Treason

Chapter 6 -- Schwartz

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 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, 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.

"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 womem. 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 be 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 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."

I was surprised. "You do things I can't dream of doing."

"Together," he said. "Alone we aren't as strong as you."

"Then make yourselves like I am."

"There are secrets that the carbon chains can keep even from us."

That was that. Yet it didn't occur to me, not for weeks, that this gave me an advantage that would set me free. For the simple reason that I didn't want to be free of them.

When I spoke to the rock, I learned many things that brought me to myself. The wars were continuing, and as I learned to endure the agony of the many deaths, I also learned to study the wars and see where the battles were being fought. When I talked to the rock, the earth's skin became my skin, and I learned to feel where the cries were coming from. The battles at first were on the plain between Allison and the headwaters of the Rebel River. Then the battles moved to the hill country of Robles, and northwest to the confluence of the Myron and the Rebel where the Rebel River ceases to be called Swoop and begins to be called Mueller. And then the war was in Wizer, a land my father had conquered, and that meant that the Nkumai had swept all before them and were at the borders of my country.

It didn't matter now that I knew the secret of the Nkumai's iron. It didn't matter that my father had sent me away and my brother, Dinte, wanted to kill me. I was no longer a radical regenerative, and I was twice the soldier my father was and by far a better general than Dinte. I was needed, if my Family was to endure.

At first the thought of going to war was repugnant to me, but my Family's need tore at me, and I began to ask the rock. I asked whether one life could be more important than another, and the rock said no. I asked whether it was right to end one life, if, by ending it, many others could be saved. The rock said yes. And I asked if loyalty meant anything to the forces of the universe, and the rock wept.

Loyalty? What but loyalty made the rock respond to the call of the Schwartzes? The Earth understood trust, and I asked if it was good for me to go back and lead my Family. And the rock said yes.

This conversation was not the product of one night's sleep under the sand, however. It took many nights and many sleeps, and the months passed before I knew that I could go home; that I must go home.

"You can't go home," said the spokesman.

"The rock spoke to me and told me I should go."

"The rock told you it was good for you to go. Good for you. Good for your family. But not good for us."

"Good for the earth."

"The blood soaks into the earth the same no matter who wields the civilized tools," said the spokesman. "If you go, it will be good and it will be bad. I can't let you go, we can't let you go; you've taken all we have to teach and now you'll use it to destroy and kill in the name of loyalty."

"I swear I'll never use what you've taught me to kill."

"If you kill, you'll use what we taught you."

"Never."

"Because now every man who dies at your hand will scream into your soul forever, Lanik."

It was something to give me pause.

When the warfare moved to the lowlands of Cramer, not three hundred kilometers from Mueller-on-the-River, the capital, I could wait no longer. Helmut and I were playing in the pinnacles of a knife-like ridge of mountains, doing acrobatics a thousand meters above the sand, when I pulled the rock out from under him and he fell.

The rock caught him on a ledge a hundred meters below me and far above the desert.

"You bastard!" he shouted.

"I have to! " I shouted back. "If you warn the council, they can stop me!"

"You said you loved me!"

I did. I do. But I said nothing. He tried to crawl up the rock. But I forbade the rock to hold him, and I was stronger. He tried to make handholds in the rock. But I was stronger. He tried to throw himself from the ledge to the sand below, but the rock would not let him jump because I said so. And I was stronger.

The ridge pointed northwest, and I went northwest. When it ended, I plunged down into the sand, and ran all day and all night, forbidding my body to sleep. I went by the fastest way any Schwartz could travel, and because none was faster than I, no pursuit could overtake me.

It took eight days. I slept while running, for my mind had to have sleep even when my body didn't. At last I reached a place where clouds skitted through the sky and where occasional clumps of grass poked from crevasses in rocks, and I was out of Schwartz. It should have been a relief, and I was glad enough to see green instead of the endless yellows and greys and browns of the desert, but I regretted leaving, so much that I stopped and turned around and almost started back.

I remembered my father's face. I remembered him saying, "Lanik, I wish to God there were something I could do." I heard his voice plead, "The body is ruined. Will the mind still serve me? Will the son still love his father?"

Yes, you land-hungry bastard, I thought. You're up against something you're no match for. And I'll come. I'm coming.

I turned back around and headed north into the high country of Sill.

The land had been wasted by war.

Burnt-over flelds were accented by the shells of houses and piles of ashes that had once been humbler huts. I walked kilometers of ruin, in what had to be farmland at best, this close to the desert. What purpose could be served by such destruction? No great military objectives lay nearby. All it could achieve was the starvation of the people. The land had been murdered. Tortured.

Yet I knew the people of Nkumi (as well as anyone could know them in their endless intertwining lies) and such destruction wasn't in their nature, not the people who stood at the lips of their treehouses and sang the morning. Even their endless, fumbling bureaucracy and the hypocritical denial that they bought and sold for profit-- these were more symptoms of good intention than of deep-seated corruption. Besides, greed would have left these fields intact. Only vicious, mindless hate could make someone want to destroy the land instead of conquering it.

But who could hate even the simple-mindedly violent people of Sill? My father had let them alone, even when he conquered their two neighbors, be cause for all their boisterous village life and boasting and raiding, they were ultimately harmless.

I got angrier the farther I walked.

At last I reached land that was watered by rivers and irrigation, and here there were people working to rebuild the canals. New houses were going up, makeshift homes to keep the rain off. I had lost track of seasons-- the rams would be coming soon.

Only now did it occur to me that I was naked, and nudity was frowned on in this part of the world. The idea of clothing seemed foreign to me-- I had been without it for a year, at least, ever since I fell from the birdnet in Nkumai. But how does a man get clothing when he has neither friends nor money, and people stare at him and avoid him when they see him coming?

The problem was solved for me. I slept, this time with body as well as mind, in the grass growing along the bank of the River Wong, and when I awoke three women were staring at me, I moved slowly, so as not to alarm them. "Greetings," I said, and they nodded. So much for conversation, I thought. "I mean you no harm," I said.

They nodded again. "We know."

I guess in my unclothed condition it was no secret I wasn't in the mood for rape. I couldn't think what to say to them next, except the obvious. "I need clothing."

They looked at each other in puzzlement.

"I don't have any money," I said, "but I can promise you I'll pay you within a month."

"Then you aren't the Naked Man," one of them murmured.

"Is there only one?" I asked.

"He walks through the fields from the desert. Some say he will take vengeance on our enemies."

So I had been noticed, and word had spread. Not at all odd that such people would take the mysterious and make of it a solution to their problems. "I'm the one," I said. "I cam from Schwartz. I'm going to find the army that did all this."

"Will you kill them?" whispered the youngest, who was far along in pregnancy.

"I will stop them from killing," I promised, wondering if I really could. "But in the meantime, I need clothing. It's time for me to dress."

They nodded, and walked away. They were in no hurry, and in the gently rolling countryside they were soon out of sight. I plunged into the water to wait for them, and amused myself by lying on the bottom of the river, watching the fish. Everything was ravaged above the surface of the water, but in the slow current of the River Wong the fish never noticed.

I realized I had been underwater a long time, surfaced, and began breathing again. No sooner had I brought my head into the air than a woman nearby screamed, and answering shouts brought others on the run. Again I realized I had fallen into the trap of thinking and acting like a Schwartz. I had to stop doing things that other people couldn't do.

"He was under there all this time," the woman was saying to the two-score people who crowded around her, glancing frequently at me, where I stood in the water. "He was under there all the time and I was here for an hour, for a whole hour."

"Nonsense," I said. "I couldn't have been under there for more than fifteen minutes."

They looked at me with respect and awe (and not a little fear) and the pregnant woman held out an armful of clothing. I walked out of the water, and they stared at me, as if they expected something unusual. I almost laughed to remember the way the sailors on the Singer ship had reacted to the way I looked before the Schwartzes cured me. If they could see me now-- in full possession of the sort of power the sailors had only imagined me to have before. Yet the way these people looked at me reminded me of my shyness about nudity when I was young and in Mueller. I dressed quickly, not waiting for my skin and hair to dry.

"Thank you," I said when I was dressed.

"We are honored," said a man who seemed to be in charge-- an old wan. I realized that there were no men of arms-bearing age.

"Your sons are all off to war?"

"There is no war anymore," the headman said.

The pregnant woman agreed, soberly. "For Sill, there is no war."

"There is no Sill," said the headman. "We're Nkumai now."

I looked at them, all nodding in agreement. "Is that so? Then what enemy do you want me to kill?"

They were silent. Until one old woman cried out bitterly, with tears in her eyes. "Nkumai! Kill the Nkumai! For God's sake, if you have any power at all--"

Others took up the cry. "Kill the Nkumai! For our sons, for our homes, for our land, kill the devils!"

I could hear the song of hate and death in their hearts, and I nodded softly and walked on.

"What's your name!" the pregnant woman shouted after me.

I turned and called out, "Lanik Mueller."

To my surprise, the crying and shouting died quickly. Some looked terror-stricken. Some wrinkled up their faces in distaste, as if I had made some obscene joke. Other faces simply froze, expressionless. Then they all silently left me and went back to their homes. Only the old woman addressed any kind of message to me. She spat in the dirt.

It could only have been my name that turned them from friendship and hope to hatred and fear. But what could my name mean in a place like this? In Mueller my name had been well enough known, being the heir apparent, but why should my name be familiar in Sill? I'd been gone for a year, throughout the whole war. I pondered the question as I headed north again, bearing a little west, on my way to Mueller-on-the-River. Could Dinte have hated me so much he spread stories about me as a traitor? Or blamed some atrocity on me? Impossible to believe that Father would let him do such a thing. Had I been gone so long that Father was no longer the Mueller? I could make no sense of it.

There were patches here and there that the Nkumai had missed, places where the green was deep and the harvest would be good enough; the people would not starve. As I ran, however, I saw no one. Had the word spread ahead of me? Were people avoiding the journey of the Naked Man? Or was it the name of Lanik Mueller they shied from? Neither seemed impossible. Fast as I was traveling, rumors could pass me; how else could the survivors of Sill have heard tales of the Naked Man, when I had traveled all day and most of the night? The stories of Rumor as an evil bird that flies faster than sound must be true.

It was a good thing I didn't get hungry. As I passed wheatfields and vegetable gardens my mouth remembered the taste and I wished for the food, but I had no need for it and didn't stop. Besides, if I had been hungry, no one was there to share food with me, and I was not yet ready to be a thief in a land where there would be little enough to eat this year.

The River Sill was two days behind me when I finally saw another person. Or persons. I felt the pounding of hooves before I saw them. They were coming from the north, from Mueller. And when they came into sight, I recognized the banner of the Army of the East. The commander would be Mancik, my godfather.

But Mancik wasn't with them, though the commander's banner was there; thus I knew that he had died. If I'd had a knife, I would have given him grief, but I had no weapon, and after a few moments I had other things on my mind.

I didn't know the commander, nor did I know the soldiers who leapt from their horses and bound me. I consented to the binding partly because I was confused and partly because I was outnumbered. There's a limit to how many body parts even a reformed radical regenerative can renew. And they looked willing to take me apart.

"I'm told to bring you to the capital alive," said the commander.

"Then I won't hinder you," I answered. "That's where I was going."

This apparently made them angry. Two soldiers struck me at once, and I was dazed for a moment. "I'm Lanik Mueller," I said, spitting put the words, "and I won't be treated like this!"

The commander looked at me coldly. "We know who you are, and after the way you've treated this land, any way we treated you would be far kinder than you deserve." He looked for a moment, grimly, across the wasted fields. "Of all the traitors who have ever lived, Lanik Mueller, there must be a special place in hell reserved for you."

"I've been to hell," I said. "It's a better place than this."

"What if you burn like you burnt these fields?" called a soldier. There was a murmur of bitter assent.

"I didn't do this," I said, perplexed that they could think I did.

"Didn't do it!" shouted a man. "I saw you dangling a torch yourself, ahead of all your inker troops!"

How could I even protest against a charge so absurd?

"Enough talking," said the commander. "He's going to claim he was insane or some such nonsense. No one will believe him, he'll get the death that such a man deserves, but there'll be no glory in it for us, having found him. The damage is already done beyond repair, and killing him won't undo any part of it."

It was a strange thing for any commander to say, and yet it had a strange calming effect on the men. They had none of the hearty lust for battle that I had seen in the army all my life. But the commander's words had stirred in them some silent, desperate courage. All did their work quickly, wordlessly. They threw me over a saddle, strapped my legs to the stirrups, and left me to find my balance as best I could with bound arms on a galloping horse. They rode madly across the fields, as if they hoped (and I'm sure they did) that my horse would fall, would shatter me, would crush me into the ashes that had once been grain. Or perhaps they thought of me no more, and merely rode, machines of flesh astride these heaving horses, empty of thought, empty of anything but the knowledge of desolation.

As I rode, what else had I to do but think? Somehow I was blamed for all this devastation, and not just by strangers, but by the men of Mueller-- the ones who once had loved me, if not for myself, then as my father's son. This was not something Dinte's lies could accomplish, nor could Ruva have persuaded anyone to think of me that way, nor any other jealous enemy. The man said he had seen me. Seen me, and though I know it was impossible, I could not doubt his honesty. It wasn't just my name that was hated here, it was my face.

Thinking of hatred, thinking of my own face, I saw an image of myself before my eyes, and it was not a memory of my face as I saw it in mirrors. Then I knew the answer, knew why it was that every accusation they made against me could be true and not-true all at once. I also knew that no matter how convincingly I told my tale, they would never believe me,

The slap of hard leather boots rang out in the stone halls of my father's palace. I was dragged in brutally and thrown down on the floor. I had seen the scene before, but from the other point of view, as men accused of treason were prepared for trial. The trial was a mere formality. The charge was so serious it was never brought unless guilt was certain.

Yet my thoughts kept wandering. As they marched me through the corridors, held me in the small cell while the court assembled, I kept looking at the dead stone of the walls, realizing how much death this place had cost the earth. If I said as much to anyone, it would be taken as madness. Living stone? But I spoke in my mind and sang the song of the rock, and felt the resonation. Far under the castle, the stones were listening. They would hear, the living stones would know, if my blood were shed.

The punishment for treason is drawing and quartering the living man. Women are decapitated first. It's grisly, but I had always thought of it as a fine deterrent.

I arose from the floor and stood.

"Kneel!" shouted Harkint, the Captain of the Guard (he used to race me on horseback through the streets of the city). I turned to him and spoke coldly, dramatically, because trials, like most of royal life, are theatrics, and I couldn't help but play my part. "I am royalty, Harkint, and I stand before the throne."

This quieted him, and now the court settled into the steady business of hate and fear.

My father looked old. It was for his sake I had returned at all. Now he looked weary and sick at heart. "Lanik Mueller, there's little point in a trial," he said. "You know and we know why you're here. You're guilty, so let's end this shabby business."

Every delay is a promise of life; and even though I knew there was no chance that they'd believe me, still I had to have my say. Perhaps it would be many years before my innocence was proven, but there would be some then who would remember that I had told the truth this day. "It's my right to hear the charges against me."

"If we listed them all," said my father, "I couldn't stop the people here from killing you with their hands."

"Say them briefly then, but name my crimes, since I don't know what they are."

My father's face wrinkled in distaste at what he thought was a feeble lie. "You shame yourself," he said. But he looked at the herald, and old Swee called out in a ringing voice:

"The crimes of Lanik Mueller: Leading the Nkumai armies into battle against the armies of Mueller. Destroying fields and homes of citizens of Mueller and dependent Families. Betraying the secret of regeneration so that our enemies now hack the bodies of our soldiers to pieces on the field, so they die. Plotting to undo the succession and take the rightful heir from the throne." Swee looked bitter and the gathered court shouted in outrage as each charge was read.

"I didn't do any of this," I said, looking my father in the eye.

"You've been seen by a thousand witnesses," said my father.

A soldier stepped forward in rage-- a commoner, since he had lost his arms and neither had grown back. "I saw you myself," he cried, "when you cut off both my arms and made me come here to tell the Mueller that you planned to drink his blood!"

"I never did that, never said it."

Father answered contemptuously. "Tbere are others who knew you who saw you leading the Nkumai armies. We've heard enough now. You're guilty, and I sentence you to--"

"No!" I shouted. "I have a right to speak!"

"A traitor has no rights!" shouted a soldier.

"I'm innocent!"

"If you're innocent," cried my father, "every whore in Mueller is a virgin!"

"I have a right to be heard, and I will speak!"

They fell silent then, perhaps because my voice still had some power to command; or more likely because they drew some bleak satisfaction out of watching me struggle vainly for my life. Still, useless as the effort was, I tried to tell them the only explanation that would fit what they had seen, and what I knew I had and had not done. Half of what I said was speculation, but as far as I knew then, I was telling the truth.

I told them that I had gone to Nkumai, but my subterfuge had been discovered only moments after I found the secret of what they sold to get iron. I told them of my escape, my disembowelment, and of the echo of myself that had been regenerated from my own gut. I described my imprisonment on a Singer ship and how the Schwartzes had cured me (I said nothing of how, or what I had learned about the living rock of our world), and how I had come as quickly as I could to warn my father of the danger.

As to the person who claimed to be me and fooled others into thinking he was, I could only guess that he was my double; that he had not died, but had been found by the Nkumai. "I was careless. I should have destroyed the body. But I wasn't thinking clearly then, and most Muellers would have died from such wounds." They must have trained him, I speculated, and he would have had all my inborn abilities. No wonder people believed he was Lanik Mueller-- right down to the genes, he was.

I explained everything I could think to explain, and then I stopped talking.

What effect had all my talking had? Little enough. Most of the people were still hostile, openly disbelieving, eager for my death. But here and there, especially among the older men, there was a face that looked thoughtful. And when I looked at my father, I knew (or did I only wish to know?) that he believed me.

I was no fool. I realized that whether he believed me or not, he, had no power to save me. He couldn't have acquitted me-- not that day, not before that audience.

I had hardly noticed Ruva and Dinte before, but now they both came up to confer with my father. It startled me to see them as allies-- hadn't Dinte hated her as much as I did? But allies they were, and of course they had noticed the change in Father's expression that had told me of his belief in my tale. Now they would try to undo any good my speech might have done for me. Ruva kept whispering to father, while Dinte stepped forward and spoke loudly, for all the court to hear.

"Apparently you think we're fools, Lanik, he said. "Never in all the history of radical regeneration has anyone formed an entire duplicate of himself."

"No rad has ever had his guts torn out and strewn across the countryside, either."

"And then you say the Schwartzes cured you. Desert savages, and they can do what none of our geneticists can manage?"

"I know it's hard to believe--"

"What's hard to believe is that you could tell us all this with a straight face, dear brother. No one has ever come out of the Schwartz Desert alive. No one has ever done any of these heroic deeds you claim to have done. What people have done is see you at the head of the enemy's army. I saw you myself, when I was commanding the Army of the South in Cramer, and you waved to me and shouted some obscenity. Don't pretend you don't remember."

"I'd hardly be the first to shout an obscenity at you, Dinte," I said, and to my surprise there were a few chuckles in the court. Not enough to hint that I had any friends. But enough to prove that Dinte had some enemies.

Now my fathq interrupted. "Dinte," he said, "you're being undignified." There was contempt in my father's voice. But there was some other emotion when he spoke to me:

"Lanik Mueller, your defense is implausible and the testimony of a thousand men is unarguable. I sentence you to be drawn and quartered alive on the playing field, by the river tomorrow at noon and may your soul if you have one rot in hell."

He got up to go. How much did I want to live? Enough to sacrifice all dignity and cry out after him, "Father! If all this were true, why in the name of God would I have given myself up to you?"

He turned slowly and looked me in the eye, "Because even the devil gives some justice to his victims, when they're beyond all help."

He left the court. The soldiers took me then, and because I had been sentenced to die they spent the afternoon and evening torturing me. Since Muellers heal so quickly, we can bear exquisite injury and still not die. Of that night I'll say no more.