Free The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card

people whose minds he entered. It was the hardest thing about the Swipe, remembering when he awoke in the morning which things he had really done, and which things not.
    He did not want his mother's memories to have such force upon him.
    And yet she was too afraid, still gnawing at her hand there at the table, waiting for the commissary to send them supper. Why are you so afraid because someone has accused me of having the Swipe?
    So he looked, and, looking, learned. She had married Homer Worthing before the rebellion, so she had rights. She had gone to sleep with somec, as starpilots' wives do, to be wakened when he returned. And one day, when her flesh burned from waking, when her memories were still newly returned to her head, the kind people in their white sterile clothes told her that her husband was dead. Outside the sleeprooms, some less kind people told her how her husband died, and what he had done in dying. She remembered having seen him only a few minutes ago, just before they bubbled her memory. He had kissed her goodbye, and she fancied she could still feel the pressure of his lips, and now he was dead, and had been dead a year before they thought it was safe to waken his widow; he was a murderer, a monster, and she hadn't had his child yet.
    Why did you have a child, Mother? Jase looked for the answer, forgetting that his errand in her mind was to find out why she was so afraid. It didn't matter: his curiosity and her fear led to the same place. She wanted Homer's child, Homer's son, because Homer's father, old Ulysses Worthing, had told her that she must.
    Ulysses Worthing had the same blue eyes that Jason saw each day in the mirror, those deep, pure, mark less blue irises that looked like God had erased a spot of Jason and let the pure sky of a living world shine through. He looked at young Uyul, the girl his starpilot son had brought home to meet him, and she did not know what he saw in her that seemed to puzzle him so. “I don't know,” said old Ulysses, “I don't know how strong you are. I don't know if there'll be much left of Uyul when she takes Homer into herself.”
    “Now, don't make her scared of me,” said Homer.
    I don't want to hear your voice, said Jason to his mother's memory of his father. I am no part of you, I have no father.
    “I'm not afraid of you,” Uyul said. But was she talking to Homer or Ulysses? “I might be stronger than you think.” But what she thought was this: if I lose myself and become nothing but the woman half of Homer, that is fine with me.
    Ulysses laughed at her. As if he could read her mind, he said,
    “Don't marry her, Homer. She's determined to be less than half a human being.”
    “I don't even know what this conversation means,” Uyul said, laughing nervously.
    Ulysses leaned close to her. “I don't care who or what my son marries. He doesn't ask my consent, and he never will. But listen tight, young lady. This is between you and me, not you and him. You will have his child, and it will be a son, and if it doesn't have blue eyes like mine, you have another until you have one that does. You won't leave me without inheritance, just because you're too weak to know your own name without Homer whispering it to you every night.”
    It made her furious. “It's none of your business how many children I have, or what sex they are, or what eyes their colors are. Colors their eyes are.” She was furious that she had got her words twisted up. Ulysses only laughed at her.
    “Never mind, Uyul,” Homer said.
    “Hold your peace!” cried the listening Jason.
    “He's only pretending to be an impossible son of a bitch,” Homer continued. “He's just testing to see if you can stand him.”
    “I can't,” Uyul said, trying to make the truth sound like a joke.
    Ulysses shrugged. “What do I care? Just have Homer's sky-eyed son. And name it Jason, after my father. We've been cycling those old names through the family for so long that—”
    “Father, you're getting