Tomorrow's Crimes Page 19

  As much as possible, I kept them between me and the line of light at the horizon. That way, it was possible to get occasional quick glimpses of them in silhouette as they reared and fought, attached to one another by that taut stout rope.

  At first I tried merely to calm the uninjured one, but with absolutely no success. He was so mad with terror that he wasn’t even aware of my existence, and I ran every risk of being knocked over and trampled by him as he leaped and writhed 2t the end of the rope. After a while, it seemed to me that if only the hurt one would be quiet perhaps the other one would grow calm as well, but of course with his broken leg he wasn’t ever going to be quiet. Unless he was dead.

  I knew that I would have to kill him anyway, though I hated the thought. But my pistol had fallen out of my clothing when I’d taken the spill, and there was no way to find it in the blackness, and my rifle was still in its sheath, attached to the saddle on the wounded hairhorse.

  The only thing to do was somehow get the rifle. The one on the ground was thrashing, and the other one was yanking him around this way and that, but I did manage at last to get in close enough and then—lying on my stomach on the beast’s heaving flank—I found the saddle with my hand, and then the sheath, and then the rifle. I was kicked several rimes in the attempt, but no matter. Holding for life to that rifle I jumped back out of the way of all those kicking legs and got ready to do the killing.

  A rifle is a hard thing for a man with one hand to fire. I held it in my right hand, my left arm up and across my chest so the rifle barrel could rest on the forearm, and in that position I could fire with fur accuracy one time. But there was no way for me to control the recoil, so that with each firing the rifle barrel would leap into the air and then drop back again painfully on my left forearm.

  It took three shots before I finally hit the silhouette of that streaming, thrashing, coughing head. Then it dropped to the snow as though yanked from beneath, and I fell down on my side on the snow and lay there panting as though I had run around the world.

  Slowly the living one lost its panic and stopped making those terrible screams. When all was quiet I got again to my feet, dragging myself through all my movements, my limbs feeling as though weighted down with lead. I took fodder from the pack animal’s back and fed it, dead grass in the snow beside the dead body. I took food our for myself as well, but I had no heart to eat it and so threw it away into the snow, I looked at the light on the horizon, and took no pleasure in it.

  I got my sleeping furs and dragged them a little off from where the living animal and the dead were tethered together. I scraped out a shallow pit for myself in the snow, made my bed, and settled into it sleeplessly to wait for the moon to rise.

  XXIV

  Seven days later I came at last to a city and it was not the right one.

  After turning to the left from my original direction, I moved directly toward the red sun for four days, traveling gradually from a world of black and white into a world of fever and rust. The cold lessened, the horizon grew brighter, and the moon dimmed in a steadily reddening sky.

  I felt one instant of naked primitive fear when the arc of Hell first crept up into sight above the horizon’s edge ahead of me. I wanted fiercely at that moment to turn back, to flee again into the darkness, to cross the dead land once more and find Torgmund’s cabin and stay there until I died. Out ahead of me, under the unmoving and baleful red sun, men crawled and cursed and preyed upon one another; when I rode among them they would surely fall upon me and gobble me up.

  My mount felt it, too, the horror shimmering away out there under the red sun, or perhaps he merely sensed my own sudden disquiet. In any case, he grew restive, fidgety, and by his movements distracting my attention and breaking the spell. I soothed him, patting his long neck, and we moved on.

  We traveled somewhat more rapidly now, as the light improved, even though my animal was more heavily loaded than before. I’d packed as much food as I could, leaving the remainder—and the extra furs—with the dead hairhorse back in the anonymous snow.

  For the first two days of this stage of the journey it was still possible to tell time by the moon, seen ever more faintly in its passage across the sky from right to left. By the third day, however. Hell had crept upward until it was fully in view, a flaming red circle in the air just above the horizon, making it no longer possible to see the moon. From then on I counted the days by my own cycles; when I was hungry, when I was tired, when I was rested.

  I came upon the road just as I was deciding to call the third day at its end. This road crossed my path at right angles, a broad bleak empty tan swath across the tundra-like plain. I halted at its edge, looking to left and right, seeing nothing. Since it was approximately time to stop in any case, I put off deciding which way to go until the following day. I turned about, retraced my steps until I found a shallow gully out of sight of the road, and bedded down there for the “night.”

  After I awoke, while feeding the hairhorse and myself, I considered the problem of where to go from here. Since I had fumed left to come into dayside, it seemed to me that to turn left again would be to return to the rim. Still, this road had to lead from somewhere to somewhere, so that it was more sensible to take it than merely to cross it and keep going forward toward Hell. Although Hell’s position didn’t seem right for it, I finally made a guess that this was the road between Ulik and Yoroch Pass—where Gar was buried—and that if I turned right I would be moving toward Ulik and must eventually find it:

  It was a wrong guess. As I worked it out later, I had been acting all along on certain wrong assumptions, such as that the mine was due east of Ulik when it was actually somewhat to the north-east. I had also assumed that Torgmund’s cabin was east of the mine, but in fact it was almost straight north of there, with both mine and cabin to dayside of the Evening Mountains. (I should have realized my thinking was off when—besides the sun being in the wrong position—there was no mountain range to cross in my traveling, but my thoughts in that period were still none too clear.)

  Again, the Anarchaotic moon did not travel from west to east, as I had supposed, but from north-west to south-east, so that I had been traveling north-west when I’d first left Torgmund’s cabin, and all of my wandering since then had been based on false postulates.

  It is as though, on a map of Anarchaos, one were to draw a square, with Ulik at the lower right comer, the central city of Ni at the lower left comer, the northerly city of Prudence at the upper left comer, and the point where I caught my first glimpse of dayside being at the upper right comer. When I turned and moved toward the light on the horizon I was traveling, although I didn’t know it, along a diagonal from corner to comer, angling down into the civilized dayside Anarchaos like an arrow through a heart, on a line char would have taken me eventually to Ni, far far away at the noon center of man’s settlement on this evil planet.

  And the road I had come across was the equivalent diagonal the other way, a tine drawn between Prudence at the north and Ulik at the east. I had stumbled on the Prudence-Ulik road, carefully but erroneously thought out what to do, and turned my back on Ulik, going off to the right, north-easterly again, toward distant Prudence.

  I traveled this road for the next three days. In that time I occasionally caught glimpses of other travelers at a distance, but my uneasiness was so great that I invariably left the road and went into hiding until they had passed. Several times I considered approaching a party of travelers—I was the only solitary wayfarer to be seen on this road—in order to ask directions and be sure I was heading toward Ulik, but fear and caution and bad memories induced me to remain hidden.

  Toward the end of the third day I began to see the towers of a city far ahead. The animal and I were both tired, both hungry, but I pressed on. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been gone—two months, six months—but all at once a great urgency came over me, I felt the full weight and impact of my purpose as I had not felt it since the day I’d been shot in the entrance of Pie
kow Lastus’ hovel, and I found myself wanting to know now who had killed Car, and why, and why they had thought it necessary to kill me also.

  A short while later I reached the scrubby outskirts of the city, where the ramshackle huts and lean-tos were far apart, abandoned, most of them collapsing. It was as though the people who had once lived out here had decided to mow closer to the center of town, like animals who huddle closer together on the coldest nights. In actual fact, it was not movement which had caused these shacks to be abandoned, it was shrinkage. The population of Anarchaos, which had gone steadily upward in its first fifty years or so, had then leveled off for a generation and was now on the decline. Anarchaos was moving slowly—too slowly—toward us inevitable dissolution. These empty shacks on the outskirts of the city would never be used again.

  And the city was not Ulik. Looking at the towers, still far away, I could see that they were different, that this was some I other city. I couldn’t yet understand it, and pressed forward even faster, looking for someone to explain to me where I was.

  The first person I saw was an old man hobbling along the road ahead of me, also heading inward. I hurried to catch up, but when he heard the hoofbeats behind him he cast one terrified glance over his shoulder and ran off to the right, behind a shack of corrugated metal. I rode after him, found him cowering in a corner with his arms over his head, and at length convinced him that I merely wanted to know the name of the city I was entering.

  He blinked at me, watery and weak. Everything about him was watery and weak. He had lived so long, I guess, by constant playing of this one part: the rabbit.

  “Prudence, sir,” he quavered. “You’re coming into Prudence, if you please, sir.”

  “Prudence.”

  “Prudence, sir. Yes, sir. Prudence, sir.”

  I turned away from the old man’s bowings and waverings, urged the hairhorse back to the road and on in toward the heart of the city. The wrong city.

  In my mind’s eye I could see the map shown me by L.L. Goss back in Ice Tower, and seeing it I could begin to see some of the mistakes and wrong guesses I had made. Well, no matter. In Prudence there would be a Union Commission Embassy. There I would find sanctuary, where I might rest until I was ready to face Anarchaos on its own terms once more. And until I was strong enough to return to Ulik and enter the Ice Tower and obtain the answers I was denied the last time I was there. Ice Tower at Ulik, that was where the answers must be.

  Riding, thinking, I heard the sound of whirling wings and looked up. Passing overhead, not very far from the ground, was a helicopter of yellow and green, with a symbol clearly visible on its underside: A hammer with a dog’s head.

  “Yaaaahbhb!” I cried, hardly myself understanding why, and raised my empty wrist in challenge, and dug my heels into my hairhorse’s ribs and gave furious and futile chase.

  XXV

  I it was not easy to find the UC Embassy; no one on Anarchaos speaks unnecessarily to strangers. I could only roam back and forth through the center of the city amid the syndicate towers until eventually I did find the one with the silver UC in thin letters over the entrance.

  Unlike all the other towers, there were no armed guards hanging around outside the entrance, although some watch apparently was kept; the door opened before I could knock, just as I was dismounting. The man who looked out at me wore the blue Union Commission uniform and his hand hovered near the ; weapon on his hip. He said, “What is it you’re looking for?”

  “Sanctuary. I’m an off-worlder.”

  He looked at my heavily bearded face, at my fur clothing, at the animal I’d been riding. “An off-worlder?”

  “From Earth. I was captured and made a slave. I escaped.”

  He was still dubious, but he said, “Come in,” and stepped to one side.

  I said. “What about my hairhorse?”

  “You can’t take it to Earth with you,” he said. “Leave it out there. Don’t worry, someone will take it.”

  I felt uncomfortable to be leaving it, but of course he was right, I wouldn’t be needing a hairhorse anymore. I dropped the reins, and followed him inside.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Is it day or night?”

  “Evening.” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty past seven.” Then he smiled thinly at me, saying, “That was an Earthman’s question. Come along, we’ll get you food and shelter. You can do the paperwork in the morning.”

  The food and shelter he then offered me were both astonishing. recalling to me the kind of meal, the kind of room, the kind of bed I had at one rime taken for granted but had now been without for so long that to an extent J had forgotten them. I slept that night like a dead man, and rose shortly before noon to eat the biggest breakfast of my life.

  After breakfast came the paperwork I’d been promised, and there seemed to be endless amounts of it, administered by a slender ascetic young man in a barren and windowless office. He had a high-pitched voice with very little strength in it, so that even though we sat on opposite sides of the same desk I had from time to time to ask him to repeat a question. I answered all of his questions exactly, editing out only my desire to learn about the murder of my brother, and being unable to give him an exact answer only once, when he wanted to know how long I’d been a slave.

  “It’s just for the records,” he said, in his reedy voice. “Make a guess.”

  “Three or four months,” I said. “Maybe six months.”

  He wrote something, and went on.

  When he was done with paper forms, there was another set to do, these the oral records. He produced a microphone from within the desk, asked me many of the same questions all over again, and at last announced that we were finished. I thanked him, left his office, and found outside in the corridor the man who had first met me at the door yesterday, a stolid quiet sort named Chafrey.

  They still weren’t sure about me, of course. There was the possibility I was a native trying to fob myself off as an off-worlder in order to wangle free transportation away from Anarchaos. Such attempts had been known to happen. Until they could be sure, Chafrey was never very far from me.

  The next three days were a time of lazy waiting. I ate and slept and sat around and felt my battered body rebuilding itself. I shaved the beard away and was astonished at the face revealed beneath; it was unchanged. All over my body were the marks of my recent existence, everywhere but on my face. Hidden away beneath all the hair, this face had survived intact, unscathed, looking now foolish and anachronistic, a lone toy forgotten and left behind in the room of a boy who had grown up.

  The Embassy doctor looked me over and pronounced me in surprisingly good condition, considering ray recent history. As to my wrist, he told me the amputation had been rough and ready but the wrist had healed well, the residual pain should soon end, and a prosthetic hand could be attached to the stump with little or no trouble.

  “Not here, of course,” he said. “On Earth. E doubt there’s any prosthetic devices at all on this benighted planet.”

  The UC people I met within the Embassy were unanimous in their hatred and contempt of Anarchaos and the entirety of its population.

  On the morning of the fourth day Chafrey came to me at breakfast and said, “We’ve got transportation for you to Ni. When you’ve had breakfast we’ll go on up.”

  “I’m done now,” I said.

  I had wanted to ask for transit to Ulik, but it would have been hard to explain why I wanted to go back there without also explaining about Gar, so I’d agreed to the trip to Ni. The Embassy people assumed I would then take the next shuttle flight off-planet, and I said nothing to dissuade them. The fact was, I intended to pick up some more money and fresh clothing from my luggage checked at Ni, and then return to Ulik by surface transportation, as I had done the first time.

  Chafrey and I went up in the elevator to the roof, where the helicopters landed. The elevator opened into a small bare room with a bench along one wall. Chafrey walked over to the door across the way, opened it, and said,
“Here he is, Mr. Rose.”

  “Thank you.” A youngish, smiling, burly man came in and looked at me. “You ran away,” he said. His head was shaved.

  Rose!

  Chafrey said, as the second one came in, “Can you and Mr. Malik handle him all right?”

  “Oh, I’m sure we can,” said Rose. He produced a pistol and pointed it at me. “Don’t be stupid now,” he said.

  I yelled, “Chafrey! What have you done?”

  “You weren’t even smart about it,” Chafrey said to me, and I could hear in his voice the hatred and contempt these people all expressed when they spoke of Anarchaos or its inhabitants. “Didn’t you know we’d check? No Rolf Malone arrived at Ni Spaceport within the last six months or the last year or the last two years!”

  “But I did! I did!”

  “The only Rolf Malone on their list down there is a man who came here over four years ago, went to work for Ice Syndicate, and was shot by robbers. Ice Syndicate reported his death. You’re an escaped slave, all right, but everything else you said was hogwash. The Union Commission isn’t interested in what you people do to one another; you can stew in your own juices. Your owners reported you missing, warned us you might come here, and asked for you back.” He gave Malik and Rose a look of superiority and contempt. “We were happy to oblige,” he said sarcastically, turned on his heels, entered the elevator, and the doors slid shut in my face as I tried desperately and uselessly to run after him.

  Rose said, softly, “You surprised us, Rolf. So we missed you the first time, isn’t that odd?”

  Malik spoke for the first time, saying, “But we’re lucky. We’ve got a second chance.”

  They wouldn’t dare shoot me here, in the UC building. I fought them, but they pinned my arms and dragged me out onto the roof and across the windy flatness to the green and yellow helicopter with the symbol on its side: A hammer with a dog’s head.