Which means there is nothing the UC xjan 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
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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 lattei 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.
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.
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The last fifty miles or so had been across a high barren plateau, rocky and uninviting. Two men mounted on hair-horses 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 sea-bed 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 ground level they were surprisingly heavy and thick in appearance, all steel and concrete, massive and window-less, darkened by their own shadows. Armed guards patrolled
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in groups at their iron doorways, glowering at me in suspicion as I drove by, and hert 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 sty-lization 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.
Each syndicate, in the beginning, had given itself a one word—usually one syllable—name which implied the syndicate's purpose, and this one had called itself Ice. The old syndicate names were still used, although today when anyone on Anarchaos spoke of Ice he actually meant Wolmak. The names of the owner corporations were never seen and rarely heard.
I stopped my car in front of the Ice tower, saw to it that I had all my weapons on me, and stepped out onto the ground. The hunting knife was in its sheath against my back, the other knife in my left side pocket, the pistol in my right hip pocket, the gas spray can in my left hip pocket, and the piece of pipe tucked into.my belt. I left my knapsack on the car seat.