How should I have felt? I felt cold, and empty. I no longer wanted antizone, any more than I still wanted revenge. There was nothing I wanted. Not even the oblivion of the black water rushing by below my elbow had any appeal for me.

I was heading toward Cannemuss, but only because life requires motion. So long as one breathes, it is necessary to move. In a map on the bridge of the ship I had seen where this place Cannemuss was: at the far south-easterly tip of the Sea of Morning, at the mouth of the Black River. Triss had told me it was a frontier town, a trapper's village, a way station for supplies going out to the rim and raw materials coming back.

The last time I looked behind me, when the flaming ship had now receded completely out of sight, the mate's watch read nearly four o'clock. From then on I looked only forward.

Five hours later I reached the coast, barren and snow-

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bound, and two hours after that, by traveling southward along the shoreline, I came at last to Cannemuss. And on the pier at Cannemuss was standing Jenna Guild.

XXXIV

4: '

at first, we didn't recognize one another. I, of course, had changed considerably since last we'd met. She had not, but was so bundled against the cold that her face could barely be seen. It was something about her stance that attracted my attention, rather than my noticing anything particularly familiar about her face.

Initially, the town itself commanded all of my scrutiny, it being unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Existing in perpetual twilight, permanently frozen, its population largely transient, Cannemuss had none of the towers I'd seen in the other cities on Anarchaos, nor any of the usual ramshackle huts and aimlessly drifting people. There was an air of bustling industry here, as of a thriving pioneer community eagerly moving into an ever-better future. The withering, the long slow decline obvious in the syndicate cities, had not yet shown itself out here.

I saw the ships in the harbor before I actually came within sight of the town itself. Black River, narrow and deep, emptied precipitately into the Sea of Morning at this point, leaving a broad deep protected bay just to the north of the river mouth. Around this bay the buildings of the town were clustered, and in the bay itself were small and medium-sized boats of every possible description, a range of boats as broad as the range of land transportation I'd seen on first leaving the spaceport at Ni. Outside the bay were a dozen or so large ships much like the one I had been a prisoner on, each with its syndicate name in large letters on the bow. Smaller boats scuttled back and forth constantly between these large ships and the port.

I came down along the shoreline from the north, seeing the large ships anchored outside the harbor first of all, and then seeing the traffic back and forth, then the broad en-trance to the bay, and at last the town itself.

Cannemuss was a low-built town. Here and there a two-

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story structure loomed above its fellows, but nothing in the town was as tall as the ships nested outside the bay. Steeply slanting roofs were standard, because of the frequent heavy snowfalls. There was no open ground; streets and all other spaces around the dark buildings were covered with hard-packed snow. Many more men than women moved about on this snow, mostly dressed in furs, many bearded, practically all with the self-sufficient Torgniund look, the look of the frontier.

I steered my little boat into the bay and to the end of the one long pier that jutted out from the quay. I tied the boat to a ring set into a vertical support, climbed the short ladder up to the pier, and met there a bundled man with a thin nose, who held a clipboard and said, "You'll have to pay rent if you stay there, you know."

Til straighten it with you when I come back,** I said, since I knew I would never be back, and walked down the length of the pier to the end, where I saw Jenna Guild.

I started by her, then was struck by some feeling of familiarity, stopped, went back a step, and looked directly into her face, framed within the fur hood she wore. She had been gazing steadily out to sea and now she made as though unaware of my presence; she naturally thought I was no more than a potential molester.

I said, "Jenna? Jenna Guild?"

Now she looked at me, and in the blankness of her expression I could see she had no idea who I was. I said, "It's Rolf Malone."

A sudden wariness came into her eyes, and guardedly she said, "You have information about him?"

"I am him. Jenna, look at me."

She looked, and looked again, and raised an impulsive hand to touch my cheek. "Rolf! My Godl"

"You can still see me underneath," I said, and tried my first smile in ages.

"I would never have known you," she said, studying me in wonderment. "I don't think there's a thing about you that hasn't changed."

"You're still the same," I said. "Not a day has passed for you."

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"In my cocoon,'* she said, with that sudden bitterness I remembered.

I said, "Why are you here? Of all places, why here?"

She laughed, with something odd in the laughter, and said, "Waiting for you, of course! But I didn't expect you to come this way." She looked past me toward the ocean, saying, ""Where's the Sledge ship?"

"Gone," I said. "You knew I was on it?"

"We thought so." Then she took my arm. "Come along, the Colonel will be very pleased to see you."

"He's here, too?"

"You're an important man, Rolf," she said. "Come along."

Arm in arm we walked into the town.

XXXV

A great fire crackled m the hearth. Electric lighting cast a smooth and even illumination throughout the room. The furniture was soft and ornate and very comfortable, and all in the richer tones of gold and brown, with polished woods predominating, I had just finished a magnificent dinner and was now sitting in an armchair before the fire, Colonel Whistler in a similar armchair to my right and Jenna Guild to my left.

This was the building the Wolmak Corporation maintained at Cannemuss, one of the few two-story structures in town, with offices downstairs and this suite of rooms upstairs. Jenna had brought me here and I had found Colonel Whistler in a downstairs office with a group of strong, able-looking men who reminded me at once of Malik and Rose. The Colonel had immediately whisked me away to the second floor, but had insisted that no one do any explaining until I had had an opportunity to rest and bathe and change into good clothing and have a decent meal. Now all of these had been attended to, the meal was done, the three of us sat before the fire, and Colonel Whistler said, "We both have questions, of course. I hope you'll allow me the privilege of having my questions asked and answered first."

I said it was all right, and that it would probably be better if I just told everything that had happened since I'd left Ice

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Tower in Ulik four years ago, rather than answer specific questions one at a time, and he agreed that would be the best way.

The story I told him was the truth, but not the whole truth. I sloughed over the part where Torgmund died, and omitted all details of what I did on the ship. Still, the story took a long while to tell. The Colonel and Jenna listened in silence, not interrupting once, and when I was done the Colonel said, slowly and heavily, "I don't know. I don't know whether to say you've been very unlucky for all of the things that have happened to you, or very lucky for having survived them all."

I said, "I was never more than a small pawn in somebody else's chess game. Most of the time I didn't matter at all. And Gar, too. His being killed is the closest thing there ig to accidental murder."