Chthon
( Aton - 1 )
Piers Anthony
Chthon was Piers Anthony’s first published novel in 1967, written over the course of seven years. He started it when he was in the US Army, so it has a long prison sequence that is reminiscent of that experience, being dark and grim. It features Aton Five, a space man who commits the crime of falling in love with the dangerous alluring Minionette and is therefore condemned to death in the subterranean prison of Chthon. It uses flashbacks to show how he came to know the Minionette, and flashforwards to show how he dealt with her after his escape from prison. The author regards this as perhaps the most intricately structured novel the science fantasy genre has seen.
Nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1968.
Nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1968.
Chthon
by Piers Anthony
CHTHON (thõn), form of English adjective chthonian, -ic, pertaining to nether world; derived from Greek chthon, the earth. 1. A subterranean prison for incorrigibles, location classified 2. A garnet-mine.
SECTOR CYCLOPAEDIA, §398
Prolog:
“In Heaven you have heard no marriage is…”
JOHN CROWE RANSOM, “The Equilibrists”
N!
Nova Factorial
Stellar explosion so vast and swift that light falls centuries behind.
This is our setting: the nova of life.
It springs from the microcosm to the planet
In eons;
From the planet to the universe
In centuries;
And its duration is the inverse function of its magnitude.
§
Section, symbolic
Date of the emergence of man: propulsion to the stars.
All that had gone before is ancient.
Number the new years: Section 1, Section 100, and on;
Communicate through sophisticate Galactic
Though colloquial convenience lingers.
Modify man’s genes for space
But hide the strange divergences. Make myths of those…
5
Family of Five
Fifth-ranked of the founding Families of Hvee
Who settled the garden world in §79,
Seeking their transcendental paradise.
But Five is decimated by the chill of §305.
Two lines remain, the eldest:
Aurelius (§348–402), betrothed to a daughter of Ten;
Benjamin (§352–460), celibate;
And the hopes of this highborn Family devolve on the child of Aurelius:
Aton (§374–400)
Aton, agonist;
Aton, protagonist;
Contending for the knowledge of the nature of evil;
Condemned for that contention.
Aton—while your body dies in prison, your emotion lives beyond;
Yet both are one: your death reflects your life.
Every episode you suffer here parallels your other existence,
Now
And in the past
And in the time to come.
Aton, Aton—child of the sun—
Come, come to our nether world:
We have need of the damned.
I. Aton
§400
1
It was hot in that cabinet. Aton licked at the salt and grime on his lips as rivulets itched down his neck and soaked into the rough prison shirt. In the sweating surface of the book he carried he saw a dark-haired, clean-shaven man.
Normal features, average stature—was this the person of a criminal? Am I, he thought, am I…?
It did not matter. Chthon was the prison of the damned, and the man incarcerated here was damned, whether there was justice in it or no. Legally damned and legally dead: no one escaped from Chthon.
The prison was deep, natural cavity far beneath the surface of a secret planet and hidden forever from the stars. No cells were there, no guards; only the living refuse of man’s empire, dying in unthought wealth. For Chthon was a garnet mine, the moderate value of its individual stones complemented by their enormous number. The manner of its enterprise was this: every twenty-four hours the single elevator went down, loaded with food. It came up again with several hundred garnets. If the value of the stones was not enough, the next shipment of food was reduced.
Aton understood this much of Chthon, and it was as much as any free man could know. Now he was to learn the other side of it, the underside. The close cage shuddered, grinding on down into the fevered bowels, and Aton rocked with its motion. He felt the heat increase; smelled his own reek.
Am I dreaming of the impossible? he thought. Is it foolish to believe in a physical escape, simply because of a rumor I overheard in space? Return from death. Freedom. Perhaps even… completion?
The motion stopped. The door opened to roaring darkness.
Heat blasted in, oppressive, suffocating. Sweat drenched his light uniform.
Knowing that he had no choice, Aton stepped into the gloom.
“One side!” a voice bellowed in his ear. Rough hands shoved him away. He stumbled into the center of the room, his book clamped under one arm, barely making out the shapes of men as they moved between him and the lighted interior of the lift.
They worked silently, three of them, hauling out crates and stacking them against the nearest wall. When the elevator was empty they carried smaller metal caskets carefully inside.
One of them slammed the door, cutting off the light. The garnets, Aton realized. The men were husky, bearded, longhaired, and naked, and each had a sloshing bag of some sort strapped to his back. The effect, in the poor light, was grotesque; they reminded Aton of hunch-backed trolls.
The noise in the room was so great that Aton could not hear the elevator ascending, but he knew that his only link to the outside world was gone. He was now at the mercy of Chthon.
There was light after all—a sputtering glow, green and strange, given off by the walls and ceiling, as though they were smoldering. His eyes adjusted. He would be able to navigate.
Now the men came at him. “New man, eh. Name.”
“Aton Five.”
“Five?”
“Take it or leave it.”
They considered that, weighing him as wolves of the pack weigh the stranger. “O.K., Five—this’s your orientation. Down here we don’t ask questions. We don’t answer questions. We don’t care why they shipped you here, only don’t do it again. Just don’t make trouble, hold your end, and you’ll get along. Get it?”
They waited for his reaction, hard, lupine.
“Where do I—”
One man stepped forward, swinging an open palm. Aton automatically caught the blow on a raised forearm. He was a hair late, and the hand hit the side of his face hard enough to make his head ring. He backed a step. “What the—?”
“Mind your business. We don’t warn twice.”
Aton fell back, angry. For a moment he toyed with the idea of repaying the advice in kind. That would mean fighting all three, probably at once. Was that what they wanted? But behind his mounting temper he realized that the suggestion was good. Don’t make trouble—at least until you know your way around. There was no point in beginning his sojourn here as a combatant. Time enough for that later. He nodded.
“Good,” the man said. He laughed. “Remember—we all got to die together!”
The others guffawed and went to pick up the crates. Aton would remember them.
“Advice,” one said as he passed, not unkindly. “Strip. Like us. Hot.”
They tramped off, leaving him alone. Were they typical? He knew there were women in Chthon, but in a prison without guards or any other exposure to the world, conventions must long since have
bowed to the stifling heat. Abnormal mores were bound to prevail—unless he was being set up for some further joke.
Aton looked about him. The room was rounded, the walls irregular but not rough. Stone, coated with glow. Long ago some scouting party must have explored these caverns, or at least enough of them to locate the garnets and determine that there was no feasible exit. He wondered whether the air was natural or somehow piped in; its presence seemed too provident to be coincidence.
But surely this terrible heat could not be borne for any length of time. This was a stifling oven. There had to be cooler sections, or it would be impossible to live. He discarded his sopping uniform, took up his book, and made his way out of the room. At the exit he touched the wall cautiously: it was hot, but not burning, and the greenish slime continued to glow for a few seconds on his fingers. The heat was evidently not from cavern chemicals.
He found himself in a short tunnel. He had been told that Chthon consisted of a maze of lava tubes, and intellectually he knew that their formation had been completed many centuries before, but it was hard to be objective. The far end of the passage pulsed with heat, and the roaring sound grew constantly louder, as though the primeval forces were still in motion. But there was no other way to go.
At length he emerged into a larger cross tunnel, a dozen feet in diameter—and was smashed into its smooth wall by a rushing mass of air. Wind—in closed caverns? This was the source of the noise; but where could such a draft be coming from? Somehow his vision of the infernal region had not included this.
Aton braced himself and forged back into the wind, letting it guide his body down the tunnel. The walls were featureless, except for the glow, and the passage was almost exactly circular in cross section. Could it have been excavated and smoothed by an untold era of wind erosion? Chthon was growing stranger yet.
The fierce breeze—thirty miles an hour or more—served nicely to cool his laboring body, giving him at least part of the answer to survival here. But almost immediately he felt its consequence: dehydration. He would have to have water, and quickly, before his body shriveled. Somewhere there should be other people, and suitable provisioning.
Moving along with one hand against the wall, Aton suddenly fell into an inlet. The wind subsided here, and the heat returned; but grateful for the rest, he decided to follow it on down. The passage was small, hardly high enough to clear his head, and opened into another cell or room similar to the one in which he had been deposited originally. A dead end.
He was about to retrace his steps when he realized with a start that this room was occupied. There was a mutter and a stirring, and a shape rose from the curving floor. It came toward him, oddly suggestive and a little frightening, bringing to mind an image from his past; nebulous, a beauty and a horror at once too tempting and too painful to handle fairly. The background howling of air seemed to shape itself into sinister music. Is it the song, he thought, the terrible broken song, the melody of death? Is this my demon, my succubus, come grinning to snatch away my manhood?
A woman’s voice issued from the figure, unctuous yet appealing. “You want to make love to me?” she asked.
Now he could see the outline of a nude female body. Conscious of his own exposure, he held his book protectively in front as she approached. He was uncertain of her intention, and she brushed the book aside and slipped into the circle of his arm. She was confident; apparently she was able to see things more readily than he, in this half-light.
“Love,” she said. “Make love to Laza.” Her naked breasts pressed up against his chest.
He was afraid of her and of his phantasm. Warned by the tenseness of her body, he jerked backward. Her hand came down savagely, the sharp stone in her fist just grazing his cheek. Twice in an hour he had been attacked. “Then die, you bastard!” she cried. “Die, die…”
Her breath caught, choking, and she fled to the far side of her cell, to fling herself down in a shuddering heap. He could still hear her tortured whisper, “Die, die…” Had she really intended to kill him?
He stepped back into the connecting hallway. Laza heard the sound and came upright immediately. “You want to make love to me?” she inquired, exactly as before.
Aton ran.
The main tube went on and on, intersecting numerous cloisters. Some seemed to be empty; others broadcast strange noises, grunts, scratchings. Aton passed them quickly.
Thirst drove him on. The cruel wind chafed at his back, wringing moisture from him. He had kept his shoes, but now he removed them and let his sweat-sodden feet breathe. And pushed on.
At last the sound of voices drew him into a larger cavern. The wind eased slightly, filling more spacious quarters, and the noise diminished. Aton’s numbed senses came back to life. There were several people here, working and chatting idly. In the center of the hall was a large metal device on wheels with a spoked axle rising from the top. Two men were pushing at the spokes and slowly rotating the top as though it were the wheel of a grinder. Nearby two other people squatted against the wall, carving small objects with slender blades. Beyond them a single man flipped pebbles into baskets. All were naked.
Nearest to him was a ponderously genial woman who spotted the visitor immediately. “New man, eh?” she said, using the same greeting he had met before. More trouble?
“Aton Five.”
“You came to the right place,” she said. “Everybody comes to Ma Skinny.”
She laughed at Aton’s blank look. “Naw—it’s ’cause I handle the skins. You’ll be wanting one, ’fore you shrivel. Here.” She went to the central machine. The men stopped their grinding to allow her to remove a bag hanging on a spout in the side.
She brought it to him. “This here’s your skin. You don’t never want to leave it behind.”
Aton took it, uncomprehending. It was made of some sturdy fabric, weighed about twenty pounds, and had straps obviously designed as a body harness. Now he saw that every person in sight wore a similar bag—the only article of clothing. But what was the purpose?
Ma Skinny picked up an empty bag and suspended it from the spout, allowing the men to resume their labor. Slowly it began to fill.
At last Aton caught on. “Water!” he exclaimed, taking the narrow neck of his skin into his mouth and sucking thirstily. The liquid was cool, comparatively, and delicious.
The woman looked on approvingly. “Worth mor’n garnets,” she said. “We just grind it out of the ’denser, here, and everybody’s happy. Just so long’s they stay right side of ol’ Skinny.”
Aton got the message. This woman had power, in whatever subterranean hierarchy existed here.
She went on to introduce the others. “Folks, this here’s Five. These two’re my pushers, this shift, Sam and Horny. Down this way we got ol’ man Chessy. He makes whole chess sets out of broken garnet stone, or whatever it is. Nice work.” Aton nodded, surprised again. Outside, those figurines were worth a fortune, both for the material and the craftsmanship—yet here the artisan was revealed as a gray old man squatting nakedly and poking with a battered knife. “This other’s Prenty to him. They got an understanding.”
The apprentice was a young woman, hardly out of her teens, but quite well formed and pretty. Aton wondered what crime she could have committed to be sentenced to Chthon at such an age. He imagined that their “understanding” was more to gratify the old man’s ego than his romantic prowess. Reputation must be most important here—a good point to remember.
Ma Skinny led the way to the man with the baskets. “Tally, here,” she said. “Good man with figures, good eye for garnets. Don’t cross him.” Tally was sorting the little stones by color: a basket each for shades of red and brown, dimly distinguishable in the imperfect light. An attractive girl resorted them into graduated sizes. “That’s Silly,” Ma said. “Her name, I mean—Selene, Silly. You’ll learn.” The girl looked up and giggled.
“Everybody’s got a job,” Ma finished. “You run around a little, Five, get settled, and we’ll fix y
ou up with something. No hurry.” Too casually, then: “You smuggled in some tools.”
“Tools?”
Her alert eye was on his bound book. She wouldn’t ask the question. Aton opened it. “LOE,” he said. “A text. They let me bring one thing.” She turned away, wordless, disgusted.
That was the tone of it. Once acclimatized to the heat and wind and able to find his way around the interlocking tunnels by sound and sight, Aton found prison life to be surprisingly easy. Too easy there could be no enduring drive towards escape, in such a situation. The inhabitants were contented, as he was not. He would have to find a catalyst.
The caverns extended down interminably. The garnets were brought up from somewhere below for sorting and trade with the outside world. They commanded a price far beyond their actual worth as gems. Artificial stones could easily surpass them in quality, but lacked the appeal of notoriety. These were the produce of condemned hands, originating in nefarious Chthon. Man always placed a premium on the morbid.
Aton found the attitude of the prisoners inexplicable. This was supposed to be the worst prison in the human sector of the galaxy, reserved for the criminally insane, the incorrigible, the perverted—those whom society could neither cure nor ignore. Chthon was pictured outside as the home of perpetual rampage and orgy, sadism and torture beyond belief.
Instead Aton discovered a crude but placid society whose members followed their own advice: make no trouble. The genuinely insane were isolated in their cells and cared for by volunteer wardens. Unless these ventured out, they were left to their own devices.
Even normal people could hardly be expected to get along so well. Were these really criminals? If not, why did they accept their lot so easily? There had to be a missing element, some binding force. He could not act until he understood its nature.
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