Hot Sleep (31 page)

LITTLE REUBEN
followed the bird into the forest. He did not look where he was going. He did not notice when he stepped through the cleared area that stretched all the way around the farm. But if he had, chances are he wouldn't have stopped. Because he was only four years old, and his education was not complete.

The bird, of course, being small, flew easily through the invisible barrier and on into the dense undergrowth of the Forest of Waters. But Reuben could still see the splash of red, now hopping back and forth on a branch. He did not know that it was hopping because even though the barrier was passable, it still caused such a disturbance in the tiny brain that it was all the bird could do just to stay on the branch.

Reuben ran through the invisible barrier, too — but it cost him far more than it cost the bird. Between the moment when his head first entered the field and the moment he hit the ground Reuben felt more pain than he had ever felt in his short life. It seemed like every nerve in his whole body was on fire, like huge thunders were erupting in his head, like lightning was dancing in his eyes. So great was the pain that he didn't notice that his shoulder struck a rock and bled profusely.

He didn't even notice the hideous scream he uttered.

And because his leg remained in the middle of the barrier after he fell, the pain went on and on and on.

He fainted, but not soon enough. When he woke in the dark house, with father and grandma bending over him, massaging his arms, he could still hear the terrible thunder in his ears, and white spots danced at the edges of the world, retreating just out of sight when he tried to look at them. And his leg was completely numb.

He heard nothing but the thunder, though grandma's lips moved, and she seemed to be angry. He wondered why his leg felt like it wasn't there. Grandma and father were arguing, it seemed, and he wondered why they were talking so soft that he couldn't hear them.

Grandma clapped her hands hard beside his ear. He thought she was trying to hit him, and he dodged. Father looked triumphant, but grandma shook her head. She reached down and rolled Reuben over on his stomach, so he was looking at the wall. Reuben didn't see anything, then, though he did feel a wind rushing past his ear — at least, his hair was stirred by something.

Then, as if from far away, he heard through the thunder a soft voice, calling his name. He rolled over quickly, to see who might be calling. But it was grandma, and she was only a few inches away. She seemed to be shouting. He answered, "I can't hear you, grandma, you sound so far away."

But she seemed pleased with that response, and father also looked relieved. Reuben didn't understand.

But he soon understood his useless leg.

Over the months his hearing gradually came back, but the feeling in his leg did not. He could swing the leg from the hip, but he had no control over what happened to the knee or foot. And so he was always falling down, always dropping things, and father and mother were impatient with him. But after a while he learned to walk by throwing his leg forward and bringing the heel down hard on the ground, which made his knee lock. Then he treated his leg just as if it were a crutch, as straight and hard as wood. He swung over it, then threw the leg forward again.

He could not see himself, but his older brothers and his older sister teased him unmercifully because of the way he walked. "You walk like a mantis," they said. "You walk like a crippled rabbit."

But one day grandpa came back. Reuben was old enough by now to notice that grandpa looked younger than father, and much, much younger than grandma. It was a mystery, but the kind of mystery that he knew not to ask questions about. Another mystery was why no one would answer him when he asked if there were other people outside the farm, and where they came from, and who was grandpa's father.

When grandpa came back he took Reuben into the shed behind the house and touched him with little cold boxes and spheres that frightened him and made him cry. But when grandpa left, grandma began massaging Reuben's leg for an hour every day.

Father complained about that, because it took so much time away from important work. But grandma answered, "That's what Jason said, my boy, and so that's what we'll bloody well do. The boy's leg is more important than the weeds."

Father looked angry, but went out of the room. Grandma kept on massaging.

It did no good.

When Reuben turned five, grandma began to take him out to the barrier now and then. He would go with her easily enough until he realized that they were near that partially cleared strip of ground. Then he began to cling to her skirt and try to hold back, try to pull her away.

"No, grandma please!" But she took him right to the barrier, and then, every time, she said the same words.

"This is the wall of Worthing Farm. On this side of the wall is life and food and clear water and everything good. On that side of the wall is death and pain and terrible loneliness. What happens if you cross that barrier?" She said all this in such a dark and terrible voice that Reuben only cried and answered, "I don't know!"

So she told him. And when she finished, he was sobbing so hard he could barely breathe, and then grandma would take him away from the barrier. At night for weeks after one of those visits to the wall, he would have nightmares, and wake screaming. "Jason!" he would call. "Help me!" But grandpa didn't come — only grandma, or mother, or father.

When Reuben turned six, he stepped on a sharp rock and cut his bad foot. But he rejoiced — for he had felt the pain, like a little spark from miles away, but he had felt it.

When he told grandma, she didn't believe him, told him that he must get used to not having the use of his leg. But then father came and looked at Reuben with his vivid blue eyes (just like grandpa's) and said, "He's telling the truth, mother." And then grandma cried for joy and hugged him in her long, strong arms.

And because he was getting better, father began to give him more work to do. Reuben learned ropemaking and bucketmaking, and was taught all the seeds and which to plant at what day of the year and month. He learned the calendar and the names of all the weeds, but grandma never taught him how she did her trick of scratching a quill on thin strips of paper, and then say the same words from it every time. She taught no one how to do it, not even father.

When Reuben turned eight, father said he was old enough to come on the Walk.

Reuben didn't want to go, but when father decided, the children did it.

The Walk came every seventh day. Winter or summer, blizzard or wind or the hottest day of the year, they would leave at noon and walk to the northeast corner of Worthing Farm. There at the corner father would repeat the very words grandma had used. Except that when he said them, he not only made the children afraid, but he also seemed to be afraid himself. When the words were said, they walked in single file all the way around the barrier. Reuben could hardly stand to be so close to the edge. In the dark forest beyond he could imagine them, waiting. He knew them well: he had seen them in a hundred terrible dreams. Now, walking along the barrier, he felt the same sweating, freezing sensation that woke him up screaming in the night. He kept turning around to look, but they retreated out of sight before he could get a clear glimpse. He stayed as close to father as possible. Why doesn't he hurry? Reuben wondered. Doesn't he know they're watching us?

Then, after they had walked the whole border of the farm, three kilometers on a side, they came, wearily, to the Worthing stone. It was a smooth silver–colored cube, harder than any other rock, and it always gleamed in the sunlight. Etched into the stone by a power greater than any of them, because they knew they could never cut its surface, were strange marks. The same kind of marks grandma made on the paper.

JASON WORTHING

From the stars

Blue–eyed one

From this land

Jason's son

And at the Worthingstone father would say, his voice trembling with emotion, "This stone was marked by your grandpa. He set it here to protect us. As long as this stone is here, the enemies from outside Worthing Farm cannot harm us. But if any harm comes to the stone, or if any of the people of Worthing Farm leave, then our protection will end, and terrible death will come upon us all."

Then the Walk was over, and they gratefully left the barrier, walking slowly at first, then running, then bounding across the farm until they were at the dark house.

The light house, of course, they could not enter — it was grandma's, and it had the trick of flying off. Everyone had to hide in the dark house, and then there would be a terrible roaring, and then grandma and the light house were gone. Matthew told Reuben once, in whispers, behind the shed, "Father said once that she goes to grandpa."

Whenever grandma came back, she was quiet for days; but she seemed serene and happy all that time, going about her work with a smile. Father would ask her, "What's so grand that you're grinning all the time?"

But grandma only answered, "Why don't you look behind my eyes, and see?"

Whenever she said that, father turned away looking angry and ashamed. Matthew told Reuben it was because grandpa had once done terrible things to father for looking into grandma's thoughts. No one was allowed to look into grandma's thoughts.

"Will I be able to know what people think?" Reuben asked Matthew one day.

Matthew laughed. "You're too little!"

But it was about the time that Reuben turned twelve that three things happened to him. His leg was almost completely better. His chest and groin began growing hair. And he began to have flashes of what people thought.

It was then that the stranger came to Worthing Farm.

He was short, and dressed in clothing that seemed like another skin, only dark brown. Reuben, Matthew, father, and Jacob were hoeing the potatoes when he stepped from the forest. How he had got through the barrier no one knew. But he was strange, he was from outside, and he must be terribly powerful.

Reuben could not control his gift yet — but he did manage to catch glimpses. They were frightening. He saw images of great halls and huge towers, the world like a little ball in the distance, men and women in strange clothing doing strange things. He heard words and sentences that had no meaning, but that sounded vaguely wondrous, and also menacing. And he understood something else: this stranger was a man of power, a man of might, a man who was used to ruling other men.

He was everything that Reuben had learned to hate and fear from outside. And almost at the same time that Reuben realized that, father and Matthew and Jacob silently picked up their bronze–headed hoes and raised them high and advanced on the stranger.

Later, Reuben could not remember if the man had spoken or not. He only knew that the man looked coldly at them, and turned and walked back toward the barrier. Don't let him get away! Reuben silently shouted, and the others thought the same thing, because they ran to catch the man, kill him before he could get away and come back with more men with such frightening minds and such calm, confident power. But the man reached the edge, fiddled with something in his hands, and stepped easily through the barrier.

At the cleared space the men stopped, wordlessly watching as the stranger calmly walked back into the forest. When he was out of sight, they came away from the barrier, shaking with fear as they always did when the barrier was too close, too long.

They said little about the incident. Reuben assumed they didn't want to tell the women and worry them. But grandma looked at them all carefully at dinner, and asked, "What is it you're not telling me?"

And father smiled and answered, "Why don't you look behind my eyes and see?"

Grandma reached over and slapped his face, lightly. "I said tell me."

And so they told her about the stranger. When they were done, she leaped to her feet. "And you waited to mention this until now! I've raised fools for sons, but I had no idea how foolish!" And she ran out of the house. Soon came the roaring of the light house, and she was gone.

They assumed she'd be back soon, but she never came.

Reuben grew up and married his Uncle Henry's youngest daughter, Mary, and all their sons had bright blue eyes, and all of them, at puberty, could look behind each other's eyes and see each other's heart. Nothing else of importance happened to Reuben; he lived out his life within the confines of the farm, and grew old, and saw his great grandchildren born.

One day, however, when he was very, very old, he went to the barrier alone, and stood there for a very long time. He wasn't sure why he had come. But finally, in order to ease the longing, he reached out his hand into the space where the barrier had always been.

And felt nothing.

He took a step forward, and still felt nothing. And another step, and another, and he was completely through the barrier to the other side, and had felt no pain, nothing at all.

He touched a tree on the other side. It felt like any other tree. The sky looked normal enough. And the leaves crunched underfoot just the same.

And then he walked back through the barrier, and fled back to his tiny room at the back of the old house, and stayed there, trembling, for an hour. He told no one of what he had found. But from that day on, he made his son Simon lead the Walk, and Reuben stayed away from the barrier for the rest of his life.

He was buried with his head pointing toward the Worthingstone.

JASON WORTHING
awoke from somec for the hundredth time within the pilot's cabin of the starship. But now he no longer exercised — it was all he could do to get out and walk around, force the blood to flow. He had long since ceased wondering how old he really was — he looked not older than forty, and felt ninety–nine. For three centuries the responsibility for a world had been on his shoulders; for forty years since then, he had been wakened every year or so to talk to Arran when she flew the scoutship from the farm to the starship. He assumed, when he got up, that it was she whose coming had roused him.

But the voice that spoke to him as he stood, flexing his arms beside the coffin, was a man's voice, and Jason looked up in shock.

The man was fairly old, but dressed in Empire fashions, though the color combinations were strange to Jason. And the old man laughed as he saw Jason's puzzlement. Jason looked into the stranger's mind, and then laughed.

"Abner Doon!" he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "I'd long since given up any hope! Abner Doon!"

And the old man embraced him. "Sweaty, aren't you," Doon commented.

"And still making a virtue out of discourtesy, I see," Jason said.

And they sat and looked at each other for a while. Finally Jason laughed again. "You know, I kept expecting any time, after the first hundred years here, that you'd turn up someday. I think I was still hanging on to some hope of that. What kept you?"

"Oh, things, you know. The revolution took a bit longer than I had expected to foment, that kind of thing. People are so damned unpredictable."

"I know," Jason said. They sat in silence for a moment.

"Oh, by the way," Boon said. "I took some liberties. I read all the Histories you've got stashed in here — fascinating reading. And the wreckage in the back of the ship here is self–explanatory. So instead of waking you and wasting your time on a guided tour, I made a few visits around your little planet."

"And is everything up to snuff?"

"Going nicely. You'll be interested to know that Wien's group — Wien's dead, by the way — made it to the lake without much trouble, and there's a magnificent little bronze–age town growing up along the shores, with farms spreading all over. And Noyock's quite ambitious — he's already sent colonists to five of the major islands. You've accomplished a great deal. A planet with no metals, and you've created a stable, religious society, progressive, well–governed, peaceful, knowledgeable — my congratulations."

Jason nodded, smiling.

Doon moved in for the kill: "So what the hell are you doing with that miserable little farm in the middle of the Forest of Waters?"

"Oh," Jason said. "You went there."

"Yes, I went there, and they damn near killed me before I got away. That's when I decided to come back here and wake you up. That farm is the opposite of everything else you've done — everywhere else, poets, music, a chance for a totally nontechnological culture of real beauty and refinement. And on that farm, everyone suspicious, murderous, ignorant, and hemmed in by the strongest damn mindshield I've ever had the misfortune to bypass."

"Well," Jason said, "that's my showcase."

Doon snorted. "Papa's pride and joy."

"Exactly."

Boon looked up, startled. "You don't mean it!"

"Didn't you see their eyes?"

"I didn't come close enough. You mean that's your family?"

"That's where my genes are being stored. Inbred. There's a very small chance that a few idiots will start turning up after a while. But in the meantime, they're going to be getting my genes from every parent for a few generations."

Doon looked disturbed. Angry. He got up and walked to the control board. "Dammit, Jason! That's terrible. I mean, it's fine to want to improve the strain — but inbreeding like that can cause real harm. You just don't have the right to play with people's lives like that!"

Doon might have said more, but Jason started laughing uproariously, and it didn't take Boon long to join in.

"Oh, well," Boon finally said. "From one man who's spent his life playing God to another, I must say you've done a thorough job."

And Jason reached over and shook his hand.

The door from the storage area opened, and Arran came in. She rushed to the coffin, saw it was empty, and whirled to see Boon and Jason shaking hands, looking at her in surprise. "Arran," Jason said.

"That must be the stranger," Arran said.

"Arran?" asked Boon. "Not Arran Handully —"

"Correct," Jason said. "Not Arran Handully. Just Arran. My wife."

Arran stepped forward, eyeing Boon suspiciously. "He came to the farm, Jason, just as you said. Thomas and the boys drove him off though — I came as soon as they told me."

"It's all right, Arran," Jason said. "He's a friend of mine."

Boon got up and offered her his hand. She took it carefully, and Boon smiled. "Still beautiful," he said, "as beautiful as ever, though the years have deepened you, it seems."

"Have we met each other?" Arran asked, surprised.

"A long time ago," Doon said.

"Never mind, Arran." Jason took her arm, and she clung to him — clung as she had when they both looked young, and she was a bride, living for three glorious years in Heaven City as the wife of God, before the Dispersal, before she went to the farm in the Forest of Waters and raised a family in the strange fashion Jason had commanded.

"Is he —" she asked, then stopped.

Jason looked at her carefully, then smiled. "Yes, Arran. He's my father."

They spent three days together in the ship, telling Doon anecdotes that hadn't found their way into the History, he speaking of events in strange, far–off places that left Arran dazzled and filled her dreams. Doon and Jason pored over charts, talked about the past, the future. And then Doon said, "Well, Jason. I see you've thought of everything, and you don't need the advice of an old man anymore. Too bad I won't be around to see what happens when some superhuman descendant of yours comes out of the wood and demands his rights as Jason's Son!"

"Where are you going next?" Jason asked. Doon only smiled. "I think," he said, "that I'll go back home now."

"Aren't you going to visit any other colonies?"

"Oh, no. No, Jason. Actually, I probably shouldn't have visited here, either. But you see, I had to kill a couple of thousand years before I dared go home to Garden and find some subtle way of living out my last few years in peace and quiet. After all, even Hitler was forgotten after two thousand years, and I wasn't quite as bad as he." They both laughed, and then Jason put his arms around the old man and embraced him, and Doon hugged him back. "You're the prize in my collection, Jason. The best I ever found. That's the best part of being God, you know — when you create someone who surpasses you."

Doon went out to his own suborbital cruiser and, without looking back, closed the door and lifted off to rejoin his starship in orbit. Jason watched until the craft was out of sight.

Arran asked him when he turned around, "Well, Jason, do I go back to the farm now?"

He looked behind her eyes.

"You don't want to go back, do you?"

She shook her head, and her aging eyes filled with tears. "Let me stay here with you, now, Jason! They're all trained. They'll stay inside the farm for a thousand years!"

"More likely two hundred, with luck," Jason said. "That's all I could hope for. The barrier itself won't last more than another fifty or sixty years. Your work's done there, Arran. Far better than I could do it."

"Why," she asked, "didn't you want to stay with me there?"

"Oh, no, Arran, I did want to stay with you. But I can't always do what I want, you know. You see, there are things in my mind that the boys might have understood, if they'd had enough time. Things that would have destroyed everything."

"You mean they can see into you, too?"

"You can stay with me now, Arran, I want you to."

And she threw her arms around him and wept. "I'm old and ugly!" she cried. "And you're still young. You'll always be young! I've lost my life with you!" And he let her weep, saying softly, "We all lose parts of our life, Arran. It can't be helped." But for a fleeting moment he felt a bitter regret for all the life that he, too, had lost; he grieved for friends who had grown old and died while he slept in the coffin; friends whose minds had been stripped by somec, whose life and love had been lost; for the children that he hadn't really been able to enjoy, for the life he had never been able to taste. "Being God," he said, "is the worst damn job in the universe."

Then he led Arran to a coffin in the now–empty B tube, and put her to sleep. He sealed the tube carefully, inspecting everything to make sure that the components had lasted the time well. Then he went through the rest of the ship, preparing it as if for deep space. The gap in the side he could do nothing about, but the interior locks in the ship were as able to withstand pressure as the exterior surface.

When he was satisfied with the condition of the starship, he sat in the control room and gently lifted the monstrous structure into the sky. He hovered it, so that the rotation of the planet moved the surface under him. Soon the land retreated to the east, and he was over the sea. He flew south, then, to a place far from any land, and gently settled the starship toward the surface of the ocean. The ship barely noticed contact with the water; it sank easily beneath the waves. And the structure was hardy enough to bear the pressure at the bottom; Jason knew that the ship had been built for far worse conditions than these; that perhaps thousands of years from now the metal would still be uncorroded, the ship's computers still capable of being revived, the ship's engines still able to bring her to the surface.

He wrote a message and laid it on the control board, spoke the same message into the ship's log, gave it to the computer so that any contact with the computer would print it out on the screen. Then he went to the coffin, lay down, put the sleep helmet on his head, and waited for his brain to be recorded. The job was done.

And then for no reason he could think of, Jason began to weep, softly, in his coffin. He was still weeping as the needle stabbed him and the somec scoured through his veins, and the agony of another thousand years of sleep began.

The ship lay waiting on the bottom. Sea creatures crawled along its surface, or made their homes in A tube, which lay open to the water. Every fifty years or so the ship would come to life, lights going on and off from one end of the ship to the other. The engines would fire, killing millions of infinitesimal plants and animals. Then the ship would go back to sleep again.

Each time it happened, a message flashed on the computer screen for a full minute:

"I am Jason Worthing. Think carefully before you waken me. If my work has failed, I don't want to know it. And if it has succeeded, but wasn't good for the people after all, I would rather sleep on. My dream of the future is too good for me to be eager to wreck it with reality."

The bottomfish, with their self–made light to protect them from the darkness of the deep, scuttled in and out of the torn place in the starship's hull. To them it was just another rock that could shelter them, for a short time, from the death always waiting just around the corner in the night.