Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle

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 ca

Then the Walk was over, and they gratefully left the barrier, walking slowly at first, then ru

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 gri

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 di

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.

17

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."