Tomorrow's Crimes Page 18

  Still there was what had to be done. I fell asleep knowing it.

  When I awoke he was indoors again, making more stew. When he brought me my bow l he said, “How you coming?”

  “Slow but steady,” I said, although I was much improved.

  During dinner and for a while afterward Torgmund spoke to me of trapping, and of skinning the hides, and of those other activities of his life in which he expected me from now on to take part. But eventually he stretched out on his makeshift bed—furs spread out on the floor—across the room, and I pretended at once to fall back asleep.

  But I had never been more awake. My eyes were closed but my ears were open, listening to the sound of his breath going in and out of his body. When the unchanging evenness of that sound convinced me he was fully asleep I crept slowly from my bed.

  I was still weak, very weak. Standing made me dizzy, and I wasn’t entirely sure I had the strength to do what had to be done.

  If I were to wait till I was stronger . . .

  No. In another two or three days he would know I was stronger anti he would no longer expose himself so freely to me. He would most likely lock me away in the room he was building I when it w-as time for him to sleep. So if it was going to be, it had to be now.

  I made no noise. I inched around the room, hanging to the walls, my bare feet moving forward tentatively at every step, my hand clutching the wall. It had to be somewhere.

  It was. The knife he used in skinning his catch, a long curving I steel blade in a sheath hanging on a nail beside the door. Slowly.

  I grasped the hilt and drew the blade our of its sheath, and then I moved to Torgmund.

  I had neither the time nor the strength for any sort of stroking cut. All I could do was drive the blade straight down into and through his throat.

  It didn’t kill him all at once, but the point of the knife was into the floor, pinning him there, and his thrashings finished the job, while I leaned spread-eagled against the wall, gasping and terrified, watching

  When it was over, I pulled the knife free and dragged the body outside into the snow. Then I went back in and latched the door and staggered to my bed, too exhausted to do any more.

  For hours, the firelight played nightmares around the room.

  XXII

  It was odd to think of moonlight as signifying day, but the period without moon was so utterly black that the time of moonglow by comparison took on a radiance as bright as day on any world in the cosmos. The moon itself was about half again as large as the moon of Earth, and much yellower in color, the result no doubt of the red sun it was reflecting. The light it produced on the ground was pale and luminescent, with perhaps a touch more of a swollen yellow than in moonlight on Earth.

  This moon didn’t exactly rise in the normal sense of the term. It appeared at first as a thin curving crescent low toward the horizon, thickened to half-moon shape by “midmorning,” was a full moon when at its zenith in the sky, and reversed this process as it slid down the curve of sky toward the horizon again, ending as a crescent, thinner, thinner, then abruptly slicing out, as though a switch had been clicked in some massive control room in the sky.

  The night, that time when the moon was blindly groping through the dayside sky, was almost utterly black. Hell stood lonely in a sparsely starred sector of space, as though ostracized for its sins from some civilized star cluster; only a few stray spots of light broke the blind blackness of the sky.

  I never left the cabin at night. Once the afternoon moon had reached three-quarter I went inside for good, bolting the door and listening often for the sounds of my enemies approaching. I no longer slept in the bunk, but made for myself a mounded bed of skins and blankets by the door, and slept there with a pistol dose by my hand. In the mornings I left the cabin cautiously, clutching Torgmund’s rifle as I opened the door inch by inch, prepared to fight off those who might be skulking just out of sight against the outer wall. I felt a great and continuous fear during those days I spent at the cabin, believing the world to be full of faceless enemies out to capture me. I was never afraid that they might murder me, but only that they would capture me. I allowed my beard to grow, dressed myself in Torgmund’s home-made clothing, and when walking about outside did my best to change my normal posture and manner—all to keep those unknown watching enemies from recognizing me. Because it was me I believed they were after, me personally, though I couldn’t have said why.

  I was full of strange thoughts then, like the business of Torgmund’s body. Killing him had affected me badly, given me nightmares and worried my mind. I had returned now to a full awareness of what I had come to Anarchaos for in the first place, the vengeance of my dead brother, and it seemed to me that if I were to be worthy and capable of avenging him I would have to have a stronger and more impersonal attitude toward death, so for the first few days I wouldn’t bury him. He kept well, lying in the cold and the snow, and I made a point of eating one meal each day outdoors, where I could see him, forcing myself to watch him as I downed a bowl of stew or gnawed at the hard biscuits. But after three days I could stand it no more, and decided to bury him anyway.

  It was then I discovered that the cabin was not built on the ground but a thickness of permanent ice down under the snow.

  I chopped through it with Torgmund’s pick, swinging it one-handed, and reached dirt about a foot down. My pick bounced back from that ground as though it were hitting iron. So Torgmund would have to do without burial.

  Eventually I merely dragged him some distance away from the cabin and covered him with snow. In the night after that I heard the moaning and yapping of animals a little way off, but I never went to look and so I don’t know precisely what happened.

  I stayed at the cabin ten days, building my strength. Torgmund had left me almost endless provisions, including a separate unheated shack filled with smoked and frozen meat. Also there were sacks of flour, quantities of a root vegetable like a cross between a potato and a carrot, and commercial tins of powder which combined with hot water to make that coffee-like drink.

  All in all, Torgmund had created a fine principality for himself, consisting of three and a half structures, the half being the slave quarters for me that he had never had a chance to finish. In addition to the cabin itself and the storage shed there was a kind of squat barn containing quantities of hay and two hairhorses, with his wagon sitting just out front. Also in the barn were a number of traps, mostly looking as though they’d been brought in for repairs.

  I spent many of the moonlight hours in the barn, familiarizing myself with the hairhorses and them with me, since I would need them eventually to rake me out of here and back to the Anarchaos version of civilization.

  They never shied away from me at all, not even at first. Perhaps, with Torgmund’s coat on, they thought I was their master. I doubt they had a much-developed sense of smell, since their own odor was quite strong and likely to blot out subtler aromas. The smell of them reminded me of rancid soup.

  Before this I had seen hairhorses only at a certain distance and in passing. Now that I was close to them I saw they were somewhat larger than I’d thought, as powerfully built as a Terran plow horse but somewhat taller, with long thick gray-black hair like that of a mountain goat back on Earth. Their heads were somewhat wider and shorter than a horse’s, but otherwise they were built very similarly indeed. Their eyes were large and brown and inevitably studied me with the calmness of a cow, lacking that nervousness always to be seen in the eyes of horses on Earth.

  Since they were mostly like a horse I treated them like horses, patting their sides and speaking softly to them. They seemed totally unafraid, even disinterested, showing enthusiasm only when I daily kicked fodder down to them from the tiny loft above their heads. At such times they came very close to actually prancing.

  I had never ridden a horse on Earth and knew next to nothing about them, but in a way I considered that possibly an advantage, since I couldn’t make a mistake in handling these creatures b
ased on their similarity in appearance to something they were not. I was learning from scratch and therefore moved with a caution I might not otherwise have shown.

  There was a saddle in the barn, and by a process of trial and error I learned how to put it on. Beginning the fifth day, when I felt strong enough, I taught myself to mount, and then to sit astride the unmoving beast, and then to ride it at a slow and even walk, and ultimately how to ride it at a trot. I practiced with both of them, alternating with scrupulous fairness, wanting them both to get a full opportunity to become familiar with me. They would soon become vital to my progress, even to my life.

  In all of this I had remarkably fine weather, losing only one day, the seventh, due to bad conditions. A snowstorm had blown up the night before, a whirling raging monster that lashed at the cabin as though enraged to find it poaching on the storm god’s land, and though it was blown out by “morning” there was still full cloud cover, which lasted the full day. The moon, of course, had not the strength to cast illumination through cloud, and that day remained as blindly black as any night. Blacker; there were not even the dozen or so faint stars I was used to seeing in the sky.

  I remained within the cabin all that day, sullen and pouring, angered at the moon for having deserted me. I left only once, lighting my way fearfully with a burning branch from the fire, going by necessity to the barn to feed the hairhorses. I couldn’t carry both the torch and a weapon, so I had Torgmund’s pistol tucked inside my belt and was prepared at any instant to hurl the torch into the snow, yank out the pistol, and fight my way back to safety. However, I was unmolested, fed the hairhorses successfully, and returned at once to the warm protection of the cabin, locking the door again behind me.

  As to the wood—a heavy, almost smokeless, beautifully slow-burning variety—it was stacked against the cabin’s rear wall. There were no trees, no vegetation of any kind growing within sight of the cabin, which meant that Torgmund must have had to make frequent trips in the direction of dayside for both fuel and fodder.

  In the totally atomistic society of anarchists, Torgmund had chosen for himself perhaps the only sensible and viable form of life; absolute separation from and independence of all other human beings. And, of course, it was only when he forcibly introduced a second human being into his atomistic existence that he ran into trouble.

  So here was another face of Anarchaos, the ragged individualist’s heaven. So long, that is, as he never bent a fraction of an inch from the solitary implications of his principles.

  There were no books in the cabin, no pictures, no films or music tapes. In many ways, Torgmund had been no more than an unusually clever animal, a son of beaver combined with bear. His remote freehold, though it used a few of the most immediately practical of man’s discoveries and inventions, was finally a refutation of and a turning away from all of man’s history, all of his progress, all of his unending attempt at self-civilization.

  After ten days, and though the outer world still frightened me, I was much relieved to be getting away from there.

  I took both hairhorses. One I saddled, and would ride, while the other I loaded with Torgmund’s provisions. His rifle and pistol and axe and knife I kept with me; spare furs and clothing

  I added to the pack animal’s load, and at moonrise on the eleventh day I was ready to leave.

  There remained only one problem, but that one insoluble. I had no idea in which direction lay dayside. In deepest night I had gone outside—in terror, of course—to stare toward the horizon in all directions, but had seen not even the faintest glow anywhere. Torgmund had no compass, and even if he had it would have done me no good as I didn’t know what an Anarchaotic compass would be oriented toward.

  My only clue was Torgmund’s statement that the moon did cross dayside, which meant that the spot where the moon first appeared above the horizon had to be either east or west and could not be north or south. I also knew that I was one day’s ride from the evening zone in which Torgmund had found me, though I had no way of knowing what this meant in absolute terms, or how one day of Torgmund’s travel would equate with one day of my own.

  Still, one had to make a choice. I finally decided to travel toward the morning moon, giving three days to the trip, and if by the end of the third day I had not come within sight of the dayside horizon I would turn around and come back and try the other way. If I had guessed wrong it would mean a full week wasted, but there was nothing else to do. And, just in case, I brought along a number of thin branches from the woodpile in back, to leave as markers along the way, to guide me should I have to turn back. If my first guess was wrong, I would want to be able to find the cabin again, in order to restock myself with supplies.

  I set off the first thing, on the morning of the eleventh day, with the moon barely a slit crescent—like a nearly closed eye—at the far horizon ahead of me. I rode the lead hairhorse, with the pack second beast trailing us, kept to us by a rope around its neck and tied at the other end around the pommel of the saddle.

  We moved at a steady lope, the hairhorses trotting with easy muscularity across the snowy and icy ground. The rhythmic eback-cback-cbaek of their hoofs on the crust of snow and ice was the only sound.

  W3 moved directly toward the thin crescent of moon, passing near to where I had left Torgmund’s body. I did not look in that direction as we went by, though it was anyway probably still too dark for me to have seen anything.

  When, a few minutes later, I looked back, the cabin was a tiny black smudge against the pale whiteness of the snow. I faced front again, folded my gloved hand around the pommel, felt the flex and flow of the animal’s muscles against my knees, and rode onward toward the slowly opening luminous yellow eye.

  XXIII

  Although it was no colder at night than in the false moonday, it somehow seemed colder then. I assumed it was so because I was no longer in motion, but had to huddle fireless in one spot and wait for the moon to rise ahead of me once again. I would have preferred to travel constantly but of course could not; there was nothing but the moon itself to give me my direction.

  Until the end of the third day, I saw nothing to indicate whether I was going in the right or wrong direction. It had seemed to me that the temperature must noticeably go either up or down, depending on whether or not I was moving toward dayside, but the biting cold, so far as I could tell, remained unchanged. That is, it seemed to be at one temperature when I was in motion and at a lower one when I was at rest, and these two temperatures did not seem to vary.

  Toward evening of each day—the inaccuracy of these terms grates on me, but they are the only ones I can use—I would dismount, hobble the animals, and dig for myself a shallow sort of trench in the snow. In this I would lie, with furs beneath me and above me and sleep or think the hours away until moonrise.

  The cold affected my wrist badly, making it sting and bum. I kept it wrapped in furs, but to no effect, and the constant pain caused me to be irritable and impatient when there was no value in such feelings.

  I don’t know how long the faint light was visible before I noticed it. My attention was exclusively, vitally, almost balefully upon the black horizon ahead of me or—as we moved through the dark “afternoon”—in quick glances behind me to be sure I was still moving directly away from the declining moon. I was staring ahead more intently than ever as my self-imposed rime limit neared its end; three days I had given myself and three days were just about up. The thought of having to retrace all that distance to the cabin, and then to have to begin the journey all over again in the opposite direction, both depressed and maddened me. If only, far out there across the snowy waste ahead of me, there would come some slight tinge of color on the horizon.

  But it wasn’t ahead of me that the light appeared. I had just about decided to stop for the night, and was looking around for a shallow dip in which to bed down—there was sometimes wind out here—when I saw that thin vague rosy line far far away, the line of light on a flat horizon.

  Could i
t be man-made, some sort of city? No, that was impossible. It extended too far along the horizon, in the first place, and in the second place there was no city anywhere along the rim. The cities of Anarchaos were five; Ulik, Moro-Geth, Prudence and Chax at the four points of a diamond, and Ni at their center. The sun had to be off in that direction, to my left.

  I turned at once, prodding the hairhorses to greater speed, riding along as though I expected to attain that horizon in half an hour. The moon, low to my left, winked out in its abrupt manner, and all about me now the land was black as the bottom of death. But I kept going, with that thin rusty glowing line to guide me, pushing on past the time when the animals and I usually stopped for food and rest, pushing on until all at once the hairhorse I was riding seemed to stumble, and for just an instant to regain its balance, and then down it went, head foremost, somersaulting in the air and hurling me clear to land bruisingly out in front on the snow and ice.

  I rolled and rolled, then staggered to my feet and limped back to them, guided by the sounds they were making; the fallen one had a constant, almost an apologetic, cough, while the other was filling the night with ear-splitting whinny-shrieks, as though someone were torturing the mate of the missing link.

  The next little while was a nightmare, as I tried in the darkness to regain control. The animal I’d been riding had stumbled in a hole or some such thing and had broken his leg, and was lying now on the ground, thrashing about and making that coughing sound. The other one was still attached to the hurt one by the rope that went from his own neck to the saddle of the other, and this nearness to a wounded member of his own species had him in a white panic of terror, causing him to rear and kick and try to run away, causing him to find the strength even to drag the hurt one for little distances this way and that through the snow. And I, fighting to restore order, was forced to work in blackness and haste and exhaustion, encumbered by the cold and my bulky clothing and a missing hand.