The Worthing Saga Read online

  Jase recoiled from the thought, for it was his darkest fear. He had grown up with the horror of who his father was. Homer Worthing, the monster, leader of the Swipe Revolt, the foulest murderer in all history. He had died in space years before Jase's mother had decided to conceive a child. The Swipe war was over then. But the universal loathing for the Swipes remained, tinged with the memory of the eight billion people Jase's father had burned to death.

  It had been nearly bloodless until then. In the seemingly endless war between the Empire and the Rebels (or the Usurpers and the Patriots, depending on which side you were on), both sides had begun using telepathic starpilots. The results were devastating —non-Swipes were helpless, and it quickly became clear to both sides that the Swipes, who could silently communicate with each other, might easily unite against both Empire and Rebels, unseat all government, take control of somec and therefore of the entire bureaucracy. As longs as normals people could not tell what the Swipes had in mind, the Swipes could not, must not be given starships.

  In fact the Swipe starpilots had been conspiring to end the war and impose peace on both sides. They thought, when both sides tried to remove them from their commands, that they could still bring off such a victory. So they seized their ships and declared both governments dissolved. In response, Empire and Rebels united, briefly, to exterminate the Swipes. At first the Swipe starpilots allowed themselves to be harried from here to there. Though Swipes were always killed as soon as they were captured, yet they tried to avoid causing too much harm, hoping at first for victory, later for compromise, at last for mercy. But the universe had no place for them; the Swipes must die. Homer was at the end of his last hope of escape. But in that moment he had chosen to destroy eight billion people rather than to die alone.

  And I am his son.

  All this came in a moment's memory to Jason Worthing. Hartman Torrock did not know what went on behind the mask of Jase's face.

  “Blood test,” Torrock said.

  Jason protested, wanted to know why.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  Jase held out his hand. He knew the test would show nothing. They were so smart, the ones who hated Swipes. They were sure they knew how the power to see behind the eyes was passed from mother to children, to lie dormant in daughters, to become active in sons. Jase's mother did not have the Swipe, and so Jase could not have it, did not have it. And yet he was a Swipe, could see behind the eyes. Someday, he knew, it would occur to someone that perhaps there was another way to be a Swipe, a way that might be passed from father to son, along with eyes as blue as a quepbird's breast. The gift to see behind the eyes had only come gradually to his mind, like the hair of manhood to his body. When he first realized what was going on, he feared that he was going crazy; later he knew that somehow the impossible had happened, and he had inherited his father's curse. That was terrifying enough—how much like his father, the mass murderer, was he? And yet the Swipe was not something he could refuse. He tried to be careful, tried to remember to pretend not to know the secrets he learned in other people's minds. The simplest way to do it, of course, would be not to look in their minds at all. But he felt like a cripple whose legs had just been healed—how could he not run, now that he had learned that it was possible? So in these months—or had it been a year?—he had grown more and more daring as he learned to better control and use his power. And today he had been careless. Today he had plainly known what he could not know by any other means.

  And yet, he told himself, I did not learn it from Torrock's mind. I only confirmed it, clarified it. The shape of the answer came to me from my own thoughts.

  Jase almost explained this aloud— I thought of the answer to the last question myself! —but he caught himself in time. Torrock had not yet told him aloud that he was worried about the last question. Don't be a fool, Jase told himself. Admit nothing, if you want to live.

  The test result came in a moment, rows of figures scrolling up from the table and then slipping backward through the air until they faded out of sight, like sheep being led to the shearing shed. Negative. Negative. Negative. Jase had none of the signs of the Swipe.

  Except one. He could not possibly know the answer to the question.

  “All right, Jase. How did you do it?”

  “Do what?” Jase asked. Am I a good liar? Id better be—my life depends on it.

  “The last question. We never studied it. I never so much as wrote down Crack's Theorem.”

  “What's Crack's Theorem?”

  “Don't be an ass,” Torrock said. He touched the keys and called up into the air the answer Jase had given to the last question. He made one set of numbers glow brighter than the others.

  “How did you learn the value of the curve of the straight line at the edge of light?”

  Truthfully, Jase answered, “It was the only number that could fit there.”

  “To the fourteenth decimal? It took two hundred years to even know the problem existed, and years of work by the best mathematicians of the Empire to determine the value of the curve to five places. Crack only proved it to the fourteenth place some fifty years ago. And you expect me to believe you duplicated all this work here at your table in five minutes?”

  The other students had been looking away from him, till now. Now, to learn that he knew the value of Crack's Theorem and how to use it in a problem— now they looked in awe at Jase. Whether he cheated to get the value of the curve or not, he had known how to use it, when they were only just getting the hang of Newton, Einstein, and Ahmed. They hated Jase with all their hearts, and hoped that he would die. He made them all look so stupid, they thought.

  Torrock too noticed the other students watching them. He lowered his voice. “I don't know how you got the value of the curve, boy, but if they think I wrote it down or taught it to you, which by God I did not, then it's my job, it's my somec, and God knows I get little enough as it is, one year under for three years up, but it's a start. I'm a sleeper, and you're not going to take it away from me.”

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” Jase said. “I figured it out on my own. It's not my fault if you asked a question that made the value of the curve obvious.”

  “It was not obvious to fourteen places,” Torrock whispered fiercely. “So get out of here, but come back tomorrow, there'll be questions to ask you, you and your mother and anyone else, because I know what you are, and test or no test I'll prove it and see you die before I let you ruin everything, for me.”

  Jase and Torrock had never got along, but it still horrified Jase to have a grown man say in words that he wanted Jase's death. It frightened him, like a child that meets a rabid wolf in the forest, able to watch nothing but the streaming jaws, the foaming teeth, able to hear nothing but the low growl in the throat.

  Still, he must pretend not to know what Torrock meant. “I didn't cheat, Mr. Torrock. I've never cheated before.”

  “There are only a few thousand of us on Capitol who know how to use the curve, Master Worthing. But there are millions of us who know how to notify Mother's Little Boys about a person who seems to show symptoms of the Swipe.”

  “Are you accusing me of—”

  “You know what I'm accusing you of.”

  I know, said Jase silently, that you're frightened half to death of me, that you expect me to be like my father and kill you where you stand, small as I am, powerless as I am.

  “Be prepared for questioning, Master Worthing. They'll know how you learned to use the curve, one way or another—there's no honest way you could have done it.”

  “Except figuring it out on my own!”

  “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.