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

Because I had thought of the story on the way to Roanoke, and because I first publicly discussed the idea at that convention, I tipped my hat to the folks there by setting part of the story in their town, which has an extraordinarily beautiful setting in the mountains of western Virginia. The rest of the story arose from that setting. What if the gift arose from a bunch of serious inbreeding in a remote mountain community? And how would good mountain people interpret it if they found all their enemies just naturally dying of cancer? They’d know it had to be either God or the devil doing it, and, given a choice, they’d be bound to settle on God. I decided that they’d consider themselves to be a chosen people, which is why they only bred with each other—but since each generation would have a few kids with more and more intense power to disturb other people’s magnetic fields, being their parents would be downright dangerous. So of course, like legendary cuckoos, they’d put them in somebody else’s home to raise, only coming to claim them when they’d found out about their powers and had learned to control them.

Add a group of unbelievers who split off from the group, and you’ve got “Eye for Eye.”

I sent the story around when I first wrote it, even though it didn’t really feel finished. Everybody rejected it, partly because it was too long; but the nicest letter came from Stan Schmidt at Analog, who suggested that he might buy it if the scientific justification were beefed up.

Years later I ran across a copy of the story, with Stan’s letter. I had forgotten that it even existed. Looking through it, I decided the idea had some merit, and rewrote it from beginning to end. This time the structure worked better, because I set it up as a first-person account as the boy tried to persuade the unbelievers not to kill him. And, because he had asked for revisions, I sent it to Stan. Alas, he still didn’t like it; but by this time, Gardner Dozois was editing Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, so I asked Stan to send it down the hall to Gardner. Gardner bought it at once and published it. To my surprise, “Eye for Eye” won both the Hugo and, in translation, the Japanese science fiction award as well.

Fred Saberhagen had let it be known in Locus and elsewhere that he was editing an anthology called A Spadeful of Spacetime, which would consist of stories that involved archaeology but did not involve time travel. He wanted stories that connected with the past the way science did it, not using the magic trick of a time machine.

I thought about this for quite a while. I loved archaeology—I had begun college as an archaeology major. But how could a story be science fiction about exploring the past without using time travel? I came up with a couple of ideas, but the one that interested me most was the idea of anti-archaeologists—people going around erasing the evidence of the past. Maybe there had been many high civilizations on Earth in the million-year history of modern man, but each one ended with blood and horror—and with the invention of a machine that could break down human artifacts and return them to their original, natural materials. The machine itself is a pretty hokey idea that doesn’t bear close examination, but the human motivations behind the complete destruction of the past are both believable and interesting.

Why, though, did it take a religious bent? In a way, that was a natural turn of the idea, because any idea that can cause such systematic transformation of human life has to end up being religious in character—much the way Communism absolutely functioned as a religion during its first ascendancy in Eastern Europe and the Far East. But there was another influence as well. I was working with some of the great old English writers in graduate school at the time, and Chaucer and Spenser were favorites of mine. I was playing with some of the forms they had used—I started a “Pedant’s Calendar” after Spenser’s “Shepherds’ Calendar,” and my epic “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow” contained deliberate echoes of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Likewise, I had toyed with the idea of doing a story cycle about pilgrims on their way to a shrine, in imitation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. That idea went nowhere, but somewhere in the process of planning out this story the title “St. Amy’s Tale” came to me. From there, it was an easy matter to introduce a religious overtone, a feeling of holiness and sacrifice to the whole series of events. I thought it made the story far richer and truer to itself.

This is the story that readers over the years have found most disturbing and unpleasant. My critics have come up with all kinds of reasons to hate it—including, absurdly enough, a feminist reading of the story in which it was deduced that I “relished” the scene in which a breast is cut off. (One wonders about the mind of someone who thinks that writers “relish” all the scenes they write. Poor bloody-handed Shakespeare!) But once I thought of the idea, it was one of the most inevitable stories I ever told—and one of the most powerful and true.

The origin of the idea was simple. It owed a bit to Damon Knight’s classic story that became the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man.” The idea of aliens who eat human beings is as old as sci-fi. But what about a story in which a human being persuades the invaders not to kill their victims, but rather to harvest them limb by limb? Would that person be a savior or a torturer? In my mind this idea was linked with the Jews in death camps who were forced into service as body-handlers, fully aware of the slaughter of their own people and, while not directly killing anybody, cooperating with the killers by cleaning up after them. And yet, when you look at it another way, there was something noble in their helpless labor, for as they fed the bodies into the furnace, weren’t they performing for the dead those last rituals that are usually performed by family? And wasn’t it better that it was done by fellow Jews, fellow prisoners, who mourned their deaths, than to have it done by sneering members of the master race? It’s an area of unbearable moral ambiguity—and that’s what I strove for in “Kingsmeat.”

I think it’s interesting that when Gene Wolfe set out to create a Christ-figure in his Book of the New Sun, he also made his protagonist begin as an apprentice torturer, so that the one who suffered and died to save others is depicted as one who also inflicts suffering; it is a way to explicitly make the Christ-figure take upon himself, in all innocence, the darkest sins of the world. I didn’t plan that out consciously, but I saw it clearly in Wolfe’s work and then, by extension, found the same thing happening in mine. That’s about the only resemblance between Wolfe’s seminal work and my little tale—but I’m glad for any resemblances to the great ones that I can get!

This story began with a simple enough idea—a challenge, really. Could I write a story that made something as despised and disdained as human excrement seem holy? To accomplish it, I needed to have a point-of-view character who would represent the American reader’s habitual disgust for human feces, and then bring him bit by bit to accept another culture’s view, until at last he, too, felt that the “meaningless” mission of bringing intestinal scrapings to a particular shrine was worth dying for. Though at the time I wrote this story I would not have stated it so clearly, I was already caught up with the idea that it is story and ritual that give meaning to our actions.