Anarchaos

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“Those who see by the light of Hell are blind to evil.” Rohstock said that, in his Voyages To Seven Planets. As I rode the shuttle to Anarchaos his words circled and circled through my thoughts, the answer to a question I preferred not to ask.

The shuttle was nearly empty: myself, two other passengers, the steward. Up front were the two pilots, of course, but I never saw them, and so they don’t count.

There is nothing more tedious than a shuttle flight between unimportant planets, even for someone like me, his first time away from home. On a shuttle there is nothing to do, nothing to see; one merely sits in an enclosed tube and is hurtled through hyperspace from here to here, without even the sensation of motion. The only difference between an elevator and such a shuttle is the distance covered. And, of course, the time spent in the voyage.

This one, from Cockaigne to Anarchaos, took four hours. It was the last leg of my journey, and in objective time the shortest, but subjectively it was the longest of all.

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