Orson Card - Wyrms

Watching the silent tableau of geblings staring at the human girl, the dwelf began to giggle insanely. "And now you've answered my question, all of you."

Patience turned to her politely. "And what is your question?"

"My question of you is, who are you, and why do geblings and humans travel together this way?"

"And what was our answer?" asked Reck.

"Your answer was that you are the gebling king, the boy and girl of you, and you, human, are the daughter of Peace, the Heptarch, and he is dead, and you now have the mindstone and scepter. You're going into battle, but you aren't sure whether or not you're on the same side."

This was no ordinary dwelf.

Patience drew the slender glass rod of her blowgun from the cross at her neck. She also took the loop from her hair. She spoke quietly to Reck and Ruin, in a tone of calm, sure intention. "If you move from your places, you'll be dead before you take a step."

"Oh, my," said the dwelf. "You shouldn't ask for answers that you don't want to hear. Let's not have any killings here. This is a place where the only traffic is in truth. Let me have your oath, all of you, that you'll wait to kill each other until you get back to the river."

No one volunteered to take the oath.

"What have I done? Trouble, trouble, that's what the truth is. You poor fools-you thought a dwelf could never know anything, and so you asked me the questions whose answer you thought no one could have. But I have all the answers. Every one of them."

"Do you?" asked Reck. "Then tell us how to resolve our dilemma. However you knew the answer, Patience has as much as confessed that she has the most precious possession of the gebling kings. Now more than ever before in our history we must have it, we must know its secrets. We would gladly kill her to get it, and she would as gladly kill us to keep it for herself. When Will comes back, we'll have no difficulty killing her, so she'll have to kill us before he gets here."

"I told you, take an oath," said the dwelf.

"We would never keep an oath about the mindstone," said Ruin, "nor would we believe her if she made one."

"I don't even know what it is," said Patience. "I only know that Father said to keep it at all costs, and Angel said to ask you to implant it in my brain."

Ruin laughed. "He thought that once I had it in my hands, I would put it into you?"

Reck, still not moving, silenced him with a hiss. Then she said, "Patience, my fool of a brother doesn't understand.

Though the mindstone by rights belongs to us, it's no good to us now."

"No good to us!" said Ruin.

"When the humans first thought to put it in their brains, it drove them mad. There was too much gebling in it. But now we could never put it in our own minds- there's too much human in it."

Ruin frowned. "There's a chance we could use it."

"And there's a better chance we could destroy ourselves trying."

Ruin looked furious. "After so many years-and we find it now at the time of greatest need, and you say we can't use it!" But his anger turned immediately to despair.

"You say it, and it's true."

Patience was skeptical. This could be a trick to lull her into complacency. So she turned to the dwelt for the only help she could think to ask for.

"I have a question for you," she said. "Tell me what the scepter does when it's connected to the brain."

"If I leave to get the answer," said the dwelf, "you'll probably kill each other before I get back, and then I can never ask you anything more."

"If they don't leave their chairs, then I won't kill them," said Patience.

"We won't leave our chairs," said Reck.

"But don't be too sure you could kill us," said Ruin.

Patience smiled. The dwelf shuddered and left the room. There was no spring in her step this time.

She came back in muttering to herself. "It's long," she said.

"I'm listening," said Patience.

The dwelf began to recite. "When implanted above the limbic node in the human brain, the organic crystal called the scepter or mindstone grows smaller crystals that penetrate to every portion of the brain. Most of these are passive, collecting important memories and thoughts.

A few of them, however, allow the human to receive memories previously stored in the crystal by prior occupants.

Since many of the memories belong to the first seven gebling kings, in whose brains the crystal originated, this can be most disorienting to the human. If the human is not able to gain control of the crystal, the alien memories can impinge on the mind in unwelcome and unmanageable ways, lending to confusion of identity, which is to say, madness. The safest way to use the crystal is to implant it in a protected place near a fairly important nerve. One or two chains of crystal will make their way to the brain, collecting memories but almost never supplying any to the human host. But there's bloody little chance that you'll ever meet anyone who needs this information, Heffiji."

All of them laughed at the last sentence.

"Whoever gave you that answer, dwelf, wasn't as wise as he thought."

"I know," said the dwelf. "That's why I left it in, so you could see that I asked him a good question after all, even though he thought I didn't."

"And what happens when it's implanted in a gebling's brain?" asked Patience.

"But why would anyone do that?" asked the dwelf.

"All a gebling has to do is-"

"Silence!" whispered Ruin.

"No," said Reck. "No, let her tell."

"All a gebling has to do," said Heffiji, "is swallow it. The gebling body can break the crystal into its tiniest pieces, and it will form again exactly where it ought to be in the gebling's brain."

"How could that happen?" asked Patience. "Why can geblings use it so easily, when humans-"

"Because we're born with mindstones," said Ruin, scornfully. "We all have them. And we eat our parents' mindstones when they die, to carry on the memories that mattered most to them in their lives." He looked at Reck with bitter triumph, as if to say, Well, you said to tell her, and now I have.

Patience looked from one to the other in growing understanding. "So all those stories that geblings eat their dead-"

Reck nodded. "If a human saw it, though it's hard to believe a gebling would ever let them see-"

"Dwelfs too," said Heffiji. "And gaunts."

"There are mindstones of some sort, much smaller than ours, too small to see, in all the animals of this world," said Ruin. "Except humans. Crippled, fleshbound humans, whose souls die with them."

Our souls die, thought Patience, except those whose heads are taken. It was a question she had thought of more than once. How did the taking of heads begin?

Why did human scientists every try to keep a head alive?

Because they knew, hundreds of generations ago, they knew that the native species had a kind of eternal life, a part of their brain that lived on after death. They were jealous. Taking heads was the human substitute for the mindstones of the geblings, dwelfs, and gaunts. Instead of the crystal globe of the mindstone, for us it was gools, headworms, and eviscerated rats dropped by a hawk into a glass jar.

"Only the Heptarchs, among all humans, have taken their parents into themselves," said Reck. "And that was only by stealing our noblest parents from us. Your ancestor killed the seventh king and stole his mindstone, so that the kings of the geblings have no memory now of how the kingdom began. Ruin is of the foolish opinion that it would be of some advantage to us to have it now.

I, however, understand that it would only have been to our advantage if we had had it all along."

"I must have it," said Ruin. "If I'm to know what I must know-"

"Unwyrm wants you to do it, Ruin." Reck seemed to enjoy forcing her brother to bow before her superior understanding. "It would please him, to have half the gebling king a babbling lunatic. Fool. If it drove humans insane, with their incomplete coupling with the stone, what do you think it will do to you, to be utterly and perfectly bonded to more than three hundred human minds?