Orson Card - Wyrms

In each case, the human genetic patterns were all imbedded within a single long molecule, just as the Earth wheat patterns had been incorporated in the single genetic molecule of all the Imakulata plants.

Heffiji could hardly contain her delight. "They didn't know it! I was the one who put it together, I was the one who knew that both of these were the answers to the same question! And when I saw humans and geblings together, I knew that you were the ones who needed to have this answer." She grinned. "That's why I cheated and gave hints."

"It isn't true!" shouted Ruin. "We are not just failed copies of humans!"

He flung out his hand as if to throw Heffiji's brass lantern to the floor. Both Reck and Patience caught his arm before he could do it.

"Are you trying to burn down this house?" demanded Reck.

"We are the original inhabitants of this world, and they are the interlopers! We are not descended from humans! They have usurped our world from us!"

Patience spoke to him quietly. "Ruin, you're right.

Even if half your heritage is human, the other half is not.

The other half is native. To imitate us was part of your nature. Whatever your ancestors were before humans came to Imakulata, it was their nature to absorb and adapt. What you are today is the fulfillment of what your ancestors had to become, if they were to be true to themselves."

"And what were we before?" asked Reck. The question was rhetorical. But again Heffiji ran off with the lantern, this time clattering down the ladder. They had no choice but to follow as she ran through the house, shouting, "I know I know! I know I know!"

They found her in the great room, where Will once again stood by the door, while Angel sat in the seat by the fire. Heffiji was holding a large paper, which contained four versions of the same drawing. She kept reciting the words written at the top of the page: "Most likely reconstruction of large segmented animals found at Rameling and Wissick sites."

It was a large wormlike animal with vestigial wings that fanned out just like geblings' fingers, with a head as proportionately tiny as the head of a dwelf, and with a body as long and lithe as a gaunt. Its belly looked loose and open, as if loose sections of bowel were protruding.

When Heffiji at last quieted down, Angel spoke softly from his place by the fire. "Wyrms," he said. "The earliest colonists called them that, and killed them all, even though there was evidence that they lived communally and buried their dead. They were too frightening, they awakened too many human fears. And now they're extinct."

"Except one," said Patience. "That's what Unwyrm is, isn't he? The last of the wyrms."

"Not quite," said Ruin, who looked exhausted and defeated. "We geblings named him, didn't we? Unwyrm.

Not-wyrm. Not our father; our brother. We didn't remember that he looked like this, didn't remember what a wyrm was. But now it's clear enough. Just like the second-generation gnat that killed off the other gnats and waited to mate again with the Earth wheat. That's what Unwyrm is doing. Waiting to mate again with a human being."

"The seventh seventh seventh daughter," murmured Angel. "I told you not to come."

"A new human species to replace the old," said Reck. "And to destroy the others-gaunt, dwelf, and gebling."

"Why did he wait so long?" asked Patience. "The gnat finished the process in the very next generation.

Why did Unwyrm wait 343 generations for me?"

Heffiji was crestfallen. "I don't have the answer to everything, you know."

RUIN CAREFULLY SHAVED PATIENCE'S HAIR FROM BEHIND the ear almost to the middle of the back of her head.

"You'll have to wear your wig now," said Angel.

"This new hairstyle might attract some attention."

Ruin chewed a leaf, then licked the shaved area with his rough tongue. He jabbed her skin many times with a dry needle. Patience did not feel it except as a tiny pressure-the nerves of pain had already gone numb.

"I won't care how my hair looks," she said. "I'll be lucky if I come out of this remembering I'm a girl." She was trying to show her confidence by joking, but she surprised herself by sounding frightened instead. "Or even a human."

Reck touched her hand. Patience vaguely remembered that only a month ago, if a gebling had touched her it would have taken concentration to avoid showing revulsion.

Now the touch came as a comfort to her. Beware of liking her too much, she told herself. Beware of affection, the great deceiver.

"Patience," whispered Reck, "it isn't good if you aren't sure who you are. You'll have the memories of hundreds of men and women in your mind when this is done. Some of them are very strong-especially the geblings. The gebling kings have always been very, very strong."

"I know who I am," Patience whispered. But it was a lie. If she knew who she was it was a secret even from herself. A secret she would at last discover, she hoped.

Having the mindstone would unfold her, back to what she was before she learned the roles assigned to her in life. If she was blank, if she was nothing but her roles, then the mindstone would fold her back again, and she would disappear in a storm of memories and selves long dead. But if she had a real self deeper than the faces painted on her by others, she would find her way out, she would keep control, she would survive.

Either I am someone, and I'll live, or I am no one, and my self dies.

She felt Ruin lift a flap of her skin and pin it out of the way. From the grinding sound, he was cutting at her skull, but she felt no more than if her head were a slab of stone. He was a stonecutter, turning her own brain into a sort of heads hall, with all of the heads alive and staring down at her, yammering at once from their jars of gools and headworms. She shuddered.

"Hold still," murmured Ruin.

Angel began a steady monologue to calm her. "Obviously, Patience, this information about Unwyrm and the origin of the geblings and dwelfs and gauints was not discovered for the first time by whoever left these answers here. The prophecies themselves, the very name of Unwyrm, the traditions of the nonhumans that they are descended from a prehuman ancestor and that Unwyrm is their brother-these all imply that this information has been known before, perhaps many times."

Ruin pried out a section of skull and set it on the table.

It made a little clunking sound.

"But knowledge comes and goes. For instance, what happened the first time a human and a gebling met? Had the geblings already developed a language? A society?

Or did they fashion their social patterns after those of human beings?"

Ruin held the tiny scepter in his hand. "This is my heritage," he whispered. "No human being could have made this. It belongs to me and Reck, and you have no right to it."

For a moment Patience thought he was reneging on his agreement, that he would put it in his mouth, swallow it, and himself walk along the brink of madness. She was relieved, for just a moment, not to have to do it herself.

But then he set it at the base of her brain and she trembled to know it was her ordeal after all. His tongue pushed it through the small incision he had made, until it rested where he wanted it, exactly on the middle of her limbic node. Then he withdrew his tongue, licked a small dish covered with a fine powder, and reinserted it to smear the powder into place.

"And another question that intrigues me," said Angel, going on as if Ruin had not spoken, as if Patience were not now irrevocably committed to a journey that could destroy her. "How does the crystal relate to nonhuman intelligence? The geblings, of course, have humanlike brains, but the dwelfs don't. You all have the crystals, but the gaunts have no will, no sense of identity-the mindstones can't be the seat of personality. And you geblings, you and Unwyrm have in common your means of communication that transcends anything possible to human beings. And yet Unwyrm can use it to call to humans-there must be something in it that is at least latently possible to us."