Anarchaos

XXVI

Malik tapped my knee and pointed at the window. “Take a look,” he said. “We’re flying over Moro-Geth.”

I looked, without interest. Below me was the familiar cluster of needle shapes surrounded by its sprawl of shacks, the whole scabbed over by the flushed light of Hell. “It’s lovely,” I said.

Malik laughed and said, “I love you, Rolf; I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to you.” Then, laughing and shaking his head, he went up front to tell Rose the funny thing I had said.

I had now lived two days longer than I had expected, and in these two days I had come to know Malik and Rose well enough to be bored by them. They were no more than large children, great hearty boys with blunt hearty senses of humor and easy hearty camaraderie, even in the company of someone they had once tried to murder. Even in the company of someone they would soon be trying to murder once again.

My lethargy and boredom was perhaps at least partially the result of terror, of not knowing when my last breath would come, of not knowing what lay in store for me before that last breath was drawn. I found myself somnolent, always half asleep, never able to really care about what was happening to me.

It wasn’t that I was drugged, though I might have been, since I did eat whatever they fed me. But this lethargy struck me earlier than that, came over me the instant Malik and Rose put their hands on me and dragged me out to the waiting helicopter. My resistance, useless anyway, ceased entirely once they had me inside the copter. I sat between them, my eyes closed as the copter lifted from the roof, and waited for the bullet.

It didn’t come. Instead, I was flown a short distance to another tower, taken down inside it to a plain but comfortable room, and kept there for two days. I was fed, but not talked to, not threatened, not dealt with at all. It seemed almost as though they had forgotten what they meant to do with me.

Until today. Malik and Rose abruptly entered my room, joked together as I dressed, and then took me up to the top of the tower and back into the helicopter. The helicopter then flew us to an airfield I took to be south-west of Prudence, and we transferred to the plane in which we now were riding. On the plane, on the hangars, on the backs of the ground crew’s coveralls, everywhere was that same yellow and green symbol, the hammer with the dog’s head.

I roused myself sufficiently as we entered the plane to ask Malik, “What is this syndicate called?”

“Sledge,” he said.

“What corporation has it?”

He laughed in a jolly manner. “That would be telling,” he said. Then we took our seats, the plane lifted, and we traveled south and west under the red sun.

On the trip, Malik and Rose joked together and with me, their voices and manner turning the interior of the plane into a locker room after a strenuous game of some sort. I didn’t even pretend to be interested.

After we flew over Moro-Geth, their heartiness seemed to diminish. They glanced at one another and at me like men entering a situation they themselves didn’t fully understand. The plane seemed to veer away into a more determinedly western direction, Hell receded down the sky behind us, and out ahead grew the darkness and cold of the rim.

In a way, I welcomed that onrushing black. It was like going home, like leaving an evil place and going to a place that was safe. But of course that was foolish; I was traveling with Malik and Rose, and no place that they were would be safe for me.

Rose was the wanderer of the two. While Malik spent most of his time sitting near me, watching me, Rose drifted back and forth, sometimes up front with the pilot, sometimes back with us, sometimes in the compartment behind us, sometimes merely pacing the aisle like an usher waiting for the show to begin.

One time, Rose came back from the pilot’s compartment and said, “We’ll land soon.”

“Good,” said Malik. “Fine.” They had both lost much of their heartiness by now.

Rose went on back to the rear compartment and returned with heavy coats, boots, gloves and hats for all three of us. “Better put this stuff on,” he told me. “It’s going to be cold out there.”

I didn’t care. There was no reason to obey, but there was also no reason to disobey. I put on the extra clothing, and a short while later we landed. Malik and Rose took my arms and we marched together off the plane.

It was very late afternoon here, Hell an orange disc across the maroon plain. The airfield where we had landed looked primitive, makeshift, with small prefabricated huts near the runway. Snow was piled up all around, where it had been cleared away by motorized plows. Malik and Rose and I climbed into a small motorized auto and, as behind us the plane taxied about and took off again, climbing abruptly into the sky as though it had been startled, we rode past the prefabricated huts and through a guarded gate in a high metal fence and along a snowy, silent, empty, anonymous road, straight down a channel between two high mounds of snow.

Although it was cold here, the temperature wasn’t low enough to warrant the heavy clothing we’d put on. Our driver was dressed more lightly than we. I didn’t understand this — even realize there was anything to understand — until our auto made a sharp right turn, drove down a bumpy white incline, and came to a stop beside the ocean.

It was like pictures I’d seen on Earth of Antarctica. The white snow leading down and down, and stopping, and then the black water stretching out away from us into the deeper blackness of the rim. The farther horizon couldn’t be seen out there; it was too far away and too remote from the light of Hell.

There was a dock, a rickety-looking affair, all metal covered with a sheen of ice. Two shaky-seeming prefabricated shacks stood on shore next to where the dock began. Out at the farther end a small boat bobbed at the end of a black rope. A man stood out there, at the edge of the dock, looking this way. Waiting for us.

I said, “What is this?”

It was the driver who answered me: “Sea of Morning.” It was said matter-of-fact, all the implications of beauty bleached out of it. The Sea of Morning, just a place, with black water, very cold. Out from shore there were whitecaps and a feeling of wind.

I shivered, and hunched farther within my heavy clothing.

Malik and Rose stepped down from the auto and brought me along with them, each holding one of my arms. They walked me out to the end of the dock, and the man there said, “Well, it took you long enough.” He looked the same as them, only a few years older.

Rose said, “We weren’t flying the plane.”

“It doesn’t matter. Get him aboard.”

I yanked my arms free and went running. The footing was bad and I slipped and skidded with every step, my arms wheeling around as I ran.

Malik and Rose caught up with me just as I reached shore, but I fought them as much as I could. Once I was taken out across that water, I knew, there would be no way to come back.

But they were two to my one, and finally got me under control. They carried me back along the dock, Malik holding my arms and Rose my legs. I kicked and thrashed, but nothing I could do would make them lose their balance or their grip on me.

Panting, Rose said, “Why don’t you give it up? It’s all over, ride along with it, give it up.”

The other man was still waiting for us near his little boat, showing a heavy impatience. “He should have been tranquilized,” he said, as I was carried close.

“Phail wants him ready to talk,” said Malik.

“If possible,” said the other man.

Malik released my arms and stepped back, and they all three watched me, Malik and Rose warily, the other man wearily. So in the end I stepped down into the little boat with no more trouble.

The other three followed me, the new man taking a position by the engine in the back. Malik released the line holding us to the dock, the engine sputtered and started, and we curved out and away, toward the darkness.

Peering ahead, hoping to see, I tried to remember what I had once known about the Sea of Morning. That it was the largest body of water on the planet, forming the western edge of the rim, extending from the Black River in the south nearly all the way to the White Wall in the north. That its far shore, around on the night side of the planet, was permanently frozen. That the first colonists who’d stumbled on it, not realizing its magnitude, had called it West Lake, a name changed later on by some sentimentalist to Sea of Morning even though the quality of the light here seemed to me more like evening — approaching night.

My own night, it seemed.

Looking back, after a few minutes, I could no longer clearly distinguish the line of the shore. The black water merely faded away toward indistinguishable grayness. There seemed to be some sort of mist behind us, through which the light of Hell feebly burned, dissipating itself, turning the mist dusky rose above, gray below.

I faced front again. I had ceased to wonder why it was I was still alive, but I couldn’t help the proddings of curiosity as to where I was being taken. Some island? Or all the way to the ice-shelf preceding the farther shore?

Neither.

When the ship loomed up before us, it was so sudden I ducked instinctively backward, thinking that the ship and this tiny boat had nothing to do with one another, were unaware of each other’s existence, and would surely crash in an instant, hurling the four of us into water too cold to survive in, too far from shore, surrounded by a mist that hid movement and seemed to deaden sound.

But I was wrong; ship and boat were connected, both parts of the same incomprehensible nightmare. When, after the first shock, I looked up the cold wet black plates of the hull, there was the familiar hammer symbol on the prow, and the name, in white letters: SLEDGE.

Malik’s hand closed on my shoulder. “Take it easy,” he said, close against my ear. “Take it easy, now; don’t get yourself excited.”

A portion of the hull, at waterline, yawned open in front of us, tike the mouth of a whale. We bobbed closer, a cork in a stream, our nose pointing this way and that but always moving steadily closer to the gaping hole, and then we were inside, and the hull shut down behind us again with a great shriek of rusted metal.

Inside, the water we floated on looked bilious. There were yellow lights high up in the metal ceiling, among the metal beams. There were metal walls painted yellow, reflecting the yellow light. There was a black metal platform sticking out of the wall just above the water, and a door in the wall by the platform. The door opened and two sailors in heavy work-clothes came out and stood on the platform.

Malik moved forward to the prow of the boat. One of the sailors tossed him a line, the other end of which was knotted through a metal ring in the platform floor. Malik pulled us hand over hand along the line till the prow of the boat hit the platform. Then the two sailors held the boat, prow and stem, while we all four climbed out.

We stood around as the sailors tied the other end of the line through the ring in the nose of the boat. Then the sailors went back through the door and shut it behind them. They had not once looked at me or at any of the others with me.

The new man said to Malik and Rose, “Take his clothing off.”

I fought them again, this time out of bewilderment, and lost again. They stripped my clothing away and held me shivering. The new man gestured with his head toward the bilious black water just below the platform, and Malik and Rose raised me and threw me out into the air over the water and I fell and the water closed over me.

It was freezing. It was so cold it was like falling into knives. It was so cold it was hot. It was so cold I could do nothing: not breathe, not move my arms, not try to surface nor dive, swim nor float, kill myself nor save myself. I fell into the water like a rubber statue, and sank, and returned to the surface, and bobbed there, shocked beyond reaction.

At the new man’s command, they fished me out again, Malik and Rose. I was held up by their hands like a drowned cat, and the new man said to me, “It is cold.”

I was trembling violently, nerves and muscles snapping in and out of tension. I couldn’t have replied even if I’d had something to say.

He went on: “We are three miles from shore, and moving. We will never be less than three miles from shore, and usually we will be more than that. You couldn’t survive it, I hope you understand that. You’d be dead inside five minutes, if you tried swimming to shore. Do you understand that?”

I tried to nod, tried desperately to nod. I didn’t want him to think he needed to demonstrate his truth to me a second time.

He was satisfied. He said to Malik and Rose, “Take him away. Dry him. Dress him. I’ll tell Phail he’s here.”

Malik and Rose turned me. They opened the door and led me into the ship.