The Worthing Saga (31 page)

He hid from them in the book. There was much to write, of Stipock, Hoom, Wix, and Dilna, he told himself. So he closed himself in Jason's room all day, writing and writing. He came down for meals, and to do the work that must be done with Father lying deathlike on his bed, but even that became unnecessary, for Lared began to find that whatever job he thought that he must do, Jason was already doing when he got to it. Lared had nothing to say to Jason, just walked away. Obviously Jason was hearing the heed to do the job from Lared's own mind, and then rushing to do it so that Lared would get back to the book. Lared even wondered sometimes if they hadn't plotted out the entire thing so that he would spend more time writing. Very well, he thought, I
will
write, as quickly as I can I'll write, and finish the book and send you and it away as far from me as possible.

One day, when the snow was falling thick outside and the house was full of the smell of sausage frying, Lared bent over the table and wrote at last of the death of Cammar and Hoom. He wept as he wrote it, not because of the dying, but because of the forgiveness Hoom gave to Wix and Dilna as he died. Jason found him there; Lared resented his coming in—Jason, at least, couldn't plead the excuse that he didn't realize Lared didn't want him there.

“I know you don't want me here,” Jason said. “But I
am
here, all the same. You've written all you know so far.”

“I want no more dreams from you.”

“Then I have delightful news. You've finished all the tales I have that are worth seeing for yourself. I will tell you how I ended my time with my people, and then—”

“And then I give you the parchment and you go away.”

“And then Justice will give you the memories that my own descendants preserved through all the generations. Like the tale of the tinker.”

“I want no more dreams and tales.”

“Don't be so angry, Lared. You should be glad of the dreams you've had. You might take a lesson from Hoom, for instance, and instead of punishing yourself and me and Justice for your father's injury, become as generous as Hoom and forgive us all.”

“What do you know and understand of Hoom?” said Lared.

“You forget that I'm the one who sent my mother off to a colony against her will. Very much the way you cut off your father's arm. You have in you the memory of every pain I've suffered in my life. You loved Hoom the more for knowing him, why not me?”

“You are not Hoom.”

“Yes I am. I'm Hoom and everyone else whose heart I've had in me. I've been so many people, Lared, I've felt so much of their pain.”

“Then why do you cause more? Why don't you leave me alone?”

Jason struck the wall behind him with the butt of his fist.

“Why don't you realize that I feel even what you're feeling now, you fool! I know you and I love you and if I could spare you one bit of this, if I could ease your burden and still accomplish what must be done.”

“Nothing
must
be done! You only
want
to do it.”

“Yes, that's right. I want to do it the way you want to breathe. Lared, for thousands of years my children watched all the worlds of men, protected you all from pain and suffering. In all that time, Lared, in all those years there
never
was a Hoom! Do you understand me? A Hoom or Wix or Dilna is impossible in a universe where actions have no consequences! Why do you love Hoom, if not because of what he did in the face of suffering? Without the suffering, what was he? A clever carpenter. Without his father's beatings all his life, without the face of his father haloed in the flames, without his wife's adultery and the deaths of Bessa, Dallat, and Cammar—yes, without the touch of Cammar's fingers as he leapt and fell, what would there be in Hoom to make you love him? What would there be of greatness in him. What would his life have meant?”

Jason's passion shocked Lared. He had been so calm for all these weeks, it made his rage the more fearsome. But Lared would not be put off, even so. “If you could ask Hoom, I think he would gladly have forgone the greatness if he could have lived his life in peace.”

“Of course he would. Everybody would prefer that everything go smoothly for them. The worst bastards in the world are those who devote their entire lives to making sure things go smoothly for themselves. Individual preference has nothing to do with what I'm saying.”

“That's plain—you've never been one to go out of your way to do good for other people, except when you need them to do something to further your grand design.”

“Lared,” Jason said, “people aren't individuals, even though we all think we are. Even before I came, what did you know of yourself, except what your family told you? Their tales of your childhood became your vision of yourself; you imitated your father and mother both, learned what it means to be a human being from them. Every pattern of your life has been bent and shaped by what other people do and what other people say.”

“So what am I then, a machine that echoes everyone around me?”

“No, Lared. Like Hoom, you have in you something that makes a choice—something that decides, This is me, this is not me. Hoom could have become a murderer, couldn't he? Or he could have treated his children as his father treated him, couldn't he? It's that part of you that chooses that is your soul, Lared. That's why we couldn't dump one person's bubble into another's mind—there are some choices you cannot live with, you cannot bear remembering that you did this thing, because it is not the sort of thing you do. So you aren't just an echo. But you are part of a cloth, a vast weaving; your life forces other people to make choices, too. The men who honor you for saving your father—don't you realize that it gives meaning to
their
lives, too? Some might be jealous of you, you know—but they are not. They love you for your goodness, and that also makes them good. But if there were no pain, if there were no fear, then what does it matter that we live together, that our lives touch? If our actions have no consequences, if nothing can be bad, then we might as well die, all of us, because we
are
just machines, contented machines, well oiled and running smoothly with no need to think, nothing to value, because there are no problems to solve and nothing we can lose. You love Hoom because of what he did in the face of pain. And because you love him, you have become him, in part, and others, knowing you, will also become him, in part. It's how we stay alive in the world, is in the people who become us when we're gone.” Jason shook his head. “I tell you all this, but you don't understand.”

“I understand, all right,” Lared said. “I just don't believe you.”

“If you understood it, Lared, you'd believe it, because it's true.”

Then Justice spoke in Lared's mind: Jason tells you only half the truth, and that is why you don't believe.

Jason must have heard her too, because his face went dark with anger, and he slumped down and sat on the floor and whispered, “So I'm not human; so be it.”

“Of course you're human,” Lared said.

“No, I'm not. Justice knows me better than any living soul. It's what she told the Judges: I am not human.”

“You have flesh and blood like any man.”

“But no compassion.”

“That much is true.”

“I
feel
what other people feel, but I have no pity for them. I saw the universe without pain and I said, This is foul, undo it, and then I chose to remain in it because I prefer to live here, surrounded by fear and suffering, I would rather live in a world where there can be agony like Hoom's—so that there can be a man like Hoom. I would rather live in a world where a man does a mad thing like walking naked through the snow just for the sake of honor, or where a blacksmith chooses and says, Take my arm to save my life, or where a woman sees her husband come home one-armed and almost dead and goes that day to tell her lover, I will never come to you again, for now if my husband learned of this, he would believe I hated him because he wasn't whole.”

Lared held the quill tremblingly in his hand. “I hate you.”

“Your mother was a woman, and nothing more. She had no face until the Day of Pain.”

“We were happier without faces, then.”

“Yes, and the dead are the happiest of all. They feel no pain, they have no fear, and the best sort of human is the one most like a river, flowing wherever it's carried by the slope of the land.”

“You're glad for other people's pain, that's what you are. That's why you came hereto relish it.”

The words stung. “Think of me what you like,” Jason said, “but now tell me this: which of all the dreams I've given you would you like to forget? Which of them would you like to have taken completely out of your mind, as if it had never happened? Which of these people do you wish you had never known?”

“You,” said Lared.

Jason looked as if he had been hit. “Besides me. Who would you like Justice to remove from your memory, the way you scuff out a drawing in the dirt?”

“You've done enough to my memory. Leave me alone.”

“You fool. What do you think all your protection was but changes in your memory? You tell me to leave you alone, but you hate me because we have done exactly that. Which do you want, boy—to be safe or to be free?”

“I just want to be alone.”

“As soon as I can, Lared, I'll let you be as alone as your heart desires. But we have a book to finish. So listen and I'll tell you all the rest of the story that's mine to tell. No dreams your precious memory will be undisturbed. Are you ready?”

Lared set down the pen. “Make it quick.”

“Do you want to know what happened to Stipock and the others?”

Lared shrugged. “You'll tell me what you want.” He knew he was infuriating Jason all the more; it was what he wanted.

“Wix and Dilna married, of course. I took them both into the Star Tower, and they each served several terms as Mayor. I made Stipock write a few books on machinery and fuels and general knowledge—something that future generations could build on. Then I took him into the ship as well, and he was Mayor twice. He married and fathered eleven children before I took him though. At the end of three hundred years there were some two million people in Heaven City. Though it wasn't a city like Capitol— maybe twenty thousand people lived in the city proper. They were spread well onto the northern plain, and south into the forests and mining country clear to the headwaters of the Star River, and already there were some who had gone to live at the mouth of Heaven River. They were all one culture and one language and one people, and I decided that they had foundation enough. They had learned all that I could teach them, and so I brought out all the people I had saved in the Star Tower, and chose some few dozen among those who had never gone under somec, and I sent out colonies year by year, five thousand people at a time. Stipock sailed in ships to the land where his mining effort had failed before; Kapock and Sara went overland with two thousand sheep to crop the grasslands east of Stipock's desert; Wien the bronzesmith went to the mountains of the northeast, and Wix and Dilna led their people eastward. Noyock sailed westward to the islands, where his cattle were fenced only by the sea. Linkeree and Hux each founded cities at opposite ends of the Forest of Waters, on the river that Stipock, Wix, and Dilna rafted on their journey home. Those are all the ones you know there were many others. And the one colony I didn't wish to send—Billin's people in the islands of the south. As I heard it, they became uncivilized rather sooner than the rest. But the peace I established wasn't permanent, not anywhere. There was commerce and there was war, exploration and concealment; lies were told and truth was left forgotten. Still, every people in every land remembered the golden age of Jason, the time of peace. People have a way of longing for lost golden ages.
You
know about that.”

“It isn't you I miss,” said Lared.

“When the last of the colonists left Heaven City, I raised the starship from its resting place in First Field. It wasn't fit for flight among the stars, but that hardly mattered. I put it into orbit and then I went to sleep. For fifty years.”

“Perched like God in the sky,” said Lared, “peering through the clouds to see how the world got on.”

Jason went on as if Lared hadn't spoken. “It was only when I awoke that I began my real work. After all, I hadn't tried to make a utopia—all I had done, really, was teach the people how to work and prosper and live with the consequences of their acts. I had some other business to attend to. I was feeling and looking nearly forty, now, and I had had no children. And Worthing's world, Lared, was going to be a place where my gifts would grow and develop and perhaps become something more than I had made them.”

“So I took a landing craft and some equipment, and chose a place beside the West River in the densest part of the Forest of Waters, a place where no highways would go, at least not until the world filled up. Which I doubted would be soon. I set off a circle ten kilometers across, and marked it with an inhibitor.”

“I don't know the word.”

“I know you don't. It sets up an invisible barrier that's very uncomfortable for an intelligent being to cross. Birds fly through it. Dogs and horses are a bit annoyed. We had no dolphin problem, for obvious reasons. I embedded the inhibitor in a stone, and lasered an inscription on the stone:”

“I can see you were determined to stop this nonsense of people worshiping you,” Lared said.

“I didn't start it—you know that, Lared. But I could use it, couldn't I? Already every colony had legends of Jason, who took the Star Tower into heaven, but someday would return. I only had to change that a little. I went to Stipock—the nation of Stipock, since Garol had already died. His grandson, Iron, was the Mayor of the place. I didn't tell them who I was, just asked for a place to live. But they weren't blind—it's hard to hide my eyes. Stories sprang up at once, and people came to see me, but I never admitted being Jason. I only lived there six months, but in that time I told some stories. Enough to tell the world to look for the coming someday of my son, and to give them some reason not to hate and murder my children if they found them. You must remember that I had lived half my life—more than half, then—in fear of being called a Swipe and killed.”