“I will pray to your god,” he said to Bedside, “if only she lives.”
Bedside nodded acceptance. “We must go immediately.”
Aton got up and slid his arms under Coquina’s numb form, lifting her into the air. He carried her to the door.
Benjamin did not move. “I think you have sold your soul,” he said.
Aton stepped into the night. The clear stars shone overhead—stars that he would not see again. ” ‘Hide, hide your golden light!’ ” he quoted softly. ” ‘She sleeps! My lady sleeps! Sleeps…’ “
§400
16
The caverns were quiet. There was no wind at all, and even the current in the water had disappeared. Some liquid hung in stagnant pools, too shallow to swim in. The rock formations had taken on a peculiar cast, an unnatural gray, and the grotesque shape of diverging passages repelled the eye.
Foreboding grew. This had the smell of a dead end. The once-mighty river had gradually seeped away, and the plentiful game had become scarce. Once more the party traveled hungry. Soon the lots would come into use again, unless someone volunteered by collapsing. The last of Bedside’s markers had been spotted two marches ago. If another were not found by the end of this march, they would have to retrace the trail.
Fourteen women and six men had survived the thirty-march journey of the Hard Trek—so far. Accident and fatigue still took their toll, and the chimera still stalked the group, though it seldom had a chance to strike any more. They were farther away from the surface than ever—and between them and final escape still waited the nemesis that had driven Bedside mad.
The march ended. They camped huddled together, trying to protect themselves from the ominous gathering of unknown forces. These caverns were menacing.
“How much more?” a woman demanded, her voice too sharp, addressing herself to the sinister passages. Aton agreed: what other pressures would be brought to bear before Chthon let them go?
A shout. It was the voice of one of the women on scout duty. Teams always went out on prowl, now, while the main group rested. The chimera never attacked an alert formation.
The others gathered around. It was one of Bedside’s cairns, with a message scratched on the floor. The rock was soft, here, and could be decorated readily.
“What does it mean?”
It was the typical skull illustration of danger, but without the crossbones. A single word was underneath.
Aton spelled out the crude letters: MYXO. “Must be a medical term,” he said.
“Myxo,” Bossman muttered. “Don’t mean anything to me. Ain’t like him to leave his picture unfinished.”
“Either something drove him off—” a woman suggested.
“Or there’s a Myxo ‘round here that don’t quite kill,” another finished.
They stood in a circle, looking at each other. No one knew. But one thing experience had made plain: Doc Bedside’s humor was scant, and his warnings were not to be ignored.
“We better move on fast,” Bossman decided. They were tired, but there was no dissent. There was danger here.
Fifteen minutes later a woman fell, clutching at her throat and head. No animal had attacked her, and nothing was wrong—visibly.
They halted for a brief consultation. Life was more precious at this juncture. If many more were lost, the party would be too small to win through the remaining challenges. There had to be scouting parties, guards, and reliefs for these, as well as individuals for special assignments for unpleasant work. Once the disciplined system broke down, the demise of the remainder would accelerate. Concern for the laggards was something new—but necessary.
They camped and made the woman comfortable. She was examined closely. What was the matter with her?
Her breathing was labored, rasping. Gradually her skin whitened. A slimy mucus was exuded all along her body, and a stomach-twisting odor arose from it. She had fallen prey to a disease—the first disease known in Chthon.
“We better kill her now,” a woman urged, “before it spreads.”
Bossman considered the matter.
“Why bother?” Aton said. “We’ve all been exposed by this time.”
“How did she catch it?”
“I ain’t seen nothing like this before.”
“Leave her here and get out,” a man cried, the contagious tinge of panic coming out.
A second woman fell. “Too late,” Bossman said. It was always too late by the time they understood the manner of the next danger. “Better stick together and fight.”
“Fight what?” the man wanted to know. But the question was academic: a third woman was toppling.
In quick succession the women fell, to lie with skins smeared white. They did not appear to be in pain, after the initial spasm; but the acrid exudation grew steadily worse. It re-formed the moment the skin was wiped clean, and it was everywhere.
Aton, Bossman, and the other four men stood by helplessly. During the trek the men had taken more risks and died more readily, and the chimera seemed to prefer them. Now the tally was being reversed, as the mysterious malady mummified the females. Bossman did what he could. Taking a woman by the foot, he dragged her to the nearest pool and tried to wash the slime away. This seemed to help; she sat up and began to splash herself, slowly, but with some effectiveness.
They did the same for the others, dumping them into the water and holding up their heads by the hair until they revived. The crisis seemed to be over.
Then it started on the men.
The masculine attacks, as though to make up for lost time, were far more violent. Almost as one, the men went into convulsions. Their skin reacted, sending out the calcifying sweat. It was the women’s turn to play nurse. Soon everyone was in the pool, and the water took on a milky hue. If this were to be a fatal disease, all would die.
But Bedside had omitted the bones.
Aton was the first of the men to recover. He had experienced no pain, aside from the extreme tightness of throat that had restricted breathing. Instead there had been a lassitude, a desire to let go, to drift—a desire shocked away by the cold water. Now, in reaction, he was disgusted. Not at the ludicrous communal bath, but at his failure to resist the disease.
“The Myxo!” he exclaimed. “This must be what Bedside was warning us about. Some kind of virus.”
The nearest woman looked at him. The black-haired one, no longer as pretty as she had been before the trek, but still interesting. She had always steered clear when Garnet was about; but Garnet had fed the creature with the white wake while the others were swimming safely across the river, and now the field was clear.
If things ever eased up enough to permit a relaxed disbursement… “Must be in the air,” she said. “We better get out.” And he had never learned her name.
Bossman revived. “Yeah,” he agreed.
They moved on, trying to escape the malady they knew they carried with them. They did not get far.
The women were first, again. This time it was fever, rising unbelievably. There were no gauges, no thermometers here, but the simple touch of the skin served notice that there were several degrees between the sick and the well. The fever rose to the limit of human endurance. Then it increased.
They no longer tried to march. It was obvious that they could not outrun it, or hide from it. The passage ahead expanded into a bubble-dome, another relic of Chthon’s formation, out of place in this section of the caverns, but welcome. The base was filled with clear, shallow water. This was convenient and relatively safe. They settled down, in and beside the pool, waiting for what might come.
At what point, Aton wondered, did brain damage occur? Surely this fever was already cooking the neural tissues of the present victims. There was no specific limit to the temperature a living body could endure, despite the attitude of the medics—but such fever was dangerous. Was this the actual course of the Bedside madness? If so, was it possible to circumvent it?
Was there some way to hold the fever down until the illnes
s ran its course?
He gazed into the water. It was cold; they were far below the fire cycle. Fully immersed—
The fever came. Aton slipped into the pool and lay down, propping himself in such a way that his face alone was exposed to the air. The relief was a blessed thing. But the juices in him were boiling, the tissues curling. The inferno of the blue garnet itself had hardly been as hot as this.
Vaguely he heard scuffling and splashing around him. Something was going on, but he was afraid to sit up and look, afraid to leave the water because of an irrational fear that he would burst into flame the moment he did so.
But he had to. He was finding it difficult to breathe for some reason. There was an obstruction.
Aton sat up and put his hand to his mouth to find it slimed with a thick layer of putrid paste. Inside, this time, obscuring nasal and glottal passages, instead of external skin. His nose was already entirely blocked. He hooked one finger into his mouth and scraped out a wad of yellow mucus, rank and rotten, which hardened immediately upon exposure to the air. No wonder his breathing was difficult. The stuff clogged the breathing passages by solidifying around them.
He looked around, or tried to, and discovered that a similar pus rimmed his eyes, almost closing them. It was the same for the others, male and female alike; the illness no longer seemed to distinguish between the sexes. Some were already retching, nauseated by the deposits. One man yanked out a huge solid chunk, and there was blood on it from the adhering membrane. No one dared to let it collect, or the choice would be between mutilation and suffocation. And still the fever raged.
Aton buried his face in the water, trying to wash the matter away. This helped; the lumps dissolved. He spat out a thick stew, gagging anew at the stench, and rinsed again. Water had saved him a second time.
The others followed his example. For three it was already too late. Several more were in doubt and would probably suffocate shortly. No one had time to assist his neighbor. There seemed to be no defense against the attack—only a temporary abridgment of the symptoms by continuous rinsing.
The pool had been fouled. “Move on—a little,” Bossman said.
They moved on, just far enough to locate a clear pool. The short walk was immensely tiring. The illness had sapped the strength of all of them drastically.
It continued for an interminable time. Toward the end most were crawling from one pool to the next between sieges, unable to walk upright. Judging by the state of his hunger, Aton estimated that the actual time elapsed since the onset was less than two marches—but subjectively, it was many times that.
The first recoveries came. The women, earliest to succumb, led the way to equilibrium. Gradually the symptoms abated for all of them.
Eleven women and three men survived. Of these, three continued in distress: Aton, Bossman, and the black-haired woman. Aton saw this, realized something, then lost the thought as he fought back another surge of dizziness and nausea.
17
Recovery: but those who had recovered completely, at least so far as the visible symptoms went, were not helping the others. They merely stood there, lethargic, waiting—for something. They did not speak.
At length the remaining three relaxed and sat up, free of the fever. The standing eleven looked on, blank-faced.
“All right,” Bossman called, his voice of command a shadow of its past. “We got to move on nex’ pool.”
He set the example, but the larger group did not follow.
“What’s the matter with them?” the black-haired one asked.
“Aren’t you coming?” Aton called back to them.
No answer.
“You know what?” the woman said. “They act like zombies.”
It was the key. The standing people did not appear to have free will at all. All of them were known to Aton, after the rigors of the trek. While they were not noted individualists, they still should—
His previous thought blossomed. Individualism: only the three most independent members of the remaining party were in motion now. The ones who always spoke for themselves, who acted on their own motivation, who habitually demanded explanations.
Further conjecture was cut off by another onset of the disease. All three staggered to the next pool and tumbled in, battling both fever and mucus with the cool water. And the others watched stolidly and did nothing.
In his fevered imagination it seemed to Aton that he was losing control over his own body. His arms responded slowly. Other muscles were sluggish, uncertain. This was an aspect of the illness that was only now beginning to make perverted sense.
But the thought of Malice buoyed him up. Her song was incomplete. He could not rest until he possessed her. Nothing else mattered. The fire in his blood was not more fierce than that in her hair; the pool no more refreshing than her deep eyes. Her love alone—
The siege passed. Aton felt stronger, now. It had been easier to resist, once he remembered his purpose. But the other two had been less fortunate. They gazed at him alertly, but did not try to rise. It was up to him to penetrate the mystery of the zombies.
Ten women and one man had neither fled the last attack nor been affected by it. Aton advanced on them.
They retreated—as a group. They shuffled away, awkward, stiff, in unison. There could be no further doubt: they were possessed and under common control. This time it was no caterpillar, at least not a physical one, but the effect was similar.
“Kill them,” Bossman rasped from the pool. “They ain’t human no more.”
Aton caught up to the lone man, a medium-built, hardworking, and congenial person, hitherto. “Snap out of it,” he said, yanking him back by the shoulder. But the man fell backwards at the pressure and crashed stiff-bodied against the floor. He did not try to get up.
Aton got down and listened for the heartbeat. There was none. The man was not breathing. He was dead.
The women continued their retreat. He went after them again—and was stopped by a third assault in this intermittent series. This one was more strenuous than before. He could hardly force his legs to cover the distance to the nearest pool. They wanted to jerk to the same rhythm that ruled the marching women. The coagulating slime in his mouth increased his distraction.
He got to the water and toppled in headfirst, not caring for the moment whether or not be drowned, so long as it was at his own direction. Malice appeared again, a lovely vision, and his insatiable yearning for her drove back the other fever, reluctantly. That was the only thing that stiffened his will to resist. The urge of the fever was too strong to endure for long.
It passed, leaving him weak and gasping. Beside him Bossman was rigid and staring, eyeballs caked with blood. Aton was afraid the leader had been overcome, but a voice came out of the twisted mouth, clogged and croaking, but Bossman’s.
“I… can’t fight no more,” Bossman said. His arm struggled in the water and brought up the shining axe. “Take it… kill me if I go….”
Aton took it. He stood up and strode toward the group once more. Again the women shuffled away, some not even facing him, but moving in automatic steps with the others. And again the fever struck.
He realized that the fever was under conscious direction. As he withdrew toward the pool, it eased; as he advanced on the zombies, it clamped down. The message was clear: leave them alone.
Aton made his reply clear. He focused his mind on the dominating picture of his love, his unobtainable minionette, and continued to advance. He struck with his free hand at the nearest woman; the coordination required to wield the axe was beyond him. She fell without a sound, to lie as the man had kin. The strain of transition must have weakened the zombies so much that any added shock was fatal. He could kill with a single blow.
“Kill—” he thought. “But these are human beings, the people I have traveled with and lived with through the most terrible adventures of our lives. How can I kill them?”
But he knew the answer to that, and in the disorientation of the mental attack th
e reasoning made sense: kill, because these people were no longer human. They had given up their minds and wills to some Chthon influence as insidious as the caterpillar, and death was merciful. He knew this intellectually, and he felt it, somehow, emotionally: there was no personality remaining in the zombies. Kill.
The invisible attack against him intensified. His breath was cut off, his sight wavered, but he fought and advanced and struck out almost blindly, again and again, connecting now and then with solid flesh, and all about him the silent females fell. It was carnage; one blow meant death, and there were many blows.
At last the pressure against him became too great, and he fell. Unable to rise, he tried to roll toward the water. But he had pushed himself too far. He succumbed, not to possession but to oblivion.
To—
“Your dream is futile,” the voice seemed to say. “The minionette is forbidden; only while you are apart from her is your emotion real. You cannot bring these opposite poles together; they can unite only in disaster.”
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!”