Treason

by Orson Scott Card

  I reached down with the wooden knife and stroked his throat with the tip. Then, suddenly, hands were around my throat from behind. I cursed myself for a fool and shoved into quicktime. The man disappeared from the floor in front of me and now leaned over my back, trying to strangle me. I broke his hold, then got behind him. As soon as I was in realtime again, I picked him up and pushed him from the bedroom and into the kitchen. He screamed all the way-- I had broken all his fingers in getting him loose from my neck in quicktime.

  But illusions extended even to the sense of touch, and suddenly he was behind me again, this time with the knife, this time stabbing through my back to my kidneys. By now I was tired of pain, and so instead of trying to fight him, I ran out of the house. An earthquake began instantly. It took tremendous force of will, but I walked right across a crevice that yawned in front of me. It was solid ground. Then, a few dozen meters from the house, I lay on the earth and as quickly as I could forced an earthquake that swallowed up, the house in a huge collapse of land.

  I was lying on the surface of the earth, and it shook beneath me. But it was not the quake that swept through me like a harrow through fine soil. It was the scream of death. Not the scream of a man murdered by a weapon in battle, nor the scream of the countless men and women and children taken by disease or famine or fire or flood. It was the scream of someone murdered by the earth itself, unwillingly, and the cry was amplified a thousand times until it filled me and I, too, screamed.

  I screamed until my voice could no longer fill my ears. The pain was not physical. When it ended, there was no residual aching in my muscles or tension that would not release. The pain was in that part of me which had been in communion with the earth, and as it shattered me I wondered, briefly, if I would die from it.

  I did not die. But when my own scream fell into silence and I looked and saw that the earth had closed again, leaving no trace of the house and its sad, nonexistent flowers, I wanted to call it back, call back the hideous old man, let the life of him continue even though the self of him could not have. He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death, and I might have gone mad at that moment, needing the house and the man and the life to return and knowing that it had to be destroyed, except that for some reason I thought of my father bloated by the water of the lake; I I thought of the thousands of soldiers and civilians of the Rebel River plain killed or left homeless as the Nkumai, led by an Anderson illuder, ravaged and ravished their way across the earth. I thought of the million deaths they had caused and would still cause, the billion lives they would grind down in misery, and this balance, this sense of the utter rightness of the destruction of Anderson, preserved my sanity and let me get up from the ground and weakly, wearily walk back to the rocks leading down to the sea.

  Yet the questions were not so easily resolved. I had heard the scream of the earth at being forced into complicity in a killing-- even a just killing. It would strip the structure of my soul forever. I had never believed I had a soul until then, when it laid bare a hurt more deep than any part of me could bear.

  I grieved all the way across the water; all the way in quicktime back to Gill. I stopped only once, to replace the clothing that got swallowed up in Anderson. I was careful to steal clothing from a house that looked like its owners could afford the loss. These long walks in quicktime left me nothing to do but think, and my thoughts were not comfortable ones on this journey. This time, for once, I could look forward to the relief of talking to someone to whom I didn't have to lie, someone who might be able to understand what I had done, who might not condemn me for it. At last I came to the whorehouse and mounted the stairs and found Lord Barton's body cut into dozens of small pieces, already rotting in the heat coming through the south-facing window.

  Chapter 13 -- Treason

  How they had found him I didn't know, but it couldn't have been hard. The integrity of the manager was suspect at best; stories of our odd midday arrival might have circulated up through the symbiotic chain of criminals and police until it reached the attention of someone who was aware of Barton's miraculous salvation from the archers. The mutilation of his body was probably because, having seen me again after I seemed thoroughly dead, the illuders and their unwitting assistants wanted to make sure there was no chance of error. And they left him in the whorehouse so I'd be sure to find him.

  I was still in qincktime as I surveyed the destruction of my friend. It had been, to me, ten "days" since I left Anderson, nineteen "days" since had left Barton. In realtime, however, it was early evening of the day after I left. I couldn't help wondering if I could have saved Barton by coming back a little faster, or by not leaving him quite so soon. But as I gave him grief, I realized that the guilt I felt because I might have saved him was a trivial thing compared to thie pain of the earth's scream in Anderson. The earth did not hold me responsible for Bartons death, and after the illuders had added Lord Barton's murder to their list of crimes, I couldn't bring myself to feel guilt for the killing of that hideous man in Anderson. So I was able to shrug off the blame for this and remember only that I loved the man, that he was good, and that I had to stop others like him from dying at the illuders' hands.

  With Barton gone, I had no reason to delay the next stage in my journey; I had every reason to hasten it. None of the illuders would escape. No matter what it took, Treason would be free of them before I was through. Any doubt I had about the rightness of my intended killings was gone. I was beyond thought, and intended only to carry out the decision I had so reluctantly made, yet was now grimly glad to fulfill.

  There was a matter of priorities. Before moving against the Andersons who were running things in other Families, I had to see to it that the home island was depopulated. No replacements, no angry and deceptive and irresistible army from Anderson should be able to rescue the rulers. And the population of Anderson could be as much as a million; certainly it was no less than a hundred thousand. That would be long and weary work in quicktime, with me armed only with my iron knife and forced to go from person to person. It would use up my lifetime before I was half through. Their destruction required a cataclysm they could not resist, that would kill them all at once. It was not something I knew how to do.

  I needed help, and there was only one place I could get it. But could I persuade the people of Schwartz to kill, even when that killing would save other lives-- and, perhaps more importantly, make millions of lives more worth living? There was little room for making value judgments in the Schwartzes' thinking, I knew too well. Life was life. Murder was murder. And I, who had left them still innocent, was coming back to them with blood on my hands, asking them to help me with my killing.

  For weeks I had lived utterly alone in quicktime, neither eating nor drinking, neither speaking nor hearing another human voice except that of the beautiful girl in Anderson. Yet I had no time to waste. So for another thirty days I traversed the whole southland of the continent, from Wood to Huss. The trees gave way to lush grassland. The grass gave way to brush that could survive the low rainfall. And finally the brush gave way to endless sand and sunbroken rocks.

  I stopped, in quicktime, by the last bush I could see, and there slipped into realtime. I could not find the Schwartzes. They would have to find me. And find me they would, I knew.

  For a moment I toyed with the thought of turning back. My reunion with them would not be happy. They couldn't possibly kill me, but when I had lived with them I had known the kind of love they give. I had depended on it. It would not be there now.

  I had walked into the desert for half a day when the first Schwartz began paralleling my path, visible from time to time a few dunes away, or at the crest of another rockpile. By afternoon there were three others, and by evening, when I stopped in the shadow of a rise of rock, there were nearly a hundred all around me, more than I had ever seen at one time when I lived among them.

  They were silent, all watching me. I did not eat, of course, but sat before them and in my mind reached into the sand, fou
nd the water far below, and pulled the water to the surface. It glittered in the reflected light from rocks that still caught the sun. I leaned down to drink. The water withdrew, sank away from me. They had judged me, just as I feared.

  I stood, then, and spoke to the Schwartzes.

  "I need your help."

  "You'll get nothing from Schwartz," said an old man.

  "The world needs your help."

  "The earth needs nothing but life." And someone murmured, "Killer."

  "I didn't say the earth!" I answered, sharply. "I said the world. Men. You know what men are-- they're the ones who still have to eat to live, who still worry about dying."

  "Who still fear murderers," said the old min. "We heard the echoes of that scream, Lanik Mueller. You performed the act, so only you heard it clearly, but we know what you did. We taught you, and you used the knowledge to kill. You forced the earth itself to be your sword. If we ever longed to kill, you would be the one whose death we'd seek. Can I say it more plainly? Leave us. Youll get nothing from Schwartz."

  "Helmut?" I asked, recognizing him, though I didn't know how.

  "Yes," the old man answered.

  "I thought you wanted to remain young forever."

  "A friend betrayed me, and I grew old."

  Then he turned his back on me, and so did the others. Yet none of them left.

  The darkness came in then, swiftly as it comes to the desert once the sun is down. But soon Dissent passed through the sky, casting little light but at least providing a reference point so the vertigo of utter darkness did not overtake me. The silence was unbroken, however, until at last I could stand it no longer. My memory of my months among the Schwartzes was too acute. I had been one of them, and now they hated me; I had a task to perform and now I would fail; there were people I cared for, and they would not be freed. I took off my clothes and pressed myself into the sand and wept.

  I wept for myself, who had betrayed the trust of the rock and killed. I wept for Barton, whose wit and courage in trusting a stranger had cost him his life, even as he opened up the possibility of saving the world. I wept for the thousands of people I had passed in my journey here, none of them even suspecting that their fate was passing by, that their future would soon be hanging in the balance.

  And I wept because I knew that in the end it would be largely futile. Even when the Andersons were gone, if I could destroy them, how free would anyone on Treason be? The Muellers would again make iron swords and attack their neighbors; the Nkumai would again descend from the trees and overrun those who fought with wood and glass. Killing the Andersons would open up a flood of death on the earth. Unfree as the world was, they didn't really know it, and they were at peace.

  Who was I to think that this peace was worse than war?

  The real enemy was not the Andersons. The real enemy was iron. Not iron for starships to escape from Treason and return to the rest of the human race. Iron to bring blood from soldiers and make them die-- that was what was destroying us. Because what choice did anyone have? If they had something, anything that could be sold to the Ambassadors for iron, then a Family had an advantage over all the others. And so it was necessary for a Family to protect its independence by striking down all other Families that might develop or had developed something the Ambassadors would buy.

  As I lay in the sand, my head resting on my arms, I realized that killing the Andersons would accomplish nothing unless I also destroyed the Ambassadors. As long as dead iron could be sent from other worlds to shed blood on this one, the dying would go on.

  "You taught me," I said, "that there is iron in the earth."

  They didn't answer me, had not turned even when I wept, supposing, probably, that I wept the tears of the guilty and the damned.

  "Why is none of this iron on the surface?"

  No answer.

  "There was some iron on the surface, wasn't there? That's why the first Schwartz came here, wasn't it? The geological survey showed that there weren't any easily accessible iron deposits. But there was iron here, wasn't there?"

  Helmut spoke: "No one will ever find iron in Schwartz."

  "But it was here, wasn't it? It was here, and you knew, or your ancestors knew, what iron could do, didn't they? They knew the iron would kill. They knew that in the scramble for supremacy, so much blood would be shed that any victory would be meaningless. Didn't they!"

  Helmut turned to me, a strange, twisted expression on his face. "No one has ever left Schwartz believing that."

  "You had the iron! And you decided not to use it! Didn't you!"

  Helmut stood, angry. "Don't you know anything? Haven't you seen the mountains? Why do you think we never let it rain here? If we let the rain fall in Schwartz, the rust in the rocks would be visible for miles! We'd have no peace, not here, not anywhere in the world! We have kept the iron hidden, and you will not bring the world in here to take it and kill with it!"

  Others were facing me now, and they looked angry too.

  "You don't understand. I don't want to tell anyone about it. I want to finish the work your fathers started. You live here in Schwartz protecting mankind from iron, but out there iron a shedding blood anyway. Don't you know that?"

  "Of course we know that," said Helmut. "But we haven't the power to change men's hearts. We're not responsible. It isn't our fault."

  "Your hands are clean, aren't they? Out here where the sun keeps everything pure. But you're not pure. Because if you can stop the suffering and dying and don't stop it, then you are guilty. It is your fault."

  "We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them."

  I had the thread of an argument, though, and I pursued it. "If you help me, I can stop the iron from coming here. I can completely stop the flow of iron from the Republic, and I can end the fear and competition that has been causing these wars. But I can't do it without your help."

  "You're a killer."

  "So are you!"

  Helmut's eyes widened.

  I pressed the point. "In Hanks, hundreds of thousands of people died at swordpoint or from the famine when the land was scorched by the armies of Gill. On the Rebel River plain, hundreds of thousands died when the armies of Nkumai destroyed every living thing in their path. Had any army ever done that kind of thing before? Ever?"

  "The sound of it was terrible," Helmut said faintly.

  "The reason that kind of war was waged was because of iron. Was because Nkumai and Mueller were both getting iron, and it seemed inevitable that one of them would become supreme among the Families. But there was another Family-- one that had a product they could never export. The Ambassador would never give them iron. But what they could do, what they have done, is go out and take the iron the other Families got."

  "What do we care what happens to Mueller and Nkumai?" Helmut said scornfully.

  "Nothing at all. But you should care what happens to humanity, for the sake of the rock if for no other reason. The Family I speak of is Anderson, and their power is to lie. Not just to tell someone something that isn't true, but to make them believe it, against their will, to make them so sure that the he is true that it never occurs to them to question it." I told them about Dinte, about Mwabao Mawa, about Percy Barton.

  Helmut looked concerned at List. "These are the people who have been killing so many?"

  "They are."

  "And what would you do? Kill them all?"

  My pause was answer enough. Helmut's look changed to loathing. "And you want us to help. You were never my friend, not if you can believe we would do it."

  "Listen to me!" I shouted, as if sheer volume would make him open his mind. "The Andersons are irresistible. No man can fight them. They've come subtly this time, insinuating themselves in governments and ruling people who don't know they're ruled by them. But if they're aroused, they can come from their island in force, and no army could resist them, because they would come appearing to be terrible monsters; or they would come invisibly in the night; or t
hey would fight openly, and yet when a man struck at them his enemy would no longer be where he seemed to be, and every soldier would be killed before he ever put his sword to good effect."

  "I know what warfare is," Helmut said contemptuously, "and I reject it."

  "Of course you reject it. Who can kill you? You'll never die. But out there are millions of people who can die, and when someone comes up to them with a sword in his hand and says, 'Obey me or I'll kill you and your wife and your children,' what does he do? He obeys. Even if he's a hero, he obeys, because he knows that anyone who has the power to kill and is willing to use it will defeat all enemies unless they are just as eager to kill. The power to steal life is the ultimate power in this world, and before that power every other man is weak."

  "We aren't weak."

  "You aren't men. Men are mortal. You can laugh at a soldier and throw up a wall of rock that will keep him out forever. You can stand on that wall and watch as he and his children and his grandchildren grow old and die, and you'll never understand why it is that they're so constantly afraid. They're afraid because the rain might not come and if their crop fails they'll starve; because floods or earthquakes can snatch away their lives without warning; but most of all because in the night another man can come and lift a sword and cut them off completely from the world. They're afraid of death I. Can you at least imagine what that means?"

  "We fear death, too," Helmut said.

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

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

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