Anarchaos

XI

L.L. Goss was a short, stocky, rumpled man standing in the middle of a stuffed, square, rumpled room and trying to decide what expression he should have on his face while greeting the brother of a dead man he used to know. He seemed to be the compulsively friendly type, and a cheerful hail fellow sort of grin struggled on his face with a solemn and mournful funeral parlor wince. Since he’d been Gar’s supervisor, a remote official detachment also strove for command of his features, but with little success.

“Mr. Malone,” he said, and pumped my hand. “Your brother talked about you a lot. Talked about you a lot.”

“Did he?”

“I was looking forward to meeting you,” he assured me, talking all in a rush, continuing to hold my hand as though he’d forgotten it was there. “Expected big things from the Malone brothers, big things. Could hardly wait to see you walk in, but not under these conditions. No, not under these conditions.”

“I feel the same way,” I said.

“Of course you do. Of course you do.” Still holding my hand, he led me deeper into the room and told me twice to sit down in one of two facing plastic chairs. When I had done so, and he had released my hand at last and sat facing me, he said, with solemnity now in charge of his face, “It was a really tragic thing, I assure you. Tragic. Gar had a brilliant mind. Yes, and a great future ahead of him. It’s hard to believe a man so vibrant is gone, hard to believe.”

“But he is gone,” I said. I didn’t want eulogies, with or without a second copy. I could supply myself all the eulogies I wanted concerning Gar.

The solemn face gave way for a while to the remote official face as he said, “Colonel Whistler tells me you understand there’s no job opening for you at the moment, now that your brother is no longer with the corporation.”

No longer with the corporation. What a phrase. I said, “I realize that.”

“Certainly. Certainly.”

“I’m not here for a job. I’m here to find out what happened.”

Goss got to his feet, looking away from me, saying, “Yes, yes, perfectly natural. Under the circumstances, perfectly natural.” He was roaming around the room, peering here and there on littered tables, not looking at me, saying, “I can understand how you feel, the shock of it— Ah, there it is!” He picked up a pipe and showed it to me, the hail fellow grin finally flashing out at me unrestrained. “Never find this thing,” he said. “Never find it.”

I said, “I want to know the details.”

“Only to be expected,” he muttered, busy now filling his pipe. “Only to be expected. Anything I can do to help, anything at all—”

“You can tell me about it.”

He stopped fussing with the pipe, looked sharply at me with a wary look I hadn’t seen in his face before, then went back to the pipe. “I’ll be glad to, glad to. Whatever I know.”

“Maybe it would be best,” I said, “if I asked you questions about the parts that interest me.”

“Excellent. Just the thing.” He came back with his pipe, trailing a thread of smoke, and sat in front of me again. “Ask away,” he invited me. “Ask away.”

I could hardly think which question came first, and finally selected one at random: “Where was he killed?”

“Where? Yoroch Pass.” He popped to his feet again, motioning at me with the pipe. “Come along, I’ll show you the exact spot. Come along.”

I followed him to one of the littered tables, and watched him clear it; stacks of papers went on another table, small lumpy specimen sacks went on the floor, pencils and rulers and compasses went anywhere they could fit. When the table top was at last clean, I could see inlaid in it a map of Anarchaos done in black and white.

“You see what this is,” Goss said unnecessarily. “It’s dayside of the planet. Here we are here, at Ulik. There’s Ni, where you landed, the center of dayside. Here’s Moro-Geth way over here to the west. And north of Ni, here’s Prudence, here, the mining town.”

“I see it,” I said, to stop him tapping each spot and telling me each name legibly printed beside his pointing finger.

But he couldn’t be stopped. He pointed to Chax, the city to the south, and told me he was pointing to Chax, and that it was to the south of Ni. He told me again that Ni was situated at dead center of the dayside of the planet, where Hell stood permanently at zenith, and that the other four cities were at approximately equidistant locations from Ni, one to each of the four points of the compass, all of which I had already known and could plainly see for myself on the map. He went on to tell me that dayside was banded by a ring of twilight which, with few exceptions, was as far as man had explored the planet, and that this ring of twilight was for the most part contiguous with natural geographic boundaries of one sort or another. To the east of where we now stood reared the Evening Mountains, a north-south range, bleak and jagged and inhospitable, but dotted with important mining sites. To the west, past Moro-Geth, there stretched the broad cold Sea of Morning, the largest ocean on the planet, icebound on its farther coast. Northward, the barrier was the White Wall, a line of cliffs rearing upward, marking the polar plateau, and to the south the Black River wound from the Empty Ocean westward to empty into the the Sea of Morning. All of this was described to me, all of this I could see for myself, and none of this was relevant.

But at last he got to it, bending over the map table, pointing to Ulik, moving his finger eastward from the city toward the mountains, saying, “You see this thin line here? This is the road, the main road to the mountains, the one most of the trappers use. You see here where it goes into the mountains. You see?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s Yoroch Pass,” he said, and tapped the spot with his finger. “Right there, that’s it.”

“Was he going out or coming back?”

“What? Coming back. Yes, he’d been on a survey and he was coming back.”

“Alone?”

“Of course not. No no, naturally not. No one travels alone here, no one. He had a guide with him, an assistant. The post you would have had.”

“Did this assistant know I was going to replace him?”

Goss looked at me in some surprise. “Did he know? You mean, would he have… But no, not possibly. He didn’t know, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He would simply have been transferred to other guard duties. Just transferred, that’s all. He would have been anyway when your brother died, if he’d wanted.”

“He didn’t want to stay?”

“No. He said the killing had frightened him; he wanted no more such work.”

I looked at the map, at Yoroch Pass. I said, “Where is he buried? Was the body brought back?”

“That would have been impossible. Unfortunately impossible.”

“So he’s still there. Is the grave marked?”

“I wouldn’t know. The guard buried him, he’d know.”

“How was he killed?”

“Shot. Shot from ambush.”

“What about the guard? Where was he?”

“Right there. Oh, right there. He was shot too, wounded, left for dead. But the wound was slight, he was fortunate.”

“Very fortunate.”

“He radioed, told us what had happened. We sent a ship for him. He buried your brother, and when our men got to him they brought him back to the city.”

“He buried my brother before the ship got to him?”

“You must understand the conditions,” he said. “The ship couldn’t go directly to Yoroch Pass. No air vehicle of any type could possibly make a landing anywhere in the Evening Mountains or to the east of them. You can’t imagine the jagged, broken conditions there, and never being sure which is solid rock and which is merely a flimsy superstructure of ice.”

I said, “What about a helicopter?”

“Possibly. A one or two man vehicle, possibly. But those mountains are full of Anarchaotians, trappers, press gangs, all sorts, and an aircraft would be an incredible prize for them. A two man helicopter would barely touch ground before it would be attacked. No, we sent a large plane to a landing field here, two days’ march from Yoroch Pass, and sent a party of five men in to get Lastus and bring him out.”

“Is that the guard’s name? Lastus?”

“Yes. Piekow Lastus.” Suddenly he looked up and said, “Ah! Perhaps you’ve solved my problem.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It has to do,” he said, “with your brother’s ring. His college ring.”

“I remember it.”

“It so happens your brother and I attended the same engineering university, though of course at different times. Just the other day I saw one of our door guards wearing a ring that looked very familiar, and which turned out to be your brother’s. As I wormed the story out of him, Lastus had naturally robbed your brother’s body before burying him, and that’s standard practice here, and this guard, who had been one of the five sent to bring Lastus back, had seen the ring on Lastus’ finger and had by threats and intimidation forced Lastus to give it to him. You understand, that’s the way life works here. Outside the towers, of course, outside the towers.”

“You’ve got the ring?”

“Yes, indeed. Yes. I’ve had it three days, and I haven’t entirely known what to do with it. It should be sent to the next of kin, of course, in this case the parents, but how to explain its turning up so belatedly or its not having been buried with the body? The customs on Anarchaos are difficult to explain in a letter.”

“I can see that,” I said.

He said, “But now I can give the ring to you! Would you mind? You’d relieve me of quite a responsibility, quite a responsibility.”

I said, “Mr. Goss, you are nothing more than you seem — a good man, fussy, a bit of a bureaucrat. Why were you wary when I first asked you to tell me about my brother’s death?”

He blinked at me in amazement, and blushed with embarrassment, trying to start a dozen sentences at once, so that for half a minute or so he merely garbled at me. Finally he shut his mouth, swallowed, licked his lips, and said, “I simply do my job, Mr. Malone; that’s all I do, I simply do my job. I hate complications that aren’t my concern, aren’t my fault. I’m no good at this sort of thing, at conniving, at… at… Your brother’s death was a tragedy, a tragedy, but it’s done and over. Nothing can bring him back. And nothing can be done about it, not here, not on Anarchaos. Nothing.”

“I’ll take the ring,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said, trying for stiff formality. Then, more honestly, he said, “I considered your brother a friend of mine, Mr. Malone, despite the difference of our ages, our positions. I admired him, I expected some day that he would be my supervisor. I wish something could be done, and I’ll help in any way open to me. I can say nothing more than that. I’ll get you the ring.”

It was in his desk drawer. He found it right away and gave it to me and I put it on the ring finger of my left hand, where it felt artificial but comforting, like responsibility.

I said, “Do you know where I can find Lastus?”

“I’m sorry, no. But one of the guards knows him well, and should be able to tell you. Lingo, his name is. He should be on duty at the main door right now.”

“Is he the one who had the ring?”

“Yes.”

“Lingo,” I said.

Goss and I shook hands at his door, where he assured me again he would offer me assistance of any sort, “in any way open to me.” He seemed ashamed of this escape clause even while he was saying it.