The Worthing Saga (64 page)

He climbed the ladder and lifted the door. All the windows were open and the forest spread wide in all directions. Martin found his son standing by the west window watching the sun set near Mount Waters. He' said nothing, but after a time his son turned to him and said, “I will sleep in this room from now on.” Martin Keeper went away downstairs.

The worlds of Worthing first appeared in October 1978, when
Analog
published Orson Scott Card's “Lifeloop.” Within four months, four more Capitol-based stories appeared—“Killing Children,” “A Thousand Deaths,” “Second Chance,” and “Breaking the Game”... the foundation of Card's first collection,
Capitol
.

The eleven stories in
Capitol
suggested the sweep of vision that would become Card's trademark, a suggestion amplified into fact by the appearance of
Hot Sleep
, a novel based on
Capitol
but exploring portions of its history in greater detail.

Capitol
concentrated on the social consequences of an illusory immortality offered by the drug somec, and on the human community as it spread through multiple worlds. Somec allowed for space travel, but it also undercut moral, spiritual, and ethical values. From beginning to end,
Capitol
traced the threat somec represented as its artificial immortality destroyed the human community, isolating individuals until their lives rarely touched those of others; they became like stones skipping over the waters of time.

In
Hot Sleep
, Card focused on Abner Doon's plans to change all of that. Doon appeared in
Capitol,
but his full story was not told there. In
Hot Sleep
, Doon assumed center stage with his protégé, Jason Worthing. He coerced Worthing to captain a colony ship bearing three hundred of the best and most restless minds of the Empire light-years into the heart of the Galaxy. When an accident destroyed the colonists' mind tapes, Worthing accepted his role as pseudogod in awakening and educating adult-sized infants. The second half of
Hot Sleep
dispensed almost entirely with Capitol and emphasized the development of Jason Worthing's isolated community.

Even here, however, Card's vision extended beyond the confines of the novel. In the final chapters, Worthing sank his spacecraft into the ocean and instructed the computer to wake him when the ship is disturbed by other humans—the implication is that if his “children” develop sufficiently to carry out sophisticated exploration of the oceans, they would be able to handle the complexities of somec and Jason Worthing. The novel concluded optimistically, with Worthing's hope that the trials and pains his people suffer would lead to great good.

But Card was not yet finished.
The Worthing Chronicle
appeared in 1983, announcing that portions had appeared previously as parts of the author's books
Capitol
and
Hot Sleep
. The comment served notice that
The Worthing Chronicle
was not simply a sequel; instead, it reexamined the worlds of Worthing, extending some fifteen thousand years further into the future and, through the rewakening of Jason Worthing, recounting the final resolution of his plan.

The Worthing Chronicle
did not incorporate parts of
Capitol
and
Hot Sleep
by simply integrating chapters into new frameworks. Instead, Card compressed and condensed earlier histories until an entire chapter of
Capitol
became a single paragraph or less. What became critical was not so much the individual narrative as the meaning that narrative conveyed.

This characteristic reflects the most important backgrounds to understanding Card—his commitment to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the influence of
The Book of Mormon
on him as person and as writer.
The Book of Mormon
is one of four books of scripture accepted by Mormons, but is the only one that functions as a single, continuous narrative. It was particularly important to Card, since he read it many times during his childhood. It would be surprising if it did
not
turn up as a major influence on the style and form of his own writings. In an interview for
The Leading Edge
, a science fiction journal published by students at Brigham Young University, Card said that in spite of his interest in such fantasists as Ray Bradbury, Stephen R. Donaldson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, the writer who had most influenced him was Joseph Smith; the language of
The Book of Mormon
, he said, coupled with that of two other books of scripture, the
Doctrine and Covenants
and
The Pearl of Great Price
, “had such impact, as well as the stories that are told there, that it colors everything I do and everything.”

The last chronicler in
The Book of Mormon
, Moroni, speaks of that book as a distillation of previous chronicles. From beginning to end, there is a sense that the history in
The Book of Mormon
is carefully formed, streamlined, and compressed to explore the shifting moral and spiritual values of its people. As a result, the book reads like a verbal rollercoaster: nations live righteously and prosper, become complacent, then fall into unrighteousness and destruction, to prosper again only when they rediscover the blessings of righteousness. Episodes are tightly focused, often less concerned about individuals than about the stories they lived. Even important characters are as much abstractions as individuals, their lives functioning as motifs in a grand tapestry of meaning.

As fiction,
The Worthing Chronicle
does precisely the same thing. Earlier stories are compressed until, in the case of the tales in
In the Forest of Waters
, they virtually disappear. “Worthing Farm” and “Worthing Inn,” the first two written, are alluded to in the chapter called “Worthing Farm” (pp. 200-218), blended and combined, but without the intense personal sense of the stories. There is more emphasis on the drought in the novel version, less on the transmission of the Worthing curse and the Worthing eyes. Only “Tinker” retains much of its flavor as it appears in
The Worthing Chronicle
. Originally published in
Eternity SF
in 1980, this draft of “Tinker” was written later and, consequently, is more developed than either “Worthing Farm” or “Worthing Inn.” It is, in miniature, the sort of narrative Card has explored since “Ender's Game” appeared in 1977—a single individual, possessed of a peculiar talent, must assume responsibility for the welfare of a community unable to understand the nature of its own savior. Card's characters recreate this pattern with ingenious variations: Lanik Mueller from Treason; Ansset from
Songmaster
; Patience, in
Wyrms
; the Shepherd in “Kingsmeat.” And, in its fullest manifestations to date, Ender Wiggin in
Ender's Game
and
Speaker for the Dead
, and Alvin Miller, Jr., in the Tales of Alvin Maker. Unlike these other versions, however, “Tinker” verges on the tragic. The savior-figure is sacrificed, bringing further death and suffering that only later transmutes into great hope. John Tinker is one with Card's Christic characters, although not the greatest among them. His function is more localized, narrower, but critical nonetheless. Perhaps for that reason,
The Worthing Chronicle
incorporates more of his history than it retains of “Worthing Farm” and “Worthing Inn.”

In a chapter appropriately titled “Winter Tales,” Card reproduces the essence of John Tinker's tale. The child Sala speaks the tale from the memories of Justice, a descendant of Jason Worthing and, in the context of the novel, a god-figure. The story is stripped of much of its descriptive and narrative power, becoming appropriate to the vocabulary and sentence structures of a child herself unsure of the true import of her tale.

At the same time, Sala incorporates specific instructions as to how to interpret the story. John Tinker is killed because, she says, the people of Worthing “had no use for a god who couldn't save them from everything” (p. 135). To this extent, Cards purposes in writing “Tinker” become even clearer through the process of distillation. Condensing the original story into a few paragraphs highlights the Christic pattern of mediation, suffering, and death—just as Moroni's distillation of the earlier histories highlights the spiritual movement in
The Book of Mormon
. As “Tinker,” the story is highly emotional, charged with altruism and humanity; as an element in a larger narrative framework, it becomes paradoxically narrower and broader. It loses some of the impact of the minutiae of narrative while gaining the strength of moral vignette.

The publication of “Worthing Farm,” “Worthing Inn,” and “Tinker” in this present collection does more than merely restore several tales to full narrative completeness, however. Even more importantly, it suggests the extent to which Card's stories function on multiple levels. In this instance, the transformation of tale into episode heightens Card's ultimate purposes, effectively concentrating his interests as they focus in
The Worthing Chronicle
. To return once again to the image of
The Book of Mormon
, we now have, in essence, the original documents which Card distilled into his summary of the worlds of Worthing. The altered focus, the intensified sense of mission and purpose, the streamlining of character to create increased depths of empathy and understanding, and most specifically, the infusion of a sense of moral weight as the stories appear in
The Worthing Chronicle
all suggest how closely Card's vision parallels that of the writers of
The Book of Mormon
. In each instance, the narrative is fascinating on its own terms, yet finally communicates far more than the basic outline of history, whether real or imagined. In Card's hands, stories become modes of power, characters become icons for meaning, and the storyteller approaches the level of poet-priest, speaking Truth through the illusion of fiction.