Treason Page 0,12

the healing of all my recent wounds taken more from me than I expected?

I didn't know. I set down the pack beside a tree and slept without waking, long and hard.

So long that when I awoke it was daylight again, and I got up and pushed on.

Again a day of walking, then weariness while the sun was still high. This time I forced myself to go on, farther and farther, until I became a machine. I was alert enough to avoid entangling roots, to pick my way through thick places, to scramble over rocks, to slide carefully down the slopes of hollows and ravines, then clamber up the other side, but I was so numb with the effort just to stay awake that I wan't conscious of any of this, not really; an obstacle was forgotten the moment it was out of view. I felt as if I had been walking for days, and yet the sun was still high.

At first my weariness in so short a time made me feel a deep dread, that the complex of symptoms that marked a radical regenerative included a kind of general dystrophy-- but that couldn't be it, for I had found the strength to go on and on, hadn't I? I wasn't weakening, for surely I had covered some ground, at least. But perhaps rads were plagued with the sudden onset of bouts of almost uncontrollable sleepiness. Yet I was controlling it, wasn't I? And the rads in the pens, while they moved with the languor of despair, did not seem to sleep more often than other men, or at least no one ever said they did.

Then I had a thought that comforted me a little-- that the strange thing that was happening to me might not be a product of the condition of my own body, but rather might arise from the mysterious forest of Ku Kuei. Couldn't it be that the forests exuded some chemical that caused weariness? Or perhaps only the illusion of weariness. Or perhaps a whole complex of debilitating drugs in the air, causing hallucinations, distorting my sense of time, making me long to sleep with as much desperation as a man longs for water after three days without a drink.

That would explain why Ku Kuei had become such a feared and hated place. What if a man could wander in here and find his sense of time so distorted that he thought he had wandered miles in only a few minutes? Overcome with weariness, he might sleep twenty-four hours, then rise again, walk a few more meters, and fall down thinking he had done a day's labor. In only a short time the cumulative effect of all these chemicals could become fatal, either directly, by poisoning the man, or indirectly, by causing him to sleep until he dies of dehydration.

No wonder there were so few wild animals here. Perhaps a few birds acclimated to the poisonous air, some insects whose brains were too small even to be affected. But this would explain why nothing was heard from the Family of Ku Kuei almost from the hour they entered this wood three thousand years before.

Now here I was, caught up in the same natural defenses of this forest, and just as unlikely to win my way to freedom. My sentence had been death after all, not just exile. My flesh would be consumed by the bacteria and small insects of the forest floor; my bones would bleach and, after decades, crumble. I would then become part of the planet we called Treason, contributing to it the only metal that this soil would ever hold, the metal of men's souls. Was mine a soft and yielding element? Or would I be a hard place in the forest floor? Would roots soak up from me a metal that would lend vigor to their massive trunks?

These were my thoughts as I struggled to keep myself awake. For a time I think I even dreamed as I walked on, imagining myself to be one of a thousand trees marching forth to do combat with the dangerous black soldiers of Nkumai. And such was my madness that I even saw myself waving vast branches to sweep the swordsmen of Mueller from their feet, then grinding them into powder with my irresistible roots.

I came, to myself again, and thought more soberly-- though perhaps just as madly-- of what this poisonous forest might imply. It made me realize that in three thousand years of