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 the 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!"

Aton jumped up, clambered out of the water, lumbered to the weapon. He slapped a hand on it as though afraid it would wriggle away. He was armed now; he was no zombie.

The women came after him, mechanically. He backed away, hesitant after their kindness to him. He had been destroying them; why had they spared him?

Something touched him. Whirling, Aton saw a man. It was Bossman, standing outside the water. His skin was clear. His eyes were vacant.

Aton knew what he had to do. He lifted the axe.

The attack began. He clenched his mind against it and swung the suddenly heavy axe. The great blade of it strove overhead, ponderous, too massive for his strength. He forced it onward, slowly, guiding it as gravity took leisurely hold and toppled it down. It came to rest at last in Bossman's skull, and he fell, fell.

I have paid my debt to you, and -- I'm sorry.

The force of the attack lay on him like a smothering blanket, but as he staggered back it eased again. The dead women lay all around; only the two who had revived him were animate. He could kill them --

And wander through the endless caverns of Chthon, alone. Was this the way it was to end? And if he succumbed, eventually, to zombi-ism, who would there be to kill him?

What had the love of Malice led him into?

"Truce." The cracked voice came from the pool behind him. He had forgotten the black-haired woman, the last holdout.

She was rising from the water. He was not alone!

She approached him, moving with the awkward gait of the possessed. Her eyes stared straight ahead.

The last of the zombie conquests was coming to him, easy prey for axe or fist.

What did it mean?

"Truce," it repeated.

It could talk. There was intelligence behind the Myxo half-death! The skull without the crossbones.

Now it was ready to parley.