Treason (31 page)

“‘It’s like the moons,’ I said to him. ‘See how Dissent moves so quickly and brightly? The most spectacular thing in the sky. But it’s spectacular because it’s so close to Treason, and so small. Freedom is a much larger moon, much farther away. It doesn’t make half the show. But Freedom makes the tides go,’ I said. ‘Freedom raises and lowers the sea.’”

I was filled with a strange feeling. Recognition. This deformed man thought as I did; and though it was only logical that he would, still it was a surprise to me. No one ever meets a man who thinks exactly as he does, not normally. But now it was as if I could say his words—my words—along with him.

“With Anderson gone, and the Ambassadors,” he—I—said, “we’re cut off from the Republic. We’re free. And when the universe hears from us again, we’ll be making the tides.”

Silence. Then I realized that I had said the last few words, not he. He smiled at me. We understood each other. Not everything, but the thought, the
way
we thought was clear to both of us, and, so help me, I felt affection for him. If the ability to communicate well has something to do with love, there is no one a man can love quite so well as himself.

“Lanik,” we said in unison, breaking the silence together. We laughed. “You first,” I told him.

“Lanik, please take the throne. If you know me, you know how I feel in this body. You know from what I’ve told you that I’ve done unbearable things. Set me free.”

Unbearable things. I didn’t tell him, didn’t try to explain the unbearable things I had done, didn’t try to communicate the scream that underlay every thought I had. Instead, I closed my eyes and began to do for him what the Schwartzes had done for me.

It had taken only a handful of Schwartzes to change me, to cure my radical regeneration, and so I hoped I could do it alone. I had nothing like their knowledge of the carbon chains, but I could sense them well enough to compare. Any difference between his DNA and mine I changed in him until we matched, perfectly. It meant that not only would his regeneration be cured, but also he would have the gift of never hungering and thirsting again, of being free of the need to breathe, of taking his energy directly from the sun.

But I couldn’t give to him the abilities that I had learned, and wouldn’t have if I could. He was the real Lanik Mueller, not I. He was Lanik Mueller as I should have been: ruling in Mueller, and ruling well; lonely, but living where he ought to live. Now, without the curse of radical regeneration, he would be free to achieve a measure of happiness that would always be beyond me.

It took hours. When I was through, he lay asleep on the attic floor, his body whole and correct and healthy. He was naked—there were no tailors to clothe the deformed bodies of radical regeneratives. I looked at his body as I have never been able to look at my own. The skin was young and smooth—for he was younger than I—and the muscles were good and the body well-proportioned. For a moment I saw myself as Saranna must have seen me, and for all that I have no love or longing for other men, I understood why she so often told me that my body was sweet. It had irritated me—an adolescent boy does not aspire to sweetness. But she was right.

It was the face that made me ache inside. He thought he had known pain, and he had, to a degree greater than many men. His face showed maturity beyond his years, and kindness, and compassion. But I had seen my own face in mirrors, had studied what time and my own acts had done to me, and my face was not kind or compassionate. I had seen too much. I had killed too often. There was no sweetness left in me, not to look at, and I yearned to be as innocent as he.

Impossible, I reminded myself. That choice was made years ago in the sand at the border of Schwartz. And I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn’t death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions. I had borne it, and I couldn’t hope not to have the scars show in my face and my body.

He awoke and looked at me and smiled. Then he realized what had happened to his body. He touched himself incredulously and wept and kept asking me, “This isn’t an illusion, is it? It’s real, isn’t it?”

Yes, it’s real, I told him. “And when I’ve destroyed the Ambassador, there’ll be no more need to keep rads like cattle. So do this for me. Make it a law that rads be sent to Schwartz, all of them, as soon as they’re identified. Have them go into Schwartz and when the desert people come to them, have them say they come in Lanik Mueller’s name. The Schwartzes will know what to do after that. They’ll send them home, whole. Or if they don’t come home, it’s because they freely chose to stay.”

“What about you?” Lanik asked.

“I don’t exist,” I answered. “In the forest of Nkumai it wasn’t you who became the extra Lanik Mueller, it was I. You’re the real one. Over the next few years, Lanik, change the illusion. Gradually make Dinte’s face become your own until you can end the deception. You want to anyway, I know that much. End the lie, except for the name, and live and rule with your own face.”

“And you?”

“I’ll find another place to live.”

Then I pushed back into quicktime and left him in the attic and went back to the court, where quite a few people still milled around, chattering about what had happened. It took me only a few minutes to spot the Andersons among them, the last of their Family to survive. I had left Lanik feeling sad and yet better than I had felt in a long time. But that didn’t stop me from killing the last of the Andersons.

In quicktime I carried their bodies to the Ambassador and laid them where the explosion would leave them unrecognizable. Back when I first set out to destroy the Ambassadors, I had decided that when I blew up the last one, I would die with it. But now I realized that that decision was unmade. I think it was because I knew that the real me was still a sweet-bodied boy who would make a good king, and though he wasn’t the me-that-I-am, he was the me-that-ought-to-be, and I gained a little respect for myself, and no longer wanted to die.

So I stayed in quicktime to break the seal on the Ambassador, then walked off to a safe distance before slipping back into realtime to watch. It took a few moments as the Ambassador waited metallically, unknowingly, as it made its own death. I felt wistful for that instant. All our history, all our purpose for far too many years, had been shaped to try to win our return to the Republic, to the kind of civilization that could make machines like this. They knew so much that we could not know once I destroyed this last Ambassador. I found myself slipping into quicktime, so I could rush to the fuse, stop it before the Ambassador died.

But I did not move. If our years of slavery had taught us anything, it should have taught us this: that the Ambassador was not the key to our freedom, it was the chain that bound us. Our freedom would only come when we forgot our dead ancestors and our distant enemies and discovered who and what we had actually become in these centuries on Treason.

I did not move, the Ambassador finished its self-immolation program, the explosion destroyed it from the inside, the lights of the machine went off, and I wondered for a frightening moment how I dared to make such a decision for the whole world, without consulting anyone else.

Then I laughed at myself. It was a little late to wonder if I ought to play God. The game was already over.

The dust from the explosion cleared. My work was done. I had decided to live past the end of my work after all, and it meant I had to make decisions I had thought never to make again. Where would I go? What did I want to do with the rest of my life?

As I walked through the fields east of Mueller-on-the-River, I knew where I would have to go. On an island in the middle of a lake in Ku Kuei, Saranna had said, “Come back soon. Come back while you’re still young enough to want me. For I’m going to be young forever.”

I wasn’t young anymore, not by any definition of the word. But I wanted her. Perhaps I only wanted the innocence of the children we had been, making love beside the river, oblivious to the pain that could and surely would come to them. Still, I wanted her more than I wanted anyone else in the world, not because my passion was so overwhelming, but because all the other things I wanted were either painfully accomplished or so hopeless that I had given up on them. Only she was left. She and a strange and quiet land of poor yet kindly people who tended sheep among the rocks by the Humping Sea.

I came to Ku Kuei in realtime and laughed a bit when several of the young ones, not knowing who I was, tried to play quicktime games with me. I easily coped with their timeflows and stayed in realtime despite all they did. They must have got worried then, and called on someone older and more skilled. Which is why Man-Who-Knows-It-All came to greet me.

“Lake-drinker,” he roared as he came into view, laughing and holding out his arms. “Gone forever! My worst student, the bad example I hold before all the children who come to me to learn. You stayed away so long, however long it’s been, who can keep track of time? But it’s been a long time, you old bastard, and come on, come on, come on, hurry!”

We hurried, the fat Ku Kuei leading the way briskly. I drank in the air of the forest. Forest wasn’t the kind of land I called home, but this forest was my father’s cemetery and the last place I had been when someone still loved me as a son and as a lover.

“Saranna,” I said, and Man-Who-Knows-It-All looked puzzled. “Stump,” I reminded him, and he laughed. “Oh, her. Her, what an incredible thing. A good student, for an outsider. We don’t call her Stump anymore, you know. It’s Stone now, Lady Stone, because there she stands in the slowest damn slowtime anyone’s ever done. Do you want to see her?”

Did I want to see her? I didn’t know how much until I stood there and realized that she was standing just as she had stood when I left, six subjective years and three real years before. Her hands were still reaching out to me. Her lips were still parted with her last words. The tears in her eyes had overflowed, and yet the first drops hadn’t reached her chin.

I gazed at her and the last six years fell away and it was only a moment ago that I had left her. I walked close to her, slowing my time; I slowed beyond anything I had ever experienced before, slowed until even the trees seemed a blur, and then, at last, her tears began to move, and her eyes saw me, and her expression changed to hope, and she said, “Lanik. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to be young forever. Take me with you.”

She embraced me, and I embraced her, and I kissed her cheek where it was wet. “I’ve been away for six years,” I said.

“Hush,” she said.

“I’ve done terrible things.”

“I don’t need to know it.”

“I’m not a good person,” I insisted.

She only kissed me, and whispered, “Good enough for me.” And she smiled and I smiled and gradually we slipped out of slowtime and the world ceased to be a blur and we were in Ku Kuei again. There were hundreds of people gathered around us. I recognized none of them.

“Why are you watching us?” I asked.

“Because,” one fat man said, “people told us the Stone Lovers were speeding up to realtime, and we had to come to see.”

“Stone lovers?”

“People have been born, grown old, and died, and only seen the two of you move an inch or two, or smile or seem to speak a single word. You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn’t amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Two, three hundred years, I figure,” he said. “But now I expect you’ll be just ordinary people.”

“I hope so,” I said, and Saranna smiled.

We left the forest and traveled east until at last we reached Britton, and in the easternmost part of Britton’s east peninsula, we came to Humping. In the last few centuries nothing had changed. A new lord ruled from cliff house, but he called himself by the hereditary name Barton. Glain’s and Vran’s house was now a garden and someone else’s house stood a few meters off, but the house was full of children and nothing had been changed. The people were still poor, still taciturn, still good to the heart.

Saranna and I built a sod house near the sea, where I began at once to teach her all that I had learned. After a time a shepherd came to see what we were up to. I healed his painful joints and Saranna cured his sick lamb, and then they all knew who I was. “Man-of-the-Wind,” they called me, and Saranna became the “Man-of-the-Wind’s Lady,” and soon just “Windlady,” and though the people of Humping loved us, they couldn’t have loved us as we loved them. The legend of Man-of-the-Wind was well known—how he had come from nowhere and lived with Glain and Vran, healing and doing good for everyone until someone told the lord in cliff house and Man-of-the-Wind went away and never came back again. This time, they vowed, it would be different. And in all the years we’ve lived here, the lord in cliff house has never sought us out.

The Humpers aren’t surprised that though they grow old and die, we don’t grow old. We have lived to cure the ills of children whose grandparents’ broken legs we fixed. It’s a quiet life, but a good one, and sometime soon Saranna and I plan to have children. When we have children, though, we will stop changing ourselves, and will grow old and die when our grandchildren are growing up, just like anyone else. Children don’t need their parents to live forever.

But we’re not quite ready for that now. Life is still sweet enough for us without children, though I look at Saranna and see that it won’t be too long now; and I look at myself and see that I’m nearly ready. And that will be good, too. Even death will be good, I think, not because it ends old bitterness, but because I believe it will come as the last of the many sharp tastes that have taught me I am alive.

Under everything I still hear the scream of the earth, but it no longer taints the things I see and do. Instead, it heightens my pleasures, and sunrise is brighter because of the dark place inside me, and Saranna’s smile is kinder because of the cruelty I have known, and healing the animals and children and adults that come to me is sweeter because once, against my own instincts but because of my own sense of right, I killed.

Whether Treason is a better place to live now I’m not the one to judge.

Whether we are progressing as well as we did before the Ambassadors were destroyed I don’t know. It’s not up to me to evaluate how well we’ve done with the opportunity I made.

Sometimes I marvel that I accomplished it at all. “You don’t exist,” Saranna often says after we make love, “you can’t be real.” She means it one way, but I believe it another, and for all the planning and plotting that I did before I acted, I know that I was shaped more by circumstance than by my own will. I wonder sometimes if I’m not, after all, a piece in some other player’s game, following blindly his grand designs without ever knowing that my path along the board is only a feint, while the important matters are played out elsewhere by other men.

But whether there’s some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: To see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. When a life spins out as joyfully as mine has done, then the price, once paid so painfully, is now recalled in gladness. I have received full value. Here among the shepherds, my cup is filled with the water of life; it overflows.