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stayed secretly on their desert, where no one went; the Ku Kuei lived somewhere in the bowels of their dark forest, never leaving it and never being troubled by outsiders, who feared the mysteries of the world’s most impenetrable forest. The edge of the forest had always been Mueller’s eastern border; and only in that direction did my father and his father never try to conquer.
    It was cold and silent. Not a birdsound. Not an insect, though there were flowers enough in the open brush. Then the sun rose and so did I, setting off into the depths of the trees, going east but one-third south.
    At first there was a morning breeze, but then that died, and the leaves hung absolutely still. Birds were rare, and when I saw any they were as if asleep in high branches, motionless. No small animals moved underfoot, and I wondered if this were the secret of Ku Kuei—that nothing but plants lived here.
    I could not see the sun, and so marked my direction by noting the trees that went in a line, correcting now and then. East and one-third south, I said again and again, trying not to hear it in the woman’s voice—why did I grieve for her, whom I did not know?
    I walked for hours and hours, it seemed, and still it was only morning from the vague direction of the brightest light, where I supposed the sun must be. Paths ran left and right, but I followed again the voice of the old woman in my memory, saying, “Follow no paths.”
    I became hungry. I chewed on mutton. I found berries and ate them, but not the white ones.
    At last my legs were so weary I couldn’t set one in front of the other, and yet it was still day. I didn’t understand my tiredness. In my training I had often been required to walk briskly from sunrise to sunset, until I could do it with little strain. Was there, then, some element in the forest air, some drug that weakened me? Or had the healing of all my recent wounds taken more from me than I expected?
    I didn’t know. I set down the pack beside a tree and slept without waking, long and hard.
    So long that when I awoke it was daylight again, and I got up and pushed on.
    Again a day of walking, then weariness while the sun was still high. This time I forced myself to go on, farther and farther, until I became a machine. I was alert enough to avoid entangling roots, to pick my way through thick places, to scramble over rocks, to slide carefully down the slopes of hollows and ravines, then clamber up the other side, but I was so numb with the effort just to stay awake that I wasn’t conscious of any of this, not really; an obstacle was forgotten the moment it was out of view. I felt as if I had been walking for days, and yet the sun was still high.
    At first my weariness in so short a time made me feel a deep dread, that the complex of symptoms that marked a radical regenerative included a kind of general dystrophy—but that couldn’t be it, for I had found the strength to go on and on, hadn’t I? I wasn’t weakening, for surely I had covered some ground, at least. But perhaps rads were plagued with the sudden onset of bouts of almost uncontrollable sleepiness. Yet I was controlling it, wasn’t I? And the rads in the pens, while they moved with the languor of despair, did not seem to sleep more often than other men, or at least no one ever said they did.
    Then I had a thought that comforted me a little—that the strange thing that was happening to me might not be a product of the condition of my own body, but rather might arise from the mysterious forest of Ku Kuei. Couldn’t it be that the forests exuded some chemical that caused weariness? Or perhaps only the illusion of weariness. Or perhaps a whole complex of debilitating drugs in the air, causing hallucinations, distorting my sense of time, making me long to sleep with as much desperation as a man longs for water after three days without a drink.
    That would explain why Ku Kuei had become such a feared and hated place. What if a man could wander in