The Worthing Saga (7 page)

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.

Jase recoiled from the thought, for it was his darkest fear. He had grown up with the horror of who his father was. Homer Worthing, the monster, leader of the Swipe Revolt, the foulest murderer in all history. He had died in space years before Jase's mother had decided to conceive a child. The Swipe war was over then. But the universal loathing for the Swipes remained, tinged with the memory of the eight billion people Jase's father had burned to death.

It had been nearly bloodless until then. In the seemingly endless war between the Empire and the Rebels (or the Usurpers and the Patriots, depending on which side you were on), both sides had begun using telepathic starpilots. The results were devastating —non-Swipes were helpless, and it quickly became clear to both sides that the Swipes, who could silently communicate with each other, might easily unite against both Empire and Rebels, unseat all government, take control of somec and therefore of the entire bureaucracy. As longs as normals people could not tell what the Swipes had in mind, the Swipes could not, must not be given starships.

In fact the Swipe starpilots had been conspiring to end the war and impose peace on both sides. They thought, when both sides tried to remove them from their commands, that they could still bring off such a victory. So they seized their ships and declared both governments dissolved. In response, Empire and Rebels united, briefly, to exterminate the Swipes. At first the Swipe starpilots allowed themselves to be harried from here to there. Though Swipes were always killed as soon as they were captured, yet they tried to avoid causing too much harm, hoping at first for victory, later for compromise, at last for mercy. But the universe had no place for them; the Swipes must die. Homer was at the end of his last hope of escape. But in that moment he had chosen to destroy eight billion people rather than to die alone.

And I am his son.

All this came in a moment's memory to Jason Worthing. Hartman Torrock did not know what went on behind the mask of Jase's face.

“Blood test,” Torrock said.

Jason protested, wanted to know why.

“Hold out your hand.”

Jase held out his hand. He knew the test would show nothing. They were so smart, the ones who hated Swipes. They were sure they knew how the power to see behind the eyes was passed from mother to children, to lie dormant in daughters, to become active in sons. Jase's mother did not have the Swipe, and so Jase could not have it,
did
not have it. And yet he was a Swipe,
could
see behind the eyes. Someday, he knew, it would occur to someone that perhaps there was another way to be a Swipe, a way that might be passed from father to son, along with eyes as blue as a quepbird's breast. The gift to see behind the eyes had only come gradually to his mind, like the hair of manhood to his body. When he first realized what was going on, he feared that he was going crazy; later he knew that somehow the impossible had happened, and he had inherited his father's curse. That was terrifying enough—how much like his father, the mass murderer, was he? And yet the Swipe was not something he could refuse. He tried to be careful, tried to remember to pretend not to know the secrets he learned in other people's minds. The simplest way to do it, of course, would be not to look in their minds at all. But he felt like a cripple whose legs had just been healed—how could he not run, now that he had learned that it was possible? So in these months—or had it been a year?—he had grown more and more daring as he learned to better control and use his power. And today he had been careless. Today he had plainly known what he could not know by any other means.

And yet, he told himself, I did not
learn
it from Torrock's mind. I only
confirmed
it, clarified it. The shape of the answer came to me from my own thoughts.

Jase almost explained this aloud— I thought of the answer to the last question myself! —but he caught himself in time. Torrock had not yet told him aloud that he was worried about the last question. Don't be a fool, Jase told himself. Admit nothing, if you want to live.

The test result came in a moment, rows of figures scrolling up from the table and then slipping backward through the air until they faded out of sight, like sheep being led to the shearing shed. Negative. Negative. Negative. Jase had none of the signs of the Swipe.

Except one. He could not possibly know the answer to the question.

“All right, Jase. How did you do it?”

“Do what?” Jase asked. Am I a good liar? Id better be—my life depends on it.

“The last question. We never studied it. I never so much as wrote down Crack's Theorem.”

“What's Crack's Theorem?”

“Don't be an ass,” Torrock said. He touched the keys and called up into the air the answer Jase had given to the last question. He made one set of numbers glow brighter than the others.

“How did you learn the value of the curve of the straight line at the edge of light?”

Truthfully, Jase answered, “It was the only number that could fit there.”

“To the fourteenth decimal? It took two hundred years to even know the problem existed, and years of work by the best mathematicians of the Empire to determine the value of the curve to five places. Crack only proved it to the fourteenth place some fifty years ago. And you expect me to believe you duplicated all this work here at your table in five minutes?”

The other students had been looking away from him, till now. Now, to learn that he knew the value of Crack's Theorem and how to use it in a problem— now they looked in awe at Jase. Whether he cheated to get the value of the curve or not, he had known how to
use
it, when they were only just getting the hang of Newton, Einstein, and Ahmed. They hated Jase with all their hearts, and hoped that he would die. He made them all look so stupid, they thought.

Torrock too noticed the other students watching them. He lowered his voice. “I don't know how you got the value of the curve, boy, but if they think I wrote it down or taught it to you, which by God I did not, then it's my job, it's my
somec
, and God knows I get little enough as it is, one year under for three years up, but it's a
start.
I'm a
sleeper
, and you're not going to take it away from me.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Jase said. “I figured it out on my own. It's not
my
fault if you asked a question that made the value of the curve obvious.”

“It was not obvious to fourteen places,” Torrock whispered fiercely. “So get out of here, but come back tomorrow, there'll be questions to ask you, you and your mother and anyone else, because I
know what you are
, and test or no test I'll prove it and see you die before I let you ruin everything, for me.”

Jase and Torrock had never got along, but it still horrified Jase to have a grown man say in words that he wanted Jase's death. It frightened him, like a child that meets a rabid wolf in the forest, able to watch nothing but the streaming jaws, the foaming teeth, able to hear nothing but the low growl in the throat.

Still, he must pretend not to know what Torrock meant. “I didn't cheat, Mr. Torrock. I've never cheated before.”

“There are only a few thousand of us on Capitol who know how to use the curve, Master Worthing. But there are millions of us who know how to notify Mother's Little Boys about a person who seems to show symptoms of the Swipe.”

“Are you accusing me of—”

“You know what I'm accusing you of.”

I know, said Jase silently, that you're frightened half to death of me, that you expect me to be like my father and kill you where you stand, small as I am, powerless as I am.

“Be prepared for questioning, Master Worthing. They'll know how you learned to use the curve, one way or another—there's no honest way you could have done it.”

“Except figuring it out on my own!”