Orson Card - Wyrms

Mother, help me. Father, save me. I hear a terrible frightened sound and it is my own sound coming out of my own mouth like Father. I scream and scream.

They fight, Mother and the black one. Father is shouting and shouting-

"Stay here and die, all of you stay and for God's sake eat each other!"

The sound of his voice says fear and I am also afraid.

Father goes through a hole in the wall of the birthing place. Father knows the way. Father we are coming! Come with Father I shout with my silent voice and they hear me with their othermind. I go and so all the others go, all those who look like me, and some of the littler ones and taller ones, all who can move, all who do not writhe on the ground dying because their bodies don't work. We cry out to him we're coming, Father, but he doesn't hear us because we don't make a sound and in the silence he is deaf. I see it in his eyes when he looks at us, he doesn't understand our cries, he only hears our screaming.

Behind us the black one that looks like Mother is eating her belly out and he will eat us all if he can.

Hungry, hungry, he pushes his hunger out into all of us. Come to me, says his hunger, come and fill me, and I can feel my brothers and sisters yielding to him, stopping, going back toward the birthing place. No! I cry!

No! Come with Father, come away. With Father with Father tell everyone to come with Father.

And the strongest ones take up my call, they call also, Come with Father, and we are stronger as we call together, stronger and stronger until we have overcome the Mother-eater's hunger.

Down into the black tunnel, all of us in the black tunnel, where are you, Father? Where are you?

I see you, bright sisters and brothers, I feel your path in the darkness, I know where you are, every one of you, in so many different tunnels. From Father's footsteps splashing ahead of me I know the path outward. Follow the water. Follow the running water. It goes away from the birthing place, follow the water-

Patience cried out with joy as she saw the light of the world for the first time. From a cavern's mouth in the face of a high cliff she looked down on a vast forest, with the heads of the River Cranwater joining to form a single river flowing away from Skyfoot. Even as she remembered she was Patience, she could also remember being the first gebling king, feeling the presence of every other gebling as each came out of his or her own tunnel to find the sky, the water leaping out from each cavern mouth. Again she saw through the gebling's eyes.

We all stand here, looking at the bright light, like-me and bigger and littler, I can feel us all here at the edge of the world. And beside me is Father, I have found him, there is water on his face. "I sold my soul for you," he says. "All I wanted was that wyrm back there. How could I want her." He shudders. "It was eating her.

What kind of monsters-"

I try to feel him, too, like I can feel all the others, but he isn't there, my eyes see him, my nose smells him, but my othermind can't find him. I touch his cheek and taste the water on his face. It is salt, not like the clear water of the cave. He sees my tongue and wrinkles his face. Then he reaches to me and touches my cheek and his mouth says, "You're not a wyrm, though, are you? It's not your fault, is it?"

Then he stands and takes my hand and leads me to the edge and holds out his hand to point to the bright blue dazzle that blinds me and all the children of man and wyrm.

"Sky," he says.

"Sick." I speak. I am like him, not like Mother.

She was eaten by the wyrm in the birthing place, but Father lives and I am like him.

"Born an hour ago, and already you can talk. What have I made here? What can you become?" Patience watched the time flow faster. The babies born, the Starship Captain teaching them everything. To build houses, to hunt for food, to tend their children and teach them. Language came easily, all learning came easily to these new people who never forgot anything once they had done it a single time. They invented their own words faster than Father could teach them, until they hardly came to him for learning anymore.

The gebling king, who never had a name for himself, he came to Father often. "Wyrm," Father said. "Your mother is the wyrm, and I am your father, but most important of all is the monster that ate your mother and drove us from the birthing place. He looks like a wyrm but he isn't a wyrm. He's your brother and he'll kill you all if he can, and if he ever comes out of the mountain you must kill him first."

So the gebling king was the first gebling who learned to kill, and he used the secret knowledge of murder just as human beings had used it from the start-to gather power to himself. I have the terrible secret. I can kill you if you disobey. But if you obey me, I can share the secret with you and you, too, can have power-

Until Father says one day, when he finds me covered with blood, "I wish Unwyrm had killed you that day in the birthing place, I wish he had killed me and eaten me rather than let me live to make you what you are. I'm sorry that I taught you, any of you."

So I kill him and eat his brain in front of the others, even though I find no mindstone in it; I don't tell them that he had no stone. And now my power is perfect, even greater than Unwyrm's power, because he has no one to obey him and I have all of these.

Patience screamed at the memory, at the taste and smell of Father's blood, at the look of horror and awe and admiration in the other geblings' eyes. I couldn't do this, I never could have done this, she cried out in revulsion. And yet this is what I was raised for, to kill in order to get power, to devour anything that threatens to block me from my will-

"It's maddening her," said Angel.

"Give her time to find herself," said Reck.

The voices meant nothing to Patience. For all she could see was the bloodshed through the years. The murders of the gebling kings, the murders of the Heptarchs.

Wars and assassinations, tortures and rapes, she remembered committing all the crimes of seven thousand years of power and she hated herself for all that she had done-

Nothing in my life except death and terror, she thought.

And then her own mother's face (or was it her mother?

She had three hundred mothers) smiling at her, touching her, saying, "Broken heart, don't cry. Don't cry at the' things that have been done in your name. For every life that was taken, there were ten thousand who lived in peace with your protection. Do you think your power would last for a moment if all you had was the power to kill? They would rise up and strike you down. You have the power to draw them together, to make them act as one. You have made the weak strong by the sound of your voice, and they love you forever."

Patience clung to the message of that voice. I have made the weak strong by the sound of my voice. They love me forever.

And at last, having found a thread to cling to so she would not fall into the abyss, she slept.

SHE AWOKE LYING IN A BED, COVERED WITH THREE FEATHERBEDS.

A cold breeze from a broken window whipped past her face. The trees outside the window were golden with autumn. Are you really the trees of Earth? she asked them silently. Or are you strange alien creatures that have captured the trees and hidden them deep inside, so you can wear their mask?

She thought of all the children she had ever had in her hundreds of lives, pictured them smiling up at her, good children every one; but then something dark, a dark worm crawled into their mouths and now when they look out at her it is the wyrm with the tiny head and the fanlike fingers-not a wing at all-and the hundred fleshy organs of tearing and digesting and reproducing-Unwyrm, do you know the difference between eating and mating?