Treason (11 page)

Two meters was enough, however, for me to see that the platform I was approaching was occupied. However, they were obviously not part of the chase—both men were facing away from me. I had no time to waste, and there was no longer any point—if there ever had been—in trying to mask the fact that I was escaping. The knife I had stolen found one man’s heart as he turned around to face me, even as the other man fell forever into the night from a sharp kick I landed on the small of his back. He made no sound as he fell.

Pulling the knife out of the Nkumai, I looked around for another escape, and discovered that I was at the crotch of a main trunk and a major branch, not two branches. There was no downward slope—only the straight-down plunge of the trunk. The branch led upward—not the direction I wanted to go. And the bridge was still bouncing with my pursuers’ travel. If they hadn’t been slowed by the missing treads, they would certainly have reached me by then, accustomed as they were to travel in the dark.

I thought of cutting the rope bridge, but the hawsers were far too thick and I didn’t try.

Instead, I decided to go up the branch and hope it led to a route I could use. I was starting the climb when I noticed what the two Nkumai had been working on: a birdnet.

They had been securing the end—the rolled-up net swung out taut into the darkness. At least one other point was secure—and that might be enough.

I tested their knots—they were tight. Then I slithered out feet-first onto the thick roll of the netting. It was rough, and provided enough purchase that I didn’t fall, or even swing over to hang from the bottom. And as I crept backward along the net, I cut the strings that held the net in a roll.

When I reached the next tie point, I tested, and found to my relief that the net was tied at the point beyond. I could hear—not very far away—the sound of footsteps reaching the platform I had just left.

Cutting every string as I passed, I continued backward along the net. I could see the net unfolding, falling open along the route I had just traveled. Would my followers try to follow my path along the net? With it open, they would find it considerably harder. Or would they cut the net? It wouldn’t hurt me—there was a tie point between me and them. And it would make pursuit impossible.

I could almost hear them trying to decide in the darkness and stillness of the Nkumai night.

How far would the net go down? How far, for that matter, had I descended? What good would it do me to unroll the net if, once I clambered to the bottom, there were still a hundred meters between me and the ground?

The net was long, and when I reached the seventh tie point, it occurred to me that guards would probably be waiting at the platform where the net ended, ready for me to back into them and return to captivity. So I laboriously turned around on the net. It was harder, going face first, but I felt more secure about the chances of surprise. And it was a good thing I did. I was at the ninth tie point when I felt a jiggling on the net. It couldn’t be coming from behind me—I would have felt it long ago if someone were pursuing me along the route I had followed. All my training in logic was not required for me to conclude that someone was coming in front of me.

I kept slicing knots in the strings as I proceeded forward. And at the next point, I decided to end my journey along the net. Just beyond the tie I began slicing the net itself. Each string cut easily, even five or six strands together, but there were hundreds in the rolled-up net. And I was so involved that I didn’t see my enemy until he was nearly with me.

He had not been cutting knots, of course, and so the net was still thick beneath him, while under and behind me the net fell away, leaving me on a much thinner and so less stable strand. I was halfway—or more—through cutting the net, but he had a knife, too, and I prudently decided that fighting him had a higher priority than cutting string.

That battle was rather one-sided. In good condition on level ground—even on a level platform—I’m sure I could have killed him easily. But on a net, high above the ground, in darkness only faintly relieved by dim and dissipated moonlight, and weakened by loss of blood and the still throbbing amputation of my fingers, I was not in the best of shape. Worse yet, the normal advantage of a Mueller—that we didn’t mind a few mortal wounds in the process of battle—didn’t apply now, since any weakening would force me to let go of the net and plunge so far to the ground that my chances of healing in time were pretty slim.

Worse yet, it was clear that he wasn’t trying to capture me alive—apparently they thought my corpse would be useful enough, even though it couldn’t be interrogated. The brief battle would have ended summarily when he finally pressed his knife into my bowels, if the top of the net hadn’t been within reach.

He passed the knife back and forth in my belly, and the pain was strong enough to make me gasp. We could absorb a few simple cuts, but it wasn’t part of the Mueller battle training to stand there while the enemy gutted us like a fallen deer. I cut down at his arm and struck flesh, but a moment afterward his hand was back, the knife again stabbing to disembowel me. It was clear that such a trade-off—his arm for my guts—would quickly end with me falling. So instead of attacking him I hacked wildly at the net above, where I had already been cutting. Pain and desperation gave me greater strength, or else the time was actually longer than I thought, but the net soon snapped, and my enemy gave a grunt of surprise as the two halves of the net broke apart, falling away from each other and down. He silently disappeared into darkness, leaving me alone, swinging on the dangling net.

It was now open along the entire remaining length, and I clung to the thin mesh by fingers and toes. The air was cold on my open abdomen. Something hot and wet brushed by my knee, and I realized that some intestine had fallen out.

Disguise of my true sex was hardly important now, and I cut off my black robe at the shoulders, to free me for a scramble down the net. Naked now, and becoming numb to the pain, I began to climb down my remnant of net.

I felt like a crippled spider on a broken web. More than once a strand gave way and I had to grasp for another handhold. Constantly the thin mesh cut into my fingers and toes.

After an eon of descent my foot found nothing under it.

I had reached the bottom of the net, and under it was air.

How much air? Fifty centimeters? Or two hundred meters?

I had no idea how high I had been when I started. Because the net had been cut, the bottom corner, where I now dangled, was lower than the net would have been in its regular open position. The ground might be a single step below me.

But what choice did I have? Weak as I was, my bowels open and dangling, blood still seeping from an impossible jumble of half-healed wounds, I could neither climb up again nor hang on much longer. My only hope of survival was to let go of the net. If the net was low enough, I might be able to land with enough bones intact that I could scramble away in the darkness and find some place to hide while my belly healed. If the net was too high, then they’d find me on the ground in the morning whether I jumped or tried to hang on a little longer.

While I hung there, trying to make a decision, the net began to tear. My weight was too much for a net designed to be invisible to birds. I heard the rapid popping of strands for a moment, and then, my fingers still gripping the strings of the net, I tumbled downward into the black air.

I fell free for a long second. I couldn’t even prepare myself to roll on impact, since I couldn’t see the ground. I landed on my back, the breath knocked out of me by the impact. And because I hadn’t let go of the net, I got tangled up in it, meter after meter piled on and around me.

I was alive.

For just a moment I lay there, almost stunned, tempted by the welcome release of unconsciousness. But I refused. The fact that I had lived to get to the bottom of the Nkumai forest made me determined to try to make good the escape. How long would it take the Nkumai to reach the bottom, going by ladder? And once down here, how long would it take them to reach me? Not long, I decided, and struggled free of the net.

I left some intestine with the net, and the gut still connected to me tried to lurch forward out of the gaping wound with every step I took. Only a hand constantly pressed to my belly held it in. I staggered off in a direction that would take me, I hoped, to the sea. I had lost all conscious sense of direction; I hoped that my unconscious northsense would lead me aright.

Even though my mind was not functioning well, I remember making at least some attempt to hide my trail. I found a brook, and pausing long enough to rinse my wound, the cold water striking my bowel like a club, I followed it downstream a long way. The drinks I occasionally took seemed to refresh me, until the sickening moment when the water reached the disrupted gut. I soon gave up drinking.

I was too mind-numbed to realize what it meant when the sound of the brook got so loud. When the waterfall tumbled off into darkness, I fell with a huge splash into the river below. Again I almost lost consciousness there, and might have drowned except that the current was swift and I was able to keep awake and afloat long enough to reach the other shore. In the river I lost the knife I had managed to keep in the fall. I cared little about that at the time, and slept on the far side of the river, in plain sight on the bank.

I woke with the sun shining dimly through the leaves at the top of the forest, and stayed awake long enough to crawl into some thick brush, where I couldn’t be seen from above.

I woke again in darkness, panting with thirst, and though I remembered the agony of the last drink I had taken, I knew that to have any hope of healing, I had to have water in my body. I slid painfully down to the river, my intestine trailing limply behind me, and drank the murky water there. It did not turn to torture in my bowel; apparently my Mueller body was coping even with that massive a wound, and had closed a connection somewhere that let the water through. The connection had bypassed much of my former intestine, however. It still slopped and dragged in the grass and dirt, I was too tired to try to clean it.

Again in daylight the sun roused me. This time I heard talking and calling. Feet ran by on the other side of the river. The Nkumai, so silent and sure in the high trees, were not good at reading groundsigns, or they would have immediately spotted the place where I crawled to the river to drink the night before. I remained quiet and unmoving in the thicket where I lay hidden, and my pursuers soon passed on. I slept again, and again that night I slid down to the water and drank. It felt like the dangling intestine was larger and more awkward to drag with me than before, but it probably felt that way because I was so weary, and so I slept again.

The water was not pure. I began vomiting early that morning, and from the first I was puking blood. I didn’t open my eyes, just writhed in agony and panicked as I feared that my fever would lead to delirium, and delirium would call my would-be killers.

I don’t know how many days after that I was feverish and unconscious. But I was vaguely aware that I recovered strength enough to walk, always in a stupor, staggering through the forest. Only the ignorance of the Nkumai saved me—I wasn’t aware enough to be careful. Perhaps I walked at night. Perhaps they had given up the search. I don’t know. But I moved from the river to cleaner brooks, and drank; the trees were an endless brown blur; the sun was merely a bright spot in the green from time to time; I knew nothing of what was transpiring.

And I dreamed that as I traveled I was not alone. I dreamed that someone traveled with me, someone to whom I spoke softly and explained all the wisdom of my fevered brain. I dreamed I held a child in my arms. I dreamed I was a father, and unlike
my
father, I would not,
did
not, disinherit my worthiest son because of some crime beyond his control. I dreamed, and then tried one day to set the child down so I could drink.

But the child would not leave my arms. And gradually, as I struggled to push the child away, I realized that birds were singing, the sun was shining, sweat was dripping from my chin, and I was not asleep.

The boy was whimpering.

The boy was real.

I remembered now how the child had cried out in hunger. I remembered now how I had deliriously crooned to him as I walked along, how we had slept snuggled together. It was all so clear—except where he had come from.

It took little investigation to discover. He was joined to me at the waist by a bridge of flesh. Gut to gut, and his food must have been whatever strength he could draw from my body. His legs dangled to within a foot of the ground when I stood erect; his head was only a little shorter than my own; and as I looked into his eyes, I realized they were mine.

Radical regenerative. I could heal anything. And when half my guts were torn away, connected to my body only by arteries and veins, my body just couldn’t decide which was the real me, which part of me to heal. So it healed both halves, and I stood looking into the eyes of my perfect duplicate, who smiled timidly at me like a stupid but sweet-tempered child.

No, not a child. He had grown quickly, and a faint down of hair around the cheeks and lips hinted at oncoming adolescence. He was thin, starved; his naked ribs protruded. So did mine. My body, unsure which of us to save, had raided my body to give strength to his, and now struggled for a balance.

I did not want a balance.

I remember the monstrous rad I had seen lurching toward the troughs in the laboratories, and imagined myself there, ready to be harvested. But I had created, not a mere head, but an entire body. And when I was ripe for the plucking, and they cut the bodies apart, which would be me, and which would they send?

At this moment there was still no doubt which of us was the original Lanik Mueller. I had breasts; I had a tiny arm growing out of my shoulder, already with fingers that clasped and curled. It had not grown at all since I escaped from the Nkumai prison; I bitterly congratulated my body on having its priorities straight, healing my gut wound before bothering with a surplus arm. Good job.