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

“So—you aren’t just being kind to Leyel.”

“Yes, we are. You are, too. Good people are kind.”

“Is that all? Leyel is just one man who’s having trouble?”

“We need him. He isn’t important just to you. He’s important to us.”

“Oh. Oh.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I was so afraid—that I was being selfish—being so worried about him. Taking up your time like this.”

“Well, if that doesn’t—I thought you were beyond surprising me.”

“Our problems were just—our problems. But now they’re not.”

“Is that so important to you? Tell me, Deet—do you really value this community so much?”

“Yes.”

“More than Leyel?”

“No! But enough—that I felt guilty for caring so much about him.”

“Go home, Deet. Just go home.”

“What?”

“That’s where you’d rather be. It’s been showing up in your behavior for two months, ever since Hari’s death. You’ve been nasty and snappish, and now I know why. You resent us for keeping you away from Leyel.”

“No, it was my choice, I—”

“Of course it was your choice! It was your sacrifice for the good of the Second Foundation. So now I’m telling you—healing Leyel is more important to Hari’s plan than keeping up with your day-to-day responsibilities here.”

“You’re not removing me from my position, are you?”

“No. I’m just telling you to ease up. And get Leyel out of the apartment. Do you understand me? Demand it! Reengage him with you, or we’ve all lost him.”

“Take him where?”

“I don’t know. Theater. Athletic events. Dancing.”

“We don’t do those things.”

“Well, what do you do?”

“Research. And then talk about it.”

“Fine. Bring him here to the library. Do research with him. Talk about it.”

“But he’ll meet people here. He’d certainly meet you.”

“Good. Good. I like that. Yes, let him come here.”

“But I thought we had to keep the Second Foundation a secret from him until he’s ready to take part.”

“I didn’t say you should introduce me as First Speaker.”

“No, no, of course you didn’t. What am I thinking of? Of course he can meet you, he can meet everybody.”

“Deet, listen to me.”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“It’s all right to love him, Deet.”

“I know that.”

“I mean, it’s all right to love him more than you love us. More than you love any of us. More than you love all of us. There you are, crying again.”

“I’m so—”

“Relieved.”

“How do you understand me so well?”

“I only know what you show me and what you tell me. It’s all we ever know about each other. The only thing that helps is that nobody can ever lie for long about who they really are. Not even to themselves.”

For two months Leyel followed up on Magolissian’s paper by trying to find some connection between language studies and human origins. Of course this meant weeks of wading through old, useless point-of-origin studies, which kept indicating that Trantor was the focal point of language throughout the history of the Empire, even though nobody seriously put forth Trantor as the planet of origin. Once again, though, Leyel rejected the search for a particular planet; he wanted to find out regularities, not unique events, Leyel hoped for a clue in the fairly recent work—only two thousand years old—of Dagawell Kispitorian. Kispitorian came from the most isolated area of a planet called Artashat, where there were traditions that the original settlers came from an earlier world named Armenia, now uncharted. Kispitorian grew up among mountain people who claimed that long ago, they spoke a completely different language. In fact, the title of Kispitorian’s most interesting book was No Man Understood Us; many of the folk tales of these people began with the formula “Back in the days when no man understood us…”

Kispitorian had never been able to shake off this tradition of his upbringing, and as he pursued the field of dialect formation and evolution, he kept coming across evidence that at one time the human species spoke not one but many languages. It had always been taken for granted that Galactic Standard was the up-to-date version of the language of the planet of origin—that while a few human groups might have developed dialects, civilization was impossible without mutually intelligible speech. But Kispitorian had begun to suspect that Galactic Standard did not become the universal human language until after the formation of the Empire—that, in fact, one of the first labors of the Imperium was to stamp out all other competing languages. The mountain people of Artashat believed that their language had been stolen from them. Kispitorian eventually devoted his life to proving they were right.

He worked first with names, long recognized as the most conservative aspect of language. He found that there were many separate naming traditions, and it was not until about the year 6000 GE that all were finally amalgamated into one Empire-wide stream. What was interesting was that the farther back he went, the more complexity he found.

Because certain worlds tended to have unified traditions, and so the simplest explanation of this was the one he first put forth—that humans left their home world with a unified language, but the normal forces of language separation caused each new planet to develop its own offshoot, until many dialects became mutually unintelligible. Thus, different languages would not have developed until humanity moved out into space; this was one of the reasons why the Galactic Empire was necessary to restore the primeval unity of the species.

Kispitorian called his first and most influential book Tower of Confusion, using the widespread legend of the Tower of Babble as an illustration. He supposed that this story might have originated in that pre-Empire period, probably among the rootless traders roaming from planet to planet, who had to deal on a practical level with the fact that no two worlds spoke the same language. These traders had preserved a tradition that when humanity lived on one planet, they all spoke the same language. They explained the linguistic confusion of their own time by recounting the tale of a great leader who built the first “tower,” or starship, to raise mankind up into heaven. According to the story, “God” punished these upstart people by confusing their tongues, which forced them to disperse among the different worlds. The story presented the confusion of tongues as the cause of the dispersal instead of its result, but cause-reversal was a commonly recognized feature of myth. Clearly this legend preserved a historical fact.

So far, Kispitorian’s work was perfectly acceptable to most scientists. But in his forties he began to go off on wild tangents. Using controversial algorithms—on calculators with a suspiciously high level of processing power—he began to tear apart Galactic Standard itself, showing that many words revealed completely separate phonetic traditions, incompatible with the mainstream of the language. They could not comfortably have evolved within a population that regularly spoke either Standard or its primary ancestor language. Furthermore, there were many words with clearly related meanings that showed they had once diverged according to standard linguistic patterns and then were brought together later, with different meanings or implications. But the time scale implied by the degree of change was far too great to be accounted for in the period between humanity’s first settlement of space and the formation of the Empire. Obviously, claimed Kispitorian, there had been many different languages on the planet of origin; Galactic Standard was the first universal human language. Throughout all human history, separation of language had been a fact of life; only the Empire had had the pervasive power to unify speech.