“I tried to fight it. I knew what you were the first time I saw you.”
Oh, Malice, Malice, do you taunt me as I do this lonely woman? Why must I hurt her?
“Don’t you know that I will never be yours? I will never kiss you. I will never love you.”
“I know,” she said.
“Are you going to kill me, too?”
She marched on, unable to speak.
“Or yourself, this time?”
Revenge was bitter; he no longer cared for it. Garnet had been a pawn in his game, no more. She had alibied him from association with the blue garnet by agreeing that they had been making love at the critical time. It was a more pleasant memory than the truth: that he had raped her once and found her wanting. Now she shared the blame for Framy’s death, and knew it.
“There is no escape,” he said, talking as much to himself as to her. “I tried to break her hold, but she reached across the light-years to strike me down.” Why did he tell his secrets to this woman? he wondered. Had he really captured Garnet for revenge, or merely because he needed a foil, a property, even in Chthon? Did he understand any part of his own motives?
11
Two more marches brought them to really spacious caverns. The ceiling towered into a lofty gloom, and passages were a hundred feet across. The wind was no more than a fading whisper, and it was cooclass="underline" distinctly disconcerting, in Chthon. There was a feeling, an expectation; the caverns could not continue much longer. The steady rise must already have brought them very near the surface.
The walls peeled back abruptly. They stood on the brink of the passage termination: an enormous chasm, so wide that the farther shore was lost in dark obscurity, so deep that toppling pebbles never returned the sound of their landing.
They gathered apprehensively, two hundred men and women milling at the brink. On either side the floor ended; there was no way around.
“Fire a torch,” Bossman snapped.
One of the rare brands was lighted, sputtering its yellow light with unfamiliar brilliance. Holding it aloft, Bossman stood at the edge and looked down.
“They ain’t supposed to burn that way,” someone muttered. “That’s too fierce.”
“How would you know?” another said. “Three years since you saw real light, ain’t it?”
The ceiling of the chasm became visible as the light flared up. It was nearer than Aton had thought, within fifty feet, a mass of depending porous formations like an undersea landscape, from which streamers of opaque vapor drifted down. There was something ominous about it. What vapor was heavier than air? But the far side was still out of sight, and the depths into which the mist descended were murky.
Bossman shouted, and the echo took ten seconds.
“There’s one way to find out how deep this thing is,” a man suggested.
Bossman smiled.
“No!” Hastings, exclaimed, jumping ponderously to stop him. But he was too late. Bossman had flung the torch into the gulf.
Hastings stared in horror. “That’s gas, you fool,” he said. “It’ll burn.”
Fascinated, the group watched the glowing stick go down. As it fell it grew brighter, illuminating the sharply slanting canyon wall beneath their feet. The brilliance was extraordinary; the light became a minor nova. Now it was reflected from below, from a whitish cloud filling the foot of the crevasse. The near wall was featureless.
The torch struck the nether cloud, and suddenly there was light, flashing silently, like sheet lightning, and then vanishing. Again the flash, revealing the splendor of Chthon in neon radiation.
Aton peered down, and saw the face of Malice, in the fire and the depth, flickering on and off, on and off, in a beckoning smile. “Kiss me,” the silent image said. “Here is the other side of the song.”
Strong hands pulled him back. “You don’t want to die that bad,” Garnet said.
At last the glowing failed, and the abyss was dark again.
“Not dense enough,” Hastings said, the cold sweat running off his body. “Praise Chthon you didn’t blow us all to hell. Can’t you see what this is?”
Bossman accepted the reprimand. “What is it?”
“The fire cycle,” Hastings said. Faces stared blankly at him. “Look, the vapor drops from the ceiling there, some kind of natural gas. It settles in a pool at the bottom. Probably there are many crevices and rifts that suck the mixture through to the flames. Miles of tubing, similar to what we have been traveling through, only much farther down. The while thing is a gigantic blowtorch (if you remember the primitive term), spewing fire and super-heated air out the other end, heating the caverns. As that air travels and expands, it cools, until it arrives back here and brushes those saturated formations above, picking up more fuel.”
“What do you know,” Bossman said in amazement.
This meant, Aton realized, that this was a closed cycle. Water vapor, oxygen, combustibles—all seeped through porous rock, allowing no physical exit. There could be no escape this way, even if they found a way to cross the main chasm. The draft went nowhere, and they were still trapped.
The party slept: men and women sprawled in all attitudes across the floor, gathering strength and courage for the march back to the river. In the “morning” those unable or unwilling to continue would be slaughtered and prepared; this was already routine, and no lots had been necessary so far for the performance of this ultimate service. Some few volunteers kept guard upwind, though in the overriding fatalism the chimera had lost much of its terror. If it came, the first scream would precipitate a savage chase—for the meat on its body.
Garnet did not sleep. She stood overlooking the sheer drop, silent and still. Her hefty body had slimmed with the lean marching. Soon it would be too slim—but right now she was a handsome figure.
Aton came up behind her. “I could push you over, now.” Would it never end?
“I guess the water’s safe,” she said.
“Turn around.”
Garnet turned with a sullen half-smile. Aton put a hand on her collarbone, fingers touching her neck, the heel of it just above and between her breasts. He exerted slow pressure. “Your body will tumble into that mist,” he said. “Over and over until it thuds against the bottom with no sound for human ears, and lies there, mistress to the rock and gas until it rots and sublimates into food for the sacrificial flame. A pyre for Garnet. You’ll like that, won’t you?”
“We both drank, and nothing happened. Must be good water.”
“Perhaps I will make love to you first,” he mused. “Then you would have to die. Everything I touch has to die.”
“Yes.”
He nudged her, but Garnet did not flinch. “It is deep behind you,” he said. “Deep as a well.
“I never knew quite how she traveled,” Aton continued, his hand sliding down to press against her breasts, but keeping her poised at the brink. “I left her on the asteroid, locked in the spotel, and I took the shuttle myself, so that she had either to remain or reveal her identity and location to outsiders. I went home, and then to Idyllia, but somehow she never left me… and I found her again on Hvee. She was in the forest with her song—the song she never finished. I knew then that I had to kill her.”
Garnet’s bare heels rested on the verge.
“But there was no cliff, no mountain, there near the farm. It had to be that special way, you see. I took her to the forest well, so narrow, so deep. Let the fall kill her as it killed my second love, as it broke the shell.”
He stepped close, bending his elbows, placing a hand on each of Garnet’s shoulders. “Because death made love an illusion. ‘Kiss me, Aton,’ she said, there on the mountain, there at the well. And then the song came up.” He shook her. “Say it.”