Treason

by Orson Scott Card

  "I'm afraid of you, Lanik. You aren't-- you aren't human anymore."

  I knew what he meant, but still it stung to have him say it. "That issue was decided when I sprouted tits and Homarnoch declared me a rad."

  "That was--"

  "Different," I said, finishing his sentence. "Because then I was less than human, and now you think I'm more. But neither one is true, Father. I was human all along, either way. This is just one thing that can happen to a human, one thing that a human being can do. Not a god, not a devil. A human."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I'm a human, and I can do it."

  "You were gone for nearly an hour it seemed, forever it seemed, Lanik. How did you breathe?"

  "I held my breath very tight. Father, forget what you saw me do. Let me tell you what I learned. There's something about the soil here. Something that slows things down, or makes it seem that way. It's as if-- I don't know. As if there's a bubble, enclosing us and the earth and trees around us in a sphere, and inside that bubble, time goes slower. Or no, that doesn't work. It's as if time goes faster for us. We walk farther, we do a day's worth of walking, and yet to the world outside, only a few minutes have passed. While we're inside, all the rest of the world seems to go slowly, but it doesn't. It's the same as always."

  "If we really walked as far as it feels like, that's one big bubble."

  "Unless it follows us around."

  "Why didn't it happen for the army?"

  "Maybe we had too much momentum or something. I don't know. But look at the sun." It was only a little past the zenith. "And we're already through for the day."

  "I'm rested now," Father said. "Felt like I had a long nap, and I woke up and you were gone, not a footprint or anything-- just gone. I didn't dare leave, for fear I'd lose you again. I waited forever it felt like."

  "I was gone a few minutes, that's all," I said. "But I spent those minutes outside the bubble."

  "I don't know about bubbles," said Father, "but I'm rested now." So we went on.

  By the sun it was only midafternoon; by my own reckoning, I had done two days' walking since morning when we reached another lake. It was one whose southern edge I had skirted on my earlier journey. Now we stood on its western shore, and the far shore was go near we could see it easily. If it was the far shore, that is. Because it seemed to disappear to the north and south, we supposed we might be looking at an island or a peninsula.

  I hadn't slept when Father did, but his rest had done him little good. He was staggering like a drunk, and I was so weary that each step was a separate effort, a triumph of will. "I don't know about you," I told Father, "but this is my limit. This is where I stop."

  We slept almost before we lay down.

  I awoke in darkness. I had never seen night in Ku Kuei on my first journey, and the night before, with the army, I had had other things on my mind. Now I watched the sky. Both Dissent and Freedom had risen, and at this time of year they were near each other. I lay there, still weary with sleep, letting my mind wander, when it occurred to me that Dissent should have passed Freedom by now.

  Instead, there was almost no detectable motion.

  Could Ku Kuei have developed a way to slow the sun and the moons? No, or we would have seen such things from Mueller, too. What was going on was not real, it was an illusion, a local phenomenon. Not a change in the earth or sky. It could only be a change in us. A change that didn't happen when the army was with us; a change that happened only when we were alone.

  "For once Dissent has learned his place," father said. So he was also awake.

  "You noticed, too."

  "I hate this place, Lanik." He sighed. "A beggar loves any coin. But I'm beginning to think I would have been happier with Harkint."

  "Up to a point, you probably would."

  "What point?"

  "When they cut your head off and it didn't grow back."

  "It's a problem with Muellers," Father said. "We never can believe that death is permanent. I heard once of a man who couldn't think how to get vengeance on his enemy, short of killing him, and he didn't want that much vengeance. So he challenged the man to combat and beat him, and while his enemy was lying on the ground, faint from loss of blood, he cut off his arm and sewed it on backward. He liked the effect so well that he did the same to the man's other arm, and his legs, too, right at the hips, so that the man's buttocks were facing the same direction as his face. And of course he had a tail. It was a perfect vengeance. When all had healed, his enemy spent the rest of his life watching himself shit, while he never knew whether he was lying with a pretty girl or a plain one."

  I laughed. It was the kind of tale told by the huge fires in Mueller-on-the-River during the wintertime. The kind of tale that men now lacked the spirit to tell, even if they had the wit.

  "I'm never going back, am I, Lanik?" Father said. And the way he said it, I knew he didn't want the truth.

  "Of course you are," I said. "It's only a matter of time before the Nkumai collapse under their own weight. There's a limit to how much land a Family can absorb."

  "No there isn't. I could have conquered everyone."

  "Not without me, you couldn't," I said, belligerently enough that he laughed. It was the same laugh I heard from him when I was a child. I thought of the time I challenged him to single combat when he ordered me to go to my room for my impertinence. He had laughed like that, until I drew sword and demanded to be met with honor. He had to cut my right hand almost off before I was content and would submit.

  "I never should have tried," he said. Tried what, I wondered, until he finished his sentence: "Doing anything without you."

  I said nothing. He had been forced to send me away, a year or so ago; I had acted with little enough choice since then. A year ago? It was yesterday. It was forever. In the darkness I felt as if I had never been anywhere but here, staring up at the stars.

  Father was also looking at the stars. "Will we ever reach them?"

  "With long enough arms."

  "And what will we find if we get there?" Father sounded vaguely sad, as if he had just realized that he would never find something he had carelessly mislaid a long time ago. "If we of Mueller got enough iron and somehow built a starship and went out among the stars, what would we find? After three thousand years, would they greet us with open arms?"

  "The Ambassadors still work. They send us iron. They know we're here."

  "If they ever meant to let us off this planet, they would have come here years ago and taken us off. Whatever sins were committed, they were paid for a thousand times before I was born, Lanik. Did I rebel against the Republic? What threat am I to them? They have weapons that would let one man stand against all of Nkumai's armies and win. While I'm an aging swordsman who once won seventeen archery matches in a single day. I'll wear all my medals and surely they'll bow." He chuckled dismally, and the chuckle twisted off into a sigh.

  "When you cut their arms off, they don't grow back," I said. "So we do have an advantage over them there."

  "We're freaks."

  "I'm cold," I said, but the clouds stayed frozen in their places near the horizon, and no wind blew.

  "No wind," I said. "They've slowed it all down. Look, Father. Across that inlet, see how the grass is lying over? As if a wind were blowing. And yet they stay that way."

  Father seemed not to notice.

  "Father," I said. "Perhaps we ought to go on."

  "Where?" he answered.

  "To find the Ku Kuei."

  "Off like Andrew Apwater, then, trying to find the third moon, a moon all of iron that will save us from hell. There are no Ku Kuei. The Family died out years ago."

  "No, Father. This isn't a natural occurrence, this bubble of time. It follows us everywhere. Since we're not doing it, it must be that it is being done to us, and that means that someone is doing it, and I mean to find them."

  "So maybe there are some Ku Kuei. If we were going to find them, we would have found them already."


  "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 can 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?"

  "Aad 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 wo
rk 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.