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

I held them in my hands, there in his little room, all ten of them when he spilled them on the bed. To celebrate he jumped up so high he smacked his head on the ceiling again and again, which made them ceiling tiles dance and flip over and spill dust all over the room. “I flashed just one, a single one,” says he, “and a cool million was what he said, and then I said what if ten? And he laughs and says fill in the check yourself.”

“We should test them,” says I.

“We can’t test them,” he says. “The only way to test it is to use it, and if you use it then your print and face are in its memory forever and so we could never sell it.”

“Then sell one, and make sure it’s clean.”

“A package deal,” he says. “If I sell one, and they think I got more by I’m holding out to raise the price, then I may not live to collect for the other nine, because I might have an accident and lose these little babies. I sell all ten tonight at once, and then I’m out of the green card business for life.”

But more than ever that night I am afraid, he’s out selling those greens to those sweet gentlebodies who are commonly referred to as Organic Crime, and there I am on his bed, shivering and dreaming because I know that something will go most deeply wrong but I still don’t know what and I still don’t know why. I keep telling myself, You’re only afraid because nothing could ever go so right for you, you can’t believe that anything could ever make you rich and safe. I say this stuff so much that I believe that I believe it, but I don’t really, not down deep, and so I shiver again and finally I cry, because after all my body still believes I’m nine, and nine-year-olds have tear ducts very easy of access, no password required. Well he comes in late that night, and I’m asleep he thinks, and so he walks quiet instead of dancing, but I can hear the dancing in his little sounds, I know he has the money all safely in the bank, and so when he leans over to make sure if I’m asleep, I say, “Could I borrow a hundred thou?”

So he slaps me and he laughs and dances and sings, and I try to go along, you bet I do, I know I should be happy, but then at the end he says, “You just can’t take it, can you? You just can’t handle it,” and then I cry all over again, and he just puts his arm around me like a movie dad and gives me play-punches on the head and says, “I’m gonna marry me a wife, I am, maybe even Mama Pimple herself, and we’ll adopt you and have a little Spielberg family in Summerfield, with a riding mower on a real grass lawn.”

“I’m older than you or Mama Pimple,” says I, but he just laughs. Laughs and hugs me until he thinks that I’m all right. Don’t go home, he says to me that night, but home I got to go, because I know I’ll cry again, from fear or something, anyway, and I don’t want him to think his cure wasn’t permanent. “No thanks,” says I, but he just laughs at me. “Stay here and cry all you want to, Goo Boy, but don’t go home tonight. I don’t want to be alone tonight, and sure as hell you don’t either.” And so I slept between his sheets, like with a brother, him punching and tickling and pinching and telling dirty jokes about his whores, the most good and natural night I spent in all my life, with a true friend, which I know you don’t believe, snickering and nickering and ickering your filthy little thoughts, there was no holes plugged that night because nobody was out to take pleasure from nobody else, just Dogwalker being happy and wanting me not to be so sad.

And after he was asleep, I wanted so bad to know who it was he sold them to, so I could call them up and say, “Don’t use those greens, cause they aren’t clean. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but the feds are onto this, I know they are, and if you use those cards they’ll nail your fingers to your face.” But if I called would they believe me? They were careful too. Why else did it take a week? They had one of their nothing goons use a card to make sure it had no squeaks or leaks, and it came up clean. Only then did they give the cards to seven big boys, with two held in reserve. Even Organic Crime, the All-seeing Eye, passed those cards same as we did.

I think maybe Dogwalker was a little bit vertical too. I think he knew same as me that something was wrong with this. That’s why he kept checking back with the inside man, cause he didn’t trust how good it was. That’s why he didn’t spend any of his share. We’d sit there eating the same old schlock, out of his cut from some leg job or my piece from a data wipe, and every now and then he’d say, “Rich man’s food sure tastes good.” Or maybe even though he wasn’t vertical he still thought maybe I was right when I thought something was wrong. Whatever he thought, though, it just kept getting worse and worse for me, until the morning when we went to see the inside man and the inside man was gone.

Gone clean. Gone like he never existed. His apartment for rent, cleaned out floor to ceiling. A phone call to the fed, and he was on vacation, which meant they had him, he wasn’t just moved to another house with his newfound wealth. We stood there in his empty place, his shabby empty hovel that was ten times better than anywhere we ever lived, and Doggy says to me, real quiet, he says, “What was it? What did I do wrong? I thought I was like Hunt, I thought I never made a single mistake in this job, in this one job.”

And that was it, right then I knew. Not a week before, not when it would do any good. Right then I finally knew it all, knew what Hunt had done. Jesse Hunt never made mistakes. But he was also so paranoid that he haired his bureau to see if the babysitter stole from him. So even though he would never accidentally enter the wrong P-word, he was just the kind who would do it on purpose. “He doublefingered every time,” I says to Dog. “He’s so damn careful he does his password wrong the first time every time, and then comes in on his second finger.”

“So one time he comes in on the first try, so what?” He says this because he doesn’t know computers like I do, being half-glass myself.

“The system knew the pattern, that’s what. Jesse H. is so precise he never changed a bit, so when we came in on the first try, that set off alarms. It’s my fault, Dog, I knew how crazy paranoidical he is, I knew that something was wrong, but not till this minute I didn’t know what it was. I should have known it when I got his password, I should have known, I’m sorry, you never should have gotten me into this, I’m sorry, you should have listened to me when I told you something was wrong, I should have known, I’m sorry.”

What I done to Doggy that I never meant to do. What I done to him! Anytime, I could have thought of it, it was all there inside my glassy little head, but no, I didn’t think of it till after it was way too late. And maybe it’s because I didn’t want to think of it, maybe it’s because I really wanted to be wrong about the green cards, but however it flew, I did what I do, which is to say I’m not the pontiff in his fancy chair, by which I mean I can’t be smarter than myself.

Right away he called the gentlebens of Ossified Crime to warn them, but I was already plugged into the library sucking news as fast as I could and so I knew it wouldn’t do no good, cause they got all seven of the big boys and their nitwit taster, too, locked up good and tight for card fraud.

And what they said on the phone to Dogwalker made things real clear. “We’re dead,” says Doggy.

“Give them time to cool,” says I.

“They’ll never cool,” says he. “There’s no chance, they’ll never forgive this even if they know the whole truth, because look at the names they gave the cards to, it’s like they got them for their biggest boys on the borderline, the habibs who bribe presidents of little countries and rake off cash from octopods like Shell and ITT and every now and then kill somebody and walk away clean. Now they’re sitting there in jail with the whole life story of the organization in their brains, so they don’t care if we meant to do it or not. They’re hurting, and the only way they know to make the hurt go away is to pass it on to somebody else. And that’s us. They want to make us hurt, and hurt real bad, and for a long long time.”