SOLVED. Sci-fi book (from the early 90s?) about a planet where different races had different powers/abilities, and 1 person learns multiple abilities, only to discover, at the end of the book, that there was an alien race harvesting them for their powers

[Guru]

SOLVED! Book found: Treason (originally titled A Planet called Treason) by Orson Scott Card.


I read this book something like 25 years ago, and would like to read it again, but can't remember enough to find the title or anything so that I can track it down. Maybe someone here can help?

It's on a world where different races / tribes / people have different powers or abilities, like the ability to speed up or slow down time, the ability to breathe underwater, the ability to shape shift, or regrow body parts. The main character comes from a group that can regrow body parts, but he has some kind of mutation that causes something like he's not normal, and grows extra body parts, so he's treated as an outcast. He has a family member (brother, cousin, friend?) who is "normal", but for some reason, they get into an argument, and he ends up killing the brother/cousin/friend... but because they both have the regeneration power, he knows it won't really kill him, but he runs away, anyway. He later discovers that the brother/cousin/friend is really a spy from the shapeshifting people, and when he killed him, he actually killed him because he didn't have the power to regenerate.

I recall a scene where he was trying to run away from his home, and got caught or kidnapped by pirates, or people on a sailing ship, and they had him locked in a storage hold / cell below decks, and he was threatening to kill himself by laying on his back and biting off his tongue so that he would drown in his own blood. Because he could regenerate, he knew that he wouldn't really die because his tongue would heal, but his captors didn't know that.

On his various travels, he meets up with different groups, and learns other powers from the people he meets, like the ability to breathe underwater. At one point, he's meditating underwater, and someone traveling with him doesn't know he can do it, and they freak out because he stays underwater for like an hour, and they didn't understand how he didn't drown.

He learns how to control time, but not with perfect control, because he can only slow down or speed up his own body, but not other things around him. There's a scene where he's trying to get back to a village as quick as possible, and wishes that he could speed up the horse he's riding, but realizes it would just be quicker to speed up himself and run there. He's goes back to reunite with a girl from that village that he fell in love with, but she was so depressed about him leaving that she slowed herself down so much that people called her a stone because she was moving so slowly that her movements were completely unnoticeable to people. He slows himself down to match her speed and talk to her to apologize for leaving, and they make up while in the super slowed down time. When they come back to "normal" speed, a really long time has passed, and they had become known as something like the 'rock couple', because they had been moving so slowly that they appeared to be statues for entire lifetimes to people at normal speed.

I think there might have been something about him learning to read minds, or connect with a spiritual /planetary higher power, or something like that, because I recall there being the occasional reference to the main character hearing the voices of the people whose deaths he had been responsible for. I think there might have been some kind of plot thread in the book where the main character was trying to prevent a war, or some kind of conflict between different groups.

And if I recall, at the very end of the book, he got transported onto a space ship in orbit, or something like that, and discovered that all of the different people of the planet had really been experiments for this alien race, who was using them to harvest the different genetic abilities to assist this alien race in their space exploration? I don't recall exactly, but that's kind of the way that I remember it.

If there is anyone who can help me track down this book, I would be ever so grateful.

Thanks.

[Guru]

SOLVED! Book found: Treason (originally titled A Planet called Treason) by Orson Scott Card.