Orson Card - Wyrms

"It's a very poetic thought."

"I told him he's lovesick-he's fallen in love with the human race. But you know how it is. I've never hated humans the way he has, and so I'm not quite so impressed when I find out that not all humans are worthless."

Reck walked to the chair on the other side of the fire.

"It's funny," said Patience. "I kept dreaming about houses. Different houses that I needed to take care of.

Sometimes Heffiji's house and sometimes my father's house, and sometimes Heptagon House. Sometimes the house where my mother was killed."

Reck looked thoughtful. There were footsteps on the stair. Ruin padded into the room. Patience noticed at once that he was no longer naked. He wore short trousers.

A step toward accepting human civilization.

"Why did you call me?" he asked.

Reck turned to him, beckoned him closer. There was no one else in the room, but still it was better not to talk too loudly, not when they were saying things that could reveal who they were before they wanted to. "She heard our call," said Reck.

Ruin looked at Patience, as if analyzing a strange new herb he had just noticed on the forest floor. "The need to come fix a very important house? And where it was?"

"I saw paths sometimes, I never knew where from or where to. But always in the distance I could see the house burning, and I knew I had to hurry-"

Reck shook her head. "There was nothing about fire in our call."

"We don't even see images," added Ruin. "The othermind isn't that precise."

But Patience was excited at the thought that she might have experienced the gebling othermind in her own body. E She wouldn't let these small objections disprove it. "I'm not a gebling, and my brain may translate things into images that I can understand. I may be more of a gebling than you think. I remember the othermind. I remember, feeling all the other geblings, and the map of Cranning.

And besides, I have the scepter now. Maybe that lets me feel your call."

Reck stroked her tongue with the long nail of her thumb. "No," she said. "Heptarchs have borne the mindstone before, but they have never heard the call of the king to the people."

Ruin cocked his head, studying Patience's face. "If it; isn't the mindstone, then perhaps Unwyrm's call has i made her more sensitive, so she hears what no human could hear before."

Reck raised a finger. "Remember, though. No Heptarch has ever worn the mindstone so close to Cranning. When the other geblings took up the call, to pass it on, perhaps it grew strong enough for her to hear."

"It was nothing like Unwyrm's call," said Patience.

"That is so clear and powerful."

"Unwyrm is much better at it than we are. Our human nature. It weakens us." Reck sounded a little resentful.

"Do you wish that you had no human parent?"

Reck laughed bitterly. "Do you think the wyrms look any prettier to us? Nobody gave us a choice of ancestors."

"I saw it," said Patience. And she told them of the birth of the first geblings. Ruin made her slow down, tell every detail. He listened with his eyes closed, as if by concentrating on the sound of her choice he could conjure up the memories that the geblings had lost forever when they lost the mindstone of the kings.

When Patience told how the infant Unwyrm killed his mother, Ruin nodded. "Yes, yes," he said. "It wasn't murder. He had to eat the crystal, you see. To know all that she knew."

"We're more discreet now," said Reck. "We're more human. We wait until our parents die naturally. It means we have more life on our own before becoming our parents. But there's nothing unnatural about a child eating its parent's memory, not on Imakulata."

Patience went on with the story, with all she could remember of the life of the first geblings. And ended when the last of the gebling kings to bear this mindstone found the corpse of the last living wyrm. Humans had burned it to death.

"Of course," said Reck. "If it's strange and frightening, kill it. The human credo."

"Humans do what they have to do," said Ruin. Reck grinned wickedly and winked at Patience, as if to say, See how my brother has become a humanophile! "The wyrms did what they had to do," said Ruin. "They knew the humans could and would kill them all, with their machines. What do you do when the enemy is too strong to destroy? You become the enemy."

"Oh, yes, everybody's doing what their genes tell them to do," said Patience.

"If they hadn't chosen to mate with humans," said Reck, "we wouldn't exist. We can hardly condemn the choice they made."

"But you see, Heptarch, we geblings are not what they decided to become," said Ruin. "We're the castoffs of the second generation, the failed experiments, the doomed hybrids, the pitiful grotesques. Dwelfs with no brain. Gaunts with no will. We geblings, we came close.

But not a perfect match. It's the next generation that will be the perfect match, while we are meant to die."

"It's not as if anyone planned it," said Patience. "Its the way life evolved here on Imakulata."

"When you put it that way," said Reck, "it makes you want to bound up to Unwyrm and have his babies, doesn't it?"

"With all due respect to the wisdom of our most ancient forebears," said Ruin, "the gebling king has decided not to go along with the plan."

"We are wyrm enough to feel the life of every other gebling," said Reck, "and human enough to have an individual will to survive. As far as we're concerned, the adaptive process went far enough when it produced us and the gaunts and dwelfs."

"We are the heirs of the wyrms," said Ruin. "Different from humans, but enough like you to live alongside you. The genes of the wyrms are best preserved in us.

Not in the perfect copy that Unwyrm means to make."

"We are allies in this war," said Patience. Impulsively she slid from her chair, sat on the floor before the fire, leaning against Reek's legs, her head resting on the gebling's knee. "I remember living gebling lives. I want you to survive as much as I want human beings to live."

Reck stroked her hair. "I have come to know you as I've known no other human being but one. I would regret it if the only way to stop Unwyrm were to kill you, too."

"But you would do it," said Patience.

"If there be no other way, I will."

"And if there be no other way," said Patience, "I want you to."

She happened, as she said it, to look back to the door.

Angel stood there, his hands on the jambs on either side.

The look on Angel's face said that he had overheard their conversation and that he would not consent to Patience's death.

And for the first time it occurred to Patience that Angel might have no intention of obeying her when it came to the final battle with Unwyrm. Angel had his own plans, and however much he might call her Heptarch, he still thought of her as a child under his tutelage.

A chill swept over Patience as she thought. What if I have to kill you, Angel, in order to do what I must do?

He could not have seen what she thought in the expression of her face, but weak as she was she could not hide the shudder. He saw it. Wordlessly he went back outside, closing the door behind him.

If Reck and Ruin noticed the momentary byplay, they did not comment on it. Perhaps it was because Reck felt her shudder that she asked, "Are you strong enough to go on?"

"What strength does it take?" asked Patience. "I'm sane, I think, and so we can go as soon as the work here is finished."

"Then we can go now. There's no need to wait here for the house to be done. It will be finished whether we're here or not. Besides, we can supervise it, in a general sort of way, without being here at all."

Reck got up.

"Wait," said Patience. "I wanted to ask you. Will.

He was watching at the foot of my bed when I woke up."