Orson Scott Card
Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle
1
JAS WORTHING was being kept alive by State Paper FN3xxR5a, and he knew it. He didn't need an assistant professor of education to tell him that. But once Hartman Tork had begun a lecture, he was unstoppable.
"There's no way, Jas Worthing, that you could have made a perfect score on that test. The information is classified, it was only bumped onto the computers by a mistake in the program —"
"Your mistake," Jas pointed out.
"Maybe not a mistake at all," Tork said, his face turning red with anger. "Maybe we've found out something about you that we desperately wanted to know. You couldn't possibly have copied off anyone else's paper —"
"Are you accusing me of cheating? Because the juvenile code requires a proper hearing and substantiating evidence —"
Tork whirled around on his swivel stool and stood up. He walked around the glowing teacherboard until he stood only a meter or less away from Jas. Again, as a hundred times before, Jas felt the vertigo of childhood, realizing that everything is up, that only when he tumbled into the future would he be as large as those who manipulated him today — or tried to, anyway.
"I've had enough," Tork said, softly, trying to be menacing; and though Jas knew that the menace was a facade worn to intimidate the small and weak, he also knew that behind the facade the threat was very, very real. "I've had enough of your cocky smartass self–assurance. Now you're going to take that test over again."
And in spite of himself Jas was trembling, though he kept the quaver out of his voice. "Unless you can prove malfeasance —"
"I know the juvenile code, Jas. And I don't have to prove malfeasance if I can prove something else."
His look of triumph was disconcerting. Jas gripped the sides of the nearest console. "I didn't cheat, Mr. Tork, and unless you have a witness —"
"The law, boy, is a lot more open when it comes to the question of the Swipe." Tork pounded his finger on the teacherboard for emphasis.
"Are you calling me a Swipe, Mr. Tork?" Jas asked. This time the quaver came into his voice.
"That's slander, Mr. Tork, unless you can prove —"
"I'm working on that, boy. Now get out."
Jas got out. But at the door he heard Tork call after him, "You got those answers out of my head and I'm going to prove it! You passed that test by picking my brains!"
Jas turned around and said, "Assistant professor Tork, no one in his right mind, given a choice, would pick your brains." Tork didn't answer, just smiled savagely. But Jas felt a little better for having said it.
He was shaking and weak all the way home.
His mother met him at the door of their flat. "What happened?" she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice, as if it couldn't be read on her face.
"Tork yelled a lot."
"What about the proof? Did you have the proof?"
"Your bloodiest came out okay, mom." Jas sat down on the bed that doubled as a sofa in the living room. "Sorry you had to get jabbed."
His mother sat next to him and took his hand. Her palms were clammy. "I was so afraid. They were so sure."
"I guess they can't cope with somebody outsmarting their stupid tests." Jas lay back on the bed and breathed deeply, "I need to rest, mom," he said. His mother nodded and got up and went to the kitchen–dining–bathroom to ring up dinner.
Jas lay on the bed, his heart still pounding. He had been stupid, not to realize that they'd know. But it had been so easy — the test in front of him, and then just by looking at Tork the answers so clear, sitting right behind Tork's eyes. It was as if for a moment Jas had forgotten that telepathy was a capital crime. In fact, of course, he hadn't really realized, not for sure, that what was happening was telepathy. It had grown so gradually, his gift — beginning when he turned twelve — fleeting glimpses at random of what people thought, what they felt. And then in the room last week, just as a child might discover a new muscle that let him wiggle his ears or twitch his scalp, Jas had realized he could control it. Not just random glimpses, but a deep, hard, long look into their minds.
The Swipe? Swipes were monsters, Swipes were planet–wreckers, Swipes weren't kids in" schoolrooms taking calculus tests.
He stared at the picture of his father on the ceiling. The tiling had been there since their last authorized remodeling, when Jas was seven, and he had instantly seen the picture. That squiggle was the nose; the dark space his eye; the lips the gentle curves just below. It was a benign face, kind if monstrous, trustworthy if incredible. How had he decided that it was his father? Jas knew. After all, he had seen no other picture.
He wanted the face to smile, but it always just smirked, as if just about to laugh, or as if it had just tired of laughter. Or as if it knew that a meal was coming. Jas shuddered.
And as he did his mind gave his body a reason for the fear. How was I to know, he asked himself. How was I to know that the last three questions were cross–programmed from another classroom, a classified, advanced, damn–it–but–it–all–made–so–much–sense classroom, and Jason rolled over and dug his hand into his mattress, partly because it felt good, and partly because his mother had told him, "When you muck up the mattress it has to be replaced early, and if it has to be replaced early, the government gets angry."
Advanced astrodynamics. Well, it just felt like more math, how was I to know I was playing little games with stars and planets? And I understood it, once I got the answer. Jas rumpled the bed again. Once he got the answer: that was the problem. He couldn't show them any figuring. He couldn't show them how he arrived at the correct answer. "I figure in my head," he said, and they showed him the paper where he had done some other figuring, and Jas had smiled and said, "Sometimes, anyway."
If only Tork had been a moron and had remembered astrodynamics wrong.
If only God were still alive and not just a face on the ceiling.
"I'm a Swipe," Jas said under his breath, trying out the words.
Suddenly a hand was fiercely clamped over his mouth. Startled, he opened his eyes to see his mother glaring down at him.
"Fool!" his mother hissed. "An intelligence that can't be measured and you talk as if the walls weren't listening!"
"I was joking," Jas stammered, "I didn't think —"
"In this world, boy, don't ever not think. Why do you suppose your father died?" She wheeled and left the room.
Jas looked after her. "Father didn't have a chance!" he shouted.
"Shut up and eat your dinner," his mother snapped, surly again. Again? Still.
The answers had just been sitting there, like a disc ready to be played, a book ready to be read, waiting for him behind Tork's eyes. Jas looked up and saw his mother watching him. He looked at her tightly–set lips, glanced at her wrinkled forehead, and saw (just behind the eyes) that she would suffer any torture if it would bring Homer Worthing back to her for one bright day, for one penetrating touch, for one last kind, delicate, ravishing night.
"I wish I looked more like him, mother," Jas said, wanting the wrinkles on the forehead to go away.
She just narrowed her eyes at him. "Don't," she whispered, and then pushed a plate of the stiff gel that was called soup in the catalog across the table toward him. Jas sat for a moment, then leaned across the table, took his mother by the shoulders, and pulled her close. His mouth by her ear, he spoke so softly that he could barely hear his own voice, and said, "It's true."
She tried to pull away, shaking her head.
"Mother," Jas insisted, pulling her closer still, "I'm a Swipe. I got the answers from the teacher's mind."