Anthony, Piers - Aton 01 - Chthon

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Chthon by Piers Anthony
Piers Anthony
Chthon
CHTHON (thõn), form of English adjective chthonian, -ic, pertaining to nether
world; derived from Greek chthon, the earth. 1. A subterranean prison for
incorrigibles, location classified 2. A garnet-mine.
SECTOR CYCLOPAEDIA, §398
CONTENTS
Prolog
I. Aton
§400
§381
II. Garnet
§400
§398
III. Chill
§400
§399
Interlog
IV. Minion
§401
§400
V. Minionette
§402
§400
VI. Chthon
§403
§400
Epilog
"In Heaven you have heard no marriage is...."
JOHN CROWE RANSOM, "The Equilibrists"
Prolog:
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.
I. Aton
§400
1
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.
At length he emerged into a larger cross tunnel, a dozen feet in diameter --
and was smashed into its smooth wall by a rushing mass of air. Wind -- in
closed caverns? This was the source of the noise; but where could such a draft
be coming from? Somehow his vision of the infernal region had not included
this.
Aton braced himself and forged back into the wind, letting it guide his body
down the tunnel. The walls were featureless, except for the glow, and the
passage was almost exactly circular in cross section. Could it have been
excavated and smoothed by an untold era of wind erosion? Chthon was growing
stranger yet.
The fierce breeze -- thirty miles an hour or more -- served nicely to cool his
laboring body, giving him at least part of the answer to survival here. But
almost immediately he felt its consequence: dehydration. He would have to have
water, and quickly, before his body shriveled. Somewhere there should be other
people, and suitable provisioning.
Moving along with one hand against the wall, Aton suddenly fell into an inlet.
The wind subsided here, and the heat returned; but grateful for the rest, he
decided to follow it on down. The passage was small, hardly high enough to
clear his head, and opened into another cell or room similar to the one in
which he had been deposited originally. A dead end.
He was about to retrace his steps when he realized with a start that this room
was occupied. There was a mutter and a stirring, and a shape rose from the
curving floor. It came toward him, oddly suggestive and a little frightening,
bringing to mind an image from his past; nebulous, a beauty and a horror at
once too tempting and too painful to handle fairly. The background howling of
air seemed to shape itself into sinister music. Is it the song, he thought,
the terrible broken song, the melody of death? Is this my demon, my succubus,
come grinning to snatch away my manhood?
A woman's voice issued from the figure, unctuous yet appealing. "You want to
make love to me?" she asked.
Now he could see the outline of a nude female body. Conscious of his own
exposure, he held his book protectively in front as she approached. He was
uncertain of her intention, and she brushed the book aside and slipped into
the circle of his arm. She was confident; apparently she was able to see
things more readily than he, in this half-light.
"Love," she said. "Make love to Laza." Her naked breasts pressed up against
his chest.
He was afraid of her and of his phantasm. Warned by the tenseness of her body,
he jerked backward. Her hand came down savagely, the sharp stone in her fist
just grazing his cheek. Twice in an hour he had been attacked. "Then die, you
bastard!" she cried. "Die, die..."
Her breath caught, choking, and she fled to the far side of her cell, to fling
herself down in a shuddering heap. He could still hear her tortured whisper,
"Die, die..." Had she really intended to kill him?
He stepped back into the connecting hallway. Laza heard the sound and came
upright immediately. "You want to make love to me?" she inquired, exactly as
before.
Aton ran.
The main tube went on and on, intersecting numerous cloisters. Some seemed to
be empty; others broadcast strange noises, grunts, scratchings. Aton passed
them quickly.
Thirst drove him on. The cruel wind chafed at his back, wringing moisture from
him. He had kept his shoes, but now he removed them and let his sweat-sodden
feet breathe. And pushed on.
At last the sound of voices drew him into a larger cavern. The wind eased
slightly, filling more spacious quarters, and the noise diminished. Aton's
numbed senses came back to life. There were several people here, working and
chatting idly. In the center of the hall was a large metal device on wheels
with a spoked axle rising from the top. Two men were pushing at the spokes and
slowly rotating the top as though it were the wheel of a grinder. Nearby two
other people squatted against the wall, carving small objects with slender
blades. Beyond them a single man flipped pebbles into baskets. All were naked.
Nearest to him was a ponderously genial woman who spotted the visitor
immediately. "New man, eh?" she said, using the same greeting he had met
before. More trouble?
"Aton Five."
"You came to the right place," she said. "Everybody comes to Ma Skinny."
She laughed at Aton's blank look. "Naw -- it's 'cause I handle the skins.
You'll be wanting one, 'fore you shrivel. Here." She went to the central
machine. The men stopped their grinding to allow her to remove a bag hanging
on a spout in the side.
She brought it to him. "This here's your skin. You don't never want to leave
it behind."
Aton took it, uncomprehending. It was made of some sturdy fabric, weighed
about twenty pounds, and had straps obviously designed as a body harness. Now
he saw that every person in sight wore a similar bag -- the only article of
clothing. But what was the purpose?
Ma Skinny picked up an empty bag and suspended it from the spout, allowing the
men to resume their labor. Slowly it began to fill.
At last Aton caught on. "Water!" he exclaimed, taking the narrow neck of his
skin into his mouth and sucking thirstily. The liquid was cool, comparatively,
and delicious.
The woman looked on approvingly. "Worth mor'n garnets," she said. "We just
grind it out of the 'denser, here, and everybody's happy. Just so long's they
stay right side of ol' Skinny."
Aton got the message. This woman had power, in whatever subterranean hierarchy
existed here.
She went on to introduce the others. "Folks, this here's Five. These two're my
pushers, this shift, Sam and Horny. Down this way we got ol' man Chessy. He
makes whole chess sets out of broken garnet stone, or whatever it is. Nice
work." Aton nodded, surprised again. Outside, those figurines were worth a
fortune, both for the material and the craftsmanship -- yet here the artisan
was revealed as a gray old man squatting nakedly and poking with a battered
knife. "This other's Prenty to him. They got an understanding."
The apprentice was a young woman, hardly out of her teens, but quite well
formed and pretty. Aton wondered what crime she could have committed to be
sentenced to Chthon at such an age. He imagined that their "understanding" was
more to gratify the old man's ego than his romantic prowess. Reputation must
be most important here -- a good point to remember.
Ma Skinny led the way to the man with the baskets. "Tally, here," she said.
"Good man with figures, good eye for garnets. Don't cross him." Tally was
sorting the little stones by color: a basket each for shades of red and brown,
dimly distinguishable in the imperfect light. An attractive girl resorted them
into graduated sizes. "That's Silly," Ma said. "Her name, I mean -- Selene,
Silly. You'll learn." The girl looked up and giggled.
"Everybody's got a job," Ma finished. "You run around a little, Five, get
settled, and we'll fix you up with something. No hurry." Too casually, then:
"You smuggled in some tools."
"Tools?"
Her alert eye was on his bound book. She wouldn't ask the question. Aton
opened it. "LOE," he said. "A text. They let me bring one thing." She turned
away, wordless, disgusted.
That was the tone of it. Once acclimatized to the heat and wind and able to
find his way around the interlocking tunnels by sound and sight, Aton found
prison life to be surprisingly easy. Too easy there could be no enduring drive
towards escape, in such a situation. The inhabitants were contented, as he was
not. He would have to find a catalyst.
The caverns extended down interminably. The garnets were brought up from
somewhere below for sorting and trade with the outside world. They commanded a
price far beyond their actual worth as gems. Artificial stones could easily
surpass them in quality, but lacked the appeal of notoriety. These were the
produce of condemned hands, originating in nefarious Chthon. Man always placed
a premium on the morbid.
Aton found the attitude of the prisoners inexplicable. This was supposed to be
the worst prison in the human sector of the galaxy, reserved for the
criminally insane, the incorrigible, the perverted -- those whom society could
neither cure nor ignore. Chthon was pictured outside as the home of perpetual
rampage and orgy, sadism and torture beyond belief.
Instead Aton discovered a crude but placid society whose members followed
their own advice: make no trouble. The genuinely insane were isolated in their
cells and cared for by volunteer wardens. Unless these ventured out, they were
left to their own devices.
Even normal people could hardly be expected to get along so well. Were these
really criminals? If not, why did they accept their lot so easily? There had
to be a missing element, some binding force. He could not act until he
understood its nature.
2
"Aton." The voice was a low, warm alto.
He came out of his reverie to discover the girl Selene, provocatively posed,
not giggling. Her eyes had lingered on him whenever they met; but though aware
of this, Aton had felt he should be wary of women until the other mysteries
were solved. A woman was trouble anywhere.
She came toward him, breasts outthrust. "I ain't no Laza, Aton," she said,
intercepting his thought. "It ain't going to kill you to come near me."
Aton was unmoved. "Tally's woman, aren't you?"
"Tally knows where I am. Tally knows where everybody is, all the time." She
came to stand against him, soft and lithe and feline. "How long since you had
a woman, Aton?"
She had scored. It had been too long a time. He had learned the way of things
in space, and space was over, now, perhaps forever. Judging from the attitude
he had seen so far, she was probably telling the truth about Tally. He might
even have sent her, as a gesture of amity.
Selene moved away, hiding behind her water-skin. Certain that she had his
attention now, she began to dance, with a rhythmic hop and swing fully as
alluring as intended. Aton set his book against the wall and went after her.
She giggled and skipped away. Playing an intricate hide-and-seek with hands
and body, she led him into a side passage. Aton checked, suddenly wary, but it
was empty.
She brushed against him. He caught her and pinned her against her water-skin
along the wall. Their lips met abruptly in a kiss, broke, touched
passionately; then she escaped and pirouetted into the center of the cell. Her
eyes glowed.
Aton stalked her, cutting off the exit and herding her into a niche; she
dodged and wriggled with delight.
Selene began to hum a tune when she saw that she was fairly trapped. It was
the final artifice: an innocent, indifferent melody, as though she were not
aware of company. It should have launched him into the terminal effort.
Instead it drove him back, cooling his ardor instantly. It was the broken
song.
She saw that something was wrong. "What's the matter, Aton?"
He turned his back. "Get out of here, Silly. You aren't half the woman I
crave."
Shocked, then in flashing anger, she ran. Aton listened to the sound of her
footsteps, a bare patter in the screaming wind. They merged to form the music
of the broken song.
"Malice," he thought. "Oh, Malice -- will you never leave me?"
• • •
It was a dream, of course, but only Aton knew it, and he, lured by the might-
have-been it dangled before him, was foolish enough to forget that it was. In
his conception he was not standing alone in the tunnel; the woman was not
fleeing in anger. There had been a failure, yes, but not a total one.
She took his arm as they walked down the dim tunnel. She wore a light blouse
and dark skirt which did more to enhance her figure than any nudity could do.
"Jill," he said, "I wanted to apologize for what happened. But you have to
understand the impact the song has upon me. When that comes -- "
She jogged his arm. He could feel the gentle pressure of her fingers through
the coat. "My name is Selene," she said.
They turned into a side passage. It slanted down, expanding. "Your interest
caught me by surprise," he continued, aware of the awkwardness of his
explanation. "Somehow I never thought of you as a woman, Jill."
"Why do you keep calling me "Jill"?" she demanded. "Look at me, Aton. I'm
Selene. Silly Selene, cave girl."
He looked. "I suppose you are," he said. "I didn't recognize you, clothed."
"Thanks."
He guided her to a seat and found a place beside her. "I never realized there
was one of these in Chthon. We had a theater for the crew on board the
Jocasta, but I never attended..."
He faded out, alarmed. Her hand was in his lap, fumbling with the fastening of
his trousers. Then her fingers were inside, reaching down to discover what lay
there. He tried to protest, but immediately the people in the neighboring
seats turned to stare, forcing him to silence lest his exposure be advertised.
The feature flashed on the big front screen. Aton's attention leaped to
embrace that still scene. A man, toiling up a steep path, a strong man in
antique costume, a young man garbed in flowing robes of indeterminate color.
One man, but filled with meaning. Behind him the trail tapered away to a
rocky, mossy slope, strangely attractive as a landscape.
摘要：

ChthonbyPiersAnthonyPiersAnthonyChthonCHTHON(thõn),formofEnglishadjectivechthonian,-ic,pertainingtonetherworld;derivedfromGreekchthon,theearth.1.Asubterraneanprisonforincorrigibles,locationclassified2.Agarnet-mine.SECTORCYCLOPAEDIA,§398CONTENTSPrologI.Aton§400§381II.Garnet§400§398III.Chill§400§399In...

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