Anarchaos

VI

When I was getting out of prison, in with the other paperwork I put a request for a stellar passport. My counselor mentioned it in our last session, saying, “You plan to start life again on a new world, Rolf, is that it?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Why is that, Rolf?” He used my name a lot, to establish a personal relationship between us. I never used his name at all.

“My record here is pretty bad,” I said. “I know that’s not supposed to mean anything — an ex-convict is supposed to have the same rights as anybody else — but we both know it doesn’t work that way.”

“It does for some men, Rolf. Men who are willing to wait it out.”

“A record doesn’t travel with you to a new world,” I said. “That’s one good rule the UC’s got.”

He snapped at everything, like a piranha fish, saying now, “You have a grievance against the Union Commission, Rolf?”

“Not a bit,” I said. “I’ve never been off Earth, never had dealings with the Commission. But I know about that rule, and I think it’s a good one.”

“Do you know anyone out there, Rolf? Any friends or relations?”

“My brother’s got a job on a place called Anarchaos.”

“I don’t believe I know the name.”

“It’s small, and way out. New, too.”

“Rolf, you could do better on Earth.”

“I could do worse, too. Waiting it out isn’t a style that’s natural with me.”

“You mean your temper, Rolf? There hasn’t been an outbreak from you in over three years. That’s cured, Rolf, I’m convinced of it.”

“It’s not cured, it’s controlled. And it’s what got me in here, took seven years off my life. I don’t want to push that control too far.”

“You may be right at that, Rolf,” he said. “I’ll recommend approval.”

“Thank you,” I said. Because it was necessary.

He was right about my temper, but on the other hand he was dead wrong. There had been no outward demonstration of it in over three years, as he’d said, but it had existed, inside me, compressed, chained, stifled, almost every waking minute of all that time. A prison is full of petty irritations, and it is my nature to irritate easily.

But I had to learn to hold it in if I ever wanted to get out of that place, and what a man has to do he can do. And now, after seven years — I’d been given an indeterminate sentence for manslaughter, after I killed five people in an argument over a noisy party — the temper was in tight iron shackles and I at last was free.

I would never lose my temper again, this I knew. By now I was a little afraid of it myself; if once let out after being pent up so long, what would it be likely to do? No. It was the quiet way for me, from now on.

With Gar. My brother Gar, three years my senior, as near enough like me to be my twin in all respects but one, and that one made all the difference. Gar had no temper at all. Nothing could enrage him, nothing aggravate him past endurance. Relatives — I’ve alienated myself from all of them by now, of course, parents included — used to say I had Gar’s temper as well as my own. That was when we were both children, and my destructive frenzies could do comparatively little damage. Later, as I grew older and stronger, such pleasantries were not among the things my relatives said of me. Gar was their darling, and I — to the extent that they dared ignore me — had ceased to exist.

I suppose it would have been normal for me to grow up hating and envying Gar, but quite the reverse was true. He was the one person I never grew angry with, the only one in the world — in any world — whose opinion mattered to me. And he was fond of me, too, with a curious blend of normal brotherly affection combined with a goodhearted man’s indulgence of a rambunctious pet. He kept me out of trouble when he could, calmed me when he could, made things right after my flare-ups when he could.

I finished my schooling at the minimum legal age, of course; school for me had been an endless succession of rows with teachers and fellow students. I had a number of jobs, none of them good, none of them for long. Then, at twenty-three, I went into prison, and stayed there till seven days past my thirtieth birthday.

Gar went on with school, became a mining engineer with additional degrees in allied fields, and went to work for one of the great alloy firms. His even disposition and absorption in his work made him an ideal explorer in virgin territories, either alone or with small parties. He changed jobs infrequently, but each change was a step upward. When he went to work for Wolmak Corporation, my fourth year in prison, he was the highest-paid field man they had, could have had an administrative job at executive level if he’d wanted it, and was only thirty years old.

He wrote me from time to time, and less frequently I wrote back. In his next to last letter he told me of his transfer to Anarchaos, exciting prospects, brand new and unrealized potential, and said that if I were to be released as soon as I expected he was authorized to offer me a job as his field assistant. I accepted at once, and in his final letter he said the job was mine.

After so many false starts, now at last I had found my place. I would be with Gar, the one man in all the world whose company I could tolerate, the two of us moving endlessly across empty landscapes where no human had ever been before, away from society, away from humankind, out where only nature could rasp my naked nerve-endings, and against nature in perfect safety I could howl my rage away.

The day I got out of prison, the message came from the Union Commission: Gar had been killed. He was dead.

Killed? By what? By whom?

I went to the UC embassy, and there I first heard something of the unique nature of Anarchaos. “It was the colony that killed your brother,” a UC man told me; a statement I was to hear often.

But I wanted more. I read tape after tape at the library, soon exhausting all that had been written about that filthy little planet, and then I read the sources of its social structure — Bakunin and the rest. And Rohstock, in his Voyages to Seven Planets:

“Life on Anarchaos is itself sufficient punishment for any crimes its citizens may perform; there is, therefore, no other.”

I was not satisfied. No one could tell me anything, no one could do anything. The identity of Gar’s killer, his motive, even his method; I couldn’t get a single fact. But I had my passport, and my traveling expenses had already been paid, and there w-as nothing to keep me on Earth, so I armed myself with an arsenal which was taken from me at Valhalla, and I went to Anarchaos.

When they took my weapons away at Valhalla, I knew I would have to kill. I required weapons on Anarchaos for purposes both of protection and persuasion, and I knew from my reading that the only way to get weapons on Anarchaos was to take them from someone else. The realization that I would be forced to kill at least one Anarchaotian did not bother me in the slightest, possibly because of my previous experience at the task but more probably because of the oft-repeated theory that, “The colony killed your brother.”

Not that I was prepared to admit the theory as fact. Whatever guilt others might share — the colony, the founders, the UC, the corporations — finally it must come down to the one, or two, or three, who had in fact committed the one specific murder of Gar Malone.

Ultimately, I myself wasn’t sure what I planned to do. Learn, to begin with, and once I knew I could decide. Deep inside me the fury coiled like a snake, like a mainspring, but I kept it in control. Mindless rage would get me nothing. I had to be cold, mind rather than emotion; I had to be a machine gathering data.

When the data was gathered, it itself would tell me what to do. What to do with the man who had killed Gar. Or, if it turned out that those were right who said the colony was his killer, I would again know what to do — then, not now. For now I knew only that I had questions to ask.

And the first man of whom I would ask them was Colonel Holbed Whistler, the Wolmak Corporation’s manager at Anarchaos, the man who had been Gar’s final employer.