I had lived with the Ku Kuei for half a year of real time (the seasons, by and large, were unaffected by their games) when I heard that Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass was dying. "Very old," said the woman who told me. And so I went to him, and found him, still in his quicktime, racing madly toward death as he lay in the grass under the sun. I sped up to his time, which few Ku Kuei were willing to do, particularly since there was nothing amusing about death. I held his hand as he wheezed.
His body had grown thinner, though he was still fat. The skin sagged and drooped.
"I can cure you," I said.
"Don't bother."
"I'm sure of it," I said. "I can renew you. I learned it in Schwartz. They live forever in Schwartz."
"Whatever for?" he asked. "I haven't been hurrying all this time just to be cheated now." And he giggled.
"What are you laughing at?" I asked.
"Life," he said. "And you. Oh, Tight-Gut. My Lake-drinker. Drink me dry."
It occurred to me that I was the only person in Ku Kuei who would grieve for him. Death was ignored here, as it had been when my father died. Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass had had many friends. Where were they? Finding new friends who hadn't rushed through life and finished up before the others were through.
"It had no meaning fo me," he said. "But it means something to you. We say that we are happy because we have hope, but it's a lie. We have no hope. You're the only person I've known in iny life who had hope, Lake-drinker. So leave here. This is a cemetery, leave here and save the world. You can, you know. Or if you can't, no one can."
I noticed with surprise that he wasn't laughing.
"You mean this, don't you?" I asked.
"I like you, Lake-drinker," he answered, and then he died. Enough of his timeflow lingered that he had largely decomposed in a few minutes of real time, and so no one moved his body from the place. His corpse just crumbled and dissolved into the earth.
I also sank into the earth, letting it close above me and listening again to the music of the earth. The war was over; the screams of the dying were isolated now, constant but isolated in space, the deaths all in the random patterns of peace. Yet I did not believe the world was at peace. The world had never been at peace.
Save the world? From what? I had no illusions.
I could, however, savor the world, and here in Ku Kuei the flavor was thin and bland. With Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass dead, and Father dead, and Saranna frozen in time, and Man-Who-Knows-It-All convinced that I would never learn any better control of time than I had now, it occurred to me that it was time to go.
"Don't," Ssranna said when I told her.
"I want to and I will," I said.
"I need you." The look in her eye was frightened. So I stayed a little longer. I stayed with her in her timeflow for another day, another night, and another day of real time and we made love and said many gentle things that would make good memories later and would soften the pain of parting. One thing that was said was, "I'm sorry," and another was, "I forgive you," though I am no longer sure whose remorse was purged that way. I doubt it was mine.
When I left, she did not cry, nor did I, though both of us wanted to, I believe. "Come back," she said.
"All right."
"Come back soon. Come back while you're still young enough to want me. For I'm going to he young forever."
Not forever, Saranna, I thought but did not say. Young only until the planet is old and is swallowed by a star. Then you will be old, and the flames will wither what time could not. And because you've chosen to hide from time, the flames will burn you infinitely before you die.
I thought when I left her I would never see her again, and so, once out of her timeflow, I looked back and memorized her, a single tear just starting to leave her eye, a loving smile on her face, her arms reaching out to bid farewell-- or perhaps reaching out to catch me and bring me back. She was unbearably lovely. The pretty girl had lost her land, her family, all her loves, and it had hurt her into womanhood. I fleetingly wondered if I was yet old enough to truly love her.
Then I left, bidding good-bye to no one else because my leaving would not have particularly amused anyone. I set out into the forest with my timeflow sliding naturally along in real time, so that at night I got tired and slept, and I woke in the morning with the sun. Normality was refreshing, for a change.
I was a day out of the city when I felt a faster timeflow nearby, and adjusted myself to fit it. I found three Ku Kuei, young girls who were still adolescently thin. They were harrying a stranger who had ventured into the forest. Whatever direction he had been traveling, he was now going south, following the Forest River that flowed outward into Jones. One of the girls left the others and explained to me that they had been with the poor fellow for days. He was nearly insane with worry about why he couldn't seem to travel more than an hour by the sun before he had to sleep. "That's one man that'll never come back to Ku Kuel," she said, giggling.
"You never know," I said. "Someone did that to me my first time through, and I came back."
"Oh," she said. "You're Tight-Gut. You're different." And then she started to undress, a sure sign that a Ku Kuei expects to make love, and I made her laugh uproariously when I told her I didn't want to. "That's what they said, but I didn't believe it! Only that white girl from Mueller, right? Stump, right?"
"Saranna," I said. That made her laugh all the more, and I left her and settled back to real time so that they would go quickly away from me. It was true, though. When I first reached puberty, I had spent countless hours plotting to sleep with every girl I could find who was willing. And there were few who were unwilling to sleep with the Mueller's heir. Yet without ever being conscious of deciding, I had somehow chosen to sleep with no one but Saranna. When had I decided that, and why?
Faithfulness had taken me by surprise. I wondered how long the phase would last.
When you walk in it without fear, the forest of Ku Kuei is beautiful enough. But I was bred to farmland and the riding range. When the Forest River broke out of the trees into the high hills of Jones, a tumble of land that led down to the great Rebel River plain, I sat for an hour on a hilltop, looking at the fields and trees and open land. From here I could see smoke rising from kitchen fires nearby; on the Rebel River far to the south there were sails; but in the great sweep of land men had made little difference after all. I felt philosophical for a few minutes, and then realized that one of the nearby orchards was filled with apples. I wasn't hungry. But I hadn't eaten food in so long that my teeth seemed to tingle just to think of chewing. So I walked down the hill, forgot philosophy, and joined the human race again.
Nobody was particularly glad to see me.
Chapter 9 -- Jones
The town had a name, but I never knew it. Just another of the villages astride the great highway between Nkumai and Mueller. Once this had been one of the many small roads that let Jones trade with Bird, Robles with Sloan, but the Nkumai empire had made it a large road, heavy with traffic. The locals said you could stand beside the road and some party of travelers would come by every five or ten minutes all day. I saw no reason to doubt them.
It was only a year since my father and I had disappeared into the Forest of Ku Kuei and never returned; already we were legend. I heard stories that I had murdered him, or that he had executed me, or that we had killed each other in some terrible duel; I also heard the prophecy that Father would return one day and unite all the nations of the western plain in a great rebellion against the Nkumai. Of course I said nothing of Father's plunge into the lake in Ku Kuei, though I couldn't help wondering if he would have chosen death, had he known the great reverence the people of the plain had for his name.