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

“The palace? What palace?”

“Mikal’s palace—I must go to Mikal—” Ansett tried to get up, but his head spun and he staggered. Hands held him up.

“The kit’s kinky, that’s what.”

“Mikal’s palace.”

“It’s only eighteen kilometer, boy, ya plan to fly?”

The joke brought a burst of laughter, but Ansset impatiently regained control of his body and stood. Whatever drug had kept him unconscious was now nearly worked out of his system. “Find me a policeman,” Ansset said. “Mikal will want to see me immediately.”

Some still laughed, a man’s voice said, “We’ll be sure to tell him you’re here when he comes to my house for supper!” but some others looked carefully at Ansset, realizing he spoke without American accent, and that his bearing was not that of a streetchild, despite his clothing. “Who are you, boy?”

“I’m Ansset. Mikal’s Songbird.”

Then there was silence, and half the crowd rushed off to find the policeman, and the other half stayed to look at him and realize how beautiful his eyes were, to touch him with their own eyes and hold the moment to tell about it to children and grandchildren. Ansset, Mikal’s Songbird, more valuable than all the treasure Mikal owned.

“I touched him myself, helping him up, I held him up.”

“You would’ve fallen, but for me, sir,” said a large strong man bowing ridiculously low.

“Can I shake your hand, sir?”

Ansset smiled at them, not in amusement but in gratitude for their respect for him. “Thank you. You’ve all helped me. Thank you.”

The policeman came, and after apologizing for the dirtiness of his armored eletrecart he lifted Ansset onto the seat and took him to the headquarters, where a flyer from the palace was already settling down on the pad. The Chamberlain leaped from the flyer, along with half a dozen servants, who gingerly touched Ansset and helped him to the flyer. The door slid shut, and Ansset closed his eyes to hide the tears as he felt the ground rush away as the palace came to meet him.

But for two days they kept him away from Mikal. “Quarantine,” they said at first, until Ansset stamped his foot and said, “Nonsense,” and refused to answer any more of the hundreds of questions they kept firing at him from dawn to dark and long after dark. The Chamberlain came.

“What’s this I hear about you not wanting to answer questions, my boy?” asked the Chamberlain with the false joviality that Ansset had long since learned to recognize as a mask for anger or fear.

“I’m not your boy,” Ansset retorted, determined to frighten some cooperation out of the Chamberlain. Now and then it had worked in the past. “I’m Mikal’s and he wants to see me. Why am I being kept like a prisoner?”

“Quaran—”

“Chamberlain, I’m healthier than I’ve ever been before, and these questions don’t have a thing to do with my health.”

“All right,” the Chamberlain said, fluttering his hands with impatience and nervousness. Ansset had once sung to Mikal of the Chamberlain’s hands, and Mikal had laughed for hours at some of the words. “I’ll explain. But don’t get angry at me, because it’s Mikal’s orders.”

“That I be kept away from him?”

“Until you answer the questions! You’ve been in court long enough, Songbird, and you’re surely bright enough to know that Mikal has enemies in this world.”

“I know that. Are you one of them?” Ansset was deliberately goading the Chamberlain, using his voice like a whip in all the ways that made the Chamberlain angry and fretful and so forgetful.

“Hold your tongue, boy!” the Chamberlain said. Ansset inwardly smiled. Victory. “You’re also bright enough to know that you weren’t kidnapped five months ago by any friends of the emperor’s. We have to know everything about your captivity.”

“I’ve told you everything a hundred times over.”

“You haven’t told us how you spent your days.”

Again Ansset felt a stab of emotion. “I don’t remember my days.”

“And that’s why you can’t see Mikal!” the Chamberlain snapped. “Do you think we don’t know what happened? We’ve used the probes and the tasters and no matter how skillfully we question, we can’t get past the blocks. Either the person who worked on your mind laid the blocks very skillfully, or you yourself are holding them locked, and either way we can’t get in.”

“I can’t help it,” Ansset said, realizing now what the questioning meant. “How can you think I mean any danger to Father Mikal.”

The Chamberlain smiled beatifically, in the pose he reserved for polite triumph. “Behind the block, someone may have very carefully planted a command for you to—”

“I’m not an assassin!” Ansset shouted.

“How would you know,” the Chamberlain snarled back. “It’s my duty to protect the person of the emperor. Do you know how many assassination attempts we stop? Dozens, every week. The poison, the treason, the weapons, the traps, that’s what half the people who work here do, is watch everyone who comes in and watch each other too. Most of the assassination attempts are stopped immediately. Some get closer. Yours may be the closest of all.”

“Mikal must want to see me!”

“Of course he does, Ansset! And that’s exactly why you can’t—because whoever worked on your mind must know that you’re the only person that Mikal would allow near him after something like this—Ansset! Ansset, you little fool! Call the Captain of the Guard. Ansset, slow down!”

But the Chamberlain was slowing down with age, and he steadily lost ground to Ansset as the boy darted down the corridors of the palace. Ansset knew all the quickest ways, since exploring the palace was one of the most pleasant of his pastimes, and in five years in Mikal’s service no one knew the labyrinth better than Ansset.

He was stopped routinely at the doors to the Great Hall, and he quickly made his way through the detectors (Poison? No. Metal? No. Energy? No. Identification? Clear.) and he was just about to step through the vast doors when the Captain of the Guard arrived.

“Stop the boy.”

Ansset was stopped.

“Come back here, Songbird,” the Captain barked. But Ansset could see, at the far end of the huge platinum room, the small chair and the whitehaired man who sat on it. Surely Mikal could see him! Surely he’d call!

“Bring the boy back here before he embarrasses everyone by calling out.” Ansset was dragged back. “If you must know, Ansset, Mikal gave me orders to bring you within the hour, even before you made your ridiculous escape from the Chamberlain. But you’ll be searched first. My way.”

Ansset was taken off into one of the search rooms. He was stripped and his clothing was replaced with fresh clothes (that didn’t fit! Ansset thought angrily), and then the searchers’ fingers probed, painfully and deep, every aperture of his body that might hold a weapon. (“No weapon, and your prostate gland’s all right, too,” one of them joked. Ansset didn’t laugh.) Then the needles, probing far under the skin to sample for hidden poisons. A layer of skin was bloodlessly peeled off his palms and the soles of his feet, to be sampled for poisons or flexible plastic needles. The pain was irritating. The delay was excruciating.

But Ansset bore what had to be borne. He only showed anger or impatience when he thought that doing so might gain some good effect. No one, not even Mikal’s Songbird, survived long at court unless he remained in control of his temper, however he had to hide it.

At last Ansset was pronounced clean.

“Wait,” the Captain of the Guard said. “I don’t trust you yet.”

Ansset gave him a long, cold look. But the Captain of the Guard—like the Chamberlain—was one of the few people at court who knew Mikal well enough to know they had nothing to fear from Ansset unless they really treated him unjustly, for Mikal never did favors, not even for the boy, who was the only human being Mikal had ever shown a personal need for. And they knew Ansset well enough to know that he would never ask Mikal to punish someone unfairly, either.