The Worthing Saga (18 page)

Jason saw his future in a moment, and in that moment decided that he would prefer any alternative to utter destruction. The missile was too close from him to move his whole, massive ship out of the way. But the payload, a slender shaft projecting forward from the massive stardrive,
it
would not go out like a pent-up star if the missile struck and exploded there. Almost instinctively Jason swung himself into the path of the missile. Somewhere back along the kilometer-long tube behind him, the missile would strike, colonists would die, and Jason found himself hoping that the missile would kill only some of the people, and not harm the all-important animals and seeds and supplies and equipment at all.

Impact. The ship shuddered from the distant explosion; alarms went off on the control panels; but the explosion was far enough from the stardrive, shielded enough that the drive was able to cope with the disturbance, balance itself before an unstoppable reaction destroyed everything.

Alive, thought Jason. Then he set about killing Claren. The enemy remained out of sight behind a planet, but Jason used Claren's own eyes to track the missiles when they were in the lee of the world, in a place where Claren knew he would be safe, but the missiles came on as if they had intelligence of their own, as if they could read his mind, for wherever he dodged the missiles were already headed for his new course, and in a few moments he was dead.

I don't like knowing my enemy's name, thought Jason.

The damage was brutal, but not unsurvivable, or so it seemed at first. The 333 colonists were arranged in three parallel corridors at the back of the payload, each of the three corridors completely shielded from the others, to help protect against the whole colony being wiped out in such an event as this. One corridor was a total loss—it had been peeled open to space and the coffins had burst open and erupted with corpses. A second corridor seemed untouched—the bodies all lay peacefully within their coffins. But the controls had been seared as the missile canted into the ship, and none of them would ever be revived.

Still, the third corridor remained, and 111 people would be enough to start the colony; with the supplies and equipment unharmed, they would survive. They would accomplish less work the first year, but they would have all the more supplies on the ship to keep them going for a few more years, till things were up to speed. It was sad that so many had died, but the colony had not been undone.

So Jason thought, until he reached the very back of the payload, where the bubbles were stored in a carefully protected environment.

That was where the missile had actually exploded.

Fourteen bubbles had survived intact. Nine from the corridor that had exploded, four from the corridor whose residents would never wake up, and only one bubble from the surviving colonists.

Only one human being left. The others would be incapable of doing anything for themselves, remembering nothing, knowing nothing. How could he deal with 111 adult-sized infants? What good were people without minds?

He walked back through the surviving corridor and looked down into the coffins at the people who, though not dead, would never again be themselves. His good friend Hop Noyock, the actress Arran Handully, he touched each coffin and remembered what he had seen within each mind, Hux, Linkeree, Wien, Sara, Ryanno, Mase, I know what you will never know again—who you are, what you have done, what you meant to be. Now what are you, if I ever wake you up? You, Kapock, with your fierce, devoted loves, what lovers will you remember now? Their names were broken with your bubble, and your past is dead.

The only bubble that survived belonged to Garol Stipock. Jason studied his face as he lay in his coffin, sleeping. Are you the one that I should waken? The one person committed to undoing authority in any form? What sort of ally would you be?

Anyone's bubble but yours, if the choice had been mine. Your childhood is the one I least needed to keep in living memory.

Jason swung the ship through its change of course, but when it was done he did not sleep. Instead he studied, dumped into his head the Empire's collective wisdom on the art of colonization. All the jobs took dozens of able-bodied women and men to make them work. He plunged deeper into the library, to the books rather than the bubbles, unscrolling them in the air over the control desk, trying to find out what he could teach infants to do, how many he could support by the labor of his own hands.

Many times he almost despaired. It could not be done. The high-level technology to farm and manufacture to create a modem society required many people with strong specializations. How could he hope to educate a hundred people from infancy to advanced specialties quickly enough that they wouldn't starve while they waited to grow up?

But gradually, inevitably, the answer came. The modern economy would be impossible, but an earlier life would not. A life with simpler tools that could be made by hand; a life from fields that could be plowed by people who had not learned their algebra but could drive an ox. I can plow an acre myself, plant and harvest it, to feed myself and a few others. Just a few at a time, until the first ones have developed enough to help me with the next ones.

The only drawback was that it would take years. The ship would preserve those he had not yet wakened, but each one he brought out would be utterly unproductive for some time, and during that time would still need an adult's portion of food, of clothing, of everything, and would require frequent attention and time consuming care. The colony would never be able to sustain more than a few of these at a time, for the economy would always be marginal, farming as they would with hand fools and animal strength.

It would take years, but perhaps, if they learned quickly enough, Jason could leave them from time to time, return to the ship and sleep for a year or two, come back just to bring new colonists from the ship, just to check and make sure the colony was running smoothly. After all, these people had been carefully chosen-the best people of Capitol, Doon had said. If some of that ability survived, despite their loss of memory, it might work. And if a few of them showed exceptional leadership ability, I could bring them aboard the ship and put them under somec again, and preserve them for a time of great need. I could—

Then Jason realized what he was doing. Planning to create a colony of ignorant peasants, using somec to create an elite class, headed by himself, of people who would withdraw from the world and return to it, years later, without having aged. All that was detestable about somec. I am already planning to use again.

But only for a time, Jason told himself. Only until the colony is firmly established, only until we've recovered from the missile that has so undone us all. Then I'll destroy somec, destroy the whole ship, sink it in the bottom of the sea, and somec will disappear from my planet.

It was the only way he could think of to form the colony at all. Even at that, it would require almost unbearable amounts of work from him, especially at the first. But it could be done.

Could be done, and might provide an opportunity no one else had ever had. A chance to create a society out of nothing. To create its social institutions, its habits, its beliefs, its rituals, to design them carefully with no need to compromise with old habits, old beliefs. I can make utopia, if I have wit enough; the power is in my hands if I can only decide what the perfect society must be.

The idea grew, and he began to write of what he thought his world might be, until at last he realized that he was happy again, excited again for the future, more than at any time before in his life. The enemy's missile undid all of Doon's designs, and for the first time in his life Jason if was truly on his own, without having to account to Doon or anyone else. If he failed now, it would be his own failure; if he succeeded, it would be success for him and for every generation that followed him in his world. And it will be my world, he told himself. By accident I have been made the creator; I am the one who will put the breath of mind into these men and women; let us stay in Eden this time, and never fall.

The house was sealed; they could all feel the difference, lying in bed in the fire light. The drafts from under the door were almost gone, so Lared felt no urgency to hide behind the low walls of his truckle bed. The heat sometimes was so great that Sala would Cast off her blankets in the night.

And still the snow did not fall. The cold whined out of the north, but the only snows were scattered, a few showers that blew into corners and clung to shingles.

“When it comes, it'll hide your head,” said the tinker. “I've got me a weather sense, and I know.”

In the night, Lared tossed and turned with the dreams that Justice took from Jason's memory and put into his mind. But it was different now. For some reason, when he awoke, he could not easily remember what he had dreamed.

“I'm trying,” he told Jason. “I know it had something to do with plowing. You were doing it all wrong or something. You were trying to drive the oxen the way you lead a well-trained horse. You weren't much of a farmer then. Is that it?”

“Of course I wasn't much of a farmer,” Jason said. “It was the first time I had seen dirt in my life.”

“What's dirt? Dirt is dirt.”

“I see,” said Jason. “That's our problem. When I brought the oxen out of the ship and put them in their plastic barn, I had never set my hand on the back of a hot, sweating beast, never felt the play of his muscles under the skin. When I hitched the plow on them, I had to discover the tricks of the straight furrow and controlling the depth of the blade myself—none of the books taught me. The ox plow and the oxen were only sent along in case of a massive power failure. Who was alive in those days who knew how to use them?”

“Even Sala knows more than you did,” said Lared. How was he supposed to take it seriously?

“It stays in my mind as magnificent, hard-won discoveries. It comes to you as clumsiness in tasks you do every year without thinking. No wonder you forget.”

Lared shrugged, though in fact he felt like he had failed them somehow. “I can't help it. It's not as if I didn't try to remember. Find another scribe.”

“Of course not,” said Jason. “Why do you think we chose you? Because you were of this world, you knew what mattered and what didn't matter. I loved the work of the soil because I had never done it before, it was all new at a time in my life when I thought I had already done everything. To you it isn't new, it's drudgery. The little things I do while you write, the axe handles, the boots, the wickerwork, it's all pleasure to me; living here with you, after all these years to be part of a village again, I love it, but what does it matter to you? So don't write it. Don't write about how I worked as hard and fast as I could to earn an hour to go wandering through the forest, collecting herbs to test in the ship's lab. Don't bother with my first tastes of real food, the way I threw up at the taste of bread after so many years of predigested pap made from algae, fish meal, soybeans, and human manure. What's that to you?”

“Don't be angry,” Lared said. “I can't help it that it doesn't matter to me. I'd remember it if I could. But who would want to read about it?”

“For that matter, who'd want to read about any of it? Lared, you dream of civilization, don't you—a life of comfort and safety, with time enough to read whatever you liked, and no one to turn you into a plowman or a blacksmith if you didn't want to do it. Yet what you do—herding the trees for harvest, shuttering the windows, making sausage and strawing the ticks—that is better than any other life I've lived or seen or even heard about.”

“Only because your life's never depended on it,” Lared said. “Only because you're still just pretending to be one of us.”

“Maybe so,”Jason said. “Just pretending, but I know my way around the forest, and I do an axe handle as well as anyone I've seen here.”

Lared was afraid when Jason was angry. “I mean then. You were pretending. You must have learned over the years.”

“Yes,” Jason said. “A little. Not much.” He was twisting horsehair into a bowstring, and his fingers were quick and sure.

“But I stole the skills from other men, who learned them better than I. I got inside them while they worked, and knew the feel of it without looking. I didn't earn it. I didn't earn anything in my life. I'm just pretending to be one of you.”

“Did I hurt you?” Lared whispered.

“And that's another way I'm not like you.
You
have to ask.”

“What did I say wrong?”

“You said nothing but the truth.”

“If you can hear my heart, Jason, you know I didn't mean to hurt you.”

“So. If we don't allow the farm and forest work into our tale, there wasn't much else. So what do we tell in the book you're writing.”

“The people—the ones who lost their memories—”

“It was the same as the farm work, tedious, filthy work. I just took them from the ship, a few a year, fed them, cleaned them, taught them as quickly as I could.”

“That's what I want to know about.”

“It's just like raising a baby, only they learned a lot quicker and when they kicked you it could really hurt.”

“And that's all?” Lared asked, disappointed.

“It was all the same. It only interests you because you've never had a child,” Jason said. “People who've had infants will know. The crying, the demands, the stink, and as they learn to get up and move on their own there's a lot of destruction and sometimes injury and—”

“Our babies have always got by without the injuries. Till lately.”

Jason winced. Lared already knew that Jason bore some responsibility for the Day of Pain, and he took some satisfaction from Jason's silent confessions of guilt. “Lared, it was the only happy time of my life. Learning to be a farmer, and teaching the children as they learned. Don't despise it because you were born with what I only learned then. Can't you write that? Can't you write of a single day?”

“Which day?”

“No day in particular. Any day would do. Not the day I first took Kapock and Sara and Batta from the ship—I didn't know what I was getting in for, that autumn; with the harvest in, I thought the year's work was done.”