Anarchaos

XXXV

A great fire crackled in the hearth. Electric lighting cast a smooth and even illumination throughout the room. The furniture was soft and ornate and very comfortable, and all in the richer tones of gold and brown, with polished woods predominating. I had just finished a magnificent dinner and was now sitting in an armchair before the fire. Colonel Whistler in a similar armchair to my right and Jenna Guild to my left.

This was the building the Wolmak Corporation maintained at Cannemuss, one of the few two-story structures in town, with offices downstairs and this suite of rooms upstairs. Jenna had brought me here and I had found Colonel Whistler in a downstairs office with a group of strong, able-looking men who reminded me at once of Malik and Rose. The Colonel had immediately whisked me away to the second floor, but had insisted that no one do any explaining until I had had an opportunity to rest and bathe and change into good clothing and have a decent meal. Now all of these had been attended to, the meal was done, the three of us sat before the fire, and Colonel Whistler said, “We both have questions, of course. I hope you’ll allow me the privilege of having my questions asked and answered first.”

I said it was all right, and that it would probably be better if I just told everything that had happened since I’d left Ice Tower in Ulik four years ago, rather than answer specific questions one at a time, and he agreed that would be the best way.

The story I told him was the truth, but not the whole truth. I sloughed over the part where Torgmund died, and omitted all details of what I did on the ship. Still, the story took a long while to tell. The Colonel and Jenna listened in silence, not interrupting once, and when I was done the Colonel said, slowly and heavily, “I don’t know. I don’t know whether to say you’ve been very unlucky for all of the things that have happened to you, or very lucky for having survived them all.”

I said, “I was never more than a small pawn in somebody else’s chess game. Most of the time I didn’t matter at all. And Gar, too. His being killed is the closest thing there is to accidental murder.”

He said, “I hadn’t known about the strike, of course, but I never fully believed the story that man Lastus brought back with him. There was always something wrong with Gar Malone’s death, but I couldn’t be sure what. When you showed up, my suspicions were doubled.”

“The way you acted,” I said, “I was suspecting you.”

He laughed. “I suppose you were. But what did I know about you?”

“That I was an ex-convict.”

“I didn’t know your brother either, of course. Not well. Not to be sure that he would behave this way or that way. You know what I began to think?”

I said, “I think so. That Gar was alive, that he’d made a strike and was keeping it to himself and I was in on it somehow.”

“Of course. Coming around to see what we at Ice thought about your brother’s so-called death. When you left, I told Lingo to have you followed, and of course he swore you’d managed to elude the man following you. I suppose he never sent anyone after you at all.”

“Not from Ice,” I said. “From that other outfit, Sledge.”

“I’ve sent word to have Lingo taken care of. That ought to please you.”

It didn’t. I was finished; I didn’t want to follow the threads back any farther. There wasn’t any beginning; it just went back and back, everything that happened caused by something that happened before it. The ones closest to it were settled with now, and the rest could go on without me. But I didn’t say so; I just mumbled something and sipped at my drink.

The Colonel said, “It was Lingo who told us you were robbed and killed. The way he said it, it wasn’t part of any plot, just another of the anonymous killings on this filthy place. I didn’t know any reason not to believe him.”

“When did you find out I was alive?”

“When Jenna brought you into this building.”

“But — she said she was waiting for me down at the pier.”

Jenna said, “The Colonel didn’t believe you could still be alive. I did.”

The Colonel said, “We have our own spies, you know, in the other corporations. It’s a business necessity in a place like this, with so many untapped resources, so many fortunes left to be made. We got word that something was going on at Sledge, it had something to do with us, something to do with a dead prospector of ours named Malone. Their man Phail was involved in it some way, and he seemed to be also the one behind the taking away from a UC Embassy of a man calling himself Rolf Malone. We’ve been trying to find Phail ever since.”

“He had me on that ship of theirs. He was hiding me from his own people, too, General Ingor and the others.”

The Colonel said, “You must realize something, Rolf. This is a bad assignment for any man, to be stationed on Anarchaos. The corporations use their Anarchaotic branches as sort of punishment centers. The men who get shipped here are the ones who’ve already got a record of bad judgment or worse. The combination of bad people in a bad situation often ends with trouble. Nowhere else would you find someone like Phail so high in the corporate structure.”

I said, “Everyone here? All the corporations are like that?”

“I know what you’re asking, and the answer is yes, me too. My own mistakes have no relevance here. Occasionally a man manages to make amends with his company while here, to build a new reputation for himself and be reassigned elsewhere for a second chance. I hope to be one of those men.”

The silence after that was uncomfortable for all of us. There was nothing for me to say. I glanced at Jenna and saw her gazing into the fire with a faraway expression on her face. I wondered; her, too? Was she here because of sins in her own past or was she merely an adjunct of Colonel Whistler, dispatched willy-nilly wherever the ups and downs of his career might take him?

The Colonel finally broke the silence by saying, “When General Ingor and the others left the Sledge tower at Ni aboard a seaplane, we thought there was probably some connection, that Phail was more than likely on the Sledge ship somewhere in the Sea of Morning. That didn’t help us much, because we had no way of knowing where the ship was. But then cryptographers from all the Sledge towers were sent down here to Cannemuss — they’re still waiting, not two blocks from here — and we knew that meant the ship would be coming here. I was sure Phail was aboard the ship, I guessed that the crypto men had something to do with coded information connected somehow with Gar Malone, but I truly didn’t expect to find you aboard and alive.”

Jenna said, “I never doubted Gar’s death, even though the story of how it happened didn’t ring true. But about you I wasn’t so sure. You’d left the tower looking so hard and sharp and sure of yourself, I couldn’t believe you’d been killed so quickly or so easily. I always suspected you were alive somewhere and would turn up some day with a fantastic story to tell.”

The Colonel said, “About your brother’s notebook. You brought it with you?”

“Yes.”

“And can you decipher the code?”

“I don’t know; I never tried.”

“But you will try, won’t you?”

“No. You can copy that page out of the notebook if you want; maybe your crypto people can solve it. But all I want is to get off Anarchaos. I’m going back to Earth.”

The Colonel leaned forward, the better to look at me. “Are you sure you haven’t decoded the message? You might think you have some personal right to your brother’s discovery, and of course you’d be worth a percentage, but you’d be hardly in the position—”

“I don’t care about the discovery. It got Gar killed; I don’t want any part of it.”

The Colonel studied me, frowning, firelight reflecting in his eyes. “You aren’t interested in money,” he said.

I looked at him, and something about his expression, something about his eyes, put me in mind of Phail, when Phail was trying to judge me and couldn’t because our values were so different. I said, “I’m interested in going back to Earth. I’ve been changed by everything here; I want to see what kind of life I can make for myself on Earth.”

“Of course,” said the Colonel softly. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” He sat back again, and looked into the fire.

We didn’t do any more talking.