Chthon (7 page)

Aton stared after him, suspicious of this act of instruction. Were these the fiercest of humanity’s prisoners? But he experimented with the new method, gaining proficiency.

After an hour of fruitless chipping he retired to eat his meal. The food tasted uncommonly good. He went to refill his waterskin, then came back to attack his mine again.

Several hours passed. He excavated a fair-sized hole, but found no sign of a garnet. The scattered pocks left by the removal of earlier garnets mocked him. He resented the facility of the unknown person who had succeeded where Aton was failing. He began to understand why the other miners did not bother him: the business of making a living was too important. This was grinding, mind-deadening labor, cramping his forearms, tiring his legs. When he shut his eyes he saw a vision of the blank, pitted, pitiless wall; when he opened them, they smarted and blurred.

At length there was a general exodus, and Aton followed, picking up the routine by observation. They went to Garnet’s office, where she was handing out new packages. The men and women formed into a rough line, each in turn offering a single gem in exchange for the meal.

Aton, of course, was empty-handed.

Garnet accepted no explanations. No garnet, no food. “Don’t cry on my shoulder, Five,” she told him irritably. “You’ve got to learn to work down here, newcomer. You don’t get nothing for nothing. Better go look for a stone.”

Aton left, tired and angry. His hands were raw and blistered, his lungs choking from the dust. He was hungry, but the vacant wall offered no hope.

His little neighbor approached: coarse black hair, bright black eyes. “No food?” Aton nodded. “Look pal, she won’t never give you nothing to eat ‘less you got a stone. You got to have a garnet.”

Aton was unimpressed with the news. “I know that,” he snarled. “I forgot to pick one up.”

The man dropped his voice confidentially. “Well, look, see, like if I was to do you a favor, would you be my pal? Name’s Framy. Like if I was to give you a stone…”

Aton studied him, not certain of the gist. What kind of proposition was this? The man was cringingly eager. If he were a pervert…

“No, I ain’t!” Framy exclaimed. Aton made a mental note to be more careful of his expression. The man’s petulance seemed genuine. What could he want, then? Company or protection? Was he a pariah? Was his friendship dangerous?

Aton’s stomach growled. The man might very well be useful, if he had garnets. Protection was a useful commodity. “Maybe,” he said, and introduced himself.

Framy poked a dirty finger into his mouth and popped out a glittering stone. Aton concealed his surprise. How else could a naked man safely store a semi-precious jewel? “Here,” Framy said, proffering the moist garnet. “I got an extra. You take it and get a package. Then you come back to me. Remember, I done you a favor.”

Aton accepted it. Moments later he turned it over to Garnet.

She took it and examined it suspiciously. “Well, I guess you got one,” she conceded reluctantly. She kicked the last package over to him. “You can have what’s left.”

He moved off, tearing it open hungrily. The cloth unraveled and fell free, empty. “There’s nothing here,” he said, showing it to her.

“I forgot to tell you mister. You came too late. Food’s all gone.” She turned her back to him.

“But my garnet—you took my garnet!”

She didn’t bother to look at him. “Too bad. No refunds.”

Aton fought down the urge to grab the tangled mat of hair and drag her through the coarse gravel. The incongruity of the situation struck him: here he was, quite naked, facing a similarly unclad woman—and his most immediate ambition was to knock out her teeth.

But he didn’t dare. He could not be certain that Bossman would meet him alone, in case he were to offer careless resistance to the crude hierarchy. Massed force might destroy him. Escape was far more important than immediate satisfaction.

He could not take vengeance physically. But there were other weapons. Many times would Garnet regret the enemy she had made this moment.

5

There was a certain feel to garnet hunting, a talent that permitted some to discover the stones easily, almost intuitively, while others strained all day (Chthon definition) only to finish hungry. Framy had it. He seemed to smell the precious quarry, and his appetite for riches was insatiable. Aton developed a fair talent; he did not go hungry again, but his reserve never grew large. Each man maintained a private cache, and Framy, at least, labored regularly in the mine more for the sake of appearance than need. A man too quick at finding garnets could become unpopular, and he and his cache were in danger from the hungry ones. Framy had done well to befriend a man like Aton; this was soon apparent.

There were many types in the lower caverns. Not all of the inhabitants were wholly sane, but once their idiosyncrasies were known life was compatible. One fought when one had to, never for amusement; one yielded upon occasion to unreason and stayed clear of trouble unless one wanted it.

One man stood out amid the steady grind for garnets. He was notable because he was a nonsurvival type who managed to survive nicely. This was the grossly obese Hastings: intelligent, knowledgeable, cheerful, quick with his hands, but with a complete vacuity of talent for mining, and perpetually unlucky. He survived as an entrepreneur. He won his garnets from men, rather than from stone.

“I need a blue garnet as I need Laza’s love,” fat Hastings expounded during a break. The others gaped at him, rising to the bait.

“Hasty, Hasty—you know what a blue garnet
is
?” Framy asked incredulously. “You know what a blue garnet’ll
do
for a man?”

The other edged in, anticipating a show.

“I know what it’ll do for a man,” Hastings said. “It’ll kill him so fast the chimera wouldn’t pick up the pieces.”

The “chimera” was the cavern name for a deadly predator of the fringe caverns that no person had ever seen—and lived.

“I’ll take that chance,” a man said. “Just gimme the garnet.”

Aton was curious. “I’ve never heard of a blue one.”

“Oh, Fiver,” Framy said, dusting himself off in the center of the group. “Lemme expoun’ to you the facts of life. You know how the little ones we find are red, and maybe a brown one once awhile? Well, there’s other kinds too, we don’t latch on to often. Worth more. Like if you got a black one, you tap ol’ bitch Garnet for a week’s chow, maybe more. And if you got a chunk of pure white jadeite—well, ol’ man Chessy upstairs is hard up for the stuff, and he’ll pull for you something awful, you sneak him a message. ‘Nuff of that stuff, you don’t have to mine no more.

“Well, these’r little fish. You ever grab hold a blue garnet, it’s your ticket to freedom.”

Aton’s interest abruptly intensified.

Framy was enjoying himself. He scratched his hair. “Yep. They’ll let you go. You won’t be punished no more. Free as a bird in the big outside.”

The others nodded agreement, sharing the dream. “But you’ll never see one,” a woman said.

“That’s right,” another put in. “Ain’t none of us seen a blue garnet. Ain’t none never will. Ain’t none.”

“That’s a lie!” Framy screamed.

“Don’t call me a liar, you little liar!” the woman said angrily. She had sharp features and black hair winding down her back. Few of the women in the lower prison were pretty, but this one was; she still looked deceptively young and soft. “I’ll poke your beady little eyeballs back into your dirty little brain,” she continued.

Framy cringed, then came back boldly. “Not with my pal Fiver here, you won’t. He’ll get you good.”

It hadn’t occurred to Aton that the woman’s threat might be literal. But it was; she had nails like talons. She now eyed him speculatively. “I reckon I can handle him awright,” she said. She inhaled to make her fine bosom stand out. “How about it, mister?”

This too was literal, and not entirely unattractive. But not now. Aton attempted a return to the subject. “What’s so deadly about the blue garnet, Hasty?”

“So your last name’s Five,” Hastings mused, as though he had just discovered the fact. “They call that the pixie number, you know. Dangerous. Only name I ever heard that translates into itself.”

“What’re you talking about?” Framy demanded.

Hastings held out a fleshy palm.

Framy fought his curiosity and lost. He spat out a small garnet and handed it over. Hastings considered Framy his prime customer.

“Science of numerology,” Hastings said, and the people around settled back comfortably, listening. “Every number from 1 to 9 has its vibration. You add up the vowels—
A
is 1 because it’s first in the old English alphabet,
E
is 5 because it’s fifth, and so on—you add them up, and add again, until you have a single number. Each one has its influence—1 is the beginning, 2 is slow, and so on down the line.”

“But how does 5—?”

“Spell it out. F-I-V-E. That
I
is worth 9; the
E
, 5. Add them up to make 14. That’s too big, so add the one and the four to each other to get your number: 5.”

Framy’s face lighted. “Five is 5!” he said, delighted with the discovery. Someone snickered, but he was oblivious. He would be translating people to numbers for many shifts to come.

Suddenly he sobered. “You say 5 is dangerous?”

“Full of surprises. 5 can bring a fortune out of the blue—or sudden death. Really has to watch his step.”

Aton steered the subject back once more. “You were talking about the special garnet.”

Hastings settled his belly back comfortably. He waited. The others chuckled: it was Aton’s turn to cough up the stake.

“Well, take a look at it this way,” Hastings said after the transaction. “A blue garnet is valuable. So valuable that a man might bribe his way to freedom with it. That’s a commendable price. Perhaps there are no blues, so the authorities believe they’re safe; or it may be their subtle way of telling us that there is no such thing as a reprieve. But if there
is
such a thing—a blue garnet, I mean—it is certain that it is a lot more valuable than a prisoner or a principle. Now all of us here are criminals—”

“I ain’t!” Framy yelled. “I ain’t no criminal. I was—”

“FRAMED!” the group chorused.

“Well, I was,” Framy said, hurt.

“…Criminals, imprisoned here for the rest of our unnatural lives. There isn’t any one of us here who doesn’t want to get out more than anything else he can think of. There isn’t any one of us who has a chance at all, unless he wants to take the Hard Trek. Except for the one who happens to uncover the blue stone.

“Now if I had a blue garnet right here in my hand, like this—” he extended a closed fist “—and I said, ‘Gentlemen, I have found eureka and I’m going to leave you now…!’ “

The fingers of his hand slipped apart a little, accidentally, it seemed. A touch of blue showed through. They watched in shocked silence.

Hastings made as if to rise. “Well, freedom is calling me!” he sang out gaily. “Be seeing you—never!”

Three flying bodies crashed him to the floor, as two men and a woman launched themselves simultaneously. One grabbed his outflung arm and wrenched the hand open with cruel force. A fragment of blue cloth fluttered out.

They turned him loose silently, the avarice in their faces fading. Hastings heaved himself upright, rubbing his arm. “Maybe you get my meaning now,” he said. “You can’t go free unless you make your garnet known. And when you do…” 

•    •    •

Garnet was hard on Aton. She reviled him every time she saw him, and lost no opportunity to make him miserable. His meals were difficult. Garnet claimed that his offerings were too small or had flaws, or merely denied he had given her one, thus forcing two or even three for a single package.

Aton took it. He never argued with her, always thanked her for the food as though she were doing him a favor. He stood silent while she yelled at him, simply looking at her. At times he would come to her for no apparent reason, just to sit and listen to her scream at him.

Framy couldn’t understand it. “What you want to hang around her for?” he inquired incredulously. “There’s lots better women’n her. Nice bodies and soft tongues, and they got the eye for you, Fiver, oh, my, they do. Like that sexy slut with the black hair. Why fool with the biggest bitch in the pit?”

Aton didn’t answer.

Garnet grew progressively more violent. It was not uncommon for her to strike him with her fist, or to kick him. Something was driving her to fury. Aton accepted it with equanimity, sometimes even smiling.

There was no night or day in Chthon, but the prisoners tended to slip into a typical cycle of labor and rest oriented on the regular meals. Most worked in company, though the mines were fiercely individual, and retired to private caves to sleep. Aton chose his own hours, and so happened to be working alone when Garnet came upon him as he was chipping out an unusually large gem.

She began cursing him immediately. “Keep working, you dirty bastard,” she shouted, as he stopped to give her courteous attention. Aton only smiled—in the caverns, strictly speaking, everyone was dirty. Washing was done by the action of sand and wind. The standard epithet referred to more than physical status. “This ain’t no vacation.”

“I know, my dear.”

Her mouth fell open. Speechless with rage, she scooped up a stone and bashed it against the gem in the wall. Aton glanced at the ruin and took hold of her.

“It seems you have taken your payment,” he said, a new note in his voice. “Now it is time for you to render service.”

She struck at him. He knocked away the stone and took her down on the cavern floor. He was far stronger than she, as his genes were derived from the modified stock of the heavy-gravity Hvee colony. Quick blows to selected nerves made her stiffen with pain; shock made her passive for the moment, though she retained full consciousness and sensation.

Then realization came, and she struggled violently, but there was nothing she could do. No broken song stopped him this time, and Garnet had the protection of neither clothing nor experience.