Free The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card Page A

tedious,” said Homer. So impatiently he said it. So urgently. Jason wished, for just a moment, that he could have been there, and listened to Homer's mind, instead of getting only Mother's memory of it.
    “What Homer is,” said Ulysses; “I am, and Homer's child will be.”
    Those were the words that Mother remembered. What Homer is, I am, and Homer's child will be. Have a son with sky-colored eyes. Name him Jason. What Homer is, I am, and Homer's child will be.
    “I'm not a murderer,” Jason whispered.
    His mother shuddered.
    “But I do see all that Father.”
    She rose and rushed toward him, knocking down the chair, stumbling over it, rushing to put her hand across his mouth.
    “Hold your tongue, boy, don't you know the walls are ears?”
    “What Homer is,” Jase said out loud, “I am, and Homer's child will be.”
    Mother looked at him in horror. He named her worst fear to her, that in posthumously obeying Ulysses's charge to her she had unleashed another Swipe upon the world. “You can't be,” she whispered. “Mother to son, that's the only way.”
    “There must be other gifts to the world,” Jase said, “than those that reside in X chromosomes, only showing up when paired with a stunted Y.”
    Suddenly she doubled her fist and brought it down like a hammer on his mouth. He cried out in pain; blood from his lips rushed into his mouth as he tried to shout at her, and he choked. Mother backed away from him whimpering, gnawing on the hand that had just struck him. “No no no,” she said. “Mother to son, you're clean, you're clean, not his son but mine, not his but mine.”
    But in his mother's mind Jason saw that she looked at him with the same eyes that had seen and loved her husband. After all, Jason had Homer Worthing's face, that well-known face, that face that frightened children in the textbooks in school. He was younger, thicker of lip, gentler in the eyes, but he still wore Homer's face, and his mother both loved and hated him for that.
    She stood in the middle of the room, facing the door, and Jason saw that she was seeing Homer, as if he had come back to her, as if he smiled at her and said, “It was all a misunderstanding, and I've come back to make you whole again.” Jase swallowed the blood in his mouth and got off his bed, walked around Mother and stood in front of her. She did not see him. Still in her mind she saw her husband, and he reached out to her, reached out and touched her cheek and said, “Uyula, I love you,” and she took a step toward him, into his embrace.
    “Mother,” said Jason.
    She shuddered; her vision cleared, and she saw that it was not her husband she held, but her son, and his mouth was bleeding. She dissolved into sobs, clung to him, pulled him to the floor and wept upon him, touching his bleeding lips, kissing him, saying over and over, “I.'m sorry, I'm so sorry you were ever born, will you ever forgive me?”
    “I forgive you,” Jason whispered, “for letting me be born.”
    Mother is insane, said Jason silently. She is insane, and she knows I have the Swipe, and if they interrogate her we are both dead.
     
    He had to go to school the next day. If he stayed away he would be confessing; he would be begging them to come to his home, where they would find Uyul, who was nobody except Homer Worthing's wife—Uyul the monster's wife, that was the name he found inside his mother's head. I wish I had never looked, he thought again and again all night. He lay awake for a long time, and awoke often, always trying to think of a solution that was not terrifyingly desperate. Go into hiding, become a wall rat? He did not know how the people with uncoded hands survived on Capitol, living in the ventilation shafts and stealing whatever they could. No, he would have to go to school, face it down. They had no proof. He had answered the question himself. Pretty much. As long as his genes didn't show it, Torrock had no proof that he was a Swipe.
    So he left his mother in