Treason (29 page)

“We fear death, too,” Helmut said.

“No, Helmut, you resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else.”

“And because of that you want us to kill people? You want us to do the same thing?”

“No, I don’t. I want you to help me stop everyone on this planet from having the power to be irresistible. I want to destroy the Ambassadors so that no Family will ever be able to raise iron weapons against wooden ones. And I want to destroy the Andersons because they, like iron, kill wantonly and cannot be withstood.”

“How would we be different from them, killing those whose actions we don’t like?”

“I don’t know! Maybe there’s a measuring rod somewhere in the universe where men’s acts are judged, and those who kill other men for the sake of power will be judged more harshly than those who kill those power-hungry men for the sake of freedom. But if there’s no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don’t think there is any good or evil in the universe, and if that’s true then it all means nothing and it wouldn’t make any difference then whether you kill or not but that can’t be true, it can’t be that way, it
does
make a difference, there comes a time when you have to take lives in order to—listen to me—in order to—”

But there was no way to convince them. I saw that now. They watched me impassively, and I despaired. “All right. I can’t compel you. Nobody can force you to do anything.” Bitterly I hurled insults at them. “You hold freedom like a prize, and it’s in your power to help others be free, but you’re too selfish to reach out and give them freedom, too. Keep your freedom, keep your immortality, but somewhere along the line I hope you figure out what you’re living forever
for
. What noble purpose you mean to achieve. Because you’re no good to anyone here, not even to yourselves.”

I turned and walked away, back the way I had come, toward Huss and civilization and hopelessness. I walked for hours, and then I realized that someone was close behind me. It was Helmut, and he looked different. It took me a moment to realize why, but it was because his hair was no longer white with age.

“Lanik,” he said, and his voice was younger. “Lanik, I must talk to you.”

“What for?” I asked, not daring to believe that my words might have had an effect on him after all.

“Because you love me. Hearing you talk like that, I realized that I love you, too. Despite everything.”

So I stopped and sat in the sand, and so did he.

“Lanik, you have to understand something. We aren’t deaf to other men. We heard you. We understood. And we
want
to achieve the goal you set out. We
want
to destroy the Ambassadors. We hate the Andersons and their murders and their deceptions as much as you—nothing is worse to us than those who murder, not for anger or hurt or revenge or because they believe it is their duty, but for profit. Do you see that? We hate what you hate. And we long for it to be destroyed.

“But Lanik, we
can’t do it
. Did you think our hatred of killing was just an opinion, just an emotion, just a wish that no more suffering take place? We
cannot
kill. It’s that simple. We suffer from the song of death among the rocks even now. But you heard the scream of the earth when you made the earth kill that man in Anderson. You
heard
it. What was it like?”

I answered honestly. “It was the worst thing in the world.”

“Well, Lanik, you have more ability with the earth than any one of us. We told you that years ago, before you left. And so you heard that scream more clearly than any of us could ever hear it.

“But if we were to destroy Anderson, we’d have to swallow up the island in the sea and the earth, take it completely from the surface, and you know as well as I do that there isn’t one of us, alone, that could do that.”

I nodded. “I hoped the council—”

“That’s the problem, Lanik. The council is a collection of individuals. Weak ones, like me. Together, we can twist and turn the earth in ways you couldn’t imagine. We could sink Anderson into the sea in moments. We could build a mountain range from one end of the world to the other in an hour. We could, if it were ever necessary, take this entire planet and twist it in its orbit until it was cooler or warmer, farther from or closer to the sun.

“But if we should kill everyone on Anderson by sinking the island under the sea, the scream you heard from one man would be magnified hundreds of thousands of times. Can you comprehend that? And those hundred thousand screams would be borne by a mere three or four hundred of us. Each of us would bear a scream hundreds of times more terrible than what you heard. And worse, because we would be the council, we would have penetrated deeper into the heart of the earth than you could ever pierce, yet we would still be individuals, and there where the rock’s voice is loudest, we would be individually less able to resist. The scream would penetrate us deeper, and we would be drowned in it as surely as the sea would drown the people of Anderson.

“Do you understand, Lanik? To do that would destroy us. And who would control the anger of the earth then? Who would absorb the hatred of the rocks? Who would cool that burning? No one. We would destroy the earth because we would no longer be able to contain his wrath. That’s why we can’t agree to what you propose.”

I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t understood the price they would have to pay. “I’ll do my best without your help.”

I got up to leave. Helmut got up, too, and after looking into his eyes a moment, I turned away.

“Lanik,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“They asked me to tell you the way.”

“The way to what?”

“The way to do what you want to do.”

I studied him, unsure of what he meant. “You said that it’s impossible.”

He shook his head, and tears came to his eyes. “I said it was impossible for us. But there’s another way. I didn’t want to tell you, Lanik, for fear you’d accept it, because it would destroy you and I love you and I don’t want you destroyed.”

“If there’s a way, Helmut, I’ll take it, even if I die. God knows every alternative means death one way or another. I never planned to live forever, anyway.” Even as I said these words, I wondered if I meant them, if I would really choose to die, or if instead I wouldn’t prefer to find a place to live, a quiet place like Humping, or a hidden wood like Ku Kuei, or even here on this desert with the beautiful strange people of Schwartz. I could hide, and I could live, so whyever would I choose to die?

Helmut put my own doubts in words. “You have so little love for your own life?”

And in answering him, I answered myself. “Helmut, you don’t know, you’ve never been alone like I have, but in my solitude I’ve discovered something. That I’m passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it’s as if I didn’t exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their land and they don’t see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch
me
. There’s a family in the hills of the poorest part of Britton, and they needed me, and their very need became the most important thing in my life. There’s a woman frozen in time by a lake in Ku Kuei, and she needed me, but we’ve been torn apart and if I could do anything to take her from the eternal death she’s consigned herself to I’d do it. A man who wasn’t old enough to die killed himself in Ku Kuei, and when he died I realized that half of me was him, and that half died with him, and the other half will never stop mourning. I’ll do what it takes, Helmut, so no one else will choose to die rather than live in this world. I’ll do what it takes.”

At other times and on other days, both before and since, I couldn’t have said those words. Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst, and had I not walked three thousand solitary kilometers only to be met with refusal and despair, I don’t know if I would have said so easily, “I’ll do what it takes.”

But I said it, and I meant it, and Helmut embraced me and explained. “When we act together, we don’t all have to go into the earth. We can send one, and he lies among the rock and sings all our songs with his voice, and he hears all the earth’s song with his heart. It can be joyful, and we honor our greatest men by sending them for us on such occasions. It can be painful, and we also honor our greatest by entrusting them with the pain for all of us. But there’s not a man among us who could bear this. And so we can’t send any of us into the earth. You, however, are stronger than any of us. How much stronger, we don’t know. But if you went into the earth for us, we could hope you might survive. And if you died, and the fury of the earth continued, we would still be alive to contain it and keep the world safe.”

We lay together in the sand, all with our arms spread; I lay in the middle, curled into a ball, and as I sank into the sand I felt them join me, one by one, until all their songs were singing in my mind as the sand swallowed me up and bore me down.

Always I had stopped at bedrock before. But now the rock softened and flowed out around me, like cold mud, closing again over my face. The deeper I sank, the warmer the rock became and the faster it seemed I fell, until the heat was as much as I could bear and even when I stopped sinking, the rock seethed and twisted around me.

With the knowledge of the hundreds of Schwartzes above me, I easily found Anderson Island, this time not an aberration of the surface but instead the leading edge of a plate of rock floating on a sea of molten granite. The flow was incredibly slow, but once I found the island I began to draw the magma out from under it.

The settling seemed slow where I was working, of course, but the damage began on the surface from the first instant. The rock sank abruptly, and every building and living thing on the island tumbled to the ground. Then, as the island continued to sink, the sea rushed in from both sides and met in a great wave in the middle of the island, along its length from north to south.

Because of the interruption of the plate of rock, hot magma surged up to the surface, striking ocean and leaping still higher until it shot into the sky, throwing hot ash and steam and mud and lava out of the sea. The water boiled, and anything left alive in that part of the sea was killed as thousands of hectares of the ocean turned to steam.

All this happened because I, with the strength of all the Schwartzes to sustain me, had forced the earth to act. And the earth, ignorant of time and so of consequences, obeyed. It was not until the screams of death began that the earth rebelled, and in that moment the Schwartzes left me. Now they had to work to keep the earth from tearing apart, to keep the crust of the earth from shrugging off the irritating life that had caused it so much agony and so little joy. They had to stem the tide of molten rock that seethed to escape and win its way to the surface at every point that had felt the trembling when the island fell.

I, however, knew nothing of their work. There were other matters at hand, because the earth was screaming at the murder of half a million men, and I was the only listener.

So many of those who died were innocent. These were the ones that would haunt me from then on—the fishermen innocently casting nets in Britton’s Bay when the huge wave struck the shore; the people in tall buildings in Hess and Gill and Israel who were killed when the structures couldn’t bear the shock wave riding out from Anderson; and however many people of Anderson who, even though they were illuders, were not murderers and meant only good to other people.

As for the earth, however, there was no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, between those whose deaths achieved no purpose and those who had to die if mankind on Treason was to mean anything. The earth knew that this was not like the reaping of fields; it could not comprehend the human logic that had brought us to this point. The earth only knew that we who had gathered there in Schwartz had commanded the earth itself to murder people who were so far away that in no sense could we call our act self-defense.

The rocks groaned horribly as if to say, “We trusted you, we gave you power, we obeyed you, and you used us to kill!” The rocks screamed “Traitor!” as the heat swept back and forth across my body.

In a moment I lost all moorings, all connections with reality, all sense of time, and where the scream of the man I killed in Anderson lasted for seconds, the scream of the earth this time lasted forever. It had no end because there was no time, and for an infinity I felt an agony of infinite magnitude and I longed for only one thing. Not to die, because death would only add to the scream of the stone, but rather to be annihilated, to have never existed, to have never lived because my life had reached this point, and this point was unreachable, unendurable, impossible.

“Treason,” screamed the earth forever.

“Forgive me,” I pleaded.

And when at last time returned and infinity was over, the rock spewed me out, the sand vomited me up, and I was thrown into the air and rushed headlong toward the stars.

I rose, and then the rising stopped, and I fell back toward the earth. It was the same feeling I had had when I stepped off the precipice in the darkness before Dissent rose, and I wondered whether the sand would receive me after all, or whether this time I would strike the surface and simply stop, broken and spread out for my blood to soak into the sand and for the sun to dry my flesh to leather and then to dust.

Yet even in the air, I exulted. Even if I died now, I had done the first and greatest work; I had lived through it, if only for a while; I had heard the most terrible scream of the earth and had lived.

Then as I fell I listened and realized that the scream was not over. I could still hear it, even in the air, unconnected with the earth. If I lived, I would hear it forever.

I reached the sand and it gave, it bore me up, it let me sink slowly, and at last I lay on the earth’s surface again, at rest, though never to be at peace again. The earth would never (the rock
could
never) forgive me for having betrayed its trust. But while it did not forgive, it could still endure me. It knew my heart, and it would bear my life. As long as I wished to keep on living, the earth would permit me to live.