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

Agnes swam underwater for a moment, attacking Danny from below, pulling him down. It was a game they had played in pools and in the ocean on Earth, and now Danny was supposed to surface for air and then dive to the bottom and hold his breath there until Agnes found him.

When he reached the bottom of the lake (and it wasn’t deep) he touched it, and his hand sank up to the wrist before it struck something solid. But even the solid part was yielding, and as Danny kicked harder his hand sank deeper and he knew the way out.

He went to the surface and told Agnes what he had found. They swam to shore, put their suits back on, and shaddled down into the water. The lake floor opened, engulfed them, and then floated them out the bottom—into the sky directly over the skipship, where it still rested on the surface of the lake. They shaddled safely down.

“This place is explorable,” Agnes told Roj and Roz, “and it’s simple. It’s like a huge balloon, with other balloons inside and more and more of them, layer after layer. It’s designed for somebody to live here, so when you’re standing on the soil you don’t sink through. To get down, you have to go through the lake.”

“But who’s it for?” Roj asked, and it was a good question for which there was no answer.

“Maybe we’ll find someone,” Agnes said. “We’ve only scratched the surface. We’re going in.”

The skipship lifted from the lake not long after, and rose through the ceiling into the lake above. Again and again, always rising, the computer keeping count. Every cell was the same, nothing changed at all, through 498 layers of ceiling/floor, until at last they reached a ceiling, apparently no different from the others, which would not give way.

“End of the road?” Danny asked.

Always thorough, Roz insisted that they try every part of the ceiling, and they spent many hours doing it, until they had convinced themselves that this ceiling was the end of their upward (or inward) travels.

“The centrifugal gravity effect is a lot weaker here,” Roj said, reading off the computer. “But it feels nearly the same, since out near the surface the real gravity was offsetting the centrifugal effect much more than it is here.”

“Hi ho,” said Roz. “Just assuming this thing is as big as it seems to be, how many people could this hold?”

Calculations, rough with plenty of room for error.

“There could be more than a hundred million cells to this thing, assuming that there’s nothing much inside the center there, where we can’t get to.” A hundred and fifty square kilometers per cell; one human being per hectare; a huge potential population, without any crowding at all, considering that all the land is productive. “If we have fifteen thousand people per cell, living in a town with the rest of the land used for farming, then this place can hold a trillion and a half people.”

They figured on, eliminating the polar zones because centrifugal gravity would be too weak, allowing more space per person, and the figure was still stunning. Even with only a thousand people per cell, space for a hundred billion.

“The fairy godmother,” Danny said, “has given us a free place to put our population overflow.”

“I don’t believe in free presents,” Roj said, looking out the window at the plain of dirt surrounding them. “There’s a catch. With all that room, maybe they all live somewhere else, and if they find out we’re here, they’ll shoot us for trespassing.”

“Or if we overload the place,” Roz suggested, “it’ll probably burst.”

“You’re overlooking the worst catch of all,” Agnes said. “Skipships are the only thing in existence that can make this trip. They hold four persons each. Allowing for overcrowding, say we can take ten people per trip”—they laughed at the thought of trying to put ten people in their craft—“and we had a hundred skipships, which we don’t have, and they could make two round trips a year, which we can’t. How long would it take to bring a billion people from Earth to here?”

“Five hundred thousand years.”

“Paradise,” Danny said. “We could make this into a paradise. And the damn thing’s out of reach.”

“Besides,” Roj added, “the kind of people who could make this place work are farmers and tradesmen. Who’s going to pay their passage?”

Metals and minerals paid for trips to the moon and the asteroids. But all that this place held was homes—homes a few million miles and a few billion dollars out of everybody’s reach.

“Well, daydreams and nightmares are over,” Agnes said. “Let’s go home.”

“If we can,” Danny said.

They could. The lakes worked as exits all the way back down, including the last time. They were back in space, and the Trojan Object had become, in their minds, the Balloon, an object obviously designed as an alternative environment for a creature not unlike man; an object perhaps unoccupied, ready and waiting, and they knew no one would ever be able to settle there.

Agnes dreamed, and the dream came back night after night. She remembered a scene she had forgotten, or had at least refused to remember clearly, since she was a child. She remembered standing between her parents and the Howarths (who, though they had adopted her, had never let her call them Mother and Father lest she forget her real heritage in Biafra), hearing her father say, “Please.”

And her dream always ended the same way. She was taken into the sky, but instead of a dark cargo plane she was in a plane with glass sides, and as she flew she could see all the world. And everywhere she looked there were her parents, holding a little girl in front of them, saying, “Please. Take her.”

She had seen pictures of the starving children in Biafra, the ones that had made millions of Americans cry and do nothing. Now she saw those children, and the children who died of starvation in India and Indonesia and Mali and Iraq, and they all looked at her with proud, pleading eyes, their backs straight and their voices strong but their hearts breaking as they said, “Take me.”

“There’s nothing I can do,” she said to herself in her dream, and she sobbed and sobbed like the white man on the airplane, and then Danny woke her and spoke gently to her and held her and said, “The same dream again?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Agnes, if I could take the memories and wipe them out—”

“It’s not the memories, Danny,” Agnes whispered, touching his eyes gently where the epicanthic fold made his eyes seem to slant. “It’s now. It’s the people I can’t do a damn thing about now.”

“You couldn’t do a damn thing about them before,” Danny reminded her.

“But I’ve seen a place that could be heaven for them, and I can’t get them there.”

Danny smiled sadly. “That’s just it. You can’t. Now you’ve just got to let your dreams know that and give you a little peace.”

“Yes,” Agnes agreed, and fell asleep again holding and being held by Danny, while Roj and Roz piloted the skipship back toward Earth, which had seemed so large when they left it, and which now seemed unbearably, impossibly, criminally small.

Earth was large in the window of the skipship when Agnes finally decided that it was her dreams that were right, her conscious mind that was wrong. She could do something. There was something to be done, and she would do it.

“I’m going back there,” Agnes said.

“Probably,” Danny said.

“I won’t go alone.”

“You sure as hell better take me.”

“You,” she said, “and others.” Billions of others. It should be done. Must be done. Therefore would be done.

“Now I will tell you the story of the Masters,” said Hector to himselves, and the Hectors listened to himself. “This is the story of why the Masters penetrate and why the Masters hurt.”