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

It was a box, and the box lurched violently this way and that.

“There’s something alive in there,” Kiren said.

“No, my dear Kiren, there is not. But there’s something moving, and it’s yours. And before I help you open it, I’ll tell you the story. I came one day in my wanderings to a town I had never visited before, and in the town were many merchants. And I asked a man, ‘Who has the rarest and best merchandise in town?’ He told me that I had to see Irvass. So I found the man in a humble and poor-looking shop. But inside were wonders such as you’ve never seen. I tell you, the man understands the bright magic from over the sky. And he asked, ‘What do you want most in the world?’ and of course I said to him, ‘I want my daughter to be healed.’”

“Oh, Father,” said Kiren. “You don’t mean—”

“I do mean. I mean it very much. I told him exactly how you are and exactly how you got that way, and he said, ‘Here is the cure,’ and now let’s open the box so you can see.”

So Kiren opened the box, with more than a little help from her father, but she dared not reach inside. “You get it out, Father,” she suggested, and he reached inside and pulled out a porcelain salamander. It was shiny yet deep with fine enameling, and though it was white—not at all the normal color for salamanders—the shape was unmistakable.

It was, in fact, a perfect model of a salamander. And it moved.

The legs raced madly in the air; the tongue darted in and out of the lips; the head turned; the eyes rolled. And Kiren cried out and laughed and said, “Oh, Father, what did he do to make it move so wonderfully!”

“Well,” said her father, “he told me that he had given it the gift of movement—but not the gift of life. And if it ever stops moving, it will immediately become like any other porcelain. Stiff and hard and cold.”

“How it races,” she said, and it became the delight of her life.

When she awoke in the morning the salamander danced on her bed. At mealtimes it raced around the table. Wherever she lay or sat, the salamander was forever chasing after something or exploring something or trying to get away from something. She watched him constantly, and he in turn never got out of sight. And then at night, while she slept, he raced around and around in her room, the porcelain feet hitting the carpet silently, only occasionally making a slight tinkling sound as it ran lightly across the brick of the hearth.

Her father watched for a cure, and slowly but surely it began to come. For one thing, Kiren was no longer miserable. The salamander was too funny not to laugh at. It never went away. And so she felt better. Feeling better was not all of it, though. She began to walk a bit more often, and stay standing more, and sit when ordinarily she would have lain. She began to go from one room to another by her own choice.

By the end of the summer she even took walks into the woods. Though she often had to stop and rest, she enjoyed the journey, and grew a little stronger.

What she never told anyone (partly because she was afraid that it might be her imagination) was that the salamander could also speak.

“You can speak,” she said in surprise one day, when the salamander ran across her foot and said, “Excuse me.”

“Of course,” he said. “To you.”

“Why not anyone else?”

“Because I’m here for you,” he answered, as he ran along the top of the garden wall, then leaped down near her. “It’s the way I am. Movement and speech. Best I can do, you know. Can’t have life. Doesn’t work that way.”

And so on their long walks in the forest they also talked, and Kiren fancied that the salamander had grown as fond of her as she had grown of him. In fact, she told the salamander one day, “I love you.”

“Love love love love love love love,” he answered, scampering up and down a tree.

“Yes,” Kiren said. “More than life. More than anything at all.”

“More than your father?” asked the salamander.

It was hard. Kiren was not a disloyal child, and really had forgiven her father for the curse years before. Yet she had to be honest to her salamander. “Yes,” she said. “More than Father. More than—more than my dream of my mother. For you love me and can play with me and talk to me all the time.”

“Love love love,” said the salamander. “Unfortunately, I’m porcelain. Love love love love love. It’s a word. Two consonants and a vowel. Like sap sap sap sap sap. Lovely sound.” And he leaped across a small brook in the way.

“Don’t—don’t you love me?”

“I can’t. It’s an emotion, you know. I’m porcelain. Beg your pardon,” and he clambered down her back as she leaned her shoulder on a tree. “Can’t love. So sorry.”

She was terribly, terribly hurt. “Don’t you feel anything toward me at all?”

“Feel? Feel? Don’t confuse things. Emotions come and go. Who can trust them? Isn’t it enough that I spend every moment with you? Isn’t it enough that I talk only to you? Isn’t it enough that I would—that I would—”

“Would what?”

“I was about to start making foolish predictions. I was about to say, isn’t it enough that I would die for you? But of course that’s nonsense, because I’m not I’m not alive. Just porcelain. Watch out for the spider.”

She stepped out of the path of a little green hunting spider that could fell a horse with one bite. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you.” The first was for saving her life, but that was his job. The second was for telling her that, in his own way, he loved her after all. “So I’m not foolish for loving you, am I?”

“Foolish you are. Foolish indeed. Foolish as the moons are foolish, to dance endlessly in the sky and never never never go home together.”

“I love you,” said Kiren, “better than I love the hope of being whole.”

And, you see, it was because she said that that the odd man came to the door of her father’s house the very next day.

“I’m sorry,” said the servant. “You haven’t an appointment.”

“Just tell him,” said the odd man, “that Irvass has come.”

Kiren’s father came running down the stairs. “Oh, you can’t take the salamander back!” he cried. “The cure has only begun!”

“Which I know much better than you do,” said Irvass. “The girl is in the woods?”

“With the salamander. What marvelous changes—but why are you here?”

“To finish the cure,” said Irvass.

“What?” asked Kiren’s father. “Isn’t the salamander itself the cure?”

“What were the words of your curse?” Irvass asked, instead of answering.

Kiren’s father’s face grew dour, but he forced himself to quietly say the very words. “May you never move a muscle in your life, until you lose someone you love as much as I loved her.”

“Well then,” said Irvass. “She now loves the salamander exactly as much as you loved your wife.”

It took only a moment for Kiren’s father to realize. “No!” he cried out. “I can’t let her suffer what I suffered!”

“It’s the only cure. Isn’t it better with a little piece of porcelain than if she had come to love you that much?”

And Kiren’s father shuddered, and then wept, for he alone knew exactly how much pain she would suffer.

Irvass said nothing more, though the look he gave to Kiren’s father might have been a pitying one. All he did was draw a rectangle in the soil of the garden, and place two stones within it, and mumble a few words.

And at that moment, out in the wood, the salamander said, “Very odd. Wasn’t a wall here ever before. Never before. Here’s a wall.” And it was a wall. It was just high enough that when Kiren reached as high as she could, her fingers were one inch short of touching the top.