The Worthing Saga

by Orson Scott Card

  Linkeree turned around and looked back. The lights of the government compound winked behind him. The sun had set, and dusk was only dimly lighting the plain.

  The sound came again. He still couldn't identify it, but now the direction was more distinct—he followed.

  Not two meters off was a feebly crying infant, the mucus of birth still clinging to his body, the afterbirth unceremoniously dumped beside him. The placenta was covered with suckers. So was the baby.

  Linkeree knelt, brushed away the suckers, looked at the child, whose stubby arms and legs proclaimed him to be a Vaq. Yet apart from that, Link could see no other sign that this was not a human infant—the dark skin must come after years of exposure to the hot noon sunshine. He remembered clearly that one of the long line of tutors he had studied with had told him about this Vaq custom. It was assumed to be the exact counterpart of the ancient Greek custom of exposing unwanted infants, to keep the population at acceptable levels. The baby cried. And Linkeree was struck bitterly with the unfairness that it was this infant that was chosen to die for the good of the—tribe? Did Vaqs travel in tribes? If seven percent of infants had to die for the good of the tribe, why couldn't there be a way for seven-hundredths of each child to be done away? Impossible, of course. Linkeree stroked the child's feeble arms. It was much more efficient to rid the world of unwelcome children.

  He picked up the infant, gingerly (he had never done so before, only seen them in the incubators in the hospital his father had built and which, therefore, Linkeree was “responsible” for), and held it against his bare chest, wondering at the warmth it still had. For a moment at least the crying stopped, and Link periodically struck off the suckers that leapt from the placenta to the baby's or his bare skin.

  We are kin, he told the child silently, we are kin, the unwanted children. “If only you'd never been born?” he heard his mother saying; this time a saying she had said only once, but the memory was sharp and clear, the moment forever imprinted on his mind. It was no act. It was no sham, like her hugs and kisses and I'm-so-proud-of-yous. It was a moment, all too rare, of utter sincerity: “If only you'd never been born, I wouldn't be getting old like this on this hideous planet!”

  Why, then, Mother, didn't you leave me on the plain to die? Much kinder, much, much kinder than to have kept me at home, killing me seven percent at a time.

  The baby cried again, hunting for a breast that by now was surely many kilometers off, leaking pap for the child that would never suckle. Did the mother grieve, perhaps? Or was she only irritated at the sensitivity of her breasts, only anxious for the last remnants of the pregnancy to fade?

  Squatting there, holding the infant, Linkeree wondered what he should do. Could he bring the child back into the compound? Unquestionably yes, but at a cost. First, Linkeree would then be caught, would then be reconfined to the hospital where the fact that he was not, was not insane would soon be discovered and they would cleanly and kindly push the needle into his buttocks and put him irrevocably to sleep. And then there was the child. What would they do with a Vaq child in the capital? In an orphanage it would be tortured by the other children, who in their poverty and usual bastardy would welcome the nonhuman as something lower that they could torment and so prove their power. In the schools, the child would be treated as an intellectual pariah, incapable of learning. It would be shunted from institution to institution—until someday on the street the torment became too much and he strangled somebody and then died for it...

  Linkeree laid the baby back down. If your own don't want you, the stranger doesn't want you either, he said silently. The baby cried desperately. Die, child, Linkeree thought, and be spared. “There's not one damn thing I can do,” he said aloud.

  “What do you mean, when you can paint like that?” Zad answered; But Link saw more clearly than she. He had meant to paint Zad, but had instead painted his mother. Now he saw what for seven months he had been blind to—Zad's resemblance to his mother. That's why he had followed her through the streets that first night, had kept watching her, until finally she had asked him what the hell—

  “What the hell?” Zad asked, but Link didn't answer, only wrinkled up the painting clumsily (You're all thumbs, Linky!), pressed the wad against his crotch, and struck the paper and thus himself viciously once. Cried out in agony. Struck himself again.

  “Hey! Hey, stop that! Don't—”

  And then he saw, felt, smelled, heard his mother lean over him, her hair brushing his face (sweet-smelling hair), and Link was filled with the old helpless fury, a helplessness made worse by clear memories of lovemaking hour after hour with this woman in an apartment filled with paintings in a government flat in the low part of the city. Now I.'m grown up, he thought, now I'm stronger than her, and still she controls me, still she attacks me, still she expects so damn much and I never know what I should do! And so he stopped striking himself and found a better target.

  The baby was still crying. Link was disoriented for a moment, wondering why he was trembling. Then another gust of wind reminded him that tonight was the night he would die in feeble expiation for his sins, he like the baby sucked dry by tiny bites, gnawed to death by the chewers that padded through the night, frozen to death by the wind. The difference would be, of course, that the infant would not understand, would never have understood. Better to die unknowing. Better to have no memories. Better to have no pain.

  And Link reached down and put his thumb and forefinger around the baby's throat, to kill it now and spare it the brief agony of death later in the night. But when it was time to squeeze tightly and shut off blood and breath, Link discovered that he could not.

  “I am not a killer,” Link said. “I can't help you.”

  And he got up and walked away, leaving behind the child's mewling to be buried in the noise of the wind pushing through the grass. The blades rasped against his naked chest, and he remembered his mother scrubbing him in the bath. “See? Only I can reach your back. You need me, just to stay clean.”

  I need you.

  “That's Mother's good boy.”

  Yes. I am, I am.

  “Don't touch me! I won't have any man touch me!”

  “But you said—”

  “I'm through with men. You're a bastard and a son of a bastard and you've made me old!”

  But Mother—

  “No, no, what am I doing? It isn't your fault that men are like that. You're different, you, my sweet little boy, give Mother a hug—not so tight, for God's sake, you little devil, what are you trying to do? Go to your room!”

  He stumbled in the near darkness and fell, cutting his wrist in the grass.

  “Why are you hitting me?” he heard the brown-haired woman who ought to be blond crying out. But he hit her again, and she fled the apartment, ran for the stairs, stumbled out into the street. It was the stumbling that let him catch her, and there in the middle of the road he stifled her scream by showing her precisely what a man was like, by throwing her at long, long last away.

  A knife pricked into his chest.

  He looked up from where he lay in the grass at a short, stocky man—no, not a man, a Vaq—and not just one, a half dozen, all armed, though some were just rising from the ground and still seemed half asleep. He had stumbled in his daze into a Vaq camping place.

  This is better, he thought, than the suckers and chewers, and so with a pillar of blackness and chill in place of his spine, he weakly stood, waiting for the knife.

  But the knife pressed no deeper toward his heart, and he grew impatient. Wasn't he the heir of the man who had done most to hurt the Vaqs, whose great tractors had swept away the livelihood of a dozen tribes, whose hunters had killed Vaqs who chanced to wander on land marked out as his? I am the owner of half this world that is worth owning; kill me and free yourselves.

  One of the Vaqs hissed impatiently. Press the knife, Link thought he seemed to say. And so he too hissed. Impatiently. Act now. Hurry.

  In surprise at his having echoed his own dea
th sentence, the Vaq with the knife at his chest withdrew a step, though he still held out the knife, pointing at Linkeree. The Vaq babbled something, something ripe with rolled r's and hissed s's—not a human language, they taught the children in the government schools, even though as Link well knew there were dozens of anthropological reports pointing out that the Vaq language was merely corrupted Spanish, and the Vaqs were obviously the descendants of the colony ship Argentine that had been thought lost in the first decade of interstellar colonization thousands of years ago, when man had first reached out from the small planet that they had utterly spoiled. Human. Definitely human, however cruel Pampas had selected for ugliness and ignorance and viciousness and inhumanity.

  Savages have no monopoly on that.

  And Linkeree reached out, gently took the hand that held the blade, and guided it back until the point pressed against his belly. Then he hissed again, impatiently.

  The Vaq's eyes widened, and he turned to look at his fellows, who were equally puzzled. They babbled; some backed away from Link, apparently in fear. Link couldn't understand. He guided the knife deeper into his flesh; blood crept back along the horizontal blade.

  The Vaq withdrew his knife, abruptly, and his eyes filled with tears, and he knelt and took Linkeree by the hand.

  Link tried to pull his hand away. The Vaq only followed, offering no resistance. The others, also, gathered around. He couldn't understand their language, but he could understand the gestures. They were, he realized, worshiping him.

  Gentle hands led him to the center of the encampment. All around, little braziers of peat burned brightly, sizzling constantly as the heat-seeking suckers left the Vaqs and gathered to die in the fire.

  They sang to him, plaintive melodies that were only deepened and enhanced by the sweep and howl of the wind. They stripped him and touched him all over, gently exploring, then dressed him again and fed him (and he thought bitterly of the child who, because of the lack of food, was even now dying in the grass) and surrounded him and lay down around him to protect him as he slept.

  You're cheating me. I came here to die, and you're cheating me.

  And he wept bitterly, and they admired his tears, and after a half hour, long before the cold moon rose, he slept, feeling cheated but somehow utterly at peace.

  Mrs. Danol sat in a chair, in Hort's office, her arms folded tightly, her eyes savagely watching every move he made—or didn't make.

  “Mrs. Danol,” he finally said, “it would help everyone, including you, if you went home.”

  “Not,” she answered acidly, “until you find my boy.”

  “Mrs. Danol, we are not even looking!”

  “And that's why I'm not leaving.”

  “The government doesn't send searchers out on the plains in the nighttime. It's suicidal.”

  “And so Linkeree is going to die. I assure you, Mr. Hort, that the hospital will regret not doing anything.”

  He sighed. He was sure that the hospital would—the annual gifts from the Danol family were more than half of the operating budget. Some salaries would go immediately—primarily his, there was little doubt. And so, knowing that, and also because he was extremely tired, he tossed aside his politic courtesy and pointed out some blunt facts.

  “Mrs. Danol, are you aware that in ninety percent of our cases, treating the patient's parents is the most effective step toward a cure?”

  Her mouth grew tight and hard.

  “And are you aware that your son is not genuinely psychotic at all?”

  At that she laughed. “Good. All the more reason to get him away from here—if he lives through this night out there in that hell that passes for a terraformed planet.”

  “Actually, your son is quite sane, half the time—a very intelligent, very creative young man. Very much like his father. That last was intended as a very deep dig. It worked.”

  She rose from her chair. “I don't want any mention of that son of a bitch.”

  “But the other half of the time, he is merely reenacting childhood. Children are insane, all of them—by adult standards. Their defense strategies, their adaptations, are all such that an adult using them is regarded as utterly mad, Paranoia, acting out, denial, self-destruction. For some reason, Mrs. Danol, your son has been kept penned into the relationship structures of his childhood.”

  “And you think the reason is me.”

  “Actually, it's not just a matter of opinion. The only times that Linkeree was sane were the times when he believed he had killed you. Believing you dead, he functions as an adult. Believing you alive, he functions as an infant.”

  He had gone too far. She shouted in rage and struck out at him across his desk. Her fingers raked his face; her other hand sprawled along his desk, shoving papers and books off onto the floor. He managed to push the call button while he grappled with her with his other hand. But he had lost a handful of hair and gained bruises in his shins by the time the attendants came in and held her back, sedated her, took them to a room in the hospital to rest.

  Morning. The hairy birds of the plains were awake, foraging briskly in the dawn, eating the now sluggish suckers that had bloated themselves on the night life of the grasslands. Linkeree woke, mildly surprised at how natural and good it felt to awaken in the open, lying on a mat of grass, with birds crying. Is there some racial memory of life in the open land that makes me feel so comfortable? he wondered. But he yawned, stood, stretched, feeling vigorously alive, feeling good.

  The Vaqs watched him, even as they pursued their morning tasks—packing up for the day's journey, fixing skimpy breakfasts of cold meat and hot water. But after the eating, they came to him, touched him again, knelt again, making arcane signs with their hands. When they were through (and Linkeree thought bitterly that it was strange that murder and worship were the only intercourse men could have with the Vaqs) they led Linkeree out of the camp, back in the direction he had come last night.

  Now, in daylight, he could see why it was that the Vaqs were such deadly adversaries when met in their native habitat. They were short, and not one of them stood taller than the thickest part of the grass, though Link, not a tall man by any human standard, could see clearly over the crest of the blades. And the grass ate up their footprints, closed behind them, hid their movements from any possible observer or follower. An army of Vaqs could pass by unnoticed a meter from the keenest observer, he thought, with some exaggeration.

  And then they arrived. They had brought him back to where the baby had been abandoned. It shocked Linkeree profoundly, that they would return to the scene of their crime. Was there no shame to the murders? At least they could have the decency to forget the existence of the child, instead of coming back to gloat.

  But they formed a circle around the small corpse (how had they found him again in the grass?) and Linkeree looked down at the child's body.

  A chewer had come in the night, and then several others. The first had (shades of Mother's nighttime threats) chewed off the infant's genitals, gnawed into the abdomen at the soft entrails, ignoring the muscle tissue entirely. But the baby and the placenta had attracted a huge concentration of suckers, and these had eagerly transferred to the much warmer chewer, bleeding it to death before its meal was finished. The later chewers were bled to death even faster, as more and more suckers came, sucked, laid eggs, and died.

  And then the birds, which had danced skyward when Link and the Vaqs had arrived, eating the dying suckers, but ignoring the sucker eggs which were implanted on the blades of grass, where tonight they would hatch, and the lucky ones would find food before they starved to death, find food and reproduce in a mad, one-night life.

  Except for the gnawed-away crotch, the child's body was intact.

  The Vaqs knelt, nodded toward Link, and began cutting up the child's body. The incisions were neat, precise. Breastbone to crotch, a U-shaped cut around the breasts, a long slice down the aims, the head completely removed; all cuts were quick and deft, and in a moment the body was entirely sk
inned.

  And then they ate.

  Link watched, appalled, as they each in turn lifted a strip of raw meat toward him, as if it were a votive offering. He shook his head each time, and each time the Vaq murmured (in thanks) and ate.

  And when the raw bones were left, and the skin, and the heart, the Vaqs opened the skin smooth side up and laid it before Link. They picked up the pile of bones, and held it out to him. He took them—he was afraid, in the face of such inhumanity, to refuse. Then they waited.

  What do I do now? he wondered. They were beginning to look a bit disturbed as he knelt, motionless, with the bones in his hands. And so, vaguely remembering some of his classical history, he tossed down the bones onto the blanket of skin and then stood, wiping the blood off his hands onto his trousers.

  The Vaqs all looked at the bones, pointing to this one and that one, though they had landed in no pattern discernible to Link. At last, however, they began to grin, to laugh, to jump up and down and jig in delight at whatever the bones had told them.

  Linkeree was more than a little glad that the portents had turned out so well. What would they have done if the bones had somehow spelled disaster?

  The Vaqs decided to reward him. They picked up the head and offered it to him.

  He refused.

  They looked puzzled. So did he. Was he supposed to eat the head? It was ghastly—the stump had not bled at all, looked like a laboratory specimen, reminded him of—

  No, he would not.

  But the Vaqs were not angry. They seemed to understand they only took the bones, buried each in a separate but shallow hole scrabbled out of the rich deep soil under the grass, and then took the skin and draped it over Link's bare shoulders. It occurred to him that they were signifying that he was the child. The leader's gesture confirmed that they believed that—he kept gesturing from the skin and the head to Linkeree, and then pausing, waiting for an answer.