Treason (19 page)

“They can’t live without making some sign, Father. Without living in some
place
.”

“And have we enough years in our lives to search every meter of the forest, hoping for a Ku Kuei dropping or some hair snagged on a low-hanging branch? They can do strange things with us, and yet we never see them. I call it magic. I give up and I call it magic and the magicians have no need for us and no help for us and I should go back to my people and die. At least then they’ll remember me as the king who fought until he died, and not as the Mueller who ran away into the forest and was eaten by the trees of Ku Kuei.”

“Father—”

“I want to sleep again. I only want to sleep.” He rolled on his side, turning his back to me.

I lay there looking at the stars and wondered what kind of people the Ku Kuei would be. On this world, they could be anything, I thought. As a child growing up in Mueller, I had thought nothing about us was strange. Every child learned his lessons with the threat of isolation or dismemberment if he failed his subject, since pain made no difference even to our children. Every child’s cuts healed a moment after he fell. That was, I thought, normal. But now I knew otherwise. Tree people who answer the questions of the universe, desert people whose minds reshape stone. On Treason, strangeness was normality, and those who really
were
ordinary were doomed to be forgotten or overrun.

We came to you, I said in my mind to the Ku Kuei, we came to you because there was nowhere else to turn and we hoped for mercy from those who have no need to fear justice.

No one answered my thoughts. No one had heard.

How loud must I shout before you’ll notice me, I thought. What must I do to get your attention, even for a moment, however long moments are around here?

The lake reflected the moonlight. Near us the water shimmered a bit, but the shimmering faded and beyond, the lake was still, waves frozen in midfall. And I knew how I could get them to notice us.

After all, water changes were the first that I had seen in Schwartz, when the water pooled so I could drink, then dissipated when I was done. Once again I lay still and spoke in my silent voice, called out to the earth under me.

The earth sensed my great need, perhaps, or perhaps my powers were stronger than I had thought. But the rocks responded, the earth under the lake loosened, flowed, and the lake sank quickly. When I was through only enough water was left to contain the fish, a scattered group of ponds and marshes, and the lake was gone.

“Sir,” said a voice behind me.

“How quickly you came,” I answered, not turning around.

“You’ve stolen our lake,” he said.

“Borrowed it.”

“Give it back.”

“I need your help.”

“You come from Schwartz.”

“No one comes alive out of Schwartz,” I said.

“We come alive out of every place we choose to visit,” said the voice. “But no one ever knows that we were there.” He giggled.

“I’m from Mueller,” I insisted.

“If you can make a lake fall into the earth, you come from Schwartz. What else did you learn there? In Schwartz they don’t kill. But we aren’t Schwartzes, and we’re willing to kill.”

“Then kill me, and say good-bye to a lake.”

“We owe you nothing.”

“You will, when I give your lake back.”

Silence. I turned around. There was no one there.

“Sneaky little bastards, aren’t you?” I murmured.

“What?” Father asked, waking up. “What the hell happened to the lake?”

“I was thirsty,” I answered. I didn’t like the fear in his eyes when he looked at me. “We had a visitor. He actually spoke to us.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone to fetch company to throw us out, I imagine. In the meantime, look at Dissent and Freedom.”

Father looked, and saw what I had seen: Dissent moved across the face of Freedom, and the leaves in the trees whispered in the wind.

“Well,” he said. “I should go to sleep more often.”

We waited on the edge of what had been the lake. But we didn’t wait long. Dissent was only a thumb past Freedom when four men came thundering through the underbrush and stood angrily around us. “What the hell!” shouted one man.

“Want to swim?” I asked.

“What right do you have to attack us like this? What harm have we done you?”

“Besides playing with our sense of time?”

They looked at each other in consternation.

“You fooled me on my first trip. But the second time through I caught on a little.”

“Why are you here?”

So Father and I told them, and they listened with inscrutable faces. They were all dark-skinned and tall and fat, but there was strength under the fat. They showed no expression as they listened to our tale.

When we were through, they studied our faces for a while until finally the tallest and fattest, who obviously was in charge—do they choose their leaders by the kilogram, I wondered—said, “And?”

“And we need your help.”

“So? Is there some reason we should give it?”

Father was perplexed. “We need it. We’re doomed unless you help us.”

“That much is plain. But what difference does that make to us?”

“We’re fellow human beings!” Father began, but was wise enough to know when to quit. They thought the idea was amusing, anyway.

“I have a good reason why you should help us,” I said. “If you don’t, you don’t have a lake. Mosquitoes breed pretty readily in ponds like these.”

“So I promise you everything you want, and you refill the lake,” said the leader. “All I need to do is kill you, and there goes our agreement. Plus, we keep the lake. So why not fill the lake and go away, back where you came from? We don’t bother you, you don’t bother us.”

I was angry. So I removed the soil under their feet and slid it sideways. They fell heavily. They tried to stand up again (and they were quicker than I thought their bulk would allow), but the soil kept dancing under their feet, until at last they gave up and sprawled on the ground and yelled for me to stop.

“For a moment,” I said.

“If you can do that,” the leader said, pulling himself upright and brushing off his clothes, “you hardly need our help. For all my talk, you know, we don’t have any weapons. We don’t need them. We haven’t killed anybody in years. Not that we have any moral objection to it, though, so don’t think you’re out of trouble.”

“It would be lovely,” I said, “if we could have the earth swallow up our enemies. But rocks don’t play with mass murder, so I can only do certain things. Demonstrations. Lake drainings. Pratfalls. Not practical against an enemy. But we don’t need you to fight our battles. What we need is time.”

They giggled uncontrollably. They laughed. They roared until tears rolled down their cheeks. A clown could retire in five years of working here, they were so easily amused. Finally the leader said, “Why didn’t you say so? If time’s all you want, we have plenty.” Which sent them into spasms of laughter again.

Father looked uncomfortable. “Are we the only sane people in the world?”

“Perhaps they think we’re grim.”

“We can give you time,” the leader said. “We’ve been working with time for years. We can’t go into the future or past, of course, since time is one-dimensional. (“Of course,” I thought, “everyone knows that.”) But we can change our own speed in relation to the general timeflow. And we can extend that change to our immediate surroundings. It takes one of us for every four or five people we want to change. How many do you have?”

“Less than a thousand,” Father said.

“How specific,” the leader answered, twisting up his mouth as if he were about to launch on another barrage of laughter. “You are right down to the last decimal, aren’t you? That would take less than two hundred of us, wouldn’t it? But less, of course, if you bunch up, if you share each other’s time. So maybe we can do it with as few as fifty.”

“Do what?” Father asked, suspiciously.

“I don’t know,” the leader said, grinning broadly. “Give you time, of course. How long until all your enemies are dead? Fifty years? If we work hard, that means you have to stay in a small area for, say, five days. Is that too long? It’s harder the faster we make the time pass for you, but if you need a supreme effort, we can give you a hundred years in a week.”

“A hundred years of what?”

“Time!” He was getting impatient with us. “You sit here for what seems to you a week, while outside our forest, a hundred years have passed. You go out, all your enemies are gone, nobody’s looking for you, you’re safe. Or am I wrong? Do your enemies live exceptionally long?”

Father turned to me. “They can do that?”

“After this last year,” I said, “I believe anything. They made us think the moons had stopped.”

The leader shrugged. “That was nothing. We had a child doing that. Let us get volunteers to help you, and while we’re gone, you fill the lake.”

I shook my head. “When you come back, I’ll fill the lake.”

“I gave you my word!”

“You also told me that it wouldn’t bother you to kill me after your word was given.”

He smiled again. “And maybe I still will. Who knows? Very chancy world, you have to get used to it.” Then, abruptly, he and his friends were gone. They didn’t turn and walk away, they were simply not there. Now, though, I could guess: Time was suddenly quicker for them, so they could leave faster than our eyes could register their passage.

“I’m old,” Father said. “I can’t cope with all this.”

“Me neither,” I said. “But if it means we can survive, I say let’s give it a try.”

There were only thirty of them, after all, but the leader assured us they were probably enough, and we set off with the lake restored to its pristine beauty behind us. “Maybe now we kill you,” said the leader when the lake was full, but then he laughed uproariously and gave me a huge hug. “I like you!” he shouted. All the others laughed. I didn’t get the joke.

“Quicktime,” said the leader, but to my surprise nobody hurried. Then I realized they meant that their time would pass quickly, while the outside world plodded on at the normal rate. It was early morning when we reached the place where the army was camped, but we had stopped and slept twice on the way, and in all our expedition had taken five days of our time, while to our army it would only be twenty-four hours or so. This time Father and I realized how hard we must have driven ourselves before. The Ku Kuei weren’t sluggish, and we were weary enough each time we lay down to rest; Father and I had made the same journey with only two sleep periods.

It was a fine journey, all done in less than twenty-four hours from the time we left the army, if only the army had been there when we got back.

From a kilometer away, it was clear something was wrong. We were skirting the shores of the long lake, and we could see far ahead along the meadowland. But where smoke still rose from the campfires, there were no large herds of horses. No horses at all. Nothing.

Except corpses, of course. Not too many, but enough to make the story clear. Homarnoch, who had insisted on bringing his wagon into the forest, troublesome though it was, lay dead in front of the wagon’s charred remains. Even a Mueller can’t regenerate burns over the entire body—but to make sure, they had cut his head off after his death. The other corpses were similarly taken care of.

This we took in after only a few moments at the camp. I looked for Saranna, calling her name. Yet I hoped she wasn’t there—better to imagine her alive among the deserters than dead, here. I went on calling for her, and soon the Ku Kuei joined in the search for living among the dead. It was the leader who called to me. “Lake-drinker!” he shouted. “Someone alive!”

I started toward him.

“It’s a woman!” he shouted, and I came faster.

Father was kneeling beside her. Her arms and legs had been cut off, and her larynx had been cut out. Her body was regenerating, but not all that quickly. She was not a rad. She still couldn’t talk.

The Ku Kuei leader kept demanding to know how she had healed so quickly and why she hadn’t bled to death, until Father told him to shut his fat mouth for a minute. We fed her, and she looked at me with an expression that tore at my heart, and the stumps of her arms reached out to me. I held her. The Ku Kuei, puzzled, watched.

“I guess this means you won’t be needing us,” said the leader, after a while.

“More than ever,” I said, even as Father said, “That’s right.”

“Now which of you do I believe?” he asked.

“Me,” I insisted. “We don’t need thirty men for our army. But there’s nowhere we can go now. The three of us. My father, Ensel Mueller. Saranna, my—wife. And my name is Lanik Mueller.”

“We’ve fulfilled our part of the bargain,” said the fat Ku Kuei. “So we’re rid of you. Shall we carry you to the edge of the forest?”

I had little patience. I moved the ground under him. He landed heavily on his backside and swore.

“You have the instincts of a bully,” he said angrily. “May your children all be porcupines! May your gall bladder be full of stones! May your father be found to have been sterile all his life!”

He looked so serious, so intense that I couldn’t help but laugh. And when I started laughing, the leader broke into a grin. “You’re my kind of fellow!” he shouted.