Anarchaos

XXVII

I thought: I’ll never be warm again.

I was dry now, in heavy clothing, and sitting in a warm room, but down inside my skin, down in my veins and bones, in my stomach and my heart and my throat, I was trembling with the cold. I sat there and shivered endlessly, my arms wrapped around myself.

Malik said to me, “Oh, come on, Rolf, it isn’t that bad,” and the door behind him opened.

The man who came in was young, but bore himself with such arrogant irritation that it was obvious he had great authority. He said, “Is he ready for me?”

Malik and Rose were both suddenly nervous. “Yes, sir,” said Malik, and motioned at me as though inviting this new one — this must be the Phail I’d heard mentioned — to help himself to me.

Phail came over and looked down at me, a crooked smile on his lips. “And to think I had you once,” he said. “Had you and let you get away. You remember the last time we met?”

I raised my eyes and studied his face. The lines of arrogance were so deep, he must have been born with them. He had a cultured face, a face that showed breeding and education, but also betrayed degeneracy; the scion of a bloodline in decline. His hair was sandy, dry-looking, lying flat to his skull and brushed back from his forehead. His eyes were a peculiarly pale blue, snapping with impatience and contempt.

I said, “I don’t know you.” My voice and enunciation were both affected badly by the chill I felt, embarrassing me. I wanted to be equal to this man, superior to him. I felt instead like a cowering mongrel, waiting for a kick from his boot.

“You don’t remember me?” he asked, and then I did.

The mine. He was one of the three young officials who had come on the tour of inspection. One had called me Malone, the second had reminded him that Malone was dead, and the third had said nothing. This was the third man, the silent one, watchful, keeping his own counsel.

He nodded now, smiling at me. “I can see you do,” he said. “It comes back to you now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Some day you must tell me how you escaped from that camp; you’re the only one who ever has.” His smile broadened. “You’ll be pleased to know the camp personnel were appropriately punished for letting you go. They’ve taken your place, the lot of them.”

“You made them slaves?”

“Doesn’t that please you? They were your masters; I should think you’d be pleased to hear they now know what it was like.”

I looked at my wrist; a shiny bluish glaze of skin had lately grown over the stump. I said, “The doctor, too?”

“Oh, the doctor especially. He was the one said it was safe to put you on that job. And he cut your hand off, after all, when perhaps he could have saved it.”

I looked at my wrist. Sometimes, when I was looking the other way, I seemed to feel the hand still there; I seemed to be able to flex the fingers, close them into a fist. I tried it now, looking, and saw useless muscles move in my forearm. “I’m sorry for him,” I said.

Phail was as surprised as I was. “I should think you’d hate him.”

“I don’t,” I said, not understanding why that should be true. Wasn’t vengeance the fuel that kept me going?

“A remarkable attitude,” said Phail, the contempt in his voice like a slap across the face. “But not what we’re here to discuss.” He turned toward Malik and Rose. “A chair.”

Rose brought it, a heavy padded chair, carrying it over hurriedly and putting it down where Phail could sit directly in front of me, our knees almost touching. I watched this operation, distracted by odd questions about myself: Why didn’t I hate the doctor and the other officials from the mine? Why wasn’t I afraid of this vicious man Phail?

Phail sat down, leaned forward, tapped my knee, and smiled falsely at me. “You aren’t going to be difficult, are you?”

“About what?”

“There are questions for you to answer.”

I waited. I didn’t know yet whether I would be difficult about answering his questions or not.

He seemed to want me to speak again, to give him some sort of assurance, but when I remained silent he shrugged, sat back, crossed his legs, and said, “Very well. I want to know where you’ve been since you left the mine. Every thing.”

There was no reason not to tell him. I said, “I got away in one of the ore trucks. I left it by—” But then my voice broke, and shivering controlled me for several seconds. When the spasm was over, I said, “Could I have something hot to drink? I’m so cold, it’s hard to talk.”

He frowned at me. “Cold? It isn’t cold in here.”

“I’m very cold,” I said.

“Are you sick?”

Malik said, “Sir?”

Phail turned an impatient glare at Malik. “What?”

“Sir, Mister Davus made us throw him in the water.”

“For what possible reason?”

“To show him he shouldn’t try and swim for shore.”

“Stupid,” said Phail. He looked at me. “I apologize for Davus. I don’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.” To Malik he said, “Get him something to drink.”

We waited in silence till Malik returned, carrying a large mug of soup. It was a meat soup, steaming with heat, and it made me think of Torgmund. I found that I regretted Torgmund, that the thought of him saddened me and made me feel unworthy to be an instrument of vengeance. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, there were stray thoughts to take me away from my purpose. I could hardly remember myself as I was when first I’d come here: steel, sharp, singular, emotionless, machined. Now I was feeling as though all I wanted to do was confess.

Confess? Confess what?

I drank the soup, pouring it down my throat as though I were a cold and empty pitcher, hollow and white inside, and it did help to ease the chill. When I was done with it, Phail asked me again to recount my history since escaping from the mine, and this time I did. I told him everything, Torgmund and the cabin, the journey out of the darkness, the errors of direction, the death of the hairhorse, the three days in the UC Embassy, everything.

He listened intently, and when I was done he said, “Plausible. You had nothing on you, no papers, no maps, nothing to show… Still, it could be in your mind.”

“What could?”

He peered at me. “Are you ignorant, or are you merely illustrating ignorance? An act, or reality?”

“I know nothing that I haven’t told you.”

“Patently false,” he said briskly. “Whole areas of your life and knowledge haven’t been touched upon at all.”

“I meant, since I left the mine.”

“Of course.” He frowned, and tapped a knuckle against his chin. “It would be easier to believe you,” he said thoughtfully, “but perhaps more dangerous as well. That you should disappear in precisely that direction, that you should return from that area, that you should have an animal and equipment you did not have before, all of this is suspicious. Even that you should be here on Anarchaos is itself suspicious. But your explanations are invariably plausible, for the hairhorse, for the clothing and equipment, for your whereabouts while not under surveillance.”

“You might be able to find Torgmund’s cabin,” I said. “That would prove what I said.”

“I am not interested in proof,” he said. “Proof is secondary to judgment. I am interested solely in judging you, for truth or falsehood. Why did you come to Anarchaos?”

“To work for the Wolmak Corporation. For Ice.”

“I believe you are lying now,” he said. “But persuasively. If you can lie persuasively now, could you have been lying just as persuasively about the other things?”

“I was going to work with my brother,” I said. “Wolmak paid my way from Earth; you can find out for yourself.”

“Proof again. Only a liar needs proof. To prove details is simple, can be done no matter how complex the lie, but to judge overall veracity is much more difficult. It is the latter which is necessary. Why didn’t you leave when you found out that your brother was dead?”

“There isn’t any truth that I know that will hurt me if I tell you,” I said. “I knew my brother was dead before I left Earth. I’d been offered the job, Gar got me the job, but just before I was supposed to leave the news came he’d been killed. I came anyway.”

“To get the job?”

“No. I didn’t care about the job. I came to find out what happened to my brother.”

He smiled as though I’d just confessed a childishness, and said, “You wanted revenge?”

“I thought so.”

“You thought so?”

“What I wanted,” I said, being as truthful as I knew how, telling myself the way things were through this medium of apparently talking to Phail, “what I actually wanted was to understand.”

“Why your brother was killed, you mean.”

“Specifically that, yes.”

He frowned again, saying, “Are you leading me away from the subject? These are strange answers. What do you mean, specifically?”

“I mean I wanted to understand. Everything. Myself, and everything around me in relation to myself. It seemed if I could understand about Gar’s killing, it might be a clue, I could—” I hunted for the word.

“Extrapolate,” he said.

“Yes. Extrapolate the general answer from the specific.”

“And therefore understand.”

“Yes.”

“And have you been successful? Do you understand?”

“I’m no longer sure it was a thing that could be looked for.”

“You are taking me away! The subject is not philosophy, the subject is money!”

I looked at him, saw the patrician face being angry, and said, “Money? What money?”

“You claim to know nothing,” he said, enraged by me. “You claim to have come here on a philosophical quest. You say the word money and you look at me with an open guileless face, as though the existence of money had never before been pointed out to you. No one is that remote from money.”

“I don’t know what money you mean,” I said.

He said, “Are you very stupid, or very clever? You present me with your mythic qualities, love and death, the slain brother, eternal questions, the unworldly view. You think if you show yourself to me as a saint you’ll impress me and I’ll stay away from you.”

I didn’t understand him, yet it did seem to be true that he was impressed by something. He was getting more and more nervous. I said, “I’m not stupid, but I’m not clever either. I came here, I came to this planet, I thought I was hard, I thought I was the strongest thing there was and it would all go my way, and nothing went my way. I lost every fight. I lost a hand. I learned nothing, and I’m sitting here a prisoner of a man I don’t know, caught up in some sort of problem I don’t understand. You’re the one making the myths, the money myth, the golden fleece. I don’t have what you want.”

He glowered at me in surly indecision, and finally said, “I cannot believe in you. No one is a money virgin. What did you do on Earth? Where were you when you decided to come here?”

“In jail.”

He sat up, looking hopeful. “For theft?”

“Manslaughter. I have… I used to have — a bad temper.” I looked inside myself but couldn’t tell, and said so: “I don’t know if it’s gone or not.”

“Bad temper,” he mimicked, in a sudden return to his angry contempt. He’d made up his mind about me, all at once. He pointed a finger at me and said, “You were at the site, I know you were. You’ll tell us where it is, you’ll lead us to it, you’ll give us the whole thing. You’ll either do it now, with no trouble, or you’ll do it later on, after a great deal of trouble.”

I said, “I don’t want any trouble. I won’t fight anybody, I won’t hide anything. I don’t want to be involved any more. I’ll answer anything you ask me, I swear I will.”

“You’ll take us to the site?”

There was nothing for me to say. I sat and looked at him, feeling helpless and very frightened.

He nodded cynically. “Ignorant again,” he said. “Such touching innocence, such a blank expression. There is a drug called antizone, have you ever heard of it?”

“No.”

“It is used with the hopelessly insane. One injection, and your brain empties itself through your mouth. You will speak your entire history, all your memories, every bit of your knowledge, the total of your conjectures, each of your hopes and expectations. You will state every item aloud, and in the act of stating it you will forget it. Sometimes this process takes days. When it is finished, your mind will be empty. You will then be retrained in those rudimentary skills necessary for survival, and you will be sent back to the mine. And this time, you won’t escape.”

Of course! A great light seemed to bloom in my mind, a beautiful illumination, and with it a lovely sensation of peace. I had found my golden fleece!

I closed my eyes. I caressed the prospect he offered me.

He said, “Well? Is that what you want?”

I said, “Yes.” I kept my eyes closed.

He slapped me stingingly across the face. My eyes popped open, and I saw him standing over me, glaring at me. “Don’t play with me!”

“I want the drug,” I said. “I am finished, but afraid to die. I didn’t know about that drug, I would like it very much.”

He backed away from me, stumbling against his chair but staying on his feet. “How clever are you? What game are you playing?”

There was no way to make him believe me, but surely he would do it anyway. I closed my eyes again. In the darkness inside I felt at peace.

I heard Phail moving around the room, prowling back and forth, muttering to himself. He asked himself what intricacies I might be plotting, if perhaps there were some drug he didn’t know about which could be taken at some earlier date and leave the taker immune to antizone, if perhaps I were under some hypnotic protection which would allow him to empty my mind without getting the information he wanted, if I were perhaps merely trying a desperate bluff.

Finally he said, with abrupt decisiveness, “Very well. We’ll fall back on proof. Malik, get all he can tell you about this alleged cabin where he spent so much of his time. Then see if you can find it, see if it exists.”

I opened my eyes, hoping to see his face, but he had already turned away and was going out the door.