Treason Page 0,49

heard praying. I heard freedom.

The captain's voice again. But this time conciliatory. It was unnerving to hear him humbled. I felt ashamed, for a moment, of having weakened him.

"Sir, whoever you are," he said, "remember that we saved your life from the sea when we brought you aboard."

I only squinted at him and waved my arms. I could vaguely see that he stepped back. They were afraid of me. Had good reason to be. The wound in my heart had already closed up. Oh, what fun we radical regeneratives can have in a pinch.

"Sir," he said, "whatever god you are or whatever god you serve, we entreat you-- tell us what you want, and we'll give it to you, if you'll only go back into the sea."

Back into the sea was out of the question. I was a good swimmer-- with two arms and two legs. I had more ballast now, and a bit less coordination.

"Set me on the land," I said, "and we'll be even." If I had been thinking well, or if I could have seen better, I would have attempted to tyrannize them a little longer and get to more friendly shores. But I couldn't see, not until I was in the prow of the longboat, with six petrified crewmen jerkily coming to life whenever the swain commanded them to row, then turning back to stone, their eyes riveted on me. That was when my sight came clear-- but my back was to the shore.

We touched bottom, and I clumsily lifted myself over the prow and splashed through the water. Only when I found dry land did I look up and see where I was.

I turned as quickly as I could, to see the longboat already nearly at the slaveship. There would be no calling them back. I had just cleverly forced them to help me kill myself.

I stood naked on a beach a few hundred meters broad. Behind it rose the craggy, rough slopes of stone and sand that was called by Mueller's sailors "Sandwash." Behind it was the bitterest desert in the world. Better to surrender to an enemy than run aground here, where there were no paths, where boats never stopped, and where walking inland only took you deep into the unknown desert of Schwartz. Nothing lived. Not even the scrub brush of the wastes on the west shore of the Sleeve. Not even an insect. Nothing.

It was afternoon. The sun was hot. My skin, white as the clouds from my long confinement, was already burning. Without water, how long would I last?

If only I had kept my mouth shut in my cool, shaded, well-watered cell. If only I had said things to dispel the crew's fear.

I walked because there was nothing else to do. Because old stories told of huge rivers in the center of Schwartz that sank beneath the desert before they escaped into other lands. Because I didn't want my skeleton to be discovered right on the shore, as if I hadn't had guts enough to try to do something.

There was no wind.

By nightfall I was already breathlessly thirsty, excruciatingly tired. I had not got to the top of the rise; the sea looked ridiculously close. With so many limbs, I wasn't much of a climber. I couldn't sleep, so I forced unready and unwilling muscles to take me farther in the darkness. The darkness was welcome, and cold came to the desert, bringing relief after the heat of the day. It was summer, or might as well have been, but the night was colder than I had thought possible in such a place, and I kept moving even after I wanted to sleep because movement kept me warmer. When the sun rose, I was exhausted. But I had reached the top, and could look forward and see endless dunes of sand, with mountains in the distance here and there; I could look back and see, far in the distance, the bright blue ocean. There was no ship in sight. And on land, there was no shade-- nowhere I could rest for the heat of the day.

So I walked, arbitrarily picking a mountain as my goal so that I would have one. It seemed to be as close as any, and as impossible to reach. I would die today, I suspected; I was fat from lack of exercise, weak from lack of hope.

By afternoon I merely concentrated on moving forward. No thought of life or death now. Just step. And step