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

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