He brought it into focus: a mass of green. It formed into whorls and petals: the flower of the hvee. Petal lips spoke again.
“There is no magic in your song. Only because it is broken does it fascinate you. Only because your love is incomplete does it endure.”
“No!” But somehow it took hold, fatalism rising like the tide, lapping gently at idealistic castles of sand. For the hvee did not lie to its master.
“You are not my master. You are only—”
Aton blanked the image from his consciousness, afraid of what it might say. The flower wavered and turned gray. It was a hanging structure on the ceiling, a crystalline stalactite, cracked and hollow like a monster shell.
The women were washing his body in the water. Their motions were unpracticed, clumsy.
Aton recoiled. They were zombies!
The axe was on the floor, where he had passed out. He had not achieved the water himself. Was he a zombie, too?
“No!”
Aton jumped up, clambered out of the water, lumbered to the weapon. He slapped a hand on it as though afraid it would wriggle away. He was armed now; he was no zombie.
The women came after him, mechanically. He backed away, hesitant after their kindness to him. He had been destroying them; why had they spared him?
Something touched him. Whirling, Aton saw a man. It was Bossman, standing outside the water. His skin was clear. His eyes were vacant.
Aton knew what he had to do. He lifted the axe.
The attack began. He clenched his mind against it and swung the suddenly heavy axe. The great blade of it strove overhead, ponderous, too massive for his strength. He forced it onward, slowly, guiding it as gravity took leisurely hold and toppled it down. It came to rest at last in Bossman’s skull, and he fell, fell.
I have paid my debt to you, and—I’m sorry.
The force of the attack lay on him like a smothering blanket, but as he staggered back it eased again. The dead women lay all around; only the two who had revived him were animate. He could kill them—
And wander through the endless caverns of Chthon, alone. Was this the way it was to end? And if he succumbed, eventually, to zombi-ism, who would there be to kill him?
What had the love of Malice led him into?
“Truce.” The cracked voice came from the pool behind him. He had forgotten the black-haired woman, the last holdout.
She was rising from the water. He was not alone!
She approached him, moving with the awkward gait of the possessed. Her eyes stared straight ahead.
The last of the zombie conquests was coming to him, easy prey for axe or fist. What did it mean?
“Truce,” it repeated.
It could talk. There was intelligence behind the Myxo half-death! The skull without the crossbones.
Now it was ready to parley.
18
Aton held the axe, unwilling to take the action that would leave him entirely alone and lost in the caverns. Intelligence, even malevolent intelligence, was a more promising opponent than solitude.
“Truce,” he agreed.
The woman-thing stopped before him listlessly. “Do not kill,” it said.
The zombie-master wanted to save its remaining conquests! He had a bargaining point. His mind explored the possibilities.
“Who are you?” he asked, not really concerned, but needing to gain time for further thought. Could he win his freedom through this thing?
The figure’s eyes blinked. She backed away, eyes on the axe. “What happened?” she asked plaintively. “Why are you—”
She had thrown off the possession! “You don’t remember?”
She saw the standing zombies. “I—I lost, didn’t I?” she said, hesitantly. “I went under. All the hurt and terror were gone—but not quite all the way. I wasn’t quite a…” she paused, gesturing toward the others.
An incomplete take-over? He did not like the smell of it. Whose agent was she now?
She straightened, becoming rigid again. “I am—Chthon.”
Chthon—this time a title, not a place. The Myxo intellect.
It had learned moderation. The true zombies were useless to it, because it could not control their bodies effectively. But by leaving a part of the human will intact it was able to draw on the speech center, and perhaps much of the memory and mind. But what was it?
He asked it.
It did not know. But, in halting interchange, a gradual picture of sorts grew. The geologic forces in the subterranean Chthon-planet had carved caverns, hundreds and thousands of cubic miles of them: hot lava tubes, winding waterways, smooth wind tunnels. The subsequent whims of nature heaved and overturned the elaborate structure, crushing the passages, kneading them down, and beginning the process over. Lava flowed again, and again; water cut across the honeycombed strata, riverbeds melted, cool lakes were crushed between molten layers. Crystals formed in the interstices, all types, growing enormously, only to be reburied. New pressures on them generated restless currents, for some were semiconductors, and diodes were formed and destroyed, while electrons ran along and through the metallic strands left as residue from prior furnaces, and discharged into the flowing waters, jumped across broken networks, and accelerated through natural coils. The sparks ignited accumulated gas, exploded the volatile bubbles. A perpetual recirculation formed, heating and cracking the cold rock and vaporizing the percolating waters as the fires settled, changing tolerances. And the crystals continued to grow and change in the new environment, and some metamorphosed into forms that were scarcely natural, and the current in them developed circulations and feedback analogous to the fire cycle nearby. At last, in whatever indefinable manner the transition from slime to living slime is made, the transition from current to consciousness was also made, without the interposition of life, and the Chthon-intellect was created.
“What do you want with us,” Aton asked it, “with human beings? What good are we to you?”
The woman faltered, lapsed into zombie status, then back to human. “It wants me to explain to you that it has no—no moving parts. It is all—electronic, a computer. It can think, but it can’t do anything, unless it controls mobile units. The local animals aren’t very good. They can’t follow complex instructions, and Chthon can’t adapt readily to their animate nervous systems. It needs units with—intelligence.”
“It has two zombies,” Aton pointed out. Three.”
“They are not—strong. They have no—it takes great concentration to make their bodies move, because the—circuits are even less familiar than those of the animals. Foreign. It needs—willing units.”
Aton’s sympathy was small. “What’s the going rate for a ‘willing unit’?”
“Security. Sanity,” she said.
Aton’s laugh was harsh. “I’ll make it this deaclass="underline" I’ll refrain from killing what’s left of these ‘sane’, ‘secure’ people, if it guides me to the surface safely.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes?” Aton did not believe it could be so easy. “Chthon agrees?”
“Yes.”
“Now?” He was looking for the catch. Was it planning to spirit away the zombies when his attention wandered, then renew the siege for him? “We travel together—the four of us,” he amended, “or I’ll kill them now.”
“It will take—six marches,” she said. The—others cannot travel that far. They will die.”
“Uh-huh. I can shorten their misery.”
“You will die—if Chthon summons an—animal—and releases its mind.”
Power politics. The thing was learning rapidly. Could it bring the chimera, or was this a bluff? But this gave him an idea.