The Worthing Saga (17 page)

“It's what isn't me in you that I most love,” said Doon.

“Where I have torn down, you will build up. I have made the chaos for, you, and the world is without form, and void. You are the light that will shine on the face of the deep.”

“I hate it when you say things you've been practicing up to say.”

“Goodbye, Jason. Go meet your colonists—day after tomorrow they go under somec, and then you're on your way.”

Lared put down his pen and sprinkled sand on the parchment to dry the ink. “Now I know why I wish you had never come here,” he said.

Jason sighed.

“It's like you said. My strongest memories are yours.”

“What I said was wrong,” Jason answered. “Just because you remember me saying it doesn't mean it was true, or that I still believe now what I believed then.”

“Sometimes I even forget and try to look into people's minds, and I can't, even though I remember doing it. It's like someone cut off my hand. Or burst my ears, or cut out my tongue.”

“Still,” Jason said. He held up the axe handle he was carving. “I cut the wood however I like, but it's the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn't just your memory that makes you who you are. There's something in the grain of the mind. They found it out from the start, when they tried dumping someone else's bubble into a person's brain. All his experiences, all his past—and the mind that came out of somec was empty, wasn't it? But the new memories wouldn't fit. He remembered only being this other person, he
believed
he was the other person, but he could not bear remembering it. It was not himself.”

“What did he do?”

“They—there were several of them. They all went mad. There was nothing right in their past, how could they stay sane?”

“Will I go mad?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because no matter how much of me you remember, me or anybody else, there is at the root of your mind a place where you are safe, a place where you are yourself, where your memories are right, and belong to you.”

“But it changes me, to remember being you.”

“And me,” Jason said. “Do you think I'm the same man, knowing the insides of other people's lives the way I do?”

“No. But are you sane?”

Jason was startled, then laughed aloud. “No,” he said. “God help me, but you ask the truest questions! Justice was right to pick you, you've got a mind like ice. No, I'm not sane, I'm utterly mad, but my madness is the sum of all the people I have known, and sometimes I think that I have known all the people in the world—at least all the kinds of people that it's possible to be.”

He seemed so delighted, so exuberant, so glad to be himself that Lared couldn't help but smile. “How can all that fit inside your head?”

Jason held up the half-finished axe handle. “As tight as the handle in the axe. And there's still room to drive in a wedge or two. Always room for more, to set it tight.”

The first heavy snowfall did not come, and did not come.

“Bad sign,” said the tinker. “It means the sky is saving up.” And he climbed on the roof to mend the flashing around the chimney, and took out the flue and rebuilt it so it fit tight again, no leaking. “Do yourselves a favor with the doors and windows—make sure all the shutters are strong, and the doors lit tight, and caulk the walls.”

Father listened to the tinker, went outside and looked at the bright cold sky, and announced that no other work mattered until the house was tight. The whole village then set aside their other work and closed their houses. The littlest children slapped more daub on the weak places of the walls, down low; doors were tooled to fit tighter; shutters were remade; and in a time of such work, Jason and Lared found themselves taken again from the work of pen and parchment. They did the ladder work together, fastening in place the shutters of the upstairs windows. Jason climbed the ladder the right way; Lared, who had always climbed like a cat, went up the ladder the wrong way, and quickly, and then perched on the sill of the beams that poked out of the wall of the house. He had no fear of falling.

“Be careful,” Jason said. “There's no one to catch you if you fall.”

“I don't fall,” Lared said.

“Things have changed.”

“I'll hold tight.”

As they worked, Jason told stories. About the people of his colony. “I called them in, one by one, and while they sweated through interviews that meant nothing, I found out from their memories just what kind of person each was. Some were haters, the sort of people you'd expect to find in any conspiracy to kill. Others were merely afraid, others were dedicated to a cause— but I didn't care that much why they had wanted me dead. I needed to know more the purpose of their lives, what made them choose their choices.”

Like Garol Stipock, a brilliant scientist-turned-engineer, who devised the machinery that could diagnose a planet from its ore to its weather in a few orbits. He thought of himself as an atheist, rejecting the strong, fanatic religion his parents had forced on him as a child; in fact, even as he worked hard to reject and break down any authoritarian system he could find, he was still the child who believed that God had definite ideas about what mankind ought to be, and Garol Stipock would give up anything and everything to try to achieve that ideal.

Like Arran Handully, who had devoted her life to entertainment, subsuming her own identity in her lifeloop role, living day after day, minute by minute, in the constant scrutiny of the loops, so that people could circle around a stage and watch her life from every angle. She was the greatest of the lifeloop actresses, and under it all was the desire for others to be happy— when she retired, she never missed the audience herself, for it was not her own need she had meant to satisfy when she performed.

Like Hux. A dedicated middle-level bureaucrat, on a two-up, one-down somec level. Everything he touched went smoothly, every job was accomplished on time and under budget. Yet despite the great esteem that superiors and underlings alike had for him, he had refused promotion after promotion. He was married to the same wife, had the same block of rooms, ate the same meals, played the same ball sports with the same friends, year after year after year.

“So why did he join a revolution?”

“He didn't know that himself.”

“But
you
knew.”

“Motives aren't remembered, especially the ones you don't understand yourself—I can't just find a place in his memory where all his unknown purposes are laid out for me to see. To others, to himself he seemed to have only one purpose in life: to keep everything the same, to resist change. But that need was just the outward face of what he wanted most: stability and happiness for everyone he knew. He was no Radamand, remaking the world to his own convenience.”

As Lared worked, a face came into his mind, a lantern-jawed face with a hint of weakness around the eyes. Hux, he knew. Justice was showing him the pictures as Jason told the tale. Where are you, Justice? Working somewhere in silence, as always, listening to us talk, with almost never a word to say yourself?

“You're not listening,” Jason said.

“You're not talking.” Lared answered.

“Put in the pin, my arms are breaking holding this shutter.”

Lared—put in the pin. The shutter swung smoothly again. Together they set to fastening it down, top and bottom, and barring it from the outside. It was a north-facing window, and the northwest wind had torn shutters away before. Jason talked on as they drove the wooden pins that would hold the shutters closed. “Hux wanted an order of life in which all were reasonably content, and when it was found he didn't want it to change. He was no hypocrite—he willingly inconvenienced himself—sacrificed much in order to keep his corner of Capitol secure and stable. He was also bright enough to see how somec undid and destroyed everything. Separated families as they straggled their separate routes across the years, ended friendships as one went to the Sleephouse while the other stayed up, not having merited sleep somec kept the Empire stable, but only at the cost of unbalancing almost every life it touched.”

“So he wanted the Empire to go on without somec?”

“One of the few in my colony who didn't long for sleep. And then Linkeree—I remember them together because of what happened later. Link was as opposite to Hux as a man can be, on the outside. He had no friends, no close associates, no family. He was the only person in my colony who had never been on somec in his life, except for the voyage from his home world. He had been confined in a mental institution for years before coming; his parents had been confusing, possessive, cruel, and exploitative—in cases like that it was usually the children who ended up being locked away. So Linkeree even believed himself to be half-crazy, a loner who loved no one and needed no one.”

“But you knew better.”

“I always know better. It's the curse of my life.” Jason frowned. “If you don't hold on with at least one hand while you're balancing on only one foot up here, I'm going to throw you down myself to end the suspense.”

“I told you I won't fall. What was the truth about Linkeree?”

“He had an overdeveloped sense of empathy. He could imagine other people's suffering, and felt it himself. His mother had used that against him all his life, torturing him with guilt for all the suffering of her life. The only thing that freed him was seeing what real suffering was.” And again an image came into Lared's mind. But not a face this time. It was an infant lying in a clear place in tall, knifelike grass, left to starve or freeze or be devoured by the creatures of the night. With the image came a feeling of desperate compassion—I can do nothing, and yet I must do something or not be myself—and finally the image gave way to another, to a group of uncivilized tribesmen kneeling in a circle in the grass, taking the child's corpse apart in a ritual; I understand, the child must die for the sake of the tribe, the child's death means life. It was a moment of clear understanding for Linkeree, for in the infant he saw himself, torn and broken to keep his mother alive. I am not insane; she is the one who is mad, and I am suffering for her. But does she love me as these tribesmen love the infant they have killed? The answer was no, and so he left, escaped from his world and went to Capitol, a place where everyone looked for someone else to suffer for them. Linkeree was a living sacrifice; he suffered to expiate the guilt of all who touched him.

“Hold tightly when such a vision comes,” said Jason. “I think we shouldn't do this when we're perched up here.”

“I'm not so fragile as that,” said Lared. But the infant stayed in his mind, lying there in the grass with savage insects hanging from its naked body.

“Linkeree was not a loner, after all. He was like Hux, in a way—all he cared about was other people. It made Hux sociable and stable; it made Linkeree shy and skittish; but I knew them both for what they were, and I said to myself, 'These I will make my leaders. Because power in their hands would be used for the good of all, and not to please themselves. Or rather, if they pleased themselves they would please others as a matter of course, because they could not be happy in the knowledge of others who were miserable.'”

“No one is that good,” said Lared. “Everyone wants what he wants.”

“You are that good,” said Jason. “That's, what goodness is, Lareled, and if there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species.”

“I don't know,” said Lared. “I've never cared much about other people's pain.”

“Because they didn't feel any. But you still hear a burned up child screaming, you still feel a man's blood pumping from a wounded foot. Don't tell me you know nothing of compassion.”

“What about you?” asked Lared. “Are
you
good?”

No, came the answer in his mind. It took a moment for Lared to realize that it was Justice who had answered, not Jason. No, Jason is not good.

“She's right,” Jason said. “It's the whole meaning of my life, that I inflict suffering on others.”

“Did you cause the Day of Pain?” asked Lared.

“It was not my choice,” said Jason. “But I believe it was the right choice.”

Lared did not say another word that afternoon, thinking how the man who worked beside him approved of what had changed in the world since the Day of Pain. And that night he dreamed.

Jazz awakened to see the lid of the coffin sliding back, the amber light winking at the edge of his vision. His bubble must have just finished dumping his memories back into his head, and his body was hot and sweating, as it always was when he came up out of somec. Pushups, sit-ups, running in place made him alert and quick again.

Only then did he notice that it was not the amber light flashing in his coffin, but the red. Had it been red all along, or had it just changed? No time to decide the question now; in a moment he was at the controls, and the ship was telling him what it knew. An enemy ship had been hiding behind a planet, almost as if it expected his approach; two projectiles were already launched.

Even as Jason's fingers sent two of his ship's four torpedoes into space, his mind searched for and found the enemy captain, the mind controlling the missiles that dodged and pitched and weaved their way toward him. The missiles were far more maneuverable than Jason's massive colony ship, but Jason knew where the missiles were going, and moment by moment Jason drew himself farther out of the enemy's way. In the meantime, his own missiles homed in on the enemy, anticipating her attempts to dodge. For once Jason didn't care if anyone noticed that he knew things he could not possibly know, that he was a Swipe. He would not be going back to Capitol again, and so at last he could fight with his full ability.

Just before the enemy's ship exploded in a globe of light, the enemy captain knew that she would die, and in that moment she took grim satisfaction from the fact that even if she died, Claren would finish off the enemy.

Claren. She was not alone. Jason and his enemy had been concentrating on their duel, routing their missiles and their own ships; only now did he realize that there was another ship, still behind the planet, which had been using the first ship as its eyes to route its own attack. Jason's ship was tracking the enemy missiles, which were already near. Desperately Jason searched for Claren, the enemy who was so close to success. He found Claren just in time. Or it would have been just in time, except that Claren was no longer controlling his missiles—when the first ship blew up, he had lost his means of seeing and therefore controlling his missiles' flight. They were homing on Jason automatically, which meant their course was absolutely predictable and easy to dodge, except that Jason had wasted too much time looking for the captain mind, and while he could avoid one missile, he could not avoid the other. It would strike him. Its high-intensity light would carve through his ship's armor; the skin of the ship would peel back from the wound and allow the missile to enter, to plunge into the core of the stardrive and there, gently, explode. A pathetic little explosion, really, but almost anything would upset the delicate balance of impossible forces, and the ship would explode.