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

“Oh, excellent. A son divorcing his father. Not too likely.”

“Or death. As the deliverer. As the fulfillment of your dream. If you die now, you defeat me. As Laios destroyed Oedipus at last.”

Alvin stood up to leave. “This is rank melodrama. Nobody’s going to die because of this.”

“Then why can’t you stop trembling?” asked Joe.

“Because I’m angry, that’s why,” Alvin said. “I’m angry at the way you choose to look at me. I love you more than any other father I know loves his son, and this is the way you choose to view it. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth—”

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. Away, away!”

“Lear, isn’t it? You gave me the script, and now I’m saying the goddamn lines.”

Joe smiled a strange, sphinxlike smile. “It’s a good exit line, though, isn’t it?”

“Joe, I’m not going to leave, and I’m not going to drop dead, either. You’ve told me a lot. Like you said, not the truth, not reality, but the way you see things. That helps, to know how you see things.”

Joe shook his head in despair. “Father, you don’t understand. It was you who put those cards up on the screen. Not I. My reading is completely different. Completely different, but no better.”

“If I’m the King of Swords, who are you?”

“The Hanged Man,” Joe said.

Alvin shook his head. “What an ugly world you choose to live in.”

“Not neat and pretty like yours, not bound about by rules the way yours is. Laws and principles, theories and hypotheses, may they cover your eyes and keep you happy.”

“Joe, I think you need help,” said Alvin.

“Don’t we all,” said Joe.

“So do I. A family counselor maybe. I think we need outside help.”

“I’ve told you what you can do.”

“I’m not going to run away from this, Joe, no matter how much you want me to.”

“You already have. You’ve been running away for months. These are your cards, Father, not mine.”

“Joe, I want to help you out of this—unhappiness.”

Joe frowned. “Father, don’t you understand? The Hanged Man is smiling. The Hanged Man has won.”

Alvin did not go home. He couldn’t face Connie right now, did not want to try to explain what he felt about what Joe had told him. So he went to the laboratory and lost himself for a time in reading records of what was happening with the different subject organisms. Some good results. If it all held up, Alvin Bevis would have taken mankind a long way toward being able to read the DNA chain. There was a Nobel in it. More important still, there was real change. I will have changed the world, he thought. And then there came into his mind the picture of the man holding the world in his hands, looking off into the distance. The Two of Wands. His dream. Joe was right about that. Right about Alvin’s longing for a monument to last forever.

And in a moment of unusual clarity Alvin saw that Joe was right about everything. Wasn’t Alvin even now doing just what the cards called for him to do to save himself, going into hiding with the Eight of Cups? His house was breaking down, all was being undone, and he was setting out on a long journey that would lead him to solitude. Greatness, but solitude.

There was one card that Joe hadn’t worked into his story, however. The Four of Cups. “This answers you,” he had said. The hand of God coming from a cloud. Elijah by the brook. If God were to whisper to me, what would He say?

He would say, Alvin thought, that there is something profoundly wrong, something circular in all that Joe has done. He has synthesized things that no other mind in the world could have brought together meaningfully. He is, as Dr. Fryer said, touching on the borders of Truth. But, by God, there is something wrong, something he has overlooked. Not a mistake, exactly. Simply a place where Joe has not put two true things together in his own life: Stories make us who we are: the tarot program identifies the stories we believe: by hearing the tale of the tarot, we have changed who we are: therefore—

Therefore, no one knows how much of Joe’s tarot story is believed because it is true, and how much becomes true because it is believed. Joe is not a scientist. Joe is a tale-teller. But the gifted, powerful teller of tales soon lives in the world he has created, for as more and more people believe him, his tales become true.

We do not have to be the family of Laios. I do not have to play at being Lear. I can say no to this story, and make it false. Not that Joe could tell any other story, because this is the one that he believes. But I can change what he believes by changing what the cards say, and I can change what the cards say by being someone else.

King of Swords. Imposing my will on others, making them live in the world that my words created. And now my son, too, doing the same. But I can change, and so can he, and then perhaps his brilliance, his insights can shape a better world than the sick one he is making us live in.

And as he grew more excited, Alvin felt himself fill with light, as if the cup had poured into him from the cloud. He believed, in fact, that he had already changed. That he was already something other than what Joe said he was.

The telephone rang. Rang twice, three times, before Alvin reached out to answer it. It was Connie.

“Alvin?” she asked in a small voice.

“Connie,” he said.

“Alvin, Joe called me.” She sounded lost, distant.

“Did he? Don’t worry, Connie, everything’s going to be fine.”

“Oh, I know,” Connie said. “I finally figured it out. It’s the thing that Helen never figured out. It’s the thing that Iocaste never had the guts to do. Enid knew it, though, Enid could do it. I love you, Alvin.” She hung up.

Alvin sat with his hand on the phone for thirty seconds. That’s how long it took him to realize that Connie sounded sleepy. That Connie was trying to change the cards, too. By killing herself.

All the way home in the car, Alvin was afraid that he was going crazy. He kept warning himself to drive carefully, not to take chances. He wouldn’t be able to save Connie if he had an accident on the way. And then there would come a voice that sounded like Joe’s, whispering, That’s the story you tell yourself, but the truth is you’re driving slowly and carefully, hoping she will die so everything will be simple again. It’s the best solution. Connie has solved it all, and you’re being slow so she can succeed, but telling yourself you’re being careful so you can live with yourself after she’s dead.

No, said Alvin again and again, pushing on the accelerator, weaving through the traffic, then forcing himself to slow down, not to kill himself to save two seconds. Sleeping pills weren’t that fast. And maybe he was wrong; maybe she hadn’t taken pills. Or maybe he was thinking that in order to slow himself down so that Connie would die and everything would be simple again—

Shut up, he told himself. Just get there, he told himself.

He got there, fumbled with the key, and burst inside. “Connie!” he shouted.

Joe was standing in the archway between the kitchen and the family room.

“It’s all right,” Joe said. “I got here when she was on the phone to you. I forced her to vomit, and most of the pills hadn’t even dissolved yet.”

“She’s awake?”

“More or less.”

Joe stepped aside, and Alvin walked into the family room. Connie sat on a chair, looking catatonic. But as he came nearer, she turned away, which at once hurt him and relieved him. At least she was not hopelessly insane. So it was not too late for change.