"I need your advice."
"And I need solitude. or dualitude. Do you realize that I was on the verge of accomplishing something that I haven't achieved in thirty years? Twice in a row. Twice in ten minutes."
"There'll be other opportunities. Listen, Barton, I've been to the palace. I've met your son. He's a woman, your age or older, and she's surrounded by fellow illuders, including your former servant. But I can't get anything out of them. They're a bit alarmed, in fact. They know that I know them; they've had a taste of what I can do. Within a week they'll be able to notify others, and I'll never be able to stay ahead of them. Do you understand the situation?"
"You bollixed it up."
"I took a chance and it missed. So now, since you were stupid enough to come here after you promised to stay in Humping--"
"Humping," he said wistfully.
"You might as well make yourself useful. I need to know where they come from. I need to know their homeland. Because unless we strike there, first and hard, we'll never stop them."
He began thinking at once.
"Well, Lanik, it's plain enough that we can't just pull numbers out of a hat and hope to find them. There are eighty Families-- it could be any one of them."
"There are ways to narrow it down. I've got a theory, a good one, I think, about what the Families are doing. In Nkumai I found a history of sorts. It listed what the different Families' founders specialized in. Nkumai, for example, was founded by a physicist. Their export product is physical and astronomical theory. In Mueller we exported the product of genetic research-- the first Mueller was a geneticist. You see?"
"How constant is that?"
"I haven't visited that many countries and been informed what their export product is. But it held true for Ku Kuei and Schwartz."
"A philosopher and a geologist."
I must have looked startled.
"I don't know why the information should surprise you. Britton was founded by a historian. Not a very likely field to turn into a viable export product, but we're fanatics about keeping records. The list of the original eighty traitors from Anderson to Wynn is memorized by every schoolchild, along with brief biographies that include their occupations. We're very thorough. I can also recite my genealogy from Britton himself to me. I haven't done so up to now because you haven't asked me to."
"I never will. You're a man of iron, Barton."
"The question is, what occupation could possibly have led to a Family becoming illuders? Psychologists would be most obvious, wouldn't they? Who was a psychologist? Drew, of course, but they live in their hovels in the north and have dreams of killing their fathers and sleeping with their mothers."
"That could be an illusion," I said.
"Only last year they attacked Arven across the mountains and were humiliatingly defeated. Does that sound like our enerny?"
I shrugged. How could we tell anything about the illuders?
"Besides, they've made little secret of what they've been working on for centuries. Somewhere along the line, the people we're looking for would have to have become secretive. Don't you think? Another psychologist, the only other one, was Hanks. I know nothing about them except that they rebelled against the East Alliance two years ago and my loving son went in with an army and burned the whole country to the ground. The stories said that only one in three people survived, and they lived by getting over the borders and living on charity in Leishman and Parker and Underwood. There is no charity in Gill. Again, it doesn't seem to be a likely spot for the illuders' homeland.
Again, he was right. "No more psychologists?"
"No."
"What other professions then?"
"Maybe they're an exception to your theory, Lanik. Maybe they came up with something new."
"Go through the list. We've got to try to find the most likely prospect, anyway."
So we went through the list. It was tedious, but he wrote it down, in a beautiful script that gave me even more respect for his education, though I could hardly read it. Our guesses were long shots. Tellerman was an actor, but that Family was well known to have literary pretensions. The Ambassador had rejected every book and play and poem they had offered in three thousand years. Their persistence was remarkable. There had been no illusionists or magicians among the original group exiled here, of course-- that was too crass a profession, since the rebellion had been a revolt of the elite against their exploitation by the democratic tyranny of the masses. With a few exceptions, the exiles on Treason were the cream of the cream, the prime intellects of the Republic. Which meant that except for the psychologists and a few other peripheral ones, probably involved in funding the revolt, most of the rebels were experts in a science.
When we had spent more than an hour exhausting, as we thought, every possibility, the answer suddenly seemed so obvious I couldn't believe we had overlooked it until now.
"Anderson," I said.
"We don't even know what he did," Barton said.
"As a profession, we don't. And yet he was head of the rebellion, wasn't he?"
"'Of traitors, traitor most foul,'" Barton intoned.
"Leader of the intellectuals, and yet not an intellectual hiniself."
"Yes. One of the inscrutable facts in history."
"A politician," I said. "A demagogue who got himself elected to the Republic Council, and yet the same man was able to win the trust of the finest minds of the Republic. Isn't that a contradiction?"
Barton smiled. "You have something there. Of course he wouldn't have any ability like our current enemies. But he was able to make people think he was what he wanted them to think he was. And, except that they're better at it, isn't that what the illuders are doing now?"
I leaned back on my chair. "You at least admit that it's plausible then?"
"Plausible. Not probable. But none of the others are even possible, so far as I can see. Which makes Anderson the best bet, at least to try first."
I got up and started out the door.
"Isn't this a bit rude? Aren't you going to invite me along?"
"I'll only be gone a couple of days," I said.
"It's at least a week's ride across rough country in Israel till you get to the shore, and then you have to get a boat to cross the nastiest bit of water in the world, the Quaking Sea-- unless you're fool enough to try the Funnel. That's at least a fortnight's absence-- and you'd probably kill a couple of horses doing it that quickly."
"It won't take me that long. Trust me. Have I let you down yet?"
"Only when you sent the young lady out of the room. Don't worry, though. I won't try to follow you. If you say two days, I'll wait two days, or even more. A man who can make arrows turn in midflight can fly to the moons, if he wishes."
I had another thought. "Maybe you ought to wait somewhere else," I said.
"Nonsense. It's more risky to go out on the street. Besides, I have unfinished business. I want to set a record for myself. Three times within one hour. Send her back in here."
I sent her back in when I left.
It was infuriating that I arrived sooner when I walked the distance in quicktime than when I rode it in realtime on a horse-- all because I hadn't learned how to extend my bubble of time in Ku Kuei. It took me nine long days' worth of walking to get to the coast of Israel in the quickest quicktime I had ever attempted since leaving Ku Kuei. There had been a time in my life when solitude and exercise had been invigorating. Now I was weary of being alone, even wearier of endlessly walking from place to place, seeing people like statues in the fields, all so unaware of how they were being subverted by the illuders. I was out to save them, and they didn't even know they needed to be saved.
I was weary to the bone when I reached the promontory of Israel overlooking the Funnel, the narrow strait between Anderson and the continent. The waves of the sea were frozen, of course, in the middle of their furious rush northward into the slightly lower Quaking Sea. The crests of the waves reached nearly to the level of the promontory wher
e I stood, like hills rising from a cataclysm of the earth.
There were few things I hadn't done in quicktime, but swimming in a realtime sea was one of them. In Ku Kuei, when I swam in quicktime I was always with someone whose timeflow was I strong enough to carry a portion of the lake, not to mention me along with it.
I gingerly stepped into the water. While air caused me no resistance at all in quicktime, the water was sluggish and bore my weight much better than it did in realtime. In fact, my passage across the Funnel was not properly swimming at all. I crawled, after a fashion, up the slope of a wave as if it were a muddy hill after a rainstorm. Then I slid easily down the other side. After a while it became exhilarating, if exhausting. It was still afternoon when I reached the other side and scrambled out of the sea onto the rocky shore of Anderson Island.
Once out of the reach of the giant seas, I looked around. The land was grassy, strewn with boulders, and sheep grazed here and there-- it was settled land. But it was also hot and dry and bleak. The grass was not thick, and each sheep that was moving at all had a small cloud of dust around it, which from my point of view seemed to hang in the air.
I walked along the crest of the slope leading down to the rocky coast, wondering how I would now go about discovering if this were indeed the home of the illuders. I couldn't very well go up to someone and say, "Good afternoon, is this where the bastards who are trying to take over the world hail from?" I had to have some plausible reason for being there. Remembering the sea I had just crossed, shipwreck seemed a likely possibility. All I had to do was make sure to struggle ashore conveniently near some shepherd's house. From there I could, I hoped, play it by ear.
When I came to a house only a few meters from the beginning of the rocky littoral, I scrambled back down the rocks to the sea. Recognizing how high the waves really were and how violent they must be in realtime, I prudently climbed to the crest of the first wave away from the shore. And then I slipped back into realtime.
I should have stood on a rock and let the spray get me wet.
Chapter 12 -- Anderson
The wave didn't wait around for anything. I was immediately dropped sickeningly toward the rocks of the coast as a new wave came after and slammed down on top of me. I met the rock with a sickening crunch of bone and then was lifted again to be slammed down again.
The pain of my shattered right leg was excruciating, which distracted me, and my body refused to let me use it in my I swimming. For the first time in quite a while I had met up with a force of nature I couldn't cope with, and I feared for my life. My father had died by breaking his spine in water. As I sank rapidly toward the rocks a second time, my urge for survival took over and I scrabbled through the water toward the shore and caught at a rock. But the wave that hit me tore loose my grasp and pulled me out again.
The third time I was able to keep my hold and drag myself farther from the waves. I was still soaked by spray every time a wave came to shore-- which seemed to be every second or two-but I was relatively safe. I waited for several minutes for my leg to begin to heal enough that, if necessary, I could walk on it. When I was satisfied that it could bear my weight, I began calling out.
"Help!" I bellowed. It was hopeless-- I couldn't possibly be heard above the din of the waves. I had to get closer to the hut and farther from the sea. I clambered less than nimbly among the rocks. It was then that I saw her, a girl who couldn't have been older than twenty, dressed in a simple garment that didn't come to her knees. She was winsomely beautiful, and the light breeze tossed her black hair. This was hardly the moment to feel amorous, but I was immediately attracted to her. Seriously attracted to a woman for the first time since leaving Saranna in Ku Kuei.
I called out again and she came delicately down among the rocks until she reached me. She smiled; I smiled back, but let the pain I still felt show clearly in my face. I stumbled often-- not hard to manage as she helped me up to the plateau. While she led me to her house I burbled out a story of getting caught in the current heading up the Funnel, my father and I in a fishing boat; how I was sure he had been drowned since the mast when it broke struck him in the head. She, in turn, told me how the sea had snatched her old father from the rocks not three years ago, and she was struggling to keep a flock of sheep and retain her independence.
"Surely you don't lack for marriage offers," I said.
"No," she answered shyly. "But I'm waiting."
"For what?" I asked.
"The right one, of course," she said playfully, and then led me to her cottage.
From a distance, when I had first seen her house, I hadn't noticed the flowers growing around the walls. They made a pleasant contrast in this land of desolation, and I found myself liking her. She offered me food, showing me a cold stew that she could soon heat up.
Before I could say anything the earth began to shake and I was thrown to the floor. I knew enough about earthquakes to know that indoors was not a good place to be during one-- I scrambled on all fours to the door and watched as the earth visibly heaved and a crevice opened in the ground not ten meters off. It was wide, and the earth groaned as it opened and closed again.
Then the quake was over. I got up, sheepishly, and dusted off my clothes. They were still wet from the sea-mud clung to them. I remembered to limp, though my leg was nearly healed now.
"I'm sorry," she said, and I realized she seemed more vexed than terrified by the quake. "We have such inconvenient weather here, between the earth, the sky, and the sea." As if to prove her point, the sky, which up to a moment ago had been cloudless, suddenly began to pour down rain as clouds roiled from one horizon to the other.
The flowers were quickly drenched-- but they seemed to stand a little straighter.
"Your clothes," she said. "I can wash out that mud, if you want to take them off. And the salt from the sea, too."
I trust my blush was convincing-- I was convmced, anyway. She seemed so innocent that it was impossible not to be shy with her.
"I'm not wearing anything under these," I admitted.
"Then go into the back room-- I have two rooms-- and pass them to me through the curtain."
I didn't have to be urged. I stripped off the trousers and shirt, reminders of Glain and Vran and Humping, and handed them to her, then lay on the bed, which was surprisingly soft-- luxury like Mueller, here in sheep country! I sank into the bed, naked, spread-eagled, to dry out and relax. It felt good, after a month of relentless travel and a grueling few hours with the sea.
I slept.
What woke me, I'm not sure. I couldn't have slept long-- the sky was virtually unchanged, still dark with clouds but not with night. The smell of the stew was strong in the house. Then the door opened. She stood in the doorway, naked. Her body was young; it reminded me achingly of Saranna's body when we were children in our teens, before I left Mueller too many years ago. I was still in my teens, wasn't I? But it felt too long ago for me to believe it. I wanted the girl. Or perhaps I wanted my youth again. Whatever my own motive, from her nakedness, from her smile, it was plain she wanted me to want her.
Wanted me to want her. Was this the shy woman who made me blush?
Something didn't fit. Many things didn't fit. As she came into the room and knelt on the bed, I realized how terribly unlikely it was that such a creature as this could live unmolested in such isolation, so near the coast. I realized how odd it was that the rainclouds appeared from nowhere, that she hadn't been bothered by an earthquake that nearly shook her house down, and that as sweet and shy as she was, she now knelt straddling my body, her arms crossed over her breasts.
I pushed into quicktime. The knife was only a handspan away from my throat. The nude young girl was now a vile, ugly old man, with perhaps the most vicious, hate-filled expression I have ever seen on a human face. His eyes were deep-set and watery, his face gaunt with poverty. I had no doubt what he was after. His skeletal body cried out for meat. By comparison to him, I was fat.
The bed I was on was not soft, eithe
r-- it was a board, and so hard and ungiving that when I slid awkwardly out from between his legs, he hardly bounced. I stood there for a moment, wondering what to do. The door to the kitchen was still open. I went in and found that the stewpot, far from being full of cold stew, was actually dusty from nonuse. None of the interior finishing that had made the place look homey and inviting was real-- it had made way for rough sod walls, a dirt floor, and filth everywhere.
The dirt, in fact, was indescribable. It was as if, because the man could choose to live in illusion, he didn't bother to make his real surroundings even tolerable. Did his illusions really fool him? Perhaps. Yet, I realized, he had already put on my clothes, and I could find no trace of his own. Had he been naked then, before? The poverty was appalling. I had never seen a human being live in such relative savagery outside of Schwartz, and there the poverty had dignity, since the Schwartzes were truly clothed in sunlight and air.
Outside, even the flowers turned out to be brambles and dusty grey grass. The hut was tilting, slipping toward collapse. There was no trace of any crevice in the earth, and the rain, like the quake, had been an illusion.
There could be no doubt, then, that Anderson was the place I was seeking. And no doubt that my decision was correct. If there was an opposite to what the world should be, Anderson was it: all seeming beautiful, but in truth vicious and squalid and murderous.
I went back into the house, back to the tiny lean-to that in the illusion was a bedroom, and took the knife out of the old man's hand. Then I slipped into realume. He turned into the girl again, but suddenly she pulled up and held one hand with the other because of the pain of my having pulled away the knife so quickly. She looked to where I was, and her face registered shock. I kicked her squarely in the groin, and suddenly she was an old man lying on the floor, writhing.
"Who are you!" he demanded. "Whose dream are you!"
"Yours," I said.
Recovering somewhat from the pain, he nastily said, "I come up with better dreams in my sleep. I thought you were real, the way that quake scared you."
Treason Page 24
