Orson Card - Treason

She immediately seized the opportunity my double represented and fanned his hatred of me, his feelings of worthlessness because he would always be the monster, the horrible one, the creature that had no right to exist. It didn't take him long to consent to lead the Nkumai armies and their allies into battle against Mueller.

He exacted a price, however, that Mwabao was only too willing to pay. He asked for training in the Anderson deception, and Mwabao Mawa taught it to him. While I was in Schwartz learning to control the earth, he was learning to control men's minds.

"People's beliefs don't exist in isolation," he explained. "Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else. Not opinions, of course-- beliefs. We-- they-- could make anybody think the sun was blue and had always been blue. But, of course, the farther you got from the place where other people believed intensely in the deception, the less you would be influenced. However, by then the work would have been done. Once someone honestly believes something to be a fact, he'll never doubt it without pretty convincing evidence." Which is why Lord Barton was able to learn the truth separated from Britton by a thousand kilometers, but had to struggle to remember it when he returned to his home, where others were also in thrall to the lie.

He had not consented, he told me, to the wasting of the land by the Nkumai army on its passage through the Rebel River plain. I could never have done that-- and so neither could he.

"And then you reappeared," he said, "and we didn't know what to do. Until, of course, you and Father escaped to Ku Kuei. Then it was clear that I had to disappear so that the monster they had made of me would color other men's perception of you, ruining your effectiveness. At the time, Lanik, I was glad of it. You can't know how much I hated you. You had hated me, not for who I was, but because I was at all."

At first they didn't know what to do with him now that Lanik Mueller was officially an exile in Ku Kuei. "Until word reached us that Dinte had disappeared. Mwabao Mawa panicked. How could anyone have known about Dinte and killed him-- and yet not publicly raised the cry about who he was? Whoever killed him would surely have seen him change before, their eyes from the young heir to a much older man."

Then I realized what should have been obvious to me long before.

"I killed Dinte," I told my double. "I slit his throat as I left the palace. I assumed he would regenerate."

He smiled at me. "So you got your wish, didn't you? You killed Dinte, and in the process you saved my life. Because I was the only one who knew Dinte well enough to impersonate him without making waves. The Andersons aren't omnipotent. They can't fool the whole world all at once. So Mwabao Mawa sent me home to Mueller. I appeared to them as Dinte. I claimed that you had captured me and left me for dead after torturing me, but I had regenerated and come home. Who could doubt me? I've played the role ever since."

His voice grew soft (as mine always grew soft when I was afraid I would show fear or pity or grief) and he said, "You know-- you know how much I hated Dinte. And yet I had to be him, and talk to his covey of traitors who had plotted your death and Father's death and-- God, Lanik, how I survived that time I'll never know. But always I kept telling myself, 'I am Lanik Mueller, not his monster child,' and I endured the sycophants and the traitors and the petty criminals and Ruva and all the rest. Because it was common knowledge that you had gone with Father deep into Ku Kuei and would never come back. Father was dead, you see, and I loved him, just like you. The more people here in Mueller abused his memory and yours, the more I felt free to identify with you, to become you in my heart. I stopped hating you long ago. I just longed for you to come back and set me free.

"Lanik," he said, "I go from time to time, I go into the pens and have these limbs cut off. They always grow back, and more besides. I'm almost due now. The doctor never knows I'm me, never remembers that he performs these operations until it's time for the next one. No one ever sees my monster shape, but I see."

He looked at me, at my body. "You," he said. "You're whole. You're right and normal. You haven't lived this sick deception for these long months, these years. Let's go back out to the throne room. I'll appear in my true form and tell them all the truth, tell them that you're not the monster you were believed to be. You can take your true place, and I'll be free."

"What will you do then?"

"I'll plead with you to kill me. I've lived for years now as a radical regenerative. It doesn't qualify as life. If you won't kill me, I'll drown myself."

I shook my head. "I came here to kill you."

"Did you know who I was, then?"

"No. I came to kill the Anderson who controlled Mueller, the one pretending to be Dinte."

He was shocked. "You knew before you came? Then the Andersons' secret is out?"

"The Andersons," I told him, "are dead. A rainstorm reached you" --I groped for the real time-- "a few days ago. A drenching rainstorm. And the sky is still overcast." He nodded. "That rain was caused a week ago when Anderson sank into the sea."

He was surprised. "Just like that? Sank into the sea?"

I heard the scream still ringing inside me. "Not just like that. But they've disappeared from the earth. Not just the ones on the island. All the others, too, in every Family. You're the last one alive who knows the Andersons' technique. You and any who worked with you here."

"How did you do it?"

"Never mind how. What matters is why." And I explained to him.

"So the Ambassadors are gone, too," he said. "No more iron. Do you realize what you've done?"

I laughed. "I have a good idea."

"We-- the Andersons knew every secret in the world, Lanik! Do you realize what was being achieved on this world? Incredible things. Things to make you proud to be on this godforsaken prison planet! And you've stopped it. Without the Ambassadors, do you think that level of invention will continue?"

I shrugged. "It might. The Andersons didn't know all the secrets in the world."

"Stupid! Shortsighted and stupid and--"

"Listen, Lanik!" I shouted back, and the act of using my own name in reference to another person surprised me. "Yes, Lanik. You are me, aren't you? Me as I should have been. Me, captured by the Nkumai and induced to learn Mwabao Mawa's tricks-- and I would have learned them, just as you did. I would have let myself become their tool, to a point, and there you sit, as I would have sat, a monster in a body trapped inside an even more monstrous illusion. No, Lanik, you're not the one to judge me as shortsighted or stupid. And I'm not the one to judge you. You called this a godforsaken planet, but you're wrong. Thousands of years ago the Republic decided to be God. They decided to put the finest minds in the universe on a hopeless, ironless planet, to punish them and their children forever and ever, as if we were born with the guilt of their crime upon us. They cruelly held out in front of our ancestors a reward: The first Family to build a starship and come out into space would receive unheard-of riches and power and prestige. For three thousand years we believed that, and spent our souls working to do what-- to give to the bastards who keep us here the best we could develop. Our own flesh! The finest products of our minds! And what have we had in return? A few tons of a metal that's cheap everywhere but here."

"So we can build a starship," said my double.

"We'll never build a starship with Republic iron, never. And if we did, do you think they'd let us all come out and take part in human life? Don't you realize the miracle this planet is? If they realized what is really going on-- if they could spend a few days in Ku Kuei, or a week in Schwartz-- if they understood what our potential really is, Lanik, they'd be here immediately, they'd bomb this planet out of existence, wipe us out of the universe. That's the only hope and promise we have from them.