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

I’m like the information that was lost in all those neglected archives. Disappearing bit by bit, unnoticed, until all that’s left is just a little bit of noise in people’s memories. Then, finally, nothing. Blank.

Self-pitying fool. That’s what happens to everyone, in the long run. Even Had Seldon—someday he’ll be forgotten, sooner rather than later, if Chen has his way. We all die. We’re all lost in the passage of time. The only thing that lives on after us is the new shape we’ve given to the communities we lived in. There are things that are known because I said them, and even though people have forgotten who said it, they’ll go on knowing. Like the story Rinjy was telling—she had forgotten, if she ever knew it, that Deet was the librarian in the original tale. But still she remembered the tale. The community of librarians was different because Deet had been among them. They would be a little different, a little braver, a little stronger, because of Deet. She had left traces of herself in the world.

And then, again, there came that flash of insight, that sudden understanding of the answer to a question that had long been troubling him.

But in the moment that Leyel realized that he held the answer, the answer slipped away. He couldn’t remember it. You’re asleep, he said silently. You only dreamed that you understood the origin of humanity. That’s the way it is in dreams—the truth is always so beautiful, but you can never hold on to it.

“How is he taking it, Deet?”

“Hard to say. Well, I think. He was never much of a wanderer anyway.”

“Come now, it can’t be that simple.”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

“Tell me.”

“The social things—those were easy. We rarely went anyway, but now people don’t invite us. We’re politically dangerous. And the few things we had scheduled got canceled or, um, postponed. You know—we’ll call you as soon as we have a new date.”

“He doesn’t mind this?”

“He likes that part. He always hated those things. But they’ve canceled his speeches. And the lecture series on human ecology.”

“A blow.”

“He pretends not to mind. But he’s brooding.”

“Tell me.”

“Works all day, but he doesn’t read it to me any more, doesn’t make me sit down at the lector the minute I get home. I think he isn’t writing anything.”

“Doing nothing?”

“No. Reading. That’s all.”

“Maybe he just needs to do research.”

“You don’t know Leyel. He thinks by writing. Or talking. He isn’t doing either.”

“Doesn’t talk to you?”

“He answers. I try to talk about things here at the library, his answers are—what? Glum. Sullen.”

“He resents your work?”

“That’s not possible. Leyel has always been as enthusiastic about my work as about his own. And he won’t talk about his own work, either. I ask him, and he says nothing.”

“Not surprising.”

“So it’s all right?”

“No. It’s just not surprising.”

“What is it? Can’t you tell me?”

“What good is telling you? It’s what we call ILS—Identity Loss Syndrome. It’s identical to the passive strategy for dealing with loss of body parts.”

“ILS. What happens in ILS?”

“Deet, come on, you’re a scientist. What do you expect? You’ve just described Leyel’s behavior, I tell you that it’s called ILS, you want to know what ILS is, and what am I going to do?”

“Describe Leyel’s behavior back to me. What an idiot I am.”

“Good, at least you can laugh.”

“Can’t you tell me what to expect?”

“Complete withdrawal from you, from everybody. Eventually he becomes completely antisocial and starts to strike out. Does something self-destructive—like making public statements against Chen, that’d do it.”

“No!”

“Or else he severs his old connections, gets away from you, and reconstructs himself in a different set of communities.”

“This would make him happy?”

“Sure. Useless to the Second Foundation, but happy. It would also turn you into a nasty-tempered old crone, not that you aren’t one already, mind you.”

“Oh, you think Leyel’s the only thing keeping me human?”

“Pretty much, yes. He’s your safety valve.”

“Not lately.”

“I know.”

“Have I been so awful?”

“Nothing that we can’t bear. Deet, if we’re going to be fit to govern the human race someday, shouldn’t we first learn to be good to each other?”

“Well, I’m glad to provide you all with an opportunity to test your patience.”

“You should be glad. We’re doing a fine job so far, wouldn’t you say?”

“Please. You were teasing me about the prognosis, weren’t you?”

“Partly. Everything I said was true, but you know as well as I do that there are as many different ways out of a B-B syndrome as there are people who have them.”

“Behavioral cause, behavioral effect. No little hormone shot, then?”

“Deet. He doesn’t know who he is.”

“Can’t I help him?”

“Yes.”

“What? What can 1 do?”

“This is only a guess, since I haven’t talked to him.”

“Of course.”

“You aren’t home much.”

“I can’t stand it there, with him brooding all the time.”

“Fine. Get him out with you.”

“He won’t go.”

“Push him.”

“We barely talk. I don’t know if I even have any leverage over him.”

“Deet. You’re the one who wrote, ‘Communities that make few or no demands on their members cannot command allegiance. All else being equal, members who feel most needed have the strongest allegiance.’ ”

“You memorized that?”

“Psychohistory is the psychology of populations, but populations can only be quantified as communities. Seldon’s work on statistical probabilities only worked to predict the future within a generation or two until you first published your community theories. That’s because statistics can’t deal with cause and effect. Stats tell you what’s happening, never why, never the result. Within a generation or two, the present statistics evaporate, they’re meaningless, you have whole new populations with new configurations. Your community theory gave us a way of predicting which communities would survive, which would grow, which would fade. A way of looking across long stretches of time and space.”

“Hari never told me he was using community theory in any important way.”

“How could he tell you that? He had to walk a tightrope—publishing enough to get psychohistory taken seriously, but not so much that anybody outside the Second Foundation could ever duplicate or continue his work. Your work was a key—but he couldn’t say so.”

“Are you just saying this to make me feel better?”

“Sure. That’s why I’m saying it. But it’s also true—since lying to you wouldn’t make you feel better, would it? Statistics are like taking cross sections of the trunk of a tree. It can tell you a lot about its history. You can figure how healthy it is, how much volume the whole tree has, how much is root and how much is branch. But what it can’t tell you is where the tree will branch, and which branches will become major, which minor, and which will rot and fall off and die.”

“But you can’t quantify communities, can you? They’re just stories and rituals that bind people together—”

“You’d be surprised what we can quantify. We’re very good at what we do, Deet. Just as you are. Just as Leyel is.”

“Is his work important? After all, human origin is only a historical question.”

“Nonsense, and you know it. Leyel has stripped away the historical issues and he’s searching for the scientific ones. The principles by which human life, as we understand it, is differentiated from nonhuman. If he finds that—don’t you see, Deet? The human race is re-creating itself all the time, on every world, in every family, in every individual. We’re born animals, and we teach each other how to be human. Somehow. It matters that we find out how. It matters to psychohistory. It matters to the Second Foundation. It matters to the human race.”