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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 life on this world, all we of Mueller had ever thought about was how to get away, how to earn such vast quantities of iron that we might someday build a spaceship and escape. Other Families had spent their efforts trying to convince their Ambassador that they had repented of their ancestors’ rebelliousness and wished to be returned from exile—after all, they said in a thousand different missives, we are but the eightieth great grandchildren of those who once threatened your pleasant Republic. But all such wheedling letters were returned torn to shreds. Whoever was on the other end of the Ambassador, controlling it, had not learned forgiveness in three thousand years. It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors’ crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent. But aren’t all monstrous criminals innocent in their own eyes? Don’t all their victims somehow deserve to die, in their imagination, at least?
    Why in all these years had we kept our gaze starward, hoping to escape this world, and so learned almost nothing of the secrets that it held? Before we came it had been studied only enough to learn two things: First, that it was habitable—that, small as it was, Treason was massive enough to maintain us at about a third the gravity of the world where humans had evolved, so we would be strong, could run bounding across the prairies and among the giant trees; and the basic chemicals of life were close enough to ours that while we couldn’t profitably eat the native animals, we and our animals could eat enough of the native plants to sustain ourselves, so sending us here was truly exile, and not a sentence of death. And, second, that so little metal was close enough to the surface that it wasn’t even worth trying to extract it. It was a worthless world. A world that did not contain within it the material we could use to build a ladder outward