Piers Anthony - Chthon

N!

Nova Factorial

Stellar explosion so vast and swift that light falls centuries behind.

This is our setting: the nova of life.

It springs from the microcosm to the planet

In eons;

From the planet to the universe

In centuries;

And its duration is the inverse function of its magnitude.

§

Section, symbolic

Date of the emergence of man: propulsion to the stars.

All that had gone before is ancient.

Number the new years: Section 1, Section 100, and on;

Communicate through sophisticate Galactic

Though colloquial convenience lingers.

Modify man’s genes for space

But hide the strange divergences. Make myths of those…

5

Family of Five

Fifth-ranked of the founding Families of Hvee

Who settled the garden world in §79,

Seeking their transcendental paradise.

But Five is decimated by the chill of §305.

Two lines remain, the eldest:

Aurelius (§348–402), betrothed to a daughter of Ten;

Benjamin (§352–460), celibate;

And the hopes of this highborn Family devolve on the child of Aurelius:

Aton (§374–400)

Aton, agonist;

Aton, protagonist;

Contending for the knowledge of the nature of evil;

Condemned for that contention.

Aton—while your body dies in prison, your emotion lives beyond;

Yet both are one: your death reflects your life.

Every episode you suffer here parallels your other existence,

Now

And in the past

And in the time to come.

Aton, Aton—child of the sun—

Come, come to our nether world:

We have need of the damned.

It was hot in that cabinet. Aton licked at the salt and grime on his lips as rivulets itched down his neck and soaked into the rough prison shirt. In the sweating surface of the book he carried he saw a dark-haired, clean-shaven man.

Normal features, average stature—was this the person of a criminal? Am I, he thought, am I…?

It did not matter. Chthon was the prison of the damned, and the man incarcerated here was damned, whether there was justice in it or no. Legally damned and legally dead: no one escaped from Chthon.

The prison was deep, natural cavity far beneath the surface of a secret planet and hidden forever from the stars. No cells were there, no guards; only the living refuse of man’s empire, dying in unthought wealth. For Chthon was a garnet mine, the moderate value of its individual stones complemented by their enormous number. The manner of its enterprise was this: every twenty-four hours the single elevator went down, loaded with food. It came up again with several hundred garnets. If the value of the stones was not enough, the next shipment of food was reduced.

Aton understood this much of Chthon, and it was as much as any free man could know. Now he was to learn the other side of it, the underside. The close cage shuddered, grinding on down into the fevered bowels, and Aton rocked with its motion. He felt the heat increase; smelled his own reek.

Am I dreaming of the impossible? he thought. Is it foolish to believe in a physical escape, simply because of a rumor I overheard in space? Return from death. Freedom. Perhaps even… completion?

The motion stopped. The door opened to roaring darkness.

Heat blasted in, oppressive, suffocating. Sweat drenched his light uniform.

Knowing that he had no choice, Aton stepped into the gloom.

“One side!” a voice bellowed in his ear. Rough hands shoved him away. He stumbled into the center of the room, his book clamped under one arm, barely making out the shapes of men as they moved between him and the lighted interior of the lift.

They worked silently, three of them, hauling out crates and stacking them against the nearest wall. When the elevator was empty they carried smaller metal caskets carefully inside.

One of them slammed the door, cutting off the light. The garnets, Aton realized. The men were husky, bearded, longhaired, and naked, and each had a sloshing bag of some sort strapped to his back. The effect, in the poor light, was grotesque; they reminded Aton of hunch-backed trolls.

The noise in the room was so great that Aton could not hear the elevator ascending, but he knew that his only link to the outside world was gone. He was now at the mercy of Chthon.

There was light after all—a sputtering glow, green and strange, given off by the walls and ceiling, as though they were smoldering. His eyes adjusted. He would be able to navigate.

Now the men came at him. “New man, eh. Name.”

“Aton Five.”

“Five?”

“Take it or leave it.”

They considered that, weighing him as wolves of the pack weigh the stranger. “O.K., Five—this’s your orientation. Down here we don’t ask questions. We don’t answer questions. We don’t care why they shipped you here, only don’t do it again. Just don’t make trouble, hold your end, and you’ll get along. Get it?”

They waited for his reaction, hard, lupine.

“Where do I—”

One man stepped forward, swinging an open palm. Aton automatically caught the blow on a raised forearm. He was a hair late, and the hand hit the side of his face hard enough to make his head ring. He backed a step. “What the—?”

“Mind your business. We don’t warn twice.”

Aton fell back, angry. For a moment he toyed with the idea of repaying the advice in kind. That would mean fighting all three, probably at once. Was that what they wanted? But behind his mounting temper he realized that the suggestion was good. Don’t make trouble—at least until you know your way around. There was no point in beginning his sojourn here as a combatant. Time enough for that later. He nodded.

“Good,” the man said. He laughed. “Remember—we all got to die together!”

The others guffawed and went to pick up the crates. Aton would remember them.

“Advice,” one said as he passed, not unkindly. “Strip. Like us. Hot.”

They tramped off, leaving him alone. Were they typical? He knew there were women in Chthon, but in a prison without guards or any other exposure to the world, conventions must long since have bowed to the stifling heat. Abnormal mores were bound to prevail—unless he was being set up for some further joke.

Aton looked about him. The room was rounded, the walls irregular but not rough. Stone, coated with glow. Long ago some scouting party must have explored these caverns, or at least enough of them to locate the garnets and determine that there was no feasible exit. He wondered whether the air was natural or somehow piped in; its presence seemed too provident to be coincidence.

But surely this terrible heat could not be borne for any length of time. This was a stifling oven. There had to be cooler sections, or it would be impossible to live. He discarded his sopping uniform, took up his book, and made his way out of the room. At the exit he touched the wall cautiously: it was hot, but not burning, and the greenish slime continued to glow for a few seconds on his fingers. The heat was evidently not from cavern chemicals.

He found himself in a short tunnel. He had been told that Chthon consisted of a maze of lava tubes, and intellectually he knew that their formation had been completed many centuries before, but it was hard to be objective. The far end of the passage pulsed with heat, and the roaring sound grew constantly louder, as though the primeval forces were still in motion. But there was no other way to go.