The Worthing Saga (15 page)

“Think what you like,” Jason said, “but Justice might surprise you. She's lost more in her life than
you
have, so she has a right to be stern—and a right to love whomever she likes whenever she likes. Begrudge her nothing, Lareled.”

In Lared's surprise, he
did
care who overheard his thoughts. Angrily he closed his pen box. “Do you
always
listen to my thoughts? When I strain over the hole in the privy, are you there, feeling what I feel? When my father takes me through the most sacred steps of a new man, will you be at his side, along with me?”

Jason raised his eyebrows. “I'm getting older, Lared. If I'm with you in the privy house, it's to recall how easy it is for a young man, compared to the work
I
go through.”

“Well, stop it!”

“You don't know what straining
is
.”

“
Stop it!
”

From downstairs came Mother's voice. “What's going on up there?”

“She's
your
mother,” Jason whispered.

“I'm telling Jason that I hate him!” Lared called.

“Oh good,” Jason whispered. “That will make everything so much easier.”

But the frank answer turned away Mother's wrath. “At last you've come to your senses!” she called. “Will he go away now?”

“And will she give the jewel back?” Jason whispered.

“No he will not!” Lared called down the stairs. “He's not through studying how country bumpkins live.” He closed the bedroom door and returned to the writing table. “Well, if you're ready to work, so am I.”

“For your information, I have lived in far more primitive conditions than this. And loved it.”

“Stay out of my mind.”

“You might as well ask me to go through my days with my eyes closed, for fear I might see someone. Believe me, Lared, I've been inside some of the foulest, minds you can imagine.”

“I know! You put the memory in
me
.”

“Well, yes, that's right, we did. I'm sorry— It's the only way to tell the story.”

“There are other ways to tell stories. You speak the language well enough, even if you can't write it.
You
tell the story. I'll copy down what you say.”

“No. I've lied too often in my life. What
you
write will sound truthful. What I write is always in the language of lies. For someone like me, that's all language is
for
, to tell lies. I get the truth in other ways. Other people never get the truth at all.”

“Well, I'm not going to dream of Abner Doon again, and we haven't finished his part of the tale, and so you're going to
have
to tell me at least a part.”

“Where did we leave off?”

“The Estorian twick.”

“That feels like forever ago!”

“We took a long walk in the woods.”

“Well, no matter. Obviously I didn't die. It took half a year for the wounds to heal, and after that Doon arranged for me to be trained as a starpilot. I lived as a starpilot lives from then on. Somec kept me asleep and ageless while I traveled in deep space, and the ship woke me up whenever an enemy approached. No one ever killed me, and I killed a lot of them, and so I became very famous and popular, which meant I had a lot of enemies, and eventually they tried to kill me and so Doon sent me off as commander of a colony ship.”

Lared spun the feathery tip of the quill between his lips. “You're right. I can tell the story better than you.”

“On the contrary. I know which things are worth telling at length, and which things are best skipped over.”

“There are some things you
never
explained.”

“Like?”

“Like what happened on that second test they gave you. I remember every bit of how much you worried about it, and nothing of how it ended.”

Jason strained to push the heavy needle through the leather of Father's new boot. “Whoever tans hides around here does a miserable job.”

“He does an
excellent
job. His boot leather sheds snow and lets no water in.”

“It also sheds needles.”

Lared was feeling annoyed and impertinent, a delicious feeling which he intended to indulge freely. “Keep trying and someday you'll be strong enough.”

Jason got in the spirit of the quarrel and handed him the boot. Lared took the needle and with a circular, twisting motion drove it quickly and smoothly through the sole. He handed the boot back to Jason.

“Oh,” said Jason.

“The test,” Lared reminded him.

“I passed it. But I couldn't have. Because the answer to the second question had only been worked out by physicists at another university a few months before. And the answer to the third question, which I halfway solved—well,
no
one had been able to answer it at all. That alerted the computer. And the computer alerted Abner Doon. Woke him up, because there was a new thing in the world, a person that might be worth collecting.”

Lared was in awe. “As a child you solved a question that the scientists couldn't answer?”

“It's not as impressive as it sounds. Somec was killing physics and mathematics, just like it was killing everything else. They should have solved both problems centuries before. But the finest minds were quickly put on the highest levels of somec months awake for six years asleep. The only people awake long enough to accomplish anything were the second-rate minds. Almost every nation does that to themselves, given enough time. They make their great minds so secure, they bog them down so much with being honored and famous, that they never accomplish anything in their lives. I was
not
a genius. I was merely clever and awake.”

“So Abner collected you?”

“He watched my moments through the computers and Mother's Little Boys. They could have caught me anytime. He saw that I went to Radamand, he overheard our conversation—the walls
were
ears—and he saw how I shipped my own mother off on a colony ship. Ruthlessness in a child—he found it charming.”

“You had no choice.”

“No, but you'd be amazed at how often people who have no choice act as if they had one, and lose everything because they could not bear to do what had to be done.”

“So then what happened?”

“No. Write what I've told you, and what you dreamed of Abner Doon—tell these stories, bare and clean, and then tonight you'll dream again.”

“I hate your dreams!”

“Why? I'm not Doon.”

“When I wake up I can't remember who is me and who is you.”

Jason pointed to himself. “
I
am me.
You
are you.”

“You never answer me.”

“That was the only answer. Whatever is contained within your body, whatever acts your hands and feet performed, that's you.” And if you remember my acts, then that is you, too.

“I never sent my mother to a world where I'd never see her again.”

“No,” Jason said. “No, you never did.”

“Then why am I so ashamed of myself for doing it?”

“Because you have a soul, Lared. They found it out in early experiences with somec. Volunteers would go under somec, and lose their memories, and then when they were revived, they dumped someone else's memories into their minds. It worked fine with rats. But then, it's hard to think of a rat who would do something that another rat wouldn't mind, doing. They woke up remembering a lifetime of performing acts that they could not bear to remember having performed. Why? They had no benchmark to measure against—as far as they knew, it was their own life. But they couldn't bear to remember having made so many
wrong
choices. There was something that remained in a human mind even after somec had taken everything else, the part of you that says, 'This is the sort of thing I do,' and 'This is the sort of thing I do not do.' The part of you that names you. Your soul. Your will. All the old words.”

“And it lives after you when you die?”

“I didn't say that. It merely survives when somec takes everything else. If you would let me show you a story from Doon's own life—”

“No.”

“Then I'll tell you. He loved a woman once. A bright and clever woman who was ruled by an invalid father and a spiritually crippled mother. All her life, this girl had bent and twisted her life to their bidding, because she loved them. It ruined everything, cut her off from everyone, except Doon, because he had his remarkable ability to understand human nature—without even the Swipe—and he saw her and knew what was locked away behind her parents' door. So he loved her. But she wouldn't leave her family to go with him.”

“To marry him?”

“It was nothing like what
you
call marriage. But she wouldn't do it. She couldn't bear to leave her parents without the support she gave them—without her, they would have truly lived in hell. So she stayed. Fifteen years, until they finally died. And in that time she had become miserable, bitter, savage, and she was no longer interested in love, even when Doon came back to her and gave it to her. So he played a trick on her. Back when they were considering, uh, marriage, he had arranged for her to have her memory bubbled for storage, but she backed out before they ever gave her somec. He saved that bubble all those years, and now he put her under somec—he had corrupted the Sleephouse by then—and put the old memories into her head when she awoke. Then he told her what he had done—that she had cared for her parents to the end, but now she could go on with her life without remembering the years that had so embittered her.”

“And so they lived happily?”

“She couldn't stand it. She couldn't bear to live without remembering every agonizing moment of her parents' decline. She was the sort of person who had to fulfill every bit of her responsibility, even if it destroyed her—she could not live without the memory of her own destruction. It wasn't the sort of thing she could do.”

“Her soul.”

“Yes. She made him put her full, true memories back into her. Even though it meant erasing the few good, happy months they had. The pain was more valuable to her than the joy.”

“She sounds like the sickening kind of person Abner would love.”

“You are so kindhearted, Lared. You have sympathy for everyone.”

“Who would want to keep pain and throw away happiness?”

“A good question,” Jason said. “Which you must answer before the end of this book. Now write these stories, and dream tonight.”

“What will I dream about?”

“Don't you want it to come as a surprise?”

“No.”

“You will dream of how Jason Worthing, the famous warrior and starpilot, ended up in command of a colony ship and lost a battle, for the first time in his life.”

“I'd rather write that than the things you've told me to write today.”

“Sometimes you have to tell the dull parts of the story so that the good parts will mean something when they come. Go on, write. Your father needs these boots before we go out lumbering next week.”

“You're coming with us?”

“I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

So Lared wrote, and Jason sewed. In the evening Father tried on his new boots and pronounced them good. In the night Lared dreamed.

Starpilots were young for a long time. On each voyage, which might take years, even at several times the speed of light, the pilot slept, only waking when the ship alerted him. It could be another ship, it could be planetfall, it could be some unexpected hazard or malfunction, but usually a pilot slept from three days after launch until three days before the voyage's end. It was rare for planetside duty to take longer than a few weeks. The result was that starpilots were at unbelievably high somec levels—an average of three weeks awake for every five years under. Only Mother, the Empress, slept more and woke less. No politician or actor had more prestige.

And of all starpilots, none was better known or more admired than Jazz Worthing, the hero of Ball away, the darling of the true loops.

Therefore, as Jason well knew, no starpilot was more hated and envied, because no other starpilot so symbolized the Empire to those who loathed it.

So it was no surprise to him when he came to port at Capitol and found himself surrounded by people who hated him. What surprised him was that most of them planned to kill him. Things were getting out of hand. What had Doon been doing these last twelve years?

Only Capitol, of all the worlds, could afford a space port large enough for starships actually to land. It was part of the majesty of Capitol, the loops they sent out to every planet, showing the tugs lowering the starships into the gaping bays in the metal surface of the world. Almost every landing had
some
loopers there to watch. Jazz's landing had every looper, hired or freelance, who could get free of grisly murders or raids from wall rats. And crowds—

Thousands of people lining the tier on tier of balconies around the bay. Jazz knew they were there before the door broke open; without trying, he could feel their adulation. As always before he cracked the door he paused and asked himself, Do I need this? Have I come to live for this? And, as always, the answer was: No. I don't think so. I hope not. No.

His agent, Hop Noyock, greeted him as he stepped through the door. It was one of Hop's perks, to be featured on true loops throughout the Thousand Worlds. It got him into an amazing number of parties while Jazz was gone. Hop was that rare creature, a starpilot's agent who didn't hate his client. After all, Hop had aged some dozen years since their relationship had begun, and Jazz had aged scarcely six months. Hop was going bald. Sagging a little in the belly. But he was loyal and intelligent and hard-working, a combination few agents ever achieved. Besides, Jazz liked him. He had grown up as a wall rat, and done well enough in the crawlspaces that he had the money and connections to buy papers and get into the corridors before he was eighteen. Doon had found him. Never met him, of course, but he was aware of him, and when Jazz decided he needed an agent to handle his Capitol business, Doon recommended him.

But Hop was taking no pleasure in the cheers of the crowd, not this time. Oh, he strutted and bowed and waved like the wall rat he was, but his heart wasn't in it. Jazz went into Hop's mind and found almost at once what was bothering him.