Treason (14 page)

“Look, Helmut, what kinds of things will the rock
do?
”

He smiled. “What could a man need from rock?”

“Iron,” I suggested.

He looked angry. “The iron of this world is hidden far below the surface, where men can never go.”

“A path up a high cliff,” I said, hoping to soothe him by taking his mind off my first suggestion. The sheer rock face beside us was formidable—I had wondered, briefly, how Helmut scaled it.

Now he was staring intently at the rock, as he had stared at the sand when I first met him. And as I watched him, I heard a faint rustling sound. I looked around, and sand was pouring from a small pocket on the face of the cliff—in a spot where no pocket had been. The sand stopped. I reached over and brushed it out, put my toes in it, and raised myself. I reached up, could find no handhold above me.

“Hold still,” said the boy, and suddenly sand fell away under my fingers, making a handhold. It was as if a hundred small spiders had suddenly erupted from the rock, and I pulled my hand away, brushed off the sand.

Helmut clicked his tongue. “No. You
must
climb. Don’t reject the gift.” He was serious. So I climbed, new handholds and footholds appearing where I needed them, until I was at the top.

I sat, breathless; not from the climb, but from what could only be magic. Helmut stood far below, looking up at me. I was not ready to come down. My hands were trembling. “Come up!” I called.

He did not use my handholds. Instead, he went to a face where the cliff was smooth and unbroken, and crawled quickly up it. His toes had little contact with the rock—just his knees and hands. I leaned over the edge watching him, and felt a terrible vertigo, as if gravity had switched directions and he was on level ground, while I clung, incredibly, to a cliff.

“What
is
this place?” I said, or rather whispered, when he reached the top and sat beside me. “What kind of people are you?”

“We’re savages,” he said, “and this is the desert.”

“No!” I shouted. “No evasions! You know what I’m asking! You do things that human beings simply can’t do!”

“We don’t kill,” he said.

“That doesn’t explain anything.”

“We don’t kill animals,” he said. “We don’t kill plants. We don’t kill rock. We don’t kill water. We leave all beings alive, and they also leave us alive. We’re savages.”

“How can you kill a rock?”

“By cutting him,” he said. He seemed to shudder.

“Rock is pretty tough,” I answered, feeling superior again. “It doesn’t feel pain, or so I’ve heard.”

“Rock is alive,” he said, “from the skin to his deepest heart. Here on the surface, he holds us up. Some of his skin he sheds and peels as we do, in sand and gravel and boulders. But it’s still part of him. When men cut the rock, it no longer falls where it should; they take the rock and make false mountains of it, and that rock is dead. It’s no longer part of him. It’s all lost to him until, over the centuries, he can break it back into sand. He could kill you all, by sneezing,” said Helmut angrily, “but he doesn’t. Because he respects even evil life. Even
civilized
life.”

Helmut did not sound like a child.

“But he
will
kill,” said Helmut, “if the need is great and the time is right. When the civilized men of Sill decided they must own more of this desert, they came with armies to kill us. Many women lived there, the peaceful sleepers, and the men of Sill killed them. So we held a council, Lanik, and we spoke to the rock, and he agreed with us that this was a time for justice.”

He stopped. “And?” I prodded.

“And he swallowed them.”

I imagined the horsemen of Sill out in the desert sand, suddenly finding the grains heaving and sifting under them, their horses sinking, their footing impossible, the sand closing over their heads as they screamed and choked and swallowed sand and were swallowed by sand until their bones were rubbed clean.

“Sill has never sent an army into the desert again,” said Helmut. “That was when we knew we were savages. Civilized men don’t value rocks above men. But then, savages don’t kill sleeping women. Do they?”

“Is this true?” I asked.

“Did you climb this cliff?”

I lay back and stared into the blue sky, where not a cloud passed. “How? Why do
you
know how to communicate with the rock—” I couldn’t finish. It sounded stupid.

“You’re ashamed,” he said.

“Damn right,” I answered.

“You’re a child. But the rock is easiest to speak to. It’s simple. It’s large. So large that you can grasp it easily. Our children learned this first.”

“Learned?”

“When we had children. Now that no one dies, why should we add to our numbers? We have no need. And some of us have chosen to be children forever, so that the older ones can be amused, and because we would rather play than think deep thoughts.”

If someone had told me this while I was safely enwombed in the castle at Mueller, I would have laughed. I would have sneered. I would have hired the man who told me as a clown. But I had climbed the cliff. I had drunk the water. My body had been healed.

“Teach me, Helmut,” I said. “I want to speak to the rock.”

“Carbon is subtle,” he said. “It holds to everything, and builds strange chains. It’s softer than the rock, but it can make small lives, where rock can only live in a huge ball that spins around the sun. It’s hard to speak to the carbon. It takes many voices to be heard by stone so subtle.”

“But you spoke to me?”

“We found the place that had gone wrong. It was on your longest chains, and we taught them how to lie differently, so that they only heal what has been lost, and not what is still whole. We thought at first that you were like us, that you could speak to the carbon, because your chains were different. We didn’t have this healing in our bodies—we had to heal every scratch, one at a time. We liked what you had done, and so we changed each other, too, and now we all heal like you do.”

So much for the secret of Mueller, I thought. “Why hadn’t you done it before?”

“We don’t do very much to the carbon chains. They’re subtle. They can cause problems. There are only a few changes we make. But to pay you for the healing change you taught to us, we gave you the life change.”

It was near dark, and we still perched on the pillar of” rock; the cliff was our only exit to the sand below. “What’s the life change?” I asked.

“Civilized men kill because they have to, to live. To get energy, they have to murder plants or animals. With killing so common, they have no respect for life at all.”

“And what do you do?”

“We’re savages. We take our energy from the same source as the plants.” And he pointed to where the sky was still light from the sun, which had dipped below the mountains to the west.

“From the sun,” I said.

“That’s why you aren’t hungry,” he said.

He talked on into the darkness, and I understood what Schwartz had achieved. A geologist, in a geologist’s paradise, and her children after her, with a profound respect for rock, an ever deeper understanding of rock until they awakened, not the earth itself, but that part of their minds which could grasp the structures and change them. The language was mystical, but not a mystery. They understood even DNA as the experts of Mueller couldn’t grasp it.

Yet the price of their knowledge was savagery. They could use no tools, make no homes, write no language. If they all died and archaeologists came to this desert, they would find nothing but corpses, and marvel that animals with human shape could be so utterly unintelligent.

“How can I learn to speak to the rock?” I asked.

Helmut’s voice came from the darkness. “You must leap from this cliff in the darkness.”

He was serious. But that was impossible. “I’ll be killed.”

“That’s been known to happen,” Helmut said. Was he amused? I couldn’t see his face. “But you must do it soon. Dissent rises in a few minutes.”

“Why will killing myself help me talk to the rock?” I tried to make a joke of it. Helmut was too serious.

“You’ve done killing, Lanik,” he said. “You must hold yourself for judgment to see if you were innocent of malice. If the sand receives you gently, the rock will make himself known to you.”

“But—” I said. I stopped because I couldn’t say that I was afraid. Why should I be afraid, when I wasn’t sure, even now, if I fully believed all this?

No. I knew that I was afraid because I
did
believe, and I was unsure whether I was innocent of malice. I had relished the prospect of warfare, and while I had never killed a man in battle back in Mueller, I had killed one man on the Singer ship, two soldiers of Mueller before I entered Ku Kuei, two soldiers of Allison as I left; I had surely killed others in escaping from Nkumai. Those killings had been forced on me, to defend myself, but hadn’t I relished the feeling of triumph and power afterward? Was that somehow different from loving to kill? Beyond that, I had approved of my father’s strategies of war and longed to be the Mueller and better his achievements. Wasn’t that longing for domination still in my heart? I was a truly civilized man. I couldn’t believe there was any chance that the sand would, as Helmut put it,
accept
me.

“I should tell you,” said Helmut, “that there is no other way down from this tower of rock.”

“What about the handholds?”

“They’re already gone. You’ll jump, or you’ll stay here forever. And you have to jump now, in the darkness, before Dissent rises, or your jump will surely be your death.”

“You don’t leave much to chance, do you, little boy?” I was angry—I had been trapped.

“I’m a boy in spirit, Lanik, but I was old when your father’s grandfather first learned not to piss in the family drinking water. And I tell you that I believe that if you jump, the sand might well receive you. But you have to have enough trust in yourself to leap. If you know that you’re a murderer, you might as well stay here. You won’t die if you stay here, you know. You won’t starve to death. You’ll just be alone here, forever.”

I stood. I knew that the edge of the tower was only a few meters away in any direction. But I couldn’t take the step.

“Lanik,” Helmut whispered, and his voice was young and innocent again. “Lanik, I believe the sand will hold you.” A cool, gentle hand grasped the inside of my thigh as I stood, trembling, because of what I had to do. “I want the sand to hold you.”

“So do I,” I said.

“Then jump while it’s still dark.”

He took his hand away and I walked briskly toward the edge and suddenly my step was in the air and I was no longer in Schwartz, I was in Nkumai and I had stepped wrong in the darkness and now I was falling endlessly through the silent trees, and everything else was a dream, all these months were a dream and I had fallen in Nkumai and was going to die and I refused to scream but let the wind rush by me and twist me in the air as my stomach rose to my throat and my bladder would not be constrained and death was a thousand knives of soil below me that would carve and break me when I touched them and then I landed in the soft embrace of the sand, which gently parted and sifted and swirled around me, splashed around me warmly, and closed over my head. There in the embrace of the sand I felt the throbbing heart of the earth, felt the rhythm of the currents of boiling rock beneath me, and heard in the most hidden place in my ears a strange song of eons of itching torment, trying to find a comfortable way to settle down and sleep, while continents danced back and forth on my skin and oceans froze and fell. And while I heard the song of this largest dance, still I could hear the small melodies of shifting sand and falling stones and settling soil. I heard the agony of rock being cut and torn in a thousand places on the surface of my skin, and I wept at the thousand deaths of stone and soil, of plants that thinly held to life between the stone and the sky.

Armies thundered on my skin, death in every heart, with dead trees carved to make tools to build more death. Only the voices of men are louder than the voices of trees, and though a million stalks of wheat whisper terribly together as they die, the death scream of a man’s mind is the strongest cry the earth can hear. I felt blood soak into my skin, and I no longer wept; I longed to die, to be free of the incessant crying.

I screamed.

The sand sifted by my ears and swept between my legs, and as it pressed against my face I separated myself from the self whose ears had heard for me, and I asked (without words, for there is no mouth that can shape that language) for the sand to lift me to the surface.

I rose through the warm sand and it broke above me. I spread my arms and legs upon the surface of the sand, and it bore me. I had fallen, it seemed, from the pinnacle of rock to the heart of the earth, and now I coasted on the surface, floated on the still wave of sand.

I smiled, and Helmut stood over me, smiling also.

“Did he sing to you?”

I nodded.

“And he found you clean.”

“Or cleaned me,” I said, and then shuddered to remember the screams of the dying. I looked at the tower of rock I had fallen from. It was no more than two meters high. My eyes widened, and Helmut laughed.

“We raised it up to make your testing place,” he said. “If you hadn’t jumped yourself, we would have crumbled it and made you fall.”

“Nice folks,” I said, but I was too full to be bitter, and it didn’t surprise me when Helmut knelt and touched my chest and then embraced me. He wept on my skin, the water standing in drops that soon evaporated. “I love you,” he whispered, “and I’m glad that you were received.”

“So am I,” I said, and we slept, his cool skin pressed against mine as the sand had pressed, not to arouse or satisfy, but to express; and as we slept we dreamed together, and I learned Helmut’s true voice, and I loved him.

I could have stayed in Schwartz forever. I wanted to. They wanted me to. I learned quickly, and while they had repaired the most obvious signs of my radical regeneration, my body was still determined to be unusual. There is a part of the brain that holds the function that lets the Schwartzes speak to stone; as I learned to use it, my body developed it, let it grow. My skull bulged a little upward of and behind my ears to make room, and the spokesman finally told me, “You are beyond us now.”