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

“But all they’d have to trade would be food. Who needs food across a few million miles of space?”

“Don’t you have any imagination at all? Excess food means one person can feed five or ten or twenty or a hundred. Excess food means that you locate your stinking factories there! Solar power unlimited, with no night and no clouds and no cold weather. Shifts around the clock. You have plenty of manpower, and a built-in market. You can do everything there that you’ve been doing here, do it cheaper, make better profits, and nobody’ll be going hungry!”

And then there was silence in the room, because Vaughan was actually seriously thinking about it. Agnes’s heart was beating fast. She was panting. She was embarrassed to have been so fervent when fervor was not fashionable.

“Almost thou persuadest me,” said Vaughan.

“I should hope so. I’ll lose my voice in a minute.”

“Only two problems. The first one is that while you’ve persuaded me, I’m a much more reasonable, persuasible man than the officers and boards of directors of IBM and ITT, and it’s their final decision, not mine. They don’t let me commit more than ten billion to a project without their approval. I could make the initial ship—but I couldn’t make any more than that. And the initial ship won’t make a profit alone. So I have to persuade them, which is impossible, or lose my job, which I refuse to do.”

“Or do nothing at all,” Agnes said, contempt already seeping into her tone. Malecker was going to say no.

“And the second problem is actually the first, too. How could I persuade the board of directors of two of the world’s largest corporations to invest billions of dollars in a project that depends entirely on being able to educate or train or even communicate with illiterate savages and peasants from the most backward countries on Earth?”

His voice was sweet reason, but Agnes was not prepared to hear reason. If Vaughan said no, she would be stopped here. There was nowhere else to go.

“I’m an illiterate savage!” she said. “Do you want to hear a few words of Igbo?” She didn’t wait for an answer, babbled off the few words she remembered from childhood. She hardly remembered meanings—they were phrases that in her anger came to the surface. Some of the words, however, were spoken to her mother. Mother, come here, help me.

“My mother was an illiterate savage who spoke fluent English. My father was an illiterate savage who spoke better English than her and had French and German, too, and wrote beautiful poems in Igbo and even though to survive in the days when Biafra was struggling for survival he worked as a house servant to an American correspondent, he was never illiterate! He’s read books you’ve never heard of, and he was a black African who was gutted in a tribal war while all those wonderful literate Americans and Europeans and educated Orientals watched placidly, counting up the profits from arms sales to Nigeria.”

“I didn’t know you were Biafran.”

“I’m not. There is no Biafra. Not on this planet. But up there, up there a Biafra could exist, and a free Armenia, and an independent Eritrea, and an unshackled Quebec, and an Ainu nation and a Bangladesh where no one was hungry and you tell me that illiterates can’t be taught—”

“Of course they can be, but—”

“If I’d been born fifty miles to the west I wouldn’t have been an Ibo and so I would have grown up exactly as illiterate as you say, exactly as stupid. Now look at me, you privileged white American, and tell me I can’t be educated—”

“If you talk like a radical no one’s going to listen to you.”

Too much. Couldn’t take Malecker’s patronizing smile, his patient attitude. Agnes struck out at him. Her hand hit his cheek, tore his fashionable glasses off. Furious, he struck back, perhaps trying more to hold her off than to hit her, but because she was moving and he was unaccustomed to hitting people his hand slugged her hard in the breast, and she cried out in pain and jabbed a knee in his groin and then the fight got mean.

“I listened to you,” he said huskily, when they were tired and pulled apart. His nose was bleeding. He was exhausted. He had a tear in his shirt, because his body had had to twist in a direction that tailored shirts were not meant to go. “Now listen to me.”

Agnes listened because, her anger spent and her mind only beginning to realize that she had just assaulted the president of her company and would certainly be grounded and blackballed and her life would be over, she was not interested in leaving or in getting up or even in talking. She listened.

“Listen to me because I’m going to say it once. Go to the engineering department. Tell them to do rough plans and estimates. A proposal. I want it in three months. Ships that will carry two thousand and make a round trip in at most a year. Shuttle ships that will carry two hundred or, preferably, four hundred from Earth up into Earth orbit. And cargo ships that will take whole stinking factories, as you so aptly named them, and take them to the Balloon. And when the cost figures are all in, I’m going to go to the boards of directors, and I’m going to make a presentation, and I swear to you, Agnes Howarth, you lousy illiterate savage bitch of a best pilot in the world, if I don’t persuade those bastards to let me build those ships it’s because nobody could persuade them. Is that enough?”

I should be elated, Agnes thought. He’s doing it. But I’m just tired.

“Right now you’re tired, Agnes,” Malecker said. “But I want you to know your fingernails and that knee in the groin and your teeth in my arm did not change my mind. I agreed with you from the start. I just didn’t believe it could be done. But if there are a few thousand Ibos like you, and a few million Indians and a few billion Chinese, then this thing can work. That’s all I needed to know, all anybody needs to know. It was uneconomical to ship colonists to America, too, and anybody who went was a damn fool, and most of them died, but they came and bloody well conquered everything they saw. You do it too. I’ll try to make it possible.”

He put his arm around Agnes and embraced her and then helped her clean up and patch up places where he had given as good as he got.

“Next time you want to wrestle,” Vaughan offered as she left, “let’s at least take our clothes off first.”

Eleven years and eight hundred billion dollars later, IBM-ITT’s ships were in the sky, filling with colonists. GM-Texaco’s ships were still under construction, and five other consortiums would soon be in the business. More than a hundred million people had signed up for seats on the ships. The seats were free—all it took was a deed made out to the corporation for all the property a person owned, in return for which he would receive a large plot of ground in the Balloon. Whole villages had signed up. Whole nations were being decimated by emigration. The world had grown so full that there had been no place to run away to. Now there was a new promised land. And at the age of forty-two, Agnes brought her ship forward to part the waters.

“Ah!” cried many Hectors in agony, and so they were all in agony, and Hector said to himselves, “They are back,” and the Hectors said to themself, “We will surely die.”

“We can never die, not you, not us,” Hector answered.

“How can we protect ourselves?”

“I was made defenseless by the Makers,” said Hector. “There is no defense.”

“Why were the Makers so cruel?” asked the Hectors, and so Hector told himselves the story of the Makers, so they would understand.

The story of the Makers:

Douglas was a Maker, an engineer, a scientist, a clever man. He made a tool that melted snow before it fell, so that crops could last a few more days and not be ruined by early snows. He made a machine that measured gravity, so that stars too dark to shine could be charted by the astronomers. And he made the Resonator.