Orson Card - Treason

I screamed.

The sand sifted by my ears and swept between my legs, and as it pressed against my face I separated myself from the self whose ears had heard for me, and I asked (without words; for there is no mouth that can shape that language) for the sand to lift me to the surface.

I rose through the warm sand and it broke above me. I spread my arms and legs upon the surface of the sand, and it bore me. I had fallen, it seemed, from the pinnacle of rock to the heart of the earth, and now I coasted on the surface, floated on the still wave of sand.

I smiled, and Helmut stood over me, smiling also.

"Did he sing to you?"

I nodded.

"And he found you clean."

"Or cleaned me," I said, and then shuddered to remember the screams of the dying. I looked at the tower of rock I had fallen from. It was no more than two meters high. My eyes widened, and Helmut laughed.

"We raised it up to make your testing place," he said. "If you hadn't jumped yourself, we would have crumbled it and made you fall."

"Nice folks," I said, but I was too full to be bitter, and it didn't surprise me when Helmut knelt and touched my chest and then embraced me. He wept on my skin, the water standing in drops that soon evaporated. "I love you, " he whispered, "and I'm glad that you were received."

"So am I," I said, and we slept, his cool skin pressed against mine as the sand had pressed, not to arouse or satisfy, but to express; and as we slept we dreamed together, and I learned Helmut's true voice, and I loved him.

I could have stayed in Schwartz forever. I wanted to. They wanted me to. I learned quickly, and while they had repaired the most obvious signs of my radical regeneration, my body was still determined to be unusual. There is a part of the brain that holds the function that lets the Schwartzes speak to stone; as I learned to use it, my body developed it, let it grow. My skull bulged a little upward of and behind my ears to make room, and the spokesman finally told me, "You are beyond us now."

I was surprised. "You do things I can't dream of doing."

"Together," he said. "Alone we aren't as strong as you."

"Then make yourselves like I am."

"There are secrets that the carbon chains can keep even from us."

That was that. Yet it didn't occur to me, not for weeks, that this gave me an advantage that would set me free. For the simple reason that I didn't want to be free of them.

When I spoke to the rock, I learned many things that brought me to myself. The wars were continuing, and as I learned to endure the agony of the many deaths, I also learned to study the wars and see where the battles were being fought. When I talked to the rock, the earth's skin became my skin, and I learned to feel where the cries were coming from. The battles at first were on the plain between Allison and the headwaters of the Rebel River. Then the battles moved to the hill country of Robles, and northwest to the confluence of the Myron and the Rebel where the Rebel River ceases to be called Swoop and begins to be called Mueller. And then the war was in Wizer, a land my father had conquered, and that meant that the Nkumai had swept all before them and were at the borders of my country.

It didn't matter now that I knew the secret of the Nkumai's iron. It didn't matter that my father had sent me away and my brother, Dinte, wanted to kill me. I was no longer a radical regenerative, and I was twice the soldier my father was and by far a better general than Dinte. I was needed, if my Family was to endure.

At first the thought of going to war was repugnant to me, but my Family's need tore at me, and I began to ask the rock. I asked whether one life could be more important than another, and the rock said no. I asked whether it was right to end one life, if, by ending it, many others could be saved. The rock said yes. And I asked if loyalty meant anything to the forces of the universe, and the rock wept.

Loyalty? What but loyalty made the rock respond to the call of the Schwartzes? The Earth understood trust, and I asked if it was good for me to go back and lead my Family. And the rock said yes.

This conversation was not the product of one night's sleep under the sand, however. It took many nights and many sleeps, and the months passed before I knew that I could go home; that I must go home.

"You can't go home," said the spokesman.

"The rock spoke to me and told me I should go."

"The rock told you it was good for you to go. Good for you. Good for your family. But not good for us."

"Good for the earth."

"The blood soaks into the earth the same no matter who wields the civilized tools," said the spokesman. "If you go, it will be good and it will be bad. I can't let you go, we can't let you go; you've taken all we have to teach and now you'll use it to destroy and kill in the name of loyalty."

"I swear I'll never use what you've taught me to kill."

"If you kill, you'll use what we taught you."

"Never."

"Because now every man who dies at your hand will scream into your soul forever, Lanik."

It was something to give me pause.

When the warfare moved to the lowlands of Cramer, not three hundred kilometers from Mueller-on-the-River, the capital, I could wait no longer. Helmut and I were playing in the pinnacles of a knife-like ridge of mountains, doing acrobatics a thousand meters above the sand, when I pulled the rock out from under him and he fell.

The rock caught him on a ledge a hundred meters below me and far above the desert.

"You bastard!" he shouted.

"I have to! " I shouted back. "If you warn the council, they can stop me!"

"You said you loved me!"

I did. I do. But I said nothing. He tried to crawl up the rock. But I forbade the rock to hold him, and I was stronger. He tried to make handholds in the rock. But I was stronger. He tried to throw himself from the ledge to the sand below, but the rock would not let him jump because I said so. And I was stronger.

The ridge pointed northwest, and I went northwest. When it ended, I plunged down into the sand, and ran all day and all night, forbidding my body to sleep. I went by the fastest way any Schwartz could travel, and because none was faster than I, no pursuit could overtake me.

It took eight days. I slept while running, for my mind had to have sleep even when my body didn't. At last I reached a place where clouds skitted through the sky and where occasional clumps of grass poked from crevasses in rocks, and I was out of Schwartz. It should have been a relief, and I was glad enough to see green instead of the endless yellows and greys and browns of the desert, but I regretted leaving, so much that I stopped and turned around and almost started back.

I remembered my father's face. I remembered him saying, "Lanik, I wish to God there were something I could do." I heard his voice plead, "The body is ruined. Will the mind still serve me? Will the son still love his father?"

Yes, you land-hungry bastard, I thought. You're up against something you're no match for. And I'll come. I'm coming.

I turned back around and headed north into the high country of Sill.

The land had been wasted by war.

Burnt-over flelds were accented by the shells of houses and piles of ashes that had once been humbler huts. I walked kilometers of ruin, in what had to be farmland at best, this close to the desert. What purpose could be served by such destruction? No great military objectives lay nearby. All it could achieve was the starvation of the people. The land had been murdered. Tortured.

Yet I knew the people of Nkumi (as well as anyone could know them in their endless intertwining lies) and such destruction wasn't in their nature, not the people who stood at the lips of their treehouses and sang the morning. Even their endless, fumbling bureaucracy and the hypocritical denial that they bought and sold for profit-- these were more symptoms of good intention than of deep-seated corruption. Besides, greed would have left these fields intact. Only vicious, mindless hate could make someone want to destroy the land instead of conquering it.