The Worthing Saga

by Orson Scott Card

  There were two routes off Capitol that a boy of Jase's age could take. He could join the military, or he could go to a colony on one of the newly opened worlds. That would be far enough away for Radamand, surely. And once enrolled in the Fleet or the Colonies, even Radamand could not touch him—the administration of Capitol had no power in imperial services like those.

  But he could not go directly to the Colonies. For if he did, Radamand would find Mother, and she would die. He must act to save her first. And the Fleet was not open to her, at her age. Only the Colonies for Mother.

  He had no choice but to go home now, at once. Yet Radamand surely knew that Jason thought this way, and would be waiting somewhere along the path, ready to destroy him.

  At the thought of Radamand and death, his newly acquired memories flooded back. He remembered his brother's face as he broke his arm at pool's edge and then held him helplessly under the water until he drowned. I have no brother, thought Jason. But he remembered the brother, and his brother's death. And pushing a knife into his sleeping father's eye. And loving it. And could not bear the memories. Could not bear to be himself, with such a past.

  Not my past! he cried out to himself. It is not my past!

  But the memories were too strong for him. He could not disregard what he so clearly remembered having done. He wept. aloud in the worm as it hurtled through bedrock, skirting the molten furnace of the world. It caused no particular commotion, that he cried. They were used to weepers in the worm.

  When Jase got home, Mother was angry. “What have you been doing? The butler went off in the middle of the day and said that you took a trip to the other side of the world! How will we live through the month now? Half the food budget, in one day—I should have restricted you, but you always—”

  Then she realized his face was raw from crying, and she looked at him in wonderment. “What's wrong?” she asked.

  “You never should have given Homer Worthing a son,” said Jase.

  Mother looked distractedly toward the butler, which still showed a red alarm light. “It was naughty of you to run away from school. The proctors called. They sealed the doors for a while, till they were sure you weren't in here.”

  Jason immediately ran to the door and opened it, set a stool in front of it to keep it ajar. “Why did they say they wanted me?”

  “Something about your answer to the third question.”

  The one that he missed.

  “He said you knew things that you couldn't have known,” said Mother. “You must be more careful, Homer. You must never know things that you couldn't possibly know. It makes people upset.”

  “I'm not Homer.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “He was a starpilot, you know.”

  “We have to leave, Mother.”

  “I don't like to leave. You go do whatever you must, and I'll wait here. That's what I like to do—wait here while you're gone. And then you'll come back to me. That's what I like. When you come back to me.”

  “If you don't come with me now, Mother, I'll never come back.”

  She turned away. “Don't threaten me, Jase. It isn't nice.”

  “If the proctors don't get me, Mother's Little Boys will! I have a man after me, trying to kill me, and he's very powerful, and he will succeed.”

  “Oh, don't be so serious, you're only a boy, Jase.”

  “He means to kill you, too.”

  “People don't go around just—killing people.”

  Jase exploded. “Everything they say about Swipes is true, Mother! Father killed billions of people, and Radamand Worthing is a killer, too! His own father and brothers and every cousin he could find—that's what Swipes are, is killers, and he knows I was coming here and he knows you know what I and he means to kills us and he will! I'm a Swipe too, Mother! That's what you did when you had me—brought one more Swipe into the world.”

  She clamped her hand over his mouth. “The door is open, and other people might not know you're joking.”

  “The only way to save our lives is—” But she was not listening. She was only waiting. That was all that was in her mind waiting for Homer to come back. Then everything would be all right. This was all too much for her to handle, and so she had to wait till Horner came back.

  “Mother, he won't come here. We have to go to him.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed. “Don't be silly. He forgot me years ago.”

  But he knew that she believed him, in her madness. He could control her, because she believed him. “It means a long voyage.”

  She followed him docilely out the door. “Does that mean somec? Does that mean sleep? I don't like sleeping. They keep changing things while you're asleep.”

  “This time they promise that they won't.”

  All the way through the corridor Jase expected to be stopped by a constable, or even one of Mother's Little Boys—Radamand wouldn't hold back anything, he'd use all his power to find Jason and stop him. So it was almost with surprise that Jase found himself at the local Colonies station, and led his mother inside.

  The room was cool, with a breeze machine going somewhere. One end of the room was given over to a scene near the brink of a cliff, surrounded by trees shedding their leaves in autumn. Far across a canyon was a slope think with brightly colored trees. “Earth Colony,” whispered the room gently. “Return home again.” Then the scene changed to a snowy hill, with skiers madly careening down the slopes. “Makor, the land of eternal winter.”

  “Where is he?” asked Mother.

  “Catch stars on Makor, and bring them home as frozen light. The scene showed some of the fantastic crystals growing in the crevices of a cliff, with a climber making his way up to harvest them.”

  Jason left her looking at the crystal-hunter, and made his way to the man at the desk. “She's not herself today, but she wants to make a long voyage anyway.”

  The Colonies were not fussy. No one in his right mind would travel fifty light-years and wake up on a world where there was no hope of return, no hope even of somec, just work through the natural span of life to the end. “We have just the place for her.”

  “A place where you can walk around in the open,” Jason said. None of those pressure-suit colonies for his mother.

  “We have just the place. Capricorn. It's a yellow-sun planet, just like Capitol.”

  Jase looked behind the man's eyes. That was the assigned planet to push for the week—they needed more platinum and aluminum miners, and women to service them. Not what Jase had in mind. He searched the man's memories until he found a planet that would do. “How about Duncan?” asked Jason.

  The man sighed. “Why didn't you tell me you had a tip from inside? Duncan it is.” A place so good they haven't even had to terraform it.

  Mother stood at his side. “Where are we going?”

  “Duncan,” said Jason. “It's a good place.”

  “You just have to sign these papers.” The man began entering information at a keyboard. It was one of the ancient screen—view kinds. You'd think the Colonies couldn't afford something better than that.

  Name? Occupation? Parents? Address? Birth date? As he demanded more and more data from her, Mother began to retreat from her illusion. Marital status? “Widow,” she said. She turned to Jason. “He's not waiting for me, Jase. He's dead.”

  Jason looked her in the eyes, trying to think of an answer. This was not a good time for Mother to be sane.

  The man smiled cheerfully. “And of course you're taking your son with you.”

  “Yes,” said Mother.

  In that moment Jason realized that he never intended to go. Even to save his own life, even though it was likely he would be arrested or killed the moment he left this office, he would not go to a Colony. Would not go off to the end of the populated universe and disappear. The Colonies were the only place his mother might be safe, but he had another alternative. The Fleet? In the Fleet he would be safe enough, might even become a starpilot. Like his father.

  “No,” sa
id Jase.

  “You're the legal guardian, according to this,” said the man. “If you say he comes, he comes.”

  “No,” said Jase.

  “You're leaving me!” she cried. “I won't have it!”

  “It's the only way to save your life,” said Jase.

  “Did you ever ask me,” she said, “if I wanted my life to be saved?”

  Jase knew his mother, better than she knew herself. “They put you under somec,” he said. “For as long as the voyage takes.”

  It stirred all the old memories. All the sleepings and wakings. Usually to find Homer there. The last time, though, she awoke alone.

  “I don't think so,” she said. “I don't think I want to do it.”

  “I'll be there,” he lied.

  “No you won't,” she said. “You mean to leave me. You plan to leave me, just like your father did.”

  It was unnerving. How could she know him so well, without the Swipe herself? But no, she didn't know, it was only her own fears. The worst thing in the world, to wake up and have him not be there. I am doing the worst thing in the world to her, for the second time.

  “Just sign here,” said the man. “Your personal code.” He pushed a keypad across the desk to them.

  “I don't want to do it,” said Mother.

  Jase calmly entered the numbers for her, taking the code out of her memory. The Colonies man was startled, but when the code checked out correctly on his screen, he shrugged. “Such trust,” he said. “Now the lady's palm.”

  Mother looked at Jason coldly. “The old lady's going crazy, so dump her off to another world, you miserable bastard, I hate you, just like your father, hate you, you bastard.” She looked at the man. “Do you know who his father is?”

  The man shrugged. Of course he knew. He had Jase's records up on the screen.

  “He's his father's son, not mine.”

  “It's the only way to save your life, Mother.”

  “Who are you, God? You decide who's supposed to live and how?”

  Like Radamand, thought Jason, again remembering the deaths of brothers he never had. But I do not use my gift to kill. I use it to save. I am not Radamand. I am not Homer Worthing. Yet he knew, from his mother's thoughts, that she loved. Jase so much that she would rather die than lose him, than leave him.

  “If you stay,” he said coldly, “they will interrogate you.”

  “I'll tell them everything,” she said.

  “And that is why you have to go.”

  The Colonies man smiled. “Everything in the Colonies is in strictest confidence. No prosecutions, all crimes absolved—it's a fresh start, whatever it is you did.”

  Mother turned to him. “And do you erase the memories too?”

  Ah, yes, Mother. That's the question. How can we forget what we remember having done? How will I forget that to save your life I must destroy it?

  “Of course not,” said the man. “We dump the memories back into your head as soon as you come out of somec.”

  “Don't you love me?” Mother asked.

  The Colonies man looked ballied.

  “She's talking to me,” said Jase. “I love you, Mother.”

  “Then why won't you be there when I wake up?”

  Desperate, Jason turned to the one strategy he hadn't tried. The truth. “Because I can't spend my life taking care of you.”

  “Of course not,” Mother said. “After all, I only spent my life taking care of you.”

  The Colonies man was getting impatient. “Your palm, lady.”

  She slapped her palm down brutally on the reader. “I'll go, you little bastard! But you're going with me! Sign him on, he's coming with me!”

  “You don't want me with you, Mother,” said Jase softly.

  “Enter your number, please,” said the man. The Colonies were used to getting unwilling people. He didn't care whether Jason went happily or not.

  So Jase entered the man's own personal code, Of course it didn't check out. But Jase knew they printed the incorrect code on the screen, and the Colonies man recognized it.

  “How did you—” began the man. Then his eyes narrowed.

  “Get out,” he said. “Get out of here.”

  Jase was only too glad to obey.

  “I hate you!” called his mother after him. “You're worse than your father,”I'll hate you forever!

  May that hatred keep you alive, thought Jason. May that hatred keep you sane. You can't hate me any worse than I hate myself. I am Radamand. All that he could do, I could do. Haven't I killed my mother here today? Taken her out of the world. To save her life, yes. But then why didn't I go with her? I am Radamand, remaking the world, breaking and bending other lives to fit myself. I ought to die, I hope I die.

  He meant it. He wanted to die. But even as he thought it, he scanned the minds of the people near him in the corridor. None was looking for him; He still had a chance to get away. And despite his feelings of despair, he would go on trying to escape until he succeeded, or until he was caught. So much for willing death.

  But how could he get anywhere? The moment he palmed a reader he'd tell where he was. To eat, to travel, to talk to Gracie, anything he might do that was worth doing would alert Mother's Little Boys, and they'd find him. Worse, he was legally an orphan now, since this mother had irrevocably signed on with the Colonies. It made him a ward of the state, and he could legally be searched for and found by anyone, without the lengthy legal process of showing cause. Until he could get himself enlisted with the Fleet, he was vulnerable.

  He used a booth and talked to Gracie, just long enough to get a directory and find the location of the nearest recruiting station. It was a good long worm ride to get there. Not as far as Radamand had been, but far enough. Did he dare?

  His question was answered almost immediately. Leaving the booth, he again scanned the people near him—and one of them was one of Mother's Little Boys, coming to get him at the booth. He ducked into a crowd and left him behind. For once he was glad he was still small—he disappeared and turned a corner, all the while keeping the man's thoughts in his mind. Lost him, thought the man. Lost him.

  But they were looking, and it had taken only a few minutes at the booth before one of Mother's Little Boys had reached him. He couldn't ride a worm. Even if he palmed the reader and immediately got aboard, the worm would hardly have finished acceleration before they got to him. So he had to walk. It was two hundred levels above him and four subs away. There was no hope of reaching there before tomorrow. In that time he would have nothing to eat—only water could be had without palming for it. And where would he sleep?

  In one of the twenty-meter parks, under a tree. The lawn was artificial, but the tree was real, and the rough bark felt good on his hand; the needles pricked him but he needed the pain. Needed the pain so he could sleep, with his mind newly crowded with memories of what he never did, and what he had just done. His mother was not sane—he knew that better than anyone, having seen directly how she lost touch with reality, how she lived in the constant hope of Homer Worthing coming home. But how was he any less mad himself, with the vision of his dying brothers before his eyes? Why do I remember it this way? Why can't I see it as a story that happened to someone else? Why does my mother's face blend so easily into these memories? He could not separate what he knew he had done from what he knew he had not done. If he could shrug off Radamand's acts, then would he lose the guilt for what he had done to his mother? He was not willing to do that. Painful as it was, what he had done, he had done, and would not give up his own past, even at the cost of keeping someone else's. Better the madness of keeping Radamand within me than the worse madness of losing Jason.

  So he slept with the prickling needles clasped lightly in one hand, the other hand resting on the bark of the tree. I am what I have done, he said to himself as he dozed off. But he awoke saying, I was what I did. I am what I will do.

  It was a whole day's walk, up the endless stairs, not daring to palm the public elevators, a
long the corridors, taking a slide-walk when he could. He reached the Fleet recruiting station just before closing.

  “I want to join,” said Jase.

  The recruiter looked at him coldly. “You're little and you're young.”

  “Thirteen. I'm old enough.”

  “Parents' consent?”

  “Ward of the state.” And without giving his name, he punched in his personal code, calling his data into the air above the recruiter's desk.

  The recruiter frowned at the name. Worthing was a name not soon to be forgotten. “What, planning to follow in your father's footsteps?” he asked.

  Jase said nothing. He could see the man wished him no ill.

  “Good scores, strong aptitudes. Your father was a great starpilot, before.”

  So there were other memories of Homer Worthing. Jase probed, and found something that surprised him. The world that Homer destroyed had refused him permission to draw water from their oceans. They had kept him there until the Fleet could catch him. They were not wholly innocent. The Fleet did not hate Homer as the rest of the universe did. Jase had grown so used to being ashamed of who he was that he did not know what to do with this new information, except to hope there would be a place for him in the Fleet. Perhaps, at last, he had a patrimony.

  But the recruiter only shook his head. “Sorry. I just applied you, and you've been rejected.”

  “Why?” asked Jase.

  “Not because of your father. Code Nine. Something abut your aptitudes. I'm not allowed to tell you more.”

  He told Jase more whether he meant to or not. Jase was being refused entry into the Fleet because of his scores at school. He was too bright to be admitted to the Fleet without consent from the Office of Education. Which he would never get, since Hartman Torrock would have to approve him.

  “Jason Worthing,” said a man behind him. “I've been looking for you.”

  Jason ran. The man behind him was one of Mother's Little Boys, and it was arrest he had in mind.

  At first the crowds in the corridors helped him. They were moving quickly, and Jase could dodge among them, moving faster than his pursuer, and always out of sight. Gradually the man chasing him was joined by more, until a half dozen were working their way through the crowd. He could not keep track of them all. It was too hard, to look out of their eyes and try to guess, from what they were seeing, where they were.