Anarchaos

XII

Lingo looked like a shaved gorilla, wearing sunglasses and fondling an automatic rifle. At first he professed total ignorance of Lastus or anything else I might want to talk about, and then he more openly stated his position: he wanted to trade information for money.

“I have money to give Lastus,” I told him, “but nobody else. If Lastus wants to split with you later, that’s up to him.”

“How much you got for him?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On things that aren’t your business.” I showed him impatience which wasn’t entirely feigned, saying, “If you won’t tell me where to find him, I’ll get the information somewhere else.”

“Give me the money,” he said, “and I’ll see he gets it.”

“Of course. Goodbye, Lingo.”

“Wait a second,” he said, as I turned away. When I faced him again he said, “You’re the brother of that surveyor got killed, the one Lastus was with.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s what you want to talk to him about, how your brother got killed.”

“Right again.”

He glanced upward, toward the top of the tower. “And nobody cares? They don’t mind you asking questions?”

“No. Why should they?”

He shrugged heavy shoulders.

I said, “I might have some money for you after all. Who would mind? Who do you think would mind, and why?”

He shook his head. “You give your money to Lastus. I’m no part of it.”

“You can tell me where to find him.”

He considered, and then said, “Why not? It can’t make any difference.”

Except for the center of the city where the towers were, the streets of Ulik — all the streets of all the cities, in fact — were nameless, mere dirt roads flanked by thrown together shacks and huts and hovels. This namelessness made directions difficult to give, and Lingo eventually had to draw a map, showing me how many blocks to go in this direction, and then which way to turn, and again how many blocks to go, until I should at last arrive at the place where Lastus was living. When we were both satisfied that I could find Lastus without too much trouble, I left Lingo and went out to the auto, still sitting where I’d left it yesterday.

I had made only one stop between leaving Goss and approaching Lingo, and that was at the guardroom on the first floor, near the elevator, where I reclaimed my weaponry, all of which was once again in place on my person. The throwing knife in its sheath was a pleasant presence between my shoulderblades, and the pistol, the gas can, the lead pipe and the other knife were comforting weights here and there in my clothing.

The auto started up at once, and I saw Lingo and the other guards watching me as I drove away, but what thoughts they had about me I couldn’t read in their expressionless faces.

I was soon away from the city center, the towers behind me, the same slovenly filthy slum all around me as the one I’d first seen outside the spaceport at Ni. I was traveling east, the shadow of my auto preceding us along the dirt street, the towers of the city casting their shadows all about me, pointing long thin black fingers toward the mountains beyond the horizon.

After my night and morning in the normal lighting of the tower I had to get used all over again to the blunt redness of everything out here. The shacks I passed looked rusted and scabrous, like wounds that had dried without healing.

No block was empty of people. They moved around as endlessly and purposelessly as wind-up toys on a sidewalk, a kind of defiant hopelessness to the curve of their shoulders, the set of their heads. Children ran after the auto, or flung stones at it, or shouted words at it. Men watched it pass with silent mouths and greedy eyes. Women for the most part pretended it didn’t exist, though here and there one would with visual and verbal obscenity inform me of her commercial availability. I drove at a good pace, ignoring everyone, and keeping the pistol handy on the seat beside me.

Lastus lived in a sagging lean-to near the outer edges of this slum, far from the towers, several blocks south of the main road to the east, the one that led eventually to Yoroch Pass. There were fewer people out here, and they showed less reaction to the presence of the auto, whether from jadedness or despair I couldn’t tell. I pulled off the road and stopped as close to the side of the lean-to as I could get.

When they saw the auto stop, several men and women in the general area began to take an obvious though furtive interest in me, and even began to sidle somewhat closer. I climbed from the auto and stood beside it while very ostentatiously I checked my pistol and then put it away. Interest in me abruptly ceased, and those who had been studying me now went back with renewed conviction to their own pointless preoccupations.

Lastus’ lean-to was broad across the front, but shallow and not very high, the open front barely five feet from ground to roof. Going to the front, I saw that dirt had been piled up over most of the width to make a kind of wall closing the lean-to in, leaving only a narrow opening in which I could see rough steps cut into the ground, leading down and in. So some, maybe most, of Lastus’ home was underground. It was dark down there, too dark to even make a guess of the dimensions of the place, though: I doubted it was much more than a shallow hole in the ground with the lean-to roof erected over it.

I had noticed pervasive stenches in the air while driving out here, the stinks of too many people and too little sanitation, but the smell that now attacked my nostrils seemed twice as bad as anything from before. I supposed it was because I’d been in a moving auto until now, with a breeze of my own making to dilute the aromas and vary them. Now, standing still, I felt the almost physical impact of an odor that seemed to flow up from the dark hole of the lean-to like the exhalations of the minotaur.

But the impression, of course, was wrong. The stink was in the air, all around me, the smell of the neighborhood and not of this one hovel, though surely Lastus’ home was contributing its share to the overall effect.

The other sensation I felt was the chill in the air. Why should it seem so much colder, so much damper, when I was standing still than when I’d been in motion in the auto? It was as though Hell, unlike any other sun, gave off cold instead of heat, so that standing in its red light I shivered and felt the air clammy against my skin.

I was impatient to be done here, and back in the comfort of the Ice tower. “Lastus!” I called into the black hole. “Lastus! Come up here!”

There were faint rustlings from within, sounds you might hear from some rat hole, but I still could see no movement in the blackness. After a minute a reedy voice called, “What is it? Who are you?”

“Come up here, I want to talk to you.”

Now I saw him. He’d moved forward, was very nearly close enough for me to lean forward and touch him, and he blinked up at me like a mole. He was wearing only shorts, and dirt streaked his torso and arms and legs and face. He was short and thin but looked hard-sinewed, strong ropes of muscle defining his arms and legs, his chest strong looking, his stomach flat. His face looked wary, and belligerent, and afraid, as though too frequently in his life he’d tested his obvious strength against men who’d proved to be stronger.

He squinted and blinked at me and said, in his reedy voice, “I don’t know you. What do you want of me? Who are you?”

“I want to hire you,” I said.

He was interested. He wiped his lips with the back of a filthy hand, wiped the back of his hand on his leg. “To do what?”

“Guide me.”

“Guide you where?”

“To Yoroch Pass.”

He’d kept moving closer, was now barely three steps from the entrance. I backed away to permit him to feel safe about coming out the rest of the way, and he said, “Why do you want to go there?”

“I want to see my brother’s grave,” I said.

“Your brother’s grave?” He came up the last three steps, and stood in the entrance. “What brother?”

“Gar Malone. I’m his brother, Rolf.”

His eyes widened. At first I thought it was surprise at what I’d said, but then I saw he was staring beyond me, at something behind me, possibly out in the street. Before I could move, the shooting started.

I heard the first two shots. Number one caught Lastus in the right shoulder, spun him half around like a weathervane when the wind shifts. Number two plunged like an invisible spike into the back of his head, plummeting his corpse down the stairs he’d just come up.

I didn’t hear the third shot, I felt it, in the middle of my back; a blunt punch from a hard metal fist. I opened my mouth, but I had no air. I tried to stand erect, but I had no will. The punch drove me forward and I saw myself hurtle down after Lastus into the darkness below. Then a greater darkness overtook me, and I ceased to know.