He didn't ask how I could do this, because I think my manner made it clear I wouldn't answer anyway. Oh, I thought of telling him, but there was no need to have someone else, even a good man like Barton, know what I could do. Not yet. Not until I knew what I was going to do about it.
He promised to stay at the cliff house, though he wasn't happy about it. I went down to the stable, saddled a horse-- the best Barton owned-- and set out for Gill. It's a measure of my stupidity that I did not walk in quicktime. There with Barton I had stepped back into my oldest role as armiger heir of Mueller; I had spoken like a lord, and now without thinking I mounted a horse so I could travel like one. Such is the power even an ancient, long disused habit can have. I had ceased to be heir of Mueller years before, but that role was still embedded in me, ready to come forward and control my actions. It nearly killed me.
As I sat astride the horse walking briskly but not frantically down the road toward civilization and eventually toward Gill, I saw a Humper driving his flock north, toward the less-civilized and therefore more inviting part of Humping. It seemed incredible to me that just the day before I had finished Glain's and Vran's planting; that I had seriously thought of spending the rest of my life there among the Humpers. The memory, only a day old, was like a terrible ache, a realization that I was not, after all, ready for goodness and peace and happiness, but instead still felt a sense of mission. If there is a purpose to fulfill, I will fulfill it, I thought bitterly (and yet with some pride, for up to now all my purposes had come to nothing and this time-- this time, because in quicktime the illuders stood revealed to me, I was not just a person who could stop, I was the only person outside Ku Kuei who could even find them. And apathetic as the Ku Kuei were, there was no chance I'd have any help from them when it came time to destroy the illuders.
Destroy them. Did I already, so casually, plan murder? But it's war, I insisted to myself, and wondered then who had declared it and why I thought I was on the good side. I need not ask the earth on this one, I realized. This time it wasn't a matter of eating vegetables. I meant to kill men, kill them in cold blood, kill them for a noble cause, but kill them just the same.
Was the cause really noble? Was I striking a blow for Mueller's independence? From what? Perhaps these illuders were actually doing something valuable for our miserable planet. They were ending the bloodshed, weren't they? Ending the competition among Families, unifying the planet to achieve a common purpose.
No. Wrong. They were not ending the competition. They were winning it by fraud, and that was a different matter. It struck me as being unfair.
Which is, after all, the only way any man decides what is right and what is wrong-- how it seems to him. To me, this was wrong. Other men's minds were solving the problems of the universe. Other men's blood and genes had gone into winning the iron Mueller had taken from the Ambassador. And those minds and that blood were being stolen without anyone's knowledge that the crime was even taking place.
I remembered being a radical regenerative. I remembered standing at the window, observing the pens, imagining myself among the monsters of many legs and arms who were fed from troughs and denied even the slightest shred of humanity. It was cruel, though how else rads could have been treated God only knew. Still, even that cruelty might have been bearable, or at least partly bearable, because the rads knew that they were doing it for Mueller. Doing it to ensure that their families and their families' families would be the ones to get offworld, would be the ones to make the starships and go out into space and be free.
If that hope had helped keep them sane, it was a terrible thing to turn it into a lie and have their suffering and loneliness and loss of humanity be for a race of strangers who insinuated themselves into families.
I hated Dinte. I had despised him before, but now I hated him. I pictured myself going into the palace at Mueller-on-the-River and walking up to him and going into quicktime and seeing the man who really was Vinte, the man pretending to be my brother, the man who had destroyed my father and robbed me of my inheritance; and when I saw him, I could picture myself killing him, and the picture gave me pleasure.
(I could remember the earth moaning with the cries of dying men, but I shut out that memory. Not that memory. Not today. I had blood to shed before I was ready for that memory again.)
But first, Percy Barton, Lord Barton's "son." I had to learn from him where he came from and who his people were, and then I'd destroy them all. If they could be destroyed. Was there any way to make an end to people who could appear to be something they were not, who could trade places with a man before your eyes and never have you notice, who could pretend to be your brother for years and never give you a clue?
How did they do it? How could I fight it?
As I descended from the hills of Humping, I felt a terrible sadness, because I knew I was leaving my truest home in order to go out and destroy my peace of mind and cause agony to the earth. I remembered the spokesman of the Schwartzes telling me, "Every man who dies at your hand will scream into your soul forever."
Almost I turned back. Almost I went back to Glain and Vran. Almost.
Instead I rode on for twelve days until I came to Gill, the capital of the Family of Gill, and also the capital of the empire called the East Alliance. In my days of travel, I had figured nothing out and knew no more than I had known before. I hadn't even taken elementary precautions, didn't even have the sense to arrive in quicktime, which is why they caught me in Gill and killed me.
Chapter 11 -- Gill
Lord Barton's servant, Dul, had reached Gill ahead of me. That had been predictable. What I had forgotten was that if Dul heard enough of our conversation to want to poison us, he also heard enough to know that I was Lanik Mueller.
Did they believe him? Did they suspect that Lanik Mueller had survived, had reemerged from Ku Kuei after two years? Perhaps they doubted it at first, but once word reached Mwabao Mawa, there would be no more doubt. She would remember having seen me in Jones a year ago, and they would he certain.
It was an academic question at the moment, however. Whoever I was, Lanik Mueller or Lake-drinker or Man-in-the-Wind, I had discovered the existence of the illuders and I had to be destroyed. They had my description, and when I came to the gate of Gill, the soldiers took me, dragged me from my horse, and held me while the captain compared me with a written notice that, he had some trouble reading. "He's the one," he finally said, but there was a little doubt in his voice.
"You're wrong," I said. "I just look like him, whoever he is."
But the captain shrugged. "If somebody else comes in who fits the description, we'll kill him, too." The soldiers put me in a cart, blindfolded, and dragged me off through the streets.
I was concerned. If they believed that I was Lanik Mueller, and if they knew-- as the illuders surely did by now-- that Muellers regenerated, they would kill me much too thoroughly. I might really die from beheading or burning. It would be beyond my ability to save myself, and so I would have to escape before they performed the execution; and the only methods of escape I had were too demonstrative of my abilities to fail to raise a real alarm among the illuders.
I was lucky. Dul, whoever he was, was not bright enough or well-enough informed to realize that if I really was Lanik Mueller, they couldn't kill me in the ordinary way. Executions in Gill were by squads of archers. Arrows are easily taken care of by any Mueller, unless there are too many of them all at once, and to a rad like me, they didn't have enough arrows to destroy me beyond my body's ability to heal.