Orson Card - Treason

"I was younger then." He got up from his chair and strode to a ladder, climbed it slowly, and reached down a book that must have weighed five kilos. When he was back to the floor, he gave it to me. "I bought this from your father, who was reluctant to part with it. But he had another copy, and when I explained how important genealogy was to me he became convinced I was a doddering idiot. He let me buy the book, though he charged me five times what he thought it was worth."

That was my father.

I opened the book. A genealogy of Mueller and a history, kept as a kind of chronicle in the hand writing of a herald. I didn't recognize the hand at the end of the book, but sure enough, the account and the genealogy ended when I was eleven. It was amusing to see what the herald had thought was worth recording. I must have been someone's delight-- every clever thing I said as an infant was there.

The expectancy of Barton's silence was pressure enough that I skimmed and rushed through to the end.

"Genuine?" he asked.

"Of course," I said. "Do you doubt it, when you got it the way you did?"

"Not at all. I just wanted your opinion before I point out an omission, a simple but very important thing left out of the book. So obvious it wouldn't occur to you to notice it was missing."

I waited.

"Your brother," he said. "Dinte."

Of course Dinte was mentioned. So many of my childhood memories were tied to him. But I glanced back to the time when Dinte was born, and there was no mention. Nor was there any mention of him for the entire duration of the journal.

"Well, maybe the herald didn't like Dinte any better than I did," I said.

"The herald didn't meet Dinte."

"He led a sheltered life in the palace, then."

"Lanik Mueller, I want you to think back to a memory. An unpleasant one, preferably. I want you to picture it in your mind."

I smiled. "No one takes psychology seriously anymore."

"It's not psychology, Mueller. It's survival."

So I thought back to the time I hed about who had lamed Rurik, the horse I was given after I had learned to ride like an adult. I had jumped him stupidly, and he had been injured, and then I walked him home and told my father that the stableboy had lamed him and that I had noticed it as soon as I was away from the stable. The boy lost his job and had a good thrashing in the bargain, particularly since he had "lied" about it and claimed the horse was healthy when I took it out. I remembered the expression on the boy's face when my father made me accuse him to his face. I remembered clearly how ashamed I felt.

"I see from your face that you've thought of something that mattered. How clearly do you remember it?"

"Clearly," I answered.

"Now, think of your clearest memory concerning Dinte from the time you were, say, seven or eight, and both learning from tutors. Did you have the same tutor?"

"Yenwi."

"But did he have the same tutor?"

I shrugged.

"Think of a childhood memory of Dinte."

Easy enough. Until I tried it. But all my memories of Dinte were of the time when I was older. When I was twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen. I simply could not remember Dinte before that, though the unshakable conviction remained that he was there.

"Just because I can't remember details," I began, and then saw that Barton was laughing.

"My own words," he said. "Just because I can't remember details. But you're so sure. Haven't the slightest doubt."

"Of course not. If I could have made the little bastard disappear, I would have done it years ago, believe me."

"Let me tell you a story, then," he said. "Settle down in the chair, Lanik Mueller, because it's a long one, and being old I shall undoubtedly lace it with details that were best left out. Try to stay awake. Snoring puts me off my form." Then he began to recount the story of his son, Percy. When he mentioned the boy's name, I immediately recognized it.

"Percy Barton? Lord Percy of Gill?"

"The same. You're interrupting."

"But he's the ruler-- or should we say, figurehead-- over the so-called East Alliance. And he's your son?"

"Born and raised in this castle, but I shan't ever finish if I can't begin, Mueller." I let him begin.

"It's my penchant for traveling, you see. I made a journey, not all that many years ago, one of my last before travel became out of the question because of my health. To Lardner. You may know Lardner-- a land of cold that makes Humping look like paradise, but it has the world's best physicians. If ever I were sick, I'd want a doctor from Lardner. While I was there, I chanced upon a doctor whom I had known when I was a young man, just married and barely into my own as lord-- lord of more than I have now, too, I assure you. Not just Humping, but of the whole east peninsula. I suppose that doesn't matter now. This doctor, Twis Stanly, was a specialist of sorts, women and women's problems, but he was also a damned fine archer and we'd bend the bow together and have the grandest time on hunts and holidays in the Spine Mountains. Good friends, but I remembered he had treated my wife only a month after we were married for a rather odd infection. This was, of course, some time before Percy was born."

He paused a moment, as if unsure how to say what came next. "He inquired, of course, after my wife, and I had to inform him, quite sadly, that she had died only two or three years before, at a ripe but not old age. She was over fifty, and it stunned me that it had been near thirty-five years earlier that Twis and I had brought down two harts of the same herd with a single arrow each, practically in unison. I mentioned the fact, and then commented on how my son, Percy, had barely a notion that his father was once handy with a bow."

"We shared a bit of a laugh at that and the foibles of youth, and then he said, 'Well, Barton, you remarried then?'"

"The question seemed odd. 'Of course not,' I told him. 'What made you think so?'"

"'Then you adopted the boy? Your son?' asks he, and I deny it. 'A true born son of my flesh,' says I, 'not two years into marriage.'"

"He went a bit white then, as we old men are prone to do, and he took down a notebook from his interminable shelves of trivial records, and looked up a particular entry, and had me read it. It recorded the hysterectomy he had performed on my wife a month after our marriage."

"Can you imagine what a shock that was to me? I was sure he was mistaken, but he was a methodical man, you know, and I couldn't shake his surety. He took everything, womb, ovaries, and she damn near died in the process, but it was that or a cancer to destroy her life within the year. So she was doomed to childlessness in exchange for life.

"It was a blow. I insisted I could remember the childbirth, but when I tried to recount the circumstances, I couldn't remember a bit of it. Not the day, not the place, not whether I went in or stayed out, nor even how I celebrated the birth of an heir, nothing. Nothing. Like you, when you couldn't remember anything about your brother just now."

I might doubt many men, but in this case I couldn't fathom a reason for Barton to lie. And now the book of genealogy in my lap weighed heavier, and I struggled even as I listened to try to remember something, anything about Dinte from our childhood together. A blank.

"That's not all my story, Lanik Mueller. I went home. And on the way home, I somehow forgot the entire conversation. Forgot it! Something like that, and it simply slipped my mind. It was not until I was out of Britton on my very last journey, this time a visit to Goldstein because of the warmth in the winter. While I was there, I got a letter from Twis. He wondered why I hadn't been answering his letters. Ha! I hadn't known I had been receiving any. But in his letter he said enough to refresh my memory. I was shocked at the lapse that had occurred, appalled that I could have forgotten. And then I realized something. It wasn't old age, Lanik Mueller, that made me forget. Someone was doing something to my mind. When I was at home, something made me forget."