Free Phthor by Piers Anthony Page A

me.”
    “I’m sorry.” She was trying to explain something vital, and he had no right to keep interrupting. He could save his questions for later.
    “All the minionettes have names like that. Fury, Agony, Torment, Wrath, Misery—”
    Arlo started to interrupt again, but turned it into a cough. He had to listen, not argue!
    Coquina smiled, and he saw in that expression the aspect that had made his father love her. “Yes, it seems strange at first. But they are true to their nature, as we are to ours. You see, the emotions of the minionette are reversed. What we perceive as love, beauty, and delight, they perceive as hate, ugliness and revulsion—and vice versa. Because they are emotionally telepathic, they receive these emotions directly. A man’s hate is divine love to them, but his love can be fatal. In fact, they are virtually immortal; hardly anything can kill them, and they remain young-seeming and beautiful for centuries. They all look alike, too, until you get to know them well. So they live until someone’s love reaches them—and then they die. Their names are actually endearments.”
    She took a breath, as though marshalling her strength. “The men of Planet Minion are more nearly normal, but they have learned to hate those they love. They beat their wives and even try to kill them—knowing that only in this way can they preserve them. So the Minion male has a strong sadistic streak associated with his love. That is why the planet is proscribed; that kind of love has made too much mischief in the history of Old Earth and would wreak devastation among the civilized cultures of the galaxy.
    “Malice stayed with Aurelius one year—long enough to bear him the child Aton. By that time Aurelius’s grief over the loss of the Daughter of Ten was fading, and he was coming to love Malice without guilt. He did not understand— perhaps did not allow himself to understand—that this was what drove her away. So Aton was raised without a mother.
    “But there is one other thing about the Minion culture. The women live for centuries, but the men normally die by the age of fifty. Apparently it takes that long for their hate to turn inevitably to love, for their sadism to weaken, and when that happens, they are executed by their own kind. It is a sad but honorable demise, known by the euphemism ‘carelessness.’ But the minionette is not widowed; she takes her son as her next husband.”
    “She what?” Arlo exclaimed. All that he had learned of human culture indicated that incest was taboo.
    “It is their system, natural for them,” Coquina continued, though he could see that she herself suffered fundamental misgivings. Coquina was a Daughter of Four, Planet Hvee, innately conservative, a child of the land. Yet she had adapted to her extraordinary situation—for love of the halfminion Aton. She had mastered tolerance. “The minionette is wife to her son, and after him her grandson who is also her son, and all her male descendants, though she is the literal mother to them all. She bears only boys until at last she grows old; then she bears the girl who will replace her.”
    “But if my grandfather—” The implications almost overwhelmed him.
    “Aurelius was human, not Minion. He could not accept the Minion system. But Malice came in quest of her son, Aton.” She paused as if gathering strength again, and this time Arlo well understood why. “You have to understand. She had the aspect of a young, beautiful woman, and she came as a lover not a mother, and he did not know—”
    Young and beautiful. That abated his revulsion somewhat. But the other matter could hardly be similarly dissipated. “My father Aton—married his—mother?”
    “Yes. There was no ceremony, for she had to conceal her identity from the authorities. Technically, he was betrothed to me, but—”
    “I will kill her myself!’’ Arlo cried, filled with a new kind of rage.
    “No. She is long dead—and she was not a bad woman. I met