The Worthing Saga (6 page)

Jason smiled at the question. “She won't tell you,” he said. A

“Why not?”

“Because where she's from is gone.”

“Aren't you from the same place?”

Jason's smile faded. “Where she's from, came from
me
. Where
I'm
from is also gone.”

“I don't understand your puzzles or your secrets. Where are you from?” Lared remembered the falling star.

Of course Jason knew what was in his thoughts. “We're from where you think we're from.”

They had voyaged between the stars. “Then why are you here? Of all the places in the universe, why Flat Harbor?”

Jason shrugged. “Ask Justice.”

“To ask Justice, I only have to think. Sometimes even
before
I think, she knows. I wake up in the night and I'm never alone. Always there's someone listening in on my dreams.”

We are here, said Justice silently, for you.

“For a blacksmith's son? Or a mushroom hunter? What do you want from me?”

“What you want from us,” said Jason.

“And what is that?”

Our story, answered Justice. Where we're from, what we've done, why we left. And why pain has returned to the world.

“You have something to do with that?”

You've known all along that we did.

“And what do you need from me?”

Your words. Your language. Written down, simply, truthfully.

“I'm not a cleric.”

That's your virtue.

“Who would read what I write?”

It will be true. Those who know truth when they see it will read it, and believe it.

“And what does it matter if they do?”

It was Jason who answered. “Our story won't bring burning rafts down the river.”

Lared remembered the half-flayed man who gave his pain as a sacrifice to some imagined god. Lared wasn't sure yet whether Jason and Justice were good or evil—his very liking of Jason made him more suspicious sometimes than his dislike of Justice. But good or evil, they were better than torture in the name of God. Still, he couldn't figure out what need they had of him. “I've never written anything longer than a page, no one's read anything longer than my name, a million billion people in the universe, you still haven't told me why me?”

Because our story has to be written simply, so simple people can read it. It had to be written in Flat Harbor.

“There are a million places like Flat Harbor.”

But I knew Flat Harbor. I knew you. And when all else that I knew was gone, where else could I go home?

“How could you know this place? When have you ever been here before?”

“Enough,” said Jason. “She's told you more than she meant to.”

“How can I know what to do? Can I write it?
Should
I write your story?”

Jason would not decide for him. “If you want to.”

“Will the story tell me what it means? Why Clany died the way she did?”

The answer to that, said Justice, and to questions that you haven't thought to ask.

Lared's work began as dreams. He awoke in the night four, five, six times, ever more surprised to still see the split-log walls, the packed-earth floor, the half-ladder stairway that ran upward into the tiny guest rooms. Fire, barely contained within the chimney. A cat stretching before the fire. The sheepskins half-ready to be parchment, drying on their frames. The loom in the corner—of course the village loom was kept here. All this had been in Lared's eyes since infancy, and yet after the dreams it was strange. Strange at first, anyway, and then unpleasant, for compared to the world that Justice showed him in his sleep, Father's inn was filthy, disgusting, poor, shameful.

They are not from
my
memory, Justice told him. I give you dreams from Jason's past. Unless you live in his world, how can you write his tale?

So Lared spent his nights wandering the clean white corridors of Capitol, where not even dust dared to settle. Here and there the passageways opened into bright caverns, teeming with people—Lared had never seen so many people in his life, had not thought so many might exist. And yet in the dream he knew they were but a tiny fraction of the people of this world. For the corridors were miles from top to bottom, and covered the world from pole to pole, except a few patches of ocean, the only place where life renewed itself. There was some attempt to remember living worlds. Here and there among the corridors were little gardens, carefully tamed plants artfully arranged, a mockery of forest. A man could hunt mushrooms here forever, and find no life but what was planted and tended.

There were trains that flew through tubes connecting place to place; and in his dream Lared held a flexible disc that he inserted into flat holes to do everything—to travel, to pass through doors, to use the booths where people who weren't there talked to you and told you things. Lared had heard of such things, but they were always far away, and never touched the life of Flat Harbor. Now, however, the memories were so real that he found himself walking through the forest with the stride of a corridor-dweller. and the tracks of wild swine took him by surprise, for there were no impressions of the passage of living things on the floors of Capitol.

As the setting grew more familiar, his dreams began to be stories. He saw players whose whole lives were recorded for others to see, even what ought to have been done by dark of night or in the privy shed. He saw weapons that made a man come afire inside, erupting through the eyes like flames through spoilt cloth. The life of Capitol was always on the edge of death, precarious as an autumn leaf resting on a fence rail on a windy day.

Nowhere was the death of Capitol more clearly promised than in the catacombs of sleepers. Again and again Justice showed him the people lying down on sterile beds, having their memories drained away into balls of foam, and then waiting docilely as quiet servants injected death into their veins. Death in the form of the drug somec, death that only delayed itself while the frozen corpses waited in their tombs. Years later the quiet servants awakened them, poured back their memories, and the sleepers got up and walked around, as proud of themselves as if they had accomplished something.

“What are they afraid of ?” Lared asked Jason as they stuffed sausages together in the butchery shed.

“Dying I first.”

“But they still die, don't they? Sleeping like that gives them not another day of life, does it?”

“Not an hour. We all end up like this.” And he bound off another link of tight-stuffed gut.

“Then why? It makes no sense.”

“It worked this way. Important people slept longer and woke up less. So they died hundreds of years later.”

“But then all their friends died first.”

“That was the point.”

“But why would you want to live, if all your friends were dead?”

Jason laughed. “Don't ask me. I always thought it was stupid.”

“Why did they do it?”

Jason shrugged. “How can I tell you? I don't know.”

Justice answered into Lared's thoughts: There is nothing so stupid or dangerous or painful that people won't eagerly do it, if by doing it they will make others believe they are better or stronger or more honorable. I have seen people poison themselves, destroy their children, abandon their mates, cut themselves off from the world, all so that others would think they were a better sort of person.

“But who would think such cripples were better?”

“There were people who felt like you,” Jason said.

But they never took somec, said Justice. They never slept, and so they lived their century and died and those who lived for the honor and power of sleep, thinking it was eternal life, they only despised the ones who refused somec.

It made no sense to Lared, that people could be such fools. But Jason assured him that for thousands of years the universe was ruled by people who lived only for sleep, who died as often as possible in order to avoid the sleep that would never end. How could Lared doubt it, after all? His dreams of Capitol were too powerful, the memories too real.

“Where is Capitol?”

“Gone,” said Jason, stirring the spiced meat before funneling another handful into the casing.

“The whole world?”

“Bare rock. All the metal stripped away long ago. No soil left, no life in the sea.”

Give it two billion years, said Justice, and maybe something will happen.

“Where did the people go?”

“That's part of the story you're going to write.”

“Did you and Justice destroy it?”

“No. Abner Doon destroyed it.”

“Then Abner Doon was real?”

“I knew him,” Jason said.

“He was a man?”

“You will write the story of how I met Abner Doon. Justice will tell you the story in your dreams, and when you wake up, you'll write it down.”

“Did Justice meet Abner Doon?”

“Justice was born some twenty years ago. I met Abner Doon some— fifteen, sixteen thousand years ago.”

Lared thought that Jason, still uncertain of the language, had got the numbers wrong. Justice corrected him. The numbers are right, she said. Jason slept for ten thousand years at the bottom of the sea, and before that slept and slept and slept.

“You—used somec, too,” said Lared.

“I was a starpilot,” Jason said. “Our ships were slower then. We who piloted the ships, we were the only ones who had a need for somec.”

“How old are you?”

“Before anyone lived here on your world, I was already old. Does it matter?”

Lared could not grasp it, and so he put it into the only terms he knew. “Are you God?” he asked.

Jason did not laugh at him. Instead he looked thoughtful, and considered the question. It was Justice who answered. All my life I called him God, she said, until I met him.

“But how can you be God, if Justice is more powerful than you?”

I am his daughter, five hundred generations from him. Shouldn't the children of God learn something in that time?

Lared took the finished chain of sausages from Jason's hands and looped it above the smoky fire. “No one ever taught me that God could make sausages.”

“It's one of the little skills I picked up along the way.”

It was afternoon already, and so they went back to the house, where Mother sullenly served them cheese and hot bread with the juice of the overripe apples. “Better than anything on Capitol,” Jason said, and Lared, remembering clearly the taste of the tasteless food of Jason's childhood, agreed.

“Only one job left before your writing days begin,” said Jason. “Ink.”

“The old cleric left me some,” Lared said.

“No better than mule piss,” said Jason. “I'll teach you how to make ink that lasts.”

Mother was not pleased. “There's work to do,” she said.

“You can't take Lared out on some foolish task like ink-making.”

Jason smiled, but his eyes were hard. “Thano, I have worked in this village like your own son. The snow will be here soon, and you have never before been so well prepared. And yet I have paid
you
for my lodging, when by rights you ought to have paid me. I warn you, don't begrudge me your son's time.”

“You
warn
me? What will you do, murder me in my own house?” She dared him to hurt her.

But he only needed to strike her with words. “Don't stand in my way, Thano, or I will tell your husband that he isn't the only one in this house who keeps a little forge. I will tell your husband which travelers you have had pumping the bellows handle for you, to keep your little tire hot.”

Mother's eyes went small, and she turned back to cutting turnips into the supper soup.

Her docility was confession. Lared looked on her with contempt and fear; He thought of his thin body, his narrow shoulders, and wondered what traveler had sired him.
What have you stolen from the chain of life?
he demanded silently.

You are your father's son, said Justice in his mind. And Sala is his, too. Those who protected you from pain prevented bastards as well.

It was scant comfort. Cold and fearsome as Mother had always been, still he had never thought she was false.

“I'm learning the language very well, don't you think?” said Jason cheerfully.

“Go make your ink.” Mother was sullen. “I don't like having you indoors here.”

I don't much like to be here either, Mother.

Jason kissed Justice lightly on the cheek as he left. Justice only glared at him. Jason explained to Lared when they got outside. “Justice hates it when I make people obey me out of fear. She thinks it's ugly and not nice. She always used to make people obey her by changing what they wanted, so it didn't occur to them to disobey. I think that's degrading and turns people into animals.”

Lared shrugged. Just so long as Mother let him learn how to make good ink, it didn't matter to Lared how Jason and Justice got it done.

Jason looked for a certain fungus growth on certain trees, and gathered them into one bag; he had Lared fill another bag with blackthorn stalks, though it cut his hands. Lared did not complain of the pain, because it gave him pleasure to bear it wordlessly. And as dark came on, and they were nearly home, Jason stopped and tapped a pine tree, which still had enough life in it to fill a little jar with gum.

The funguses they boiled and ground up and boiled again, then strained out the thin black fluid that was left. They crushed the blackthorn into it, and strained it again, and then boiled it for an hour with the pine gum. At last they squeezed it through fine linen, and ended up with two pints of smooth black ink.

“It will stay black for a thousand years, and readable for live thousand. The parchment will turn to dust before the ink is too faint to see,” said Jason;

“How did you learn to make such ink?”

“How did you learn to make such parchment?” Jason answered, holding up a sheet of it that Lared had made. “I can see my hand through it.”

“There's no secret to parchment,” Lared answered. “The sheep wear the secret on their bodies till they die, and give it up when we butcher them.”

That night Lared dreamed of how Jason met Abner Doon. How God met Satan. How life met death. How making met unmaking. The dream was given to him by Justice, as she remembered it from finding the memory complete in Jason's mind. Memories of memories of memories, that was what lay in Lared's mind the next morning, when with trembling quill he began to write.