Anarchaos Read online

  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 pornograph
ic 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.

  IV

  ON EARTH, in the nineteenth century O.T., an obscure Russian nihilist named Mikhail Bakunin wrote in French a book called Dieu et l’Etat, in which he said such things as:

  “Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists. The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. When you have freed your mind from the fear of God, and that childish respect for the fiction of right, then all the remaining chains that bind you—property, marriage, morality, and justice—will snap asunder like threads.”

  Bakunin slept several centuries in well-earned oblivion, until resurrected by the founders of Anarchaos, who used his writings as the core of their social philosophy. If such a place as Anarchaos could be said to have a patron saint, Bakunin is it.

  This re-emergence of the ancient naysayer was the direct, though unexpected, result of Union Commission law, in particular that law relating to the political structure of colonies. According to UC regulations, colonies receiving UC assistance—without which colonization is impossible—have total freedom for self-determination of their own style of government, within the limitations of precedence. That is, colonies are not permitted to invent whole new systems of government out of whole cloth, but are limited to those governments which have existed in the past, of any era, either in fact or in an extensive body of philosophical and socio-political literature. The trainers of this regulation hoped thereby to save future colonies from half-digested or harebrained new political theories like those which, in the first wave of stellar colonization, caused such pain and bloodshed. Governmental theories which had never been tested in fact but which did boast a broad body of literature were considered safe because it is a basic tenet of Union Commission faith that sooner or later discussion inevitably leads to reason.

  The Commission had apparently never heard of anarchism. But the founders of Anarchaos had, and Bakunin was their chief prophet, assisted by such other anarchist, nihilist or syndicalist writers as William Godwin, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, Josiah Warren, Max Stirner, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, Georges Sorel and Sergius Nachaev. The literature of anarchism is extensive and, in its way, distinguished, frequently—as in Turgenev and Tolstoy—calling upon the noblest elements of human nature as the bedrock of society, a call which is itself noble but not entirely realistic.

  The UC disapproved, but was powerless to prevent the colony from going its own way. The Union Commission actually has few real teeth, and even those are kept carefully blunted by the member planets, each jealous of its own sovereignty. The Commission is the final—and only—authority in space, and has limited authority and responsibility in colonies. This latter authority the Commission itself has tried to expand from time to time but always without success. The greatest fear of every planetary government, it seems, is that some day the UC will succeed in usurping domestic planetary powers.

  Which means there is nothing the UC can do about Anarchaos. The planet remains permanently on colony status, using UC money, with UC embassies in each city, with UC men staffing the spaceport. Only when a colony is ready for self-government does the UC depart, and Anarchaos, having no government and having no desire to form a government, will naturally never be ready.

  The UC probably would do something about Anarchaos, even though it would be stretching legality, if there were no other factors to consider, but there is another factor; the businessmen, the corporations, the off-worlders who have money and prestige and political power and who profit hugely from Anarchaos as it now stands.

  An adjunct of anarchist theory is syndicalism. Instead of governments, men are to form voluntarily into syndicates which will run the factories and the farms, the schools and the transport systems, and goods and services will move by a barter system between the syndicates. The theory is naive now and must have always been naive, though a number of polysyllabic thinkers gave it weighty discussion in weighty tomes. Whatever its flaws, it was a part of the founding structure of Anarchaos, and for the first few years it apparently worked with some degree of success.

  The first generation on Anarchaos, in fact, didn’t do too badly at all, but of course they had been trained on other worlds and understood discipline and group effort, those two hallmarks of government. But the second generation, growing up with no influence but anarchism, followed their natural bent, atomized the society into its individual fragments, and the theoretical structure of Anarchaos collapsed in red dust.

  At that point the off-worlders moved in. The syndicates founded by the first colonists were quietly and unofficially taken over by foreign corporations and soon the economic—if not the political—structure of Anarchaos was in the hands of profit-seekers who directed operations from grand offices light years away. Behind the facade of the syndicate towers in Ni, in Moro-Geth, in Ulik and the other cities, sat the corporations, fat and getting fatter.

  For Anarchaos is a rich world, a storehouse of valuable minerals and a significant exporter of furs. Trapping and mining are the two primary occupations, the former done by rugged individualists out in the wilds, the latter done by slaves captured by roaming press gangs and sold to the mining syndicates.

  Human occupancy of Anarchaos was in its eighty-seventh year when I arrived, making it the longest-running planet-wide madhouse in the history of the human race.

  V

  THE SUN INCHED minutely backwards across the sky as I drove eastward toward Ulik, so that I seemed gradually to be outdistancing it, until, when I first saw the city ahead of me, that red ball was in a position behind me that in my friendlier sun at home would indicate, in summer, approximately two o’clock in the afternoon. On Earth, of course, a distance of a thousand miles or more would separate sites two hours apart by the sun, but Anarchaos was in a much closer orbit to its Hell, so that Ni and Ulik were barely four hundred miles apart.

  The last fifty miles or so had been across a high barren plateau, rocky and uninviting. Two men mounted on hairhorses had tried to stop me at one point, blocking my path, but I accelerated toward them, and fired a shot from my new pistol, and they whirled away in front of me, cursing and shaking their fists. They were bearded, and dressed in furs, and had heavy-looking swords at their waists. They were the last humans I saw before coming to Ulik.

  Ulik was built in the center of a great flat brown valley, the dry bed of a onetime inland sea. The plateau ended here, the road sweeping down the bare eastern slope to the bottom, and then—a thin black line—arrowed straight across the dry seabed to the city.

  Ulik, first seen from far away and high atop the eastern edge of the plateau, had a land of frail grandeur to it, the only sign of man in all this emptiness. The syndicate towers were fewer here than at Ni, but just as tall and just as graceful and just as slender, reflecting blood-red glints of sunlight. Because Hell lay off the zenith there were shadows of the tallest rock formations, long pointing black fingers stretching toward the city across the valley floor. I drove quickly down the long decline.

  It had been getting cold atop the plateau, but now as I moved down into the valley the air grew somewhat warmer again. I remembered that the UC man at the spaceport had said the temperature at Ulik was approximately sixty degrees.

  Ulik was a fur center, where the trappers brought their pelts for sale, where they were cured and treated and prepared for transport off-world. This paved Union Commission road ended at the city itself, but on the other side broad dirt tracks moved off toward the evening line, showing the routes of the trappers and tradesmen, slavers and solitaries.

  The junkyard hovels were all on that side, too, so that the western approach to the city, where I was coming in, was all beauty and shine, as modern as any city anywhere, all towers and spires and graceful arches, sweeping high walkways and gossamer webs of communications lines.

  Now for the first time I was seeing the syndicate towers up close. At g
round level they were surprisingly heavy and thick in appearance, all steel and concrete, massive and windowless, darkened by their own shadows. Armed guards patrolled in groups at their iron doorways, glowering at me in suspicion as I drove by, and here and there down the side streets raggedly dressed men and women slithered along the concrete walls on minor, urgent, and incomprehensible missions.

  Although the off-world corporations owned these syndicates and their towers body and soul, nowhere did a corporate name or logo appear. Instead, above the heavy iron main doors of each structure was mounted the symbol of each syndicate: an inverted triangle containing the letter S, an X of crossed lightning bolts, a sledge hammer with a dog’s head, a raised black grillwork on which was laid a silver stylization of a bird in flight.

  Finally I saw the one I wanted: a cornucopia dripping ice. Originally a syndicate of those who made or repaired refrigeration machines—freezers, air conditioners, home refrigerators—it had been taken over long ago by the Wolmak Corporation, a chemical company with some connections to the local mining industry. In the first decade or so of the colony’s existence, refrigeration units had actually been manufactured in this tower, and bartered with other syndicates, and later serviced and repaired by members of this syndicate, but all that was in the long dead past. The factory had long since been stripped bare, the original membership of the syndicate had died out, and the membership now was small, badly-trained for repair work, and totally subservient to the Wolmak Corporation.