And the road I had come across was the equivalent diagonal the other way, a line drawn between Prudence at the north and Ulik at the east. I had stumbled on the Prudence-Ulik road, carefully but erroneously thought out what do, and turned my back on Ulik, going off to the right, north-easterly again, toward distant Prudence.
I traveled this road for the next three days. In that time I occasionally caught glimpses of other travelers at a distance, but my uneasiness was so great that I invariably left the road and went into hiding until they had passed. Several times I considered approaching a party of travelers—I was the only solitary wayfarer to be seen on this road—in order to ask directions and be sure I was heading toward Ulik, but fear and caution and bad memories induced me to remain hidden.
Toward the end of the third day I began to see the towers of a city far ahead. The animal and I were both tired, both hungry, but I pressed on. I had no way of knowing how long I'd been gone—two months, six months—but all at once a great urgency came over me, I felt the full weight and impact of my purpose as I had not felt it since the day I'd been shot in the entrace of Piekow Lastus' hovel, and I found myself
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wanting to know now who had killed Gar, and why, and why they had thought it necessary to kill me also.
A short while later I reached the scrubby outskirts of the
city, where the ramshackle huts and lean-tos were far apart,
abandoned, most of them collapsing. It was as though the
people who had once lived out here had decided to move
closer to the center of town, like animals who-huddle closer
together on the coldest nights. In actual fact, it was not move
ment which had caused these shacks to be abandoned, it was
shrinkage. The population of Anarchaos, which had gone
steadily upward in its first fifty years or so, had then leveled
off for a generation and was now on the decline. Anarchaos
was moving slowly—too slowly—toward its inevitable dissolu
tion. These empty shacks on the outskirts of the city would
never be used again. >
And the city was not Ulik. Looking at the towers, still far away, I could see that they were different, that this was some other city. I couldn't yet understand it, and pressed forward even faster, looking for someone to explain to me where I was.
The first person I saw was an old man hobbling along the road ahead of me, also heading inward. I hurried to catch up, but when he heard the hoofbeats behind him he cast one terrified glance over his shoulder and ran off to the right, behind a shack of corrugated metal. I rode after him, found him cowering in a corner with his arms over his head, and at length convinced him that I merely wanted to know the name of the city I was entering.
He blinked at me, watery and weak. Everything about him was watery and weak. He had lived so long, I guess, by constant playing of this one part: the rabbit.
"Prudence, sir," he quavered. "You're coming into Prudence, if you please, sir."
"Prudence."
"Prudence, sir. Yes, sir. Prudence, sir."
I turned away from the old man's bowings and waverings, urged the hairhorse back to the road and on in toward the heart of the city. The wrong city.
In my mind's eye I could see the map shown me by L. L. Goss back in Ice Tower, and seeing it I could begin to see some of the mistakes and wrong guesses I had made. Well,
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no matter. In Prudence there would be a Union Commission Embassy. There I would find sanctuary, where I might rest until I was ready to face Anarchaos on its own terms once more. And until I was strong enough to return to Ulik and enter the Ice Tower and obtain the answers I was denied the last time I was there. Ice Tower at Ulik, that was where the answers must be.
Riding, thinking, I heard the sound of whirling wings and looked up. Passing overhead, not very far from the ground, was a helicopter of yellow and green, with a symbol clearly visible on its underside: A hammer with a dog's head.
"Yaaaahhhh!" I cried, hardly myself understanding why, and raised my empty wrist in challenge, and dug my heels into my hairhorse's ribs and gave furious and futile chase.
XXV
it was not easy to find the UC Embassy; no one on Anarchaos speaks unnecessarily to strangers. I could only roam back and forth through the center of the city amid the syndicate towers until eventually I did find the one with the silver UC in thin letters over the entrance.
Unlike all the other towers, there were no armed guards hanging around outside the entrance, although some watch apparently was kept; the door opened before I could knock, just as I was dismounting. The man who looked out at me wore the blue Union Commission uniform and his hand hovered near the weapon on his hip. He said, "What is it you're looking for?"
"Sanctuary. "I'm an off-worlder."
He looked at my heavily-bearded face, at my fur clothing, at the animal I'd been riding. "An off-worlder?"
"From Earth. I was captured and made a slave. I escaped."
He was still dubious, but he said, "Come in," and stepped to one side.
I said, "What about my hairhorse?"
"You can't take it to Earth with you," he said. "Leave it out there. Don't worry, someone will take it."
I felt uncomfortable to be leaving it, but of course he was
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right; I wouldn't be needing a hairhorse any more. I dropped the reins, and followed him inside.
"Tell me," I said. "Is it day or night?"
"Evening." He glanced at his watch. "Twenty past seven." Then he smiled thinly at me, saying, "That was an Earthman's question. Come along, well get you food and shelter. You can do the paperwork in the morning."
The food and shelter he then offered me were both astonishing, recalling to me the kind of meal, the kind of room, the kind of bed I had at one time taken for granted but had now been without for so long that to an extent I had forgotten them. I slept that night like a dead man, and rose shortly before noon to eat the biggest breakfast of my life.
After breakfast came the paperwork I'd been promised, and there seemed to be endless amounts of it, administered by a slender ascetic young man in a barren and windowless office. He had a high-pitched voice with very little strength in it, so that even though we sat on opposite sides of the same desk I had from time to time to ask him to repeat a question. I answered all of his questions exactly, editing out only my desire to learn about the murder of my brother, and being unable to give him an exact answer only once, when he wanted to know how long I'd been a slave.
"It's just for the records," he said, in his reedy voice. "Make a guess."
"Three or four months," I said. "Maybe six months."
He wrote something, and went on.
When he was done with paper forms, there was another set to do, these the oral records. He produced a microphone from within the desk, asked me many of the same questions all over again, and at last announced that we were finished. I thanked him, left his office, and found outside in the corridor the man who had first met me at the door yesterday, a stolid quiet sort named Chafrey.
They still weren't sure about me, of course. There was the possibility I was a native trying to fob myself off as an off-worlder in order to wangle free transportation away from Anarchaos. Such attempts had been known to happen. Until they could be sure, Chafrey was never very far from me.