Anarchaos

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 Piekow Lastus’ hovel, and I found myself wanting to know now who had killed Gar, 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 move 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 its 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 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.

“Yaaaahhhh!” 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.