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

If I wasn’t a science fiction reader, per se, why did my impulse toward storytelling come out in science fictional forms? I think it was the same reason that my playwriting impulses always expressed themselves in stories aimed at and arising from the Mormon audience. The possibility of the transcendental is part of it. More important, though—for Mormonism is not a transcendental religion—is the fact that science fiction, like Mormonism, offered a vocabulary for rationalizing the transcendental. That is, within science fiction it is possible to find the meaning of life without resorting to Mystery. I detest Mystery (though I love mysteries); I think it is the name we put on our decision to stop trying to understand. From Joseph Smith I learned to reject any philosophy that requires you to swallow paradox as if it were profound; if it makes no sense, it’s probably hogwash. Within the genre of science fiction, I could shuck off the shackles of realism and make up worlds in which the issues I cared about were clear and powerful. The tale could be told direct. It could be about something.

Since then I have learned ways to make more realistic fiction be about something as well—but not the ways my literature professors tried to teach me. The oblique methods used by contemporary American literateurs are bankrupt because they have forsaken the audience. But there are writers doing outside of science fiction the things that I thought, at the age of twenty-three, could only be done within it. I think of Olive Ann Burns’s Cold Sassy Tree as the marker that informed me that all the so-called Mysteries could still be reached through stories that told of love and sex and death; the need to belong, the hungers of the body, and the search for individual worth; Community, Carnality, Identity. Ultimately, that triad is what all stories are about. The great stories are simply the ones that do it better for a particular audience at a particular place and time. So I’m gradually reaching out to write other stories, outside of both the Mormon and the science fiction communities. But the fact remains that it was in science fiction that I first found it possible to speak to non-Mormons about the things that mattered most to me. That’s why I wrote science fiction, and write science fiction, and will write it for many years to come.

“You will make no speeches,” said the prosecutor. “I didn’t expect they’d let me,” Jerry Crove answered, affecting a confidence he didn’t feel. The prosecutor was not hostile; he seemed more like a high school drama coach than a man who was seeking Jerry’s death.

“They not only won’t let you,” the prosecutor said, “but if you try anything, it will go much worse for you. We have you cold, you know. We don’t need anywhere near as much proof as we have.”

“You haven’t proved anything.”

“We’ve proved you knew about it,” the prosecutor insisted mildly. “No point arguing now. Knowing about treason and not reporting it is exactly equal to committing treason.”

Jerry shrugged and looked away.

The cell was bare concrete. The door was solid steel. The bed was a hammock hung from hooks on the wall. The toilet was a can with a removable plastic seat. There was no conceivable way to escape. Indeed, there was nothing that could conceivably occupy an intelligent person’s mind for more than five minutes. In the three weeks he had been here, he had memorized every crack in the concrete, every bolt in the door. He had nothing to look at, except the prosecutor. Jerry reluctantly met the man’s gaze.

“What do you say when the judge asks you how you plead to the charges?”

“Nolo contendere.”

“Very good. It would be much nicer if you’d consent to say ‘guilty’,” the prosecutor said.

“I don’t like the word.”

“Just remember. Three cameras will be pointing at you. The trial will be broadcast live. To America, you represent all Americans. You must comport yourself with dignity, quietly accepting the fact that your complicity in the assassination of Peter Anderson—”

“Andreyevitch—”

“Anderson has brought you to the point of death, where all depends on the mercy of the court. And now I’ll go have lunch. Tonight we’ll see each other again. And remember. No speeches. Nothing embarrassing.”

Jerry nodded. This was not the time to argue. He spent the afternoon practicing conjugations of Portuguese irregular verbs, wishing that somehow he could go back and undo the moment when he agreed to speak to the old man who had unfolded all the plans to assassinate Andreyevitch. “Now I must trust you,” said the old man. “Temos que confiar no senhor americano. You love liberty, ne?”

Love liberty? Who knew anymore? What was liberty? Being free to make a buck? The Russians had been smart enough to know that if they let Americans make money, they really didn’t give a damn which language the government was speaking. And, in fact, the government spoke English anyway.

The propaganda that they had been feeding him wasn’t funny. It was too true. The United States had never been so peaceful. It was more prosperous than it had been since the Vietnam War boom thirty years before. And the lazy, complacent American people were going about business as usual, as if pictures of Lenin on buildings and billboards were just what they had always wanted.

I was no different, he reminded himself. I sent in my work application, complete with oath of allegiance. I accepted it meekly when they opted me out for a tutorial with a high Party official. I even taught his damnable little children for three years in Rio.

When I should have been writing plays.

But what do I write about? Why not a comedy— The Yankee and the Commissar, a load of laughs about a woman commissar who marries an American blue blood who manufactures typewriters. There are no women commissars, of course, but one must maintain the illusion of a free and equal society.

“Bruce, my dear,” says the commissar in a thick but sexy Russian accent, “your typewriter company is suspiciously close to making a profit.”

“And if it were running at a loss, you’d turn me in, yes, my little noodle?” (Riotous laughs from the Russians in the audience; the Americans are not amused, but then, they speak English fluently and don’t need broad humor. Besides, the reviews are all approved by the Party, so we don’t have to worry about the critics. Keep the Russians happy, and screw the American audience.) Dialogue continues:

“All for the sake of Mother Russia.”

“Screw Mother Russia.”

“Please do,” says Natasha. “Regard me as her personal incarnation.”

Oh, but the Russians do love onstage sex. Forbidden in Russia, of course, but Americans are supposed to be decadent.

I might as well have been a ride designer for Disneyland, Jerry thought. Might as well have written shtick for vaudeville. Might as well go stick my head in an oven. But with my luck, it would be electric.

He may have slept. He wasn’t sure. But the door opened, and he opened his eyes with no memory of having heard footsteps approach. The calm before the storm: and now, the storm.

The soldiers were young, but unSlavic. Slavish, but definitely American. Slaves to the Slavs. Put that in a protest poem sometime, he decided, if only there were someone who wanted to read a protest poem.

The young American soldiers (But the uniforms were wrong. I’m not old enough to remember the old ones, but these are not made for American bodies.) escorted him down corridors, up stairs, through doors, until they were outside and they put him into a heavily armored van. What did they think, he was part of a conspiracy and his fellows would come to save him? Didn’t they know that a man in his position would have no friends by now?