Phthor

by Piers Anthony

  But her manner changed most of all. She remained highly irritating, but she also became highly suggestive. And, oddly, it was when she was most infuriating that she was most intriguing.

  “Where do these lead?” Ex asked, gesturing toward an irregular series of openings in the wall. She was almost better now, and eager to go everywhere.

  “Only to the big gas crevasse,” Arlo said, “No way to pass that. “It’s the largest canyon in the caverns, hundreds of miles long.”

  “Oh let me see!” she cried, and ran for the nearest hole.

  “Wait!” Arlo exclaimed, pursuing her twinkling bottom. Part of his mind noted how much fuller her buttocks were than they had been; perhaps it was because she had sat for so long, recovering. “It isn’t safe!”

  But she scurried on through, bending over to clear the low tunnel ceiling. This had the effect thrusting out her posterior further, making it an object of increasing interest to Arlo, though he was aware that there really was nothing there. Still, the immediate danger alarmed him.

  “There’s a drop-off!” he called. “No safe way down, from here—and the gas would choke you anyway.”

  She scooted on around a bend. He followed. Beyond it was another turn, and here the passage narrowed so far that her hips caught against the sides. He knew the drop was close ahead, so he grabbed her where he could. One hand passed inside her legs, catching the front of the thigh, his fingers sinking into the smooth flesh. “Stop!” he cried.

  “You’re doing it!” her voice came back “Goosing me!” She wriggled, and her hips slid through the construction.

  He tried to hold her, but first her thighs pressed tightly against his hand, then spread wide, and his fingers slid out. Again he experienced that mixed excitement and alarm, wanting to hold that thigh because it excited him, and to protect Ex from danger—and losing that hold despite everything.

  He dived after her—but now his own hips caught in the construction. He ripped free, scraping skin on both sides, for the rock was very rough. Annoyed by the burning pain, and by her escape, he accelerated again.

  “Oh!” she cried ahead, and for a moment he feared she had plunged into the chasm. But she had stopped in time, and now was sitting on the cliff edge, dangling her legs down.

  “Why didn’t you wait?” he demanded angrily. “You could’ve gotten killed that way! I told you it was dangerous!”

  She looked out into the mist before them as though nothing had happened. “What is it, Arlo? I’ve never seen anything like this!”

  “It is the gas crevasse, as I said,” he said tightly. “The gas vapors drop down from the ceiling, there.” He pointed to the distant, lofty roof, not actually visible from this vantage. “they drift into the bottom, maybe a mile down, maybe more—I don’t know how to judge it—and get sucked into tubes. At the other end, way across the caverns, there’s fire. It blows into the passages and makes the hot upwind tunnels where the prison is. The wind finally expands and cools and slows and comes back here, to pick up more gas and repeat the cycle.”

  She peered down. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Course you can’t. There’s no glow down there.”

  “Then how do you know about the gas?”

  “My father told me.” On one of those few prior occasions when Aton had talked freely. He was more apt to tell about things than about people.

  “How does he know?”

  “Fat Hasty must have explained it to him, when they were on the Hard Trek.”

  She sniffed. “ That’s a myth.”

  “What?”

  “The Hard Trek. It’s just a prison story. There never was any such thing.”

  “My father was on it!” Arlo protested hotly. “They had nothing to eat, so they ate their own dead. The chimera stalked them, and the myxo, and—”

  “It’s a lovely story, anyway,” she said. “And you’ve lovely too.” She leaned over to him where he squatted beside her and kissed him on the mouth.

  She had not done that before. The effect was potent. Arlo’s whole being seemed to funnel into the meeting of their lips, and he felt as if he were turning, around and around and end over end. It was sheer, confusing bliss. LOE had described kissing many times, often shortly before the ellipses that annoyingly concealed the mechanics of reproduction—but the reality was beyond his expectations.

  Suddenly the falling and twisting were literal. Ex pushed herself off the ledge, and almost took him with her. Arlo found himself clinging to the rough rim by the one hand, his other arm about her, while his feet scrambled for some toehold.

  In a moment his experienced toes found that lodging, and the terror of his incipient fall abated. “What were you doing!” he cried in fury.

  “I slipped.” Her attitude was blithe.

  “You did not! You—”

  She scrambled up, treating him to another view of her newly mysterious bottom, and ran down an adjacent passage. Again he pursued, furious.

  This tunnel was even tighter than the other. Ex wriggled through just ahead of him and finally emerged in the main passage. But Arlo, flowing too closely, blinded by mixed lust and anger, got jammed again. This time he has really wedged, his hips so tight against the stone that he could neither advance nor retreat without exquisite pain. He was stuck upright, facing into the passage.

  Ex looped back when she found he wasn’t chasing her. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m caught. I can’t move,” he said hotly.

  “Really?” She sounded pleased.

  “Well, what does it look like!”

  She leaned forward to peer closely at his midsection. Her newly developing breasts assumed more form in this position. In time, he knew, they would resemble those of Verthandi, large and full. Later perhaps, they would become pendulous, like those of the other Norns, and less stimulating. But this nascent quality was now immensely provocative. “I think it’s rising,” she said.

  “My hips are what’s stuck!” he said. “Help me out!”

  “Yes, it’s definitely getting big.”

  “Shut up about that!” he exclaimed in a fury of embarrassment. Though he had scant sexual shame and was proud of the erection he could muster, he did not want it in this particular situation. It tended to show his ignorance, and it reminded him of the touch and interest to the Norns. What had they said about it? “This rod transfixes...?” But he had no control.

  Ex danced very close, turning and thrusting out her rear so that it almost brushed him. “Why don’t you....”

  Arlo suffered an abrupt clarification of motive. He knew where to put his hardened organ! He lunged at her, uncertain whether he intended rape or mayhem or both. But the rocks held fast, and he got a searing bolt of pain in the flanks. He was so angry he could hardly see her, yet he lusted for her with an intensity he had never known could exist. Yes, he knew what to do—when he had the chance!

  “Kootchie-koo!” Ex sang, this time actually touching his member.

  Arlo got smart. He twisted instead of pushing straightforward. Skin scraped from him on either side, and the very bone seemed to be compressed—but he wrenched free, sliding out of the constriction.

  But Ex was gone. She was now as fleet as he, and she knew the caverns well enough to hide from him indefinitely. He could not catch her.

  Perhaps it was just as well. He had bargained with Chthon to preserve her life, but in that moment he would gladly have killed her himself.

  • • •

  “The minionette?” Coquina repeated, and now the stress lines showed on her face, making her look older.

  “Father said I could ask you now,” Arlo said, his muscles tightening nervously. Now, for once, he was glad of the required clothing that helped conceal the tensions of his body. “Doc Bedside said the minionette was death like the salamander—that they were parallel, like all his life and death. He—”

  “Dr Bedeker is mad,” she said.

  “Yes. He says he’s all mad, and that my father is half-mad
. Only I don’t think he means the same thing by the word that we do. But Bedside has always spoken truth to me, in his fashion, and he says my father was imprisoned for loving the minionette. Yet he also said my grandmother was a minionette, and I am quarter-minion. How can a man be imprisoned for loving his mother? I love you—”

  Coquina put her hand to the hot wall to steady herself. Arlo grabbed her other arm, afraid she would fall. “What’s the matter?”

  His mother got a grip on herself. “How are things with you and Ex?”

  Coquina had met Ex only once. It had been a disaster. Coquina had shown no jealousy, but instead had extended her arms in welcome—and Ex had run away. Arlo had reacted with familiar fury, but he could not get Ex to return or explain. She associated with Arlo, Aton, and Bedside, making them all angry in little ways—yet Coquina, who had nothing but love to give, was shunned. That was just one of the things that aggravated Arlo—but despite it, he was drawn to Ex with increasing passion. It was as though he liked perversity, as though part of him wanted to hurt and be hurt—and that disgusted him. On the off chance that something in his heritage could account for this, he had finally gotten up the nerve to put the question to his mother.

  “She’s a damned nuisance,” he said. “But sometimes she’s awfully sweet. Half the time I want to kill her, and the other half—” he hesitated, uncertain how much he should admit. He doubted that Coquina would be pleased to hear about the misadventure of the gas crevasse, for example. Nothing had happened, really; but had he been just a little faster...

  “She is a young female, and you’re a young male,” Coquina said. “It’s natural for you to desire her sexually. There is no shame in this.”

  Then why had his mother never told him how to implement the sex act? Obviously there was shame, some there. “But I desire her most when I hate her most!” he exclaimed.

  Coquina sat down on her rock chair. Because it was stone, it conveyed the heat of the wall and floor to her body Arlo was sweating from the ambient temperature, but his mother never sweated. Her whole temperature-control mechanism had broken down, apparently. “Yes, it is time for you to know. But I have to warn you: There is pain in this—for your father, for me, and even for you.”

  “Because I am quarter-minion!” he said, catching on.

  “Yes. I had hoped this element would be suppressed, but it seems it is not. So it is best that you know the truth, so that you can deal with it, as your father did.”

  “He loves and hates you?” Arlo asked, horrified. No one could hate Coquina!

  She smiled wanly. “No. He has never hurt me. But until he conquered his chimera, it was very bad. There was much blood on his hands, much that must be forgotten, because he didn’t know. I pray there will be none on yours.”

  “He didn’t know what?” Arlo cried in frustration. At times his parents were as bad as Bedside or the Norns in their obscure answers, tantalizing him.

  “It began with your grandfather Aurelius Five, Aton’s father. Aurelius married a daughter of Ten, by all accounts a wonderful woman the hvee loved. But in two years she died in childbirth, for Planet Hvee is primitive in some ways. In anguish he went to space, and there fell into the power of the minionette. It was his terrible sorrow that attracted her to him—even his guilt at loving her.”

  “I don’t understand! Why should he not have remarried?”

  “Minion is a proscribed planet. He broke galactic law by going there, and broke it again by taking Malice home with him. So—”

  “Malice!” The Norns had used that word! “What kind of a name is that?”

  Coquina put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “That is difficult, son. Bear with me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She was trying to explain something vital, and he had no right to keep interrupting. He could save his question for later. “All the minionettes have names like that. Fury, Agony, Torment, Wrath, Misery—”

  Arlo started to interrupt again, but turned it into a cough . He had to listen, not argue!

  Coquina smiled, and he saw in that expression the aspect that had made his father love her. “Yes, it seems strange at first. But they are true to their nature, as we are to ours. You see, the emotions of the minionette are reversed. What we perceive as love, beauty and delight, they perceive as hate, ugliness, and revulsion—and vice versa. Because they are emotionally telepathic, they receive these emotions directly. A man’s hate is divine to them, but his love can be fatal. In fact, they are virtually immortal; hardly anything can kill them and they remain young-seeming and beautiful for centuries. They all look alike, too, until you get to know them well. So they live until someone’s love reaches them—and then they die. Their names are actually endearments.”

  She took a breath, as though marshaling her strength. “The men of Planet Minion are more nearly normal, but they have learned to hate those they love. They beat their wives and even try to kill them—knowing that only in this way can they preserve them. So the minion male has a strong sadistic streak associated with his love. That is why the planet is proscribed; that kind of love has made too much mischief in the history of Old Earth and would wreak devastation among the civilized cultures of the galaxy.

  “Malice stayed with Aurelius one year—long enough to bear him the child Aton. By that time Aurelius’s grief over the loss of the Daughter of Ten was fading, and he was coming to love Malice without guilt. He did not understand—perhaps did not allow himself to understand—that this was what drove her away. So Aton was raised without a mother.

  “But there is one other thing about the Minion culture. The women live for centuries, but the men normally die by the age of fifty. Apparently it takes that long for their hate to turn inevitably to love, for their sadism to weaken, and when that happens, they are executed by their own kind. It is a sad but honorable demise, known by the euphemism “carelessness.” But the minionette is not widowed; she takes her son as her next husband.”

  “She what?” Arlo exclaimed. All that he had learned of human culture indicated that incest was taboo.

  “It is their system, natural for them,” Coquina continued, though he could see that she herself suffered fundamental misgivings. Coquina was a Daughter of Four, Planet Hvee, innately conservative, a child of the land. Yet she had adapted to her extraordinary situation—for love of the half-minion Aton. She had mastered tolerance. “The minionette is wife to her son, and after him her grandson who is also her son, and all her male descendants, though she is the literal mother to them all. She bears only boys until at last she grows old; then she bears the girl who will replace her.”

  “But if my grandfather—” The implication almost overwhelmed him.

  “Aurelius was human, not Minion. He could not accept the Minion system. But Malice came in quest of her son, Aton.” She paused as if gathering strength again, and this time Arlo well understood why. “You have to understand. She had the aspect of a young beautiful woman, and she came as a lover not a mother, and he did not know—”

  Young and beautiful. That abated his revulsion somewhat. But the other matter could hardly be similarly dissipated. “My father Aton—married his—mother?”

  “Yes. There was no ceremony, for she had to conceal her identity from the authorities. Technically, he was betrothed to me, but—”

  “I will kill her myself!” Arlo cried, filled with a new kind of range.

  “No. She is long dead—and she was not a bad woman. I met her. I knew her. What she was, what she did, was in her genes and in her culture. We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.”

  “There has to be,” Arlo said.

  “I have never known a more intelligent, lovely competent and loving woman, apart from that ironic inversion of emotion. What I see today in Aton is that half-share he possesses of the minionette, and I love him as much for that as for his human side—which is also excellent.” Again she paused. “Yet I would love him regardless...”

  “But he would
not have married you, if she had lived,” Arlo carried. “How can you—”

  “It is no bad thing to be the second love,” she said. Arlo felt a tingle, remembering the very similar thing his father had said. These two, so different on the surface, had certain community of nature underneath, and were well matched. “First love may be wild, ill advised, difficult; second love is based on experience. I regret only that the minionette had to die to make our marriage possible.”

  “He would not marry you until his mother died? I will kill him!” Arlo cried, shaking with fury, yet knowing it was bravado. He had neither the power nor a real desire to kill his father; he had merely to express his support for Coquina. Actually, he was getting repetitive—but the idea of requiring one’s mother to die to make way for one’s wife had an unholy fix on his mind.

  “You are quarter-minion,” she said. “To kill one’s father—that too, is the way of the minion. The men who live too long are killed by their sons, who are impatient to assume their conjugal duties.”

  That stopped Arlo cold. All his recent furies and passions came into focus now: the minion blood in him craved sadistic love. No wonder his romance with Ex had been turbulent! He would have to change that.

  “I hope there is more of Aurelius in me than of the minionette,” Arlo said. “I would have liked to know that bold old man.”

  “His brother Benjamin still lives. Doctor Bedeker still has occasional dealings with him. He is very like Aurelius.”

  “Oh?” That was most interesting! “Will I ever get to meet Benjamin?”

  “You would have to leave the caverns, or he to enter them. Either is unlikely.”

  True. Intriguing as it was, it was a dead end. Arlo returned to the primary matter: “Still, you should have been Aton’s first choice, not his second.”