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

“Then we have to stay like this?” Lika asked.

“Until Cyril dies, you have to stay like this,” Martha said. “It’s the law. He and you have both been given everything you ever petitioned for. Ingrates.”

Martha would have turned to go, but she saw Lika looking pleadingly at Cyril, and saw Cyril nod slowly, and then Cyril turned away from the door, picked up the crosscut saw, and drew it sharply and hard across his own throat. The blood gushed and poured, and Martha thought it would never, never end.

But it did end, and Cyril’s body was taken out and disposed of, and then everything was set to rights, with Lika going back to her family and a real carpenter getting the cottage with the dark red stains on the floor. The best solution after all, Martha decided. Nobody could be happy until Cyril was dead. I should have killed him in the first place, instead of these silly ideas of mercy.

She suspected, however, that Cyril would rather have died the way he did, ugly and bloody and painful though it was, than to have an injection administered by strangers in a plastic room in the capital.

I’ll never understand them. They are as foreign to human thought as monkeys or dogs or cats. And Martha returned to her desk and went on double-checking everything just in case she found another mistake she could fix.

That is the story of the Masters.

When Hector was finished the Hectors wriggled uncomfortably, some (and therefore all) of them angry and disturbed and a little frightened. “But it makes no sense,” the Hectors said to themself. “Nothing was done right.”

Hector agreed. “But that’s the way they are made,” he said to himselves. “Not like me. I am regular. I act as I have always acted, as I will always act. But the Masters and the Masses always act oddly, forever seeing things in the future where no one can see, and acting to avert things that would never have come to pass anyway. Who can understand them?”

“Who made them, then?” asked the Hectors. “Why were they not made well, as we were?”

“Because the Makers are as inscrutable as the Masters and the Masses. I shall tell you their story next.”

(“They are gone,” whispered the ones who had been penetrated. “They have gone away. We are safe after all.” But Hector knew better, and because he knew better, so did the Hectors.)

“You invited yourself to my bedroom, Agnes. That isn’t typical.”

“I accepted your standing invitation.”

“I never thought you would.”

“Neither did I.”

Vaughan Malecker, president of IBM-ITT Space Consortium, Inc., smiled, but the smile was weak. “You don’t long for my body, which is in remarkably good shape, considering my age, and I have an aversion to making love to anyone who is doing it for an ulterior motive.”

Agnes looked at him for a moment, decided that he meant it, and got up to leave.

“Agnes,” he said.

“Never mind,” she answered.

“Agnes, it must have been something important for you to be willing to make such a sacrifice.”

“I said never mind.” She was at the door. It didn’t open.

“Doors in my house open when I want them to,” Malecker said. “I want to know what you wanted. But try to persuade my mind. Not my gonads. Believe it or not, testosterone has never made a major decision here at the consortium.”

Agnes waited with her hand on the knob.

“Come on, Agnes, I know you’re embarrassed as hell but if it was important enough to come this far, you can get over the embarrassment and sit down on the couch and tell me what the hell you want. You want to take another trip to the Balloon?”

“I’m going anyway.”

“Sit down, dammit. I know you’re going anyway but I was trying to get you to say something.”

Agnes came back and sat down on the couch. Vaughan Malecker was a remarkably good-looking man, as he had pointed ont, but Agnes had heard that he slept with anyone good-looking and was nice to them afterward. Agnes had been turning him down for years because she wanted to be a pilot, not a mistress, and Danny was plenty for her needs, which were not overwhelming. But this mattered, and she thought… .

“I thought you’d listen to me if I came this way, I thought—”

Malecker sighed and buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes. “I’m so tired. Agnes, what the hell makes you think I ever listen to a woman I’m trying to lay?”

“Because I listen to Danny and Danny listens to me. I’m naive. I’m innocent. But Mr. Malecker—”

“Vaughan.”

“I need your help.”

“Good. I like to have people need my help. It makes them treat me nicely.”

“Vaughan, the whole world needs your help.”

Malecker looked at her in surprise, then burst out laughing. “The whole world! Oh, no! Agnes, I would never have thought it of you! A cause!”

“Vaughan, people all over the world are starving. There are too many people for this planet—”

“I read your report, Agnes, and I know all about the possibilities in the Balloon. The problem is transport. There is no conceivable way to transport people there fast enough to make even a dent in the population problem. What do you think I am, a miracle worker?”

This was the argument Agnes was waiting for. She pounced with descriptions of the kind of ship that could carry a thousand people at once from Earth orbit to an orbit around the Balloon.

“Do you know how many billion dollars a ship like that would cost?” Vaughan asked.

“About fifteen billion for the first ship. About four billion for each of the others, if you made five hundred of them.”

Vaughan laughed. Loud. But Agnes’s serious expression forced his laughter to become exasperation. He got up from the couch. “Why am I listening to you? This is nonsense!” he shouted.

“You spend more than that every year on telephone service.”

“I know, damn AT&T.”

“You could do it.”

“IBM-ITT could do it, of course, it’s possible. But we have stockholders. We have responsibilities. We’re not the government, Agnes, we can’t throw money away on stupid useless projects.”

“It could save billions of lives. Make the Earth a better place to live.”

“So could a cure for cancer. We’re working on that, but this—Agnes, there’s no profit, and where there’s no profit, you can bet your ass this company will not go!”

“Profit!” Agnes shouted. “Is that all you care about?”

“Eighteen million stockholders say that’s all I’d better care about or I get a kick in the butt and an old-age pension!”

“Vaughan, you want profit, I’ll give you profit!”

“I want profit.”

“Then here’s profit. How much do you sell in India?”

“Enough to make a profit.”

“Compare it to sales in Germany.”

“Compared to Germany, India is practically nothing.”

“How much do you sell in China?”

“Exactly nothing.”

“You make your profits off one tiny part of the world. Western Europe, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and the United States of America.”

“Canada, too.”

“And Brazil. But the rest of the world is closed to you.”

Vaughan shrugged. “They’re too poor.”

“In the Balloon they would not be poor.”

“Would they suddenly be able to read? Would they suddenly be able to run computers and sophisticated telephone equipment?”

“Yes!” And on she went, painting a picture of a world where people who had been scratching out a bare subsistence in poor soil with no water would suddenly be able to raise far more than they needed. “That means a leisure class. That means consumers.”