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

Not that anyone had told me that, of course. But the signs were clear. The children’s section was for children—and that meant that the non-children’s sections were not for children.

That year I read everything remotely interesting in the children’s section. I prided myself, as a third-grader, on not reading anything aimed at any grade under sixth, and those books were soon read. What now? Nothing to read, nothing to check out with my library card and carry home in the basket on the front of my bike.

And then I realized: there were hundreds, thousands of books on the other side of the circulation desk. If I could just make my way over there, find a book, and then hide somewhere and read it…

I dared not. And yet that strange, forbidden territory lured me. I knew better than to ask —then I would be told no and would be watched all the more carefully because I had confessed my interest in forbidden places. So I watched, for all the world like a child hoping to shoplift and waiting for the clerks all to look the other way.

Finally they did. I moved swiftly and silently across the long space before the circulation desk, the no-man’s-land between the bright-windowed children’s section and the deep-shadowed adult section. No one called out for me to stop—it would have been a harsh, guttural “Halt!” I knew, for I had seen enough World War II movies on TV to know that unreasoning authority always spoke with a German accent. At last I ducked behind a shelf unit and found myself in the brave new land, safe for the moment.

Sheerest coincidence placed me directly in front of a single shelf entitled “Science Fiction.” There were few books there—mostly story collections edited by people like Judith Merrill and Groff Conklin. Best Science Fiction Stories of 1 955. That sort of thing.

But I was glad. After all, I was used to reading easier stuff. The letters in these books were all so small and close together. There were so many words. But at least the stories were short. And science fiction. That was like those time-travel stories in Boy’s Life, right?

I took a couple of books and snuck off to a secluded table. There were some adults around, but they weren’t official, and as long as I was quiet I figured they wouldn’t tell on me. I opened the books and started to read.

Most of the stories were just too hard. I’d read a paragraph or two, maybe two pages, and then I’d flip on to the next story. Mostly it was because the stories were about things that I didn’t care about. Sometimes I couldn’t even figure out what was going on. Science fiction wasn’t meant to be for eight-year-olds, I knew—but still, they didn’t have to make it so darned hard, did they?

There were a few stories, though, that spoke clearly to me and captured my imagination from the start. By far the longest one I was able to finish began with the image of people visiting a great concert hall, being pestered by a strange, twisted old man who seemed to take some sort of pride in it. Then the story flashed back and told the story of how that great concert hall came to be, and who that old man was.

You see, there was a time when people had forgotten the joy of music. It only survived in commercial jingles, short songs designed to sell something. Except that there was one jingle-writer who had a special gift, an ability that transcended the limitations of his craft. The story struck me more deeply than any other I had ever read till then. I identified with the hero—he was all my best hopes and dreams. His pains were mine; his achievements would be mine as well. I, as a child, was too young to truly understand some of the concepts in the story. Intellectually I grasped them, but I had no experience to make the idea come to life. Nevertheless, the story itself, the hero’s discovery of who he was and what he could do, the response of others around him, and what his actions led to—ah, that was the path of a great man’s life. I thought. Anyone can be great when following in paths that others praise. But when you achieve solitary greatness, when you bend an unbending world and turn it into a new path, not because the world wanted to turn, not because anyone asked you to turn it or helped you, but rather because you walked that path yourself and showed the way, and, having seen it, they could not help but follow: that became my lifelong measure of the true hero.

Or perhaps it already was my measure, and it took that story to make me aware of it—does that matter? At the time, as an eight-year-old child unschooled in philosophy, I found the story overwhelming. It remade me. I saw everything through new eyes afterward.

I grew up and learned to tell stories myself. First I was a playwright; then I turned to fiction, and when I did it was science fiction that I wrote, though I cared not overly much for science. It was the mythic story that I wanted to tell, though I couldn’t remember when I had decided that. And it was in the genre of science fiction and fantasy that the mythic story could still be clearly, plainly told—I knew that, was deeply certain of it. I could not do with fiction what I knew I had to do, except in this realm of strangeness.

So I wrote science fiction, and eventually that came to be the mainsail of my writing career. And one day in the dealer’s room in a science fiction convention I saw the name Groff Conklin on the spine of an old and weathered book and I remembered those old anthologies from my childhood, when I thought I had to sneak into the adult section in order to read. I stood there, my hands resting on the book, in reverie, trying to remember the stories that I had read, wondering if I might find them again and, if I did, whether I’d laugh at my childish taste.

I talked to the dealer, telling him the time period of the books I had read in the Santa Clara library. He showed me what he had; I scanned through the books. I couldn’t remember title or author of the one story that meant most to me, but I remembered vaguely that it was the last story in the book. Or was it simply the last I read, because there was no point in reading any other? I couldn’t remember even that.

Finally I struggled to tell him the tale, calling up more details with each one I spoke aloud. At last I had told him enough.

“That’s ‘Tunesmith’ you’re looking for,” he said. “By Lloyd Biggie, Jr.”

Lloyd Biggie, Jr. Not one of the writers of that time who had made the transition into the seventies and eighties. His name was not a household word now, like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, or Bradbury, though all were his contemporaries. I felt a stab of regret; I also felt a tiny thrill of dread, because of course the same could happen to me. There’s no guarantee, because your works have some following in one decade, that you’ll still have an audience hungry for your stories in another. Let that be a lesson to you, I thought.

But it was a stupid lesson, and I refused to believe it. Because another thought came to mind. Lloyd Biggie, Jr., didn’t become one of the rich and famous ones when science fiction became commercial in the seventies and eighties. He didn’t have crowds of salesmen touting his works. He didn’t have dumps of his novels near the checkout stand at every WaldenBooks in North America. But that had nothing to do with whether he had succeeded, whether his work had been worth doing, his tales worth telling. Because his story was alive in me. It had transformed me, though even then I did not yet understand how completely I had taken “Tunesmith” into myself.

And I knew that if I could write a story that would illuminate some hitherto dark corner in someone’s soul and live on in them forever, then it hardly mattered whether writing made me rich or kept me poor, put my name before the public or left me forgotten, for I would have bent the world’s path a little. Just a little, yet all would be different from then on because I had done it.