Anarchaos

III

Mandell had been somewhat impressed by the UC man’s warnings after all; he approached me in the customs shack to ask if I intended to go to Ulik. “If so, we could travel together. There’s safety in numbers.”

That’s what all sheep believe. I was going to Ulik, as a matter of fact, but I told him I wasn’t. “Moro-Geth is the city I want to see,” I said. “I believe that’s in the opposite direction.”

“That fellow was right about you,” he said. “You’re no tourist.”

There was no point arguing with him. I went on to see about my baggage.

My luggage consisted of three pieces: two large suitcases and a knapsack. The suitcases were actually unnecessary, merely full of extra clothing and whatnot, amid which I had hoped to hide my arsenal. Now that I was weaponless, there was no point carrying all that gear with me. I arranged with the UC customs men to store my suitcases with them, packed the few essentials into my knapsack, and went on to currency exchange.

Anarchaos, having no government, has no monetary system of its own, and therefore uses the same Union Commission paper money used in all new colonies until they’re sufficiently established to set up their own monetary system. The basic unit of this UC money is the credit, with the credit value dependent upon local standard of living. That is, the assumption is that one hundred credits would be an average weekly income, so the value of the credit is higher or lower depending upon the cost of living, which is itself determined to a large extent by the cost of imported goods. On different planets, therefore, the credit will be worth different amounts. The Anarchaos credit turned out to be about the equivalent of two crowns on Earth. (A second monetary unit in this system is the token. Ten tokens equals one credit.)

I exchanged a part of my money — seven hundred credits worth — and left the rest with the UC representatives for safe keeping. I took my time, wanting to be sure that Mandell was already gone before I went outside, and when I did go through the gate to the street neither he nor the missionary was anywhere in sight.

The ramshackle suburbs of Ni began here, stretching away toward the tall towers of the city itself in the distance. Those arches and spires, glinting ruby and saffron in the dull red glare of the sun, had a kind of feverish beauty to them, but the shacks and lean-tos in the foreground were merely scrubby, a junkyard in which people lived.

Awaiting me were two commercial groups eager to offer me their services: chauffeurs and prostitutes. They clamored and waved their arms, all of them, out-shouting and out-gesticulating one another and yet very carefully not bumping into one another, not standing in front of one another, not causing any direct offense to one another.

The prostitutes I had no use for, but the chauffeurs were potentially of interest. Each stood in front of his vehicle, showing it off, shouting its fine points at me, and I studied these vehicles and their drivers with a great deal of care.

There was just about every means of land locomotion imaginable there, most of them pulled by hairhorses, native Anarchaotic beasts whose shaggy hair and rough similarity to Earth’s horses gave them their name. These I was not interested in; it was motorized transport I desired.

Motors were fewer in number, but varied in style. One contraption of wood, with large wooden wheels and no top, seemed to have been homemade, with an electric engine from some other kind of machine mounted on a platform at the rear. Another was a small truck, the sides and top of the body cut away and a fat lumpy sofa mounted sideways in the back for passengers. There were a few fairly ordinary automobiles, some with liquid fuel engines and others with electric engines, all imports from off-planet. There was some limited manufacture here, but not of anything as large and expensive as motorized transport. Those inter-system corporations which found it to their advantage to maintain offices here — and whose towers I could see in the center of Ni — brought any such large equipment here from off-planet, unassembled. These automobiles lined up with all the other conveyances were for the most part obsolete equipment sold by one or another corporation; or, perhaps, were simply stolen property.

In any case, they were what I was most interested in. I studied them, studied their clamoring drivers, and finally chose a small but rather clean auto with two sets of seats, one behind the other. The driver was short, narrow-faced, middle-aged, with nervous energetic movements and darting suspicious eyes; he looked right for my purposes.

I went to him and said, “You’ll take me to Ulik?”

The shout went up all around me: “Here’s another for Ulik! Ulik, Ulik! I live in Ulik, I’ll take you to Ulik!”

My driver squinted at me. “Ulik? Of course. Climb aboard, climb aboard.” He swept the door open.

“How much?” I said.

“The normal rate. Get in, get in.”

“What’s the normal rate?”

“We’ll talk about it when we get there.” And he kept motioning me anxiously to get in. He didn’t quite dare pluck me by the sleeve.

The calls around us were dying down. Everyone wanted to see how the haggling would go, what I would like and what I would mistrust; they wanted to be ready to better this first man’s offer if I should reject him.

I said, “We’ll talk about it now. How much to Ulik?”

He studied me. He put the little finger of his right hand in the corner of his mouth, squinted up his face, squeezed his right eye shut, and with the left eye surveyed me for some clue to what the market would bear.

Another driver shouted, “Hurry it up! Make up your mind before sundown!” Everyone laughed at that, the whores across the street cackling the loudest of all, and I understood this to be a common and well-known joke; only natural, I suppose, on a world where the sun never moves from its place in the sky.

When the laughter died down, my little driver took his finger from his mouth and said, “Five credits an hour. You couldn’t get a better price.”

I shook my head. “No. You’ll—”

“All right,” he said. “Four credits fifty.” He appealed to the others, saying, “Is that fair?”

They hooted him with what might have been good nature, and when they were done I said, “Give me a flat rate. Not by the hour.”

“A flat rate? Nobody ever does that.”

“No?” I turned as though to ask if anyone else would give me a flat rate.

Before I — or anyone — could say a word, my driver shouted, “Wait! Wait! A flat rate!”

“Name it.”

“Mmm, two hundred credits.”

“Forty,” I said.

He turned his back on me.

The whole transaction took about another five minutes, and when we were done he had agreed to drive me to Ulik for ninety-eight credits and five tokens. I got into the back seat, he stationed himself behind the wheel, and we moved off. Behind us the crowd, knowing there’d be no more newcomers this time, separated and drifted aimlessly away.

We drove east across hard-packed dirt streets, through what seemed an endless succession of blocks of squalid huts, shacks, lean-tos and tents. Children flung rocks and other things at us as we passed, and the driver cursed them and shook his fist out his glassless side window. There was no glass in any of the windows, in fact, and a hot breeze blew in on us through the gaping windshield. The driver muttered and mumbled to himself and, hunched over his wheel, drove competently and with good speed down the endless dirt street.

Several blocks from the spaceport we passed a cluster of people, and I saw Brother Roderus standing in their midst. They’d ripped his clothing off him and he was now naked, his pale skin a wretched rose in the light of the sun, the tatters of his clothing around his feet. His suitcase had been ripped apart and its contents scattered over the ground. The crowd seemed to be in high spirits, and hadn’t actually begun to kill him yet. His expression was very earnest, and I saw his lips move; I assume he was making a speech.

“That’s a bad thing,” my driver said, with natural hypocrisy. “No one ought to treat foreigners like that. But don’t you worry. So long as you’re with me, I’ll see to it you’re left alone. If you want a guide after we get to Ulik, someone to watch out for you, clear the way for you…”

“We’ll see,” I said. “What sort of engine do you have? Electric?”

“The finest. Molecular power source. Never run down, never.” He was parroting something he himself knew nothing about.

A short while later we left Ni and got onto the narrow paved road to Ulik; the Union Commission had built this road, paying for it by assessing those off-world corporations with interests on Anarchaos.

For the first hour we crossed a vast grassy plain. Here and there, at great distances from the highway, I caught sight of the high walls of farms, but for the most part the plain was deserted, looking just as it had before man had first come here.

In this early part of the trip my driver attempted from time to time to pump me as to my purposes here, but I ignored him and after a while he gave it up. Then we drove in restful silence.

Adaptation comes quickly. Already I was taking the redness of everything for granted, and my body was feeling less irritated by the subtle increase in gravity. Still, I had to be careful, and not overestimate my adaptability; I was still not as able in this environment as someone who had lived here all his life.

After the plain we came to hills, low but jagged, rocky and lifeless, one after the other for mile upon mile, the road curving back and forth among them, only rarely climbing to cross some stone-backed ridge. On one of these curves we met a hairhorse-drawn wagon coming the other way, and barely avoided an accident, which set the driver into another paroxysm of cursing. When it was done I asked him, “Is that the wagon the other traveler took?”

“Who? The one ahead of you? Not him. He took a car, the biggest one there.”

“Car?”

“Like this,” he said, motioning to indicate his own automobile.

“Oh,” I said. “This is what you call a car. We call them autos, or automobiles.”

He shrugged. Language meant nothing to him. Then he said, “You think something might happen to him? The man who took him maybe rob him, kill him, be coming back?”

“Something like that.”

My driver shook his head. “Not him,” he said. “Not that one. He’ll get where he’s going, that one.” Then, as an afterthought: “So will you. I can tell that sort of thing.”

A while later we encountered our second vehicle since leaving Ni, another hairhorse and wagon, this one going the same direction as we. We overtook it amid the hills and curves and my driver passed it without hesitation, though he couldn’t see ten feet ahead.

That second wagon was full of standing men, naked to the waist, in chains. They looked after us sullenly, and the wagon driver cracked his whip at us as we went by.

“Slaves,” said my driver, and shuddered theatrically. “That’s a bad business.”

A while later we emerged from the hills to another plain, flat and grassy and featureless as the first. The road went straight, as far as the eye could see, and there was no traffic but ourselves.

I slipped off my belt, formed a loop by putting the other end through the buckle, slipped the loop over my driver’s head from behind, pulled it tight, used the seat between us for leverage, and strangled him where he sat. The auto slowed, and continued straight down the road, until his flailing arms struck the steering wheel and we went jouncing off at an angle onto the grass and rolled to a stop.

I retrieved my belt and pushed the body out onto the ground. I searched the body and the auto and found what I’d hoped to find: I’d chosen this driver because he was small, physically unawesome, and therefore likelier to keep some sort of weaponry on his person. I needed new weapons.

I got them. From the body, a clasp knife and a good throwing knife, the latter in a neck sheath so the knife lies between the shoulder blades. From the auto, a pistol and extra supply of ammunition, a filled length of iron pipe, and a spray can of blinding gas.

On the body I also found over two hundred credits and several pornographic photos. I left the photos, took the money, got into the auto — car they call it here, I reminded myself — and drove on toward Ulik.