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, 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
I 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 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, we’ll 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.
The next three days were a time of lazy waiting. I ate and slept and sat around and felt my battered body rebuilding itself. I shaved the beard away and was astonished at the face revealed beneath; it was unchanged. All over my body were the marks of my recent existence, everywhere but on my face. Hidden away beneath all the hair, this face had survived intact, unscathed, looking now foolish and anachronistic, a lone toy forgotten and left behind in the room of a boy who has grown up.
The Embassy doctor looked me over and pronounced me in surprisingly good condition, considering my recent history. As to my wrist, he told me the amputation had been rough and ready but the wrist had healed well, the residual pain should soon end, and a prosthetic hand could be attached to the stump with little or no trouble.
“Not here, of course,” he said. “On Earth. I doubt there’s any prosthetic devices at all on this benighted planet.”
The UC people I met within the Embassy were unanimous in their hatred and contempt of Anarchaos and the entirety of its population.
On the morning of the fourth day Chafrey came to me at breakfast and said, “We’ve got transportation for you to Ni. When you’ve had breakfast we’ll go on up.”
“I’m done now,” I said.
I had wanted to ask for transit to Ulik, but it would have been hard to explain why I wanted to go back there without also explaining about Gar, so I’d agreed to the trip to Ni. The Embassy people assumed I would then take the next shuttle flight off-planet, and I said nothing to dissuade them. The fact was, I intended to pick up some more money and fresh clothing from my luggage checked at Ni, and then return to Ulik by surface transportation, as I had done the first time.
Chafrey and I went up in the elevator to the roof, where the helicopters landed. The elevator opened into a small bare room with a bench along one wall. Chafrey walked over to the door across the way, opened it, and said, “Here he is, Mr. Rose.”
“Thank you.” A youngish, smiling, burly man came in and looked at me. “You ran away,” he said. His head was shaved.
Rose!
Chafrey said, as the second one came in, “Can you and Mr. Malik handle him all right?”
“Oh, I’m sure we can,” said Rose. He produced a pistol and pointed it at me. “Don’t be stupid now,” he said.
I yelled, “Chafrey! What have you done?”
“You weren’t even smart about it,” Chafrey said to me, and I could hear in his voice the hatred and contempt these people all expressed when they spoke of Anarchaos or its inhabitants. “Didn’t you know we’d check? No Rolf Malone arrived at Ni Spaceport within the last six months or the last year or the last two years!”