Treason (13 page)

“Sir, whoever you are,” he said, “remember that we saved your life from the sea when we brought you aboard.”

I only squinted at him and waved my arms. I could vaguely see that he stepped back. They were afraid of me. Had good reason to be. The wound in my heart had already closed up. Oh, what fun we radical regeneratives can have in a pinch.

“Sir,” he said, “whatever god you are or whatever god you serve, we entreat you—tell us what you want, and we’ll give it to you, if you’ll only go back into the sea.”

Back into the sea was out of the question. I was a good swimmer—with two arms and two legs. I had more ballast now, and a bit less coordination.

“Set me on the land,” I said, “and we’ll be even.”

If I had been thinking well, or if I could have seen better, I would have attempted to tyrannize them a little longer and get to more friendly shores. But I couldn’t see, not until I was in the prow of the longboat, with six petrified crewmen jerkily coming to life whenever the swain commanded them to row, then turning back to stone, their eyes riveted on me. That was when my sight came clear—but my back was to the shore.

We touched bottom, and I clumsily lifted myself over the prow and splashed through the water. Only when I found dry land did I look up and see where I was.

I turned as quickly as I could, to see the longboat already nearly at the slaveship. There would be no calling them back. I had just cleverly forced them to help me kill myself.

I stood naked on a beach a few hundred meters broad. Behind it rose the craggy, rough slopes of stone and sand that was called by Mueller’s sailors “Sandwash.” Behind it was the bitterest desert in the world. Better to surrender to an enemy than run aground here, where there were no paths, where boats never stopped, and where walking inland only took you deep into the unknown desert of Schwartz. Nothing lived. Not even the scrub brush of the wastes on the west shore of the Sleeve. Not even an insect. Nothing.

It was afternoon. The sun was hot. My skin, white as the clouds from my long confinement, was already burning. Without water, how long would I last?

If only I had kept my mouth shut in my cool, shaded, well-watered cell. If only I had said things to dispel the crew’s fear.

I walked because there was nothing else to do. Because old stories told of huge rivers in the center of Schwartz that sank beneath the desert before they escaped into other lands. Because I didn’t want my skeleton to be discovered right on the shore, as if I hadn’t had guts enough to try to do
something
.

There was no wind.

By nightfall I was already breathlessly thirsty, excruciatingly tired. I had not got to the top of the rise; the sea looked ridiculously close. With so many limbs, I wasn’t much of a climber. I couldn’t sleep, so I forced unready and unwilling muscles to take me farther in the darkness. The darkness was welcome, and cold came to the desert, bringing relief after the heat of the day. It was summer, or might as well have been, but the night was colder than I had thought possible in such a place, and I kept moving even after I wanted to sleep because movement kept me warmer.

When the sun rose, I was exhausted. But I had reached the top, and could look forward and see endless dunes of sand, with mountains in the distance here and there; I could look back and see, far in the distance, the bright blue ocean. There was no ship in sight. And on land, there was no shade—nowhere I could rest for the heat of the day.

So I walked, arbitrarily picking a mountain as my goal so that I would have one. It seemed to be as close as any, and as impossible to reach. I would die today, I suspected; I was fat from lack of exercise, weak from lack of hope.

By afternoon I merely concentrated on moving forward. No thought of life or death now. Just step. And step again.

That night I slept in the sand, with no insects buzzing around my head because no insects were foolish enough to try to survive where I was.

I surprised myself. I woke up, and walked on. My point of death was farther off than I thought. But surely not much farther. My shadow was still on the morning side when I reached a place where the sand gave way to stone and a rough outcropping of rock. Whether it was a shoulder of a mountain I was too incurious to care. It gave shade. And as I lay down in the shade my heart stopped beating and I gasped for breath and discovered that death was not so bad after all, if only it would come quickly, if only it wouldn’t linger, if only I didn’t have to lie there for an eternity before I was free to go.

He leaned over me, and my eyes could not focus. But he was a man, not a nightmare of Dinte or the Turd or even myself.

“Would you like to die?” he asked in a young voice, a serious voice. I considered the alternatives. If living meant another day on the desert like the ones I had already spent, the answer was yes. But then, this person, this hallucination, whoever he was, was alive. One could live on this desert.

“No,” I said.

He did nothing. Just watched me.

“Water,” I said.

He nodded. I forced myself to rise, to lean on two elbows as he took a step away from me. Was he going for help? He stopped and squatted on the rock. He was naked and carried nothing with him—not even a water bottle. That meant water was close. Why was he waiting? It should be obvious I couldn’t pay him. Or did he consider me, in my monstrous shape, not human? I had to drink, or I would die.

“Water,” I repeated. He said nothing, didn’t even nod this time. Just looked at the sand. I could feel my heart beating inside me—beating vigorously and well. It was hard to believe that just a short time ago it had stopped. Where had this boy come from? Why didn’t he get water? Did he plan to watch me die, for sport?

I looked at the sand where he was staring. It was moving.

It shifted sloppily to the left and right, then caved in in small patches, falling down, slipping into something, splashing softly, collapsing, until a circle about a meter and a half across was filled with softly swirling water, black water that blinded me with reflected sunlight.

He looked at me. I awkwardly lifted myself (every muscle aching except my strong, youthful heart) and pulled myself to the water. It was still now. Still and cool and deep and good, and I plunged my head in and drank. I came up for air only when I had to.

At last I was satisfied, and I lifted myself and then let myself drop on the sand beside the water. I was too tired to wonder why sand should come up water, or how the boy had known it would. Too tired to wonder why now the water seeped down into the sand and left a dark stain that soon evaporated in the sun. Too tired to answer clearly when the boy looked at my body and asked, “Why are you like that? So strange?”

“God knows I wish I weren’t,” I said, and then I slept again. Slept this time not expecting death but expecting, somehow, through a coincidence of having been found right beside a spring in this waterless desert, to live.

When I woke again it was night, and I had forgotten the boy entirely. I opened my eyes and saw his friends in the moonlight.

They were silent, sitting around me in a circle, a dozen sun-blackened men with sun-blonded hair, as naked as the boy had been. Their eyes were on me, unmoving. They were alive and so was I and I had no objections.

I would have spoken, would have asked them to shelter me, except that I was sidetracked. I noticed my body from the inside. Noticed that there was nothing to notice. Something was terribly wrong.

No. Something was terribly right.

There was no pulling on my left side where three legs tried to balance two. There was no odd arching of my back to compensate for all the limbs resting awkwardly under me as I slept. There was no pinch of air painfully being drawn in through an extra nose.

From the inside, all I felt were two arms, two legs, the sex I had been born with, a normal face. Not even breasts. Not even that.

I raised my left hand (only one!) and touched my chest. Rounded only with muscle. Hard with muscle. I slapped myself on the chest, and my arm was alive and strong.

What was real? What was the dream? Had I not been confined in a cell on a ship for several months? Was that, too, a hallucination? If it was, how had I come here, I wondered. I could not believe that I was, again, normal.

It was then that I remembered the boy and the water that had come from the desert. This, too, was a dream, then. Impossible things were happening as I died. Dreams of water. Dreams of a whole normal body. These were the dreams of a dying man. Time was being extended in my last remaining moments of life.

Except my heart was beating too strongly to ignore. And I felt as full of life as I had before I ever left Mueller. If this is death, give me more, I thought.

I asked them, “Did you cut them off?”

They didn’t answer for a moment. Then one asked, “Cut?”

“Cut,” I said. “To make me like this. Normal.”

“Helmut said you wanted them off.”

“They’ll only grow back.”

The man who was speaking to me looked puzzled. “I don’t think so,” he said. “We fixed that.”

Fixed that. Undoing what a hundred generations of Muellers had tried to cure and couldn’t. So this was what Schwartz had come to. The arrogance of savages.

I stopped myself in mid-contempt. Whatever they had done, it shouldn’t have worked this way. When something was cut off a radical regenerative, it grew back, no matter what. Radical regeneratives grew back every impossible limb and added more until they died of sheer mass and unwieldiness. Yet when they cut my limbs off and my breasts and all the other extras, the wounds had healed without a scar, normally.

My body was in its proper shape, and when the boy had stared at the sand, water had risen, and I had drunk of it. Their seeming arrogance—could it, after all, be mere confidence? If what I was seeing and feeling was real, these people, these Schwartzes, had something too valuable to believe.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“From the inside,” the man answered, beaming. “We only work from the inside. Do you want to continue your walk now?”

It was an absurd question. I had been dying of thirst on the desert, a helpless monster, and they had saved my life and cured my deformity. Now did they expect me to wander on through the sand, as if I had some errand that their intervention had delayed?

“No,” I said.

They sat, silently. What were they waiting for? In Mueller, a man didn’t wait a minute before inviting a stranger—particularly a helpless one—into his home for shelter, unless he thought the man was an enemy, in which case he let off an arrow at the first opportunity. But these people—waited.

Different people, different customs. “Can I stay with you?” I asked.

They nodded. But they said nothing more.

I became impatient. “Will you take me to your home, then?”

They looked at each other. They shrugged.

“What do you mean?” they asked.

I cursed in my mind. A common language all over the planet, and they couldn’t understand a simple word like
home
.

“Home,” I said. “Where you live.”

They looked around again, and the spokesman said, “We’re alive now. We don’t go to a certain place to live.”

“Where do you go to get out of the sun?”

“It’s night,” said the man, incredulous. “We’re not
in
the sun.”

This was getting nowhere. But I was surprised and gratified that I was physically up to the challenge of conversing with them. I would live—I was whole and strong and talkative again, that was plain.

“I need to go with you. I can’t live here on the desert alone.”

Several of them—the ones who seemed oldest, but who could tell?—nodded sagely. Of course, they seemed to say. There are people like that, aren’t there?

“I’m a stranger to the desert. I don’t know how the hell anyone survives here. Perhaps you can take me to the edge of the desert. To Sill, perhaps, or Wong.”

A few of them giggled. “Oh, no,” the spokesman said, “we’d rather not. But you can live with us, and stay with us, and learn from us, and be one of us.”

But no visits to the borders? Fine, for now. Fine, until I knew how to survive in this hell where they seemed to be so comfortable. In the meantime, I was delighted to live with them and learn from them—the alternative being death.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be one of you.”

“Good,” said the spokesman. “We examined you. You’ve got good brains.”

I was amused and slightly offended. I was the product of the finest education the most civilized Family in the West could provide, and these savages had examined my brain and decided it was good. “Thanks,” I murmured. “What about food?”

They shrugged again, puzzled. It was going to be a long night. I was too tired to deal with this. It would all go away when I woke up for real in the morning. Or when I finished dying. So I lay back and slept again.

I was still alive in the morning.

“I’m with you today,” said the boy who had found me. “I’m told to give you what you need.”

“Breakfast,” I said.

“What’s that?” he answered.

“Food. I’m hungry.”

He shook his head. “No. You’re not.”

I was about to take his head off for impertinence when I realized that, despite having eaten nothing for days before, I wasn’t hungry at all. So I decided not to belabor the point. The sun was already hot, and it was barely dawn. My skin, which was fair and burned easily at the beginning of every summer, was already browned and able to endure the direct sunshine. And another day had come with my body as it should be. I jumped up (had I ever felt this good upon rising?) and leaped from the rock where I had slept into the sand below, bellowing at the top of my voice. I couldn’t help myself. I ran a large circle, then awkwardly turned a somersault in the sand, landing sprawled on my back.

The boy laughed.

“Name!” I shouted. “What’s your name?”

“Helmut,” he answered.

“And my name’s Lanik!” I called back. He grinned broadly, then jumped down and ran to me. He stopped only a meter off, and I snaked out a hand to trip him. I was not used to men anticipating my attacks, but Helmut jumped in the air the exact fraction of a centimeter required to make me miss him. Then he lightly jumped over me, tapping my hip with both feet before I could react.

“Quick little grasshopper, aren’t you?” I said.

“Slow as a rock, aren’t you?” he answered, and I lunged at him. This time he let me engage, and we wrestled for fifteen minutes or so, my weight and strength making it impossible for him to pin me, his speed getting him out of my grasp when I had him in holds no one had ever been able to resist before.

“We’re a match?” he asked.

“I want you,” I said, “in my army.”

“What’s an army?”

In my world, up to then, that was akin to asking, “What’s the sun?”

“What’s wrong with you?” I demanded. “You don’t know about food, about breakfast, about armies—”

“We are not civilized,” he said. Then he flashed a broad grin and took off running. I had done that as a child, forcing governors, trainers, and teachers to chase wherever I went. Now I was the follower, and I scrambled after him, up rocky hills and skimming down the faces of sand dunes. The sun was hot and I was pouring with sweat when I finally ran around a rock he had passed only a moment before, to have him jump on my shoulders from above. “Ride, horse! Ride!” he shouted.

I reached up and pulled him off—he was lighter than his size would indicate. “Horses,” I said. “You know horses?”

He shrugged. “I know that civilized people ride horses. What’s a horse?”

“What’s a rock?” I answered, in exasperation.

“Life,” he answered.

“What kind of answer is that? Rock is dead if anything is!”

His face went dark. “They told me you’re a child, and so I, who choose to be a child, should teach you. But you’re too stupid to be a child.”

I am not used to being called stupid. But in the last few months I had had ample reason to realize that I would not always be treated like the best soldier in Mueller, and I held my tongue. Besides, he had said
choose
.

“Teach me then,” I said.

“We begin,” he said instantly, as if he could teach me only as soon as I asked, “with rock.” He ran his finger delicately along the face of the rock. “The rock lives,” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“We stand on his skin,” he said. “Underneath he seethes with hot blood, like a man. Here on his skin, he’s dry. Like a man. But he’s kind, he’ll do good to a man, if the man will only speak to him.”

Religion again. Except—and it nagged at me, though I tried to put it out of my mind—they had cured me.

“How do you—uh, speak to rock?” I asked.

“We hold him in our mind. And if he knows we’re not rock killers, he helps us.”

“Show me,” I said.

“Show you what?”

“How you talk to the rock.”

He shook his head. “I can’t show you, Lanik-e. You must do it yourself.”

I imagined myself in animated conversation with a pebble and consigned myself to the madhouse, where I had so recently been. Reality was still up for grabs to me, and I wondered if it was I who was hearing wrong, not he who was speaking foolishly. “I don’t know how.”

“I know,” he said, nodding helpfully.

“What happens when you talk to the rock?” I asked.

“He listens. He answers.”

“What does he say?”

“It can’t be said by mouths.”

I was getting nowhere. It was like a game. Nothing could be done for me unless I asked for it, and even then if I asked in the wrong way, I wouldn’t get it. Like food—only as soon as I thought of it, I realized I still wasn’t hungry.