Treason Read online

  There was no arguing that, since I didn't yet know olfactory from occipital.

  Another thing she had said intrigued me. I picked up on what she said about men traveling faster than light. "Any schoolchild knows that's impossible," I said. "Our ancestors were brought to Treason in starships that took a hundred years of sleep to arrive."

  "So mankind was crawling then," she said. "Did you think they would stop learning, just because our ancestors left them? In three thousand years of isolation, we've missed the great things of humanity."

  "But faster than light," I said. "How could they have done that?"

  She shook her head, a faint grey in the grey of night moving faintly. "I was just talking," she said. "Just chattering on. Let's go back."

  We retraced our steps. We were halfway up a rope ladder when a voice above us whispered faintly in the night.

  "Someone's on the ladder."

  Mwabao Mawa ahead of me froze, and I did the same. Then I felt the rope jiggle slightly, and her foot came down near my face. I assumed we were going down, and would have descended at once except that her foot twisted and hooked under my arm, stopping my descent. So I waited until she climbed down the opposite side of the ladder to be at the same height as me-- her feet on the rung below mine, and so her lips not far below my ear.

  The sound wouldn't have been audible three feet away. "First platform. Wash face. Going to visit Official Who Feeds All the Poor. Two Torches."

  So we went on climbing, and reached the first platform, which by chance-- lucky chance, too, since it was not common-- had a barrel of water. I washed my face as silently as possible, while Mwabao Mawa kept climbing up and down the same three meters of rope ladder, so that anyone observing the strand in the night wouldn't know we had stopped.

  I got my face as clean as possible, and also my hands and feet. Then I climbed on the ladder behind her.

  "No," she whispered, and then we were both standing on the platform, as she demanded, quietly of course, that I give her my robe.

  "I can't," I whispered.

  "You're wearing clothing underneath, aren't you?", she asked, and I nodded. "Well, I can't be caught naked on the treeways. I can't."

  But still I refused, until finally she said, "Then give me your underclothing." I agreed to that, and reached under the robe to strip off the pants and halter. The pants were too tight for her hips, but she struggled into them anyway. The halter, however, fit nicely-- one more sad proof of exactly how buxom I had become.

  I had a worse realization, however, at the same time. The halter, as I slipped it off my shoulder inside my robe, had snagged on something on my shoulder. There should have been nothing there to snag on. Which meant that something new was growing.

  An arm? Then I had less than a week before I'd have to cut it off, and it wasn't in a good position for me to get at alone. How could I go to an Nkumai surgeon (were there any Nkumai surgeons?) and ask him to remove an extra arm?

  But the momentary alarm that gave me turned into relief as I realized that of course I didn't have to stay here for a week,, or even another day. I had all that I needed, all I had hoped for. I could now make a great show of leaving Nkumai in disgust at their failure to let me see the king. I could return to my father and tell him what the Nkumai sold to the Ambassador.

  Smelly air.

  I might have laughed, except that we were climbing the ladder again. And as I realized how close I had come to laughing, it occurred to me that whiffs of Nkumai forest air above noxious swamps could be dangerous. Self-restraints that I could normally count on, disciplined reflexes that had always been sure, didn't function as well here, not this night.

  Finally we reached the platform where the guards were watching.

  "Stop," said the sharp whisper, and then hands grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the platform. Unfortunately, I wasn't ready for the movement, and it was only with luck that I kept my feet on the rope ladder. As it was, I hung over the abyss, my feet on the ladder and my one arm suspended in the firm grasp of a guard.

  "Careful," said Mwabao. Careful, she's a soiler, she might fall."

  "Who are you?"

  "Mwabao Mawa and Lady Lark, the soiler emissary from Bird."

  A grunt of recognition, and I found myself being pulled toward the platform, until my shin struck the edge. I stepped clumsily onto the wood, falling to one knee.

  "What are you doing, wandering in the dark like this?" the voice insisted. I decided to let Mwabao answer. She explained that she was leading me to meet with Official Who Feeds All the Poor.

  "Nobody has torches out now," said the voice.

  "He will."

  "Will he now?"

  "Two torches," she insisted. "He is expecting a guest."

  Whispers, and then we waited while quiet feet scampered off. A guard-- or two, I realized, as the breathing patterns broke up-- stayed with us, while another ran to check. It wasn't long before he returned and said, "Two torches."

  "All right then," said the voice. "Go on. But in the future, Mwabao Mawa, carry a torch. You are trusted, but not infallible."

  Mwabao mumbled her thanks, and so did I, and we were on our way again.

  When two torches shone in the distance, Mwabao Mawa said good-bye.

  "What?" I said, rather loudly.

  "Quiet," she insisted. "Official must not know that I brought you."

  "But how do I get there from here?"

  "Can't you see the path?"

  I couldn't, so she took me closer, until the dim light of the torches illuminated the rest of the way. I was glad that Official didn't have the same penchant for narrow approaches that Mwabao did. I felt safe enough following the path in the dark, as Mwabao Mawa slipped off into the night of the trees.

  I came to the door and said, very softly, "From the earth to the air."

  "And to the nest, come in," said a soft voice, and I stepped through the curtains. Official sat there looking very, well, official in his red robe in the flickering light of two candles.

  "You came at last," said Official.

  "Yes," I said, and added truthfully, "I'm not very good at traveling in the dark."

  "Speak softly," he said, "for the curtains conceal little, and the night air carries sounds a long way."

  So we spoke softly as he asked me questions about why I wanted to see the king and what I wanted to accomplish. What could I say? No need to see the old boy now, Official, already got what I wanted. So I answered all his questions, until at last he sighed deeply and said, "Well, Lady Lark, I've been told that if you passed my screening, I was in no way to impede you from further approach to the king."

  Yesterday I would have been delighted. But tonight-- tonight I Just wanted to take my deformed body with the new arm it was growing and get out of Nkumai.

  "I'm grateful, Official."

  "Of course you don't go straight from me to him. A guide will come and take you to the very highly placed person who gave me my instructions, and that very highly placed person will take you higher."

  "To the king?"

  "I don't know exactly how highly placed this person is," Official said, not smiling. How could they conduct government this way, I wondered.

  But a boy appeared when Official snapped his fingers, and led me off another way. I followed gingerly, and this time there was a swing-- but the boy lit a torch at the other end, and I made it, though I landed clumsily and twisted my ankle. The sprain was mild, and it healed and lost its soreness in a few minutes.

  The boy left me at a house which had no light, and he told me to say nothing. So I waited in front of the house, until finally a low whisper said, "Come in," and I went in.

  The house was absolutely dark, but once again I was asked questions, and once again I answered, not having any idea who I was speaking to or even where, precisely, he was. But after a half hour of this, he finally said, "I will leave now."

  "What about me?" I asked idiotically.

  "You'll stay. Someone else will co
me."

  "The King?"

  "The person next to the king," he said, even more softly, and left through the gap in the curtains I had entered by.

  Then I heard soft steps in another direction, and someone came in and sat beside me. Close beside me. And then chuckled softly.

  "Mwabao Mawa," I said, incredulous.

  "Lady Lark," she whispered back to me.

  "But they told me--"

  "That you would meet the person closest to the king."

  "And it's you?"

  She chuckled again.

  "So you are the king's mistress."

  "In a way," she said. "If only there were a king."

  That one took awhile to sink in.

  "No King?"

  "No one king," she answered, "but I can speak for those who rule as well as anyone. Better than most. Better than some of them."

  "But why did I have to go through all of this? Why did I have to-- bribe my way up to you? I was with you all along!"

  "Softly," she said. "Softly. The night listens. Yes, Lark, you were with me all along. I had to know that I could trust you. That you weren't a spy."

  "But you showed me the place yourself. Let me smell the smells."

  "I also showed you how impossible it was to stop us, or duplicate it. Near the ground, Lark, the air smells foul. And your people could never climb our trees, you know that."

  I agreed. "But why did you show me anyway? It's so useless."

  "Not useless," she said. "The smell has other effects. I wanted you to breathe that air."

  And then I felt her hand pull the cap off my hair. She gently pulled at a single lock of it. "You owe me a favor," she said, and suddenly I felt my own death approaching.

  Her breath was hot on my cheek and her hand was stroking my throat when I finally thought of a way out of this. At least a way to postpone it. Perhaps the perfumed air was enough to loosen the sexual tabus of the people of Nkumai. Perhaps it would have been enough of a dose to weaken a normal woman's inhibition against making love to another woman. But I had no inhibition against making love to a woman, and my body, too long deprived, reacted to Mwabao Mawa's offer as if it were extraordinarily opportune. Fortunately, my inhibition against dying was very strong, And the air hadn't weakened it a bit. I knew that if I let things go on to their natural conclusion it would lead to discovery of my odd physique. It occurred to me that Mwabao Mawa would not be quite so open-minded about finding a man in her bed as she expected me to be about finding a woman in mine.

  "I can't," I said.

  "You will," she said, and her cold hand slid inside my robe. "I can help you," she said. "I can pretend to be a man for you, if you like," and she began humming and singing a soft, strange song. Almost immediately that hand inside the robe became rougher, stronger, and the face that kissed my cheek felt rough and whiskered. All of this seemed to happen through her song. How did she do it, I wondered, even as another part of my mind gratefully noticed that her pretence at maleness would probably help quell my desire for her.

  Except that my breasts reacted like any woman's, and I began to be very afraid as the song became too rhythmic, pulled me more deeply into a trance.

  "I mustn't," I said, and I pulled away. She followed. Or he? The illusion was powerful. I only wished I could do the same, and fool her into thinking I was a woman no matter what evidence her lands lips and eyes might find. But I couldn't. "If you do," I said, "I'll kill myself afterward."

  "Nonsense," she answered.

  "I haven't been purified." I tried to sound desperate. It wasn't hard.

  "Nonsense," she said.

  "If I didn't kill myself, my people would," I said. "They will, if this happens and I haven't been purified first."

  "How would they know?"

  "Do you think I would lie to my own people?" I hoped that the huskiness and trembling in my voice sounded like offended honor instead of the rank terror I actually felt.

  Perhaps it did, for she stopped, or rather paused, and asked, "What is it, this purification?"

  I made up a jumble of religious ritual, half stolen from the practices of the people of Ryan and half a product of my need for solitude. She listened. She believed me. And so I made another journey in the dark, and found myself alone in Mwabao Mawa's room, the one with the chests and boxes. My purpose there, she told me, was to meditate.

  I stayed there for a morning and an evening and a night.

  I had no idea what to do. Mwabao was in the other room, the one we had shared for two weeks, humming softly an erotic song-- one that kept me almost constantly aroused.

  I toyed with the idea of cutting off my genitals, but I couldn't be sure how long regeneration would take, and the healed wound of castration would not be taken for the anatomy of a woman.

  I also thought of escape, of course, but I knew perfectly well that the only escape route lay through the room where Mwabao Mawa cheerfully waited. I cursed again and again-- very softly, of course-- wondering why I had the miserable fortune to end up imprisoned in a woman's body with a lesbian for a jailer and hundreds of meters of gravity serving as the bars for my cell.

  At last I realized that my only hope, thin as it was, was to escape, not as a woman, but as a man. Tomorrow night, in the darkness, if I painted myself black, I might elude the guards. If I didn't, and I was taken, all I'd need to do is fall. Drop, I thought ironically. And my identity as a Mueller would be safe.

  Getting past Mwabao? Simple. Kill her.

  Could I do it? Not so simple. I liked her. She had breached diplomatic protocol, but she had done me no real harm. Also, she was well-connected, she would quickly be missed.

  So I wouldn't kill her. A knock on her head, a breaking of bones, that should be enough. It should silence her for long enough, or at least immobilize her. Though truth to tell, I had no idea how hard I'd have to hit a normal person to knock her unconscious without killing her, how many bones to break without crippling her for life. With Muellers, it was never an issue. And I had never heard of a Mueller striking a foreigner without the intent to kill or maim. Still, I'd do my best to leave her whole.

  All that remained was to hide who I was. The blacking of my skin could come later, after I finished with Mwabao. But the other preparations would be good for shock value.

  I began searching quietly through her boxes, hoping to find a knife. With it I would cut off my breasts. They'd grow back, of course, but by tonight the scar tissue would only have turned back into normal flesh, and the breasts would still not have begun noticeably to grow. It was the closest thing to a change of sex. that I could hope to accomplish, I realized bitterly.

  I didn't find a knife. Instead I found several more books, and a moment's curiosity led me to a half-hour's concentration.

  It was a history of Treason. I had read our history of the planet, of course, but this was more complete in some ways. In some very important ways, and I began to realize that I had been almost completely fooled. And yet it was so obvious.

  What Mueller's history left out, and what Nkumai's history dwelt on, was the entire group. It was an account of not just one family, but all the members of the conspiracy who were exiled to this metalless planet as a horrible example to the rest of the Republic of what happened to people who tried to establish a government of the intellectual elite. The long-dead issues that had brought the Families here always seemed laughable to me, and still do. Who should rule whom? The answer was always, eternally, "I should." Whoever "I" might be, "I" would seek power.

  But the Nkumai history went over the roster of names. I hunted for Mueller, and found it. Han Mueller, a geneticist specializing in the hyperdevelopment of human regeneration. I found others. But of course the one most interesting to me at that moment was Nkumai. Ngago Nkumai, who had adopted a pseudo-African name as a gesture of defiance, had made his name in the development of theoretical physical constructs of the universe. Making new ways of looking at the universe that would enable men to do new things.

&nb
sp; It all came together at once, each part so flimsy that alone it proved nothing, but all the events of the weeks I had spent in Nkurnai fit so well that I couldn't doubt my conclusion.

  The smelly air above the swamp was nothing, was a decoy, was Mwabao Mawa's device for getting the slim, pretty blond girl from Bird into bed. But other things were true. There was no king, for instance. Mwabao had told the truth: a group governed this place. But it was not a group of politicians. It was a group whose profession was the same as the founder, Ngago Nkumai. They were scientists who made up new ways of looking at the universe-- scientists who invented things like True Sight and Making the Stars Dance. They used Mwabao Mawa as their liaison with what official government workers Nkumai had. Whom did they use as liaison with the army? With the guards? It hardly mattered. And why did all the common Nkumai believe there was a king? There undoubtedly had been-- or perhaps there still was-- a figurehead. Again, it hardly mattered.

  What mattered was that Nkumai wasn't selling smells to the Ambassador at all. It was selling physics. It was selling new ways of looking at the universe. It was selling, of course, faster-than-light travel, as Mwabao Mawa had so blandly let slip and then covered so well. And other things. Things worth far more to the Watchers than arms, legs, hearts, and heads that were carved off the bodies of radical regeneratives.

  Each Family would, if it had any hope of creating anything to sell to the Ambassador, try to develop what its founder had known best: Mueller, human genetics. Nkumai, physics. I looked up Bird and laughed. The original Bud had been a wealthy socialite, a woman with few marketable skills and abilities at all, except her knack for bending others to her will. The matriarchy was her only legacy. In the competition for iron that gave them no advantage. Yet, like all the others, she had passed on to her Family her knowledge of what she was best at.

  I closed the book. Now it was even more urgent that I escape, because this particular discovery could be the key to a Mueller victory over Nkumai. And I could-- I was sure of it-- train a Mueller army to be able to fight in the trees. And we could-- I had hope for it-- win a victory and capture at least some of those minds, or at least control their Ambassador and block them from using it. After all, the basic population of Nkumai was ill-equipped for fighting, but the basic population of Mueller was raised to the knife and the spear and the bow. We could do it.