Orson Scott Card - Treason

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TREASON

by Orson Scott Card

v1.1 (Jan-24-1999)

If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number

by 0.1 and redistribute.

Chapter 1 -- Mueller

I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least, I was the last

to know that I knew.

Saranna realized it when her hand glided up my chest and instead of smoothly

cresting the pectorals made lean and hard by hours of sword and javelin and

archery, her fingers snagged on a looser kind of flesh. Her hands remembered

that same discovery on her own body not that many years before, and being a

true daughter of Mueller, with a sharp eye and an uncompromising mind, she

knew it all at once, knew all my future history, knew all that was now

impossible between us. Yet, being a true daughter of Mueller, she said

nothing, nor did she grieve; it simply happened that from then until I left

Mueller, she never touched me, at least not as she had before, not with the

promise of decades of passion in our future. She knew, but I did not yet know.

Dinte saw it, too. Watching me as he always does, the second son hoping for

some accident to befall me so that he can delay any help that might come to

me; searching for some hint of congenital idiocy so he can be named regent

after father dies; noting any flaws or weaknesses in my fighting or my

thinking, so that when, not if, he betrays me, he can gain some advantage over

me-- watching me with that kind of eagerness, he had to see the way my shirt

moved differently across my chest. Of all the ways that I could be rendered

unfit to sit on Father's throne, this had to be the one that he would relish

most.

Being a poor excuse for a son of Mueller, he immediately became cocky, not

naming my affliction, but treating me with the arrogance that even cowards

have the grace to display only toward the corpse of their enemy. He knew, but

I did not yet know.

Father would not have seen it. There was always too much work for the

Mueller to do; he had no time for watching me himself. But he had me watched,

by all my tutors and half my friends; especially during the crucial time of

puberty, when the greatest danger comes.

We in whom the Mueller blood runs true, our bodies have a great gift: to

heal so quickly that scars form before the blood is dry, and to grow back any

part of our body that is lost. It makes us very hard to kill.

Our enemies say that Muellers feel no pain, but it isn't true. To them it

looks that way because in battle we willingly absorb a dangerous blow that any

other man would have to parry to save his life, and while our enemy's sword is

buried in our own flesh, we can cut the lifeblood out of him and then walk on

to find another enemy to engage, our own wound already healing.

But we feel pain, just like anyone else. Our women faint in childbirth when

the flesh is torn. When you put our hand into the fire, the agony burns as hot

inside our brain as inside any other man's. We feel pain; what we don't feel

is fear. Or rather, we've learned to separate pain and fear.

To other people, pain means that their life is in danger; to preserve

themselves, they must have the reflex to avoid that pain by any means they

can. But to a Mueller, pain means that the danger is small. Death comes to us

only in ways that are beyond pain-- the crumbling of senility, the cold hard

breath of drowning, the loss of all feeling when the body is severed from the

head. A mere cut or burn or stab or broken bone means only that some vigor

will be taken from us as our body quickly heals; it means well be fed on

blood-rare steak and not on radishes when the battle ends.

And the worst fear that others feel-- the fear of dismemberment, of losing

toes or fingers, hands or feet, ears or nose or eyes or genitals-- we laugh at

that.

Why is it their worst fear? Because they've come to think of their present

shape as their true self, and if they lose that shape, they lose their self,

they become a monster even in their own eyes.

But we Muellers have long since learned that our present shape is not

ourself at all. We can have many different shapes and still be who we always

were. It's a lesson we learn during the madness of adolescence. At twelve or

fourteen years of age, we also go through the bizarre jumbling of chemicals

that cause others to grow hair in strange places, and become machines that can

build copies of themselves. With us, though, since our bodies are so powerful,

adolescence is also stronger. We bred ourselves to regenerate lost or broken

body parts; during the madness of puberty, our bodies forget their proper

shape and try to grow parts that are already there. Every young man and woman

has waved a third arm tauntingly at friends, danced some complicated step

designed to make use of an extra leg or two, winked a superfluous eye,

grimaced with three rows of teeth above and four below. I endured having four

arms once, an extra nose, and two hearts pumping away before the surgeon took

me under his knife to cut away the excess. Our self is not our shape. We can

have any shape, and still be who we are. We have no dread of losing limbs. We

can't distort or destroy our self through subtraction.

We have other dreads.

All during my adolescence, Father had me watched. Even at the age of

fifteen, when my body was only a decimeter or two from a man's full height and

my sexual changes should have been complete-- complete enough for Saranna to

have my child in her already-- even then, I could still feel their eyes on me

from dawn to dusk, measuring me body and soul, so they could tell the tale to

Father, in those moments when he had the time to think of me. It's impossible

that they missed what was happening to me; Father must have known before

Dinte, even before Saranna did. They all knew.

But I didn't know.

Oh, of course I knew. I knew it well enough to abandon all my tight-fitting

clothing and wear only the looser, blousier clothes. I knew it well enough to

find excuses rather than go swimming with my friends, well enough not to snap

at Dinte for being even snottier than ever, as if I dared not provoke him into

naming what it was I had become. I knew it well enough not to wonder why

Saranna wasn't touching me, knew it well enough during that last month not to

take her into my bed. And yet I never named what had become of me, not even to

myself.

I never even let the thought of my terrible new future come into my head.

Except once, with the precious steel sword of royalty flashing in my hand,

when I vowed, so strongly that I remember the moment even now as if it had

happened only this moming-- I vowed never to live without such a sword in my

hand or at my side. Even then, I was pretending to myself that my fear was of

becoming a commoner, the sort of sluglike semi-soul who never touches iron and

who shudders at the slightest cut that bleeds.

"Today," said Homarnoch.

"I haven't time," I said, with that imperious archness that the sons of

princes use to remind others of authority they don't yet have.

"The Mueller says."

And that was that. All deceptions were over; all lies that I believed, I'd

have to unbelieve all at once. Yet still I put him off, told him I was filthy

and had to wash, which wastrue enough; but I managed to bathe without once

looking in the silvered glass to see myself. Clothing hung over all the

mirrors, or somehow they had all been set aside, so that in my room I never

had to see myself. This was just one more sign that I knew without knowing--

until that month I had been as vain as any boy and surrounded myself with

glass.

But there was no hiding from the rumor in Homarnoch's sterile surgical den,

his place of sharp steel knives and bloody beds, where barbed arrows were cut

from soldiers' flesh and gaudy useless body parts were struck from adolescent

bodies.

He stood me before the mirror, himself behind me, and cupped both hands

under breasts that by now had grown voluptuous. For the first time I was

forced to stare at flesh that couldn't possibly be my own. For the first time

I was aware of the pressure of someone else's touch. Still, I don't think it

was Homarnoch's brusk surgeonly caress that aroused me. That touch was far

more strange to me than sexual. I think it was the sight of what had to be

someone else's breasts being taken in someone else's hands. I think it was

voyeurism. I still didn't believe in what was happening to me.

"Why didn't you come to me at once?" asked Homarnoch. He sounded almost

hurt.

"For what? I've grown all kinds of body parts before."

He shook his head. "You're not a fool, Lanik Mueller."

I heard my name, and felt a sick dread. Later I realized that it was the

name Mueller that caused me fear-- not because it was my name, but because so

soon it would not be.

"It happens even in the Mueller's family, Lanik. Every few generations. No

one is immune."

"It's just puberty," I said, willing him to believe it.

He looked at me sadly, and not without affection, I thought. "I hope you're

right, " he said, but of course he had no hope. "I hope that when I examine

you, we find out that you're right."

"There's no need to--"

"Now, Lanik," he said. "The Mueller asks me to give him my answer, within

the hour."

What my father commanded, I performed. I lay down on the table and willed

myself to relax as the knife bit into my abdomen. I had felt worse pain

before-- the ragged tearing of the wooden practice swords, for instance, or

the time an arrow passed into my temple and out my eye-- but it wasn't the

pain. Or not the pain alone. Because for the first time since earliest

childhood, pain and fear burned together within me, and I felt what common men

feel that so unmans them on the battlefield, that makes them fodder for a

Mueller's hungry sword.

When he was finished, he taped the wound. I already felt ihe giddiness and

tingling that told me healing was under way-- these were clean cuts, and all

would heal without scars within hours. I didn't have to ask what he had found.

I knew from the stooping of his shoulders, the harsh stoicism of his face. I

could tell that it was grief and not rejoicing that his dispassionate mask

concealed.

"Just cut them off," I said, lightly, jokingly.

He didn't take it as a joke. "It's ovaries, too, Lanik, and if I cut them

out, cut out the uterus, they'll just grow back." He faced me then, with the

same courage with which a man faces his enemy in battle. "You're a radical

regenerative, Lanik. It will never end."

There it was. The name for what I had become. Like my beautiful cousin

Velinisik, who went mad and pissed all over everyone with the penis whose

growth had monstered her. Radical regenerative. Rad. Like everyone else, I had

turned away from her, hadn't so much as spoken her name from that day to this.

First she ceased to be human. Then she had never been human. Then she had

never existed.

At the end of puberty, most Muellers settled into their adult form, and only

regrew those parts of their bodies that had been lost. But a certain small

number of us never got back under control. Adolescence went on forever, with

new body parts growing at random. In such cases the body forgot what its

natural shape ought to be; it thought of itself as an endless wound, forever

to be healed; as a perpetually dismembered body, with parts forever to be

renewed.

It was the worst way to die, because there was no funeral; you ceased to be

a person, but they refused to let you become a corpse.

"Say that, Homarnoch," I told him, "and you might as well also say that I'm

dead."

"I'm sorry," he said simply. "But I must tell your father immediately."

And he left.

I looked again in the large mirror on the wall, where my clothing hung on a

hook. My shoulders were still broad from hours and days, and weeks with sword,

staff, spear, and bow, and more recently with the bellows at the forge. My

hips still slim from running and riding. My stomach ridged with muscle, hard

and solid and virile. And then, ridiculously soft and inviting, my breasts--

I took my knife from the belt hanging on the wall and pressed its sharp

silver edge against my breast. It hurt too badly-- I cut only an inch deep and

had to stop. There was a sound at the door. I turned.

A little black Cramer bowed her head so she would not see me. I remembered

that she had been taken in the last war (which Father won), and so belonged to

us for life; I spoke gently to her because she was a slave.

"You're all right, don't worry," I said to her, but she didn't relax.

"My lord Ensel wants to see his son Lanik. He says immediately."

"Damn!" I said, and she knelt to receive my anger. I didn't hit her, though,

only touched her head as I walked to my clothing and put it on. I couldn't

help but see my reflection as I left-- my chest heaving up and down as I

strode out of the room. The little Cramer murmured her thanks as I left.

I started to run down the stairs to Father's chambers. I hadn't learned yet

to walk like a woman, smoothing my steps and rolling my hips to avoid needless

jostling. After three steps I stopped and leaned on the banister until the

pain and fear subsided. When I turned around to go down more slowly, I saw my

brother Dinte at the bottom of the stairs. He was smirking, as fine a specimen

of budding asshood as the Family had ever produced.

"I see you've heard the news," I said, walking carefully downstairs.

"May I suggest you acquire a halter?" he offered blandly. "I'd loan you one

of Mannoah's but hers are far too small."

I put my hand on my knife and he retreated a few steps. I had cut off his

fingers and put out his eyes so many times in childhood quarrels that I knew

the futility of it-- but the knife felt necessary in my hands when I was

angry.

"You mustn't hurt me anymore, Lanik," Dinte said, still smirking. "I'll be

heir now, and head of the Family soon enough, and I'll remember."

I tried to think of some answer. Some scornful reply, to let him know that

nothing he could ever do to me would compare in agony to what had just

happened, to what was about to happen.

But to confess that much fear and pain is what you do with your most trusted

friend, and perhaps not even then. So I said nothing and walked past him

toward Father's private room. As I passed he hummed in the back of his throat,

as one does to call the prostitutes on Hivvel Street. I did not kill him,

however.

"Hello, my son," said Father when I came into his chamber.

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TREASONbyOrsonScottCard(c)1979,1988byOrsonScottCardv1.1(Jan-24-1999)Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,pleaseupdatetheversionnumberby0.1andredistribute.Chapter1--MuellerIwasthelasttoknowwhatwashappeningtome.Oratleast,IwasthelasttoknowthatIknew.Sarannarealizeditwhenherhandglidedupmychestandinsteadofs...

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Orson Scott Card - Treason

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