Treason (30 page)

The Schwartzes lay around me. After a long time I realized they were weeping. Then, strangely, I remembered Mwabao Mawa singing morningsong from a perch high in Nkumai. The melody played endlessly through my head. For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longed to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done.

We lay there, all of us, exhausted beyond movement.

Hours later—or was it a day later, or days?—the vast cloud of vapor from the sea that had poured into the sky above the sinking of Anderson came over Schwartz, and for the first time in millennia it rained there, and water touched the iron-rich mountains and water bled into the sand and cooled it and water mingled with the tears on the faces of the people of Schwartz and erased and washed away their weeping and Helmut arose and walked to me in the rainstorm and said, “Lanik, you lived.”

“Yes,” I said, because he was really saying, “Lanik, I love you and you still live,” and I was really saying, “Helmut, I love you and I still live.”

“We’ve done what we’ve done,” Helmut said, “and we won’t regret it because it was necessary if not good. But even so, we ask you to leave. We won’t thrust you out because without you worse things would have happened, but please, Lanik, leave us now and never come back.”

“You’ll still hear of me. I have more work to do. I’ll cause you more pain.”

“Do your work,” he said. “I hope that someday the blood will wash from your hands.”

“Guard your iron. Keep it safe. Don’t let it rust.”

He smiled (a grisly thing at the moment, and yet more surprising, and refreshing than the rain) and he embraced me and he said, “I thought you had betrayed me when you left before. I didn’t understand, Lanik. I thought that when I trusted you, that meant you would always act the way I wanted you to. I think perhaps I’ll be young again after all, and let someone else be spokesman. I’ve had enough responsibility for a lifetime.”

“And I for ten,” I answered. He kissed me and embraced me and then sent me away. I walked eastward toward Huss. Somewhere along the way I found my clothes, neatly folded and placed in my path, and on top of them my knife. It was the Schwartzes’ benediction, absolution in advance for the murders I had yet to commit.

I put on the clothes and held the iron knife in my hand and shoved myself again into quicktime, and for the next three years of my own time I spoke to no man and heard no man’s voice, and spent my days walking between murders, listening to the cry of the dying and dead and hearing the earth’s scream and knowing that someday I would have found them all, they would all be dead, and I would never have to kill again.

Percy Barton I killed willingly, for that old woman had deceived and murdered my friend. But her death scream harrows up my soul as loudly as that of Mwabao Mawa, even though she (no,
he
, a bald white man ruling a nation of proud, unknowing blacks) had sung the beautiful morningsong. There was no distinction. The hated and the loved died the same, and in the end my knife went no more easily into Percy Barton’s throat than into Mwabao Mawa’s.

Destroying the Ambassadors was easier, for the earth made no protest at their death. They were machines, already lifeless. All I had to do was break the seal where it said, “Warning, tampering will result in the destruction of this machine and the death of anyone within 500 meters of it,” and then walk away in quicktime faster than the explosion could follow.

I killed along a path radiating outward from the ruins of the lands bordering Anderson, visiting every capital of every Family to make sure I found all the Andersons and killed every one, and to make sure that no Ambassador survived. Because I was in my fastest timeflow, all this took a week of realtime. I was ahead of every messenger. So far as the people of the world knew, a sudden scourge removed the rulers from their world, and the Ambassadors as well.

I wondered what the people thought when they found an old woman’s corpse sitting on Percy Barton’s throne. Would they make a connection? Or always wonder who it was they found, and never know why or where their king had disappeared?

There was no point in keeping a calendar during my long journey of assassination. By the end of it, a week after it began, I was, as closely as I can guess, about twenty-four years old. When my father was twenty-four I was already alive, and he had played with me in the morning and gone out and led his men into battle in the afternoon. I had no child, but neither could my murders weigh as lightly on my soul as my father’s did. He knew no better, and thought the killing would make him a good king. I hadn’t even the faint right of kings, and I knew exactly how much murder cost. I was twenty-four in years, but at heart I was unbearably old, and my body was weighted down and weary.

There was one place, however, where I had not yet gone, and when all the other Andersons and all the other Ambassadors were dead, there was one yet to kill: the one who had been my brother Dinte; the one who had destroyed my father; the one who had robbed me of my inheritance; the one that I had hated and rivaled and resented in all our years together; the one who, inexplicably, was still my brother regardless of how much I knew he was really not.

Could Lord Barton actually have killed the man he once believed was his son? Could I really kill Dinte?

That I would find out when the time arrived. And so I came at last to Mueller-on-the-River, and for the first time in years I entered a city, not hidden by quicktime, but openly. I was Lanik Mueller, and this place had been my home, and whether I was welcome here or not, I would come in proudly and declare, at last, when all the Andersons were dead, the work that I was doing and the work that I had done. The world thought of Lanik Mueller as a monster back when I still wasn’t one; now that I was, I wanted them to know it. Even those regarded as evil want their deeds to be known.

I walked into the court where Dinte sat upon the throne and strode firmly to the middle of the room. While many there did not recognize me, for even those who had known me had last seen me as a fifteen-year-old boy, enough did recognize me that the whisper “Lanik Mueller” ran through the room. Every eye was upon me and, for a moment, everyone feared to act.

My brother Dinte arose from the throne and held his arms stiffly out, and in an unnaturally loud voice he said, “Well, brother. Have you come at last to take your throne?” He stepped aside to let me sit where by right I should sit. He commanded the people there to kneel as I mounted the dais. They knelt. Dinte waited for me, smiling, welcoming.

In all the possible versions of this scene that I had imagined, this one had never occurred to me. Yet for one long moment it seemed exactly right. The usurping brother, confronted by the wanderer who has at last come home, willingly steps aside in order that the more lawful heir may take his rightful place.

I had planned to come in, name Dinte as a traitor and a murderer, and in front of everyone in the court stab him to death. Nothing secret: This was not to be Lake-drinker, Man-in-the-Wind, or the Naked Man performing justice on an Anderson illuder. This was to be Lanik Mueller performing justice on his brother Dinte, the usurper who drove his father into the forest of Ku Kuei where he died.

Now Dinte had robbed me of that. Having so willingly (though I knew it was a lie) stepped aside for me, if I killed him now, openly, it would only add to the legend of Lanik Mueller as Andrew Apwiter come to life to re-create chaos and end the world. So, reluctantly, before the Anderson who hid behind Dinte’s face could kill me unaware, I pushed into quicktime and stepped forward, which meant that to all intents and purposes I disappeared.

But Dinte did not turn into the Anderson I expected, the crusty, middle-aged man or woman I had supposed waited for me in quicktime. Instead he turned into a creature with four arms and five legs; two sets of male genitals contrasted absurdly with the three breasts that dangled in middle-aged sags. If I had seen such a being in the pens, I would not have been surprised. But I had been expecting an Anderson, and this was either an incredible monster or a radical regenerative from Mueller. And who from Mueller could ever have become an illuder?

Then I looked into the creature’s face, frozen, staring at the spot where a moment ago I had been standing. And I recognized the monster, and everything changed.

The face was mine. Lanik Mueller’s head topped the bizarre assortment of limbs and protuberances. Despite the ears and eyes and noses growing out of place, I recognized myself. It was I who stood beside the throne; not the Lanik Mueller who was cured in Schwartz, but Lanik Mueller the radical regenerative, the monster, the child.

It was my double, who was born in the forest of Ku Kuei.

Impossible! my mind cried out. This creature didn’t exist until after Dinte had lived with us for years. This creature could not possibly have been Dinte.

At first I tried to tell myself that he was obviously a secondary illusion; that this Anderson had found a way to fool me in quicktime, too. But that was nonsense—if an Anderson could have fooled me, another would have done it long before.

So I walked in quicktime to the throne, sat down, and slipped back into realtime.

The effect was one I had rarely been able to show off before: suddenly I disappeared in one place and appeared in another. The murmur of the crowd was frantic. But Dinte (now with the normal number of arms and legs, as I had always known the little bastard) did not seem surprised.

“Dinte,” I said. “All these people are startled to see me sitting here, but you and I know that Lanik Mueller has been sitting on this throne for years.”

He looked at me a moment, then nodded slightly.

“And so, Dinte, I will meet you, privately, in the room where I kept my snail collection when I was five.” I pushed back into quicktime and left the throne room.

I had kept my snail collection in a long-unused attic in one of the older parts of the palace, a place never locked but, because it was accessible only by ladder and winding corridors, rarely visited. I headed there in quicktime, then slowed down nearly to the flow of realtime, and waited. I kept just enough edge of speed that if Lanik/Dinte had ideas of treachery, I could react faster than he could attack.

If he was a fraud, if he was not truly me, he would not know what room I meant.

I waited for fifteen minutes. Then he came along the dusty attic walkway and sat before me on the floor. It was hard for him to walk, with his awkward arms and legs, and sitting was ludicrous, but I didn’t laugh. I remembered my struggle up a not-too-difficult slope in Schwartz after I was set off the Singer slave ship. It had taken him three years in realtime to reach the condition I was in after my months of confinement on the ship. But I remembered; I had been inside that body. I knew exactly who he was and how he felt.

In realtime now, I spoke softly. “Hello, Lanik.”

“Hello, Lanik,” he answered, his smile ghastly on a twisted face.

“Last time we met, I tried to kill you,” I said.

“Many times since then I’ve wished you had succeeded.”

We sat in silence for a few moments. What do you talk about when you meet yourself after so many years?

“How did you come here?” I asked, though I already had guessed much of the story. “How did you learn to be an illuder?”

He told me. How he had lain half-dead as his already weak body tried to regenerate the skull and skin and keep the brain tissue from degenerating. How he had been found by the huge search party the Nkumai had sent after me. “If they hadn’t found me,” he said, “they would certainly have kept searching until they found you. When they finally realized what had happened and tried to follow you again, they traced you right to the seacoast. You were easy enough to find; if they had followed you at once, you wouldn’t have escaped.” He smiled. “I saved your life.”

Then he told me of days and weeks with Mwabao Mawa in her treetop house. My body, in constructing him, had given him my memories; or perhaps in my delirium as we traveled together in the forest I had poured out into him all that mattered, all that made me who I was. It took Mwabao some time before she realized that he was only a duplicate of me. “By then she had learned enough that she was certain I was from Mueller—I had spoken Dinte’s and Father’s names in my madness, and her fellow Andersons were already here, as you seem to know.”

She immediately seized the opportunity my double represented and fanned his hatred of me, his feelings of worthlessness because he would always be the monster, the horrible one, the creature that had no right to exist. It didn’t take him long to consent to lead the Nkumai armies and their allies into battle against Mueller.

He exacted a price, however, that Mwabao was only too willing to pay. He asked for training in the Anderson deception, and Mwabao Mawa taught it to him. While I was in Schwartz learning to control the earth, he was learning to control men’s minds.

“People’s beliefs don’t exist in isolation,” he explained. “Everyone’s firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else. Not opinions, of course
—beliefs
. We—they—could make anybody think the sun was blue and had always been blue. But, of course, the farther you got from the place where other people believed intensely in the deception, the less you would be influenced. However, by then the work would have been done. Once someone honestly believes something to be a fact, he’ll never doubt it without pretty convincing evidence.” Which is why Lord Barton was able to learn the truth separated from Britton by a thousand kilometers, but had to struggle to remember it when he returned to his home, where others were also in thrall to the lie.

He had not consented, he told me, to the wasting of the land by the Nkumai army on its passage through the Rebel River plain. I could never have done that—and so neither could he.

“And then you reappeared,” he said, “and we didn’t know what to do. Until, of course, you and Father escaped to Ku Kuei. Then it was clear that I had to disappear so that the monster they had made of me would color other men’s perception of you, ruining your effectiveness. At the time, Lanik, I was glad of it. You can’t know how much I hated you. You had hated me, not for who I was, but because I
was
at all.”

At first they didn’t know what to do with him now that Lanik Mueller was officially an exile in Ku Kuei. “Until word reached us that Dinte had disappeared. Mwabao Mawa panicked. How could anyone have known about Dinte and killed him—and yet not publicly raised the cry about who he was? Whoever killed him would surely have seen him change before their eyes from the young heir to a much older man.”

Then I realized what should have been obvious to me long before.

“I killed Dinte,” I told my double. “I slit his throat as I left the palace. I assumed he would regenerate.”

He smiled at me. “So you got your wish, didn’t you? You killed Dinte, and in the process you saved my life. Because I was the only one who knew Dinte well enough to impersonate him without making waves. The Andersons aren’t omnipotent. They can’t fool the whole world all at once. So Mwabao Mawa sent me home to Mueller. I appeared to them as Dinte. I claimed that you had captured me and left me for dead after torturing me, but I had regenerated and come home. Who could doubt me? I’ve played the role ever since.”

His voice grew soft (as mine always grew soft when I was afraid I would show fear or pity or grief) and he said, “You know
—you
know how much I hated Dinte. And yet I had to
be
him, and talk to his covey of traitors who had plotted your death and Father’s death and—God, Lanik, how I survived that time I’ll never know. But always I kept telling myself, ‘I am Lanik Mueller, not his monster child,’ and I endured the sycophants and the traitors and the petty criminals and Ruva and all the rest. Because it was common knowledge that you had gone with Father deep into Ku Kuei and would never come back. Father was dead, you see, and I loved him, just like you. The more people here in Mueller abused his memory and yours, the more I felt free to identify with you, to become you in my heart. I stopped hating you long ago. I just longed for you to come back and set me free.

“Lanik,” he said, “I go from time to time, I go into the pens and have these limbs cut off. They always grow back, and more besides. I’m almost due now. The doctor never knows I’m me, never remembers that he performs these operations until it’s time for the next one. No one ever sees my monster shape, but
I
see.”

He looked at me, at my body. “You,” he said. “You’re whole. You’re right and normal. You haven’t lived this sick deception for these long months, these years. Let’s go back out to the throne room. I’ll appear in my true form and tell them all the truth, tell them that you’re not the monster you were believed to be. You can take your true place, and I’ll be free.”

“What will you do then?”

“I’ll plead with you to kill me. I’ve lived for years now as a radical regenerative. It doesn’t qualify as life. If you won’t kill me, I’ll drown myself.”

I shook my head. “I came here to kill you.”

“Did you know who I was, then?”

“No. I came to kill the Anderson who controlled Mueller, the one pretending to be Dinte.”

He was shocked. “You knew before you came? Then the Andersons’ secret is out?”

“The Andersons,” I told him, “are dead. A rainstorm reached you”—I groped for the real time—“a few days ago. A drenching rainstorm. And the sky is still overcast.” He nodded. “That rain was caused a week ago when Anderson sank into the sea.”

He was surprised. “Just like that? Sank into the sea?”

I heard the scream still ringing inside me. “Not just like that. But they’ve disappeared from the earth. Not just the ones on the island. All the others, too, in every Family. You’re the last one alive who knows the Andersons’ technique. You and any who worked with you here.”

“How did you do it?”

“Never mind how. What matters is why.” And I explained to him.

“So the Ambassadors are gone, too,” he said. “No more iron. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

I laughed. “I have a good idea.”

“We—the Andersons knew every secret in the world, Lanik! Do you realize what was being achieved on this world? Incredible things. Things to make you proud to be on this godforsaken prison planet! And you’ve stopped it. Without the Ambassadors, do you think that level of invention will continue?”

I shrugged. “It might. The Andersons didn’t know all the secrets in the world.”

“Stupid! Shortsighted and stupid and—”

“Listen, Lanik!” I shouted back, and the act of using my own name in reference to another person surprised me. “Yes, Lanik. You are me, aren’t you? Me as I should have been. Me, captured by the Nkumai and induced to learn Mwabao Mawa’s tricks—and I would have learned them, just as you did. I would have let myself become their tool, to a point; and there you sit, as I would have sat, a monster in a body trapped inside an even more monstrous illusion. No, Lanik, you’re not the one to judge me as shortsighted or stupid. And I’m not the one to judge you. You called this a godforsaken planet, but you’re wrong. Thousands of years ago the Republic decided to be God. They decided to put the finest minds in the universe on a hopeless, ironless planet, to punish them and their children forever and ever, as if we were born with the guilt of their crime upon us. They cruelly held out in front of our ancestors a reward: The first Family to build a starship and come out into space would receive unheard-of riches and power and prestige. For three thousand years we believed that, and spent our souls working to do what—to give to the bastards who keep us here the best we could develop. Our own flesh! The finest products of our minds! And what have we had in return? A few tons of a metal that’s cheap everywhere but here.”

“So we can build a starship,” said my double.

“We’ll never build a starship with Republic iron, never. And if we did, do you think they’d let us all come out and take part in human life? Don’t you realize the miracle this planet is? If they realized what’s
really
going on—if they could spend a few days in Ku Kuei, or a week in Schwartz—if they understood what our potential really is, Lanik, they’d be here immediately, they’d bomb this planet out of existence, wipe us out of the universe. That’s the only hope and promise we have from them.

“And what would we do if we joined them? Persuade them to be nice? If they were going to be kind, they wouldn’t be keeping the hundredth great grandchildren of traitors imprisoned on a hopeless planet like this.”

“I know that,” he said. “I’ve often thought about the hopelessness of it, too, Lanik. Dissent accomplishes nothing. It’s something I told a young man who had been arrested for protesting against a law. I took him out by the river at night, without his guards, and I pointed out some facts to him. That if he kept his mouth shut, the law would leave him alone and he’d be free. ‘I don’t want to be free,’ he said, ‘while that law exists. I will dissent until you take it away.’ ‘No,’ I told him, ‘you’ll dissent until you die in prison, and what will you have accomplished?