Phthor (2 page)

“You were just asking me about—”

“Still,” she said.

Disgruntled, he made as if to strike her. He was quickly becoming furious.

She neither flinched nor fought. Suddenly she smiled— such an impish, carefree grin that he realized she had been teasing him. He smiled back, appreciating the humor of it—and she turned abruptly sullen.

A human being, he realized, was more complicated than an animal. He remained for a moment contemplating her, trying to fathom her motives. But these seemed as elusive as the flesh he had sought between her legs.

She came from the prison; that was his only hint. So she was a criminal, cast out from her own kind. But surely not merely because her moods were mercurial!

The prison caverns were not completely familiar to Arlo for several reasons. They were hot and windy, so that a person without a supply of water soon dehydrated; they were far removed from his normal haunts; they were partially closed off from the main caverns so that it was hard to reach them; and Aton had forbidden him to visit them. Thus he had seen little of the prisoners, and regarded them much as he did the zombies: creatures of a different environment, not his kind. All of them were adult, some old; the men were stringy and muscular, the women with full or pendulous breasts and furry hair on their underbellies. They were ugly compared to Coquina despite their nudity; but sometimes, considering them, he had discovered his genital swelling up hard.

“Your penis is getting long,” the girl said.

Embarrassed for no discernible reason, Arlo moved on downriver, forcing her to scamper to keep up. “Why don’t you speak of your pasts?” he fired over his shoulder.

“I don’t know. It’s just a convention, I guess. I don’t—”

“Don’t step in that!” he cried suddenly.

She halted, one foot poised above the water. “I can’t jump across all the time the way you do! It’s not deep here.”

“This is a sucker section.”

“What’s a sucker?”

“I’ll show you.” He dipped the jellywog into the clear river and wiggled it, keeping his fingers out of the water. In a moment there was a shimmer of motion.

When he pulled the wog out, two thin, transparent tails hung from it. Already a ribbon of red was forming within each one as blood from the meat siphoned into the parasite’s digestive tract. “Suckers hurt,” Arlo explained.

“Ugh!” she agreed, shrinking back.

Arlo bashed the jellywog against the wall, dislodging the suckers. They dropped back into the water and disappeared with quick swirls.

“Why didn’t you kill them?” the girl asked.

“They don’t taste very good unless they’ve just gorged.”

“I don’t mean to eat! I mean to make them dead.”

“Why?”

“They’re dangerous!”

“Not to me.”

“You just showed me how they—”

“Anyone stupid enough to put his foot in their waters—”

“You still haven’t asked me my name.”

“I forgot.” He went on downstream. She followed, now able to jump over nimbly enough.

The firespout jetted from a cleft in hot stone. Arlo held the jellywog over it, letting the fatty flesh singe.

“How does that work?” the girl asked.

“Aton says it’s a leak from the gas-cavern system. Most of the gas goes to the big tunnels above the prison, but some

squeezes a long way through rifts and leaks out in places like this. Aton lit this one so it wouldn’t foul our air.”

“You sure know a lot!” she said admiringly.

“I’m fourteen, almost. I know how to read.”

“I’m eleven. I read, too.”

“What did you do? Kill someone?”

“You never asked my name.”

“If I ask your name, will you tell me what you did?”

“No. I’m not supposed to tell.”

Arlo shrugged, though he was furious at being balked again. This child did not seem like a criminal—but according to Aton, only the worst offenders were sentenced to Chthonprison. What could she have done, to deserve this?

“I could tell you a lie,” she offered. “I’m good at that. You wouldn’t know the difference, would you?”

“I would if you told me it was a lie!”

“But I could pretend it was the truth.”

Arlo found her reasoning too devious. “Coquina says people should always tell the truth.”

“Do you believe that?”

He thought of the necessary lies he had told his mother. “No.”

“Well?”

“All right. What’s your name?”

“Vesta. That’s a lie, too.”

“Why?”

“Because my real name might give away what I did.”

“Then why were you so eager to give me your name?”

“So you’ll know me.”

“I don’t need a name for that!”

“Yes you do. A girl’s name is excruciatingly important.”

“Not to me.”

“Call me Ex for short.”

“I don’t need to call you anything!”

“You’re lovely when you’re mad.”

“Here’s your food,” he said, shoving the scorched and bubbling meat under her nose.

“It should be Esta, or maybe Es, but I like Ex better.”

“So why are you in prison?”

“I’m not. I’m out in the caverns, here. I’m an Exprisoner.”

“That isn’t what I meant!”

“Ugh!” she said, sniffing the jellywog. “Maybe we should have left it raw.”

“You told me you’d tell me if I asked your name!”

“I told you I’d tell you a lie,” she said. “I did.”

“The name-lie doesn’t count!”

“The lie,” she said carefully, “was that I would tell you why I was sent to prison.”

For a moment he was baffled. “I don’t understand you!”

“Do you need to?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, dismayed.

“You could take back your burned fish.”

“Why?”

“To get even for the lie. Punishment. Revenge.”

“That would waste the food.”

“Then you could hurt me some other way. Hit me, maybe.”

He thought about it. The notion was peculiarly attractive, but she was probably teasing him again. The blow would never land—or would be accepted as the gambit for a deadly counter. That was the way Aton fought, and even in play it was dangerous. Still, this could test what she really knew about combat. If he struck hard and fast blocked the countershot and jumped away simultaneously, it might be worth the risk. “Yes.”

“Hit me!” she said, putting her hands behind her back and lifting her small chin. She was very pretty that way.

Arlo hit her.

Swift and hard, his fist caught her on the chin and knocked her back. He was pleased—he had actually foiled the counter and gotten out of range unharmed!

Ex fell like a broken stalagmite. The back of her head cracked into the stone wall. She collapsed into a huddle similar to the one he had found her in, but this time she was not crying.

Immediately Arlo was sorry. He had not realized how much larger he was than she, or how little resistance she would have. It was obvious now that Ex was not a trained fighter. She had aggravated him and invited retaliation, not expecting more than a token strike. He had been angry but had never meant to destroy her.

He squatted, looking at her head. There was blood on it, seeping through her yellow hair, turning it red. He scooped some water from the river—this was beyond the sucker section—and splashed it on, trying to clean the wound. She was not dead, but he knew that a head injury could kill her slowly or make her like a zombie. Loss of blood was not good either, and its smell would attract predators.

Arlo realized that he was much better at killing than at healing. “Chthon!” he cried in anguish, appealing to his friend the god for help. But still Chthon was absent.

Quickly he considered his alternatives. He could put her in the river, letting her body float down to the nearest potwhale. It happened to be a medium-sized one, capable of consuming the carcass in a few hours. But she wasn’t dead yet, and despite all the annoyance she had caused him, he still didn’t want her dead. Never before had he had company, other than adult; now he knew he needed it.

He could tell his parents. But Aton would be suspicious of human intrusion into the caverns, and Coquina would be upset. They might make Ex go away, back to the prisontunnels—and Arlo wasn’t ready for that either. This little girl had made an impression on him—of what nature he wasn’t sure. But he could not let her go until he knew.

He could take her to his hvee garden, a secret place even his parents did not know of. Ex had said hvee grew only on Planet Hvee, but this was not true. In his garden it would be easy to take care of her and feed her until she recovered—if she did recover. If not—there were plenty of potwhales.

So his mind reasoned, but his emotion was already committed. He had hurt her; he must make her well. He hardly knew her, yet she promised to fill a void that was no less intense for its recent discovery.

He picked her up, amazed again at how little she weighed, and carried her downstream. Her bare legs dangled across his left arm, and her blood-damp hair across his right. He felt again the unaccustomed agony of remorse.

Never again would he strike a person thoughtlessly.

In due course he passed a glow chipper—a gray, mansized creature with close-fitting scales, standing on its hind legs and bracing against its tail to reach the edible heights of glow with its buck teeth. It was strong but harmless; in fact, it was possible to ride on its back even without Chthon’s intercession. Few cavern creatures were that docile!

“Good!” Arlo exclaimed. “Chipper can carry the burden!”

But he soon realized that this would not do after all. Riding was one thing; making the stupid creature carry was another. Only Chthon could tune it to that degree. By themselves, the chippers followed their natural bent. They knew that Arlo was not a threat to them, so they ignored him. No help there.

The burden was not great, but travel was cumbersome with his arms engaged. He might have slung her over his shoulder, but he was afraid her dangling head would bleed worse. He was unable to take advantage of the most direct route to the garden because he could not swim or climb this way. Few of the linked caverns were conveniently level; their reaches twisted like monstrous wormholes—lava tubes, Aton called them—cut through by streams and fractures. The most dangerous animals tended to frequent the lower reaches of any given cave—the very region Arlo now had to walk. And he could neither throw his cheek-stones nor wield his stalactite-spear while carrying Ex.

It was amazing what a difference one girl made.

He was in no trouble yet. The animals of the caverns were not as smart as he and would not realize his limitations immediately. But this was increasingly nervous business, for news of his strange behavior would already be spreading through Chthon. Free, strong, and agile, he had few mortal enemies; handicapped, he would have many. The chimera...

Arlo shuddered momentarily. He could not risk that!

There was only one dry, level-route shortcut to the garden: through the labyrinth of the dragon.

Arlo did not fear the dragon, but that was because it was unable to leave its own tunnels. Its huge body was so constructed that it could operate effectively only in its own territory; in a larger cavern it would become clumsy, easily escaped. But within its ten-foot diameter tubes it was a juggernaut, ferocious and irresistable. It was carnivorous, feeding on those creatures large and small who foolishly wandered or dropped into its premises and were unable to find their way out in time.

Now Arlo was about to enter that region. For the sake of a bothersome girl who would probably die anyway. He knew he was acting irrationally—being a fool, as Aton put it—and a part of him raged against that. Still, he went.

These passages were not natural. They were round, scraped out of the solid rock by the mighty claws of the dragon. True, the rock was soft here; Arlo could chip it himself with his stalactite. But it would have taken him months of tedious labor to make even a small tunnel—and these were not small!

He entered through a reduced-diameter tube, left over from that time, perhaps centuries ago, when the dragon had been young. It had widened most of the passages, but there were a lot of them to cover and it had neglected some at the fringe. Perhaps it had merely changed the design, so that they were not needed anymore—or even left them deliberately for the entry of prey. Obviously more were caught than escaped, or the dragon would have starved.

Arlo had been all around the burrow, extensive as it was, and knew that it was largely two-dimensional. The dragon’s bulk was such that it could be crushed by its own weight in any fall, so it didn’t like to climb. Old Doc Bedside had explained that; he knew a lot about the way animals functioned.

Also, the dragon normally slept at this time, and it was not readily roused. So the gamble was not intolerable.