Treason

Chapter 14 -- Lanik in Mueller

In all the possible versions of this scene that I had imagined, this one had never occurred to me. Yet for one long moment it seemed exactly right. The usurping brother, confronted by the wanderer who has at last come home; willingly steps aside in order that the more lawful heir may take his rightful place.

I had planned to come in, name Dinte as a traitor and a murderer, and in front of everyone in the court stab him to death. Nothing secret: This was not to be Lake-drinker, Man-in-the-Wind, or the Naked Man performing justice on an Anderson illuder. This. was to be Lanik Mueller performing justice on his brother Dinte, the usurper who drove his father into the forest of Ku Kuei where he died.

Now Dinte had robbed me of that. Having so willingly (though I knew it was a lie) stepped aside for me, if I killed him now, openly, it would only add to the legend of Lanik Mueller as Andrew Apwiter come to life to re-create chaos and end the world. So, reluctantly, before the Anderson who hid behind Dinte's face could kill me unaware, I pushed into quicktime and stepped forward, which meant that to all intents and purposes I disappeared.

But Dinte did not turn into the Anderson I expected, the crusty, middle-aged man or woman I had supposed waited for me in quicktime. Instead he turned into a creature with four arms and five legs; two sets of male genitals contrasted absurdly with the three breasts that dangled in middle-aged sags. If I had seen such a being in the pens, I would not have been surprised. But I had been expecting an Anderson, and this was either an incredible monster or a radical regenerative from Mueller. And who from Mueller could ever have become an illuder?

Then I looked into the creature's face, frozen, staring at the spot where a moment ago I had been standing. And I recognized the monster, and everything changed.

The face was mine. Lanik Mueller's head topped the bizarre assortment of limbs and protuberances. Despite the ears and eyes and noses growing out of place, I recognized myself. It was I who stood beside the throne; not the Lanik Mueller who was cured in Schwartz, but Lanik Mueller the radical regenerative, the monster, the child.

It was my double, who was born in the forest of Ku Kuei.

Impossible! my mind cried out. This creature didn't exist until after Dinte had lived with us for years. This creature could not possibly have been Dinte.

At first I tried to tell myself that he was obviously a secondary illusion; that this Anderson had found a way to fool me in quicktime, too. But that was nonsense-- if an Anderson could have fooled me, another would have done, it long before.

So I walked in quicktime to the throne, sat down, and slipped back into realtime.

The effect was one I had rarely ben able to show off before: suddenly I disappeared in one place and appeared in another. The murmur of the crowd was frantic. But Dinte (now with the normal number of arms and legs, as I had always known the little bastard) did not seem surprised.

"Dinte," I said. "All these people are startled to see me sitting here, but you and I know that Lanik Mueller has been sitting on this throne for years."

He looked at me a moment, then nodded slightly.

"And so, Dinte, I will meet you, privately, in the room where I kept my snail collection when I was five." I pushed back into quicktime and left the throne room.

I had kept my snail collection in a long-unused attic in one of the older parts of the palace, a place never locked but, because it was accessible only by ladder and winding corridors, rarely visited. I headed there in quicktime, then slowed down nearly to the flow of realtime, and waited. I kept just enough edge of speed that if Lanik/Dinte had ideas of treachery, I could react faster than he could attack.

If he was a fraud, if he was not truly me, he would not know what room I meant.

I waited for fifteen minutes. Then he came along the dusty attic walkway and sat before me on the floor. It was hard for him to walk with his awkward arms and legs, and sitting was ludicrous, but I didn't laugh. I remembered my struggle up a not-too-difficult slope in Schwartz after I was set off the Singer slave ship. It had taken him three years in realtime to reach the condition I was in after my months of confinement on the ship. But I remembered; I had been inside that body. I knew exactly who he was and how he felt.

In realtime now, I spoke softly. "Hello, Lanik."

"Hello, Lanik," he answered, his smile ghastly on a twisted face.

"Last time we met, I tried to kill you," I said.

"Many times since then, I've wished you had succeeded."

We sat in silence for a few moments. What do you talk about when you meet yourself after so many years?

"How did you come here?" I asked, though I already had guessed much of the story. "How did you learn to be an illuder?"

He told me. How he had lain half-dead as his already weak body tried to regenerate the skull and skin and keep the brain tissue from degenerating. How he had been found by the huge search party the Nkumai had sent after me. "If they hadn't found me," he said, "they would certainly have kept searching until they found you. When they finally realized what had happened and tried to follow you again, they traced you right to the seacoast. You were easy enough to find; if they had followed you at once, you wouldn't have escaped." He smiled. "I saved your life."

Then he told me of days and weeks with Mwabao Mawa in her treetop house. My body, in constructing him, had given him my memories; or perhaps in my delinum as we traveled together in the forest I had poured out into him all that mattered, all that made me who I was. It took Mwabao some time before she realized that he was only a duplicate of me. "By then she had learned enough that she was certain I was from Mueller-- I had spoken Dinte's and Father's names in my madness, and her fellow Andersons were already here, as you seem to know."

She immediately seized the opportunity my double represented and fanned his hatred of me, his feelings of worthlessness because he would always be the monster, the horrible one, the creature that had no right to exist. It didn't take him long to consent to lead the Nkumai armies and their allies into battle against Mueller.

He exacted a price, however, that Mwabao was only too willing to pay. He asked for training in the Anderson deception, and Mwabao Mawa taught it to him. While I was in Schwartz learning to control the earth, he was learning to control men's minds.

"People's beliefs don't exist in isolation," he explained. "Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else. Not opinions, of course-- beliefs. We-- they-- could make anybody think the sun was blue and had always been blue. But, of course, the farther you got from the place where other people believed intensely in the deception, the less you would be influenced. However, by then the work would have been done. Once someone honestly believes something to be a fact, he'll never doubt it without pretty convincing evidence." Which is why Lord Barton was able to learn the truth separated from Britton by a thousand kilometers, but had to struggle to remember it when he returned to his home, where others were also in thrall to the lie.

He had not consented, he told me, to the wasting of the land by the Nkumai army on its passage through the Rebel River plain. I could never have done that-- and so neither could he.

"And then you reappeared," he said, "and we didn't know what to do. Until, of course, you and Father escaped to Ku Kuei. Then it was clear that I had to disappear so that the monster they had made of me would color other men's perception of you, ruining your effectiveness. At the time, Lanik, I was glad of it. You can't know how much I hated you. You had hated me, not for who I was, but because I was at all."

At first they didn't know what to do with him now that Lanik Mueller was officially an exile in Ku Kuei. "Until word reached us that Dinte had disappeared. Mwabao Mawa panicked. How could anyone have known about Dinte and killed him-- and yet not publicly raised the cry about who he was? Whoever killed him would surely have seen him change before, their eyes from the young heir to a much older man."

Then I realized what should have been obvious to me long before.

"I killed Dinte," I told my double. "I slit his throat as I left the palace. I assumed he would regenerate."

He smiled at me. "So you got your wish, didn't you? You killed Dinte, and in the process you saved my life. Because I was the only one who knew Dinte well enough to impersonate him without making waves. The Andersons aren't omnipotent. They can't fool the whole world all at once. So Mwabao Mawa sent me home to Mueller. I appeared to them as Dinte. I claimed that you had captured me and left me for dead after torturing me, but I had regenerated and come home. Who could doubt me? I've played the role ever since."

His voice grew soft (as mine always grew soft when I was afraid I would show fear or pity or grief) and he said, "You know-- you know how much I hated Dinte. And yet I had to be him, and talk to his covey of traitors who had plotted your death and Father's death and-- God, Lanik, how I survived that time I'll never know. But always I kept telling myself, 'I am Lanik Mueller, not his monster child,' and I endured the sycophants and the traitors and the petty criminals and Ruva and all the rest. Because it was common knowledge that you had gone with Father deep into Ku Kuei and would never come back. Father was dead, you see, and I loved him, just like you. The more people here in Mueller abused his memory and yours, the more I felt free to identify with you, to become you in my heart. I stopped hating you long ago. I just longed for you to come back and set me free.

"Lanik," he said, "I go from time to time, I go into the pens and have these limbs cut off. They always grow back, and more besides. I'm almost due now. The doctor never knows I'm me, never remembers that he performs these operations until it's time for the next one. No one ever sees my monster shape, but I see."

He looked at me, at my body. "You," he said. "You're whole. You're right and normal. You haven't lived this sick deception for these long months, these years. Let's go back out to the throne room. I'll appear in my true form and tell them all the truth, tell them that you're not the monster you were believed to be. You can take your true place, and I'll be free."

"What will you do then?"

"I'll plead with you to kill me. I've lived for years now as a radical regenerative. It doesn't qualify as life. If you won't kill me, I'll drown myself."

I shook my head. "I came here to kill you."

"Did you know who I was, then?"

"No. I came to kill the Anderson who controlled Mueller, the one pretending to be Dinte."

He was shocked. "You knew before you came? Then the Andersons' secret is out?"

"The Andersons," I told him, "are dead. A rainstorm reached you" --I groped for the real time-- "a few days ago. A drenching rainstorm. And the sky is still overcast." He nodded. "That rain was caused a week ago when Anderson sank into the sea."

He was surprised. "Just like that? Sank into the sea?"

I heard the scream still ringing inside me. "Not just like that. But they've disappeared from the earth. Not just the ones on the island. All the others, too, in every Family. You're the last one alive who knows the Andersons' technique. You and any who worked with you here."

"How did you do it?"

"Never mind how. What matters is why." And I explained to him.

"So the Ambassadors are gone, too," he said. "No more iron. Do you realize what you've done?"

I laughed. "I have a good idea."

"We-- the Andersons knew every secret in the world, Lanik! Do you realize what was being achieved on this world? Incredible things. Things to make you proud to be on this godforsaken prison planet! And you've stopped it. Without the Ambassadors, do you think that level of invention will continue?"

I shrugged. "It might. The Andersons didn't know all the secrets in the world."

"Stupid! Shortsighted and stupid and--"

"Listen, Lanik!" I shouted back, and the act of using my own name in reference to another person surprised me. "Yes, Lanik. You are me, aren't you? Me as I should have been. Me, captured by the Nkumai and induced to learn Mwabao Mawa's tricks-- and I would have learned them, just as you did. I would have let myself become their tool, to a point, and there you sit, as I would have sat, a monster in a body trapped inside an even more monstrous illusion. No, Lanik, you're not the one to judge me as shortsighted or stupid. And I'm not the one to judge you. You called this a godforsaken planet, but you're wrong. Thousands of years ago the Republic decided to be God. They decided to put the finest minds in the universe on a hopeless, ironless planet, to punish them and their children forever and ever, as if we were born with the guilt of their crime upon us. They cruelly held out in front of our ancestors a reward: The first Family to build a starship and come out into space would receive unheard-of riches and power and prestige. For three thousand years we believed that, and spent our souls working to do what-- to give to the bastards who keep us here the best we could develop. Our own flesh! The finest products of our minds! And what have we had in return? A few tons of a metal that's cheap everywhere but here."

"So we can build a starship," said my double.

"We'll never build a starship with Republic iron, never. And if we did, do you think they'd let us all come out and take part in human life? Don't you realize the miracle this planet is? If they realized what is really going on-- if they could spend a few days in Ku Kuei, or a week in Schwartz-- if they understood what our potential really is, Lanik, they'd be here immediately, they'd bomb this planet out of existence, wipe us out of the universe. That's the only hope and promise we have from them.

"And what would we do if we joined them? Persuade them to be nice? If they were going to be kind, they wouldn't be keeping the hundredth great grandchildren of traitors imprisoned on a hopeless planet like this."

"I know that," he said. "I've often thought about the hopelessness of it, too, Lanik. Dissent accomplishes nothing. It's something I told a young man who had been arrested for protesting against a law. I took him out by the river at night, without his guards, and I pointed out some facts to him. That if he kept his mouth shut, the law would leave him alone and held be free. 'I don't want to be free,' he said, 'while that law exists. I will dissent until you take it away.' 'No,' I told him, 'you'll dissent until you die in prison, and what will you have accomplished?

"'It's like the moons,' I said to him. 'See how Dissent moves so quickly and brightly? The most spectacular thing in the sky. But it's spectacular because it's so close to Treason, and so small. Freedom is a much larger moon, much farther away. It doesn't make half the show. But Freedom makes the tides go,' I said. 'Freedom raises and lowers the sea.'"

I was filled with a strange feeling. Recognition. This deformed man thought as I did; and though it was only logical that he would, still it was a surprise to me. No one ever meets a man who thinks exactly as he does, not normally. But now it was as if I could say his words-- my words-- along with him.

"With Anderson gone, and the Ambassadors," he-- I-- said, "we're cut off from the Republic. We're free. And when the universe hears from us again, we'll be making the tides."

Silence. Then I realized that I had said the last few words, not he. He smiled at me. We understood each other. Not everything, but the thought, the way we thought was clear to both of us, and, so help me, I felt affection for him. If the ability to communicate well has something to do with love, there is no one a man can love quite so well as himself.

"Lanik," we said in unison, breaking the silence together. We laughed. "You first," I told him.

"Lanik, please take the throne. If you know me, you know how I feel in this body. You know from what I've told you that I've done unbearable things. Set me free."

Unbearable things. I didn't tell him, didn't try to explain the unbearable things I had done, didn't try to communicate the scream that underlay every thought I had. Instead, I closed my eyes and began to do for him what the Schwartzes had done for me.

It had taken only a handful of Schwartzes to change me, to cure my radical regeneration, and so I hoped I could do it alone. I had nothing like their knowledge of the carbon chains, but I could sense them well enough to compare. Any difference between his DNA and mine I changed in him until we matched perfectly. it meant that not only would his regeneration be cured, but also he would have the gift of never hungering and thirsting again, of being free of the need to breathe, of taking his energy directly from the sun.

But I couldn't give to him the abilities that I had learned, and wouldn't have if I could. He was the real Lanik Mueller, not I. He was Lanik Mueller as I should have been: ruling in Mueller, and ruling well; lonely, but living where he ought to live. Now, without the curse of radical regeneration, he would be free to achieve a measure of happiness that would always be beyond me.

It took hours. When I was through, he lay asleep on the attic floor, his body whole and correct and healthy. He was naked-- there were no tailors to clothe the deformed bodies of radical regeneratives. I looked at his body as I have never been able to look at my own. The skin was young and smooth-- for he was younger than I-- and the muscles were good and the body well-proportioned. For a moment I saw myself as Saranna must have seen me, and for all that I have no love or longing for other men, I understood why she so often told me that my body was sweet. It had irritated me-- an adolescent boy does not aspire to sweetness. But she was right.

It was the face that made me ache inside. He thought he had known pain, and he had, to a degree greater than many men. His face showed maturity beyond his years, and kindness, and compassion. But I had seen my own face in mirrors, had studied what time and my own acts had done to me, and my face was not kind or compassionate. I had seen too much. I had killed too often. There was no sweetness left in me, not to look at, and I yearned to be as innocent as he.

Impossible, I reminded myself. That choice was made years ago in the sand at the border of Schwartz. And I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions. I had borne it, and I couldn't hope not to have the scars show in my face and my body.

He awoke and looked at me and smiled. Then he realized what had happened to his body. He touched himself incredulously and wept and kept asking me, "This isn't an illusion, is it? It's real, isn't it?"

Yes, it's real, I told him. "And when I've destroyed the Ambassador, there'll be no more need to keep rads like cattle. So do this for me. Make it a law that rads be sent to Schwartz, all of them, as soon as they're identified. Have them go into Schwartz and when the desert people come to them, have them say they come in Lanik Mueller's name. The Schwartzes will know what to do after that. They'll send them home, whole. Or if they don't come home, it's because they freely chose to stay."

"What about you?" Lanik asked.

"I don't exist," I answered. "In the forest of Nkumai it wasn't you who became the extra Lanik Mueller, it was I. You're the real one. Over the next few years, Lanik, change the illusion. Gradually make Dinte's face become your own until you can end the deception. You want to anyway, I know that much. End the lie, except for the name, and live and rule with your own face."

"And you?"

"I'll find another place to live."

Then I pushed back into quicktime and left him in the attic and went back to the court, where quite a few people still milled around, chattering about what had happened. It took me only a few minutes to spot the Andersens among them, the last of their Family to survive. I had left Lanik feeling sad and yet better than I had felt in a long time. But that didn't stop me from killing the last of the Andersons.

In quicktime I carried their bodies to the Ambassador and laid them where the explosion would leave them unrecognizable. Back when I first set out to destroy the Ambassadors, I had decided that when I blew up the last one, I would die with it. But now I realized that that decision was unmade. I think it was because I knew that the real me was still a sweet-bodied boy who would make a good king, and though he wasn't the me-that-I-am, he was the me-that-ought-to-be, and I gained a little respect for myself, and no longer wanted to die.

So I stayed in quicktime to break the seal on the Ambassador, then walked off to a safe distance before slipping back into realtime to watch. It took a few moments as the Ambassador waited metallically, unknowingly, as it made its own death. I felt wistful for that instant. All our history, all our purpose for far too many years, had been shaped to try to win our return to the Republic, to the kind of civilization that could make machines like this. They knew so much that we could not know once I destroyed this last Ambassador. I found myself slipping into quicktime, so I could rush to the fuse, stop it before the Ambassador died.

But I did not move. If our years of slavery had taught us anything, it should have taught us this: that the Ambassador was not the key to our freedom, it was the chain that bound us. Our freedom would only come when we forgot our dead ancestors and our distant enemies and discovered who and what we had actually become in these centuries on Treason.

I did not move, the Ambassador finished its self-immolation program, the explosion destroyed it from the inside, the lights of the machine went off, and I wondered for a frightening moment how I dared to make such a decision for the whole world, without consulting anyone else.

Then I laughed at myself. It was a little late to wonder if I ought to play God. The game was already over.

The dust from the explosion cleared. My work was done. I had decidede to live past the end of my work after all, and it meant I had to make decisions I had thought never to make again. Where would I go? What did I want to do with the rest of my life?

As I walked through the fields east of Mueller-on-the-River, I knew where I would have to go. On an island in the middle of a lake in Ku Kuei, Saranna had said, "Come back soon. Come back while you're still young enough to want me. For I'm going to be young forever."

I wasn't young anymore, not by any definition of the word. But I wanted her. Perhaps I only wanted the innocence of the children we had been, making love beside the river, oblivious to the pain that could and surely would come to them. Still, I wanted her more than I wanted anyone else in the world, not because my passion was so overwhelming, but because all the other things I wanted were either painfully accomplished or so hopeless that I had given up on them. Only she was left. She and a strange and quiet land of poor yet kindly people who tended sheep among the rocks by the Humping Sea.