’t fight.”

“Stopped a spaceman at the point? You’re a strange one. You and your damned book.”

Aton said the word that condemned him: “Minionette.”

Tally stared. “I’ve heard of that. Stories—you mean you met one? They really exist?”

Aton didn’t answer.

Tally backed off. “I’ve heard about what they do. About the kind of man who—” His voice, friendly before, turned cold. “You are trouble. And I sent Silly to you.”

Tally came to his decision. “I don’t want to know any more. You aren’t one of us, Five. You’ll have to go below. I don’t care how many men you kill; you aren’t staying with us.”

It was the reaction Aton had come to expect. “No killing,” he said. “I’ll go now.”

Hvee was a pastoral world without pastoral creatures whose rolling mountains and gentle dales bespoke no strife. No dwelling lay within sight of another, and few of the angularities of man’s civilization defaced the natural landscape. The population was small and select, hardly sufficient to man the smallest of cities on megapolistic Earth. There was just one major occupation and one export: hvee.

A small boy wandered through the circular fields of the Family of Five, careful not to tread on the green flowers yearning toward him. Too young to cultivate the crop, he could afford to be its friend. The hvee plants all about him projected, in effect, a multiple personality, an almost tangible aura that was comforting indeed.

He was seven years old, his birthday just one day behind, and he was still awed at the marvel of it, of that extra year so suddenly thrust upon him. The planet was smaller now, by a seventh of his life, and he wanted to explore it all over again and come to understand its new dimension.

In his arms he carried a large, heavy object, his birthday gift. It was a book, sealed in shiny weatherproof binding and closed by a bright metal clasp with a miniature combination lock. Ornate letters on its surface spelled out L O E, and beneath them, in script, his name: ATON FIVE.