The Worthing Saga (8 page)

“Not to the fourteenth decimal.”

No. Not to the fourteenth decimal.

Jase got up and left the classroom. The other students were careful not to look at him until his back was to them. Then they stared and stared. The explosion had come, after all, from nowhere, out of silence, out of the tension of the test that
they
had all been struggling with. What have I done to myself?

He put his palm on the reader at the worm, and the gate chimed to let him through. As long as he was going home from school, there was no charge. The worm was not crowded at this hour, which made it more dangerous—at the levels where Jase and his mother could afford to live, the wall rats were bold enough to come out into the worm and take what they could. For safety, Jase walked forward from segment to segment as the worm rushed smoothly through its tunnel, until he came to a place where several people were gathered. They looked at him suspiciously. He was no longer a little child, he realized. He no longer looked safe to strangers.

Mother was waiting for him. He never found her doing anything when he got home—just sitting there, waiting for him, if it weren't for the fact that she still had her job, still earned what pitiful money they had, he could think she sat down across from the door the moment he left for school, and sat there the whole time until he came back. Her face looked dead, like a slack puppet. Then, after he said hello, after he smiled at her, the corners of her mouth twitched; she smiled, she slowly stood up. “Hungry?” she asked.

“Not much.”

“Something wrong?”

Jason shrugged.

“Here, I'll call up the menu.” She punched in the one-bark meal menu. Not much choice today—or ever. “There's fish or fowl or red meat.”

“It's all algae and beans and human feces,” answered Jase.

“I hope you didn't learn to speak that way from me,” said Mother.

“Sorry. Fish. Whatever you want.”

She punched it in. Then she folded down the little table and leaned on it, looking across at Jase, where he sat on the floor in the comer. “What's wrong?”

He told her.

“But that's absurd,” said Mother. “You can't have the Swipe. I was tested three times before they let me have Homer's—your father's child. I told you that when you were young.”

“Somehow that doesn't reassure them.”

And it didn't reassure Mother, either. Jase realized that she looked genuinely uneasy, frightened. “Don't worry, Mother. They can't prove anything.”

Mother shrugged, bit on her palm. Jase hated when she did that, holding her hand palm up and gnawing on the fleshy part. He got up from the floor and went to the bed wall and folded down his bed. He swung up onto it and stared at the ceiling. At the spot on the ceiling tiles that Jase had known was a face since he was a child. When he was very little he had dreamed about that face. Sometimes it was a monster, come to devour him. Sometimes it was his father, who had gone away but still watched over him. When he was six Mother had told him who his father was, and Jase had known that he was right both times—it was his father, and his father
was
a monster.

Why was Mother so afraid?

Jase longed to look behind
her
eyes, but he never had before. Oh, her conscious thoughts, now and then, but nothing deep. He was afraid of the way she gnawed her hand, and sat slack-faced in the chair when he wasn't home, and knew the answer to every question he asked her and yet never seemed interested in anything— he was afraid, instinctively, that whatever was in her memories, he did not want to know it.

For he experienced other people's memories as if they were his own, and remembered them as clearly, so that once having dwelt in their minds for a time he could easily become confused about which things that he remembered were actually things that he had done. Many hours late at night he had lain in his bed, letting his mind wander, searching the nearby rooms—he did not know how to range farther than that with his listening, prowling gift. No one suspected his intrusions. They thought their thoughts, held their memories, dreamed their dreams as always, unaware of this spectator. In his memory, Jase was no virgin—with the prurience of childhood he had been man and woman in acts he did not think his neighbors had imagination enough to perform. In memory, Jase had beaten his children, killed a man in a riot on a lower level, stolen from his employer, quietly sabotaged the electrical system—all the most memorable, painful, exhilarating acts of the people whose minds he entered. It was the hardest thing about the Swipe, remembering when he awoke in the morning which things he had really done, and which things not.

He did not want his mother's memories to have such force upon him.

And yet she was too afraid, still gnawing at her hand there at the table, waiting for the commissary to send them supper. Why are you so afraid because someone has accused me of having the Swipe?

So he looked, and, looking, learned. She had married Homer Worthing before the rebellion, so she had rights. She had gone to sleep with somec, as starpilots' wives do, to be wakened when he returned. And one day, when her flesh burned from waking, when her memories were still newly returned to her head, the kind people in their white sterile clothes told her that her husband was dead. Outside the sleeprooms, some less kind people told her how her husband died, and what he had done in dying. She remembered having seen him only a few minutes ago, just before they bubbled her memory. He had kissed her goodbye, and she fancied she could still feel the pressure of his lips, and now he was dead, and had been dead a year before they thought it was safe to waken his widow; he was a murderer, a monster, and she hadn't had his child yet.

Why did you have a child, Mother? Jase looked for the answer, forgetting that his errand in her mind was to find out why she was so afraid. It didn't matter: his curiosity and her fear led to the same place. She wanted Homer's child, Homer's son, because Homer's father, old Ulysses Worthing, had told her that she must.

Ulysses Worthing had the same blue eyes that Jason saw each day in the mirror, those deep, pure, mark less blue irises that looked like God had erased a spot of Jason and let the pure sky of a living world shine through. He looked at young Uyul, the girl his starpilot son had brought home to meet him, and she did not know what he saw in her that seemed to puzzle him so. “I don't know,” said old Ulysses, “I don't know how strong you are. I don't know if there'll be much left of Uyul when she takes Homer into herself.”

“Now, don't make her scared of me,” said Homer.

I don't want to hear your voice, said Jason to his mother's memory of his father. I am no part of you, I have no father.

“I'm not afraid of you,” Uyul said. But was she talking to Homer or Ulysses? “I might be stronger than you think.” But what she thought was this: if I lose myself and become nothing but the woman half of Homer, that is fine with me.

Ulysses laughed at her. As if he could read her mind, he said,

“Don't marry her, Homer. She's determined to be less than half a human being.”

“I don't even know what this conversation means,” Uyul said, laughing nervously.

Ulysses leaned close to her. “I don't care who or what my son marries. He doesn't ask my consent, and he never will. But listen tight, young lady. This is between you and me, not you and him. You will have his child, and it will be a son, and if it doesn't have blue eyes like mine, you have another until you have one that does. You won't leave me without inheritance, just because you're too weak to know your own name without Homer whispering it to you every night.”

It made her furious. “It's none of your business how many children I have, or what sex they are, or what eyes their colors are. Colors their eyes are.” She was furious that she had got her words twisted up. Ulysses only laughed at her.

“Never mind, Uyul,” Homer said.

“Hold your peace!” cried the listening Jason.

“He's only pretending to be an impossible son of a bitch,” Homer continued. “He's just testing to see if you can stand him.”

“I can't,” Uyul said, trying to make the truth sound like a joke.

Ulysses shrugged. “What do I care? Just have Homer's sky-eyed son. And name it Jason, after my father. We've been cycling those old names through the family for so long that—”

“Father, you're getting tedious,” said Homer. So impatiently he said it. So urgently. Jason wished, for just a moment, that he could have been there, and listened to Homer's mind, instead of getting only Mother's memory of it.

“What Homer is,” said Ulysses; “I am, and Homer's child will be.”

Those were the words that Mother remembered. What Homer is, I am, and Homer's child will be. Have a son with sky-colored eyes. Name him Jason. What Homer is, I am, and Homer's child will be.

“I'm not a murderer,” Jason whispered.

His mother shuddered.

“But I do see all that Father.”

She rose and rushed toward him, knocking down the chair, stumbling over it, rushing to put her hand across his mouth.

“Hold your tongue, boy, don't you know the walls are ears?”

“What Homer is,” Jase said out loud, “I am, and Homer's child will be.”

Mother looked at him in horror. He named her worst fear to her, that in posthumously obeying Ulysses's charge to her she had unleashed another Swipe upon the world. “You can't be,” she whispered. “Mother to son, that's the only way.”

“There must be other gifts to the world,” Jase said, “than those that reside in X chromosomes, only showing up when paired with a stunted Y.”

Suddenly she doubled her fist and brought it down like a hammer on his mouth. He cried out in pain; blood from his lips rushed into his mouth as he tried to shout at her, and he choked. Mother backed away from him whimpering, gnawing on the hand that had just struck him. “No no no,” she said. “Mother to son, you're clean, you're clean, not his son but mine, not his but mine.”

But in his mother's mind Jason saw that she looked at him with the same eyes that had seen and loved her husband. After all, Jason had Homer Worthing's face, that well-known face, that face that frightened children in the textbooks in school. He was younger, thicker of lip, gentler in the eyes, but he still wore Homer's face, and his mother both loved and hated him for that.

She stood in the middle of the room, facing the door, and Jason saw that she was seeing Homer, as if he had come back to her, as if he smiled at her and said, “It was all a misunderstanding, and I've come back to make you whole again.” Jase swallowed the blood in his mouth and got off his bed, walked around Mother and stood in front of her. She did not see him. Still in her mind she saw her husband, and he reached out to her, reached out and touched her cheek and said, “Uyula, I love you,” and she took a step toward him, into his embrace.

“Mother,” said Jason.

She shuddered; her vision cleared, and she saw that it was not her husband she held, but her son, and his mouth was bleeding. She dissolved into sobs, clung to him, pulled him to the floor and wept upon him, touching his bleeding lips, kissing him, saying over and over, “I.'m sorry, I'm so sorry you were ever born, will you ever forgive me?”

“I forgive you,” Jason whispered, “for letting me be born.”

Mother is insane, said Jason silently. She is insane, and she knows I have the Swipe, and if they interrogate her we are both dead.

He had to go to school the next day. If he stayed away he would be confessing; he would be begging them to come to his home, where they would find Uyul, who was nobody except Homer Worthing's wife—Uyul the monster's wife, that was the name he found inside his mother's head. I wish I had never looked, he thought again and again all night. He lay awake for a long time, and awoke often, always trying to think of a solution that was not terrifyingly desperate. Go into hiding, become a wall rat? He did not know how the people with uncoded hands survived on Capitol, living in the ventilation shafts and stealing whatever they could. No, he would have to go to school, face it down. They had no proof. He
had
answered the question himself. Pretty much. As long as his genes didn't show it, Torrock had no proof that he was a Swipe.

So he left his mother in the morning, and dozed in the worm on the way to school. He went to his morning classes as usual, ate the free lunch that was usually his best meal of the day, and then the headmaster came and invited him to his office.

“What about history?” Jase asked, trying to act unconcerned.

“The rest of your classes today are canceled.”

Torrock was waiting in the headmaster's office. He looked pleased with himself. “We have prepared a test. It's no more difficult than the one you took yesterday. Except that I didn't write the questions. I don't know the answers. Someone will be with you all the time. If you could perform an act of genius yesterday, surely you can do it again today.”

Jason looked at the headmaster. “Do I have to? I was lucky yesterday, I don't know why I have to go through this test.”

The headmaster sighed, glanced at Torrock, and raised his hands in helplessness. “A serious accusation has been made. This test is an allowable act.”

“It won't prove anything.”

“Your blood test is— ambiguous.”

“My blood test was negative. It was from the time I was born. I can't help who my father was!”

Yes, the headmaster agreed silently, it's hardly fair, but “There are other tests, and your genetic analysis shows—irregularities.”

“Everybody's genes are different.”

The headmaster sighed again. “Take the test, Master Worthing. And do well.”

Torrock smiled. “There are three questions. Take as long as you like. Take all night if you like.”

Shall I take your secrets out of your memory and tell them to the world? But Jase did not dare look behind Torrock's eyes. He had to take this test with no knowledge of anything he should not know. It might have been his life at stake. And yet even as he denied himself any illegitimate knowledge, he wondered if it might not be better to know as much as possible. To know what the real object of the test was. He felt helpless. Torrock could make him do anything, could make the test mean anything, and Jase had no recourse.