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 Famil
y 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 n
o 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.
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