Orson Card - Wyrms

"I was afraid of King Oruc, of course."

"You never were afraid of him. And lying does you no good-see what the headworms do with you?"

Abruptly he changed tactics. He smiled, and wryly said, "Even the headkeeper had some mercy. Now I feel like I've been constipated for a month and a diarrhea attack is beginning. You have no idea how bad these worms can be."

"Tell me now and have your ease."

Lightly he said, as if it didn't matter, "I feared the call to Cranning. It was the caller that I shouted at, whoever it was."

"Who else could it be but the gebling king?" asked Patience.

"Oh, you think you've solved it?"

"Angel told me that the gebling kings have always been able to command their people without a word. From mind to mind."

"Did Angel tell you that this power of the geblings has never touched a human being? We're deaf as a post when the geblings cry out to each other."

"The Cranning call-if it isn't the geblings, who is it, and why do you fear it?"

"I don't know who it is, but I fear him. I fear what he can do to people. The Wise of Grandfather's day were brilliant and strong, the greatest minds in the history of the world, working together, building on each other's learning, until they did things that had never been done on any world. Here, where iron is so hard to find that we can never rely on the machines that have always made humans powerful, they unlocked the powers of life. They weren't just petty breeders, like the Tassaliki, like the ancient scientists who created these headworms and gools four thousand years ago-those were mountebanks by comparison. The Wise of Grandfather's day had taught the chromosomes to name themselves in crystals, atom for atom, in patterns that could be seen and read by the naked eye. They had found how passion fish mate with clams to make cressid plants. And when I was born, they changed me so that I could never sire anything but sons."

Patience thought about that for a moment. "They did it so the prophecy wouldn't be fulfilled. So there'd be no seventh seventh seventh daughter."

"That was the plan."

"Why did you change your mind? Why did you have Angel undo what they did? Surely you didn't become a Watcher."

"No, not a Watcher. The Wise did this to me when I was still a child. As soon as they had made my body incapable of siring girlchildren, the Cranning call began.

One by one, the best of them began to leave. They would go off to teach somewhere. They would retire to a country home. They would be sent as ambassadors or governors.

But they would never arrive at their destination.

Instead they would be seen along the rivers and roads leading to Cranning."

"Your father was Heptarch then?"

"Not yet. My father watched what happened to the empire, as all the able men disappeared. He went to them and begged them not to go. The ones who hadn't yet felt the Cranning call vowed most solemnly to stay. The ones who had felt it, though-they promised anything but they broke all their promises. And Grandfather did nothing to stop it. It was a frightening time, with provinces in rebellion, the army in disarray. Father finally had Grandfather arrested and took over the government."

"So the Usurper wasn't the first to overthrow a Heptarch."

"For the good of the King's House, even treason.

Yes. But it was too late. Even when he tortured some of them, even when he killed some as an example, they went. Even when he cut off their heads and put them here, in Slaves' Hall, the Cranning call was so strong in their minds that the headworms had no power over them.

The Cranning call was more urgent than anything the headworms could do to them."

"What were they wanted for?"

"Do you think Father didn't try to find out? But they themselves didn't know. And no one ever knew what became of them, once they got to Cranning. Father's spies never came back. And after a few years, the empire was lost. Twelve of the Fourteen Families were in revolt.

Oruc's father led it. But he wasn't called the Usurper then. He was called the Liberator. He came, he said, to restore Grandfather to his rightful place on the Heptarch's throne."

"Ah."

"Father should have killed Grandfather."

"As Oruc should have killed us?"

"Grandfather wasn't the-seventh seventh seventh daughter." Lord Peace closed his eyes. Patience knew that if he still had his body, he would put his fingertips together, then touch them to his mouth; she could almost see his hands rise. She felt the grief for his death well up in her for the first time, seeing him half-alive like this, remembering him whole.

She shook off the feeling. "How was I born, Father?"

"My father lost the city of Heptam before I came of age. I led one army, he led another. He lost and was captured and killed. I never lost. I wandered the wilderness with an ever-shrinking guerrilla band. One by one my sons came to adulthood. One by one they were killed. The enemy seemed to find my boys so easily-as if some traitor led them. It was as if some terrible invisible power guided them to destroy everyone but me.

Everyone but me. My first wife, my father, my children, and I alone was alive."

"So you could sire the daughter of prophecy."

"I studied the chronicles. I realized that my family's fall began almost the moment they undaughtered me.

That was the crime for which the Wise were taken and the throne was lost. You see, Patience, the prophecies that these men of science had long thought were mere superstition-someone or something of great power meant to have them fulfilled. And we thought-perhaps if we find a way to undo what was done. Perhaps if I could have a girlchild, then the Wise would come home, and all could be restored as it was. Peace could be restored to the world. But how could we undo the work of the Wise, so my daughter could be born? Who would know how to do it, when the Wise were all gone?"

"Angel," said Patience. "I know this story."

"I was in my forties then. He came to me, a very young man then, and said he had been studying the journals of the great men, and he thought he knew a way to refresh and revivify my woman-making sperm. He explained, but I could not understand it-I know what every educated man knows about genetics, but he was deep in the chemistry and mathematics of it, catalysts and countercatalysts and inducers and blocks. I said to him, 'You know too much. You've become one of the Wise. The Cranning call will come to you.' He only smiled and said, 'Lord Peace, my Heptarch, if the caller wants you to have a daughter, then he will leave me here.' "

"So my birth ... served the purpose of the Cranning call."

"Angel and I argued over it. Better to be castrated than to give in to what this enemy wants, I said. But it came to this: We didn't know what purpose the Cranning call might have for you, but we knew that as long as you remained unborn, the world was in turmoil. We were at Ilium at the time, under the protection of Lady Hekat.

She told us, 'The prophecies are ambiguous. The seventh seventh seventh daughter is called the destruction of the world, and the salvation of the world. Why not let her be born, and then teach her to be a savior?' So I took Lady Hekat as my second wife, and Angel made the change in me, and you were born."

"Lady Hekat." Patience saw her mother's face as it had been the last time she saw her. Weeping as the soldiers took Patience away from her. Crying out, My daughter, my daughter, my child, God be with you, always with you; and then the knock on Father's door, and the sudden cry of agony as father looked into the bag that was delivered there. I saw his face. His face, Mother's face, the same agony. "And you trained me to be an assassin," she said.

"I taught you to serve the King's House. However much you think you hate me now, I know you. You will always act for the good of the King's House. You are the hope of humanity. Not as the Watchers and Vigilants believe, as the mere mother of some imagined god. You yourself. I know it."