The Worthing Saga

by Orson Scott Card

  “How could you know this place? When have you ever been here before?”

  “Enough,” said Jason. “She's told you more than she meant to.”

  “How can I know what to do? Can I write it? Should I write your story?”

  Jason would not decide for him. “If you want to.”

  “Will the story tell me what it means? Why Clany died the way she did?”

  The answer to that, said Justice, and to questions that you haven't thought to ask.

  Lared's work began as dreams. He awoke in the night four, five, six times, ever more surprised to still see the split-log walls, the packed-earth floor, the half-ladder stairway that ran upward into the tiny guest rooms. Fire, barely contained within the chimney. A cat stretching before the fire. The sheepskins half-ready to be parchment, drying on their frames. The loom in the corner—of course the village loom was kept here. All this had been in Lared's eyes since infancy, and yet after the dreams it was strange. Strange at first, anyway, and then unpleasant, for compared to the world that Justice showed him in his sleep, Father's inn was filthy, disgusting, poor, shameful.

  They are not from my memory, Justice told him. I give you dreams from Jason's past. Unless you live in his world, how can you write his tale?

  So Lared spent his nights wandering the clean white corridors of Capitol, where not even dust dared to settle. Here and there the passageways opened into bright caverns, teeming with people—Lared had never seen so many people in his life, had not thought so many might exist. And yet in the dream he knew they were but a tiny fraction of the people of this world. For the corridors were miles from top to bottom, and covered the world from pole to pole, except a few patches of ocean, the only place where life renewed itself. There was some attempt to remember living worlds. Here and there among the corridors were little gardens, carefully tamed plants artfully arranged, a mockery of forest. A man could hunt mushrooms here forever, and find no life but what was planted and tended.

  There were trains that flew through tubes connecting place to place; and in his dream Lared held a flexible disc that he inserted into flat holes to do everything—to travel, to pass through doors, to use the booths where people who weren't there talked to you and told you things. Lared had heard of such things, but they were always far away, and never touched the life of Flat Harbor. Now, however, the memories were so real that he found himself walking through the forest with the stride of a corridor-dweller. and the tracks of wild swine took him by surprise, for there were no impressions of the passage of living things on the floors of Capitol.

  As the setting grew more familiar, his dreams began to be stories. He saw players whose whole lives were recorded for others to see, even what ought to have been done by dark of night or in the privy shed. He saw weapons that made a man come afire inside, erupting through the eyes like flames through spoilt cloth. The life of Capitol was always on the edge of death, precarious as an autumn leaf resting on a fence rail on a windy day.

  Nowhere was the death of Capitol more clearly promised than in the catacombs of sleepers. Again and again Justice showed him the people lying down on sterile beds, having their memories drained away into balls of foam, and then waiting docilely as quiet servants injected death into their veins. Death in the form of the drug somec, death that only delayed itself while the frozen corpses waited in their tombs. Years later the quiet servants awakened them, poured back their memories, and the sleepers got up and walked around, as proud of themselves as if they had accomplished something.

  “What are they afraid of ?” Lared asked Jason as they stuffed sausages together in the butchery shed.

  “Dying I first.”

  “But they still die, don't they? Sleeping like that gives them not another day of life, does it?”

  “Not an hour. We all end up like this.” And he bound off another link of tight-stuffed gut.

  “Then why? It makes no sense.”

  “It worked this way. Important people slept longer and woke up less. So they died hundreds of years later.”

  “But then all their friends died first.”

  “That was the point.”

  “But why would you want to live, if all your friends were dead?”

  Jason laughed. “Don't ask me. I always thought it was stupid.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  Jason shrugged. “How can I tell you? I don't know.”

  Justice answered into Lared's thoughts: There is nothing so stupid or dangerous or painful that people won't eagerly do it, if by doing it they will make others believe they are better or stronger or more honorable. I have seen people poison themselves, destroy their children, abandon their mates, cut themselves off from the world, all so that others would think they were a better sort of person.

  “But who would think such cripples were better?”

  “There were people who felt like you,” Jason said.

  But they never took somec, said Justice. They never slept, and so they lived their century and died and those who lived for the honor and power of sleep, thinking it was eternal life, they only despised the ones who refused somec.

  It made no sense to Lared, that people could be such fools. But Jason assured him that for thousands of years the universe was ruled by people who lived only for sleep, who died as often as possible in order to avoid the sleep that would never end. How could Lared doubt it, after all? His dreams of Capitol were too powerful, the memories too real.

  “Where is Capitol?”

  “Gone,” said Jason, stirring the spiced meat before funneling another handful into the casing.

  “The whole world?”

  “Bare rock. All the metal stripped away long ago. No soil left, no life in the sea.”

  Give it two billion years, said Justice, and maybe something will happen.

  “Where did the people go?”

  “That's part of the story you're going to write.”

  “Did you and Justice destroy it?”

  “No. Abner Doon destroyed it.”

  “Then Abner Doon was real?”

  “I knew him,” Jason said.

  “He was a man?”

  “You will write the story of how I met Abner Doon. Justice will tell you the story in your dreams, and when you wake up, you'll write it down.”

  “Did Justice meet Abner Doon?”

  “Justice was born some twenty years ago. I met Abner Doon some— fifteen, sixteen thousand years ago.”

  Lared thought that Jason, still uncertain of the language, had got the numbers wrong. Justice corrected him. The numbers are right, she said. Jason slept for ten thousand years at the bottom of the sea, and before that slept and slept and slept.

  “You—used somec, too,” said Lared.

  “I was a starpilot,” Jason said. “Our ships were slower then. We who piloted the ships, we were the only ones who had a need for somec.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Before anyone lived here on your world, I was already old. Does it matter?”

  Lared could not grasp it, and so he put it into the only terms he knew. “Are you God?” he asked.

  Jason did not laugh at him. Instead he looked thoughtful, and considered the question. It was Justice who answered. All my life I called him God, she said, until I met him.

  “But how can you be God, if Justice is more powerful than you?”

  I am his daughter, five hundred generations from him. Shouldn't the children of God learn something in that time?

  Lared took the finished chain of sausages from Jason's hands and looped it above the smoky fire. “No one ever taught me that God could make sausages.”

  “It's one of the little skills I picked up along the way.”

  It was afternoon already, and so they went back to the house, where Mother sullenly served them cheese and hot bread with the juice of the overripe apples. “Better than anything on Capitol,” Jason said, and Lared, remembering clearly the taste of the tasteless food of Jason's childhood, agreed
.

  “Only one job left before your writing days begin,” said Jason. “Ink.”

  “The old cleric left me some,” Lared said.

  “No better than mule piss,” said Jason. “I'll teach you how to make ink that lasts.”

  Mother was not pleased. “There's work to do,” she said.

  “You can't take Lared out on some foolish task like ink-making.”

  Jason smiled, but his eyes were hard. “Thano, I have worked in this village like your own son. The snow will be here soon, and you have never before been so well prepared. And yet I have paid you for my lodging, when by rights you ought to have paid me. I warn you, don't begrudge me your son's time.”

  “You warn me? What will you do, murder me in my own house?” She dared him to hurt her.

  But he only needed to strike her with words. “Don't stand in my way, Thano, or I will tell your husband that he isn't the only one in this house who keeps a little forge. I will tell your husband which travelers you have had pumping the bellows handle for you, to keep your little tire hot.”

  Mother's eyes went small, and she turned back to cutting turnips into the supper soup.

  Her docility was confession. Lared looked on her with contempt and fear; He thought of his thin body, his narrow shoulders, and wondered what traveler had sired him. What have you stolen from the chain of life? he demanded silently.

  You are your father's son, said Justice in his mind. And Sala is his, too. Those who protected you from pain prevented bastards as well.

  It was scant comfort. Cold and fearsome as Mother had always been, still he had never thought she was false.

  “I'm learning the language very well, don't you think?” said Jason cheerfully.

  “Go make your ink.” Mother was sullen. “I don't like having you indoors here.”

  I don't much like to be here either, Mother.

  Jason kissed Justice lightly on the cheek as he left. Justice only glared at him. Jason explained to Lared when they got outside. “Justice hates it when I make people obey me out of fear. She thinks it's ugly and not nice. She always used to make people obey her by changing what they wanted, so it didn't occur to them to disobey. I think that's degrading and turns people into animals.”

  Lared shrugged. Just so long as Mother let him learn how to make good ink, it didn't matter to Lared how Jason and Justice got it done.

  Jason looked for a certain fungus growth on certain trees, and gathered them into one bag; he had Lared fill another bag with blackthorn stalks, though it cut his hands. Lared did not complain of the pain, because it gave him pleasure to bear it wordlessly. And as dark came on, and they were nearly home, Jason stopped and tapped a pine tree, which still had enough life in it to fill a little jar with gum.

  The funguses they boiled and ground up and boiled again, then strained out the thin black fluid that was left. They crushed the blackthorn into it, and strained it again, and then boiled it for an hour with the pine gum. At last they squeezed it through fine linen, and ended up with two pints of smooth black ink.

  “It will stay black for a thousand years, and readable for live thousand. The parchment will turn to dust before the ink is too faint to see,” said Jason;

  “How did you learn to make such ink?”

  “How did you learn to make such parchment?” Jason answered, holding up a sheet of it that Lared had made. “I can see my hand through it.”

  “There's no secret to parchment,” Lared answered. “The sheep wear the secret on their bodies till they die, and give it up when we butcher them.”

  That night Lared dreamed of how Jason met Abner Doon. How God met Satan. How life met death. How making met unmaking. The dream was given to him by Justice, as she remembered it from finding the memory complete in Jason's mind. Memories of memories of memories, that was what lay in Lared's mind the next morning, when with trembling quill he began to write.

  3. A Book of Old Memories

  Here is how Lared began his book:

  “I am—Lared of Flat Haven Inn. I am not a cleric, but I have read books and know my letters, ties, and bindings. So I write, with good new ink on parchment I made myself, a story that is not my own. It is a memory of my dreams of another man's childhood, dreams that were given me so I could tell his tale. Forgive me if I write badly, because I have little practice at this. I have not the elegance of Semol of Grais, though my pen longs to write such language. All you will have from me is the plain tale.”

  “The name of the boy I tell you of was Jason Worthing, then called Jase, without respect, because no one knew what he was or what he would become. He lived on a world of steel and plastic called Capitol, which now is dead. It was a world so rich that the children had nothing to do but go to school or play. It was a world so poor that no food grew there, and they had to eat what other worlds sent them in great starships.”

  Lared read it over, and felt at once pleased and afraid. Pleased that he could write so many words at once. Pleased because it did sound like the beginning of a book. And afraid because he knew how uneducated he was, knew that to clerics it would sound childish. I am a child.

  “You're a man,” said Jason. He sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, sewing the leather boots he had volunteered to make for Father. “And your book will be good enough, if you only tell the truth.”

  “How can I be sure I'll remember everything?”

  “You don't have to remember everything.”

  “Some things in the dreams I don't even understand.”

  “You don't have to understand it either.”

  “How do I even know it's true?”

  Jason laughed, driving the long, heavy needle through the leather and drawing the thread tight. “It's your memory of your dreams of Justice's memory of my memory of things that happened to me in my childhood on a planet that died more than ten thousand years ago. How could it help but be true?”

  “What should I start with?”

  Jason shrugged. “We didn't choose a tool, we chose a person to write our story. Start with the first thing that matters.”

  What was the first thing that mattered? Lared thought through the things he remembered of Jason's life. What mattered? Fear and pain—that's what mattered to Lared now, after a childhood virtually without either. And the earliest fear, the earliest pain that mattered, that was when Jason nearly lost his life because he did too well on a test.

  It was in a class that studied the movements and powers of the stars, one that only a few hundred of the thirteen-year-olds of Capitol knew enough to take. Jase watched as the problems appeared in the air above his table, like little stars and galaxies he could hold in his hands. The questions were written in the air below the stars, and Jase entered his answers on a keyboard.

  Jase knew all the answers easily, for he had learned well, and he grew more confident as it became clear the test was below his abilities. Until the last question. It was completely unrelated to the rest of the test. He was not prepared for it. They had not studied it in class. And yet as he looked at the problem, he thought he understood how the answer might be found. He began calculating. There was one figure that baffled him. He thought he knew what it meant, but did not know how to prove it, to be sure, to be exact. A year ago he would have called it a good guess and entered his answer. But this year had changed everything. He had a way of finding out what he needed to know.

  He looked at the teacher, Hartman Torrock, who was gazing around the room. Then he shifted something in his mind, the way things shifted when his eyes suddenly focused on something far, when they had been seeing something near. It was as though he could suddenly see behind Hartman Torrock's eyes. Now Jase could hear his present thoughts as if he were thinking them himself —his mind was on the woman who had quarreled with him this morning, and whose body he wanted to cause pleasure to and cause pain to this night. It was an ugly sort of desire, to rule her and make her be like his own tongue, to speak only his thoughts, to disappear inside him when she was
not in use. Jase never liked Hartman Torrock, but loathed him now. Torrock's thoughts were not pleasant scenery.

  Jase quickly plunged deeper than Torrock's present thoughts, moved among, his unthought-of memories as easily as if they were his own, finding Torrock's knowledge of stars and motions, seeking the meaning of the unfamiliar figure. And the exact figure was there, perfect to the fourteenth decimal place. Then he slipped gratefully from Torrock's mind and entered the result into the keypad. No more problems appeared above his table. The test was over. He waited.

  His score was perfect, when it came. And yet a red glow appeared, and hung in the air above Jase's table. The red glow meant a failing score. Or a computer malfunction, or cheating. Torrock, looking worried, got up and came to him. “What's wrong?” asked the teacher.

  “I don't know,” said Jase.

  “What's your score?” He looked, and it was perfect. “Then what's wrong?”

  “I don't know,” said Jase again.

  Torrock went back to his own table and began talking quietly with the air. Jase, as always, listened to Torrock's mind. The mistake had been Torrock's.. The last question should not have been on his test. It dealt with secrets that children should not learn until years later. Torrock had written it last night, meaning to append it to an examination he would give to his advanced students tomorrow. Instead he had added it to his beginning class today. Jase should not have been given the question at all; above all, he should not have been able to get it right. It was a sign of cheating.

  But how could he cheat? thought Hartman Torrock. Who in the room knew the answer, except me? And I never told him.

  Somehow this boy stole secrets from me, thought Torrock. They will think that I told him, that I broke my trust, that I am not fit to know secrets. They will punish me. They will take away my somec privileges. What has this boy done to me? How did he do it?

  Then Torrock remembered the darkest truth about Jase Worthing: his father. What do you expect from the son of a Swipe? thought Torrock. He knew my secret because he is his father's son.