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

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Maps in a Mirror For the hundreds of thousands who are newly come to Card, here is chance to experience the wonder of a writer so versatile that he can handle everything from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction with equal ease and grace. The brilliant story-telling of the Alvin Maker books is no accident; the breathless excitement evoked by the Ender books is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In this enormous volume are forty-six stories, plus ten long, intensely personal essays, unique to this volume. In them the author reveals some of his reasons and motivations for writing, with a good deal of autobiography into the bargain.
THE SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD brings together nearly all of Card’s stories, from his first publications in 1977 to work as recent as last year. For those readers who have followed this remarkable talent since the beginning, here are all those amazing stories gathered together in one place, with some extra surprises as well. For the hundreds of thousands who are newly come to Card, here is a chance to experience the wonder of a writer so talented, so versatile that he can handle everything from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction with equal ease and grace. The brilliant story-telling of the Alvin Maker books is no accident; the breathless excitement evoked by ENDER’S GAME is riot a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In this enormous volume are 46 stories, broken into five books: Ten fables and fantasies, fairy tales that sometimes tell us truths about ourselves; eleven tales of dread—and commentary that explains why dread is a much scarier emotion than horror; seven tales of human futures—science fiction from a master of extrapolation and character; six tales of death, hope, and holiness, where Card explores the spiritual side of human nature; and twelve lost songs.
The Lost Songs are a special treat for readers of this hardcover volume, for here are gathered tales which will not see print again. Here are Card’s stories written for Mormon children, a pair that were published in small literary magazines, a thoughtful essay on the writing of fiction, and three major works which have, since their original publication, been superseded by novel-, or more than novel-length works. First, there is the original novella-length version of Card’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel, ENDER’S GAME. Then there is “Mikal’s Songbird”, which was the seed of the novel SONGMASTER; “Mikal’s Songbird” will never be published again. And finally, the narrative poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow”—here is the original inspiration for the Alvin Maker series, an idea so powerful that it could not be contained in a single story, or a hundred lines of verse, but is growing to become the most original American fantasy ever written.
MAPS IN A MIRROR is not just a collection of stories, however complete. This comprehensive collection also contains nearly a whole book’s worth of
material. Each section begins and ends with long, intensely personal introductions and afterwords; here the author reveals some of his reasons and motivations for writing what he writes—and a good deal of autobiography into the bargain.
ORSON SCOTT CARD grew up in Utah and attended Brigham Young University, where he studied drama. Card’s early writing career was devoted to plays; he had his own theater company, which was successful for a number of years. Card spent his missionary years in Brazil, learning to speak fluent Portuguese. He now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife and three children. From book flaps:

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And for some reason I found myself also grieved at Crofe’s death. The corporation, of course, would continue to progress in its dealings with the Ylymyny—would, indeed, have an easier time of it now. But Crofe was a worthy bargaining partner. And he and I had loved the game of bargaining, however many barriers our mutual strangeness kept between us.

I watched as his soldiers stripped his corpse. They buried the clothing under rocks. And then they hacked at the skin with their knives, opening up the man’s bowels and splitting the intestines from end to end. The stench was powerful; I barely avoided vomiting. They worked intently, finding every scrap of material that had been passing through the bowel and putting it in a small leather bag. When the intestine was as clean as stone knives could scrape it, they closed the bag, and Da tied it around his neck on a string. Then, tears still streaming down his face, he turned to the others, looking at them all, one by one.

“I will go to the mountain,” he whispered.

The others nodded; some wept harder.

“I will give his soul to the sky,” Da whispered, and now the others came forward, touched the bag, and whispered, “I, too. I, also. I vow.”

Hearing the faint noise, the two archers guarding the saddle came to our sanctuary among the stones and were about to add their vows to those of the others when Da held up his hand and forbade them.

“Stay and hold off pursuit. They are sure to know.”

Sadly, the two nodded, moved back to their positions. And Fole once again gripped my arm as we moved silently away from the crest of the peak.

“Where are we going?” I whispered.

“To honor Crofe’s soul.” Stone turned and answered me.

“What about the ambush?”

“We are now about matters more important than that.”

The Ylymyny worshiped the sky—or something akin to worship, at least. That much I knew from my scanty research into their religious beliefs, in the city on the plain, where I had first landed.

“Stone,” I said, “will the enemy know what we’re doing?”

“Of course,” he whispered back. “They may be infidels, but they know what honor binds the righteous to do. They’ll try to trap us on the way, destroy us, and stop us from doing honor to the dead.”

And then Da hissed for us to be quiet, and we soundlessly scrambled down the cliffs and slopes. Above us we heard a scream; we ignored it. And soon I was lost in the mechanical effort of finding footholds, handholds, strength to keep going with these soldiers who were in much better condition than I.

Finally we reached the end of the paths and stopped. We were gathered on a rather gentle slope that ended, all the way around, in a steep cliff. And we had curved enough to see, above and behind us, that a large group of Golyny were making their way down the path we had just taken.

I did not look over the edge, at first, until I saw them unwinding their ropes and joining them, end to end, to make a much longer line. Then I walked toward the edge and looked down. Only a few hundred meters below, a valley opened up in the mountainside, a flood of level ground in front of a high-walled canyon that bit deep into the cliff. From there it would be a gentle descent into the plain. We would be safe.

But first, there was the matter of getting down the cliff. This time, I couldn’t see any hope of it unless we each dangled on the end of a rope, something that I had no experience with. And even then, what was to stop the enemy from climbing down after us?

Fole solved the dilemma, however. He sat down a few meters back from the edge, in a place where his feet could brace against stone, and he pulled gloves on his hands. Then he took the rope with only a few meters of slack, looped it behind his back, and gripped the end of the rope in his left hand, holding the rest of the line tight against his body with his right.

He would be a stable enough root for the top end of the climbing line; and if he were killed or under attack, he would simply drop the line, and the enemy would have no way to pursue.

He was also doomed to be killed.

I should have said something to him, perhaps, but there was no time. Da was quickly giving me my only lesson in descending a rope, and I had to learn well or die from my first mistake. And then Da, carrying the bag of Crofe’s excrement, was over the edge, sitting on the rope as it slid by his buttocks, holding his own weight precariously and yet firmly enough as he descended rapidly to the bottom.

Fole bore the weight stolidly, hardly seeming to strain. And then the rope went slack, and immediately Stone was forcing me to pass the rope under my buttocks, holding the rope in gloved hands on either side. Then he pushed me backward over the cliff, and I took a step into nothingness, and I gasped in terror as I fell far too swiftly, swinging to and fro as if on a pendulum, the rock wall skimming back and forth in front of my face—until the rope turned, and I faced instead the plain, which still looked incredibly far below me. And now I did vomit, though I had not eaten yet that day; the acid was painful in my throat and mouth; and I forgot the terror of falling long enough to grip the rope tightly and slow my descent, though it burned my gloves and the rope was an agony of tearing along my buttocks.

The ground loomed closer, and I could see Da waiting, beckoning impatiently. And so I forced myself to ignore the pain of a faster descent, and fell more rapidly, so that when I hit the ground I was jolted, and sprawled into the grasses.

I lay panting in disbelief that I had made it, relief that I no longer hung like a spider in the air. But I could not rest, it seemed—Da took me by the arm and dragged me away from the rope that was now flailing with the next man’s descent.

I rolled onto my back and watched, fascinated, as the man came quickly down the rope. Now that my ordeal was over, I could see a beauty in a single man on a twine daring gravity to do its worst—the poetical kind of experience that has long been forgotten on my gentle homeworld of Garden, where all the cliffs have been turned to gentle slopes, and where oceans gently lap at sand instead of tearing at rock, and where men are as gentle as the world they live in. I am gentle, in fact, which caused me much distress at the beginning of my military training, but which allowed me to survive a war and come out of the army with few scars that could not heal.

And as I lay thinking of the contrast between my upbringing and the harsh life on this world, Stone reached the bottom and the next man started down.

When the soldier was only halfway down, another climbed onto the rope at the top. It took me a moment to realize what was happening; then as it occurred to me that the Golyny must have nearly reached them, Da and Stone pulled me back against the cliff wall, where falling bodies would not land on me.

The first soldier reached the bottom; I saw it was the one named Pan, a brutal-looking man who had wept most piteously at Crofe’s death. The other soldier was only a dozen meters from the ground when suddenly the rope shuddered and he dropped. He hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs; I started to run out to help him, but I was held back. The others were all looking up, and in a moment I saw why. The giant Fole, made small by distance, leaped off the cliff, pulling with him two of the Golyny. A third enemy fell a moment later—he must have lost his balance in the struggle on the cliff.

Fole hit the ground shudderingly, his body cruelly torn by the impact, the Golyny also a jumble of broken bones. Again I tried to go out to try to accomplish something; again I was held back; and again I found they knew their world better than I, with my offworld instincts, could hope to know it. Stones hit the ground sharply, scattering all around us. One of them hit the soldier who already was dying from his relatively shorter fall; it broke his skull, and he died.

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