“Your particular madness stems from a biological basis,” Bedside said. “There is no cure for it. You cannot undo your parentage. You will go on killing sadistically because the minion in you curves the telepathic pleasure of innocent pain. You will go on forgetting your crimes because the man in you cannot accept the guilty pleasures your other self demands. You will go on vindicating the judgment of those who proscribed Minion, hating yourself far more than any other thing—and not without justice.

“Oh, yes—you know your madness now, don’t you, minion?”

“I did kill,” Aton said, “but not sadistically. There was justice and mercy in my action. I was not the chimera.”

Bedside did not relent. “I am not talking of honest murders, minion. I know there are times in Chthon when killing is necessary. Nor do I mean your failures: your Idyllia girl, your vengeance on the minionette, the cavern woman. You tried to kill them all, but you were so much at war with yourself that you could neither love nor hate effectively.

“No, not these actions. But think back to one specific case: your little friend, Framy. (Yes, my god tells me everything.) You protect your innocence there because you did not technically spill his blood. But you betrayed the nether caverns, and pinned the blame on him, and had him posted for execution. And you were there, listening, when the chimera came. Your minion sensitivity responded to the savage little mind of the chimera as it stalked, and you knew it was coming for Framy. You could have alerted the others, and saved him—but you did not. You were there, savoring his agony, as that chimera struck, and still you gave no alarm. Only his dying scream alerted the others-too late.

“This is what you did in Chthon, not once but many times. You used the chimera to gratify your brutal passion. Was this your justice? Your—sanity?’

Aton remembered. Chthon, where his lust for pain had been intensified by confinement. The men whose dying he had savored, the macabre tortures inflicted upon them by a creature he could have stopped, but didn’t, as their lifeblood dwindled. The unholy ecstasy that had thrilled him, the almost religious joy culminating in transported spasms of pleasure as those death agonies came.

He remembered, too, the trial, on Hvee: the experts testifying that his aberration was after all biological, not emotional, and that there could be no cure. That he had not murdered, yet, but could not be set loose again, for the safety of mankind. That even a complete personality-wash would not remove his proscribed urges. He remembered the sentence: Chthon.

The minion traits had come upon him with maturity, but for a time had been wholly directed to the search for this minionette. When her influence diminished, the horror began. His love of Coquina had been the last struggle of the human qualities within him—a losing struggle.