It was tempting. Aton saw that his entire adult life had been a destructive nightmare of passion and pain, contaminating everything it touched. The minionette had been part of it, naturally and knowingly. But Coquina—it would be kindest for her if he had the same courage of the minionette before him, and simply stepped out of her life. She would be better off with her own kind. The love he bore her could achieve its finest expression in deprivation.
But the minionette had died to give him human semblance. She had known him well, known of his link with Chthon, and had cried out against it. Malice and Coquina, minionette and human, his first and second loves—these two had come together not as rivals but as sincere collaborators for his benefit. They had agreed that he had a chance, and both had staked their lives upon it. Could he betray them now?
Perhaps both were mistaken—but they believed in his recovery, and he owed it to both to make the ultimate effort, to resist the easy way. He could not abolish his crimes by running away from life. He had to live, to atone, to make some effort to balance the scales. He had to face what he was and what he had done—and search for a way to make amends. This, perhaps, was the real battle he had come to participate in: that against the capitulation rendered so attractive by Doc Bedside.
“No,” Aton said.
Bedside’s aspect changed. “I will show you what you are,” he said, his voice sharp, his mouth gaping, teeth exposed like those of the cavern salamander. “You rationalize, you delude yourself with hopes of future goodness. But your true wish is still to kill yourself, because you know you are the partner in a crime against your culture. You tried to blame the minionette, but you are the one that forced the act. Yes, you know what I mean, minion.”
Aton’s attitude also changed subtly as he listened. It was coming now, and he could neither stop it nor tolerate it. Bedside’s blade was on guard. His space training had prepared him for action against a knife—but not one wielded by the hand of a mad surgeon. Normal reflexes would not be sufficient.
Bedside continued: “You have so conveniently forgotten your incestuous passions. Careful!” he rapped as Aton moved. “I would not kill you so long as Chthon needs you, but you would not find my surgery entirely painless.”
This was Bedside’s final effort. Could he nullify it? The man was infernally clever.
There in your spotel,” Bedside whispered intently. “That’s when you did it. Chthon knows. That’s when you had the minionette alone, knowing what she was.” The bright eye-lenses glittered in the green glow, just above the pointing blade. “That’s when you raped your moth—”
The knife clattered to the floor as minion struck with the strength and speed of telepathy. Bedside stared at the thing he had loosed, a living chimera. “Pray to your god for help!” it whispered, hot teeth poised, talon fingers barely touching the bulging eyeballs, ready to nudge them redly out of their sockets. “Perhaps it will help you die.”
They remained in frozen tableau, the young warrior and the old. Then the chimera faded. Aton let the man fall, unharmed. “I am not what I was,” he said, “and I was never the physical chimera. I will not kill you for distorting what you do not understand.”
Bedside lay where he had fallen, at Aton’s feet. The menace in him was gone; he was a tired old man. “You have slain your chimera.”
“I have slain it.”
“I return to Chthon in the morning. You are free.”
Aton went to the port and swung out, feet searching for the ladder.
“Let me speak for a moment as a man,” Bedside said, halting Aton’s descent. “Chthon desires your service, not your demise. There is no resentment. Chthon will help you to win your other battle.”
“No.”
“Listen, then. Had I had a woman like your Coquina to love me, I would never have needed Chthon. She broke my arm, eleven months ago—I had not thought she knew your fighting art—but she is a woman you cannot replace. You will lose her, unless—”
Aton dropped down to the ground and began to move away.
“Think, think of the date!” Bedside cried after him. “And of the hvee! Otherwise…” But his voice was lost in the rapid distance.
Eighteen
Aton had defeated the evil one of Chthon, once he recognized it as himself, his sadistic killer instinct. The prison of Chthon was the refuge of those who were dominated by such impulses. Doc Bedside, now the agent of Chthon, had almost proved that Aton had escaped in body only; but the sacrifice of the minionette and the care of the daughter of Four had swung the balance and brought the civilized man in him to victory. He had been roused too soon; with more time he would have come to understand and accept the painful truths he had blinded himself against. Blindness had not solved the problems of Oedipus, nor had the ritualistic physical blinding of victims solved the problems of the men of Minion. Aton had been obsessed with blindness, physical and emotional.
More time, and Bedside could not have roused the dying chimera at all. It had been close—unnecessarily close. Why had he been thrust into battle prematurely? Could Coquina have wanted him to lose?
No, it was not possible to doubt her motives. Coquina was good, and she loved him far more than he had ever deserved. He had been the one to fall short, every time. He had denied their betrothal, even before he had met her. He had thrown her off the mountain. He had killed the hvee.
Think of the hvee, and of the date. What cryptic message had Bedside intended?
How little he knew Coquina, after all. His brief time with her on Idyllia, in retrospect, had been the happiest of his life. If he had only been able to stay with her then, instead of chasing his own obsessions. He had, he knew, a great deal in common with the daughter of Four. Her background was naturally similar to that of a son of Five. She was intellectual, upper-class Hvee, on a planet that made no presumption of democracy; she was a far cry from the low-caste girls of the latter Families. Lovely shell! Why had he never looked inside? How well Aurelius had chosen!
Think of the hvee…
But the hvee had died. All his life had been nightmare, except for Coquina—and the hvee had condemned that too. Had he won the battle of his future, only to endure it alone?
Think of the date…
The date was Second Month, §403: no more distinctive than any other month or year, on the even-tempered, non-seasonal planet of Hvee. This appeared to be an extraneous riddle.
The hvee—there was something meaningful. Bedside could not have known about the recent episode, since it had happened less than an hour prior to their conflict. But he had known that it would happen, whenever Aton actually touched his plant. He had warned that Coquina would be lost, unless—
Aton began to regret his contemptuous sloughing off of Chthon’s emissary. What was there about the hvee that could save Coquina for a man it had deemed unworthy? A quality that a knowledgeable third party could predict?
Think…
Aton thought. His steady jog carried him across the countryside, familiar from his childhood. He could smell the light perfume of the scratched tree barks, of scuffled earth and crushed weeds and wild forest flowers. He could see the black outlines of the taller trees against the starry sky, and hear the nocturnal scufflings of minor foragers. Memories stirred in him, small poignant recollections of detail that became important only because it was unimportant. The feel of a dry leaf, the whiff of an idle breeze—all the wonderful things set aside by adulthood. Soon, now, he would pass near the spot where he had met the minionette, where he had acquired the wild-growing hvee.