"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 ..."
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"Well 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 lif e.
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
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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.
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IV
on eahth, in the nineteenth century O.T., an obscure Russian nihilist named Mikhail Bakunin wrote in French a book called Dieu et VEtat, 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 nay-sayer 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 anarch-
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ism. 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.