At last everything was ready. The ship still moved forward from its own momentum, but with increased sluggishness. I dressed myself warmly in clothing taken from the dead crewmen, set the fire which would eventually lead itself to the spilled fuel and from there to the fuel tank itself, and went on down to the opening in the hull through which I'd first been brought into the ship.
There were three small motorboats down here, tied to the metal platform, and I scuttled two of them. I found the way to open the hole in the hull, started the engine of the remain-
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ing motorboat, and steered my way carefully out to the open sea.
I had taken the mate's watch with me, and it read three-
twenty a.m. when I started out in the small boat. I main
tained course in the same direction the ship had taken, guid
ing myself by the light on the horizon far ahead and just
slightly to the left, and as I went I looked back from time to
time at the faintly-seen ship, its yellow lights outlining it in
the blackness behind me. For the longest while it seemed to
sit motionless and eternal back there, an angular black sil
houette in a halo of dim light surrounded by the blackness,
but at precisely three-thirty by the mate's watch I saw the
first jet of flame. Bright red, shooting upward, it illuminated
the ship and the bit of ocean just around it in miniature imi
tation of the noon light of Hell. ,
So long as I could still see it, the ship never exploded and it never sank. It merely burned and burned and burned, flaming away like a torch back there in the night. I moved away from it at a good speed, sitting in the stern of the small boat, huddled against the cold wind of my passage, and behind me the red beacon silently roared.
I was finished. After four years, I had done what I had come to Anarchaos to do: learn the truth about my brother's slaying and choose an appropriate vengeance. It seemed that I had lost every battle, and then won the war.
How should I have felt? I felt cold, and empty. I no longer wanted antizone, any more than I still wanted revenge. There was nothing I wanted. Not even the oblivion of the black water rushing by below my elbow had any appeal for me.
I was heading toward Cannemuss, but only because life requires motion. So long as one breathes, it is necessary to move. In a map on the bridge of the ship I had seen where this place Cannemuss was: at the far south-easterly tip of the Sea of Morning, at the mouth of the Black River. Triss had told me it was a frontier town, a trapper's village, a way station for supplies going out to the rim and raw materials coming back.
The last time I looked behind me, when the flaming ship had now receded completely out of sight, the mate's watch read nearly four o'clock. From then on I looked only forward.
Five hours later I reached the coast, barren and snow-
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bound, and two hours after that, by traveling southward along the shoreline, I came at last to Cannemuss. And on the pier at Cannemuss was standing Jenna Guild.
XXXIV
4: '
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 en-trance to the bay, and at last the town itself.
Cannemuss was a low-built town. Here and there a two-
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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 Torgniund 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."
Til 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 started 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 Godl"
"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."
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"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?"