The Worthing Saga

by Orson Scott Card

  The day's work told on them. There was little weeping, though there was plenty to mourn for. Instead the survivors wandered from room to room to sit with each other, occasionally saying something or asking something, but always thinking of the pile of bodies in neat crisscrossed rows.. The magnitude of their disaster left them beyond private grief. Of three hundred people in Worthing only seventy-two alive. Little hope of finding the others. Little hope of all seventy-two remaining alive, as children who had spent a night and a day in the snow violently coughed their lives out. Their parents looked on helplessly, or struggled with disease themselves.

  Sammy Barber was helping Martin and Goodwife Keeper in the kitchen. He stirred the soup lazily, whistling softly as he did. When the soup boiled he swung it off the tire and set it aside to simmer.

  “One thing,” Sammy said to no one in particular. “We won't run out of food. More than enough to feed everyone that's alive in Worthing this winter.”

  Goody Keeper looked at him coldly and went back to cutting meat. Martin Keeper said gruffly as he filled a keg of ale from the great barrel, “Come next spring there'll be too few hands to plant, and too few hands to harvest come fall. Some of us who've lived in town all our lives'll be back in the fields or starve.”

  “Not you,” Sammy Barber said. “You've always got the inn.”

  “And what good is that,” Martin murmured, “if there's no one to sleep here and no food to feed them if they come?”

  When they carried supper into the common room a man was bearing out the body of a woman who had just died. They stood aside to let him pass.

  “Nobody could help him carry her?” Martin asked.

  “He wouldn't,” a woman said softly, and then they were in a crowd around the food as Sammy and Martin and Goody Keeper dished it out. There was more than enough, and as the women and children went back to the soup bowl for more, the men refilled their mugs at the ale barrel, saying that ale gave them more warmth to the blood than thin soup.

  Martin was interrupted in ministering to the ale-drinkers by a tug on his sleeve.

  “Take your turn, I've got two hands,” he said, but the answer was not in a mans voice.

  “Papa,” Amos said.

  “What are you doing out of bed!” Martin turned away from the keg, and the men lost no time in keeping cups under the free-flowing spout. “Get back to bed if you want to live,” Martin said.

  Amos shook his head weakly. “I can't, Papa.”

  Martin picked him up in his arms and said, “Then I'll put you there. I'm glad to see you feel better, but you have to stay A in bed.”

  “But John Tinker's here, Papa.”

  Martin stopped and set down his son. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Can't you see him?” Amos answered, and glanced toward the stairs to the second floor. There John Tinker leaned against the wall, a few steps up and higher than the crowd. Already some had noticed him and were backing away, muttering.

  “He's come back,” Amos whispered, “to save us.”

  And then the whole crowd fell silent as all of them saw the tinker. They backed farther way, and he staggered down the stairs and fell to his knees on the floor. His chin was caked with ice where his four-day beard had gathered it, and his hands were stiff. He seemed unable to move normally, as if he had no feeling in his arms or legs. Without looking at anyone he struggled to his feet and lurched forward. The crowd made more space for him, until he was alone in the center of the room. He wavered as he stood there.

  The murmuring in the crowd became louder, and then the man whose wife had died came down the stairs from the second floor.

  He walked down the corridor that John Tinker had opened in the crowd until he faced the magic man. They stood that way, face to face, and the crowd fell silent.

  “If you'd been here,” he said softly, “Inna'd be healed now.”

  After a long pause, the tinker slowly nodded. And then the grieved man's face began to work, and his shoulders began to shake, and he began to cry for the crowd. And then for the crowd he raised his hand up and slapped the tinker across the face. The crowd was silent, except that Amos back in the corner gasped.

  The man lifted his hand again, and struck harder. A few people in the crowd moved in. He struck again, and again, and again until the tinker slowly sank to his knees.

  “Can't you stop him, Papa?” Amos whispered, urgently. Martin didn't take his eyes off the man standing in the middle of the floor. “Stop him, Papa, they'll hurt him!”

  The man stepped back a pace from where John Tinker knelt facing him. He bent over a little, and then kicked the tinker powerfully in the face. The tinker flew backward and sprawled on the floor.

  “Magic-man!” cried his tormentor. “Magic man! Magic man!”

  The crowd picked up the chant quickly, and drew together, making a tight circle where the tinker lay. Magic man. Magic man. Magic man. And as they watched, the tinker rolled over and struggled to his knees, his face bleeding, his nose broken, an eye puffed up and turning brown. But he opened the other eye and gazed unwaveringly at the man who had kicked him. The man backed away. John looked at another man, then slow turned and with one blue eye gazed for a moment into the eyes in the front row of the crowd. The chant died away and there was silence as John Tinker struggled to stand.

  He pulled one leg under him and tried to rise, but he lost his balance and caught himself with his arm. He tried again, and again his legs wouldn't hold him. Woodenly he tried the other leg. He failed again. And when again he tried he didn't catch himself at all, but lay on his side, his eyes open, his body shaking.

  For a moment the crowd was still, like vultures unsure whether their prey is dead. Then a few of them stepped forward to where the tinker lay shivering. Silently they began to kick him. They kicked him viciously until they were exhausted and moved away, and their place was taken by others. The tinker never made a A sound.

  At last the crowd dispersed, many of them leaving the room, some staying near the fire, a few others going to where the keg still held a little ale. John Tinker's body lay in the middle of the room. His skull had broken, as had his skin in dozens of places, and a vast pool of blood lay around him. Footprints of blood led away from the body, following those who had stepped in it, until distance wore the blood off their feet. The tinker's face was not a face, his eyes were not eyes, his lips were not lips, and his split and splintered hands spread like roots lover the floor.

  After a while Martin Keeper looked away from his cousin's body and turned to face his son. Amos looked up at his father with no expression whatever on his face. But his eyes were as blue as the tinker's eyes had been, and they were cold and penetrating and Martin felt accused, condemned, ashamed. He couldn't hold his son's gaze. He looked at the floor until Goody Keeper came and quietly took Amos off to bed.

  Then Martin carried his cousin's body up the stairs, and when he came back he spent the night washing the blood from the floor. Every print. In the morning there was no trace of it left.

  All of Worthing Town lived in Worthing Inn until the spring thaw came. When the weather turned it turned sharply, and suddenly the days were hot and dry. As the snow melted, the people started to drift back to their houses, but soon found a more urgent task at hand. The bodies in the square were starting to rot.

  They couldn't break the ground yet, and so they took lamp oil and poured it over the bodies and set them afire. The stench was horrible, and the fire burned for days, though they threw wood on it to make it burn hotter and faster. And as it burned they went into the houses and found the bodies of those who had been lost all winter and threw them on the fire too, until all the corpses in town were burned. They might have thrown John Tinker's body on the fire too, but the birds had come to him during the winter and picked his body clean, so that only bones were left, and those Amos silently gathered up and when the ground was soft he buried them but made no marker.

  The town was not rebuilt at all. The houses that were still
livable were few, but they were enough for the few left to live in them. Instead all the people went to the fields and plowed, and then to the fields and planted, and then they hoed. At night a few of them plied their trade, though Sammy Barber nicked a, few faces by candlelight and Calinn Cooper's weary and little-trained hands made few casks that didn't leak.

  Most of the people preferred to live as far as possible from the center of town, and when they did come to the square they always walked around the space where the pyre had been. The ashes stayed in the soil until the spring winds and rain washed them away.

  And from time to time a family was seen with a loaded cart passing by the inn on the Linkeree road, or going the other way toward Hux. By summer Worthing claimed only forty citizens, and they were weary to the bone and grieved to the soul and bitter. There were no songs in the common room of Worthing Inn.

  One day when Martin Keeper came home from the field he couldn't find his son Amos, who was still a boy, of course, but who like all the other boys left in Worthing had forgotten how to laugh loud and play in the streets in the evenings. He and his wife searched through all the rooms of their part of the inn, and out in the yard, until finally Martin Keeper climbed the south tower stairs. As he had at last guessed, the boards he had nailed over the trapdoor in the south tower room had been pried off.

  He climbed the ladder and lifted the door. All the windows were open and the forest spread wide in all directions. Martin found his son standing by the west window watching the sun set near Mount Waters. He' said nothing, but after a time his son turned to him and said, “I will sleep in this room from now on.” Martin Keeper went away downstairs.

  Afterword

  by Michael R. Collings

  The worlds of Worthing first appeared in October 1978, when Analog published Orson Scott Card's “Lifeloop.” Within four months, four more Capitol-based stories appeared—“Killing Children,” “A Thousand Deaths,” “Second Chance,” and “Breaking the Game”... the foundation of Card's first collection, Capitol.

  The eleven stories in Capitol suggested the sweep of vision that would become Card's trademark, a suggestion amplified into fact by the appearance of Hot Sleep, a novel based on Capitol but exploring portions of its history in greater detail.

  Capitol concentrated on the social consequences of an illusory immortality offered by the drug somec, and on the human community as it spread through multiple worlds. Somec allowed for space travel, but it also undercut moral, spiritual, and ethical values. From beginning to end, Capitol traced the threat somec represented as its artificial immortality destroyed the human community, isolating individuals until their lives rarely touched those of others; they became like stones skipping over the waters of time.

  In Hot Sleep, Card focused on Abner Doon's plans to change all of that. Doon appeared in Capitol, but his full story was not told there. In Hot Sleep, Doon assumed center stage with his protégé, Jason Worthing. He coerced Worthing to captain a colony ship bearing three hundred of the best and most restless minds of the Empire light-years into the heart of the Galaxy. When an accident destroyed the colonists' mind tapes, Worthing accepted his role as pseudogod in awakening and educating adult-sized infants. The second half of Hot Sleep dispensed almost entirely with Capitol and emphasized the development of Jason Worthing's isolated community.

  Even here, however, Card's vision extended beyond the confines of the novel. In the final chapters, Worthing sank his spacecraft into the ocean and instructed the computer to wake him when the ship is disturbed by other humans—the implication is that if his “children” develop sufficiently to carry out sophisticated exploration of the oceans, they would be able to handle the complexities of somec and Jason Worthing. The novel concluded optimistically, with Worthing's hope that the trials and pains his people suffer would lead to great good.

  But Card was not yet finished. The Worthing Chronicle appeared in 1983, announcing that portions had appeared previously as parts of the author's books Capitol and Hot Sleep. The comment served notice that The Worthing Chronicle was not simply a sequel; instead, it reexamined the worlds of Worthing, extending some fifteen thousand years further into the future and, through the rewakening of Jason Worthing, recounting the final resolution of his plan.

  The Worthing Chronicle did not incorporate parts of Capitol and Hot Sleep by simply integrating chapters into new frameworks. Instead, Card compressed and condensed earlier histories until an entire chapter of Capitol became a single paragraph or less. What became critical was not so much the individual narrative as the meaning that narrative conveyed.

  This characteristic reflects the most important backgrounds to understanding Card—his commitment to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the influence of The Book of Mormon on him as person and as writer. The Book of Mormon is one of four books of scripture accepted by Mormons, but is the only one that functions as a single, continuous narrative. It was particularly important to Card, since he read it many times during his childhood. It would be surprising if it did not turn up as a major influence on the style and form of his own writings. In an interview for The Leading Edge, a science fiction journal published by students at Brigham Young University, Card said that in spite of his interest in such fantasists as Ray Bradbury, Stephen R. Donaldson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, the writer who had most influenced him was Joseph Smith; the language of The Book of Mormon, he said, coupled with that of two other books of scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price, “had such impact, as well as the stories that are told there, that it colors everything I do and everything.”

  The last chronicler in The Book of Mormon, Moroni, speaks of that book as a distillation of previous chronicles. From beginning to end, there is a sense that the history in The Book of Mormon is carefully formed, streamlined, and compressed to explore the shifting moral and spiritual values of its people. As a result, the book reads like a verbal rollercoaster: nations live righteously and prosper, become complacent, then fall into unrighteousness and destruction, to prosper again only when they rediscover the blessings of righteousness. Episodes are tightly focused, often less concerned about individuals than about the stories they lived. Even important characters are as much abstractions as individuals, their lives functioning as motifs in a grand tapestry of meaning.

  As fiction, The Worthing Chronicle does precisely the same thing. Earlier stories are compressed until, in the case of the tales in In the Forest of Waters, they virtually disappear. “Worthing Farm” and “Worthing Inn,” the first two written, are alluded to in the chapter called “Worthing Farm” (pp. 200-218), blended and combined, but without the intense personal sense of the stories. There is more emphasis on the drought in the novel version, less on the transmission of the Worthing curse and the Worthing eyes. Only “Tinker” retains much of its flavor as it appears in The Worthing Chronicle. Originally published in Eternity SF in 1980, this draft of “Tinker” was written later and, consequently, is more developed than either “Worthing Farm” or “Worthing Inn.” It is, in miniature, the sort of narrative Card has explored since “Ender's Game” appeared in 1977—a single individual, possessed of a peculiar talent, must assume responsibility for the welfare of a community unable to understand the nature of its own savior. Card's characters recreate this pattern with ingenious variations: Lanik Mueller from Treason; Ansset from Songmaster; Patience, in Wyrms; the Shepherd in “Kingsmeat.” And, in its fullest manifestations to date, Ender Wiggin in Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, and Alvin Miller, Jr., in the Tales of Alvin Maker. Unlike these other versions, however, “Tinker” verges on the tragic. The savior-figure is sacrificed, bringing further death and suffering that only later transmutes into great hope. John Tinker is one with Card's Christic characters, although not the greatest among them. His function is more localized, narrower, but critical nonetheless. Perhaps for that reason, The Worthing Chronicle incorporates more of his history than it retains of “Worthing Farm” and “W
orthing Inn.”

  In a chapter appropriately titled “Winter Tales,” Card reproduces the essence of John Tinker's tale. The child Sala speaks the tale from the memories of Justice, a descendant of Jason Worthing and, in the context of the novel, a god-figure. The story is stripped of much of its descriptive and narrative power, becoming appropriate to the vocabulary and sentence structures of a child herself unsure of the true import of her tale.

  At the same time, Sala incorporates specific instructions as to how to interpret the story. John Tinker is killed because, she says, the people of Worthing “had no use for a god who couldn't save them from everything” (p. 135). To this extent, Cards purposes in writing “Tinker” become even clearer through the process of distillation. Condensing the original story into a few paragraphs highlights the Christic pattern of mediation, suffering, and death—just as Moroni's distillation of the earlier histories highlights the spiritual movement in The Book of Mormon. As “Tinker,” the story is highly emotional, charged with altruism and humanity; as an element in a larger narrative framework, it becomes paradoxically narrower and broader. It loses some of the impact of the minutiae of narrative while gaining the strength of moral vignette.

  The publication of “Worthing Farm,” “Worthing Inn,” and “Tinker” in this present collection does more than merely restore several tales to full narrative completeness, however. Even more importantly, it suggests the extent to which Card's stories function on multiple levels. In this instance, the transformation of tale into episode heightens Card's ultimate purposes, effectively concentrating his interests as they focus in The Worthing Chronicle. To return once again to the image of The Book of Mormon, we now have, in essence, the original documents which Card distilled into his summary of the worlds of Worthing. The altered focus, the intensified sense of mission and purpose, the streamlining of character to create increased depths of empathy and understanding, and most specifically, the infusion of a sense of moral weight as the stories appear in The Worthing Chronicle all suggest how closely Card's vision parallels that of the writers of The Book of Mormon. In each instance, the narrative is fascinating on its own terms, yet finally communicates far more than the basic outline of history, whether real or imagined. In Card's hands, stories become modes of power, characters become icons for meaning, and the storyteller approaches the level of poet-priest, speaking Truth through the illusion of fiction.