Read Online The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card - Free Book Online Page B

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