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

Ansset sang to him of hope.

“There’s no hope. I have fifty sons, three of them legitimate, all of them fools who try to flatter me. They couldn’t keep the empire for a week, not all of them, not any of them. There’s not a man I’ve met in all my life who could control what I’ve built in my lifetime. When I die, it all dies with me.” And Mikal sank to the floor wearily.

For once Ansset did not sing. Instead he jumped to his feet, the floor turning firm under him. He raised an arm above his head, and said, “For you, Father Mikal, I’ll grow up to be strong! Your empire shall not fall!” He spoke with such grandeur in his childish speaking voice that both he and Mikal had to laugh.

“It’s true, though,” Mikal said, tousling the child’s hair. “For you I’d do it, I’d give you the empire, except they’d kill you. And even if I lived long enough to train you to be a ruler of men, I wouldn’t do it. The man who will be my heir must be cruel and vicious and sly and wise, completely selfish and ambitious, contemptuous of all other people, brilliant in battle, able to outguess and outmaneuver every enemy, and strong enough inside himself to live utterly alone all his life.” Mikal smiled. “Even 7 don’t fit my list of qualifications, because now I’m not utterly alone.”

And then, as Mikal drifted off to sleep, Ansset sang to him of his captivity, the songs and words of his time of loneliness in captivity, and as the men on the ship had wept, so Mikal wept, only more. Then they both slept.

A few days later Mikal, Ansset, the Chamberlain, and the Captain of the Guard met in Mikal’s small receiving room, where a solid block of clear glass as perfect as a lens stretched as a meters-long table from one end of the room to the other. They gathered at one end. The Chamberlain was adamant.

“Ansset is a danger to you, my Lord.”

The Captain of the Guard was equally adamant. “We found the conspirators and killed them all.”

The Chamberlain rolled his eyes heavenward in disgust.

The Captain of the Guard became angry, though he kept the fact hidden behind heavy-lidded eyes. “It all fit—the accent that Ansset told us they had, the wooden ship, calling each other freemen, their emotionalism—they could have been no one else but the Freemen of Eire. Just another nationalist group, but they have a lot of sympathizers here in America—damn these ‘nations,’ where but on old Earth would people subdivide their planet and think the subdivisions meant anything.”

“So you went in and wiped them all out,” the Chamberlain sneered, “and not one of them had any knowledge of the plot.”

“Anyone who could block out the Songbird’s mind as well as he did can hide a conspiracy like that!” the Captain of the Guard snapped back.

“Our enemy is subtle,” the Chamberlain said. “He kept everything else from Ansset’s knowledge—so why did he let him have all these clues that steered us to Eire? I think we were given bait and you bit. Well, I haven’t bitten yet, and I’m still looking.”

“In the meantime,” Mikal said, “try to avoid harassing Ansset too much.”

“I don’t mind,” Ansset hurriedly said, though he minded very much: the constant searches, the frequent interrogations, the hypnotherapy, the guards who followed him constantly to keep him from meeting with anyone.

“I mind,” Mikal said. “It’s good for you to keep watch, because we still don’t know what they’ve done to Ansset’s mind. But in the meantime, let Ansset’s life be worth living.” Mikal glared pointedly at the Captain of the Guard, who got up and left. Then Mikal turned to the Chamberlain and said, “I don’t like how easily the Captain was fooled by such an obvious ploy. Keep up your investigation. And tell me anything your spies within the Captain’s forces might have to say.”

The Chamberlain tried for a moment to protest that he had no such spies—but Mikal laughed until the Chamberlain gave up and promised to complete a report.

“My days are numbered,” Mikal said to Ansset. “Sing to me of numbered days.” And so Ansset sang him a playful song about a man who decided to live for two hundred years and so counted his age backward, by the number of years he had left. “And he died when he was only eighty-three,” Ansset sang, and Mikal laughed and tossed another log on the fire. Only an emperor or a peasant in the protected forests of Siberia could afford to burn wood.

Then one day Ansset, as he wandered through the palace, noticed a different direction and a quickened pace to the hustling and bustling of servants down the halls. He went to the Chamberlain.

“Try to keep quiet about it,” the Chamberlain said. “You’re coming with us, anyway.”

And within an hour Ansset rode beside Mikal in an armored car as a convoy swept out of Capital. The roads were kept clear, and in an hour and fifteen minutes the armored car stopped. Ansset bounded out of the hatchway. He was startled to see that the entire convoy was missing, and only the single armored car remained. He immediately suspected treachery, and looked down at Mikal in fright.

“Don’t worry,” Mikal said. “We sent the convoy on.”

They got out of the car and with a dozen picked guards (not from the palace guard, Ansset noticed) they made their way through a sparse wood, along a stream, and finally to the banks of a huge river.

“The Delaware,” whispered the Chamberlain to Ansset, who had already guessed as much.

“Keep your esoterica to yourself,” Mikal said, sounding irritable, which meant he was enjoying himself immensely. He hadn’t been a part of any kind of planetside military operation in forty years, ever since he became an emperor and had to control fleets and planets instead of a few ships and a thousand men. There was a spring to his step that belied his century and a quarter.

Finally the Chamberlain stopped. “That’s the house, and that’s the boat.”

A flatboat was moored on the river by a shambling wooden house that looked like it had been built during the American colonial revival over a hundred years before.

They crept up on the house, but it was empty, and when they rushed the flatboat the only man on board aimed a laser at his own face and blasted it to a cinder. Not before Ansset had recognized him, though.

“That was Husk,” Ansset said, feeling sick as he looked at the ruined corpse. Inexplicably, he felt a nagging guilt. “He’s the man who fed me.”

Then Mikal and Chamberlain followed Ansset through the boat. “It’s not the same,” Ansset said.

“Of course not,” said the Chamberlain. “The paint is fresh. And there’s a smell of new wood. They’ve been remodeling. But is there anything familiar?”

There was. Ansset found a tiny room that could have been his cell, though now it was painted bright yellow and a new window let sunlight flood into the room. Mikal examined the windowframe. “New,” the emperor pronounced. And by trying to imagine the interior of the flatboat as it might have been unpainted, Ansset was able to find the large room where he had sung his last evening in captivity. There was no table. But the room seemed the same size, and Ansset agreed that this could very well have been the place he was held.

Down in the ship they heard the laughter of children and a passing eletrecart that clattered along the bumpy old asphalt road. The Chamberlain laughed. “Sorry I took you the long way. It’s really quite a populated area. I just wanted to be sure they didn’t have time to be warned.”

Mikal curled his lip. “If it’s a populated area we should have arrived in a bus. A group of armed men walking along a river are much more conspicuous.”

“I’m not a tactician,” said the Chamberlain.