Treason (12 page)

Was the new me alive? Human? Intelligent? I didn’t think to ask. I only knew that I would not live with two of me.

I was naked and had no knife. But the connection between us was still only the thin folds of tissue, rich with arteries, that had kept him alive during his gestation.

It. That had kept
it
alive. If I let the creature become
him
in my mind, then it was only a short shift to thinking of him as me. As it was I could hardly bear thinking of
me
as me.

Its hair grew as mine did, the same curls and twists, wild and tangled. I tore at the hair, tried to push it away. Of course it could not go. But it could not stay, either. It was myself, exactly myself, as I had been only a few months ago, before my body had changed to make room for a woman who did not belong there, a woman they insisted was myself.

Without a weapon, the operation of severance was filthy and painful. The creature awoke as I hacked at our connection with a sharpened stone. It wept, tried feebly to stop me. But it did not speak.

We both bled as the skin broke, as I ripped us apart, as I carved my freedom from the burden of bearing myself.

At last we were separated. My body was weak from having created him, but with all the strength I had I brought the stone down on his head, again and again. Its head. It stopped crying, and the broken skull poured brains. I was sobbing from the exertion, from seeing myself die. I threw down the stone and fled into the forest.

I ate what I could find, trying to gather strength. I saw no more signs of my pursuers—they must have given up the hunt long ago. But that didn’t help me escape. If they found me again, my fate would be quick. From where I was, all directions led deeper into Nkumai territory—all but one. From the sun’s position I calculated a rough northwest and headed that way.

Travel was hard, for I wasn’t strong, but at least now I was conscious. I took the trip in easy stages, each day a little closer, following a brook to a river, the river to, eventually, the sea.

Of course, there was an Nkumai city by the rivermouth, but it was in the trees, except for a few buildings by a rough wharf. They were not sea people, I realized; they had not adapted as we of Mueller had. I remembered the huge fleet that had sailed out the Sleeve from Mueller, carrying thousands of troops that conquered Huntington in less than a month. From Nkumai no ships would sail.

But ships from other lands might come. And such a ship was my only hope of getting out of Nkumai and eventually getting word to Father about what the Nkumai sold to the Ambassador.

I waited until night, then walked under the Nkumai city to the sea. I kept to the border of the forest and walked a couple of kilometers up the coast from the wharf. I could watch for ships from there, and if I could still swim as well as I used to, I could get aboard with no trouble.

Secure in my hiding place, I slept.

I woke at midday, panting and sweating. I had dreamed that I—but it was not I, it was the child-self I had killed in the forest—I dreamed that I had come to kill me, and I had wakened as knives flashed, as both I and my mirror image stabbed deep and found each other’s hearts.

I vaguely remembered being wakened from the dream by a cry, and wondered if I had called out in my sleep. But when I crept from hiding and looked toward the sea, I saw a ship passing near shore, and the cries were coming from men who were trimming the sails.

The ship put into the port, and for the two days it stayed I tried to calculate how I could attract the attention of the sailors without calling the Nkumai from the city to find me.

I found a rotted branch and tested it in the water. It would float. Even if I was too weak to make the distance, I would have the branch to support me. The water was cold on my naked skin, but as I saw the ship pull away from the wharf and turn northeast, toward me, I splashed out into the water, and then, lying on the log as if I already needed it, paddled awkwardly out past the gathering breakers into the gentle swells of a calm sea.

Someone on the ship shouted, “Man in the sea! Man!”

I raised a hand and waved.

In a short time I was picked up from the water, and sat shivering under a blanket in a small boat heading for the ship.

“Thank you,” I said.

One of the oarsmen grinned. Not a particularly genial smile. And the rudderman said, “Fine. Take you to captain.”

“What nation are you from?”

They seemed reluctant to answer. I wondered whether they had understood.

“What Family? What Family does your ship come from?”

Grudgingly the rudderman replied, “Singer.”

The island people from the great North Bay, who had been conquering in Wing when I left Mueller. The emissary from Wankier had asked my father for troops, knowing his nation would be next, but he had gone away with our sympathy and little else. But at least these sailors were not Nkumai, and they had enough humanity to pull me from the water. I might live.

The captain looked little kinder than his crew, and after I was taken aboard, he spent little time in interviewing me. “Nation?” he asked, and because I thought it prudent not to tell the truth, I said, “Allison. I just escaped from an Nkumai prison camp.”

He nodded reflectively, then made a motion. A few sailors came and tore the blanket from me.

“My God,” said the captain, “what are those bastards doing to prisoners these days?”

I didn’t answer. Let him think what he liked, I thought defiantly. But I was afraid.

“Which is it? Man or woman? Which is real?”

“Both, now,” I said truthfully, and he shook his head.

“Impossible,” he said. “This makes things very difficult. How will I know how to price you?”

Price me? And then I remembered something else the Wankier emissary had said. That Singer had a thriving business going. In human flesh.

“Amusement,” another officer said. “Put him in a cage and charge money.”

“Good,” said the captain. “And I think the best market is Rogers. They have circuses. Drop him.”

The command had barely been given when I was picked up and carried to a hatch. They opened it and thrust me down. I landed heavily. The hatch closed above me.

There was no light. There was little air. But I was alive. It hadn’t occurred to me to resist. What mattered was that I had value to them; only the dead have no hope.

But Rogers was at the southwest corner of the continent. The trip would take months. Would it then be too late for me to get my information about Nkumai to my father? I didn’t know. And it didn’t matter. There was little enough I could do about it until I got out.

Had they noticed the extra arm growing from my shoulder? In the bright sunlight, perhaps not; staring at my breasts and genitals, they were distracted. But now the arm flexed involuntarily, tickling me on the back. It was going to be a long trip.

It was hard to amuse myself, locked alone in utter darkness, stark naked, with about two square meters of floor space. Sleep took up a large amount of my time, of course, but was hardly restful—it was impossible to straighten my body all at once. As the ship sailed north, cold seeped in; as it went south again, the cell became a sweatbox, with not just my body but also the walls dripping with my sweat. The smell of salt was always with me.

Yet it could have been worse. While I did not see the sun for nearly five months, I was fed, and I learned to appreciate the subtle flavors of wormy meat and moldy bread. The bucket was lowered to me each morning, filled with water; each evening, filled with food. When I had emptied the bucket, I refilled it, determined to keep the cell as clean as I could without being able to see. I think they rinsed it in seawater before putting my food and drink in it again. Even the crudest farmer takes care that his cattle don’t get sick.

There
were
sounds. My only contact with other people came from noises above me, below me: the cries of the men in the spars, the snapping of sailcloth in the wind; the morning and evening prayers as the crew sang and chanted hauntingly, and some men wept their confessions to the captain; the curses, the quarrels, the jokes, the fumbling attempts at seduction by men who had been so long at sea that other men began to look beautiful to them. I came to know all their names. Roos and Nose-up had a running quarrel that sounded like friendly banter to me, until one night someone had a knife and Roos died right over my hatch. The blood dripped through before they washed the deck, and I heard Nose-up plead for mercy before they hanged him by his thumbs and fired arrows into his limbs until he bled to death. Funny—he wept and begged until the first arrow. Then he seemed to realize that this was exactly as bad as the pain would get, that they could do no more to him. He began to tell jokes and throw gibes at the archers, and just before he died he told a sentimental story about his mother that had most of the men somber and some shamelessly in tears. I think that was when they finally let him die, by giving him an arrow in the heart. A strange people, at once cruel and kind, strong and weak, and so quick to change from one extreme to the other that I could not predict what they would do.

Except the captain, who was an island of strength amid the confusion. He was a father to a shipful of children, hearing their complaints patiently, mediating their quarrels, forgiving their sins, teaching them their tasks, and making all but their most trivial decisions for them. I marveled at him, for I rarely heard him angry, and then only momentarily, for effect; he never wavered, never broke. I always knew his footsteps on the deck. Step, step, step, in perfect rhythm. It was as if even the sliding deck held firm for him, and he did not have to compromise with the rolling sea. He reminded me of my father, and I longed to go home.

But there is a limit to how much sympathy a slave can have for his owners. After a while the darkness caved in on me, and I resented having to wake up, resented having to go to sleep, and above all dreamed of sunlight. I was a horseman, not a seaman. My idea of travel is with surging flesh between my legs, or my own feet slapping the ground underneath me, not bounding from side to side and up and down and back and forth with the roll, pitch, and yaw of the boat at sea.

Besides, the effects of my visit among the Nkumai were not over. The massive regenerative effort of my body that resulted in the creation of my erstwhile double did not end with the amputation. Instead, my body seemed determined to regenerate every part of me. Within a few weeks of the start of my captivity, the arm sprouting from my shoulder was long enough and developed enough that I could scratch my back with it as it dangled. Other limbs quickly sprouted, other growths began. And while there was plenty of food to sustain the growth, I had no chance for exercise; all the energy I took in only had one outlet. Growth.

The heat had been unbearable for days when I finally realized that I was losing my mind. I found myself lying in the grass by Cramer River, watching the light fishing boats skim upstream with the wind. Beside me was Saranna, her robe falling open carelessly (though I knew she was aware of just how much arousal each centimeter of exposure produced), her finger tickling me unbearably while I pretended not to feel it. I saw all this, I was doing this, while wide awake, curled in a ball on the floor of my steaming hot prison.

I was doing this while the fifth leg to grow from my hips began twitching awkwardly, beginning to come to life. That was the reality. The sweat dripping on my breasts. The darkness. The destruction of my body. The loss of freedom.

This is how the rads in the pens endure it, I realized. They live another life. They are not wallowing in dirt or grass, feeding at troughs—their bodies are sound and whole again, and they lie by riverbanks preparing to make love to a lover who, in reality, dares not now remember that they live.

But as soon as I realized that such madness was my only means of escape, I determined not to use it. I determined, instead, to keep my mind awake in this present reality, unbearable as it was.

I have a good memory. Not a phenomenal one—I can’t conjure up written pages one by one—but I began to use my time to put together all I had learned while reading history in Mwabao Mawa’s farthest room.

Mueller—genetics.

Nkumai—physics.

Bird—high society.

These stuck easily in my mind. But again and again I forced myself to go back, let the trance of madness take me somewhere useful, until I remembered others. Not all, but others.

Schwartz, lost to all human contact on the desert—she had been a geologist. Wasted on this world without hard metals.

Allison—theology. Much good it had done them.

Underwood—botany. And now in the high mountains, what flowers did his children hopelessly grow?

Hanks—psychology, the treatment of the mad. No help for me.

Anderson—the useless leader of the rebellion, whose only gift was politics.

Drew—dreams and their interpretation.

Who had found what to export? I didn’t know. But surely in my father’s library were the books that would tell what I couldn’t remember; books that would fill in the gaps and give us hints of what projects were secretly being worked on in other Families. Some, of course, would have given way to despair, having nothing that on this world could possibly be of value to the Ambassador—the engineers, for instance, Cramer and Wizer. They had been easy to conquer, farmers now, having forgotten lore that could never be put to adequate use on this world. And Ku Kuei, a philosopher whose ideas obviously had no wide audience in the Republic—he had never lived to found a family. Perhaps in his wisdom he determined that his last act of rebellion was to disappear, to die, so that his children would not be prisoners on Treason forever.

But iron had come at last to Nkumai and Mueller. Physics and genetics. They with ideas, we with products. Our products would never run out; would their ideas? It didn’t matter, not if they were getting paid so much iron for each idea that they could overwhelm us quickly.

I would never make it to Mueller in time.

Resist it though I did, I doubt I held off the madness altogether. Because I remember, as if it were real, a creature like myself who came and laughed at me in my cell. He could have been Lanik as I remembered me from mirrors in my early adolescence, except that the side of his head was bashed in and his brains kept sloughing out. Yet he carried on a pleasant conversation and only at the end did he try to kill me. I strangled him with four arms, tore him apart. I remember it clearly.

I also remember my brother, Dinte, visiting me. He cut me into little pieces, and each grew up into a little Lanik, so small at adulthood that Dinte had great fun smashing them with his boots. Perhaps I screamed then—Dinte fled when someone beat on the hatch above me.

Ruva came, too, her mouth full, but bragging to me as she chewed that she had got my father’s testicles at last, had got them and was chewing them up, and I was next. She had a hideous little boy with her, wearing a mockery of my father’s face; at the age of—what, ten?—he still drooled. His wet chin shone in the light. Yet I knew it could not be real, because there was never light in my cell except a dazzle for a moment as the bucket was lowered or raised.

And an old woman from the high hills of Mueller kept bringing me arrows until I was half-buried in them.

These mad waking dreams I remember as clearly as I remember my father teaching me to cut down a man from horseback or giving me grief and wiping the blood on his face as he told me my fate. In retrospect I have learned to distinguish which of my memories were real from those that could not have been. At the time it was not so clear.

One day I heard a new sound. It was not unusual in intensity, but I realized I was hearing new voices. The ship had not put into any port. No one had come alongside. Obviously, then, they were letting slaves out of the cells and onto the deck. This meant we were nearing port—atrophied muscles must now be awakened so the slaves would make a good showing in the markets of Rogers and Dunn and Dark.

But that first day no one let me out, and I wondered why.

By the second day I reasoned that because I was not to be sold for labor, it didn’t matter if I seemed strong. I was to be a freak. I wondered grimly what my owners would think of me now. A new nose was growing alongside and partly joined to the old. On the left side of my head, three ears protruded from my shaggy hair. My body was a hodgepodge of arms and legs that had never been taught to walk or grasp. They thought they had a curiosity before. I would be a one-man circus now.

Above me, other slaves were walking, could see, could feel the sun and the wind. And I could not.

I began shouting. My voice was unaccustomed to speaking, and my mind had lost its command of words. I made little sense, I’m sure. But gradually I increased in volume and my feeding hatch popped open.

“You want your ass kicked up your chest?” asked a voice I knew too well, though I had no idea who owned it.

“I’ll do the ass-kicking!” I yelled back. My voice didn’t have quite the effect it used to have on training fields when I maneuvered cavalry troops without the help of a caller. But it did well enough. Instead of a kick, I got another voice.

“Listen, Trash,” he said, “up to now you’ve been a model slave. Don’t start giving us shit except in your bucket, if you know what’s good for you!”

“Take me out!”

“No slaves on deck.”

“There are ten slaves on deck right now!”

“They’re farmers. You’re a sideshow.”

“I’ll kill myself.”

“Naked? In the dark?”

“I’ll lie on my back and bite my tongue off and drown on the blood!” I shouted, and for a moment I meant it, though I knew perfectly well that my tongue would heal too damn fast. I must have sounded crazy, though, because a new voice came. It was the captain.

He spoke softly, and the threat in his voice was clear. “There’s only one reason we ever let a slave on deck out of turn. It’s for punishment.”

“Punish me! Just do it in sunlight.”

“The punishment usually begins with removal of the tongue.”

I laughed. “What do you do for an encore?”

“We finish up by cutting off your balls.” He meant it. A eunuch would fetch as good a price as a breeding slave. But that’s only a mildly frightening threat to a man who already has three pairs of testicles. Maybe it was the testosterone that had given me an overlarge shot of courage.

“You can fry them and feed them to me for breakfast! Let me out!”

It wasn’t entirely courage, of course. I knew my main value to them was as a freak. No one wants to see a freak that’s been mutilated by men. Nature’s mutilations only, please. They wouldn’t harm me. In the meantime, the thought of another slave being on deck when I was stuck in a hole was the most outrageous provocation I had yet had in my life.

Still, I was surprised when they gave in and tossed ropes down to me. I took them and held on with four arms as they pulled me up.

I was more surprised at the intensity of their reaction, though I should have expected it: They had put a man with a large bosom in that cell, or a woman with a prick. They pulled out a monster.

I couldn’t see anything. The light was too dazzling, and it was hard enough finding my balance on legs that had not really stood up in months. Some of my legs had never borne weight at all. I couldn’t walk—I could only lurch from one side to the other, struggling for equilibrium.

They weren’t helping. Their screams were deafening, and I kept hearing the word
devil
and other words whose meaning I couldn’t guess, except that the sailors were terribly frightened. Of me.

I knew an opportunity when I saw one.

I roared. They answered with a uniform shriek, and I made some fumbling steps toward the loudest group of screamers. I was answered with an arrow in my arm.

I am a Mueller. The pain didn’t stop me, and as for the arm, I had several others just as good—two, in fact, that were much better, since they had injured an arm that I didn’t use much. I kept on advancing. And now the terror had turned to awe. An arrow had not made the monster pause.

The captain was shouting. Orders, I supposed. I squinted against the light to try to see. The ocean was dazzling blue. The ship and everyone on it were invisible, shadows that flashed until I had to close my eyes again.

I heard someone coming, felt the vibration of the footsteps on the deck. I turned awkwardly, met the rush. It was then that I discovered I had grown an extra heart—his wooden knife found the one I was used to, and it didn’t stop me. I only knew weaponless warfare with my two original arms, but rather than let the sailors notice that fact, I got my extras into the act. They made me fumble at it, but it only delayed me a moment, and in this case delay was rather to my benefit. I took my attacker apart and threw pieces of him to the waiting sailors. I heard vomiting. I heard praying. I heard freedom.

The captain’s voice again. But this time conciliatory. It was unnerving to hear him humbled. I felt ashamed, for a moment, of having weakened him.