“You don’t remember me?” he asked, and then I did.
The mine. He was one of the three young officials who had come on the tour of inspection. One had called me Malone, the second had reminded him that Malone was dead, and the third had said nothing. This was the third man, the silent one, watchful, keeping his own counsel.
He nodded now, smiling at me. “I can see you do,” he said. “It comes back to you now, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. Some day you must tell me how you escaped from that camp; you’re the only one who ever has.” His smile broadened. “You’ll be pleased to know the camp personnel were appropriately punished for letting you go. They’ve taken your place, the lot of them.”
“You made them slaves?”
“Doesn’t that please you? They were your masters; I should think you’d be pleased to hear they now know what it was like.”
I looked at my wrist; a shiny bluish glaze of skin had lately grown over the stump. I said, “The doctor, too?”
“Oh, the doctor especially. He was the one said it was safe to put you on that job. And he cut your hand off, after all, when perhaps he could have saved it.”
I looked at my wrist. Sometimes, when I was looking the other way, I seemed to feel the hand still there; I seemed to be able to flex the fingers, close them into a fist. I tried it now, looking, and saw useless muscles move in my forearm. “I’m sorry for him,” I said.
Phail was as surprised as I was. “I should think you’d hate him.”
“I don’t,” I said, not understanding why that should be true. Wasn’t vengeance the fuel that kept me going?
“A remarkable attitude,” said Phail, the contempt in his voice like a slap across the face. “But not what we’re here to discuss.” He turned toward Malik and Rose. “A chair.”
Rose brought it, a heavy padded chair, carrying it over hurriedly and putting it down where Phail could sit directly in front of me, our knees almost touching. I watched this operation, distracted by odd questions about myself: Why didn’t I hate the doctor and the other officials from the mine? Why wasn’t I afraid of this vicious man Phail?
Phail sat down, leaned forward, tapped my knee, and smiled falsely at me. “You aren’t going to be difficult, are you?”
“About what?”
“There are questions for you to answer.”
I waited. I didn’t know yet whether I would be difficult about answering his questions or not.
He seemed to want me to speak again, to give him some sort of assurance, but when I remained silent he shrugged, sat back, crossed his legs, and said, “Very well. I want to know where you’ve been since you left the mine. Every thing.”
There was no reason not to tell him. I said, “I got away in one of the ore trucks. I left it by—” But then my voice broke, and shivering controlled me for several seconds. When the spasm was over, I said, “Could I have something hot to drink? I’m so cold, it’s hard to talk.”
He frowned at me. “Cold? It isn’t cold in here.”
“I’m very cold,” I said.
“Are you sick?”
Malik said, “Sir?”
Phail turned an impatient glare at Malik. “What?”
“Sir, Mister Davus made us throw him in the water.”
“For what possible reason?”
“To show him he shouldn’t try and swim for shore.”
“Stupid,” said Phail. He looked at me. “I apologize for Davus. I don’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.” To Malik he said, “Get him something to drink.”
We waited in silence till Malik returned, carrying a large mug of soup. It was a meat soup, steaming with heat, and it made me think of Torgmund. I found that I regretted Torgmund, that the thought of him saddened me and made me feel unworthy to be an instrument of vengeance. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, there were stray thoughts to take me away from my purpose. I could hardly remember myself as I was when first I’d come here: steel, sharp, singular, emotionless, machined. Now I was feeling as though all I wanted to do was confess.
Confess? Confess what?
I drank the soup, pouring it down my throat as though I were a cold and empty pitcher, hollow and white inside, and it did help to ease the chill. When I was done with it, Phail asked me again to recount my history since escaping from the mine, and this time I did. I told him everything, Torgmund and the cabin, the journey out of the darkness, the errors of direction, the death of the hairhorse, the three days in the UC Embassy, everything.
He listened intently, and when I was done he said, “Plausible. You had nothing on you, no papers, no maps, nothing to show… Still, it could be in your mind.”
“What could?”
He peered at me. “Are you ignorant, or are you merely illustrating ignorance? An act, or reality?”
“I know nothing that I haven’t told you.”
“Patently false,” he said briskly. “Whole areas of your life and knowledge haven’t been touched upon at all.”
“I meant, since I left the mine.”
“Of course.” He frowned, and tapped a knuckle against his chin. “It would be easier to believe you,” he said thoughtfully, “but perhaps more dangerous as well. That you should disappear in precisely that direction, that you should return from that area, that you should have an animal and equipment you did not have before, all of this is suspicious. Even that you should be here on Anarchaos is itself suspicious. But your explanations are invariably plausible, for the hairhorse, for the clothing and equipment, for your whereabouts while not under surveillance.”
“You might be able to find Torgmund’s cabin,” I said. “That would prove what I said.”
“I am not interested in proof,” he said. “Proof is secondary to judgment. I am interested solely in judging you, for truth or falsehood. Why did you come to Anarchaos?”
“To work for the Wolmak Corporation. For Ice.”
“I believe you are lying now,” he said. “But persuasively. If you can lie persuasively now, could you have been lying just as persuasively about the other things?”
“I was going to work with my brother,” I said. “Wolmak paid my way from Earth; you can find out for yourself.”
“Proof again. Only a liar needs proof. To prove details is simple, can be done no matter how complex the lie, but to judge overall veracity is much more difficult. It is the latter which is necessary. Why didn’t you leave when you found out that your brother was dead?”
“There isn’t any truth that I know that will hurt me if I tell you,” I said. “I knew my brother was dead before I left Earth. I’d been offered the job, Gar got me the job, but just before I was supposed to leave the news came he’d been killed. I came anyway.”
“To get the job?”
“No. I didn’t care about the job. I came to find out what happened to my brother.”
He smiled as though I’d just confessed a childishness, and said, “You wanted revenge?”
“I thought so.”
“You thought so?”
“What I wanted,” I said, being as truthful as I knew how, telling myself the way things were through this medium of apparently talking to Phail, “what I actually wanted was to understand.”
“Why your brother was killed, you mean.”
“Specifically that, yes.”
He frowned again, saying, “Are you leading me away from the subject? These are strange answers. What do you mean, specifically?”
“I mean I wanted to understand. Everything. Myself, and everything around me in relation to myself. It seemed if I could understand about Gar’s killing, it might be a clue, I could—” I hunted for the word.