Treason Page 0,115

turned away.

"Lanik," he said.

"Yes," I answered.

"They asked me to tell you the way."

"The way to what?"

"The way to do what you want to do."

I studied him, unsure of what he meant. "You said that it's impossible."

He shook his head, and tears came to his eyes. "I said it was impossible for us. But there's another way. I didn't want to tell you, Lanik, for fear you'd accept it, because it would destroy you and I love you and I don't want you destroyed."

"If there's a way, Helmut, I'll take it, even if I die. God knows every alternative means death one way or another. I never planned to live forever, anyway." Even as I said these words, I wondered if I meant them, if I would really choose to die, or if instead I wouldn't prefer to find a place to live, a quiet place like Humping, or a hidden wood like Ku Kuei, or even here on this desert with the beautiful strange people of Schwartz. I could hide, and I could live, so whyever would I choose to die?

Helmut put my own doubts in words. "You have so little love for your own life?"

And in answering him, I answered myself. "Helmut, you don't know, you've never been alone like I have, but in my solitude I've discovered something. That I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their land and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me. There's a family in the hills of the poorest part of Britton, and they needed me, and their very need became the most important thing in my life. There's a woman frozen in time by a lake in Ku Kuei, and she needed me, but we've been torn apart and if I could do anything to take her from the eternal death she's consigned herself to I'd do it. A man who wasn't old enough to die killed himself in Ku Kuei, and when he died I realized that half of me was him, and that half died with him, and the other half will never stop mourning. I'll do what it takes, Helmut, so no one else will choose to die rather than live in this world. I'll do what it takes."

At other times and on other days, both before and since, I couldn't have said those words. Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst, and had I not walked three thousand solitary kilometers only to be met with refusal and despair. I don't know if I would have said so easily, "I'll do what it takes."

But I said it, and I meant it, and Helmut embraced me and explained. "When we act together, we don't all have to go into the earth. We can send one, and he he's among the rock and sings all our songs with his voice, and he hears all the earth's song with his heart. It can be joyful, and we honor our greatest men by sending them for us on such occasions. It can be painful, and we also honor our greatest by entrusting them with the pain for all of us. But there's not a man among us who could bear this. And so we can't send any of us into the earth. You, however, are stronger than any of us. How much stronger, we don't know. But if you went into the earth for us, we could hope you might survive. And if you died, and the fury of the earth continued, we would still be alive to contain it and keep the world safe."

* * *

We lay together in the sand, all with our arms spread; I lay in the middle, curled into a ball, and as I sank into the sand I felt them join me, one by one, until all their songs were singing in my mind as the sand swallowed me up and bore me down.

Always I had stopped at bedrock before. But now the rock softened and flowed out around me, like cold mud, closing again over my face. The deeper I sank, the warmer the rock became and the faster it seemed I fell, until the heat was as much as I