Treason

Chapter 8 -- Ku Kuei

It could have been a holiday in one of the Sweet River woods. Father walking briskly along (he isn't old at all, I realized) and I following only a little behind, watching as his hands reached up to touch leaves and branches, down to pluck grass or flowers, out in wild gestures as he talked. Once I had thought those gestures were flamboyance, showing off-- or worse, a way of striking out, reaching out to control me and everyone else around him, to beat us into submission. That was when I was a child, though. Now I saw that the waving, slashing, jabbing of his arms was a sign of exuberance. His body wasn't large enough, didn't move swiftly enough to contain all his life and joy.

Ironic, then, that I realized this only now, when his joy was so out of place. It should have been contagious, but to me it seemed forced. Now instead of wanting to laugh and move and shout along with him, I wanted to weep for him. I would have, too, except that it would shame him. There were things that could be wept for, like long-lost sons come home, but for the losses a Mueller didn't weep. Didn't even give grief for the loss of a kingdom. My father was still alive, but already I mourned for him, because his true self was the Mueller, the ruler, the man so large that only a kingdom could contain him; and now here he was, confined into the space of his body, his kingdom a strange forest and a few men who loved, the memory of what he was, and so continued to serve this shrunken remnant of himself. Ensel the Mueller was dead. But Ensel Mueller insisted on being alive, on carrying a kind of greatness with him even in defeat.

I had always expected to inherit the kingdom from him. To step into his place when he died; to become him. I thought I was capable of it. But now, following behind him through the forest, I realized that while I might have become the Mueller, had things worked out differently, I was not yet large enough to take his place, because when he died he would leave so many places empty, places that I barely knew existed, roles that I would never be large, enough to fill.

We left the lake soon enough, without event. I was begiining to wonder if what I felt before, when I passed through Ku Kuei mad with weariness, was mere illusion. But then it began again, just as it had happened when I passed through Ku Kuei before. We walked and walked, and still the sun was high in the sky, hardly seeming to move; Father got hungry and we ate, and the sun had not moved, and we walked on until we were tired, and the sun had moved only a little, and at last we had walked until we were utterly exhausted and couldn't walk anymore, and it might have been noon.

"This is ridiculous," Father said wearily as we lay in the grass.

"I find it consoling," I said. "Now I know that I wasn't insane when this happened before."

"Or else that we both are."

"This is just what happened to me when I came here before."

"What, you got weak and gave out after only a morning's walk?"

"That's what I thought, only now I'm not sure." I had learned some things about the world since I last passed through Ku Kuei. That stargazers in treetops could imagine ways to make men fly faster than light between the stars. That naked savages in the desert could turn rocks into sand. Were we wearing out early? Or was the sun merely a little slow in her travels? "We see that no matter how tired we get, no time has passed, so we think we must be wearing out early. But think-- doesn't it feel as if we've been traveling forever? Maybe our bodies are fine, and it's time itself that's gotten a little sluggish."

"Lanik, I'm too tired even to understand you, let alone think about what you said."

"Rest, then," I said to Father.

Father drew his sword and lay on his left side, so his right hand, which held the sword, would be free to move into action the moment he awoke. He was asleep in a moment.

I also lay on the grass under the trees, but I didn't sleep. Instead I listened to the rock. Listened through the barrier of living soil and the voices of a million trees, and heard:

Not the voice of the rock, but rather a low, soft, almost unthinkable whisper, and I couldn't understand. It seemed to speak of sleep, or could that have been my own mind? I tried to hear the cries of the dying (though usually I tried to shut them out) and this time I heard, not a crush of voices crying in agony together, but rather distinct, low calls. Tortured, but slow. Tortured and hating and fearing but endlessly delayed and separated and distinct, and against their rhythm my own heart was quick, racing, panicking, and yet I was at rest and my heart beat normally.

I let myself fall into the soil, which gave way only reluctantly until I was down resting against the rock. Stones slid away behind my back; deep roots slithered off to let me by; and then harsh rock gave way and cushioned me gently and I heard:

Nothing unusual at all. The voice of the rock was unchanged, and what I had heard near the surface was gone.

I was confused. I hadn't merely imagined what I heard before, and yet now, next to the rock, all was as it had been in Schwartz a few weeks before.

I rose again, listening all the way, and gradually the song of the earth changed, seenud to slow, seemed to separate into distinct voices. The earth, too, seemed more sluggish to part and let me by. But at last I was on the surface, my arms spread, floating as always on what could only seem to me to be a slightly-thicker-than-normal sea.

Father was standing, watching me, the expression on his face indescribable. "My God," he said, "what's happened to you!"

"Just resting," I answered, because there was little else to say.

"You were gone, and then you rose up out of the earth, like the dead coming back out of the grave."

"I forgot to tread water," I said. "Don't worry about it. I had to find something out. I-- Father, in Schwartz I learned to do some things. Things that could never be exported through an Ambassador, because they're a way of-- thinking, and talking to-- things that other people never think of talking to."

"I'm afraid of you, Lanik. You aren't-- you aren't human anymore."

I knew what he meant, but still it stung to have him say it. "That issue was decided when I sprouted tits and Homarnoch declared me a rad."

"That was--"

"Different," I said, finishing his sentence. "Because then I was less than human, and now you think I'm more. But neither one is true, Father. I was human all along, either way. This is just one thing that can happen to a human, one thing that a human being can do. Not a god, not a devil. A human."

"How do you know?"

"Because I'm a human, and I can do it."

"You were gone for nearly an hour it seemed, forever it seemed, Lanik. How did you breathe?"

"I held my breath very tight. Father, forget what you saw me do. Let me tell you what I learned. There's something about the soil here. Something that slows things down, or makes it seem that way. It's as if-- I don't know. As if there's a bubble, enclosing us and the earth and trees around us in a sphere, and inside that bubble, time goes slower. Or no, that doesn't work. It's as if time goes faster for us. We walk farther, we do a day's worth of walking, and yet to the world outside, only a few minutes have passed. While we're inside, all the rest of the world seems to go slowly, but it doesn't. It's the same as always."

"If we really walked as far as it feels like, that's one big bubble."

"Unless it follows us around."

"Why didn't it happen for the army?"

"Maybe we had too much momentum or something. I don't know. But look at the sun." It was only a little past the zenith. "And we're already through for the day."

"I'm rested now," Father said. "Felt like I had a long nap, and I woke up and you were gone, not a footprint or anything-- just gone. I didn't dare leave, for fear I'd lose you again. I waited forever it felt like."

"I was gone a few minutes, that's all," I said. "But I spent those minutes outside the bubble."

"I don't know about bubbles," said Father, "but I'm rested now." So we went on.

By the sun it was only midafternoon; by my own reckoning, I had done two days' walking since morning when we reached another lake. It was one whose southern edge I had skirted on my earlier journey. Now we stood on its western shore, and the far shore was go near we could see it easily. If it was the far shore, that is. Because it seemed to disappear to the north and south, we supposed we might be looking at an island or a peninsula.

I hadn't slept when Father did, but his rest had done him little good. He was staggering like a drunk, and I was so weary that each step was a separate effort, a triumph of will. "I don't know about you," I told Father, "but this is my limit. This is where I stop."

We slept almost before we lay down.

I awoke in darkness. I had never seen night in Ku Kuei on my first journey, and the night before, with the army, I had had other things on my mind. Now I watched the sky. Both Dissent and Freedom had risen, and at this time of year they were near each other. I lay there, still weary with sleep, letting my mind wander, when it occurred to me that Dissent should have passed Freedom by now.

Instead, there was almost no detectable motion.

Could Ku Kuei have developed a way to slow the sun and the moons? No, or we would have seen such things from Mueller, too. What was going on was not real, it was an illusion, a local phenomenon. Not a change in the earth or sky. It could only be a change in us. A change that didn't happen when the army was with us; a change that happened only when we were alone.

"For once Dissent has learned his place," father said. So he was also awake.

"You noticed, too."

"I hate this place, Lanik." He sighed. "A beggar loves any coin. But I'm beginning to think I would have been happier with Harkint."

"Up to a point, you probably would."

"What point?"

"When they cut your head off and it didn't grow back."

"It's a problem with Muellers," Father said. "We never can believe that death is permanent. I heard once of a man who couldn't think how to get vengeance on his enemy, short of killing him, and he didn't want that much vengeance. So he challenged the man to combat and beat him, and while his enemy was lying on the ground, faint from loss of blood, he cut off his arm and sewed it on backward. He liked the effect so well that he did the same to the man's other arm, and his legs, too, right at the hips, so that the man's buttocks were facing the same direction as his face. And of course he had a tail. It was a perfect vengeance. When all had healed, his enemy spent the rest of his life watching himself shit, while he never knew whether he was lying with a pretty girl or a plain one."

I laughed. It was the kind of tale told by the huge fires in Mueller-on-the-River during the wintertime. The kind of tale that men now lacked the spirit to tell, even if they had the wit.

"I'm never going back, am I, Lanik?" Father said. And the way he said it, I knew he didn't want the truth.

"Of course you are," I said. "It's only a matter of time before the Nkumai collapse under their own weight. There's a limit to how much land a Family can absorb."

"No there isn't. I could have conquered everyone."

"Not without me, you couldn't," I said, belligerently enough that he laughed. It was the same laugh I heard from him when I was a child. I thought of the time I challenged him to single combat when he ordered me to go to my room for my impertinence. He had laughed like that, until I drew sword and demanded to be met with honor. He had to cut my right hand almost off before I was content and would submit.

"I never should have tried," he said. Tried what, I wondered, until he finished his sentence: "Doing anything without you."

I said nothing. He had been forced to send me away, a year or so ago; I had acted with little enough choice since then. A year ago? It was yesterday. It was forever. In the darkness I felt as if I had never been anywhere but here, staring up at the stars.

Father was also looking at the stars. "Will we ever reach them?"

"With long enough arms."

"And what will we find if we get there?" Father sounded vaguely sad, as if he had just realized that he would never find something he had carelessly mislaid a long time ago. "If we of Mueller got enough iron and somehow built a starship and went out among the stars, what would we find? After three thousand years, would they greet us with open arms?"

"The Ambassadors still work. They send us iron. They know we're here."

"If they ever meant to let us off this planet, they would have come here years ago and taken us off. Whatever sins were committed, they were paid for a thousand times before I was born, Lanik. Did I rebel against the Republic? What threat am I to them? They have weapons that would let one man stand against all of Nkumai's armies and win. While I'm an aging swordsman who once won seventeen archery matches in a single day. I'll wear all my medals and surely they'll bow." He chuckled dismally, and the chuckle twisted off into a sigh.

"When you cut their arms off, they don't grow back," I said. "So we do have an advantage over them there."

"We're freaks."

"I'm cold," I said, but the clouds stayed frozen in their places near the horizon, and no wind blew.

"No wind," I said. "They've slowed it all down. Look, Father. Across that inlet, see how the grass is lying over? As if a wind were blowing. And yet they stay that way."

Father seemed not to notice.

"Father," I said. "Perhaps we ought to go on."

"Where?" he answered.

"To find the Ku Kuei."

"Off like Andrew Apwater, then, trying to find the third moon, a moon all of iron that will save us from hell. There are no Ku Kuei. The Family died out years ago."

"No, Father. This isn't a natural occurrence, this bubble of time. It follows us everywhere. Since we're not doing it, it must be that it is being done to us, and that means that someone is doing it, and I mean to find them."

"So maybe there are some Ku Kuei. If we were going to find them, we would have found them already."

"They can't live without making some sign, Father. Without living in some place."

"And have we enough years in our lives to search every meter of the forest, hoping for a Ku Kuei dropping or some hair snagged on a low-hanging branch? They can do strange things with us, and yet we never see them. I call it magic. I give up and I can it magic and the magicians have no need for us and no help for us and I should go back to my people and die. At least then they'll remember me as the king who fought until he died, and not as the Mueller who ran away into the forest and was eaten by the trees of Ku Kuei."

"Father--"

"I want to sleep again. I only want to sleep." He rolled on his side, turning his back to me.

I lay there looking at the stars and wondered what kind of people the Ku Kuei would be. On this world, they could be anything, I thought. As a child growing up in Mueller, I had thought nothing about us was strange. Every child learned his lessons with the threat of isolation or dismemberment if he failed his subject, since pain made no difference even to our children. Every child's cuts healed a moment after he fell. That was, I thought, normal. But now I knew otherwise. Tree people who answer the questions of the universe, desert people whose minds reshape stone. On Treason, strangeness was normality, and those who really were ordinary were doomed to be forgotten or overrun.

We came to you, I said in my mind to the Ku Kuei, we came to you because there was nowhere else to turn and we hoped for mercy from those who have no need to fear justice.

No one answered my thoughts. No one had heard.

How loud must I shout before you'll notice me, I thought. What must I do to get your attention, even for a moment, however long moments are around here?

The lake reflected the moonlight. Near us the water shimmered a bit, but the shimmering faded and beyond, the lake was still, waves frozen in midfall. And I knew how I could get them to notice us.

After all, water changes were the first that I had seen in Schwartz, when the water pooled so I could drink, then dissipated when I was done. Once again I lay still and spoke in my silent voice, called out to the earth under me.

The earth sensed my great need, perhaps, or perhaps my powers were stronger than I had thought. But the rocks responded, the earth under the lake loosened, flowed, and the lake sank quickly. When I was through only enough water was left to contain the fish, a scattered group of ponds and marshes, and the lake was gone.

"Sir," said a voice behind me.

"How quickly you came," I answered, not turning around.

"You've stolen our lake," he said.

"Borrowed it."

"Give it back."

"I need your help."

"You come from Schwartz."

"No one comes alive out of Schwartz," I said.

"We come alive out of every place we choose to visit," said the voice. "But no one ever knows that we were there." He giggled.

"I'm from Mueller," I insisted.

"If you can make a lake fall into the earth, you come from Schwartz. What else did you learn there? In Schwartz they don't kill. But we aren't Schwartzes, and we're willing to kill."

"Then kill me, and say good-bye to a lake."

"We owe you nothing."

"You will, when I give your lake back."

Silence. I turned around. There, was no one there.

"Sneaky little bastards, aren't you?" I murmured.

"What?" Father asked, waking up. "What the hell happened to the lake?"

"I was thirsty," I answered. I didn't like the fear in his eyes when he looked at me. "We had a visitor. He actually spoke to us."

"Where is he?"

"Gone to fetch company to throw us out, I imagine. In the meantime, look at Dissent and Freedom."

Father looked, and saw what I had seen: Dissent moved across the face of Freedom, and the leaves in the trees whispered in the wind.

"Well," he said. "I should go to sleep more often."

We waited on the edge of what had been the lake. But we didn't wait long. Dissent was only a thumb past Freedom when four men came thundering through the underbrush and stood angrily around us. "What the hell!" shouted one man.

"Want to swim?" I asked.

"What right do you have to attack us like this? What harm have we done you?"

"Besides playing with our sense of time?"

They looked at each other in consternation.

"You fooled me on my first trip. But the second time through I caught on a little."

"Why are you here?"

So Father and I told them, and they listened with inscrutable faces. They were all dark-skinned and tall and fat, but there was strength under the fat. They showed no expression as they listened to our tale.

When we were through, they studied our faces for a while until finally the tallest and fattest, who obviously was in charge-- do they choose their leaders by the kilogram, I wondered-- said, "And?"

"Aad we need your help."

"So? Is there some reason we should give it?"

Father was perplexed. "We need it. We're doomed unless you help us."

"That much is plain. But what difference does that make to us?"

"We're fellow human beings!" Father began, but was wise enough to know when to quit. They thought the idea was amusing, anyway.

"I have a good reason why you should help us," I said. "If you don't, you don't have a lake. Mosquitoes breed pretty readily in ponds like these."

"So I promise you everything you want, and you refill the lake," said the leader. "All I need to do is kill you, and there goes our agreement. Plus, we keep the lake. So why not fill the lake and go away, back where you came from? We don't bother you, you don't bother us."

I was angry. So I removed the soil under their feet and slid it sideways. They fell heavily. They tried to stand up again (and they were quicker than I thought their bulk would allow), but the soil kept dancing under their feet, until at last they gave up and sprawled on the ground and yelled for me to stop.

"For a moment," I said.

"If you can do that," the leader said, pulling himself upright and brushing off his clothes, "you hardly need our help. For all my talk, you know, we don't have any weapons. We don't need them. We haven't killed anybody in years. Not that we have any moral objection to it, though, so don't think you're out of trouble."

"It would be lovely," I said, "if we could have the earth swallow up our enemies. But rocks don't play with mass murder, so I can only do certain things. Demonstrations. Lake drainings. Pratfalls. Not practical against an enemy. But we don't need you to fight our battles. What we need is time."

They giggled uncontrollably. They laughed. They roared until tears rolled down their cheeks. A clown could retire in five years of working here, they were so easily amused. Finally the leader said, "Why didn't you say so? If time's all you want, we have plenty." Which sent them into spasms of laughter again.

Father looked uncomfortable. "Are we the only sane people in the world?"

"Perhaps they think we're grim."

"We can give you time," the leader said. "We've been working with time for years. We can't go into the future or past, of course, since time is one-dimensional. ("Of course," I thought, "everyone knows that.") But we can change our own speed in relation to the general timeflow. And we can extend that change to our immediate surroundings. It takes one of us for every four or five people we want to change. How many do you have?"

"Less than a thousand," Father said.

"How specific," the leader answered, twisting up his mouth as if he were about to launch on another barrage of laughter. "You are right down to the last decimal, aren't you? That would take less than two hundred of us, wouldn't it? But less, of course, if you bunch up, if you share each other's time. So maybe we can do it with as few as fifty."

"Do what?" Father asked, suspiciously.

"I don't know," the leader said, grinning broadly. "Give you time, of course. How long until all your enemies are dead? Fifty years? If we work hard, that means you have to stay in a small area for, say, five days. Is that too long? It's harder the faster we make the time pass for you, but if you need a supreme effort, we can give you a hundred years in a week. "

"A hundred years of what?"

"Time!" He was getting impatient with us. "You sit here for what seems to you a week, while outside our forest, a hundred years have passed. You go out, all your enemies are gone, nobody's looking for you, you're safe. Or am I wrong? Do your enemies live exceptionally long?"

Father turned to me. "They can do that?"

"After this last year," I said, "I believe anything. They made us think the moons had stopped."

The leader shrugged. "That was nothing. We had a child doing that. Let us get volunteers to help you, and while we're gone, you fill the lake."

I shook my head. "When you come back, I'll fill the lake."

"I gave you my word!"

"You also told me that it wouldn't bother you to kill me after your word was given."

He smiled again. "And maybe I still will. Who knows? Very chancy world, you have to get used to it." Then, abruptly, he and his friends were gone. They didn't turn and walk away, they were simply not there. Now, though, I could guess: Time was suddenly quicker for them, so they could leave faster than our eyes could register their passage.

"I'm old," Father said. "I can't cope with all this."

"Me neither," I said. "But if it means we can survive, I say let's give it a try."

There were only thirty of them, after all, but the leader assured us they were probably enough, and we set off with the lake restored to its pristine beauty behind us. "Maybe now we kill you," said the leader when the lake was full, but then he laughed uproariously and gave me a huge hug. "I like you!" he shouted. All the others laughed. I didn't get the joke.

"Quicktime," said the leader, but to my surprise nobody hurried. Then I realized they meant that their time would pass quickly, while the outside world plodded on at the normal rate. It was early morning when we reached the place where the army was camped, but we had stopped and slept twice on the way, and in all our expedition had taken five days of our time, while to our army it would only be twenty-four hours or so. This time Father and I realized how hard we must have driven ourselves before. The Ku Kuei weren't sluggish, and we were weary enough each time we lay down to rest; Father and I had made the same journey with only two sleep periods.

It was a fine journey, all done in less than twenty-four hours from the time we left the army, if only the army had been there when we got back.

From a kilometer away, it was clear something was wrong. We were skirting the shores of the long lake, and we could see far ahead along the meadowland. But where smoke still rose from the campfires, there were no large herds of horses. No horses at all. Nothing.

Except corpses, of course. Not too many, but enough to make the story clear. Homarnoch, who had insisted on bringing his wagon into the forest, troublesome though it was, lay dead in front of the wagon's charred remains. Even a Mueller can't regenerate burns over the entire body-- but to make sure, they had cut his head off after his death. The other corpses were similarly taken care of.

This we took in after only a few moments at the camp. I looked for Saranna, calling her name. Yet I hoped she wasn't there-- better to imagine her alive among the deserters than dead, here. I went on calling for her, and soon the Ku Kuei joined in the search for living among the dead. It was the leader who called tome. "Lake-drinker!" he shouted. "Someone alive!"

I started toward him.

"It's a woman!" he shouted, and I came faster.

Father was kneeling beside her. Her arms and legs had been cut off, and her larynx had been cut out. Her body was regenerating, but not all that quickly. She was not a rad. She still couldn't talk.

The Ku Kuei leader kept demanding to know how she had healed so quickly and why she hadn't bled to death, until Father told him to shut his fat mouth for a minute. We fed her, and she looked at me with an expression that tore at my heart, and the stumps of her arms reached out to me. I held her. The Ku Kuei, puzzled, watched.

"I guess this means you won't be needing us," said the leader, after a while.

"More than ever," I said, even as Father said, "That's right."

"Now which of you do I believe?" he asked.

"Me," I insisted. "We don't need thirty men for our army. But there's nowhere we can go now. The three of us. My father, Ensel Mueller. Saranna, my-- wife. And my name is Lanik Mueller."

"We've fulfilled our part of the bargain," said the fat Ku Kuei. "So we're rid of you. Shall we carry you to the edge of the forest?"

I had little patience. I moved the ground under him. He landed heavily on his backside and swore.

"You have the instincts of a bully," he said angrily. "May your children all be porcupines! May your gall bladder be full of stones! May your father be found to have been sterile all his life!"

He looked so serious, so intense that I couldn't help but laugh. And when I started laughing, the leader broke into a grin. "You're my kind of fellow!" he shouted.

it didn't take much to get ahead with the Ku Kuei.

They carried Saranna back with them, amazingly careful for such huge, malproportioned people; but they stopped to rest oftener than Father or I needed, and while Father eagerly ate the immense snacks they constantly offered to share with us, I didn't bother eating. Instead I stayed with Saranna and fed her. We had been traveling for hours on our second day after leaving the camp when Saranna finally spoke.

"I think," she began huskily, "that my voice will work again."

"Oh no!" shouted one of the Ku Kuei. "A woman speaks, and silence is banished from the forest!" The remark brought immense peals of laughter, and several of the Ku Kuei were lying on the ground, unable to sit up because either the laughter or the meal made it impossible for them to remain upright.

"Saranna," I said, and she smiled.

"You weren't gone very long, Lanik."

"Too long, it seems," I said.

"They left me alive to tell you what they thought."

"The only good thing that's been done in a month."

"They were sure you had gone off to kill the Mueller. They knew you planned to bring the terrors of Ku Kuei back to destroy them. They hated you. And so they left."

"Killing on the way."

"Homarnoch forbade them and threatened to kill the first man who left. There were a great many who intended to be first, and so Homarnoch killed no one. Some of the men tried to defend him. They died, too."

"And you."

"They were quick. They wanted to make sure I couldn't travel easily. They thought it would stop you and the monsters from pursuing them."

I looked at the thirty-odd Ku Kuei, sitting, like small mountains or snoring in the grass. "Monsters," I said, and Saranna laughed, but the laughter soon turned to tears, her voice sobbing thickly.

"It feels so good to have a voice to cry with," she murmured when the tears had subsided.

"How are your feet?"

"Better. But the bones aren't hard. Tomorrow I can walk, a little."

I unwrapped the bandage the Ku Kuei had improvised around her legs. "Liar," I said. "You're not even halfway down the shin yet."

"Oh," she answered. "I thought I could feel my toes."

"That's the nerve regenerating. Haven't you ever lost a leg before?"

"My friends didn't pull pranks like that. And I always behaved in school." She smiled.

"All right, we're going, hup hup, hurry, we haven't much time!" shouted the leader, and the others laughed loudly as we started going again. I silently longed to kill the next man who laughed.

The city of the Ku Kuei was in the middle of the lake, on the island we had seen from the shore. If you can call it a city. There were no buildings, no structures of any kind. Just forest, and grass that was rather thoroughly tramped down in a few places.

What was remarkable were the people. The children, mercifully, were thin, but the adults made me suspect that kilo for kilo, the Ku Kuei were more than half the mass of human life on Treason. The impression I got-- and I never had any reason to change it-- was one of incredible laziness. No one seemed to do anything that he could avoid doing. "Come hunting with us," many of them said to me, and once I went. They would put themselves into quicktime and walk up to the prey and kill it while it stood motionless, still in normal time. When I suggested it wasn't sporting, they looked at me oddly. "When you want to run a race, do you cut off your feet?" one of them asked me. And another one said, "If I cut off my feet, does that mean I never have to run another race?" Paroxysms of laughter. I went back to the city then.

Yet for all their laziness, their determination to be amused at everything, and their utter unwillingness to take any commitment seriously, I came to love the Ku Kuei. Not as I had the Schwartzes, for I had also admired them; I loved the Ku Kuei as immense self-propelled toys. And they, for some strange reason, loved me, too. Perhaps because I had found a new way to force someone to take a pratfall.

"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 Saranna, I left him.

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. Saranna and I were lying in the grass, our eyes closed, paying careful attention as the teacher spoke softly and sang occasionally and tried to help us feel his own timeflow as it enveloped us. I don't know what aroused me from the trance (and I roused unwillingly, I'm sure, since Man-Who-Knows-It-All has the gentlest timeflow I ever shared), but I looked over at Father and his eyes were open, staring straight into the sky, and the track of a tear ran down from his eye to his hair.

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.

Saranna caused me another kind of worry. It began when I found her making love to Bug-killer, so named because he thrashed around so much during sex. She was laughing as he flung out his legs, and she kept laughing even when she looked at me.

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 Saranna because of any overconcern with faithfulness. I just found Ku Kuei women too fat to enjoy. I was a little jealous, I'm sure, but overriding that was my realization that Saranna seemed no different from any other woman in Ku Kuei-- amused, detached, easy.

It was Saranna who had begged me to take her with me when I first left Mueller; Saranna who had gashed herself deeply when I refused to let her continue as my lover after I found out I was a rad. And she had been intensely in love with me from the time I came back. Yet now--

"Saranna is a good student," said Man-Who-Knows-It-All.

"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 Saranna is as good as one of our own more gifted children?"

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 Saranna."

"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 Saranna-- but it held her differently. She slowed down. It was not a sudden decision-- "Today I'll be slow" --it was gradual. But after she mastered timeshaping I began to notice that when I was with her, caught up in her flow, everything around us moved quickly. Unbearably fast, the Ku Kuei who passed us dancing madly, racing out of sight, jabbering for a moment and going on. When Saranna and I talked, she kept looking over my shoulder, from side to side, watching as people sped by. Now and then she'd smile, an expression unrelated to our conversation, and I'd turn to see the scene that had amused her already gone.

When I met her once early in the morning and after a short conversation found that it was nearly night, I asked her why she slowed down so much.

"Because they're so funny," she said. "Racing along like that."

That would have been reason enough for the flighty girl I had first fallen in love with, but it wasn't reason enough now. I insisted. She balked. "You're too intense, Lanik. But I love you."

We made love, and it was as good as ever, and her passion for me was still warm, not the laughing, amusing affairs she had with the Ku Kuei. I knew I still had a hold on her, yet not enough of one to persuade her not to make the world race by without taking part.

She became notable. The Ku Kuei took to calling her Stump for another reason now; to most of them she was as immovable and dead as a cut tree. She wouldn't change her timeflow for anyone, and so I, the chameleon who changed times with every friend, was the one who could most easily talk to her. Most of the time she stood, frozen impossibly in midstep, and from a distance I watched sometimes for hours as she would complete a step and shift weight to the other foot.

Once for three days every time I saw her she was in the middle of making love to Man-Who-Knows-It-All. The caresses and strokes were as slow, the movement as infinitesimal, as if they were distant stars, and I felt as if I had never known her, or worse, as if she were merely a pornographic statue under a tree on Ku Kuei Island.

Saranna and Father were both finding their own way to retreat from life. While I was unable to escape.

The day that Father died he came to me and lay beside me under a tree as a thin drizzle fell. "Play no games with time today," Father said. "You always concentrate so hard that I don't think you're listening to me." And so I lay there and Father put his arm around me and pulled me close as he had when we were on maneuvers when I was a child. He was saying I love you. He was saying good-bye.

"I was a builder," he said, writing his epitaph in my mind, "but my buildings crumbled, Lanik. I have outlived all my works."

"Except me."

"You've been shaped by stronger forces than I can muster. It's a shame when an architect lives to see the temple fall."

No one had built temples in Mueller for centuries.

"Was I a good king?" Father asked.

"Yes," I answered.

"No," he said. "Wars and murders, conquest and power, all so important for so many years, and then all undone. Not undone by the inexorable forces of nature. Undone because men who live in trees happened to win the game and get the prize faster than we, and it unbalanced us, threw us to the ground. Chance. And it was as much chance when we got iron from the Ambassador, and so I wasn't an empire builder after all, was I? I just used the iron to kill people."

"Yov were a good ruler to your people," I said, because he needed to hear it and because, on the relative scale by which monarchs must be measured, it was true.

"They play games with us. A dose of iron here, a dose there, and see what that does to the playing field. I was a pawn, Lanik, and I thought I was the king."

He grabbed me fiercely, clung to me, whispered savagely in my ear, "I will not laugh!" To prove it he wept, and so did I.

He drowned himself that day. The body was found floating in the tall rushes of the shallow side of the island, where the current had carried him. He had jumped from a cliff into a shallow part of the lake and broken his neck; his body could not regenerate quickly enough to stop him from drowning as he lay helpless on the bottom. The pain I felt then still qomes back to me in sharp memories sometimes, but I refused to grieve. He had beaten the regeneration, and I was rather proud of his ingenuity. Suicide had been beyond most of the Muellers for years, unless they were mad and could lie down in flames. Father was not mad, I'm sure of it.

With Father gone, some things were better. He no longer worried me, and when I was finally able to forget the empty feeling, the sense of loss, when I stopped turning around, looking for someone that it took me a moment to remember would not be there, I improved as a student. "You are still terrible," Man-Who-Knows-It-All told me, "but you can at least control your own timeflow." And it was true. I could walk within a meter of someone on a different flow, and not be changed. It gave me a measure of freedom I hadn't had in this place before, and I took to changing my flow to a very fast rate when it was time to sleep, so that my nine hours took only a few minutes and to others I seemed to be awake, all the time. I saw every hour of every day, and like a Ku Kuei, I found they all amused me.

But I wasn't happy.

No one was happy, I realized one day. Amused, yes. But amusement is the reaction of very bored people when nothing entertains them anymore. The Ku Kuei had all the time in the world. But they didn't know what to do with it.

I had lived with the Ku Kuei for half a year of real time (the seasons, by and large, were unaffected by their games) when I heard that Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass was dying. "Very old," said the woman who told me. And so I went to him, and found him, still in his quicktime, racing madly toward death as he lay in the grass under the sun. I sped up to his time, which few Ku Kuei were willing to do, particularly since there was nothing amusing about death. I held his hand as he wheezed.

His body had grown thinner, though he was still fat. The skin sagged and drooped.

"I can cure you," I said.

"Don't bother."

"I'm sure of it," I said. "I can renew you. I learned it in Schwartz. They live forever in Schwartz."

"Whatever for?" he asked. "I haven't been hurrying all this time just to be cheated now." And he giggled.

"What are you laughing at?" I asked.

"Life," he said. "And you. Oh, Tight-Gut. My Lake-drinker. Drink me dry."

It occurred to me that I was the only person in Ku Kuei who would grieve for him. Death was ignored here, as it had been when my father died. Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass had had many friends. Where were they? Finding new friends who hadn't rushed through life and finished up before the others were through.

"It had no meaning fo me," he said. "But it means something to you. We say that we are happy because we have hope, but it's a lie. We have no hope. You're the only person I've known in iny life who had hope, Lake-drinker. So leave here. This is a cemetery, leave here and save the world. You can, you know. Or if you can't, no one can."

I noticed with surprise that he wasn't laughing.

"You mean this, don't you?" I asked.

"I like you, Lake-drinker," he answered, and then he died. Enough of his timeflow lingered that he had largely decomposed in a few minutes of real time, and so no one moved his body from the place. His corpse just crumbled and dissolved into the earth.

I also sank into the earth, letting it close above me and listening again to the music of the earth. The war was over; the screams of the dying were isolated now, constant but isolated in space, the deaths all in the random patterns of peace. Yet I did not believe the world was at peace. The world had never been at peace.

Save the world? From what? I had no illusions.

I could, however, savor the world, and here in Ku Kuei the flavor was thin and bland. With Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass dead, and Father dead, and Saranna frozen in time, and Man-Who-Knows-It-All convinced that I would never learn any better control of time than I had now, it occurred to me that it was time to go.

"Don't," Ssranna said when I told her.

"I want to and I will," I said.

"I need you." The look in her eye was frightened. So I stayed a little longer. I stayed with her in her timeflow for another day, another night, and another day of real time and we made love and said many gentle things that would make good memories later and would soften the pain of parting. One thing that was said was, "I'm sorry," and another was, "I forgive you," though I am no longer sure whose remorse was purged that way. I doubt it was mine.

When I left, she did not cry, nor did I, though both of us wanted to, I believe. "Come back," she said.

"All right."

"Come back soon. Come back while you're still young enough to want me. For I'm going to he young forever."

Not forever, Saranna, I thought but did not say. Young only until the planet is old and is swallowed by a star. Then you will be old, and the flames will wither what time could not. And because you've chosen to hide from time, the flames will burn you infinitely before you die.

I thought when I left her I would never see her again, and so, once out of her timeflow, I looked back and memorized her, a single tear just starting to leave her eye, a loving smile on her face, her arms reaching out to bid farewell-- or perhaps reaching out to catch me and bring me back. She was unbearably lovely. The pretty girl had lost her land, her family, all her loves, and it had hurt her into womanhood. I fleetingly wondered if I was yet old enough to truly love her.

Then I left, bidding good-bye to no one else because my leaving would not have particularly amused anyone. I set out into the forest with my timeflow sliding naturally along in real time, so that at night I got tired and slept, and I woke in the morning with the sun. Normality was refreshing, for a change.

I was a day out of the city when I felt a faster timeflow nearby, and adjusted myself to fit it. I found three Ku Kuei, young girls who were still adolescently thin. They were harrying a stranger who had ventured into the forest. Whatever direction he had been traveling, he was now going south, following the Forest River that flowed outward into Jones. One of the girls left the others and explained to me that they had been with the poor fellow for days. He was nearly insane with worry about why he couldn't seem to travel more than an hour by the sun before he had to sleep. "That's one man that'll never come back to Ku Kuel," she said, giggling.

"You never know," I said. "Someone did that to me my first time through, and I came back."

"Oh," she said. "You're Tight-Gut. You're different." And then she started to undress, a sure sign that a Ku Kuei expects to make love, and I made her laugh uproariously when I told her I didn't want to. "That's what they said, but I didn't believe it! Only that white girl from Mueller, right? Stump, right?"

"Saranna," I said. That made her laugh all the more, and I left her and settled back to real time so that they would go quickly away from me. It was true, though. When I first reached puberty, I had spent countless hours plotting to sleep with every girl I could find who was willing. And there were few who were unwilling to sleep with the Mueller's heir. Yet without ever being conscious of deciding, I had somehow chosen to sleep with no one but Saranna. When had I decided that, and why?

Faithfulness had taken me by surprise. I wondered how long the phase would last.

When you walk in it without fear, the forest of Ku Kuei is beautiful enough. But I was bred to farmland and the riding range. When the Forest River broke out of the trees into the high hills of Jones, a tumble of land that led down to the great Rebel River plain, I sat for an hour on a hilltop, looking at the fields and trees and open land. From here I could see smoke rising from kitchen fires nearby; on the Rebel River far to the south there were sails; but in the great sweep of land men had made little difference after all. I felt philosophical for a few minutes, and then realized that one of the nearby orchards was filled with apples. I wasn't hungry. But I hadn't eaten food in so long that my teeth seemed to tingle just to think of chewing. So I walked down the hill, forgot philosophy, and joined the human race again.

Nobody was particularly glad to see me.