“Flitz Kapock,” the young man said, to introduce himself. “How dare you accuse Arran Handully of such a foul crime?”
“Because it's true,” said Jazz.
“Apologize, Jazz, and let's get the hell out of here,” said Hop quietly.
“Rapiers or pellets?” asked Kapock. Oh, he meant to do it according to the rules, didn't he? Jazz laughed at him and accepted the duel with rapiers.
One thing led to another. Jazz didn't kill the young man, mainly because Mother's Little Boys arrived while the duel was in progress. No one had called them—Doon had sent them himself. So Abner is somehow responsible for all this sudden interest in my death. If only I were sure that Doon knows what he's doing.
Mother's Little Boys created enough havoc that he escaped, with Arran's unwilling help. Jazz had only one objective—to find Doon and point out to him that Jazz's love for him did not extend to a willingness to die for him. Along the way he shed Hop and Arran, figuring they'd be safer away from him, and Hop knew well enough how to take care of himself. And at last he was face to face with Doon, beside the lake in his private garden.
“Very well done, to get away,” said Doon. “Some of their plots were quite thorough. You were almost in danger several times.”
Jason fingered the cut Kapock had given him on his arm. “What are you doing, Doon?”
“Oh, just isolating and bringing out the best people of Capitol. You can get inside their heads and find out who they are. I have to work out little tests like this.”
“Next time just ask me.”
“I look for things even you wouldn't be able to find.”
“It shouldn't be too hard. Your test for the best people is whoever wants me dead.”
“What do you expect? You're the foremost symbol of a detestable empire.”
“I am what you made me. We're all what you made us.”
Doon was genuinely hurt. “Surely you don't think I'm God, do you? I'm just one element in your environment, that's all.”
“In theirs, maybe. In mine you're more.”
“Because you love me so deeply?” asked Doon, mocking.
“Because the most important events in my life happened to you. The only woman who mattered to me was your little piece of unrequited love. All my best triumphs were your triumphs, all my strongest dreams were yours.”
“Not true.”
“Of course it's true! Your memories are more present in my mind than my own!”
“And why is that?” asked Doon.
“Because you cared so much. You have such a strong sense of purpose, even when you don't even know what it is you're trying to accomplish—all your memories mattered to the person who went through the experience.”
“And your own past? Is that nothing? Battles, struggles, fear, conflict.”
“What conflict? What fear? Except for one long moment with a little beast in your garden, Doon, I have never been afraid. A bit tense, to see how the game would go, but the outcome was never in doubt. In battle I could always hear the other fellow's plans as he thought of them, in conversation I always know the other person's hidden thoughts, I've never had to wonder or guess.”
“Your life is such a bore. Poor Jason.”
“There are times when I wake up thinking that I'm you. I look around the inside of the ship and I think, why am I here? I look in the mirror and I'm surprised to see this face. This face is from the loops. This face is Jazz Worthing, but I remember very clearly, I am Abner Doon, I am the one who won the confidence of Mother herself and told her when it might be a good time to die.”
As he spoke, Jason looked in Doon's mind to see if indeed the time was up. Abner had wakened the Empress herself, had met with her, revealed himself to her many years ago. “I will wreck your empire,” he told her. “I thought it only fair to let you know—” She took it calmly, perhaps even happily, and gave her consent, on one condition—that he tell her when he was about to do it, so she could be awake to watch. Now Jason looked to see if he meant to tell her soon. To see if Doon was planning to end the Empire now.
“Of course not,” said Doon. “I have too much to accomplish before that. Give me at least another hundred years.”
What did he have to accomplish? He had been sending out colony ships for centuries now. But these that he was sending now, they were the ones that held his hope.
“Mankind is my experiment,” said Jason. “Cut the threads that bind the stars together, and each world will spin on its own for a while. Perhaps thousands of years, until someone comes up with a stardrive that needs no sleep, and then we'll see what mankind has become in a thousand different cultures.”
“That's my speech,” said Doon.
“That's all right,” Jason said. “You've been playing puppet with us all. My voice, your words.”
“Are you angry?”
“Why me? Why am I singled out for the joy of being one of your twelve oddities?”
“I don't know.”
“I know you don't know. I know what you know, and I know what you don't know. I even know what you don't know that you don't know. I can find things in your head that you've forgotten ever knowing. You have been planning this for me for the fifty years that I've been gone, and you don't even know what you expect from it!”
“I'm sending you farther than I'm sending anyone else. I'm keeping no record that your ship was ever sent. Officially, all the traitors and conspirators going with you were executed. No one will look for you, not until they find the message that will be released a few thousand years from now. Your little world will have longer to develop than any other.”
“What do you expect, evolution in a few thousand years?”
“Not evolution, breeding.”
In Doon's mind, Jason saw himself as Doon saw him. With the eyes pure unflecked blue. Like his father's eyes, and his father's eyes...
“The stud—for a world of Swipes, is that it?”
“Sire is the more delicate word.”
“I wasn't raised on a farm.”
“You and your family are an anomaly. Your gifts are far more reliable, far more extensive than any known strain of telepathy. Why not see what happens to it in isolation?”
“Then why didn't you isolate me? Why give me a colony full of people who have spent their last few wakings plotting to kill me?”
Doon smiled. “It appealed to my sense of proportion. It would be too easy for you to run a normal colony. It would hardly be enough to keep you awake all day.”
“It's kind of you to keep me so alert.”
Doon took Jason by the hair at the back of his neck and drew him down, drew him close, and face to face he said, “Surpass me, Jason. Do more than I have done.”
“Is this a contest?. Then why not start even? Three hundred and thirty-three colonists against one ship's captain—I don't like the odds.”
“With you,” said Doon; “no one is even.”
“I don't want to go.”
“Jason, you have no choice.”
Jason saw that it was true. Doon had already given out more than enough proof that Jason was a Swipe. He would be arrested the moment he left Doon's personal protection; if he tried to escape, where would he hide, when everyone on Capitol knew his face?
“The puppet,” Jason said, “wishes to be free.”
“You are free. Stay and die, go and live—you have your choice.”
“What choice is that!”
“What do you expect, an infinite selection? To have a choice at all is to be free—even when the choice is between two terrible things. Which is most terrible, Jason? Which do you hate the most? Then choose the other and be glad.”
So Jason chose to go; Doon had his way again.
“It's not so bad,” Doon said. “Once you've gone, you won't have me manipulating things anymore.”
“The only star on the journey through the night,” said Jason. “It will comfort me as my colonists sharpen their knives in the darkness.” Yet it was no com
fort. To be without Doon, that was what frightened Jason most. Doon was the foundation for his life, for good or ill; ever since Doon had found him, Jason had known that nothing could go too wrong in his life—Doon was watching.
Now when he stumbled, who would lift him up? This was freedom after all, Jason realized, because from now on no one would save him from the consequences of his own acts. It wasn't freedom that I yearned for, was it? It was childhood that I wanted, and Doon is barring me from my refuge; he has been my father all these years, and now he's thrusting me away. “I'll never forgive you for this,” Jason said.
“That's all right,” Doon said. “I never expected to be loved.” Then he smiled oddly, and Jason knew he was not as cheerful as he pretended. “But I love you,” Doon said.
“I'm so much like you that to love me is purest narcissism.” Jason was not trying to be kind.
“It's what isn't me in you that I most love,” said Doon.
“Where I have torn down, you will build up. I have made the chaos for, you, and the world is without form, and void. You are the light that will shine on the face of the deep.”
“I hate it when you say things you've been practicing up to say.”
“Goodbye, Jason. Go meet your colonists—day after tomorrow they go under somec, and then you're on your way.”
Lared put down his pen and sprinkled sand on the parchment to dry the ink. “Now I know why I wish you had never come here,” he said.
Jason sighed.
“It's like you said. My strongest memories are yours.”
“What I said was wrong,” Jason answered. “Just because you remember me saying it doesn't mean it was true, or that I still believe now what I believed then.”
“Sometimes I even forget and try to look into people's minds, and I can't, even though I remember doing it. It's like someone cut off my hand. Or burst my ears, or cut out my tongue.”
“Still,” Jason said. He held up the axe handle he was carving. “I cut the wood however I like, but it's the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn't just your memory that makes you who you are. There's something in the grain of the mind. They found it out from the start, when they tried dumping someone else's bubble into a person's brain. All his experiences, all his past—and the mind that came out of somec was empty, wasn't it? But the new memories wouldn't fit. He remembered only being this other person, he believed he was the other person, but he could not bear remembering it. It was not himself.”
“What did he do?”
“They—there were several of them. They all went mad. There was nothing right in their past, how could they stay sane?”
“Will I go mad?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because no matter how much of me you remember, me or anybody else, there is at the root of your mind a place where you are safe, a place where you are yourself, where your memories are right, and belong to you.”
“But it changes me, to remember being you.”
“And me,” Jason said. “Do you think I'm the same man, knowing the insides of other people's lives the way I do?”
“No. But are you sane?”
Jason was startled, then laughed aloud. “No,” he said. “God help me, but you ask the truest questions! Justice was right to pick you, you've got a mind like ice. No, I'm not sane, I'm utterly mad, but my madness is the sum of all the people I have known, and sometimes I think that I have known all the people in the world—at least all the kinds of people that it's possible to be.”
He seemed so delighted, so exuberant, so glad to be himself that Lared couldn't help but smile. “How can all that fit inside your head?”
Jason held up the half-finished axe handle. “As tight as the handle in the axe. And there's still room to drive in a wedge or two. Always room for more, to set it tight.”
The first heavy snowfall did not come, and did not come.
“Bad sign,” said the tinker. “It means the sky is saving up.” And he climbed on the roof to mend the flashing around the chimney, and took out the flue and rebuilt it so it fit tight again, no leaking. “Do yourselves a favor with the doors and windows—make sure all the shutters are strong, and the doors lit tight, and caulk the walls.”
Father listened to the tinker, went outside and looked at the bright cold sky, and announced that no other work mattered until the house was tight. The whole village then set aside their other work and closed their houses. The littlest children slapped more daub on the weak places of the walls, down low; doors were tooled to fit tighter; shutters were remade; and in a time of such work, Jason and Lared found themselves taken again from the work of pen and parchment. They did the ladder work together, fastening in place the shutters of the upstairs windows. Jason climbed the ladder the right way; Lared, who had always climbed like a cat, went up the ladder the wrong way, and quickly, and then perched on the sill of the beams that poked out of the wall of the house. He had no fear of falling.
“Be careful,” Jason said. “There's no one to catch you if you fall.”
“I don't fall,” Lared said.
“Things have changed.”
“I'll hold tight.”
As they worked, Jason told stories. About the people of his colony. “I called them in, one by one, and while they sweated through interviews that meant nothing, I found out from their memories just what kind of person each was. Some were haters, the sort of people you'd expect to find in any conspiracy to kill. Others were merely afraid, others were dedicated to a cause— but I didn't care that much why they had wanted me dead. I needed to know more the purpose of their lives, what made them choose their choices.”
Like Garol Stipock, a brilliant scientist-turned-engineer, who devised the machinery that could diagnose a planet from its ore to its weather in a few orbits. He thought of himself as an atheist, rejecting the strong, fanatic religion his parents had forced on him as a child; in fact, even as he worked hard to reject and break down any authoritarian system he could find, he was still the child who believed that God had definite ideas about what mankind ought to be, and Garol Stipock would give up anything and everything to try to achieve that ideal.
Like Arran Handully, who had devoted her life to entertainment, subsuming her own identity in her lifeloop role, living day after day, minute by minute, in the constant scrutiny of the loops, so that people could circle around a stage and watch her life from every angle. She was the greatest of the lifeloop actresses, and under it all was the desire for others to be happy— when she retired, she never missed the audience herself, for it was not her own need she had meant to satisfy when she performed.
Like Hux. A dedicated middle-level bureaucrat, on a two-up, one-down somec level. Everything he touched went smoothly, every job was accomplished on time and under budget. Yet despite the great esteem that superiors and underlings alike had for him, he had refused promotion after promotion. He was married to the same wife, had the same block of rooms, ate the same meals, played the same ball sports with the same friends, year after year after year.
“So why did he join a revolution?”
“He didn't know that himself.”
“But you knew.”
“Motives aren't remembered, especially the ones you don't understand yourself—I can't just find a place in his memory where all his unknown purposes are laid out for me to see. To others, to himself he seemed to have only one purpose in life: to keep everything the same, to resist change. But that need was just the outward face of what he wanted most: stability and happiness for everyone he knew. He was no Radamand, remaking the world to his own convenience.”
As Lared worked, a face came into his mind, a lantern-jawed face with a hint of weakness around the eyes. Hux, he knew. Justice was showing him the pictures as Jason told the tale. Where are you, Justice? Working somewhere in silence, as always, listening to us talk, with almost never a word to say yourself?
“You're not listening,” Jason said.
“You're not talking.” Lared answered.
“Put in the pin, my arms are breaking holding this shutter.”
Lared—put in the pin. The shutter swung smoothly again. Together they set to fastening it down, top and bottom, and barring it from the outside. It was a north-facing window, and the northwest wind had torn shutters away before. Jason talked on as they drove the wooden pins that would hold the shutters closed. “Hux wanted an order of life in which all were reasonably content, and when it was found he didn't want it to change. He was no hypocrite—he willingly inconvenienced himself—sacrificed much in order to keep his corner of Capitol secure and stable. He was also bright enough to see how somec undid and destroyed everything. Separated families as they straggled their separate routes across the years, ended friendships as one went to the Sleephouse while the other stayed up, not having merited sleep somec kept the Empire stable, but only at the cost of unbalancing almost every life it touched.”
“So he wanted the Empire to go on without somec?”
“One of the few in my colony who didn't long for sleep. And then Linkeree—I remember them together because of what happened later. Link was as opposite to Hux as a man can be, on the outside. He had no friends, no close associates, no family. He was the only person in my colony who had never been on somec in his life, except for the voyage from his home world. He had been confined in a mental institution for years before coming; his parents had been confusing, possessive, cruel, and exploitative—in cases like that it was usually the children who ended up being locked away. So Linkeree even believed himself to be half-crazy, a loner who loved no one and needed no one.”
“But you knew better.”
“I always know better. It's the curse of my life.” Jason frowned. “If you don't hold on with at least one hand while you're balancing on only one foot up here, I'm going to throw you down myself to end the suspense.”
“I told you I won't fall. What was the truth about Linkeree?”
The Worthing Saga Page 13
