The Worthing Saga (13 page)

“That depends on whether I'm one of the fifty that gets saved either way, or one of the fifty that dies to save you.”

Jason frowned. Together they cast the linen sheet over the ticks and tucked it in under them. “The tinker gets linen, and I have to sleep on wool.”

“Wool's warmer.”

“Linen doesn't itch.”

“You didn't like my answer.”

“I hated your answer. It doesn't depend on whether you'll live or die. It depends on what's
right
. And what's right and wrong doesn't come down to your personal preference. It never does. If it comes to what you personally prefer, then there's no right or wrong at all.”

Lared was ashamed and angry. Angry because he didn't think it was right that Jason should make him feel ashamed. “What's wrong with wanting to live?”

“Any dog can do that. Are you a dog? You're not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for, the greater you are.”

“What did you live for, when the twick was eating you?”

Jason looked angry, but then he smiled. “The life of my body, of course. We're animals first, aren't we? I thought I would live to do something very important.”

“Like make a bed for a wandering tinker?”

“That was exactly what I had in mind.”

“You speak our language better than I do, now.”

“I've spoken a dozen languages. Yours is just an evolved version of one I spoke very early in my life. My native language, in fact. All the patterns are there, and the words are changed in predictable patterns. This planet was settled from Capitol. By Abner Doon.”

“When a child is very bad, they say, 'Abner Doon will come in the night and steal all your sleep.'”

“Abner Doon, the monster.”

“Wasn't he?”

“He was my friend. He was a true friend of all mankind.”

“I thought you said he was the devil.”

“That, too. What would you call the man who gave you the Day of Pain?”

Lared remembered; as he did more and more rarely these days, the sound of Clany's screams, the blood pulsing from the leg of the man they carried upstairs, the death of the old cleric—

“You couldn't forgive him, could you?” asked Jason.

“Never.”

Jason nodded. “And why not?”

“We were so happy before. Things were so good before.”

“Ah. But when Abner Doon undid the Empire, unslept the sleepers, things were not good. Life was empty or miserable for almost every living soul.”

“Then why didn't they thank him?”

“Because people always believe things were better—before.”

Lared realized then that he had made a mistake. He had thought, from all his dreams, that Doon was Jason's enemy. Now he knew that Jason loved the man. It frightened Lared, that Jason Worthing loved the devil. What is this work I'm doing? I should stop at once.

Of course Jason and Justice heard this thought. But they answered not at all. Not even to tell him he was free. Their silence was the only answer that he got. Maybe I will quit, he decided. Maybe I'll tell them to go to some other village and find some other uneducated, ignorant scribe.

As soon as I find out what happened next, I'll quit.

•    •    •

Lared was the forester for Flat Harbor, and so he had to spend a week in the forest, girdling trees. Jason was coming along. Lared was not glad. Ever since he was nine years old, he had girdled the trees for the winter's lumbering. It meant days on end, wandering the woods that he knew better than any other in the village, seeing the old places made new and naked by winter, discovering where the animals were hidden, and above all spending nights alone in the wattle and daub huts he made himself each afternoon. No sound of anything but his own breathing, and then waking some mornings to see his breath like steam in the air, and other mornings to a thick fog in the woods, and other mornings to trackless snow hiding the ground from him, unmaking all the old paths, forcing him to make something new in the world just by walking forth from his night's hut.

But this year he would have Jason with him, because Father insisted.

“We've never had winter before, not like this,” said Father.

“In past years we've been—protected. This year we're like the animals—the cold can kill us, we can get lost, we can go hungry, a tool can bite us and who will be there to stanch the blood? You go nowhere alone. Jason is needed for nothing else, he can go, and so he
will
go.” Father glared at Jason, daring him to argue. Jason only smiled.

It was not a job that needed two men. Lared had been watching the trees all summer, and knew which ones should be harvested this year. Such trees were almost never close enough together that Lared could point out one for Jason to girdle while he did another himself. And if they worked the same tree, Jason was always getting in Lared's way. By noon on the first day Lared made it plain that he did not want Jason there, and so Jason discreetly kept his distance. There was little snow on the ground, and that only in patches. Jason took to gathering mosses from trees and stones, sorting them into pouches in the woolen bag he had sewn for himself while Lared wrote. Not a word passed between them all afternoon. Yet Lared was always aware of Jason. He girdled the trees quickly, deftly, moving faster than he usually did. He knelt before the tree, and his chisel bit into the bark. He tapped it with the mallet and drove it all around the tree, then clawed the bark downward with the iron tool he had drawn for Father. Before Lared they had girdled twice, in two parallel lines around the tree. But that took twice as long as necessary—once there was a single cut, the bark could be clawed off far enough to be sure the tree was dead before harvest in the deep snow. Then, next year, new shoots would come from the stump. It was part of Lared's work each year to trim off the shoots, so they could be dried to shape and worked into stems and handles and frames on reed and wicker baskets. Nothing was wasted, and Lared was proud of how smoothly he worked, how quickly the job was done.

He worked with such concentration that the sun was already setting when he realized that he had not yet made the hut for the night's sleep. He had never done so many trees on the first day before. He had never had Jason Worthing watching him, either. Now he was well past the remnants or old first-day huts. He didn't want to go back for them. Nor would it be practical to go on to second-day huts—they “were too far ahead, and he always scaled the rock cliff of Brindy Stream on the second day, in broad daylight—that wasn't a work for evening. So he would need Jason's help, making a new hut quickly, with no old wattles to start from.”

No sooner had he thought this than Jason was beside him, silent and expressionless, waiting for instructions. Lared chose a good house tree, with a long low branch for the central beam, and near enough to a willow that it would not be inconvenient. Jason nodded and began using his own knife to cut the willow withes where they hung from the tree. Lared saw that Jason knew what he was doing, and could reach higher and cut longer sticks than ever Lared could. So after Lared had gathered the deadwood sticks for the wattle frames, he set to work making the daub at the edge of a stream. It was cold work, digging with a hand-spade in the muddy bank, and splashing water onto the soil with his wooden bowl. But he did it quickly, and by the time Jason had the withes woven together into large strong wattles, the mud was ready for daubing.

Jason brought over the wattles one at a time. He quickly learned Lared's way of daubing—taking a handful of large fallen leaves and scooping up the mud with it. They slapped the mud-covered leaves onto the wattle and left them there—the leaves made the wall thicker and warmer and more watertight than mud alone. Together they carried each finished wattle to the tree and leaned it against the beam. Because Jason had been able to cut such long twigs, the wattles spread out much wider than any hut Lared had ever mad; before—room for two men inside.

They cut saplings to strengthen the door, and hung on it the sheepskin Lared carried for that purpose. It was fully dark before they had a fire going out in front of the hut. They heated water and simmered the sausage so it would go warm into their bellies for the night's sleep. Lared went and washed the little pot, and when he came back Jason was already asleep on one side of the tent, leaving Lared with half the space to lay out his blanket and sleep. It was a fine hut, and Lared discovered that he didn't mind the sound of Jason's breathing beside him after all. They had not exchanged a word all day. The silence of the forest was complete, except for the noises of owls on the hunt, and a bear passing by.

As always on the first night of tree-girdling, Lared drifted off to sleep thinking, Why should I ever go back to Flat Harbor? Why don't I spend forever here?

That night he dreamed. And in his dream he was not Jason Worthing, the first time that he had not been given Jason's own life as a memory.

He was Abner Doon.

He sat before a table, and in the air before him was a world. Or rather, a map of a world, with nations marked out in different colors. He pressed keys, and different colors came onto the globe, and the world turned and showed him other faces, and as Doon studied it he understood that a thing of beauty was being wrought there. It was a game, of course, only a game, but among the players was one of true genius. Herman Nuber, said the computer registration of players. Herman Nuber, who at the moment was under somec, was the player who had taken the Italy of 1914 and played it into a position of world domination, with an empire of allies, client states, and outright possessions that was larger than anything Earth had seen till that point in history.

Nuber's Italy was a dictatorship, but one that was studiedly benign. In every client state and conquered territory, rebellion was ruthlessly suppressed—but loyalty was lavishly rewarded, taxes were not high, local customs and freedoms were respected, and life for the computer-simulated populace was good. Rebellions profited nothing, and lost all, and so the government was stable, so stable that even inferior players, making stupid blunders while Nuber was on somec, even they could do little damage to Nuber's Italy.

Indeed, that was what had first drawn Abner to the game. He did not pay much attention to International Games, any more than he wasted time watching the endless lifeloops, with their tediously complete reproduction of the lives and loves of dull and oversexed people, in three dimensions and full color. He was busy building his own network of power, turning his office as assistant minister of colonization into the center of the world. But so many people were talking about Nuber's Italy. Nuber will be waking soon. Nuber will conquer the world this time. The bets were running high, but all the odds were on the actual date of the end of the game, not on whether Nuber could bring it off. Of course he could. Of all the players in the history of International Games, no one had ever started from so weak a position and built it into such a strong one in so short a time. Perfection, it was called. The ultimate empire.

Naturally, Abner had to see.

He studied it carefully for many hours, and all they had said was true. It was the sort of government that could stand forever. A new Roman Empire that made the old look transient and paltry.

Such a challenge, thought Abner.

And in his dream, Lared understood the thing of beauty Herman Nuber had conceived and brought to be, and he cried out in his sleep against the act that Abner planned. But the dream continued, for it was not in his control.

Abner Doon bought Italy. Bought the right to play that nation. It was expensive, because there had been some illegal speculation in the players market and the price had inflated, in order to force Nuber to pay bonuses in order to buy it. But Abner had no intention of forcing Nuber to pay anything. Abner never meant to sell Italy. Instead, he would use it as a test of what he planned to do in real life: he would see how well he could bring off the utter destruction of the order of the world.

He played carefully, and in his dream Lared believed he understood all that Abner did. He engaged in pointless wars and made sure they were badly generaled and stupidly fought—but not so stupidly that there were any crushing defeats. Just attrition, a slow wearing away of the army, of the wealth of the empire.

And within the empire he also began a quiet corrosion. Mismanagement and stupid decisions on industrial production; changes in the civil service to promote corruption; unfair, almost whimsical taxation. And the conquered nations were singled out for harassment. Religious persecution; insistence on the use of the Italian language, discrimination against certain groups in jobs in education; severe restrictions on what could and could not be printed; barriers to travel; confiscation of peasant land and the encouragement of a new aristocracy. In short, he did everything he could to make Nuber's Italy function much the way the Empire did. Only Abner timed and controlled things, watched carefully to be sure that the resentment built gradually, held off rebellions, kept them small and weak, biding his time. I do not want a few geysers, Abner told himself. I want a volcano that will consume the world.

The only thing Nuber's Italy had that Capitol lacked was Catholicism, a binding force, a common faith that bound at least the ruling classes together, ensured they looked out upon the world with a shared vision. The integrity of the Church, that was the one thing they trusted in the corrupt empire that Abner was giving them.

Like somec. Like the Sleephouse. The common hope and faith of all the ruling class of Capitol and the Thousand Worlds. To sleep, and thus live longer than the poor fools who could not qualify. The integrity, the incorruptibility of the keepers of the Sleephouse was the faith of all. If through my accomplishment I truly merit somec, I will have it. It can't be bought, it can't be demanded, it can't be cajoled, it can't be had by fraud. Only recognized achievement It was the only thing that preserved the Empire of the Thousand Worlds, despite the rot that holed and softened it everywhere else. The faith in the final judgment of the Sleephouse, which measured men and women and gave them immortality, if they were worthy.