The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card

the answer at once, in a different direction from anything he had been pursuing. It meant a slight revision to the way he had understood the curve, but now it worked; He entered the second answer.
    He tried for a while longer with the third question, but with what he had discovered on the first two, he realized that there were too many variables and he couldn't solve it with the present data. He could solve a few cycles in it, but that was all. So he entered what he could, called the rest unanswerable and closed the test.
    There was a red glow above the table. Failure.
    He woke up the headmaster. “What time is it?” the old man asked.
    “Time to get somebody else to take tests for you,” Jase said.
    The headmaster saw the red glow and raised an eyebrow.
    “Goodbye,” Jason said. He was out the door before the headmaster was awake enough to do anything more.
    His school was nested inside the university, and he went straight to Gracie, the university library. His student status would give him better access to Capitol's information system than he could get from public stations. However, he might not have much time. The red light at the end of his test might mean many things, and none of them were good. It might mean that he failed the test, and thereby “proved” to them that he could not have passed the first one without being a Swipe, and they would be looking for him to kill him. It might mean that he passed the test, but that they did not believe he could not have done it without being a Swipe, The truth was that neither the first nor second test proved anything. But if they thought it proved something, he was just as dead.
    One thing might be. Mother believed that Jase's grandfather was also a Swipe, and certainly her memory of the event supported that view. If what Jase had was indeed a version of the Swipe that could be passed from father to son, and it had been going on long enough for Ulysses Worthing to know that it was hereditary, then there should be other Worthings with the same gift. Of course, the fact that Mother's Little Boys didn't know about it meant that all the others had, succeeded in keeping their gift secret.
    Row on row, hundreds of dusty pink plastic carrels with the grey-blue letter C of the Communications Bureau in prominent display. He had been here often enough before to know where the older students went, and where they didn't. He went to where they didn't, the older section without individual printouts in each booth—and where there weren't enough externals to play the most popular games. Jason had sat for hours playing Evolution, in which constant environmental changes forced the player to adapt animals to fit. He had gotten to the level where eight animals and four plants had to be adapted at once. Jase had a knack for it, but he wasn't here to play.
    He carded the reader for charges, then palmed it for identification. The air over the desk went bright with directory entries. He flipped through it up, back, and to the left, until he got to the genealogical programs. He brought Genealogy: Relatives by Common Descent into the window and punched Enter. A much simpler menu appeared. He chose Male Relatives by Male Lines Only and entered his own name and code. Gracie identified him at once—his birth date and place appeared in the middle of the air, then settled slow as a dust lake toward the bottom. Above him, connected by a little line, was his father's name, and his father's name, and so on: Homer Worthing, Ulysses Worthing, Ajax Worthing, another Homer, another Jason. And spiraling around and out from the central column were all the cousins, hundreds of them, thousands of them. It was too much to handle.
    Nearest five living cousins only, he entered.
    All but five names disappeared. To his surprise, there were two near ones, and the next three were quite distant relatives, branching from his line more than fifteen generations back. Only the first two were close at all.
    Full current