VI. CHTHON

§403

Sixteen

Aton recovered slowly. The calendar on the wall across the room opened on the face of Second Month, §403—almost a year after the horror he remembered. He had kissed the minionette, and...almost a year!

Where have I been? What have I done, in that vanished interim?

He looked about. The first substantial feature of the comfortable room that his attention fixed upon was the hard-backed wooden chair: the mighty chair of Aurelius, guarding the exit. Across the floor was the plush couch, also too familiar—the couch he had always thought of as his mother’s. Above it still was the framed picture of the daughter of Ten, evoking no guilt now. Beside that—

Beside that was the web work of Xest artistry: mother and son.

He blotted the room from his mind and studied himself. He was wearing a light shirt and clean farming overalls and the soft heavy footwear of the hvee farmer; whoever had dressed him had known how. Could he have done it himself, in some amnesiac state?

There was a stirring in the adjacent room. Aurelius? No, he was dead, as the nymph of the wood was dead, as everyone who had cared for him wad dead. Who occupied this house of Five? The tread was light, familiar.

“Theme of the shell!” he exclaimed, suddenly glad, very glad.

He had thought of her, too, as dead, if she had existed at all outside his dreams. He had killed her—but it had been a symbolic execution, a denial of his second love, and now the symbolism was gone.

She stepped into view, her hair longer than that of his four-year memory, glowing silver against the hvee in the afternoon sunlight. Her fair features were set; her wrist was bare.

There was no physical death on Idyllia, and they both had known it. Yet he had pushed her off the mountain at the moment of rapture. She had no telepathy; she could not have known that his action represented denial, not of her, but of the minionette. To Coquina it was his second rejection...and the vibrant hvee she still wore showed that her love for him had never faltered.

To be worthy of such a woman—

“Daughter of Four,” he said, “I love you.”

She looked up. “Aton?”

Nonplussed, he stood up. His body felt strong—he had not spent the past year in bed. “Coquina—don’t you know me?”

She studied him carefully. “Aton,” she repeated, smiling at last.

He strode toward her. She retreated. “Please do not touch me, Aton.”

“Coquina—what is it?”

She stood behind the large-boned chair of Aurelius. “Things may not be as you remember them, Aton.”

He returned to his own chair and sat down. “Were my dreams mistaken, pretty shell? Did something die on Idyllia?”

“No, Aton, no—not that. But you have been—gone—a long time. I must be sure.”