Treason

All these thoughts led to only one conclusion: The certainty of my death. And yet they fined me with a strange excitement, a longing to live long enough to learn more about this world. I had received a great insight. There was another road to freedom besides iron won from the Ambassadors. We had been given a whole world, hadn't we? Could we be free by no longer pressing upward against the prison wall of gravity, and instead turning downward and discovering what lay beneath our feet; outward, discovering the native life around us and learning wisdom from it?

It was that excitement that drove me on. I even wondered for a time if in the moments before I died, the plants would speak to me, not that they would find voices, of course, but that their poisons would provoke some illuminating vision that would tell me what this world had pla

Until at last I could not make my legs go anymore, they crumbled under me, and it was only early afternoon, if my guess at the sun's place was correct. As I staggered forward and collapsed to my knees, I saw a shimmer of bright blue before me; I had come at last to the lake.

It was not so wide I couldn't see the other shore, far and faint in the haze of vapor rising invisibly from the surface, but it was long enough that I saw no end, either north or south. The sun dazzled on the bright water. And yes, it could only be two o'clock in the afternoon.

I lay by the water and slept, and woke the next day at what, seemed to be, the very time I had gone to sleep.

I despaired, but also I hoped. For I had slept, that was certain. My muscles ached, my legs were rubbery under me, but I could move again, I had the fresh vigor that could only mean I had had, if not as much rest as I needed, at least enough to go on. Above all, I was awake. The poisons in the air had not consigned me to die here in my sleep.

Perhaps it was only because I had won free of the trees and collapsed here, where perhaps the open water cleared the air. I felt it was a kind of victory, to have reached this place. I thought back to the map of Treason I held within my head-- one of the things that lingered from school days, the map of the world that dated from the first orbital surveys when our ancestors arrived. There were other lakes, strung out eastward of here. If this was in fact the southwesternmost lake, then striking due east would take me to the largest of the lakes, and by skirting the southern shore and following a large river to the easternmost lake I would be within reach of the borders of Allison.

I knew that the southern tip of the lake was where the woman had told me I should turn south. But Jones was too much in the shadow of Mueller; Dinte might have spies there, and Father certainly would-- there was always the chance that Father might have changed his mind and decided the good of Mueller required my death.

My best hope, now that I had proven I could defeat the menace of Ku Kuei, was to go east, fight my way through to Allison, only one Family to the west of Nkumai. There I could complete the mission Father had given me, and perhaps, by proving my loyalty, earn the right to go home, or at least to live without fear of some agent of Mueller coming to remove a threat to the government.

I went east, toward Nkumai, toward the rising sun-- rising, that is, in former days, when it used to move across the sky. The journey changed not at all. The same confusion, the same exhaustion-- for in each march I seemed to cover so much ground that from the map, I carried in my head it should have taken two full days at a good hard walk, not the few hours it seemed to take by the sun. I invented dozens of new explanations or codicils to the old ones; I wearied of trying to understand, and let imaginary visions of Sara

I ate what berries I could find, and my pack was long since empty; my body, which had always been muscular, now became lean, and my womanly breasts, which had grown soft and large on the comfortable diet of Mueller, were now tight and spare and hard, like the rest of me. It made it somehow easier to bear having them, knowing that they had to respond to the same urgencies that drove the rest of my body. Scant rations and hard work affected them along with the rest of me. They were a part of myself. They might have been unwelcome when they first appeared, but it didn't feel strange to have them anymore.

Finally I reached the grey-barked slender ragwit trees that told me I was near:

... white-tree Allison, Of dawn and light among the leaves.

Almost at once, with the change of woods, the poisons stopped having their effect on me. I was still weary-- as well a man should be, covering a thousand kilometers, what should have been twenty days journey even for the bounding stride of a soldier in open country, in only a dozen long, terrible marches. I knew then that whatever seemed to have happened to the sun's passage through the sky, I had surely covered the ground I thought I covered-- that my exertions were as excruciating as I imagined them to be. Indeed, if I ever lived to return to Mueller, and ever somehow became a person again in Mueller's eyes, the song they would sing of me would surely include this marvelous journey through the poisonous wood of Ku Kuei, covering in what seemed to be a few days by the sun, in a dozen marching periods, what should have taken a man twenty days in open country, well-supplied; what would have taken an army twice that time. If ever a hero-song were sung of me, this journey would be the envoy. So I thought then, knowing so little.

The madness of the journey was over now, anyway; the sun made its normal passage at its normal pace, and I was able, at last, to walk on until dark.

In the morning, a road. I went back among the trees and changed into the girl's clothing that the woman of the High Hills had given me. I counted my wealth: twenty-two rings of gold, eight rings of platinum, and, in case of great need, two rings of iron. A dagger in the pack.

I was unsure what to do next. The last news we had heard in Mueller was that Nkumai was attacking Allison. Had they won? Was the war still raging?

I stepped onto the road and walked east.

"Hey, little lady," said a soft but penetrating voice behind me. I turned and saw two men. Rather larger than I-- I still didn't have my full man's weight, though I did have near my height since I was fifteen. They looked rough, but their clothing seemed to be the vestiges of a uniform.

"Soldiers of Allison, I see," I answered, trying to sound glad to see them.

The one with his head in a handage answered with a sick smile. "Ay, if there yet be an Allison, with black inkers loose to rule."

So the Nkumai had won, or were wi

The shorter one, who couldn't take his eyes off my bosom, chimed in with a voice that sounded rusty, as if for lack of use. "Will you travel with two old soldiers?"

I smiled. Mistake. They had me half-stripped before they realized that I knew how to use my dagger and was not playing games. The short one got away, but from the way his leg was bleeding I didn't think he'd get far. The tall one lay on his back in the road with his eyes rolled up in his head, as if to say, "And after all I lived through, I have to die like this." I closed his eyes.