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

The party was fun and noisy and all the adults played games and talked and ate the store-bought dessert and said thank you for the wonderful evening and went home.

Then Mother and Father talked quietly for a few minutes and they decided that Father would go up and talk to Susan.

Father knocked on the door. “May I come in?” he asked.

“Certainly,” answered a voice.

Father came in.

“Susan, I want to talk to you for a couple of minutes.”

Susan turned around on her chair and looked at him in dignified surprise. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but you must have the wrong address. There is no Susan here.”

Father looked at her for a moment and said, “I’m afraid I must have been given the wrong address. Who does live here?”

“No one lives here. This is the office and studio and den of Gert Fram, the world-famous author.”

Father smiled. “I’ve never been in the office and studio and den of a world-famous author before.”

“Well, you needn’t ask for an autograph,” Gert Fram replied. “I gave up signing autographs years ago. It was such a bother.”

“I don’t want an autograph,” Father said. “I think I want an exclusive interview.”

Gert Fram tilted her head. “For that, I’m afraid you’ll need to consult my agent. I never grant interviews on the spur of the moment.”

Father looked at the floor. “You’re not making this very easy for me,” he said.

A funny look passed across Susan’s face, but it was Gert Fram who answered him.

“That’s because it shouldn’t be any easier for you than it is for me,” she said disdainfully. “Fair is fair and right is right. Besides, I know what you’re really here for.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. You’re like all the others. You want a sneak preview of my latest novel.”

“I don’t really think that’s why I came up here, Susan,” Father said.

“Oh, you’ll definitely want to read it when you hear the title. It’s called Susan the Jerk.”

This time it was Father’s face that got the funny look. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I really do want to read it.”

Susan handed him the book with a shaking hand. Gert Fram’s voice was steady, however, when she said, “I knew it would work. My titles are irresistible.”

Father sat on the bed and read Susan the Jerk from the beginning to the end. He looked at the picture of the rocket ship crashing into the sun for a long time.

When he looked up at Susan, he saw Gert Fram watching him carefully, one eyebrow raised. Father sighed.

“Gert Fram, you’re a fine author and I’m very impressed with your book. But there’s been a terrible mistake made here. I really came to this address to see somebody else. You see, I respect you and admire you but you’re just not in my class, Miss Fram. I was looking for a woman named Susan Parker. I wanted to tell her that I’m sorry that I’ve been cross with her. I wanted to tell Susan Parker that her father and her mother love her so much that when they know she’s unhappy and it’s their fault, they feel terrible until they can make it right. Can you pass that message along for us?”

“I hardly run a messenger service here,” Gert Fram answered. But then her voice cracked and she said, “But I’ll try to let her know. I don’t think she’ll believe that message, though.”

Father bowed his head. “I hope she believes it. Because Susan just might be thinking right now that she’s a jerk. And it just isn’t true. She’s a wonderful person. It’s just that her parents and her brother and sisters are so used to having her around that they forget how wonderful she is. They forget to treat her like a wonderful person. But oh, Miss Fram, if they ever lost Susan they’d miss her so much—”

And suddenly Susan realized that the reason that Father had stopped talking was because he was crying. She had never seen her father cry before. And he was crying because he loved Susan Parker so much and right then Gert Fram disappeared and Susan Parker was back and she was crying and hugging her father but mostly letting him hug her. He was saying, “My little girl, my little girl.”

Finally Susan said, very softly, “I’m not a little girl, Father.”

Father took her by the shoulders and held her away from him a little and looked into her eyes. He looked a long time into her eyes and then he smiled, even though he still had tears, and he said, “You’re absolutely right. And to think I didn’t realize it until this moment.”

Then they both said a lot of things and didn’t say other things and went downstairs for family prayer. Then Mother and Father kissed Susan good-night and she went back upstairs. She undressed for bed and said her prayers and got under the covers and turned off the light.

A few minutes later she turned the light back on and got up and went to the desk. She picked up the book Susan the Jerk and turned it over and on the last page, in little letters where there was still some space left, right after where it said, “boy that Susan is sure a jerk,” she wrote:

“But whenever they said that, Susan’s father said, you better watch it, that’s my dauter you’re talking about, and they didn’t say it anymore.”

That was a better ending to the novel. Susan turned off the light and went to sleep. In the morning she would realize that she had never washed the jello dessert off her elbows and it was now all over her bedroom, but tonight it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter in the morning.

These works share a common fate—they were killed commercially by the publication of a novel that superseded them. Not long ago I wrote an essay about this process for Foundation, a British literary journal about speculative fiction, and that essay will serve as a complete afterword to those stories in this collection. So here it is:

I never set out on a regular program of turning my old novelettes and novellas into novels. At the time I wrote most of my shorter works, I thought they were just right at that length. Yet somehow the expansion of old stories has become a regular feature of my career.

My novel Songmaster was built from the novelette “Mikal’s Songbird.” Hart’s Hope began life as a novella of the same name. Wyrms was originally written as the novella “Unwyrm.” Eight years before Ender’s Game was published as a novel, the novelette of that name was my first published science fiction story.

In fact, I’ve gone even further—I find myself revising my old books. My first novel, Hot Sleep, and my first book, the collection Capitol, were replaced by the 1983 novel The Worthing Chronicle; it, in turn, will be included in the megabook Worthing Complete sometime in the next few years. Recently St. Martin’s Press brought out Treason, a reworking of my second novel, A Planet Called Treason.

What’s going on here? Is all this meddling with dead works a sort of resurrection or is it literary necrophilia? Am I making silk purses out of sows’ ears, or am I so short of new ideas that I have to go back to what I did in bygone years? Am I a modest fellow who, in learning new skills, discovers the inadequacies of early work and tries to repair them, or am I so narcissistic that I find my past works too fascinating to ignore?

Maybe all of those things, or none of them. Each one of these expansions and rewrites came about in its own way, not because of any plan of mine, so I doubt they have any meaning in the aggregate. But perhaps an account of how these stories were transformed over time will have some value in understanding why they are the way they are.