Hot Sleep

by Orson Scott Card

  What he read there was Radamand’s immediate fear—and the fact that Radamand was also seeing Jas’s fear. Their bright blue eyes locked.

  “You’re impossible,” the older man said. “You can’t be.”

  “Apparently you’re hallucinating,” Jas said.

  “He just broke in here and demanded—” the secretary said, righteously indignant.

  “Shut up.” Radamand was sweating.

  So was Jas. Because he could hear in the man’s mind the decision that Jas had to die.

  “Is that the way to greet a long-lost relative?” Jas asked.

  “Get out of my—” Radamand stopped, but Jas knew he had been about to say—

  “Mind?” Jas asked.

  “Office.” Radamand bit the word, and then Jas heard/saw/felt Radamand’s panic, his rage—

  “Why are you afraid, Uncle Radamand?” Jas asked in his sweetest voice.

  In the older man’s mind he found the answer: Because you have it too, and if they catch you, they might catch on, they might realize it’s hereditary on the male line, and they’ll trace the genealogies and find me—

  And as Jas heard Radamand’s thoughts, he realized that Radamand had heard what leaped into Jas’s thoughts: that assistant professor Hartman Tork already suspected he was a Swipe, was laying traps for him.

  “I’m afraid for you,” Radamand said sweetly, through gritted teeth. “I’m afraid you might fall into a trap somewhere.”

  “I’m smarter than they are,” Jas said.

  But not smarter than me, Radamand thought loudly, fearfully, angrily.

  Jas saw the laser in Radamand’s mind before Radamand could find it in his pocket. Jas dropped to the floor, rolled. The laser seared the floor behind him. A moment while the weapon recharged, and in that moment Jas was out the door, running down the corridor.

  An alarm sounded somewhere in the complex.

  The door ahead of him slammed shut. A guard stood in front of it. Jas stopped and frantically searched the man’s thoughts for another way out, another exit. Where were the doors? He found them just behind the guard’s eyes, even as the guard noticed Jas’s fugitive appearance. The gun raised—Jas was already gone.

  Through this? No, this door. Out and down the stairs. And through this last door and into corridors branching off into the endless underground city of Capitol, which stretched in an unplanned and unplannable labyrinth from pole to pole to—

  Home? Not home, Jas thought, because the plan already forming in Radamand’s mind was to arrest Jas on some charge or other—breaking and entering? Resisting inquiry? For someone at Radamand’s level, and with his obvious influence and prestige, it shouldn’t be hard to get Jas put away forever behind bars.

  Or in a little plastic box in the cemetery.

  Jas’s mind kept wandering as he loped down corridors, losing himself in the turns and the rises, putting as much as possible of three dimensions between him and his cousin. He smiled to think of how Radamand had probably acquired his influence and prestige: for he could easily spot a superior’s guilty secrets and then drop subtle hints—not enough for blackmail and the subsequent murder, just enough to let the superior know that Radamand shared his secret. And understood. Would never tell; could be trusted; was a friend who knew all and loved anyway.

  And so promotion. And so power. And so all of the wealth and position that Radamand was afraid he would lose because now someone shared his guilty secret.

  Jas came to the tube and got on going away from his home.

  Then he got off at the second stop and changed to the first tube leaving for anywhere.

  Then got off and caught another.

  And another.

  And then left the tubestop and went to a computer terminal and pushed in his card. Dangerous? Perhaps—but access to the master files of the computer was closely guarded by Mother’s Little Boys, and Jas doubted that Radamand’s considerable influence was quite that considerable. No, it would be the constables that Radamand had on his trail, not the computer police, not the listeners in the walls.

  So probably the computers were safe.

  Jas punched for a readout on criminal law. He specified. And specified again. “Exemptions from all class 2-8b felonies and all misdemeanors.”

  Then Jas specified for exemptions accessible to juveniles. There were only two: the Service and the Colonies.

  Never the Colonies. Not the one shot of somec, and then waking up fifty lightyears away on an empty planet, doomed to live out the normal hundred or so years of life and then die, with neither fame nor power nor hope of the somec doses of immortality. Colonies were for the despairing, not for the merely desperate. Jas still had hope.

  Had to be the Service. There at the end of the somec sleep through space the captains awoke, fought a battle or did a short term of duty and then went back under the somec to return to Capitol, where they were heroes—at least the successful ones—and wealthy, whether spectacularly successful or not; and, most important, the captains were on somec, waking only one year out of every thirty or forty or fifty, watching the centuries slip by and laughing at time—

  The Service then. And it would be ironic, too; for his father had been a ship captain, before the Swipe crisis that killed him. It would be somehow appropriate to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  And then Jas remembered his mother’s warning that sons of Swipes tried to expiate guilt. Maybe, he thought. Maybe after all I’m just trying to relive my father’s—

  A hand gripped his shoulder.

  “Jason Worthing, age thirteen, number RR3njw-4, status juvenile, state your business in this district.”

  Jason leaned limply against the wall, and the man made sure he wouldn’t leave the wall abruptly. The man’s voice sounded official, but he wasn’t in uniform. A constable not in uniform? Behind the man’s eyes Jas learned that he was one of Mother’s Little Boys. Then he must have guessed wrong, and Radamand did have that much influence.

  “Well, little boy, your mother’s worried about you. Seems you didn’t come home after school.”

  “I just went—I went exploring,” Jas said, using his young voice, his unintelligent voice. “I was trying to find my way home.”

  “Your mother asked us to run a missing persons check. You shouldn’t stick your credit card into computer outlets if you want to run away,” the man said.

  “I don’t want to run away,” Jas said, longing to run away.

  “Good thing,” the man answered with a smile, “because you can’t.”

  They rode in the closed compartment of the tube back to the station only a few corridors away from Jas’s flat. The man didn’t let go of his iron grip until Jas’s mother opened the door.

  “Jas, you’re all right.” She hugged him, acting for all the world like a parent who had been worried that her little boy might be hurt. But Jas knew what the real fear had been. Though he was already a little tired of looking into people’s thoughts, it was almost reflex already, and he saw his mother’s flashing memory of a visit from Hartman Tork.

  “Thank you, officer,” she said, tears of joy in her eyes.

  “Any time, ma’am.” The man left. Jas’s mother closed the door. She looked at Jas in fear.

  “Hartman Tork came,” Jas said. She nodded, biting her lip in an exaggerated show of fear. Again, Jas was convinced for a moment that she was mad.

  “Looking for you,” she said. “He has proof. He said you had passed the second test, that it was proof positive—”

  “Proof when I passed it?” Jas asked, surprised.

  “He said it contained information that had only been fed into the computers this week, completely and totally restricted, there was no way you could have studied the information, so obviously you got the answers by—”

  “But I didn’t look into anyone’s mind, mother. I just used logic, I just figured it out—”

  “Apparently,” she said bitterly, “your logic has just caught up with the latest advances in astrodynamic theo
ry.”

  Jas leaned against the wall. “I thought the test went the other way. I thought that if I failed it they’d think it was proof that I’d cheated, or something else. I thought I had to get a good score.”

  Years ago, seven-year-old Jason leading her from the park to the zoo to the dome to the cave, all the sights; and she proud, happy, following where he led, devoted to him.

  But he was no longer seven years old. He was thirteen. He was frightened. He was leading his mother on an excursion that had no destination, whose only goal was escape. Where to, on a planet where there was no outside except the thin sky, no away except on starships—

  Colonies.

  The sign blinked. Colonies were one of the few projects the government considered important enough that they could be allowed a lighted sign.

  Colonies put people on starships and sent them far beyond the reach of Mother’s Little Boys. Colonies asked few questions, and answered none. To go with the Colonies was the next thing to dying.

  But it was only the next thing. And when dying was the alternative… . Jas stood for a moment, looking at the sign. He had the option of joining the Service. His mother didn’t.

  So Jas led his meekly following mother through the impressive archway leading into the plush Colonies reception room. Lighted panels on the walls depicted huge fields of a golden plant, extending to the horizon, with blue sky and a yellow sun. “Earth Colony,” the panel said, in a muted, feminine whisper. “Return home again.” Another panel was in motion—hundreds of tiny human beings scrambling over red rocks and black cliffs, raising a mesh of fine metal strands. The mesh began to glow. “Catch stars on Manookin,” the virile masculine panel-voice said, “and bring them home as frozen light.”

  Bring them home—Jas laughed silently, bitterly. No one came home from a colony. A hundred years just to get established with any degree of security. Another two hundred or so before anything worth exporting could be developed in exportable quantities. And without the somec sleep, who would still be alive? None of the original colonists. None of their great-great-grandchildren, either.

  “A new home,” sang a chorus of children’s voices, “where children have room to run and play under the sun. Carter. The children’s dream planet.”

  And they were at the desk. “Both of you?” the woman asked.

  “Just her,” Jas answered. “A place where you can walk around in the open.”

  The woman pretended to think hard. “Capricorn? It’s a yellow sun planet, just like Capitol.”

  Jas wasn’t taken in. Obviously Capricorn was what they were pushing today. “What do they export?”

  “Oh, exciting things.”

  “Excite me,” Jas said.

  “Aluminum,” she said. “And platinum. And chrome.”

  Jas smiled wanly. “You don’t do much walking in the open when you’re down a mine shaft, ma’am. A planet that exports food.”

  “Duncan, then. Sol-type planet, they didn’t even have to terraform it. She’ll love it.”

  “Papers?”

  And the papers appeared on the desk. Jas insisted that the receptionist write in Duncan as the legal contract destination, and in the preferred work space Jas wrote, “Clerical.” The chances of anyone getting a clerical assignment on a colony world were very slim, but there was no harm in asking. And then the papers were in front of his mother, and she meekly picked up the pen and signed, writing the name very, very carefully, as if for the first time, though she was a legal scribe, both longhand and punching.

  “You have a few minutes for good-byes,” the receptionist thoughtfully said. “And then these nice men will take you with them.” These nice men were two blond, blue-eyed gorillas with cheerful smiles on the front of their microcephaly. Jas felt a strange lightness in his stomach, a gentle twisting that he recognized as guilt, though he had never felt much guilt before.

  He turned to face his mother. She was looking at the two guards.

  “You selfish bastard,” she whispered gently, “I’m not crazy enough not to know what you just did.”

  “I had to,” Jas said, not believing himself.

  “I would have done it gladly if you had asked.”

  Jas took her hand. It was lifeless as it lay in his. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you.”

  And in his mother’s mind he saw his father, heard him say, “I’m sorry. I love you.”

  His mother’s face contorted. “Selfish,” she said loudly. Then she screamed: “Selfish bloody flaming Swipe bastard, you’re your father’s son, you’re no son of mine!”

  Jas had made a gesture as if to stop her when she said the word Swipe, and she noticed it. “That’s right, Jas, boy, look out for number one, the old lady’s going crazy, but all you care about is who can overhear us, well I can shout it out, you know—” and her voice rose to a high-pitched scream—“I can yell to the whole world that you’re a stinking—”

  “Sedation?” asked the receptionist. Jas didn’t answer, but one of the gorillas came over with a needle anyway. Jas’s mother tried to back away, but there was no retreat. The needle dug into her back, and in less than a minute she was smiling sweetly. “Hi,” she said to the gorilla. “I’m Nita Worthing. Are you coming to Duncan, too?”

  The gorilla smiled and patted her shoulder.

  Nita turned to her son and smiled again. “Thank you, son. Good-bye. Wish me a happy voyage.”

  “Have a happy voyage, mother.”

  “It’ll be happy because at the end of it, I’ll have memories of you.”

  The gorillas led her away. She was telling them a joke as they went through the doors to the inner complex.

  The receptionist leaned forward over the counter. “Your mother signed on as a volunteer, didn’t she? No legal problems, right?”

  Jas nodded, shook his head. “Volunteer. She’s not wanted for anything.”

  “Don’t worry about her,” the receptionist said kindly. “They often react that way. The minute the papers are signed they’re frantic to change their minds. Silly, isn’t it? You’d think they’d just signed their own death warrant or something. Why, they’re absolutely lucky to get away from this tin can of a world.”

  Jas smiled. “You’re right. No doubt you’ve already signed onto a colony ship.”

  The woman’s smile disappeared. “Get out of here, smart mouth,” she said. As Jas left he heard her muttering, “Some people, you try to get friendly and they get so… .”

  Jas took another tube and ended up in one of the huge parks that were placed in every borough by some politicians who had visited Earth and had thought it would be wonderful to spend tax money duplicating it on Capitol. Live trees growing out of real lawns. The residents were unimpressed, by and large—most of them had never seen a tree, and chlorophyll smelled dirty, somehow. Green growing things were just large forms of mold, and mold meant you had to have your humidifier adjusted.

  But Jas had been drawn to the parks since childhood, and as he stepped onto the lawn he remembered coming to this very park with his mother, several times. She had sat on the grass, spooning beef out of a dish, as Jas had climbed that rock, and jumped onto the lawn, laughing and laughing.

  Well, I don’t feel like laughing now, Jas reminded himself. And then wondered what it would be like on a colony world—green, like this? Only without the ceiling. Without the walls. Without the crowded corridors leading off in six directions.

  The park was nearly empty, as always, and Jas hoped that though cameras monitored the comings and goings here as everywhere else, such an unfrequented place might not be too well monitored. He crept into the middle of a large clump of bushes and curled up around the base of the tree that grew out of the middle. It was shady, and so darker than everywhere else in the open corridors. In the darkness of the shade he tried to think. Had to decide what to do.

  He daren’t be caught by the constables because of Radamand. And only the constables could offer him any protection from Hartman Tork and the mobs that wo
uld form if word got out that a Swipe had been found. Mother’s Little Boys? Jas shuddered. You just don’t go to Mother’s Little Boys. For finding missing persons, yes. For protection? Who would protect you from the Little Boys?

  If he used the computers he could be found, and yet the computers were the only way he could get into the Service. And the other escape route, the Colonies, he wouldn’t do that. Jas had dreams of an impressive and important future for himself. People on Colony ships didn’t have impressive and important futures.

  He thought of his mother, and the future she had, and again felt the twist of guilt; maybe she wouldn’t have been caught, maybe they wouldn’t have tortured her and got the answer, maybe—

  There were no maybes. And when they had proved that Jas was a Swipe and killed him, they would have executed her, too, because the trait is passed from mother to son. That’s all they know,

  Jas thought. Mother to son indeed. I’m like my father. He thought the words again and again. I’m like my father.

  He woke about six hours after he had crept into the bushes. And when he woke he knew what to do. How long had it taken Mother’s Little Boys to find him when he had used the computer terminal the last time? Not long—three minutes, perhaps. But that would be long enough, if he hurried.

  For a moment he wondered what he was so worried about. For all he knew, Mother’s Little Boys weren’t even looking for him—just the constables and the school.

  But it was too easy to file a missing persons query, and the constables and the school would have little trouble proving right-to-know. Mother’s Little Boys would be looking for him, all right.

  He walked to the nearest public terminal. Five specifications got him an application form for entry into the Service. Then he punched memory and coded it to his private number, snapped on a cover code, and then retrieved his card and hurried away from the terminal. Mother’s Little Boys wouldn’t find him there—it had taken only one minute.