Anarchaos

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 any more. 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 time taken for granted but had now been without for so long that to an extent I 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 has grown up.

The Embassy doctor looked me over and pronounced me in surprisingly good condition, considering my 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. I 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 heel, 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.