Tomorrow's Crimes Read online

  No one had gone out to murder Gar Malone for being Gar Malone.

  It was with the same impersonality that I snuffed the life from Triss.

  XXXII

  I wanted to be angry; it would make it much easier to do what I had to do. I thought about the uselessness and stupidity of Gar’s death, about the bungling and panic that had cost me years from my life and led to the loss of my hand, about the lost opportunity that Gar had been offering me, I thought about it all and I couldn’t be angry. I could only feel a heavy regret, a weighted nostalgia and remorse.

  Everything was much more difficult this way. Without the blessed blindness of fury, I had to do everything coldly, impersonally, watching myself every step of the way.

  Violence done of duty weighs more heavily than violence done out of passion

  I moved through the ship light and quick and silent and unseen, armed with nothing but my hand. From Triss I had learned the location of Phail’s quarters and there I hurried; this first part had to be gotten over with as quickly as possible.

  I saw no one. According to the artificial time by which everyone on Anarchaos lived it was now late at night, so that only a few crew members were up and about. These I avoided easily, and soon came to Phail’s quarters.

  The door wasn’t even locked. I entered a darkened room, stood silent in the darkness for a while, and finally determined that I was alone; there was no sound of breathing here. I felt my way around the room, touched furniture which indicated it was a parlor or sitting room, and came at last to another doorway, in which the door stood ajar. I paused here, listening, and heard the sound of regular breathing I’d been hoping for.

  I moved through the dark to that sound, and reached my hand out, and promptly found his throat. I dosed my hand around it.

  How the pulse beat against my palm! He woke up at once, thrashing and waving his arms around, but I stood and waited and after a rime his struggles weakened. I released him when he was lying limp but the pulse was still beating; I didn’t want him to die without being sure who was doing it to him, and why.

  I left him, and found a light, and switched it on. His face was so altered by lack of breath that for one bad instant I thought I’d come to the wrong room. But it was him, Phail, with his arrogant face and dry sandy hair. He slept nude, and in his thrashings had kicked the covers off; his body was surprisingly pale and thin.

  I brought water from the bath and sloshed it on him, then slapped his face until he returned to consciousness. When his eyes opened, and I saw that he recognized me, I put my hand on his throat again.

  He didn’t move. He lay there unblinking, and stared up at me.

  I said, “You murdered Gar Malone. I came to Anarchaos to find you and punish you.”

  Then I dosed my hand.

  XXXIII

  The rest did not require individual attention. What did I have to say to General Ingor or Elman or Davus or Malik and Rose?

  From the kitchens I obtained the knife with which I disposed of the crewmen on duty, beginning with the mate on watch at the wheel and ending with the two engineers on duty in the engine room. All told, seven men.

  I smashed the radio equipment. There were six lifeboats and I punched holes in all of them. I damaged the engines with pliers and a hammer, then punctured the great fuel tank and led a trail of flammable objects down the flight of stairs into the pool of it at the bottom.

  The ship was no longer moving through absolute blackness. Far ahead of us, and a bit to the left, there was a red glow on the horizon. As I moved about the ship, sometimes having to travel along the deck, I glanced at the horizon and from it got a feeling of urgency, as though it indicated an actual dawn coming up. It seemed to me as though I must be finished with what I had to do before that dawn.

  At last everything was ready. The ship still moved forward from its own momentum, but with increased sluggishness. I dressed myself warmly in clothing taken from the dead crewmen, set the fire which would eventually lead itself to the spilled fuel and from there to the fuel tank itself, and went on down to the opening in the hull through which I’d first been brought into the ship.

  There were three small motorboats down here, tied to the metal platform, and I scuttled two of them. I found the way to open the hole in the hull, started the engine of the remaining motorboat, and steered my way carefully out to the open sea.

  I had taken the mate’s watch with me, and it read three-twenty a.m. when I started out in the small boat. I maintained course in the same direction the ship had taken, guiding myself by the light on the horizon far ahead and just slightly to the left, and as I went I looked back from time to time at the faintly seen ship, its yellow lights outlining it in the blackness behind me. For the longest while it seemed to sit motionless and eternal back there, an angular black silhouette in a halo of dim light surrounded by the blackness, but at precisely three-thirty by the mate’s watch I saw the first jet of flame. Blight red, shooting upward, it illuminated the ship and the bit of ocean just around it in miniature imitation of the noon light of Hell.

  So long as I could still see it, the ship never exploded and it never sank. It merely burned and burned and burned, flaming away like a torch back there in the night. I moved away from it at a good speed, sitting in the stem of the small boat, huddled against the cold wind of my passage, and behind me the red beacon silently roared.

  I was finished. After four years, I had done what I had come to Anarchaos to do: learn the truth about my brother’s slaying and choose an appropriate vengeance. It seemed that I had lost every battle, and then won the war.

  How should I have felt? I felt cold, and empty. I no longer wanted antizone, any more than I still wanted revenge. There was nothing I wanted. Not even the oblivion of the black water rushing by below my elbow had any appeal for me.

  I was heading toward Cannemuss, but only because life requires motion. So long as one breathes, it is necessary to move. In a map on the bridge of the ship I had seen where this place Cannemuss was: at the far south-easterly tip of the Sea of Morning, at the mouth of the Black River. Triss had told me it was a frontier town, a trapper’s village, a way station for supplies going out to the rim and raw materials coming back.

  The last time I looked behind me, when the flaming ship had now receded completely out of sight, the mate’s watch read nearly four o’clock. From then on I looked only forward.

  Five hours later I reached the coast, barren and snowbound, and two hours after that, by traveling southward along the shoreline, I came at last to Cannemuss. And on the pier at Cannemuss was standing Jenna Guild.

  XXXIV

  At first, we didn’t recognize one another. I, of course, had changed considerably since last we’d met. She had not, but was so bundled against the cold that her face could barely be seen. It was something about her stance that attracted my attention, rather than my noticing anything particularly familiar about her face.

  Initially, the town itself commanded all of my scrutiny, it being unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Existing in perpetual twilight, permanently frozen, its population largely transient, Cannemuss had none of the towers I’d seen in the other cities on Anarchaos, nor any of the usual ramshackle huts and aimlessly drifting people. There was an air of bustling industry here, as of a thriving pioneer community eagerly moving into an ever-better future. The withering, the long slow decline obvious in the syndicate cities, had not yet shown itself out here.

  I saw the ships in the harbor before I actually came within sight of the town itself. Black River, narrow and deep, emptied precipitately into the Sea of Morning at this point, leaving a broad deep protected bay just to the north of the river mouth. Around this bay the buildings of the town were clustered, and in the bay itself were small and medium-sized boats of every possible description, a range of boats as broad as the range of land transportation I’d seen on first leaving the spaceport at Ni. Outside the bay were a dozen or so large ships much like the one I had been a prisoner on. ea
ch with its syndicate name in large letters on the bow. Smaller boats scuttled back and forth constantly between these large ships and the port.

  I came down along the shoreline from the north, seeing the large ships anchored outside the harbor first of all, and then seeing the traffic back and forth, then the broad entrance to the bay, and at last the town itself.

  Cannemuss was a low-built town. Here and there a two-story structure loomed above its fellows, but nothing in the town was as tall as the ships nested outside the bay. Steeply slanting roofs were standard, because of the frequent heavy snowfalls. There was no open ground; streets and all other spaces around the dark buildings were covered with hard-packed snow. Many more men than women moved about on this snow, mostly dressed in furs, many bearded, practically all with the self-sufficient Torgmund look, the look of the frontier,

  I steered my little boat into the bay and to the end of the one long pier that jutted out from the quay. I tied the boat to a ring set into a vertical support, climbed the short ladder up to the pier, and met there a bundled man with a thin nose, who held a clipboard and said, “You’ll have to pay rent if you stay there, you know.”

  “I’ll straighten it with you when I come back,” I said, since I knew I would never be back, and walked down the length of the pier to the end, where I saw Jenna Guild.

  I started by her, then was struck by some feeling of familiarity, stopped, went back a step, and looked directly into her face, framed within the fur hood she wore. She had been gazing steadily out to sea and now’ she made as though unaware of my presence; she naturally thought I was no more than a potential molester.

  I said, “Jenna? Jenna Guild?”

  Now she looked at me, and in the blankness of her expression J could see she had no idea who I was. I said, “It’s Rolf Malone.”

  A sudden wariness came into her eyes, and guardedly she said, “You have information about him?”

  “I am him, Jenna, look at me.”

  She looked, and looked again, and raised an impulsive hand to touch my cheek. “Rolf! My God!”

  “You can still see me underneath,” I said, and tried my first smile in ages.

  “I would never have known you,” she said, studying me in wonderment. “I don’t think there’s a thing about you that hasn’t changed.”

  “You’re still the same,” I said. “Not a day has passed for you.”

  “In my cocoon,” she said, with that sudden bitterness I remembered.

  I said. “Why are you here? Of all places, why here?”

  She laughed, with something odd in the laughter, and said, “Waiting for you, of course! But I didn’t expect you to come this way.” She looked past me toward the ocean, saying, “Where’s the Sledge ship?”

  “Clone,” I said, “You knew I was on it?”

  “We thought so.” Then she took my arm. “Come along, the Colonel will be very pleased to see you.”

  “He’s here, too?”

  “You’re an important man, Rolf,” she said “Come along.”

  Arm in arm we walked into the town.

  XXXV

  A great fire crackled in the hearth. Electric lighting cast a smooth and even illumination throughout the room. The furniture was soft and ornate and very comfortable, and all in the richer tones of gold and brown, with polished woods predominating. I had just finished a magnificent dinner and was now sitting in an armchair before the fire. Colonel Whistler in a similar armchair to my right and Jenna Guild to my left.

  This was the building the Wolmak Corporation maintained at Cannemuss, one of the few two-story structures in tow n, with offices downstairs and this suite of rooms upstairs. Jenna had brought me here and I had found Colonel Whistler in a downstairs office with a group of strong, able-looking men who reminded me at once of Malik and Rose. The Colonel had immediately whisked me away to the second floor, but had insisted that no one do any explaining until I had had an opportunity to rest and bathe and change into good clothing and have a decent meal, Now half of these had been attended to, the meal was done, the three of us sat before the fire, and Colonel Whistler said, “We both have questions, of course. I hope you’ll allow me the privilege of having my questions asked and answered first.”

  I said it was all right, and that it would probably be better if I just told everything that had happened since I’d left Ice Tower in Ulik four years ago, rather than answer specific questions one at a time, and he agreed that would be the best way.

  The story I told him was the truth, but not the whole truth. I sloughed over the pan where Torgmund died, and omitted all details of what I did on the ship. Still, the story took a long while to tell. The Colonel and Jenna listened in silence, not interrupting once, and when I was done the Colonel said, slowly and heavily, “I don’t know. I don’t know whether to say you’ve been very unlucky for all of the things that have happened to you, or very lucky for having survived them all,”

  I said, “I was never more than a small pawn in somebody else’s chess game. Most of the time I didn’t matter at all. And Gar, too. His being killed is the closest thing there is to accidental murder.”

  He said, “I hadn’t known about the strike, of course, but I never fully believed the story that man Lastus brought back with him. There was always something wrong with Gar Malone’s death, but I couldn’t be sure what. When you showed up, my suspicions were doubled.”

  “The way you acted,” I said, ‘I was suspecting you.”

  He laughed. “I suppose you were. But what did I know about you?”

  “That I was an ex-convict.”

  “I didn’t know your brother either, of course. Not well. Not to be sure that he would behave this way or that way. You know what I began to think?”

  I said, “I think so. That Gar was alive, that he’d made a strike and was keeping it to himself and I was in on it somehow.”

  “Of course. Coming around to see what we at Ice thought about your brother’s so-called death. When you left, I told Lingo to have you followed, and of course he swore you’d managed to elude the man following you. I suppose he never sent anyone after you at all.”

  “Not from Ice,” I said. “From that other outfit, Sledge.”

  “I’ve sent word to have Lingo taken care of. That ought to please you.”

  It didn’t. I was finished; I didn’t want to follow the threads back any Earther. There wasn’t any beginning; it just went back and back, everything that happened caused by something that happened before it. The ones closest to it were settled with now, and the rest could go on without me. But I didn’t say so; I just mumbled something and sipped at my drink.

  The Colonel said, ‘It was Lingo who told us you were robbed and killed The way he said it, it wasn’t part of any plot, just another of the anonymous killings on this filthy place. I didn’t know any reason not to believe him.”

  “When did you find out I was alive?”

  “When Jenna brought you into this building.”

  “But—she said she was waiting for me down at the pier.”

  Jenna said, “The Colonel didn’t believe you could still be alive. I did.”

  The Colonel said, “We have our own spies, you know, in the other corporations. It’s a business necessity in a place like this, with so many untapped resources, so many fortunes left to be made. We got word that something was going on at Sledge, it had something to do with us, something to do with a dead prospector of ours named Malone. Their man Phail was involved in it some way, and he seemed to be also the one behind the taking away from a UC Embassy of a man calling himself Rolf Malone. We’ve been trying to find Phail ever since.”

  “He had me on that ship of theirs. He was hiding me from his own people, too. General Ingor and the others.”

  The Colonel said, “You must realize something, Rolf. This is a bad assignment for any man, to be stationed on Anarchaos. The corporations use their Anarchaotic branches as sort of punishment centers. The men who get shipped here are the ones who’ve alre
ady got a record of bad judgment or worse. The combination of bad people in a bad situation often ends with trouble. Nowhere else would you find someone like Phail so high in the corporate structure.”

  I said, “Everyone here? All the corporations are like that?”

  “I know what you’re asking, and the answer is yes, me too. My own mistakes have no relevance here. Occasionally a man manages to make amends with his company while here, to build a new reputation for himself and be reassigned elsewhere for a second chance. I hope to be one of those men.”

  The silence after that was uncomfortable for all of us. There was nothing for me to say. I glanced at Jenna and saw her gazing into the fire with a faraway expression on her face. I wondered; her, too? Was she here because of sins in her own past or was she merely an adjunct of Colonel Whistler, dispatched willy-nilly wherever the ups and downs of his career might take him?

  The Colonel finally broke the silence by saying, “When General Ingor and the others left the Sledge tower at Ni aboard a seaplane, we thought there was probably some connection, that Phail was more than likely on the Sledge ship somewhere in the Sea of Morning. That didn’t help us much, because we had no way of knowing where the ship was. But then cryptographers from all the Sledge towers were sent down here to Cannemuss—they’re still waiting, not two blocks from here—and we knew that meant the ship would be coming here. I was sure Phail was aboard the ship, I guessed that the crypto men had something to do with coded information connected somehow with Gar Malone, but I truly didn’t expect to find you aboard and alive.”

  Jenna said, “I never doubted Gar’s death, even though the story of how it happened didn’t ring true. But about you I wasn’t so sure. You’d left the tower looking so hard and sharp and sure of yourself, I couldn’t believe you’d been killed so quickly or so easily. I always suspected you were alive somewhere and would turn up some day with a fantastic story to tell.”