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

This story began with an essay I started writing once, about how real life has no borders and boundaries, no frame surrounding it the way that paintings do, no beginnings and ends like stories. It occurred to me that artists who tried to get rid of those frames and boundaries and beginnings and endings were making a foolish mistake. First of all, it can’t be done—any work of an individual human being will have boundaries, both in time and in space, and any attempt to evade that is pure deception. Second, it shouldn’t be done, because the very reason why human beings hunger so for art—especially for storytelling—is because art, with its beginnings and endings, provides an overlay of order on the chaos of life. Life never means anything, not clearly enough to count on it, but art always means something. Its very edges declare that this is inside the boundary and everything else is out.

The essay never got written. Instead, I wandered off into the idea that human life does in fact have one very simple but natural frame: birth and death. So while the mass of human life, taken together, cannot be separated into simple cause-and-effect chains that can be unambiguously interpreted, the life of a mortal being always has definable limits. And after a person has died, then it might, just might, be possible to go about discovering what actually happened within the frame of those two moments, birth and death, and what all those years between might mean.

This speculation would give rise, in the long run, to my concept of a speaker for the dead. In the short run, though, it gave rise to “Mortal Gods,” for if it is death that provides the limit that allows life to be comprehended, that allows us to assign meaning to life, then what would this mean to sentient creatures who could not die? All our gods seem to be immortal—but wouldn’t immortals search for mortal gods?

When Kristine and I moved our family from the Great American West (i.e., the part of the country where trees only grow if you water them) to the Great American East (i.e., the part of the country where trees grow everywhere you haven’t paved or mowed recently), one of the biggest cultural shocks was religious television. There just isn’t that much of it out west, especially in Mormon country, where our video style is at once slicker and more sedate. So when I saw TV preachers for the first time, especially TV faith healers like Ernest Ainglee, I watched them for hours in horrified fascination. Of course I knew that the faith healing business was rife with fakery and fraud. But what struck me most powerfully was the deep and desperate faith of those who came, day after day, week after week, to be healed. I wanted to write a story about one of those believers. I also wanted to write about somebody who really had the power to heal, and how he would get along with the fakes. When I realized they were the same story, I was able to write “Saving Grace.”

That was in South Bend, Indiana, in 1982. I wrote it. I mailed it out. Nobody bought it.

Yet I knew it was a good story. I had read it aloud at a couple of conventions and the audience response told me that it worked, absolutely. So why didn’t it sell?

I think part of the problem was that the story was too sympathetic to religion—it wasn’t light and satirical enough, and the main characters seemed to be, after a fashion, believers. I don’t think the sci-fi markets in those days were ready for that. Also, TV charismatics hadn’t yet taken as much prominence in the public eye as they would half a decade later, when every cable system seemed to have a bunch of religious stations, and when the antics of that immortal love triangle of Jim and Tammy and Jessica, and of voyeur extraordinaire Jimmy Swaggart, made these guys household names.

Whatever the reason, I couldn’t sell the story. Until, years later, a nice guy and talented writer and editor named Alan Rodgers told me that Twilight Zone magazine was spinning off a horror digest called Night Cry, and did I have anything he might publish? I never wrote horror—at least not in the normal conception of the term—but I did have a contemporary fantasy called “Saving Grace.” I told him something about it, and he said, Sure, send it along.

I pulled the story out, thinking to do some major revisions. Instead I found that it needed only some minor changes to be up to speed; Alan bought it by return mail. The result was that “Saving Grace” did finally reach an audience—though I dare say that people buying Night Cry had to be more than a little surprised at what this story turned out to be!

This story began in my ancient Datsun B-210, a hideously rusted out blue coupe that I had bought from a friend who had pretty well used it up on the salt-covered roads in Lafayette, Indiana, while he got his doctorate at Purdue. The car vibrated so much that after a trip of more than fifty miles I ended up trembling for hours. But it served me well for many years, on trips to Texas, Michigan, Florida, and points in between. I couldn’t bear to sell it—I finally gave it away.

All this has nothing to do “Eye for Eye.” I just miss the old car.

I was driving to a convention in Roanoke, Virginia, with my good friend and fellow writer, Gregg Keizer. He had been a student of mine in an evening class I taught at the University of Utah in the late 70s. The class was on writing science fiction, but Gregg never learned anything from me—he already knew how before he got there. I once was so sure that a story of his would sell that I bet him that if it didn’t sell within a year I’d run naked through Orson Spencer Hall (the building where the class was held). It took more than a year. I reneged on the bet. But Gregg was very nice about it. And the story did sell soon after. Anyway, when I moved to Greensboro to be senior editor at Compute! Books, and we needed to hire another assistant editor, I thought of Gregg, called him up, and asked him if he wanted to apply. He did. He got the job and did brilliantly. He also long outlasted me, ending up as editor of Compute! Magazine five years after I walked away from the place.

This has nothing to do with “Eye for Eye,” either. But Gregg is living in Shreveport, Louisiana, these days, and I miss him, too.

Anyway, Gregg and I were on our way to Roanoke, and just for the fun of it we decided to come up with some story ideas. Actually, I think I was saying some damfool thing about how a real writer could come up with a story idea anytime he felt like it, and make it work, too. So my ego was invested in this, just a little bit. The story idea I came up with was, what if a person discovered he had the ability to cause cancer in other people? What if he had had the ability for a long time, but didn’t realize why all the people around him were all dying of cancer?

That was my story—finding out that you had killed people without meaning to. When I actually got down to writing it, of course, I raised the stakes by making it so my hero had killed the people closest to him; I also made him a pretty decent guy. The rest of the story came out of my speculations on how such an ability might arise. I had read a little bit about this doctor in Scandinavia who was trying to promote the body’s ability to heal itself by adjusting the electromagnetic field that surrounds living organisms, so I used that to give the story a pseudoscientific veneer.