Treason

I had kept my snail collection in a long-unused attic in one of the older parts of the palace, a place never locked but, because it was accessible only by ladder and winding corridors, rarely visited. I headed there in quicktime, then slowed down nearly to the flow of realtime, and waited. I kept just enough edge of speed that if Lanik/Dinte had ideas of treachery, I could react faster than he could attack.

If he was a fraud, if he was not truly me, he would not know what room I meant.

I waited for fifteen minutes. Then he came along the dusty attic walkway and sat before me on the floor. It was hard for him to walk with his awkward arms and legs, and sitting was ludicrous, but I didn't laugh. I remembered my struggle up a not-too-difficult slope in Schwartz after I was set off the Singer slave ship. It had taken him three years in realtime to reach the condition I was in after my months of confinement on the ship. But I remembered; I had been inside that body. I knew exactly who he was and how he felt.

In realtime now, I spoke softly. "Hello, Lanik."

"Hello, Lanik," he answered, his smile ghastly on a twisted face.

"Last time we met, I tried to kill you," I said.

"Many times since then, I've wished you had succeeded."

We sat in silence for a few moments. What do you talk about when you meet yourself after so many years?

"How did you come here?" I asked, though I already had guessed much of the story. "How did you learn to be an illuder?"

He told me. How he had lain half-dead as his already weak body tried to regenerate the skull and skin and keep the brain tissue from degenerating. How he had been found by the huge search party the Nkumai had sent after me. "If they hadn't found me," he said, "they would certainly have kept searching until they found you. When they finally realized what had happened and tried to follow you again, they traced you right to the seacoast. You were easy enough to find; if they had followed you at once, you wouldn't have escaped." He smiled. "I saved your life."

Then he told me of days and weeks with Mwabao Mawa in her treetop house. My body, in constructing him, had given him my memories; or perhaps in my delinum as we traveled together in the forest I had poured out into him all that mattered, all that made me who I was. It took Mwabao some time before she realized that he was only a duplicate of me. "By then she had learned enough that she was certain I was from Mueller-- I had spoken Dinte's and Father's names in my madness, and her fellow Andersons were already here, as you seem to know."

She immediately seized the opportunity my double represented and fa

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."