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

Maybe I do hallucinate, he thought. The idea frightened him.

The FBI man came back after about an hour.

“What did Maynard die of?” Reuben asked, jumping to his feet.

“Nothing,” said the man. “He’s not dead. I mean, he is, of course,” he caught himself, seeing the look of hope that Reuben couldn’t hide. “But there’s no reason in the world that the dog should be dead. Perfect shape. Good for years. Not an injury.”

“But dead anyway,” said another man who came through the door. Reuben hadn’t met him before.

“He’s The Boss,” the FBI man said, “and he wants to have a talk.” The Boss smiled. Reuben did not smile. The FBI man left the room.

Reuben and The Boss had a talk. During the talk Reuben figured out that nothing had happened down in southern Utah, that the whole thing was either called off or was so subtle that nobody saw it. The FBI was hunting for straws, because they did have the microfilm, and it had to mean something.

“Ideas?” The Boss asked.

“You’re asking me for ideas?” Reuben asked.

“Is there anyone else in the room?” The Boss asked.

“What kind of great ideas do you think I can give you when you’ve been trying so hard not to tell me that nothing happened down in Enterprise and that you don’t know what’s going on?” Reuben said with a look that made The Boss feel a little weak.

“So you can read between the lines,” The Boss whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Reuben asked.

“Get off my back for a minute,” The Boss said. “In my line of work we meet guys with brains about once every twenty years. Everybody else is a cop, a crook, or a congressman.”

“So let’s trade some secrets,” Reuben said, feeling, for some reason, a little less contempt for The Boss than he felt toward everyone else.

“All right,” The Boss agreed.

“You first,” Reuben said.

“Okay,” The Boss said, sighing. “So much for Top Secret. Right, nothing happened in Enterprise, even though everything pointed to it, and so we figure that either they were on to you, in which case why the hell did they have another rendezvous in the park today, or else the whole thing was a sham and they wanted someone to find out about Enterprise so we’d all go there while the real thing happened someplace else. In which case we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“And you want ideas,” Reuben said.

“You said we’d trade secrets,” The Boss said,

“All right,” Reuben said. “How’s this? Maybe it was a sham, like you said, only not to keep you from noticing something happening at the same time someplace else, but to keep you from noticing that it already happened awhile ago.”

The Boss looked at him. “Like?”

“Like you’re running around this time and maybe next time and maybe the time after, trying to find where the enemy is going to land—all the time not noticing that they’re already here and working right where you won’t notice them—under your noses.”

The Boss looked interested. “So if they can do that, what’ve they been waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” Reuben said, “unless maybe there aren’t very many of them, and they need to get up an organization, or else maybe they’re weak, and they have to divide us in order to take over. I don’t know. But I think they’re here.”

And then Reuben told The Boss about the way the woman in the park never seemed to touch the Auerbach’s package. “And the way Maynard died. My dog. Just bit her and then dropped dead.”

“Interesting theory,” The Boss said. “In fact it holds up pretty well, just the sort of devious thing we might expect. Except for one thing.”

“Yeah?” asked Reuben.

“We know who the lady is. Birth certificate, lots of relatives, no way she could be a plant, already thirty years old when the enemy ships came. Sorry. Just an ordinary Earth-type traitor.”

“Was she ever bit by a dog before?” Reuben asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?” The Boss asked.

“Because unless it’s ordinary for certain people to cause dogs to drop dead without an injury, then she isn’t ordinary. She’s changed, right?”

The Boss smiled. “Very good, Reuben,” he said. “We’ll check it out.”

Reuben shook his head. “Promise me something.”

The Boss said, “What in particular? Some promises I can’t make.”

“Promise me you’ll tell me what happens.”

On the way out Reuben stopped by Maynard’s corpse in the autopsy rooms. The body was kind of a mess, and Reuben did not touch Maynard’s fur.

“Want us to take care of this for you?” The Boss asked.

“Yeah,” Reuben said.

Three months later they told him what happened, and as Reuben had announced on his birthday, it was his lucky year. He got to meet the president of the United States and shake his hand and wear a medal, none of which impressed him much. He got to have his picture in every newspaper in the country, along with pictures of the people he had followed who turned out to be the enemy, which didn’t thrill him either.

However, he also got to go home.

His father wasn’t happy about it and Reuben noticed that there were new locks on all the bedroom doors, but Reuben just thought Suck Rocks and talked to his mother for an hour or two alone just to bug his father. They quarreled a lot, Reuben and his father. And his mother really didn’t understand him any better than she ever had. But all in all it beat hell out of the government-owned apartment and there were other compensations.

It turned out that the enemy was a very intelligent but not-too-tough marsh gas sort of thing, only about six of them, and they had to take over human bodies—curious people, who came too close—in order to do anything at all. And once they were in a human body, when the body died so did they. So—firing squads (Utah law) and the problem was over. The ships continued to circle around the Earth, but after a few months some air force shuttleships with heavy rockets shot them down. All the ships defenses, impregnable a few months before, were gone, and the ships fell into the Sargasso Sea.

It was on Reuben’s thirteenth birthday that he realized his lucky year was over. That was the day they took away his purple card and he had to start carrying money and asking permission. But he didn’t mind all that much. It was kind of fun.

The day after his thirteenth birthday his mother and father took him to the park. Out at the car, Reuben’s father remembered the camera.

“It’s upstairs in my closet,” his father said, and Reuben ran back up the asphalt path. He stopped just inside the front door. He bowed his head a moment, reached out his hand, and waited.

The camera materialized in his palm.

He opened his eyes, looked at the camera, smiled, and ran back outside, being careful to lock the door behind him as his father always asked. Then he skipped down the sidewalk, conversing with the stranger in his mind, who followed him far more closely than he would have thought possible back in the old days when he was a child, and still human.

Mort, he says to me, “Runt, you wanna bicycle, you gotta figure out how to get the money.” “Thanks,” I says. “Hey, Mort, you’re a real pal, I knew that already.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Mort, “I forgot, you got all the brains in the family.”

We always talk like that. I’d kill anybody else called me Runt, and he’d kill anybody else called him Mort, but we can’t kill each other, we’re brothers. Oh, every now and then he pounds the crap out of me, but these days he bleeds pretty bad before I call uncle and so he don’t fight me too much. Everybody else calls him Butch and me Ernie.