Orson Card - Wyrms

Or is there a difference to you? All hungers are the same hunger.

She opened her eyes. She saw him before she saw anything else, standing there half lit by the dim autumnal light through the window. Will. His face watching her in his utter silence, his unreadable stolidness, like an animal; or no, like a mountain, like the face of living rock.

Why are you watching me?

She did not speak; he did not answer. He only noticed that her eyes were open, nodded, and walked from the room. He closed the door gently behind him. It was the tenderness, the gentleness of the closing of the door that told her that he was not, after all, made of stone. It wasn't lifelessness that made him still, it was peace. He had made his peace with life, and so his face had no more to say, no silent pleas to make between speeches, and his mind had no speeches to make between silences.

He isn't hungry. He is already satisfied.

And as she thought of hunger, she felt again the Cranning call, as powerful as ever, gnawing at her womb.

I am hungry to have his babies, she thought. It came to her as the memory of a hundred nightmares during the time she slept. He will make me hungry for his seed in me, just as his mother made the Starship Captain yearn for her. He will make me think that it is ecstasy.

She shuddered. But now that she had dreamed Unwyrm a hundred times, his writhing as he devoured his mother and slaughtered his helpless deformed brothers, now that it was so familiar to her it did not make her lose control of herself and scream, as she had done in all the dreams.

She was too tired of it to cry out against it anymore. I'll just have to see to it that it doesn't happen, that's all.

He'll die before he has me, or I'll die. His children will not be born from my body.

But even if I live, will I ever want a man as I want Unwyrm? What if he dies while still calling me? Will that need be with me then forever, always unsatisfied?

Thoughts like that made her angry with herself. She sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. At once she was almost overcome with dizziness. The door to her room opened, and Angel came in. Angel, looking strong and healthy, no longer weak from the wound in his throat.

"Your wound has healed and the trees have turned colors," she said. "How long have I slept?"

"Forty days and forty nights, like Moses in the mount, like the rain of the deluge, like Elijah fasting in the wilderness. If you can call it sleeping. You've done a lot of shouting and kept us all awake. Even River has complained that you frighten his monkey. How are you?"

She reached up and touched the side of her head that Ruin had shaved. The hair had grown several centimeters.

"Weak," she said. "Unwyrm is calling me."

"We were afraid the scepter was too much for you."

"It wasn't the scepter, really. It was all the terrible things I had done."

"You didn't do any of them."

"But I did. Angel. No, don't argue with me. I didn't kill my own father and eat his brain, the way the first gebling king did, or kill my own wife, as my father did.

But I have killed. Obeying you or father, or to save my own life, I have killed easily, with pleasure, with pride.

That made it hard for me to-separate myself from all their crimes. I could only find and follow a very slender hope running from life to life throughout my past, Angel.

A hope that it all works together for good. That out of the blood I've poured into the ground, life can grow again."

"Many people who've just awakened from a sound sleep think they're philosophers," Angel said.

"Don't make fun of me," said Patience. "This is important. This is my-my contribution to the scepter, if I have one to make. All the children will look to me, gebling children and human children, they all will look to me and I have to keep them safe. From Unwyrm's children. And yet sometimes I think-Unwyrm's children would not be murderers. They would all be bound together with one heart and mind, the way the wyrms were before the coming of humans to this world. Before human genes made us strangers to each other. Unwyrm's children would never be alone. And I could be their mother."

"Don't say that. Patience," said Angel.

"It's just that I finally understood the thought he sends to me, Angel. I know what Unwyrm did to his own mother. He's the devourer, not me. I'll kill him if I can." But she knew she didn't sound convincing. It didn't matter, though. It wasn't Angel she had to convince, it was herself.

"He is a wyrm, then? A descendant of the ones the first colonists killed?"

"He is the Unwyrm, Angel. The very one. The only one. Alive for all seven thousand years of the world's history."

"To live so long-"

"We're strangers here. The native life can adapt itself, make changes in a single generation that we take a million years to make. Unwyrm is more intelligent than all of them. In him are combined the most powerful of the native gifts, and he called the most brilliant of human minds, and they must have taught him all they knew. What's to stop him from repairing himself genetically, when he finds any part of him becoming weak, decaying?

What's to stop him from living until he's ready to mate?"

"Why would he wait so long?"

"I don't know. I only know how humans looked to the first geblings. The machines that let our ancestors fly, that made pictures in the air, that chewed up forests and spat out wheatfields. What did the wyrms see, when a new star appeared in the sky and metal birds skittered above the surface of the world? They weren't gnats, replacing safe and stationary wheat. They were at the peak of the ecological system, these wyrms, but we were more powerful than they. And if they were to replace us-"

"They had to know all that we knew."

"The wheat sits there, passively waiting for its enemy to destroy it. But the wyrms knew that human beings weren't passive. We were the most deadly competitor for life that this world had ever seen. To overpower us, the wyrms' grandchildren not only had to be identical to human beings-they had to excel at the things that human beings do best. They had to know more, to be more beautiful, more brilliant, more powerful, more dangerous.

How could a single wyrmchild, Unwyrm, hiding in his ice cave in Skyfoot, how could he learn enough to prepare his children?"

"An ice cave? That means he's high in the mountain, where the glaciers are."

"Don't you understand, Angel? He couldn't defeat us if we built machines. The wyrms knew it from the start.

When they captured the Starship Captain, before they even brought him down, they first made him destroy all the metal that was easy to mine. But there was still metal-I remember my ancestors who pursued it, who mined it, who tried to build machines with it. They might have succeeded. But always the geblings came, a flood of geblings out of Cranning."

"I'm reasonably familiar with the history of the world."

"Angel! I'm telling you what no one ever knew. I'm telling you the why of it. I've seen the pattern in it, remembering it all at once like this. Unwyrm sent the geblings to stop mankind from making the machines that would have made us irresistible. He waited all this time to keep us weak while he gathered wisdom to himself.

He gave himself seven thousand years. And then fulfilled his own prophecy by causing my brothers to be killed and me to be-"

He touched her head gently, to soothe her. His hand felt cool and loving on her forehead, on her cheek.

"River tells us that Cranning is only a week away, and the autumn winds are strong for getting there. But we have to go now. The winter winds will beat us back. It's good you came to yourself today-we'll bring you to Cranning in your right mind."

There was an artificiality in his tone as he spoke; his heart wasn't in what he said, and she couldn't think why he was lying to her. But that was no surprise, she could hardly think at all. So she let it go, didn't try to discover what it was he was concealing. "Tell Reck and Ruin that I also know the map of Cranning."