The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online

as if it were Sala who wept, and Justice who comforted her.
    “Your sister,” said Jason. “She is good.”
    Lared had never thought of it before, but it was true. Slow to anger, quick to forgive: Sala was good.
     
    For all their friendship in the field and forest, Lared still felt shy of Jason, and terrified of cold Justice, who did not want to learn the village speech. Jason and Justice had been there three weeks before Lared worked up the courage to ask even such a simple question as, “Why don't you ever speak in my mind, as Justice does?”
    Jason deftly peeled the last shaving from the spade edge, and this time the iron blade-tip fit smoothly. He held it up. “Good work!”
    “Perfect,” Lared said. He took the; spade and began to nail down the iron sheathing. “Why,” he asked between blows, “don't you want to answer me?”
    Jason looked around the shed. “Any other wood work?”
    “Not unless you count smoking the winter's meat with the scrap wood. Why don't you ever speak in my mind?”
    Jason sighed. “Justice does all. I do little.”
    “You hear what I think even when I don't speak, the same as her. You walked on the—walked where she did, just the same, the day I first saw you.”
    “I hear what I hear—but what you saw me do, she did.”
    Lared didn't like that, for the woman to be stronger than the man. It wasn't the way of Flat Harbor, anyway. What would it be like, if Mother had Father's strength? Who would protect him from her then? And would Mother work the forge?
    Where I come from, Justice said silently in Lared's mind, Where I come from men and women care nothing for strength, only for what you do with it.
    She had been listening in from the house, of course. Since she wasn't interested in learning the language, she often avoided their company, preferring to work at spinning and weaving with Mother and Sala, where songs were always being sung, and Sala would say whatever words Justice needed to say. Still, Justice was no less with them, just because her body wasn't there. And it annoyed Lared that he and Jason were never really alone together, no matter how far away they went, no matter how quietly they spoke. Justice even knew that it annoyed him, no doubt, and did it anyway.
    As to what Justice claimed about her people, Lared was not surprised that they made no difference between the sexes. Where Justice and Jason came from people walked on water and learned to cause pain and talked to each other without opening their mouths. Why shouldn't they do everything else oddly, too? It was something else that interested Lared. “Where are you from?”
    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