Treason

I remembered being a radical regenerative. I remembered standing at the window, observing the pens, imagining myself among the monsters of many legs and arms who were fed from troughs and denied even the slightest shred of humanity. It was cruel, though how else rads could have been treated God only knew. Still, even that cruelty might have been bearable, or at least partly bearable, because the rads knew that they were doing it for Mueller. Doing it to ensure that their families and their families' families would be the ones to get offworld, would be the ones to make the starships and go out into space and be free.

If that hope had helped keep them sane, it was a terrible thing to turn it into a lie and have their suffering and loneliness and loss of humanity be for a race of strangers who insinuated themselves into families.

I hated Dinte. I had despised him before, but now I hated him. I pictured myself going into the palace at Mueller-on-the-River and walking up to him and going into quicktime and seeing the man who really was Vinte, the man pretending to be my brother, the man who had destroyed my father and robbed me of my inheritance; and when I saw him, I could picture myself killing him, and the picture gave me pleasure.

(I could remember the earth moaning with the cries of dying men, but I shut out that memory. Not that memory. Not today. I had blood to shed before I was ready for that memory again.)

But first, Percy Barton, Lord Barton's "son." I had to learn from him where he came from and who his people were, and then I'd destroy them all. If they could be destroyed. Was there any way to make an end to people who could appear to be something they were not, who could trade places with a man before your eyes and never have you notice, who could pretend to be your brother for years and never give you a clue?

How did they do it? How could I fight it?

As I descended from the hills of Humping, I felt a terrible sadness, because I knew I was leaving my truest home in order to go out and destroy my peace of mind and cause agony to the earth. I remembered the spokesman of the Schwartzes telling me, "Every man who dies at your hand will scream into your soul forever."

Almost I turned back. Almost I went back to Glain and Vran. Almost.

Instead I rode on for twelve days until I came to Gill, the capital of the Family of Gill, and also the capital of the empire called the East Alliance. In my days of travel, I had figured nothing out and knew no more than I had known before. I hadn't even taken elementary precautions, didn't even have the sense to arrive in quicktime, which is why they caught me in Gill and killed me.

Chapter 11 -- Gill

Lord Barton's servant, Dul, had reached Gill ahead of me. That had been predictable. What I had forgotten was that if Dul heard enough of our conversation to want to poison us, he also heard enough to know that I was Lanik Mueller.

Did they believe him? Did they suspect that Lanik Mueller had survived, had reemerged from Ku Kuei after two years? Perhaps they doubted it at first, but once word reached Mwabao Mawa, there would be no more doubt. She would remember having seen me in Jones a year ago, and they would he certain.

It was an academic question at the moment, however. Whoever I was, Lanik Mueller or Lake-drinker or Man-in-the-Wind, I had discovered the existence of the illuders and I had to be destroyed. They had my description, and when I came to the gate of Gill, the soldiers took me, dragged me from my horse, and held me while the captain compared me with a written notice that, he had some trouble reading. "He's the one," he finally said, but there was a little doubt in his voice.

"You're wrong," I said. "I just look like him, whoever he is."

But the captain shrugged. "If somebody else comes in who fits the description, we'll kill him, too." The soldiers put me in a cart, blindfolded, and dragged me off through the streets.

I was concerned. If they believed that I was Lanik Mueller, and if they knew-- as the illuders surely did by now-- that Muellers regenerated, they would kill me much too thoroughly. I might really die from beheading or burning. It would be beyond my ability to save myself, and so I would have to escape before they performed the execution; and the only methods of escape I had were too demonstrative of my abilities to fail to raise a real alarm among the illuders.

I was lucky. Dul, whoever he was, was not bright enough or well-enough informed to realize that if I really was Lanik Mueller, they couldn't kill me in the ordinary way. Executions in Gill were by squads of archers. Arrows are easily taken care of by any Mueller, unless there are too many of them all at once, and to a rad like me, they didn't have enough arrows to destroy me beyond my body's ability to heal.

The soldiers were very businesslike. In Mueller every person-- stranger, slave, or citizen-- had the right to a hearing. In Gill, apparently, strangers were exempt from that particular formality. I was arrested, carted off in a wagon through the streets of Gill (the people apparently disposed of rotten fruit and vegetables by casting it as a parting gift into the executioner's wagon), pulled out of the city through a back gate, dragged from the wagon, and placed in front of a large pile of straw, so that misses wouldn't result in a lost or damaged arrow.

The archers looked bored and perhaps a little irritated. Had this been their day off? They lined up casually, selecting arrows. There were a dozen archers, and all looked competent. The captain of the guard, who had escorted me to the place of execution, raised his arm. There were no preliminaries, no last words, no final meal (a waste of food, of course), no a

It hurt. I knew that I didn't need to breathe, knew that my brain could stay alive far longer with scant oxygen than most people's, and while the arrows had stopped my heartbeat, as long as they were still in my body they also partly staunched the flow of blood from my heart. Still, the wound was serious enough, the pain sudden and drastic enough, that my body decided that it was dying, and collapsed.

They didn't rush over and pull out the arrows, unfortunately, so my heart couldn't yet begin to heal; and it would not be politic, I decided, to reach up and pull the arrows out myself. So I went into slowtime-- a mild slowtime that left me stiff to them, while their handling of my body left painful bruises, but that was nothing my Mueller body couldn't heal on its own. I figured they'd probably be rid of my body within fifteen minutes-- they showed no tendency to wait around-and that would be about five or six minutes of subjective time, leaving me a few seconds to remove the arrows and heal before my body started hurting for lack of blood. I could live for some time without breathing, but the blood had to flow.

They cut it close, and for one terrible moment as they carried me by a furnace I was afraid they practiced cremation, in which case all bets were off. Instead they dumped me in a hole in the ground and yanked the arrows out of my chest, tearing open my heart where it had started to heal around the arrowheads, but allowing it, at last, to start healing properly. As soon as they had quit shoveling on the dirt, I went mto realtime, muscled the dirt out of the way enough that I could remove the arrows, and lay there healing for a while. Once I was in reasonable health again, I went back into slowtime-- no point in trying to endure hours of being shut up in a grave if you can avoid it-- and only came out when I estimated it would be evening.