Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

“I’m not sure. Mostly. I’m very excited, but I’m also a little angry at how I’ve been left out, but mostly I’m—I’m so relieved.”

“Good. You’re in a hopeless muddle. You’ll do your best work if we can keep you off balance forever.” With that, Zay led him back to the bed, helped him lie down, and then left the room.

Alone with Deet, Leyel had nothing to say. He just held her hand and looked up into her face, his heart too full to say anything with words. All the news about Hari’s byzantine plans and a Second Foundation full of psychohistorians and Rom Divart taking over the government—that receded into the background. What mattered was this: Deet’s hand in his, her eyes looking into his, and her heart, her self, her soul so closely bound to his that he couldn’t tell and didn’t care where he left off and she began.

How could he ever have imagined that she was leaving him? They had created each other through all these years of marriage. Deet was the most splendid accomplishment of his life, and he was the most valued creation of hers. We are each other’s parent, each other’s child. We might accomplish great works that will live on in this other community, the library, the Second Foundation. But the greatest work of all is the one that will die with us, the one that no one else will ever know of, because they remain perpetually outside. We can’t even explain it to them. They don’t have the language to understand us. We can only speak it to each other.

My early fiction won me a reputation for cruelty. The most memorable line was from a review in Locus: “Reading Card is like playing pattycake with Baby Huey.” This sort of comment, however well-phrased, worried me more than a little. Clearly my fiction was giving the impression of being bloodier than most writers’ stories, and yet that was never my intent. I’m an innately nonviolent person. I have almost never struck another person in anger; my custom in school when the subject of fighting came up was to talk my way out when I couldn’t simply run. I never tortured animals. I don’t enjoy pain. So why was I writing fiction that made grown men gag?

This story, “A Thousand Deaths,” was one of a pair (the other is “Kingsmeat”) that did most to earn me that reputation. It is the one story I’ve written that was so sickening that my wife couldn’t finish reading it—she never has, as far as I know. And yet I couldn’t see at the time—and still can’t—how it could be written any other way.

The story is about noncompliance. It was triggered in part by a line in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, which dwells in my memory in this form: “I do none harm, I think none harm, and if this be not enough to keep a man alive, then in faith I long not to live.” There are times when a government, to stay in power, requires that certain people be broken, publicly. Their noncompliance with the will of the government is a constant refreshment to the enemies of the state. One thinks of Nelson Mandela, who, to be set free, has only to sign a statement renouncing violence as a means of obtaining the rights of his people. One thinks of the wonderful line from the movie Gandhi (which had not been made when I wrote this story, though the line expresses the theme of this story almost perfectly): “They can even kill me. What will they have then? My dead body. Not my obedience.” It is the power of passive resistance, even in the face of a government that has the power to inflict the ultimate penalty, that eventually breaks the power of that government.

With “A Thousand Deaths” I simply did what satiric science fiction always does—I set up a society that exaggerates the point in question. In this case, it was the power of the state to inflict punishment in order to control the behavior of others, and my what-if was, “What if a government could, not just threaten to kill you, but actually kill you over and over until it finally got the confession it needed?” The mechanism was easy enough—I had already developed the drug somec and had stolen the idea of brain-taping from many other writers years before, for my Worthing Chronicle series. What mattered to me, though, was to focus on the point where coercion ultimately breaks down, and that is on the rock of truth. The government kills the story’s hero, trying to break him to the point where he will confess his wrong, and confess the rightness of the government. The trouble is that the government will only measure his confession against a standard too high for him to meet. It isn’t enough that his confession be passionate. It must also be believed. And that is the one thing that the hero cannot deliver—a believable confession. He can’t believe it himself; neither can anyone else. That is what coercion cannot do. It can win compliance from fearful people. But it cannot win belief. The heart is an unstormable citadel.

How, tell me please, could I possibly have told this story without making you, the reader, believe absolutely in the hero’s deaths? You have to experience some shadow of the suffering in order to understand the impossibility of his confession. If you find the story unbearable, remember that there have been far more deaths than this, and more terrible ones as well, in the same struggle in the real world.

A footnote: In the late seventies, I set this story in a United States ruled by a Soviet government. In this I was not seriously predicting something I believed likely to happen. But I was trying to place the story of a totalitarian state within the United States if only to bring home the idea to American readers, who, outside of the experience of American blacks in many a Southern town, are ignorant of the suffering and terror of totalitarianism. Once the decision to set the story here was made, I had two choices: to show an America ruled by a homegrown demagogue, or to show an America ruled by an foreign conqueror. I rejected the former, in part because at that time it had lately become a cliche of American literateurs to pretend that the only danger to the U.S. was from conservative extremists. I preferred to show America ruled by the most cruel and efficient totalitarian system ever to exist on the face of the Earth: the Stalinist version of the Communist Party.

The events of 1989 in eastern Europe do not change this; it was the very unwillingness of Gorbachev to play Stalin that led to the unshackling of the captive nations. Had he been willing to resort to the machine gun and the tank, as his predecessors did, there would be no more Solidarity, no second Prague Spring, no holes in the Berlin Wall, no bullet-riddled body of Ceausescu, no Hungarian border open to Austria. Or would there? Gorbachev was the man who brought Russia over that moral cusp—but I think it would have had to come eventually, with him or someone else. “A Thousand Deaths” is a true story, and I used the Soviets in it because they are the most recent world power to prove that it is true.

Once, back in the mid-1970s, I had a conversation with a young woman I had once thought myself to be in love with. “I had such a crush on you before you went on your mission,” she said. “And the poems you wrote me while you were gone… I thought something would come of it when you got home. But when you returned from Brazil, I waited and waited and you never even called.”

“I thought of calling,” I said. “Often.”

“But you never did. And on the rebound from you I fell in love with someone else.”

Here’s the funny thing: I never guessed how she felt. One reason I never called her was because I thought she might think I was weird to try to convert a friendship to something more. Thus do adolescents manage to work at cross-purposes often enough to make romantic tragedies possible.