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

“How can I?” Brian asked helplessly, knowing that the space on the airplane was limited and the correspondents were forbidden to take any Biafrans with them.

“We can,” his wife whispered again, and so Brian reached out his arms and took Agnes and held her. Agnes’s father nodded. “Thank you, Brian,” he said, and Brian was the one who wept and said, “I’m sorry, if any people in the world deserve to be free—”

But Agnes’s parents were already gone, heading for the forest before the Nigerian Army could get into town.

Brian and his wife took little Agnes to the stretch of abandoned highway that served as the last airport in free Biafra and took off in an airplane crammed with correspondents and luggage and more than one Biafran child sitting in the darkest corners of what was never meant to be a passenger plane. Agnes’s eyes were wide all through the flight. She did not cry. She had never cried much as an infant. She just held tightly to Brian Howarth’s hand.

When the airplane landed in the Azores, where they would change to a flight to America, Agnes finally asked, “What about my parents?”

“They can’t come,” Brian said.

“Why not?”

“There wasn’t room.”

And Agnes looked at the many places where another couple of human beings could sit or stand or lie, and she knew that there were other, far worse reasons why her parents couldn’t be with her.

“You’ll be living with us in America now,” Mrs. Howarth said.

“I want to live in Biafra,” Agnes said. Her voice was so loud that it could be heard throughout the airplane.

“Don’t we all,” said the woman farther to the front. “Don’t we all.”

The rest of the flight Agnes passed in silence, unimpressed by the clouds and the ocean below her. They landed in New York, changed planes again, and at last reached Chicago. Home.

“Home?” Agnes echoed, looking at the two-story brick house that loomed out of the trees and lawn and seemed to hang brightly over the street, “This isn’t home.”

Brian couldn’t argue with her. For Agnes was a Biafran, and there would never be home for her again.

Years later, Agnes would remember little about her escape from Africa. She would remember being hungry, and how Brian gave her two oranges when they landed at the Azores. She would remember the sound of antiaircraft fire, and the rocking of the plane when one shell exploded dangerously near. Most of all, however, she remembered the white man sitting across from her in the dark airplane. He kept looking at her, then at Brian and Agnes Howarth. Brian and his wife were black, but their blackness had been diluted by frequent infusions of white blood in past generations; little Agnes was much, much darker, and the white man finally said. “Little girl. You Biafran?”

“Yes,” Agnes said softly.

The white man looked angrily at Brian. “That’s against the regulations.”

Brian calmly answered, “The world will not shift on its axis because a regulation was broken.”

“You shouldn’t have brought her,” the white man insisted, as if she were breathing up his air, taking up his space.

Brian didn’t answer. Mrs. Howarth did. “You’re only angry,” she said, “because your Biafran friends asked you to take their children, and you refused.”

The man looked angry, then hurt, then ashamed. “I couldn’t. They had three children. How could I claim they were mine? I couldn’t do it!”

“There are white people on this airplane with Biafran children,” Mrs. Howarth said.

Angry, the white man stood. “I followed the regulations! I did the right thing!”

“So relax,” Brian said, quietly but with a command in his voice. “Sit down. Shut up. Console yourself that you obeyed the regulations. And think of those children with a bayonet slicing—”

“Sh,” Mrs. Howarth said. The white man sat back down. The argument was over. But Agnes always remembered that afterward, the man had wept bitterly, for what seemed hours, sobbing almost silently, his back heaving. “I couldn’t do a thing,” she heard him say. “A whole nation dying, and I couldn’t do a thing.”

Agnes remembered those words. “I couldn’t do a thing,” she sometimes said to herself. At first she believed it, and wept for her parents in the silence in her home on the outskirts of Chicago. But gradually, as she forced her way past the barriers society placed before her sex and her race and her foreign background, she learned to say something different:

“I can do something.”

She went back to Nigeria with her adopted parents, the Howarths, ten years later. Her passport showed her to be an American citizen. They returned to her city and asked her real family where her parents were.

“Dead,” she was told, not unkindly. No relative closer than a second cousin was left alive.

“I was too young,” she said to her parents. “I couldn’t do a thing.”

“Me too,” Brian said. “We were all too young.”

“But I’ll do something someday,” Agnes said. “I’ll make up for this.”

Brian thought she meant revenge, and spent many hours trying to dissuade her. But Agnes did not mean revenge.

Hector felt large when he saw the light, large, and full and bright and vigorous, and the light was the right color and the right brightness and so Hector gathered himselves and followed the light and drank in deep.

And because Hector loved to dance, he found the right place and began to bow, and spin, and arch, and crest, and be a thing of great dark beauty.

“Why are we dancing?” the Hectors asked themself.

And Hector told himselves, “Because we are happy,”

Agnes was already known as one of the two or three best skipship pilots when the Trojan Object was discovered. She had made two Mars trips and dozens of journeys to the moon, many of them solo, just her and the computer, others of them with valuable cargos—famous people, vital medicines, important secret information—the kind of thing valuable enough to make it worth the price of sending a skipship from the ground out into space.

Agnes was a pilot for IBM-ITT, the largest of the companies that had invested in space; and it was partly because IBM-ITT promised that she would be pilot on the expedition that the corporation won the lucrative government contract to investigate the Trojan Object.

“We got the contract,” Sherman Riggs told her, and she had been so involved in updating the equipment of her skipship that she didn’t know what he meant.

“The contract,” he said. “The contract. To go to the Trojan Object. And you’re the pilot.”

It was not Agnes’s habit to show emotion, whether negative or positive. The Trojan Object was the most important thing in space right now, a large, completely light-absorbent object in Earth’s leading trojan point. One day it had not been there. The next day it had, blotting out the stars beyond it and causing more of a stir in the space-watching world than a new comet or a new planet. After all, new objects should not suddenly appear a third of the way around Earth’s orbit. And now it would be Agnes who would pilot the craft that would first view the Trojan Object up close.

“Danny,” she said, naming her Leaner, the lover/engineer who always teamed with her on two-person assignments. On a long trip like this, no pilot could stand to be without his Leaner.

“Of course,” Sherman answered. “And two more. Roger and Rosalind Thorne. Doctor and astronomer.”

“I know them.”

“Good or bad?”

“Good enough. Good. If we can’t get Sly and Frieda.”

Sherman rolled his eyes. “Sly and Frieda and GM-Texaco, and there isn’t a chance in hell—”