I was lying on my back on something soft and deep, and over me were spread blankets of animal skins. I was very confused. I remembered being a slave, and I also remembered some son of journey spent clinging to the side of a truck, and I remembered a jumble of details from my dream. But what was dream, and what was reality?
And what was this place w-here I now found myself? And who was the man who had spoken to me? I was sure of little, but of one thing I was certain: I had never seen him before in my life.
He came forward, little drops of liquid falling from the spoon, and he said, “Could you eat? You want some stew?” His voice was rough-grained, as though he seldom had a chance to use it.
My own was worse, when I said, “Please. Thank you.”
“Good.”
I closed my eyes, trying to restore order to my jumbled brain. The truck? Yes, now I remembered it, traveling on it and managing to leave it, and that I’d been escaping from the compound in which I had been held a slave. My mind ran backward, encompassing Anarchaos, Ulik, Jenna Guild and Colonel Whistler, Gar (dead), prison, fighting, being myself in all situations, everything. All back. All secure.
I was me again.
I opened my eyes, and he was approaching me with a wooden bowl from which steam was rising. I said, with my voice as rusty as unused track, “You found me out there. You brought me in.”
“That’s right,” he said. He stood beside me, and somewhere inside his beard he was smiling, beaming at me.
“You saved my life.”
“More than likely. Can you sit up?”
I could, but only with his help. I could now see that I was lying in his bed, a home-made affair like everything else here, built into one corner of the room. I sat with my back propped against the rough wall, feeling dizzy, my body stiff and aching, but not too badly, not much worse than after a normal work period inside the mine. My rags had been stripped off me and I was wearing a bulky fur coat like my rescuer’s. Beneath it I was naked.
“Here,” he said.
I held out my cupped hand, palm up, and he placed the bowl in it. It felt heavy. “Thank you,” I said.
“Is it too hot?”
Acute heat drilled into my palm through the bottom of the bowl, but I welcomed it. “It’s good,” I said. “It’s just right.” I brought the bowl to my mouth, tipped it, tasted gravy and meat and vegetables. Gravy dribbled down my chin, making me smile with comfort, like a cat.
“You eat,” he said, “and then sleep some more. I’ve got work to do outside.”
I nodded, my mouth full of stew.
It was good food, and I think would have been good even if I hadn’t been starving. But it was too rich, and I couldn’t keep it down. I was alone in the cabin now, but I felt the roiling in my stomach and I refused to soil either the bed or the floor. I rolled out of the bed, my right hand clutching at everything for support, and somehow I staggered around the walls to the door and pushed it open and lurched outside.
Snow!
I fell face down into it, and emptied my stomach.
“What’s this? What’s this?”
I raised my head and saw him trotting toward me, bearlike in his heavy clothing, a large axe in his hand. He chopped the axe down into the snow and left it there, the handle angling upward for his return, and ran over to me, shouting, “What are you doing? You’ll kill yourself!”
He picked me up, and cleaned my face with a handful of snow. Past him I could see black peaks, snow everywhere, pale moonlight. Moonlight! Where was I?
He carried me inside and put me back to bed. “I didn’t want to make a mess in here.” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “But stay here now. Do you want to try biscuits?”
“Yes.” I was very hungry now, hungrier than before I’d eaten the stew.
He brought me three pale, hard, bumpy biscuits, and I lay on my back, covered by furs, the biscuits sitting on my chest. I nibbled at them, slowly, and they tasted of salt and soda. But they stayed down. I ate all three, and then I closed my eyes and slept.
XXI
I said, “Am I on Earth?”
He turned to look at me. “You’re awake, eh?” He’d been sewing hides together, and he now put them down on the table, got to his feet and came over to look at me. “How do you feel?”
“Better. But weak.”
“You want to try the stew again?”
“I think so. And a biscuit with it, to help it stay down.”
“Just the thing.”
I managed to sit up by myself this time, and prop myself against the wall, while he got a bowl of stew and two more biscuits and brought them over to me. I took the bowl in my cupped right hand again, but then there was no way for me to hold a biscuit. He saw my difficulty and said, “That’s all right; just a minute.” He brought a chair over and sat down beside me and said, “When you want some biscuit, hand me the bowl.”
“Thank you.”
“We’ll have to get you strong,” he said, and smiled within his beard.
I chewed meat, and swallowed it, and said, “My name is Malone.”
“Torgmund,” he said. “That’s me, Torgmund. Nobody ever gave me a name to go in front of it.” He laughed, and took the bowl while I ate some biscuit. Watching me eat, he said, “Why’d you ask about Earth? You’re on Anarchaos, where you’ve always been.”
“Not always,” I said.
He was surprised. “You came here from someplace else?”
“Earth.”
“And that out there, that looked like Earth?”
“Because of the moon,” I said. “I didn’t know Anarchaos had a moon.”
“A lot of them don’t,” he said. “Daysiders,” he added, contemptuously. “They never see it, because they’ve got daylight all the time. But we on the rim, we see it.” He chuckled, and gave me back the bowl. “Gives us a kind of day and night,” he said. “You take a look out that door now, it’s black as the bottom of a hole; you can’t see your hand in front of your face.” Then he glanced at my stump, and seemed embarrassed.
I said, “We must be farther east. A lot farther than where you found me.”
“A full day,” he said. “I was coming back from Ulik when I found you. I put you in the back of the wagon and took you home.”
I said, “A full day? What sort of day?”
He laughed again, and pointed skyward, and said, “Rim sort. By the moon. Twenty-seven hours, fifteen minutes, Earth Standard. Little longer than an Earth day, isn’t it?”
“Yes. You’re a trapper.”
“That’s what I am. And you’re a slave.”
“Yes.”
“Got away from one of those mines they have around there.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I never heard of one of you escaping,” he said. “How’d you do it?”
Between mouthfuls of food I told him about working in the mine, and the loss of my hand, and the change of jobs, and how I’d found a way to escape and did it. He listened, bright-eyed, interested in what I had to tell him about a slave’s life and enjoying the story of my escape and also. I think, pleased merely at the prospect of someone else in the cabin to talk to. Looking around, I could see that no thought had ever been given to more than one person occupying this place. His had to be a very lonely life.