Chthon

by Piers Anthony

  To me this land is lush and lovely, convex hills so high and fine, matching mounds so softly rounded, waiting for—

  Aton shook himself, the sealed suit shifting with him like a second skin. What was happening to him? Why was he thinking in metric feet? There was no atmosphere; there could be no trees, no poetry. This was a bare slab of rock hurtling in orbit around a numbered star. There could be no security in hallucination. If he ever really forgot where he was, death would be a blunt reminder.

  Yet down beyond those yearning mountains, where the passive waters shine, the source of life is waiting for me, waiting while I—

  Shocked, Aton turned again, resuming his progress toward the fossil at the planet’s edge. Somehow, unconsciously, he had traveled farther down the valley, lulled by the hint of some fierce ecstasy—to which he dared not yield. Something was speaking to him, luring him, drawing him onward to some unimaginable rendezvous.

  Beyond the mountains are the waters, thick and warm as fresh-let blood.

  “Jill!” he cried. “Stay out of my fantasy.” I fled from your cruelty ten years ago; I hardly remember you; you don’t belong here; I am afraid of the thing you stand for: the feel of blood upon my hand, the sound of laughter at my ear. Not blood, you say—not blood, but bliss, offered to my fourteenth year.

  Aton turned once more, breathing hard, trying to achieve the objectivity of the stone leaf. That had been the turning point. Until then he had been in control of himself.

  Reality came back, showing the conical outcroppings he had walked between, the glaring shadows they cast in the beam of the distant sun. As he watched, those shadows softened, became misty. The hills turned green and more than green, breathing with luxury.

  Before him was a curving field leading down to a valley sheltered between gently rolling bluffs. The secret lake was there, more exciting, more inviting than any isolated mirage. The bliss it offered within its depths no longer wholly repelled him. His blood sang with the need to enjoy that liquid, to plunge himself totally into it. He had come from it; he would return to it.

  No! But the vision reached inside his resistance and turned it off, leaving a faint muted protest tingling far behind. Fourteen steps he took to reach that lake, and hesitated, afraid to pass beyond the nameless barrier within himself. The water called, it called, but that tiny castrate conscience, damned somewhere behind the frozen leaf, pleaded with him not to sacrifice the thing he had been for the thing he would become. The shaking sweat mottled his face as he fought, knowing that the outcome had already been determined, but fighting still to preserve the forms of a bygone innocence.

  Slowly a hand came up to unfasten the helmet of his suit. Could it be his own? The clasps came open, the seals were broken, the helmet came away from his head. He did not die. The air of the valley came to him then, musky and sweet, exhilarating in its freshness. He tasted the bloom of it and felt strong. Soon the remainder of his impeding suit was off; naked, he ran on to the water.

  Once more the fading doubt held him back, a doubt permitted now because the usurper felt secure. Resistance had become mere titillation, adding luster to the act. The dominant emotion toyed felinely with his timorous conscience and gave it the freedom of thinking it was free.

  He was suffused with the sense of impending accomplishment. The touch of the water at his bare toes electrified his body. He could not see the liquid any more. Only his flesh was aware of it sliding voluptuously over his ankles enfolding them in a closure of incipient pleasure, tantalizing at its commencement, luxurious in its completion.

  A fundamental meaning was rising in him, a meaning whose only expression had to be calamitously powerful, a thrusting-forth of such magnitude as to remove mountains and impregnate the entire lake with animation.

  The warm pressure ascended, circling calves, knees, thighs. It washed against him rhythmically, drawing forth the deepest force in him with delicate strokes. The tide of it increased, suddenly, compellingly, throwing him into a second vision of a young hand traveling up younger skirts, touching the forbidden junction. But this time the stickiness did not alarm; it drew him on and in with tempestuous passion.

  The two scales of flesh and liquid merged under a superimposed image of the vernier, jumping into focus before his closed eyes. Unable to hold back full expression any longer, he plunged in all the way.

  The water, the landscape, the universe rang with the tumescence of his urge, and from the depths of his most intimate ambition the fluid essence surged, climbing, swirling, subject to enormous pressure, bursting into a hurricane of force, exploding at last in a tortured pleasuration rending flesh and dissolving bone and satiating spirit beyond endurance. In Heaven you have heard… Love has pitched his… O joy! O joy! O joy!

  Some power outside himself buoyed him up, lifted him through surging currents of excruciation far, far to a light above. It was her hand, warm on his arm, bringing him away from the obliteration his equivocal passion had led him to. A dark god waited at the terminus, a thing to whom passion and guilt were simple tools, a god whom a sane man could not serve.

  A god that Aton would serve when the full implication of the asteroid allegory reached his conscious mind.

  The rain had stopped, though he was soaking; monsters and confining walls were gone. Sunlight played down, not on the broken column he half expected, but on a glistening countryside, high and green in the dusk and wondrously attractive.

  “You have—won,” she said, selecting an imprecise word. She was the woman of the forest, the nymph of love. “I cannot, I cannot let you go that way. Not to so great an evil.” She spoke of evil: not the thing they had done at the spotel, but the god he was to serve. The god who had offered him sanctuary.

  The phantasmagoria was over. The specters were gone, whatever they had been, and Malice was once again the unspoiled luster of his dreams. The lovely lady of his childhood had returned, the object of all his love, never to be distorted again.

  His pure emotion encompassed her. He kissed her, savoring the completion of the melody at last. Never had his love been so strong.

  Under his, her lips grew cold. She was dead.

  §400

  13

  Downriver: once more it tapered into a slender, hard-running chute, and the walls on either side closed in until there was little more than a narrow tunnel. But the walk-way continued just above the level of the water, wide enough for men to travel single-file.

  Bossman led the way, alert for the markers of the man who had scouted and not returned. “If this gets much tighter,” he said, “we’ll have to swim for it.”

  No one commented. A swim in that water could be dangerous. Any mistake in judgment would send the bodies helplessly down its current, through possible rapids, and into the jaws of river predators, or whatever else stood ready to defend the reputation of the Hard Trek. On foot, they felt at least a partial security, and every bend that brought a continuance of the path into view was greeted with an easing of tension.

  The passage held, high enough for a tall man to stand upright, but narrow. The walkway took up a quarter of the base, the swift river the rest, and the wall threatened to nudge the unwary traveler into the water. It continued, mile after mile, a hallway leading—down.

  Aton had returned, reluctantly, to make his report: there was no exit above, only an impassable waterfall. He had not told them of the other tunnel, beyond the falls. He had peered down it, heard the distant beating, and sensed a menace than no man could face. How he knew, he could not say; but he was certain.

  Few believed that the chances downriver were good—but Bossman allowed them their hysterical hope. There might be an intersection with another stream, one whose channel could be traced to the surface. After all, the pit creatures must have entered somewhere… and Bedside had escaped. Where else could he have passed, but here? If only he had left a sign.

  Miraculously, it ended. A final stricture, an almost perfect doorway, followed by release. They filed into a beautiful dome-s
haped cavern with a large pool in the middle.

  The pool was about a hundred feet across, and the dome arched to an apex fifty feet above it. The mysterious path circled the edge, a ledge eighteen inches deep and three feet above the waterline. The walls above and below that ledge were vertical or slanting inward; no pocks marred them, no crevices. A naked man could not climb away from the path. On the side of the pool opposite the entrance, the ledge dropped gradually down almost to the water level, where the top of a hole less than two feet in diameter could be seen. The water sucked greedily through this hole.

  The pool itself was deep. The green luminescence came through for several feet, but was finally lost in the black reaches. The water was cool; the lots would determine the first volunteers for washing and swimming.

  The entire party managed to fit around the pool. Bossman posted a guard at the entrance and allowed the others to relax. Men and women sat like children around the edge, dangling their feet and joking. The atmosphere, for the first time on the Trek, was carefree. The lots proved to be unnecessary, as people who had almost forgotten what it was like to swim disported themselves with open glee.

  But Aton was uneasy. He sensed, as the others did not, the massive danger behind them. It had emerged from its tunnel behind the falls and sent its heartbeat after him, following Aton down the river. His mind somehow felt its hunger, its huge appetite, not entirely for food. It moved slowly, miles behind, but it was coming. It was coming.

  Where was the exit? This cavern must have been formed by some enormous rising gas bubble, back during the molten days of Chthon’s being, caught here by the gradual cooling and hardening of the surrounding rock. Then the river had found it and cut through, filling it and carving its own exit. That meant that there could be no passage deep beneath the water, or the cavern would not have filled. And the flow through the visible hole seemed to match that entering exactly.

  It would be a risky thing to plunge through the outlet. Here there would be no question of mastering the swirling current. A man would be helpless—as the advance scout must have been, since he had disappeared entirely.

  Perhaps a length of their rope, salvaged from the entrance to the upper caverns, so long ago, could be dangled in the water, and held while a man climbed along it—if such a man were able to breathe at all, down there. And on the other side: how could they be certain that there was air, beyond the seal that the water made?

  Yet the hours passed, and if any others shared Aton’s doubts, they did not show it. Even Bossman camped with over-all serenity, watching Garnet as she swam. Men dived deep into the water, searching for fish or other marine life, and coming up empty-handed. Some slept, propped against the wall; now and then a neighbor would playfully hoist a sleeper into the drink for a rude surprise.

  This dome, it appeared, was as close as Chthon could come to a natural paradise.

  Aton did not believe in paradise. He plunged down, ten feet, twenty, as deep as he could go, but found no bottom. He cut to the side as he came up, and was taken and spun about by an eddy in the water. In a moment he was out of it, unharmed, but it bothered him. The sense of impending menace was stronger. Was there after all a drainage from below?

  He swam to the opposite shore, keeping clear of the turbulence near the visible exit. Here the little current was repeated. There was an undertow around the entire circumference of the pool. This was sinister: why should there be such an effect in still water?

  Unless something massive were rising from below, sucking water in around the sides.

  Bossman was watching him. Aton pointed to the edge and the man nodded. He had noticed.

  Nothing was said to the others. There was no point in giving alarm until the danger was known—if there really were danger. But immediate steps should be taken to investigate the exit. It might be needed in a hurry.

  There was a cry from the guard at the gate. Something was attacking!

  So it was not my imagination, Aton thought. My mind was not losing touch with reality.

  A scuffle, a hoarse scream; then two bodies tumbled into the pool. One was the guard; unhurt, he swam to the edge and mounted the path again. The other was one of the scaled stone-eaters, wounded and dying.

  These creatures were not carnivorous, as far as he could tell. Too slow to be the chimera, they had never advanced on man, and were easy prey to him. What had affected this one?

  Another animal came, and a third. Soon the pool was littered with corpses, as the clumsy creatures charged upon the men’s stone knives. What was driving them?

  Bossman joined Aton near the entrance. “Listen,” he said.

  There was a new noise in the distance, far up the tunnel—one unlike anything heard in the caverns before. It was the sound of marching—of many feet tramping in unison.

  They looked at each other, and a general hush fell upon the group. A disciplined army—here? It made no sense at all. The upper caverns would not have organized any search party, and could not have kept one supplied this far. If the exit to the long trek were near, there might be human beings, and they might indeed march, but not from the direction the prison party had come.

  The sound persisted, coming down the tunnel toward their dome, a measured beat increasing in volume. This, whatever it might be, was the thing that had driven the other animals before it.

  Everyone in the dome heard it now. Sleeping people were nudged awake, to listen apprehensively for a sound they could not understand.

  “Great Chthon!” the guard exclaimed, drawing back in terror. The marching beat loudened. The source had rounded the last bend, though it was not yet in sight of the people in the dome.

  Then it appeared. A gigantic, grotesque head poked through the entrance. It had enormous faceted eyes and antennae as thick as a finger and a foot long. It rotated slowly, mechanically, to gaze upon the assemblage; the tramping died away. Then it came forward—into their refuge.

  The back of the head compressed into a neck scarcely two inches thick. The body emerged: a squat, irregular hump, supported by two thick legs that lifted and fell jerkily. The people nearest fell back, appalled, giving ground to the creature.

  The body tapered down again to a two-inch-diameter tail. Then, astonishingly, a second body followed, similar to the first. A third, and a fourth. The thing was segmented!

  Now the people before the head were crowding back in unabashed horror, desperate to get away from it, but finding no room to retreat. Some jumped into the water as the creature advanced relentlessly.

  There was a general shuffle as those who could not swim, or who were afraid to, pushed roughly around the ledge to make way for the caterpillar. Aton and Bossman were now nearest to the great head. Bossman’s axe was ready, but he chose so far to retreat rather than to attack. Not enough was known about this thing, yet.

  The ledge had become quite crowded. There had been little surplus room to begin with, and a considerable length of the monster had appeared. Ten, fifteen bodies; and more segments appearing endlessly, until it took up almost a quarter of the circumference. When would it end?

  Aton noticed that the latter parts were misshapen, grotesque even to one familiar with the standards of a creature such as this. They were no longer uniform, except in the synchronized motion of the legs. Some of the segments had extra limbs hanging uselessly by their sides, withered. Some segments appeared to have shrunken heads. It was as though they actually belonged to different species.

  One segment even looked human.

  Ridiculous! Aton backed away from the gross head.

  How did the thing feed itself? There was no discernible mouth on the forepart, and the segments were not in a position to feed effectively. Yet more and more of them appeared, each neatly taking up the full width of the ledge. It was apparent now for whose use the convenient path had been cut.

  People scrambled over each other and fell into the water in their mad effort to escape. Those still standing were crowded into less than half the circle—and sti
ll the thing advanced. The segments most distant from the ugly head were oddly shriveled, sucked dry of juices; if the thing went hungry, Aton thought, it did so from the rear forward.

  At last the end appeared. There was a concerted sigh of relief. The thing would not force them all into the water.

  The final segment finished in a needle-like stinger projecting some four feet.

  There was a scream above the prevailing bedlam. All heads turned involuntarily. Almost every person’s whole attention had been absorbed by the caterpillar, so that another development in the pool had gone unnoticed.

  A shape had risen from below, coming up slowly under the water. Whalelike, it filled the pool from side to side, an immense mass of turgid black blubber a hundred feet across. The last covering of water dribbled from its convex and waxy surface to expose a large circular orifice: a mouth.

  Aton recognized it now. It was one of the jellyfish, grown to a shocking magnitude. It was, he strongly suspected, carnivorous. The animal bodies had disappeared down the river drain, so the evidence was not immediate.

  Proof was not long in coming. The mouth gaped wider, disclosing a whitish internal runnel that frothed and gurgled and belched a noxious yellow stomach vapor. A tubular tongue snaked out. It cast about blindly, then slapped over the body of a woman in the water and hauled her shrieking into the maw.

  Meanwhile the caterpillar was busy, too. The head commanded the water-exit, and the tail had projected itself across the entrance and was moving backwards along the opposite ledge, preventing any escape that way. Its mighty prong was, if anything, more frightening than the head itself.

  The tail suddenly shot out, extending its length a good four feet. It neatly impaled the nearest man, who had been foolishly threatening it with a fragment of stone, stabbing through his middle and emerging behind his back. He brayed horribly and collapsed; but his body was held upright by the spike. This contracted, pulling him up against the concluding segment of the caterpillar.