She had gone with him, since he was not to be resisted, and her position with the merchant service was already forfeit. She had gone with him although she still did not know how to handle the coming crisis. She could not tell him the truth, since that would have sent him away forever—but neither could she submit to the passionate embrace he had in mind. She could not stay and she could not leave.
Thus, at the point of no return, the silence. Only in this way could she keep him close yet distant, until some more permanent alternative offered itself.
Thus Aton rationalized, now but not in the past—and found that even this was not enough. His imagination was fighting desperately to protect him from full realization. His mind had blanked the entire episode from memory as long as it could, and now gave ground unwillingly. He had to search out the evil, knowing it was there, knowing that he was not yet mature enough to face it.
The spotel episode had not been concluded. The two of them had to play it out, past and present, until the full reason for his torment lay exposed.
The secret was out: Aton was in love with his mother. Start with that, and go back. Relive it—if you can.
Back—as she had known he would, he reacted to the news with anguished indecision. The thing he had dreamed of could not be. Sweet as his emotion might be to her perception, brightening her lovely hair, it was a hollow luxury. He would go and never meet her again. He would spare her.
How little he understood the minionette!
Nude, as she remained after he had doffed the space suit, she beckoned him. “Aton,” she said. She was absolutely beautiful.
He came to her, as he always had, embarrassed for his thoughts as much as for the situation. It hurt him terribly to lose her, for she had lived—as a woman—in his fond imagination since the first forest encounter.
“Aton,” she repeated. “On Minion”—this, at the spotel, had been the first time he had heard the name of her home planet, and the name alone had stayed with him—“on Minion our culture is not like yours. I was wrong to go away with the outworlder, but I was young then and did not understand.” She took his hands in the familiar gesture. “Aton—on Minion the women live a long time, many times the life span of the men. The minionette outlives her first mate, if he is not soon executed, and then belongs to her closest of kin. By him she will bear another kin, and later yet another, from one generation to the next, until at last she is too old and has to birth a daughter. This is our way.”
Aton kneeled dumbly before her, his two hands prisoners to hers. What was she trying to tell him?
“Aton, you are half minion, and you are my kin.”
The horror of it began to force itself upon him, then. “You are my mother—”
“Yes. That is why this must be. That is the reason I came to you so early in the forest and gave you the melody and the hvee—so that you would know in your spirit what you could not know from your book. That you are minion, born to possess the minionette. You must do this, and your son after you, because it is in your culture and in your blood—your minion nature.”
Fighting what he knew now was the truth, Aton suffered a greater shock. For though the culture he understood forbade this thing utterly, he had, in an inversion that paralleled her emotional one—that he had not known about, then—grown up to believe her to be the most desirable of women. Because she had been, according to his incomplete knowledge, no relation to himself.
Now he knew that she, by beliefs of his own that were fundamental, was forbidden. And he found her—
Found her still the most compellingly desirable woman he could imagine. She had offered herself to him—and he wanted her, physically, more than ever before. That was what upset him most.
“Until this moment,” she said, “you were not ready, Aton. I had to wait a very long time to win you.” She relaxed on the couch, splendid in repose, pulling him with her. The living flame of her hair spread in and out, over face and shoulders and perfect breast, highlighting her body. Black-green eyes, so near to his, opened in deep vistas.
“So long a time,” she said. “So lovely. Kiss me, Aton, and come to me. Now, Aton—now!”
Fourteen
The day was turbulent. They rose together and left the garden shed, walking in the wind.
“Why did you let me discover your identity, at the spotel?” Aton asked her now. “The thing you wanted—it might easily have been, if I had not known.”
“Aton,” she said, shaking her head in gentle reproach, “Have you, have you not been to Minion? Have you not seen what love, your love, will do to the minionette?”
He had allowed himself to forget.
“Your love would have killed me, as that of your father would have killed me, had it been as you imagined when you courted me,” she explained. “Only your knowledge of the truth could make you condemn. Only through that—to you, negative—emotion could you approach me physically. You had to know.”
Aton could not reply immediately. She had waited a long time—but their meeting had been too soon. “Death and love were always linked, for us,” he said, not looking at her. “The death of illusion, the love of pain. I had to think that you were evil, and you had to let me believe that. But my resistance was stronger than desire. I left you, after all.”
“Did you, Aton?”
The path became steep, though the wind had dropped. He helped her climb, though she did not need it. Their discussion died as she seemed to metamorphose again, to fit his lonely parade of memories. Now she wore a pack and her blonde hair fluttered in an idle gust. On her wrist the silver circlet glittered.
Aton felt a qualm, suddenly wondering whether there had ever been an interlude with a pretty slave girl, a second love hoping pitifully to combat the first—a love that would have saved him from Chthon, had he been able to accept it. Had she been a genuine person at all? Or only another translation of his imagination? Had he ever really left the side of the minionette?
Theme of the shell! Were you part of the broken song? Was my dream vain, even then?
Even then…
Nothing dies on Idyllia—except hope.
They were at the top of a hillock representing a mountain. Aton forgot his doubt. Under the massing clouds the view was beautiful, bright with that special color of early dusk. The shell, the song—no use to understand.
“I love you!” he shouted, his voice distant in his own ears. “I love you—” and once again his emotion was honest and strong.
Her hair was red; it was black; it was writhing in pain and she fell, as she had to fall, stricken cruelly. Thunder blasted sky and forest and field and love, and the rain fell, drenching, soiling all of it. And the melody he loved was washing away and soaking its blood into the ground.
He tumbled after, rolling, bumping, down the hillside, shocked with the blow he had dealt unwittingly, grasping at the song and finding only mud and torn weeds. Love was forbidden. He had never taken a woman for love, only for morbid purpose. Always the song had severed love—and now he was beyond the song; he had lost it, broken it forever… and the cold water sheeting into his upturned face was drowning him.