Anarchaos

XXXIV

At first, we didn’t recognize one another. I, of course, had changed considerably since last we’d met. She had not, but was so bundled against the cold that her face could barely be seen. It was something about her stance that attracted my attention, rather than my noticing anything particularly familiar about her face.

Initially, the town itself commanded all of my scrutiny, it being unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Existing in perpetual twilight, permanently frozen, its population largely transient, Cannemuss had none of the towers I’d seen in the other cities on Anarchaos, nor any of the usual ramshackle huts and aimlessly drifting people. There was an air of bustling industry here, as of a thriving pioneer community eagerly moving into an ever-better future. The withering, the long slow decline obvious in the syndicate cities, had not yet shown itself out here.

I saw the ships in the harbor before I actually came within sight of the town itself. Black River, narrow and deep, emptied precipitately into the Sea of Morning at this point, leaving a broad deep protected bay just to the north of the river mouth. Around this bay the buildings of the town were clustered, and in the bay itself were small and medium-sized boats of every possible description, a range of boats as broad as the range of land transportation I’d seen on first leaving the spaceport at Ni. Outside the bay were a dozen or so large ships much like the one I had been a prisoner on, each with its syndicate name in large letters on the bow. Smaller boats scuttled back and forth constantly between these large ships and the port.

I came down along the shoreline from the north, seeing the large ships anchored outside the harbor first of all, and then seeing the traffic back and forth, then the broad entrance to the bay, and at last the town itself.

Cannemuss was a low-built town. Here and there a two-story structure loomed above its fellows, but nothing in the town was as tall as the ships nested outside the bay. Steeply slanting roofs were standard, because of the frequent heavy snowfalls. There was no open ground; streets and all other spaces around the dark buildings were covered with hard-packed snow. Many more men than women moved about on this snow, mostly dressed in furs, many bearded, practically all with the self-sufficient Torgmund look, the look of the frontier.

I steered my little boat into the bay and to the end of the one long pier that jutted out from the quay. I tied the boat to a ring set into a vertical support, climbed the short ladder up to the pier, and met there a bundled man with a thin nose, who held a clipboard and said, “You’ll have to pay rent if you stay there, you know.”

“I’ll straighten it with you when I come back,” I said, since I knew I would never be back, and walked down the length of the pier to the end, where I saw Jenna Guild.

I walked by her, then was struck by some feeling of familiarity, stopped, went back a step, and looked directly into her face, framed within the fur hood she wore. She had been gazing steadily out to sea and now she made as though unaware of my presence; she naturally thought I was no more than a potential molester.

I said, “Jenna? Jenna Guild?”

Now she looked at me, and in the blankness of her expression I could see she had no idea who I was. I said, “It’s Rolf Malone.”

A sudden wariness came into her eyes, and guardedly she said, “You have information about him?”

“I am him, Jenna, look at me.”

She looked, and looked again, and raised an impulsive hand to touch my cheek. “Rolf! My God!”

“You can still see me underneath,” I said, and tried my first smile in ages.

“I would never have known you,” she said, studying me in wonderment. “I don’t think there’s a thing about you that hasn’t changed.”

“You’re still the same,” I said. “Not a day has passed for you.”

“In my cocoon,” she said, with that sudden bitterness I remembered.

I said, “Why are you here? Of all places, why here?”

She laughed, with something odd in the laughter, and said, “Waiting for you, of course! But I didn’t expect you to come this way.” She looked past me toward the ocean, saying, “Where’s the Sledge ship?”

“Gone,” I said. “You knew I was on it?”

“We thought so.” Then she took my arm. “Come along, the Colonel will be very pleased to see you.”

“He’s here, too?”

“You’re an important man, Rolf,” she said. “Come along.”

Arm in arm we walked into the town.