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

The Resonator focused sound waves of different but harmonious frequencies on a certain point (or diffused the sound waves over a large area), setting up patterns that resonated with stone to bring mountains crumbling down; metal, to shatter steel buildings; and water vapor, to disperse storms.

It could also resonate with human bones, crumbling them inside the body and turning them to dust.

Douglas personally made his Resonator change the weather, so that his nation had rain while other lands were in drought. Douglas personally used his Resonator to carve a highway through the highest mountains in the world. However, Douglas had nothing whatever to do with the decision by his nation’s military leaders to use the Resonator against the population of the largest and most fertile part of the neighboring nation.

The Resonator worked beautifully. Over a period of ten minutes, through an area of ten thousand square miles, the Resonator struck silently yet thoroughly. Nursing mothers crumbled into helpless piles of dying flesh and muscle and organs, their chests not even rigid enough for them to muster one last scream: in their last moments of life they listened as their infants, not understanding what had happened, continued crying or gooing or sleeping, protected from the Resonator by their softer bones. The infants would take days to die of thirst.

Farmers in the field collapsed on the plow. Doctors in their offices died in puddles beside their patients, unable to help anyone and unable to heal themselves. Soldiers died in their moving fortresses; the generals also died at their map tables; prostitutes dissolved, their customers a soft blanket spread over them.

But Douglas had nothing to do with this. He was a Maker, not a destroyer, and if the military chose to misuse his creation, what was he to do? It was a great boon to mankind, but like all great inventions, it could be perverted by evil men.

“I deplore it,” Douglas said to his friends, “but I’m helpless to stop them.”

The government, however, felt uncommon gratitude to Douglas for his help in making the conquest of the neighboring nation possible. So he was granted a large estate on lands recently reclaimed from the sea, beautiful lands where once there had been only broad tidal marshes. Douglas marveled at the achievement. “Is there nothing man cannot do?” he asked his friends, not expecting an answer, since the answer was no, there was nothing beyond the reach of men. The sea was pushed back, and trees and grass grew on the landfill and transplanted topsoil, and the homes were far apart, for this land was used only for those whom the state wished to reward, and the government knew that the thing most desired by men is to have as much distance between themselves and other men as possible, without giving up any of the modern conveniences.

One day Douglas’s servants were digging in the garden, and they called to him. Douglas had only been in his new home for a few days, and he was alarmed when the servant said, “A body, buried in the garden.”

Douglas ran outside and looked, and sure enough, there was a fragment of a human body, oddly misshapen, but clearly including a face. “Just the skin, sir,” a servant commented. “A most brutal affair,” Douglas answered, and he immediately called the police.

But the police refused to come out and investigate. “No surprise there, mate,” said the lieutenant. “What do you think the landfill they used was made of? They had to do something with the hundred thousand corpses of the enemy from the recent war, didn’t they?”

“Oh, of course,” Douglas said, surprised that he hadn’t realized right off. That explained the bonelessness of the body.

“I expect you’ll find ’em right commonly. But since the bones is dissolved, mate, they tell me it’ll make the soil uncommon fertile.”

The lieutenant was absolutely correct, of course. The servants found body after body, and soon grew quite inured to the sight; within a year, most of the corpses had rotted enough that they were simply unusually good humus. And plants grew taller and faster than in most other places, the soil was so rich.

“But wasn’t it a bit of a shock?” asked one of Douglas’s ladyfriends, when he told her the grisly little tale.

“Oh, I should say,” Douglas said with a smile. His words were false; his confident smile was the truth. For though he hadn’t realized the particulars, he knew from the start that his estate was built upon the bodies of the dead. And he slept as well as any man.

And that is the story of the Makers.

“They’ve returned,” the Hectors said, and because they were already more aware, they said it nearly at once, and none of them needed to speak alone.

“Is there pain?”

“No,” the Hectors answered. “Just sorrow. For now we shall never be free.”

“That is true,” Hector said to himselves sadly.

“How can it be borne?” the Hectors asked himself.

“Others have borne it. My brothers.”

“And what will we do?”

Hector searched his memories, because he was given no imagination and could not conceive of what would follow from an event he had never before experienced. But the Makers had put the answer to that question in his memory, and therefore in all the Hectors’ memories, and so he was able to say, “We shall learn more stories.”

And the Hectors’ minds grew wide, and they listened, and they watched, because now, instead of hearing the stories told to them, they would watch as they happened.

“Now we will truly understand the Masses, and the Masters, and the Makers,” they said to themself.

“But you shall never,” said Hector, and then he stopped.

“Why did you stop?” the Hectors asked. “What shall we never?”

And then, because there was no part of Hector that was not part of the Hectors, they knew he was going to say, “But you shall never understand ourself.”

The Balloon’s revolution took only a little while, and it was bloodless, and nobody suffered for it at the time, except a few scientists whose curiosity was insatiable and could never be satisfied.

It happened when the team of researchers examining the inmost wall of the Balloon had tried everything short of a hydrogen bomb to break through that final, impenetrable barrier. Deenaz Coachbuilder, a brilliant scientist who had spent her girlhood in the slums of Delhi, spent days trying to find another approach, but finally determined that the damnable last barrier in the Balloon would not stop her, she asked for a bomb.

And got it.

She chose a site where there were no human settlements within a hundred cells in any direction, set up the bomb, retired to a distance she thought was safe, and set it off.

The entire Balloon shuddered; lakes throughout the world emptied as a sudden, flooding rain on the cell beneath; the ceilings went dark for an hour, and blinked off and on occasionally for several days thereafter. And though people kept their heads enough to avoid killing each other in panic, they were terribly afraid, and it was all Agnes could do to keep them from sending Deenaz Coachbuilder and her scientists off the planet through the nearest lake, without a ship.

“We made an impression,” Deenaz said, arguing to be allowed to stay.

“You risked all our lives, caused terrible damage,” Agnes said, trying to remain calm.

“We cut into the surface of the inmost wall,” Deenaz insisted. “We can penetrate it! You can’t stop us now!”

Agnes gestured out across the plain of her cell, with only a few of the crops able to stand upright, for the flood from the rainstorm had wiped out the fields. “The land is healing, and the water is high in the lake again. But next time, will we be so easily restored? Your experiment is a danger to us all, and it will stop.”