Treason (24 page)

“‘Then you adopted the boy? Your son?’ asks he, and I deny it. ‘A true born son of my flesh,’ says I, ‘not two years into marriage.’

“He went a bit white then, as we old men are prone to do, and he took down a notebook from his interminable shelves of trivial records, and looked up a particular entry, and had me read it. It recorded the hysterectomy he had performed on my wife a month after our marriage.

“Can you imagine what a shock that was to me? I was sure he was mistaken, but he was a methodical man, you know, and I couldn’t shake his surety. He took everything, womb, ovaries, and she damn near died in the process, but it was that or a cancer to destroy her life within the year. So she was doomed to childlessness in exchange for life.

“It was a blow. I insisted I could remember the childbirth, but when I tried to recount the circumstances, I couldn’t remember a bit of it. Not the day, not the place, not whether I went in or stayed out, nor even how I celebrated the birth of an heir, nothing. Nothing. Like you, when you couldn’t remember anything about your brother just now.”

I might doubt many men, but in this case I couldn’t fathom a reason for Barton to lie. And now the book of genealogy in my lap weighed heavier, and I struggled even as I listened to try to remember something, anything about Dinte from our childhood together. A blank.

“That’s not all my story, Lanik Mueller. I went home. And on the way home, I somehow forgot the entire conversation. Forgot it! Something like
that
, and it simply slipped my mind. It was not until I was out of Britton on my very last journey, this time a visit to Goldstein because of the warmth in the winter. While I was there, I got a letter from Twis. He wondered why I hadn’t been answering his letters. Ha! I hadn’t known I had been receiving any. But in his letter he said enough to refresh my memory. I was shocked at the lapse that had occurred, appalled that I could have forgotten. And then I realized something. It wasn’t old age, Lanik Mueller, that made me forget. Someone was doing something to my mind. When I was at home, something
made
me forget.

“I came home, only this time I thought, steadily, continuously, of how my son was a fraud, a total mountebank. I’ve never had such a struggle in my life. The closer I got to home, the more familiar sights I saw, the more I felt that Percy had always been a part of me, a part of my home. Everything familiar and dear to me had been tied to Percy in my mind, even though I had no specific memory of him in that place. I clutched Twis’s letter to my bosom and reread it every few minutes all the way home. I would finish reading the letter and have no idea what it had said. The closer I got to Britton, the harder it became. I’ve never suffered so much anguish of mind. But I kept saying, ‘I have no son. Percy is a fraud,’ and never mind wondering how anyone could come to a childless man and pass himself off as his son. Suffice it to say that I made it. I came here with my mind and memory intact. And behold, on this very desk, four letters from Twis, opened and obviously read, which I had utterly no memory of receiving. Now I could read them, and each one of them referred to the matter of Percy being an impossibility.

“In the other letters, Twis gave me comments from friends who had come from Lardner to stay with him during his days in Britton, friends who had met me. I remembered them well. All of them had clear memories of the fact that I was childless and that my wife and I knew perfectly well that we had no hope of having children. He quoted my own witticism to the effect that at least now my wife had no time of month when she could beg off from her duties in bed. All at once, as I read Twis’s mention of that occasion, I remembered it. I remembered saying that. It was as though something snapped inside of me. I remembered everything. I had no son. Until I turned forty or so, and then, suddenly, I had a nineteen-year-old boy, eager to rule, passionate for opportunity. I made him governor of my northernmost holding, and it was all he needed. In five years he was, incredibly, overlord of all of Britton. Eight years ago he rose from there to the head of the alliance and turned it into a dictatorship.”

I shook my head. “Not a dictatorship, Barton. A figurehead for a committee of scientists. The self-proclaimed wise men rule in Nkumai and Mueller, too.”

“It’s always wise, when looking for figureheads, to be certain who is manipulating whom,” Barton said with a bite that made it clear he thought me unclever in holding that opinion. “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? Dinte and Percy are alike. Children who appeared out of nowhere, but no one questions them, no one doubts them in their own family, in their own country, and now they have both risen to the highest position of authority in very powerful countries, and everyone is convinced they’re mere figureheads.”

It did sound rather odd.

“I shall help you be convinced,” he said. “When I spoke to you once about how it felt to be heir to the throne, you said, quite bluntly—your father was proud of your bluntness, as I remember—you said—and you were a little boy then—you said, ‘Lord Barton, I can only be comfortable as heir because father has no other sons. If I had a brother, I’d have to be more careful how I behaved, for then if they got rid of me there’d always be a spare.’ I remember the words because your father made me recite them to five or six different people during my visit, as evidence of your precocity. Do you recall this?”

I did. I recalled the words. I recalled the moment. I even remembered old Barton, younger then, of course; he was much amused and slapped his thigh, roaring with laughter, repeating fragments of the remark. I had felt much impressed with myself at having won laughter from such a man.

I remembered, and at that moment I knew that Barton was right. I had no brother. I was an only child.

And I remembered something else. I remembered Mwabao Mawa. Not in Nkumai, but riding into Jones in an open carriage.

The servant who had brought me to the cliff house came in with toddy in a pitcher.

I had seen a middle-aged white man in that carriage. And then a moment later, coming out of quicktime, I had seen Mwabao Mawa in the carriage in precisely the same place. She saw me; I fled; and yet in all that time since then, I had never wondered why the man would have left the wagon in the midst of the streets of Jones to let Mwabao Mawa get on. Where had Mwabao Mawa been till then? Where did the white man go?

It fit the pattern. A seemingly powerless figurehead, run by the committee of scientists—but when viewed differently, perhaps the very person who ruled.

The servant poured toddy for me first, at Barton’s insistence, and was now carrying another to Barton.

I had been in quicktime when I saw the bald white man. Then, in realtime, I had seen Mwabao. Was that the difference, then? In quicktime, I saw the reality? In realtime, I was fooled like everyone else?

The servant leaned over Barton and I remembered having caught a glimpse, that very morning as I came out of quicktime, of a blue cape on a shorter man turning into a red cape on the gaunt servant who now bent over Barton, who now watched as Barton took the toddy to his lips.

“Don’t,” I said to Barton. “Don’t drink it.”

Barton looked surprised for a moment, while the servant stood, blankly looking at me. Then, suddenly, the servant crumpled and Barton leaped to his feet, ran agilely out the door. I was startled. I was put off. I was slowed down. It took several precious moments before I looked again at the servant lying in a tumble on the floor and realized it was not the servant at all. It was Barton.

How had I seen the servant fall and Barton leave, and been in error? They had never changed places, not that I had seen. And yet there lay Barton, his head had been nearly severed from his body, held in place only by the spine. It must have been done in a single strong whick of a very sharp blade. But when had this happened? Why hadn’t I seen?

An iron blade.

No time for speculation, of course. I knelt by Barton and pressed the head against the neck and did the kind of thing I had done for so many Humpers and their animals. I connected blood vessels, I healed torn muscles, I linked the skin together without a seam, I made the body healthy and whole. Then, because I was already doing the work and because I cared for the man and because it was easier to do something I
knew
how to do than to think about what to do next, I even found his rheumatism and his feebleness and his lung disease and his dying heart and fixed them, renewed them, made him healthier than he had been in many years.

He was conscious, looking at me. “Man-of-the-Wind,” he said, smiling. “The stories are true.”

“The servant was one of them,” I said, though of course I had no idea who
they
were, except that somehow they had come to rule the world.

“That much I guessed as the blade passed through my throat. Dear Dul. How do they carry off their disguise, Lanik? I distinctly remember believing that Dul was born in this house, the child of my housekeeper. It never occurred to me to question the memory. He overheard our conversation, of course. I suppose he meant to poison us. You warned me not to drink—tell me, how did you guess?”

I had neither time nor inclination to tell him about Ku Kuei and the manipulation of time. “I just guessed,” I said. “You had made me alert.”

He looked at me doubtfully, then probably decided that if I had wanted to tell the truth I would have told it already. He got to his feet. He arose so suddenly, in fact, that he startled himself and nearly lost his balance forward. “When you heal someone, you don’t go by halves, do you?” he asked. “I feel like a thirty-year-old.”

“A shame. I meant for you to feel twenty.”

“I didn’t want to brag. Lanik, what are you? Never mind. Never mind. The question that matters is, What is Dul, what is Percy, what is Dinte? I doubt we’ll find Dul, at any rate. Even if we chased him, he’d probably seem to be an old woman and then slip a knife into our backs as we passed.”

“We?” I asked.

“I was waiting to see if you confirmed my theory before I acted,” Barton said. “I was still—in the back of my mind, I was still more than a little worried that I was going mad and had made it all up. But now, of course, I know I’m right and so do you, and since I’m also now in excellent youthful vigor, it’s time to confront Percy and kill the little bastard.”

Kill? “You don’t seem the type,” I said.

“Perhaps not,” Barton answered. “But there’s a sort of rage a man feels when he’s been deceived where he most trusted. It compares to no other anger. He made a fool of me, and not over something small, but over my own self, over my own wife, over my own hope of a family. He became my heir, he used me as a springboard to power, and all by pretending, by illuding me into thinking he was my son. I’m very angry, Lanik Mueller.”

“He’ll also think you’re dead, once Dul gets back to him. Is it wise to disabuse him of the notion so soon?”

Barton paused at that.

“Besides, Barton, what good will killing one of them do? We already have evidence of four of them—Dinte, your son Percy, Dul, and the woman from Nkumai, Mwabao Mawa.”

“So now you’re sure of her, too?”

“I saw something once that I didn’t understand till now. Four, but surely there are others ready to step into their place. If we’re to solve the problem, we have to found out where they’re from.”

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“Doesn’t it?”

He smiled. “Yes, it does. It occurs to me that they’ve gone a long way toward taking over the entire planet. And Nkumai and Mueller both had iron, yes?”

“And now these people, whoever they are and however they do what they do, now they control the source of that iron.”

Barton shook his head and laughed bitterly. “For thousands of years all the Families have competed murderously for something to sell offworld through the Ambassadors in order to be the first to build a starship and get out of here. Now they’ll be first, no matter who wins. Now they’ll control it all. And no one but us even realizes they’re doing it.”

“It’s not your normal swindle,” I pointed out.

“You’ve taken all this so calmly.”

“I’m used to seeing strange things in this world. I’m going to Gill, Barton, but I urge you to stay here. Here, at least, you’ll be safe. And I think I have a way of recognizing them. Easily and safely. Recognizing them and getting around their illusions.”

He didn’t ask how I could do this, because I think my manner made it clear I wouldn’t answer anyway. Oh, I thought of telling him, but there was no need to have someone else, even a good man like Barton, know what I could do. Not yet. Not until I knew what I was going to do about it.

He promised to stay at the cliff house, though he wasn’t happy about it. I went down to the stable, saddled a horse—the best Barton owned—and set out for Gill. It’s a measure of my stupidity that I did not walk in quicktime. There with Barton I had stepped back into my oldest role as armiger heir of Mueller; I had spoken like a lord, and now without thinking I mounted a horse so I could travel like one. Such is the power even an ancient, long disused habit can have. I had ceased to be heir of Mueller years before, but that role was still embedded in me, ready to come forward and control my actions. It nearly killed me.

As I sat astride the horse walking briskly but not frantically down the road toward civilization and eventually toward Gill, I saw a Humper driving his flock north, toward the less-civilized and therefore more inviting part of Humping. It seemed incredible to me that just the day before I had finished Glain’s and Vran’s planting; that I had seriously thought of spending the rest of my life there among the Humpers. The memory, only a day old, was like a terrible ache, a realization that I was not, after all, ready for goodness and peace and happiness, but instead still felt a sense of mission. If there is a purpose to fulfill, I will fulfill it, I thought bitterly (and yet with some pride, for up to now all my purposes had come to nothing), and this time—this time, because in quicktime the illuders stood revealed to me, I was not just a person who could stop them, I was the
only
person outside Ku Kuei who could even find them. And apathetic as the Ku Kuei were, there was no chance I’d have any help from them when it came time to destroy the illuders.