Orson Card - Wyrms

"I'm a child, fifteen years old. I'm the hope of nothing.

I have no great purpose."

"If you have no purpose of your own, then you will fulfill the purpose of the Cranning call. It waits for you, Daughter. But Angel and I have done all we could to teach you what the Heptarch lives for. If you haven't learned it, we could do no more."

"You don't know anything Father. You don't know who is calling from Cranning, you don't know what he wants me for, and you don't even know me."

"How could I know you, Patience? I felt the Cranning call, too. Are you surprised? I never felt it until you were born, but then it began. A terrible urgency to take you there, to carry you to Skyfoot and give you-to whatever waits there. Whenever I was with you, all your life, I have felt a longing worse than anything these petty worms can do to me. So I have spent as little time with you as I could, for fear I would break under the pain of it, and carry you off before you were ready."

"Ready for what?"

"To face whatever waits there."

"Am I ready now?"

"How can I know? But you're as ready as I could make you in my life. Trust Angel now. He is the last of the Wise, the only one who can protect you from the thing that calls. From Unwyrm."

"You know its name?"

"One prophecy says that you will take the world into Unwyrm's lair and give it to him, and all mankind will die and be reborn. It's the only prophecy that gives a name."

"Who made the prophecy?"

"A prophet, I suppose. What matters is that the Cranning call is proof that the prophecies are true-or some undefeatable power wants to make them true, which amounts to the same thing."

"There's no such thing as an undefeatable power," said Patience. "You always taught me that."

"Go now, Patience. I've told you everything. Now don't let them find you here, or my whole life was for nothing. And if they ask me, I'll have to tell them that I saw you. It'll give them a fresh trail."

Almost she obeyed him. But then she realized that he had not fully answered her. There was still a twitching in his face, a sign that he was resisting, that he had not told her all that she had asked for.

"One more story," she said.

"No more."

"The one you don't want to tell me."

The face grimaced as the head tried to resist the urging of the worms. "Leave me in peace, child! Let my name be something more than a terrible irony."

"Whatever you want so badly not to tell, that is the thing I most badly need to know."

"You're wrong, you fool! If you needed to know I would have told you! Leave me this one secret to take to the grave."

"I'll have it from you, Father! I'll have it, or wait here until Oruc takes me!"

Finally, sweating and weeping, the head spoke. Patience pumped steadily, but the voice was high and strange.

"The priests say that the Starship Captain was taken in the spirit by God, made some prophecies, and then disappeared into heaven."

"I know the tales."

"I know the truth. The captain of the starship Konkeptoine went mad as our ancestors orbited the world. It's true that he wrote the prophecy with his right hand in the ship's log. He also drew the map of the world, showing all the great deposits of iron and coal, the stuff that steel is made of. Then he .used the ship's powers to destroy those deposits. In that one act he determined the future of the world. Imakulata is not naturally poor in iron. Because of his insane act of destruction, we children of the great engine builders are deprived of steel. We have no great machines. We are weaker in this world than human beings have ever been before."

"If he was insane enough to do that, why did anyone think he was a prophet?"

"Because his map was more accurate than the one the ship's own mind drew. He knew things about the world that could not be known. They said at the time he seemed to be possessed. I who have felt the Cranning call know now that this was probably true. Whatever controlled him in the ship, that compulsive power is still alive. He left the ship in a landing craft and was never seen again. His craft was never found."

"If something like this happened, why isn't it in any of the histories?"

"There are stories passed from Heptarch to Heptarch that none of the historians know. I meant you to know this much, anyway; I told Angel, and he was to tell you.

The priests know only of the map he drew with his right hand, and the words he spoke with his mouth. The words that his possessor wanted us to believe. Words about how Kristos would come to Imakulata and make the human race new and perfect. But his daughter Irena, the first Heptarch, she saw something that only the Heptarchs know: As he spoke the prophecy and drew the map with his right hand, his left hand slowly tapped out into the mind of the ship, 'Save my daughter from the lair of the wyrms, or they will devour all mankind.' "

"His daughter-"

"Not Irena, child. You. His distant daughter. At first they didn't know how distant. There were prophecies that it would be the seventh seventh daughter. Magic numbers.

Only in the last thousand years have there been prophets who said that the Daughter of Prophecy, the Mother of God, is to be the seventh seventh seventh daughter of the Starship Captain."

"Then there's no reason to believe that the prophecy is anything more than the raving of a Vigilant."

"Of course. Except that the Cranning call obviously intends to fulfill that prophecy. I have no doubt that you are the daughter that needs saving, as the Starship Captain warned."

"But what is the lair of the worms-this? The headworms?"

"He wrote a word that in Star Speech, the most ancient of languages, means 'monster,' and not just any ' monster, but the most dangerous and cunning and powerful of enemies. An enemy powerful enough to take control of the Starship Captain's mind while the Konkeptoine still orbited Imakulata. An enemy powerful enough to call all the Wise to Cranning. Do you understand the danger of the world, Patience? We are facing an enemy that formed its plans seven thousand years ago, when we first arrived here. Whatever ruled Imakulata before humankind came here wants to rule again."

"A gebling then. They were the highest native life, as intelligent as humankind-"

"Were they? Then why is Geblic merely another corrupt form of Star Speech? And Dwelf and Gauntish, why did they have to take their language from mankind? They rose to where they are when humanity arrived; there was, something more powerful, an intelligence older than they.

I meant for Angel to warn you of this. I didn't mean for you to be ignorant of it. But that's all now. That's all, now go."

But even now, there was more, she could see what the headworms told her, that he was hiding still another secret from her. The headkeeper hadn't broken him. His power of resistance was still strong. But she would do what the headkeeper had failed to do. She would break him and have from him the tale he didn't want to tell.

"I know you better than that, Father," she said. "If I am such a danger to the world, you would have killed me in my childhood."

"The Starship Captain didn't say to kill his daughter.

He said to save her. And even if he had not said so, I could not have killed you. Anyone else could die, child, anyone at all, but you would live. To destroy mankind or to save the world, I cannot guess, but you would live, whatever the cost."

"Why! Not because I'm your daughter-so why!"

His face twisted in agony. She had asked him the unbearable question, and the headworms would torture the answer from him. But even as she realized this, she also remembered something else. This was the expression on his face the night of Mother's death. This was the mask of pain he wore. "In all your talking, Father, you never told me what you meant when you cried out on the night they brought Mother's body to you."