It was a fine journey, all done in less than twenty-four hours from the time we left the army, if only the army had been there when we got back.
From a kilometer away, it was clear something was wrong. We were skirting the shores of the long lake, and we could see far ahead along the meadowland. But where smoke still rose from the campfires, there were no large herds of horses. No horses at all. Nothing.
Except corpses, of course. Not too many, but enough to make the story clear. Homarnoch, who had insisted on bringing his wagon into the forest, troublesome though it was, lay dead in front of the wagon's charred remains. Even a Mueller can't regenerate burns over the entire body-- but to make sure, they had cut his head off after his death. The other corpses were similarly taken care of.
This we took in after only a few moments at the camp. I looked for Saranna, calling her name. Yet I hoped she wasn't there-- better to imagine her alive among the deserters than dead, here. I went on calling for her, and soon the Ku Kuei joined in the search for living among the dead. It was the leader who called tome. "Lake-drinker!" he shouted. "Someone alive!"
I started toward him.
"It's a woman!" he shouted, and I came faster.
Father was kneeling beside her. Her arms and legs had been cut off, and her larynx had been cut out. Her body was regenerating, but not all that quickly. She was not a rad. She still couldn't talk.
The Ku Kuei leader kept demanding to know how she had healed so quickly and why she hadn't bled to death, until Father told him to shut his fat mouth for a minute. We fed her, and she looked at me with an expression that tore at my heart, and the stumps of her arms reached out to me. I held her. The Ku Kuei, puzzled, watched.
"I guess this means you won't be needing us," said the leader, after a while.
"More than ever," I said, even as Father said, "That's right."
"Now which of you do I believe?" he asked.
"Me," I insisted. "We don't need thirty men for our army. But there's nowhere we can go now. The three of us. My father, Ensel Mueller. Saranna, my-- wife. And my name is Lanik Mueller."
"We've fulfilled our part of the bargain," said the fat Ku Kuei. "So we're rid of you. Shall we carry you to the edge of the forest?"
I had little patience. I moved the ground under him. He landed heavily on his backside and swore.
"You have the instincts of a bully," he said angrily. "May your children all be porcupines! May your gall bladder be full of stones! May your father be found to have been sterile all his life!"
He looked so serious, so intense that I couldn't help but laugh. And when I started laughing, the leader broke into a grin. "You're my kind of fellow!" he shouted.
it didn't take much to get ahead with the Ku Kuei.
They carried Saranna back with them, amazingly careful for such huge, malproportioned people; but they stopped to rest oftener than Father or I needed, and while Father eagerly ate the immense snacks they constantly offered to share with us, I didn't bother eating. Instead I stayed with Saranna and fed her. We had been traveling for hours on our second day after leaving the camp when Saranna finally spoke.
"I think," she began huskily, "that my voice will work again."
"Oh no!" shouted one of the Ku Kuei. "A woman speaks, and silence is banished from the forest!" The remark brought immense peals of laughter, and several of the Ku Kuei were lying on the ground, unable to sit up because either the laughter or the meal made it impossible for them to remain upright.
"Saranna," I said, and she smiled.
"You weren't gone very long, Lanik."
"Too long, it seems," I said.
"They left me alive to tell you what they thought."
"The only good thing that's been done in a month."
"They were sure you had gone off to kill the Mueller. They knew you planned to bring the terrors of Ku Kuei back to destroy them. They hated you. And so they left."
"Killing on the way."
"Homarnoch forbade them and threatened to kill the first man who left. There were a great many who intended to be first, and so Homarnoch killed no one. Some of the men tried to defend him. They died, too."
"And you."
"They were quick. They wanted to make sure I couldn't travel easily. They thought it would stop you and the monsters from pursuing them."
I looked at the thirty-odd Ku Kuei, sitting, like small mountains or snoring in the grass. "Monsters," I said, and Saranna laughed, but the laughter soon turned to tears, her voice sobbing thickly.
"It feels so good to have a voice to cry with," she murmured when the tears had subsided.
"How are your feet?"
"Better. But the bones aren't hard. Tomorrow I can walk, a little."
I unwrapped the bandage the Ku Kuei had improvised around her legs. "Liar," I said. "You're not even halfway down the shin yet."
"Oh," she answered. "I thought I could feel my toes."
"That's the nerve regenerating. Haven't you ever lost a leg before?"
"My friends didn't pull pranks like that. And I always behaved in school." She smiled.
"All right, we're going, hup hup, hurry, we haven't much time!" shouted the leader, and the others laughed loudly as we started going again. I silently longed to kill the next man who laughed.
The city of the Ku Kuei was in the middle of the lake, on the island we had seen from the shore. If you can call it a city. There were no buildings, no structures of any kind. Just forest, and grass that was rather thoroughly tramped down in a few places.
What was remarkable were the people. The children, mercifully, were thin, but the adults made me suspect that kilo for kilo, the Ku Kuei were more than half the mass of human life on Treason. The impression I got-- and I never had any reason to change it-- was one of incredible laziness. No one seemed to do anything that he could avoid doing. "Come hunting with us," many of them said to me, and once I went. They would put themselves into quicktime and walk up to the prey and kill it while it stood motionless, still in normal time. When I suggested it wasn't sporting, they looked at me oddly. "When you want to run a race, do you cut off your feet?" one of them asked me. And another one said, "If I cut off my feet, does that mean I never have to run another race?" Paroxysms of laughter. I went back to the city then.
Yet for all their laziness, their determination to be amused at everything, and their utter unwillingness to take any commitment seriously, I came to love the Ku Kuei. Not as I had the Schwartzes, for I had also admired them; I loved the Ku Kuei as immense self-propelled toys. And they, for some strange reason, loved me, too. Perhaps because I had found a new way to force someone to take a pratfall.
"What's your name?" I asked the man who had led our would-be rescue party.
"What do you think, Lake-drinker?"
"How should I know? And my name's Lanik Mueller."
He giggled. "That's not a name. You drank the lake, you're Lake-drinker."
"You're the only one who calls me that."
"I'm the only one who calls you anything," he said. "And how's Stump?"
When I found out he meant Saranna, I left him.
He couldn't understand why I was angry. He thought the name was appropriate.
I suppose the months I passed in Ku Kuei were a sort of idyll, like my time in Schwartz. But in Schwartz I was still exuberant for the future. In Ku Kuei, my future was behind me. And Father was trying to die.
I realized it on the second day of our lessons with Man-Who-Knows-It-All. Saranna and I were lying in the grass, our eyes closed, paying careful attention as the teacher spoke softly and sang occasionally and tried to help us feel his own timeflow as it enveloped us. I don't know what aroused me from the trance (and I roused unwillingly, I'm sure, since Man-Who-Knows-It-All has the gentlest timeflow I ever shared), but I looked over at Father and his eyes were open, staring straight into the sky, and the track of a tear ran down from his eye to his hair.
At the time I put the worry out of my mind. Surely Father had ple
nty to feel bad about; no reason to try to force him to imitate cheerfulness he didn't feel.
But because of Father, I found it progressively harder to involve myself in the happy-go-lucky mood that unflinchingly gripped the Ku Kuei. Unflinchingly gripped? That was my attitude. Though at times I felt relaxed, felt loved, felt good, I was never wholly at peace. Mostly because of my worry about Father. But partly because in all my growing up, I had never had lessons in breaking loose and not caring. I had just survived a very difficult year, and its effects were slow to fade. Besides, it's impossible to be uncaring after having heard the music of the earth.
"You're too intense," said Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass (the name I eventually gave to the leader I had given several pratfalls to-- he loved the name and several of his friends picked it up). "Man-Who-Knows-It-All says you're not making very good progress. You have to learn to laugh."
"I know how to laugh."
"You know how to make silly sounds with a tight belly. Nobody can laugh with a tight belly. And you're too thin. It's a sign of worry, Lake-drinker. I'm telling you this because I think you want to learn timeshifting. You're trying too hard." For once Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass looked deadly serious, very concerned. The expression was so foreign to his face that I had to laugh, and he laughed back, thinking he had achieved something. But he had achieved nothing.
Because Father was not paying attention. Even in easygoing Ku Kuei, one had to pay attention to survive, and Father didn't care. He fell down a lot, once from a rather high hill. That time he ended up with two broken arms. They healed in a few days, but as he lay under a tree during a rainstorm, while I practiced elementary time control by slowing the two of us down a little (very little) so the drops fell with less apparent force, he suddenly held my hand very tightly, which surely caused his arm to hurt worse, and said, "Lanik, you have the power of the Schwartzes. Can you change me?"
"Into what?" I asked, trying to keep the mood light because a light mood was getting ingrained in me.
"Take away my Muellerness. Take away the regeneration."
I was puzzled. "If I did that, Father, that fall might have killed you. And it would take months for these arms to heal."
He looked away from me, his eyes full of tears, and I realized that the fall from the hill might not really have been an accident. It worried me. Father had had reverses before, but this one, admittedly the worst by far, was holding him far too tightly.
Saranna caused me another kind of worry. It began when I found her making love to Bug-killer, so named because he thrashed around so much during sex. She was laughing as he flung out his legs, and she kept laughing even when she looked at me.
Sex under the trees was a common enough sight in Ku Kuei, and I wasn't under any delusion that I had been confining my lovemaking to Saranna because of any overconcern with faithfulness. I just found Ku Kuei women too fat to enjoy. I was a little jealous, I'm sure, but overriding that was my realization that Saranna seemed no different from any other woman in Ku Kuei-- amused, detached, easy.
It was Saranna who had begged me to take her with me when I first left Mueller; Saranna who had gashed herself deeply when I refused to let her continue as my lover after I found out I was a rad. And she had been intensely in love with me from the time I came back. Yet now--
"Saranna is a good student," said Man-Who-Knows-It-All.
"I know," I answered. "I can sense her timeflow now almost as well as I sense yours."
"You're unhappy," said my teacher.
"I imagine so."
"Are you jealous because you are the poorest student I've ever had while Saranna is as good as one of our own more gifted children?"
I shrugged. That certainly was part of it. "Maybe I'm more worried because she seems to care less about the things that I care about."
Man-Who-Knows-It-All laughed. "You care about everything! How can anybody care about so much!"
"My father cares even more," I said.
"On the contrary, Tight-Gut, your father cares as little as we do. It's just that he tends to despair, while we are full of hope."
"I'm losing Saranna."
"That's good. No one should own someone else." And he went on explaining why it was that my time-sense was no good and I needed to relax before I got as stiff and hard as a tree.
I wasn't worried all the time, of course. That would be impossible in Ku Kuei. If there weren't the games in the lake or the mad expeditions through the forest, there would be enough to engage a man for a century just walking through the city, pausing to taste the timeflows as people lived at their own pace.
For instance, Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass was almost constantly in a very fast timeflow. I was so inept at timeshaping that I almost automatically joined the timeflow of anyone nearby; in contrast, even Ku Kuei of ordinary skills could hold onto their own timeflow even standing right next to someone else. When I was with Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass, the rest of the world seemed utterly stopped. We walked and talked and the sun never moved in the sky and the people we passed were frozen or (if they had a fast timeflow) they moved sluggishly. No one moved as quickly as Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass.
"My friend," I finally said one day, when I felt he was my friend, "you speed through life so quickly. What's your hurry?"
"I'm not in a hurry. I never walk fast."
"I've been here for maybe a month or so--"
He interrupted by giggling. "I don't know how you keep track of the days, as if they meant anything!"
"And you've grown older in that time."
He touched his hair. "Grey, huh?"
"Grey. And wrinkles."
"Laugh wrinkles!" he said triumphantly, as if that answered everything.
His fey attitude was growing in Saranna-- but it held her differently. She slowed down. It was not a sudden decision-- "Today I'll be slow" --it was gradual. But after she mastered timeshaping I began to notice that when I was with her, caught up in her flow, everything around us moved quickly. Unbearably fast, the Ku Kuei who passed us dancing madly, racing out of sight, jabbering for a moment and going on. When Saranna and I talked, she kept looking over my shoulder, from side to side, watching as people sped by. Now and then she'd smile, an expression unrelated to our conversation, and I'd turn to see the scene that had amused her already gone.
When I met her once early in the morning and after a short conversation found that it was nearly night, I asked her why she slowed down so much.
"Because they're so funny," she said. "Racing along like that."
That would have been reason enough for the flighty girl I had first fallen in love with, but it wasn't reason enough now. I insisted. She balked. "You're too intense, Lanik. But I love you."
We made love, and it was as good as ever, and her passion for me was still warm, not the laughing, amusing affairs she had with the Ku Kuei. I knew I still had a hold on her, yet not enough of one to persuade her not to make the world race by without taking part.
She became notable. The Ku Kuei took to calling her Stump for another reason now; to most of them she was as immovable and dead as a cut tree. She wouldn't change her timeflow for anyone, and so I, the chameleon who changed times with every friend, was the one who could most easily talk to her. Most of the time she stood, frozen impossibly in midstep, and from a distance I watched sometimes for hours as she would complete a step and shift weight to the other foot.
Once for three days every time I saw her she was in the middle of making love to Man-Who-Knows-It-All. The caresses and strokes were as slow, the movement as infinitesimal, as if they were distant stars, and I felt as if I had never known her, or worse, as if she were merely a pornographic statue under a tree on Ku Kuei Island.
Saranna and Father were both finding their own way to retreat from life. While I was unable to escape.
The day that Father died he came to me and lay beside me under a tree as a thin drizzle fell. "Play no games with time today," Father said. "You always concentrate so hard that I don't think you're liste
ning to me." And so I lay there and Father put his arm around me and pulled me close as he had when we were on maneuvers when I was a child. He was saying I love you. He was saying good-bye.
"I was a builder," he said, writing his epitaph in my mind, "but my buildings crumbled, Lanik. I have outlived all my works."
"Except me."
"You've been shaped by stronger forces than I can muster. It's a shame when an architect lives to see the temple fall."
No one had built temples in Mueller for centuries.
"Was I a good king?" Father asked.
"Yes," I answered.
"No," he said. "Wars and murders, conquest and power, all so important for so many years, and then all undone. Not undone by the inexorable forces of nature. Undone because men who live in trees happened to win the game and get the prize faster than we, and it unbalanced us, threw us to the ground. Chance. And it was as much chance when we got iron from the Ambassador, and so I wasn't an empire builder after all, was I? I just used the iron to kill people."
"Yov were a good ruler to your people," I said, because he needed to hear it and because, on the relative scale by which monarchs must be measured, it was true.
"They play games with us. A dose of iron here, a dose there, and see what that does to the playing field. I was a pawn, Lanik, and I thought I was the king."
He grabbed me fiercely, clung to me, whispered savagely in my ear, "I will not laugh!" To prove it he wept, and so did I.
He drowned himself that day. The body was found floating in the tall rushes of the shallow side of the island, where the current had carried him. He had jumped from a cliff into a shallow part of the lake and broken his neck; his body could not regenerate quickly enough to stop him from drowning as he lay helpless on the bottom. The pain I felt then still qomes back to me in sharp memories sometimes, but I refused to grieve. He had beaten the regeneration, and I was rather proud of his ingenuity. Suicide had been beyond most of the Muellers for years, unless they were mad and could lie down in flames. Father was not mad, I'm sure of it.
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