Orson Card - Wyrms

Sken, stark naked, was up to her neck in a huge and steaming tub, occasionally bellowing curses at Strings, who was scrubbing her back. Strings endured it calmly enough; Patience, listening, knew that he only served Sken because Reck and Patience wanted him to. Sken cursed again, but then began to tell him-for the third time-how she had killed Tinker's men in the battle in the woods, months before. Strings listened, the perfect audience, responding exactly when she needed to hear him say, "Yes," or "Bravely done," or "Remarkable."

Patience knew that Sken was telling of the battle with Tinker because she could bear to think of it; she had little to say of the battle in Unwyrm's cave, and did not tell the tale of the baby who died only moments before Sken would have murdered it. We'll all choose the stories we can live with, and forget the rest, thought Patience. I hope so, anyway.

She walked to the east fireplace. Many of the old men were watching as several geblings carefully worked on Unwyrm's huge mindstone. Reck was directing the work of separating the hundreds of mindstones that had grown together. The geblings poured a solution over the crystal, then carefully pried the surface crystals away. Many small mindstones, the size of the one that Patience bore within her brain, lay in a tray before the fire, drying.

"What are you looking for?" asked Patience.

"These are all the crystals of the Wise, which he took from them and ate," said Reck. "But in the center there'll be the crystal that was his own. Himself. That's the one I want."

"What can you do with it?" asked Patience.

"We'll know what to do when we find it." Reck led her away from the fire. "See how the old men watch?

They know where those mindstones came from, and they want them back."

"Can't you do it? Give the mindstones back? They came from their brains in the first place."

"Which one do we give to each of these men? They have so little memory left-just their memory of life in this house, with vague shadows of the past-that whatever stone we give them will take them over and become them. It would be no favor. And besides, these stones have lived as long in Unwyrm's head as they ever lived in their original human hosts'. Do these men look strong enough to endure Unwyrm's memories?"

Patience shook her head. "But it's tragic. This great treasure of learning, useless."

"This?" asked Reck. "These stones are the way that wyrms passed their wisdom from one generation to the next. You humans brought another way. And that way still lives."

"Heffiji's house," said Patience.

"What was learned once can be learned again," said Reck. "Ruin is already babbling about a university there, administered by geblings whose whole purpose is to protect Heffiji and catalogue her house. I think nothing will be lost."

"Except these old men."

"What's the tragedy there, Heptarch?" asked Reck.

"How is what happened to them any worse than death?

And that's how all lives end. Their works live on at Heffiji's house-it's more immortality than most people get. And these old men live. No matter what you might think of it right now, life is good and sweet, even with the memory of great loss and terrible grief."

"I have lost both my fathers," Patience whispered, "and I killed them both with my own hands."

"You were Unwyrm's hands when Angel died."

Patience shook her head, then walked toward the other hearth.

Will lay on a pallet stretched before the fire. Kristiano knelt by the giant man, wiping his naked, sweating torso with a wet cloth. Patience knelt beside the boy ok.

"He likes this," said Kristiano. "But he's afraid."

Patience took the gauntling's hand in hers. "May I?"

Kristiano relinquished the cloth with a sweet but enigmatic smile. Patience saw herself, for a moment, as the gauntling saw her-this human woman would come and serve Will for a moment, but the gaunt would serve him hour after hour, unfailing. If love was giving the gift most desired, then only gaunts in all the world truly loved. But Patience shrugged off the silent criticism of the beautiful child. You are what you are; I have other work to do, and I can only give a few gifts to anyone.

Maybe none at all.

Will's eyes were open, but he said nothing. Patience had no smile for him, nor he for her. They were alive, weren't they? And Unwyrm was dead. That was victory.

But it had been Patience's hand that threw the loop that nearly cut off Will's. And it had been Patience also who killed Unwyrm and held Unwyrm's only child as it died.

There was much murder and pain in Patience's memory, and she had not yet discovered whether any love remained.

Ruin sat nearby, his broken leg heavily splinted, his face glum as he stared into the fire. Reck soon came with a carafe of water and gave Ruin a draught of it. He drank long and deep, then touched her arm in silent thanks.

Reck gave the carafe to Patience, who took it, lifted Will's head, and let water into his mouth. Will lapped it gratefully. Gently she lowered him to the pallet again.

Finally, now, Will spoke. "How did you find strength to do it?" he whispered.

"It wasn't my strength," said Patience. "It was lent to me. The geblings called me. Together, with one voice. It gave me just enough freedom within myself to find myself.

So I did what I was born for."

"Saved the world."

"Murdered an enemy who trusted me. I remained the consummate assassin to the end."

"You did what God wanted," whispered Will. Then he closed his eyes.

Ruin spoke. "He's right, you know. About what God wanted. The kind of god I believe in, anyway. Humans and geblings and gaunts and dwelfs, we all wanted to live more than Unwyrm wanted us to die. It all worked together. You couldn't kill Angel, and he lived to bring into the birthing place the knives you killed Unwyrm with, after he thought he had left you weaponless. Reek's arrow saved you; Will broke my leg to save me; Sken, useless and stupid and foul, kept Reck from killing herself under Unwyrm's control. Every bit and piece of it, an intricate and impossible network, a web that could have failed at any point." Ruin nodded, almost angry in his insistence. "We are god, if there is a god, and Unwyrm fell before us."

Patience remembered again the unbearable joy she had felt under Unwyrm's body. And felt again the way his ichor spilled over her, the way her knife tore through his tender organs. It was not what she had felt with her body that most affected her now. It was what she had felt with her mind. For as the death agony came, he cried out to her with his silent voice, the one that had ruled her for so long; he cried out: I live. I want to live. I must live. It was the desperate cry of her own heart, too. He had wanted nothing more than any human wanted. To live, to pass on his genes to his children, to keep death at bay for as long as he could. His people-for such the wyrms were, to each other-his people had lived for centuries, but he had lived longest of all, waiting to be the salvation of all his race. And his death was the death of ten thousand generations of wyrms.

His death was the death of the miraculous child she had held in her arms, the new shape a dying species had tried to adopt in order to save themselves. They saw us coming, and they knew we would be the disease for which there was no cure. They did all that they could do.

The last breath of their struggle grew in my womb, shaped like a human in tribute to the human gods who had come to destroy them. But we did not accept the offering, no; I killed Unwyrm before the child's yolk was complete, and when the child was born I let it die in my arms.

What is so much better about my kind of life, that we should survive, and they should die? She could think of no standard of judgment that made sense, except this one: I am human, and so humans must live. It was not a struggle for justice. It was a battle of savages. The cruelest won. I was the perfect savior for mankind.