The Worthing Saga (24 page)

What do you do with another man's past? Jason rocked the case of Stipock's bubble in his hands. All of Stipock's past in his hands, and Stipock's living body hot with somec in the corridor, the last of the original colonists, waiting to be wakened.

Before the missile plowed this ship, I was full of plans, how I would deal with three hundred people who wanted to murder me. I had ideas, I remember. Keep them off balance, quarreling with each other, reliant on me for any kind of stability at all. I didn't need to do it after all. Now, instead of keeping them disturbed, I keep the peace. I find the best of them, the wisest, they serve a few years as Mayor and then I bring them here, I save them for when they're needed next. I never asked them to think of me as God, but the prestige it gives to those I take into the ship makes Heaven City a safe and stable people. Sixty years so far, safe.

And stagnant.

He tossed the bubble gently into the air, caught it. Stipock wasn't one of the haters. He hadn't wished for my blood, he only wanted what Doon wanted: the breaking of the game. Stipock was one who did not believe. He had believed too much religion as a child. I could not have created a society to gall him more than this one, with their naive faith, their willing compliance with authority.
Why do you obey the Mayor?
he would ask. Because Jason isn't here, they would answer.
Well, why do you obey Jason?
he would ask. Because he was the first. Because he made us. Because everything obeys Jason.

Will you tell them, Stipock? Will you teach them all the ways of Capitol? Teach them about stars and planets, bending light and gravity? No, you're not such a fool as to think you can build utter ignorance into true science. You'll see the oxen and the wooden plows, the brasswork and the tin, the faith in Jason and the peaceful trust in Jason's Mayors, and it won't be physics that you tell them.

It will be revolution.

I would be a fool to wake you up with your memories. Just one more New One, one more infant, the last of all, and you would trust me as faithfully as you trusted in your parents' god, until your disillusionment. But
I
would never disillusion you. I'm what you longed for all your life—someone you could believe in. I know the thoughts of your heart, I never age, I come and go as I like, I produce people from my tower and whatever question you have, I can answer it, and you'll never know my answer isn't truth. I'm the god that will not fail.

But if you have your memory, we will be enemies, and you are the one I fear most of all. Without malice, without a lust for power, not a rival for my people's faith, but an enemy of faith itself. You will undo the stories that they've chosen to believe, change the meaning of everything that happens. They're waiting for you, as they wait in every generation of the world: the young, the resentful almost-men and almost-women who Want to move into their parents' places. They were the built-in catalysts in every culture I have found in the ship's computer. No society can stay the same, because the young ones have to
change
things, to show there's a reason for them to be alive. They're waiting for you to come and tell them not to believe.

Jason pressed the clear case between his palms. I will erase you, and you will be mine. No one will know it, life in Heaven City will be better because of it.

But he did not crush the case. He found himself walking back to Stipock's coffin, holding his memory, holding Stipock's childhood in his hands.

He tried to understand why he was going to do it. Some sense of fairness, some idea that you don't steal the past of a man? It was all right for it to happen accidentally, it was fine to take advantage of the thieveries of fate, but to do it deliberately would be murder, was that it?

But he had killed before, he had been inside a man's mind at the moment when Jason's missiles took him into the bright tunnel of death. He would do it in a moment, if he thought his people would be better for it. No moral scruples would stop him, if his children needed it.

His children. It was for them that he would put the bubble in its place, let it dump Stipock's life back into him. Jason did not even know what good would come of it. Perhaps it was that his people did not need good right now. Perhaps it was a taste of evil that they needed. Someone to do for his stable society just what Doon had done for Capitol. Trouble was, he never had found out how Doon's revolution had turned out.

Who is Mayor? Noyock? Poor Hop—what am I doing to you? Putting a rebellion in your city. Indeed, a rebellion in Noyock's own house. It was a troubling situation as it was. Noyock was here for his second stint as Mayor; he had slept forty years. He was still in his late thirties, physically, and his son Aven was older, in his fifties, going grey. Aven had guessed by now that Jason would not take him into the tower. How could he? Aven was a stubborn, vengeful man, the sort that would never do as Mayor. Now Aven was taking it out on Hoom, his youngest son, ruling him as cruelly as he would have ruled the city, given the chance, proving over and over again how right Jason was not to take him up. Hoom was another matter. He was Noyock again, he had ability, if his adolescence didn't ruin him.

Last year, when he had first realized how bad the situation was, Jason had toyed with the idea of taking Hoom from Aven's house. But the good of all was more important than the good of one—if he once violated the family, now in the third generation, the echoes would be heard throughout history. Hoom would pay for the safety of Heaven City. It was cruel, but necessary.

So why am I bringing Stipockout, if the good of the whole is more important than any individual? Jason hesitated again before starting to waken his sleeping enemy. How dare I do this, when I don't even know why I'm doing it?

Yet he knew that he must do it, and could only trust his own blind impulse. Any other mind he could probe and understand. With his own, he was as helpless as everyone else. For some reason, not in spite of but because of his love for the people of his city, he must let Stipock loose to do what he inevitably would do.

He depressed the levers, then leaned back against the other wall to wait for Garol Stipock to wake up. Now that he had committed himself to giving Stipock his memories, he had to figure out a way to explain to him why the colony was as it was, and why it had taken Jason sixty years to wake him.

It was almost sunrise when I they brought the boat to shore. Stipock was almost naked and dripping wet and a little cold, and the others laughed at him as he shivered, but it was exhilarated laughter, and they loved him for what they had done this morning. Stipock had made a hobby of sailing on the great indoor lake of Sector ff3L, and it felt good to swim again, even if the river was a little silty. But it was not swimming and boating
again
that pleased him. The joy of it was its firstness: never before had a boat rested on the waters on this world; never before had these children seen a human being swim.

“You will
teach
us!” Dilna demanded. “If I'm going out on this boat again, I want to know how to swim!”

“If I can find time between road-building and shingle-cutting and answering your ridiculous
questions
all the time—” Stipock said.

Wix laughed at him. “If we didn't ask questions, you'd talk anyway. You're a talker, Stipock.”

“But Hoom here is the only real listener.”

Hoom smiled but said nothing. Just sat by the boat, holding the wood that he himself had worked and shaped to do what Stipock had said that it must do. There were few carpenters to match Hoom's handwork. He was slow, but when he was finished the boat was tight as a barrel, and scarcely needed the coat of gum they gave it. Stipock had thought of starting with a canoe, but it was too easy to spill from one, and the young ones couldn't swim. If he hadn't had Hoom as carpenter, he couldn't have done it.

“Well,” said Dilna, “when do we hold a public demonstration?”

“Today,” said Wix. “Right now. Let's call the whole of Heaven City to see us ride on the water like a wood chip.”

Dilna poked at the boat with her toe. “It
is
a wood chip. She grinned at Hoom to show him that she meant no harm by it. He smiled back. Stipock enjoyed seeing how much he was in love with her. It was one of the best things about being with young people—everything was for the first time, everything was new, they were still young enough to believe in the future. No one had ever plucked them up from their life, thrown them into a colony ship, and sent them out to the edge of the universe in the power of a starship pilot who liked the idea of being God.”

“I think we should wait to show everybody,” Stipock said.

“I'm supposed to meet with Noyock this morning. Let me talk to him about it. Besides, it isn't enough just to go out on the water with it. We have to
go
somewhere. The other side, I think.
Your
father should go with us, Hoom.”

Why did Hoom look alarmed? “I don't think so,” he said.

“Imagine meadowlands that went on forever. Room for millions of cattle to graze.”

“Millions,” said Dilna. “That's what I like best about you, Stipock. You always think small.” Then, as usual, Dilna brought them all back to reality. “We have to get home now. It's morning, and people will wonder where we are.”

Stipock left first, with Wix, because he could tell Hoom wanted to hang back and be alone with Dilna for a while. Wix took his leave as they crested Noyock's hill, and went on down into the city. Stipock walked up the dirt road to the house where Mayor Noyock lived.

It was hard for Stipock to take the Mayor seriously. He had seen him too often before, on Capitol, Jazz Worthing's oily, ubiquitous agent, getting into every loop, as if by appearing often he could become more than ten percent of a man. Everything was different here, of course. Hop Noyock had never been sycophant or a parasite, as far as
he
remembered, anyway. Stipock had seen the wound in the ship, the damaged coffins, the ruined bubbles. He knew that it meant a fresh start for everyone, to come into the world empty-minded again.

But not quite open-minded, after all. Because Jason was present in every part of the colony, Jason's mind was imprinted all over so-called Heaven City. Jazz Worthing, the starship pilot, had finally got what he longed for: absolute worship by backward, debased peasants. He had made no effort at all to teach them what the human mind was capable of. What the universe itself was like. Just a mumbo jumbo of religion, like an ancient emperor trying to convince his people that he was a god. Only Jason had done much better than most. He had the miracles to prove it. Only Stipock knew that his apparent agelessness was nothing but somec, that his wisdom was nothing but a decent education in Capitol's school system, that the miracles he wrought were all machinery hidden in the Star Tower—no, the colony ship, they've got me saying it, too.

Stipock knew what was in store for him. Jason had put his memory in place and let him come into the colony unfettered. Stipock could think of only one reason for such an act: the egomaniacal Jazz Worthing still needed an audience, still needed the people of Capitol to worship him. Stipock was the only person available to watch and then applaud. You'll get damn little cheering out of me, he told himself with anticipation. I've spent my life undoing pompous, dogmatic, self-serving tyrants like you, and I'll do it again. I'll do it the way I've done it every time before: with the truth'. It's the one thing that the Jazz Worthings of the universe can't bear for long.

Stipock was not naive. He knew what he was up against. Sixty years of Jason's lies and miracles, his power and authority, had made this a rigid, powerful theocracy, with the Mayor like Jason's archangel standing guard at the tree of life. Jason still has the power of the rulers of Capitol: he still controls somec, and if he wishes he can leave me behind as he and his chosen servants skip like stones across the face of time. But while Jason slept, Stipock could do his own work of undoing. I will unweave your little fabric, Jazz, I will ravel it out before you wake again. Three years you've given me, or so you said, before you'll come again. See what I can do in that amount of time.

Jason had inadvertently given him a powerful tool. Because Stipock was the last of the New Ones, because he had let Stipock come from the ship walking and talking, with a store of knowledge and a vocabulary as elevated above the rest of the colony as Jason's own, some of Jason's aura of divinity had fallen upon Stipock. The most pathetically ardent of Jason's worshipers hardly dared argue openly with Stipock, his prestige was so high. It made him free.

Till now. No doubt Noyock had called him today to try to silence him. Well, Noyock, you can try. But already I have wakened enough people that your authority is shaken, and any punishment you try to measure out will only martyr me in the eyes of those who have realized the backwardness of Heaven City. I've taken the young people out on the water and shown them how to swim. They won't be trapped here between rivers anymore.

Still, Stipock, was honest enough to admit to himself as he knocked at the door of Noyock's house that he was afraid. Noyock was not just a creature of Jason's shared prestige. It wasn't just the office of Mayor that made him powerful. Noyock had been Mayor before, for seven years, and on his own he had done much to change and improve the life of Heaven City. He was the one who I had started the little villages miles away; he was the one who had divided up the land so each family farmed their own, and the common work was limited to road-making, lumbering, and harvest. The result had been much greater prosperity, a spurt of growth, and now, in his second term as Mayor, Noyock was still energetic, a good leader, with the trust and confidence of everyone whose trust was worth having. Including Stipock. Stipock's contempt for him as Jazz's agent did not make him blind to the fact that Noyock was a benevolent despot. Unfortunately, benevolent despots were the worst kind: it was so much harder to convince people they ought to get rid of them.

The door opened. It was Aven, Noyock's son. He greeted Stipock coldly. “Come in.”