Treason

"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 Sara

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. Sara

At the time I put the worry out of my mind. Surely Father had plenty 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.

Sara

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 Sara

It was Sara

"Sara

"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 Sara

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 Sara

"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 Sara