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

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