I was filled with a strange feeling. Recognition. This deformed man thought as I did; and though it was only logical that he would, still it was a surprise to me. No one ever meets a man who thinks exactly as he does, not normally. But now it was as if I could say his words-- my words-- along with him.
"With Anderson gone, and the Ambassadors," he-- I-- said, "we're cut off from the Republic. We're free. And when the universe hears from us again, we'll be making the tides."
Silence. Then I realized that I had said the last few words, not he. He smiled at me. We understood each other. Not everything, but the thought, the way we thought was clear to both of us, and, so help me, I felt affection for him. If the ability to communicate well has something to do with love, there is no one a man can love quite so well as himself.
"Lanik," we said in unison, breaking the silence together. We laughed. "You first," I told him.
"Lanik, please take the throne. If you know me, you know how I feel in this body. You know from what I've told you that I've done unbearable things. Set me free."
Unbearable things. I didn't tell him, didn't try to explain the unbearable things I had done, didn't try to communicate the scream that underlay every thought I had. Instead, I closed my eyes and began to do for him what the Schwartzes had done for me.
It had taken only a handful of Schwartzes to change me, to cure my radical regeneration, and so I hoped I could do it alone. I had nothing like their knowledge of the carbon chains, but I could sense them well enough to compare. Any difference between his DNA and mine I changed in him until we matched perfectly. it meant that not only would his regeneration be cured, but also he would have the gift of never hungering and thirsting again, of being free of the need to breathe, of taking his energy directly from the sun.
But I couldn't give to him the abilities that I had learned, and wouldn't have if I could. He was the real Lanik Mueller, not I. He was Lanik Mueller as I should have been: ruling in Mueller, and ruling well; lonely, but living where he ought to live. Now, without the curse of radical regeneration, he would be free to achieve a measure of happiness that would always be beyond me.
It took hours. When I was through, he lay asleep on the attic floor, his body whole and correct and healthy. He was naked-- there were no tailors to clothe the deformed bodies of radical regeneratives. I looked at his body as I have never been able to look at my own. The skin was young and smooth-- for he was younger than I-- and the muscles were good and the body well-proportioned. For a moment I saw myself as Saranna must have seen me, and for all that I have no love or longing for other men, I understood why she so often told me that my body was sweet. It had irritated me-- an adolescent boy does not aspire to sweetness. But she was right.
It was the face that made me ache inside. He thought he had known pain, and he had, to a degree greater than many men. His face showed maturity beyond his years, and kindness, and compassion. But I had seen my own face in mirrors, had studied what time and my own acts had done to me, and my face was not kind or compassionate. I had seen too much. I had killed too often. There was no sweetness left in me, not to look at, and I yearned to be as innocent as he.
Impossible, I reminded myself. That choice was made years ago in the sand at the border of Schwartz. And I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions. I had borne it, and I couldn't hope not to have the scars show in my face and my body.
He awoke and looked at me and smiled. Then he realized what had happened to his body. He touched himself incredulously and wept and kept asking me, "This isn't an illusion, is it? It's real, isn't it?"
Yes, it's real, I told him. "And when I've destroyed the Ambassador, there'll be no more need to keep rads like cattle. So do this for me. Make it a law that rads be sent to Schwartz, all of them, as soon as they're identified. Have them go into Schwartz and when the desert people come to them, have them say they come in Lanik Mueller's name. The Schwartzes will know what to do after that. They'll send them home, whole. Or if they don't come home, it's because they freely chose to stay."
"What about you?" Lanik asked.
"I don't exist," I answered. "In the forest of Nkumai it wasn't you who became the extra Lanik Mueller, it was I. You're the real one. Over the next few years, Lanik, change the illusion. Gradually make Dinte's face become your own until you can end the deception. You want to anyway, I know that much. End the lie, except for the name, and live and rule with your own face."
"And you?"
"I'll find another place to live."
Then I pushed back into quicktime and left him in the attic and went back to the court, where quite a few people still milled around, chattering about what had happened. It took me only a few minutes to spot the Andersens among them, the last of their Family to survive. I had left Lanik feeling sad and yet better than I had felt in a long time. But that didn't stop me from killing the last of the Andersons.
In quicktime I carried their bodies to the Ambassador and laid them where the explosion would leave them unrecognizable. Back when I first set out to destroy the Ambassadors, I had decided that when I blew up the last one, I would die with it. But now I realized that that decision was unmade. I think it was because I knew that the real me was still a sweet-bodied boy who would make a good king, and though he wasn't the me-that-I-am, he was the me-that-ought-to-be, and I gained a little respect for myself, and no longer wanted to die.
So I stayed in quicktime to break the seal on the Ambassador, then walked off to a safe distance before slipping back into realtime to watch. It took a few moments as the Ambassador waited metallically, unknowingly, as it made its own death. I felt wistful for that instant. All our history, all our purpose for far too many years, had been shaped to try to win our return to the Republic, to the kind of civilization that could make machines like this. They knew so much that we could not know once I destroyed this last Ambassador. I found myself slipping into quicktime, so I could rush to the fuse, stop it before the Ambassador died.
But I did not move. If our years of slavery had taught us anything, it should have taught us this: that the Ambassador was not the key to our freedom, it was the chain that bound us. Our freedom would only come when we forgot our dead ancestors and our distant enemies and discovered who and what we had actually become in these centuries on Treason.
I did not move, the Ambassador finished its self-immolation program, the explosion destroyed it from the inside, the lights of the machine went off, and I wondered for a frightening moment how I dared to make such a decision for the whole world, without consulting anyone else.
Then I laughed at myself. It was a little late to wonder if I ought to play God. The game was already over.
The dust from the explosion cleared. My work was done. I had decidede to live past the end of my work after all, and it meant I had to make decisions I had thought never to make again. Where would I go? What did I want to do with the rest of my life?
As I walked through the fields east of Mueller-on-the-River, I knew where I would have to go. On an island in the middle of a lake in Ku Kuei, Saranna had said, "Come back soon. Come back while you're still young enough to want me. For I'm going to be young forever."