Gatefather

by Orson Scott Card

  But because the Earth wept and suffered with Persephone in the underworld, Zeus decreed that she must come back to the surface. Hades, having tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds, was able to make her come back to the land of the dead for six months of the year. All very just-so, but it mattered that Hermes was the messenger that Zeus sent to Hades to bring her back to the surface.

  Though the three addresses were different, the emails all repeated the same kind of subject line. First it was, “Take me home and find out what I know.” Then, “You can be a god if you follow me into the shadows.” And finally, “I’m old enough to decide. Don’t make me go home alone.”

  All three subject lines sounded like sexual come-ons designed to evade spam filters. And when Set clicked on two of the messages, probably searching for porn, the URLs in the emails did lead to sites specializing in underage-looking women posing explicitly. But Danny knew that the contents of the emails didn’t matter, because whoever sent them knew that Danny couldn’t choose to open any email message. All that mattered was the sender’s email address and the subject line.

  All three dealt with people who were brought back from death. All three subject lines could be taken as advice or requests to Danny. I’m going to die, they seemed to say. It’s your job to follow me to the land of the dead—Hades, Dis, or Duat—and “find out” whatever it was that Duat had to teach him. And one of them asserted that she was “old enough to decide,” which meant he shouldn’t feel bad about her dying, but should instead use the opportunity to learn whatever he could.

  Danny didn’t allow himself even to attempt to take action, but his anxiety grew with every letter. Since all the addresses were female, he assumed that they came from a woman—from the same woman. “I’m old enough” implied that it wasn’t Veevee or Leslie. It was either one of his high school friends from Parry McCluer High, or it was Hermia from the Greek Family.

  Hermia seemed unlikely, if only because she was the one who betrayed him by moving the Wild Gate and letting all the Greeks go through, turning loose the power of augmented mages—gods—in Mittlegard again.

  And of the girls at Parry McCluer, the only ones educated enough to think of the names of these three mythical women were Pat and Laurette.

  Danny might be wrong, he knew, but he believed Laurette was way too selfish to put her own life at risk, even in a noble cause. So the letters came from Pat. Pat was planning some insane move to try to break him free from the power of Set. Clearly her plan involved going to the land of the dead—which meant, from what Danny had been able to learn, Duat, the third planet, the one from which all the kas and bas of humankind derived.

  Don’t do it, Pat, he thought. And then stopped himself from thinking it, because whatever he thought too clearly, Set could understand, at least partly, and he didn’t want to alert his enemy to how important Pat was to him.

  Still, he had to admit it was clever of her to figure out a way to deliver a message to him. This way, if he should run across her dead or dying body, he would know that her plan was for him to somehow follow her into death. And then, with luck, bring her back with him.

  The problem with this clever plan was that he had no idea how to do it. He hadn’t seen that much death in his life. At least not deaths of humans. So he had no idea of whether he could even find Pat’s dying ka and somehow attach to it in order to hitch a ride into hell. Or heaven. Whatever.

  And Persephone only made it back for half-years. Eurydice was cheated at the last moment because Orpheus looked back. Osiris’s resurrection was only temporary. The track record for returning from death was pretty poor even in the stories.

  Yet the emails hinted at ideas that fit within conversations that Pat and Danny had before Set took him over. He himself must have given her this really, really bad idea.

  So if she died and he couldn’t find her departing inself, let alone follow her, he’d bear the added guilt of knowing that she had died trying to save him, and that words of his had, unintentionally, led her to her death.

  We all die in the end, he thought. All we can influence is the timetable. Not the outcome. Even if everything works according to the plan Pat seems to be proposing, and I bring her back, she’ll still die eventually. Or we’ll both stay dead. Which might not be all that bad, compared to living until Set gets tired of me. Everybody dies.

  “Well, isn’t that the truth,” said Set aloud, using Danny’s mouth.

  Danny pretended not to know what Set was talking about—he tried to shrug. Set blocked him, but then did an elaborate super shrug. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything,” said Set in a whiny caricature of Danny’s voice. “But I heard you, North boy. ‘We all die in the end.’”

  Again Danny shrugged; again Set overdid the gesture.

  “But you’re wrong, Danny North, philosopher. I won’t die. Bummer, huh? You can die. You will die. But your final comfort as you lie there dying can be this: The Mighty One who taught me how to live will continue to live on after me, in another body, and another after that, forever and ever. Your greatest happiness will come from knowing that you were once my sock puppet. Do you like that one? Sock puppet! Except that I didn’t come in through your butthole.”

  Crude as always. Set was as disgusting as a seventh-grader. Danny was surprised he didn’t spend all day drinking soda pop in order to produce ever longer, louder flatulence.

  The message emails stopped coming, but Danny didn’t stop looking. He’d bring up the memory of checking emails, then Set would check the next batch of emails and Danny would scan them quickly to see if any of them looked like a message. None of them did. Then one night, when it was almost dark, someone knocked on the door.

  Set used Danny’s body to spring up and open the door.

  It was Pat. She looked him steadily in the eye. “Danny,” she said. “I can’t just leave you alone in there.”

  “He’s not alone,” said Danny’s voice.

  Pat’s eyes turned cold. “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Good thing,” said Set. “Because I’m not talking to you, either.”

  Danny’s right hand flashed out and gripped Pat’s shoulder. She winced and cringed at the pain and pressure. Then Danny’s left hand leapt forward and slashed across her throat. Only then did Danny realize that he—that Set—was holding his knife. Blood geysered from Pat’s throat and splashed into Danny’s eyes.

  For a moment, startled at being blinded, Set’s attention was distracted. Danny could have made one of the captive gates right then and passed it over her. He could have healed her and then given the gate back to itself.

  But that wasn’t what Pat had come for. The plan she proposed was for Danny to follow her to Duat. Or Hades. Or Hell. And for that to work, he had to let her die, even though healing her was within his power.

  Instead, Danny watched for her ka and then he realized—I don’t have to find her ka, I need to find her outself, her ba, because I know what those feel like. They feel like gates. Pat is a windmage now, not a gatemage—but she has a ba and as she is dying, it’s going to flow back to her and I can see it, I can find it, there it is. Her ba, returning, guiding me to the ka.

  It was like when Danny swallowed the Gate Thief’s gates, only instead of breaking the connection between Pat’s ba and ka, he left the connection open, and when the ba found the ka and reunited with it, Danny held them both within his grasp. Whatever it was in him that did the grasping.

  He waited for Set to recognize what he was doing and stop him, but either Set didn’t sense it or Set couldn’t stop it. Or perhaps Set wanted it to happen.

  Danny hadn’t taken Pat’s ba and ka, but he had a grip on it, he knew where it was. He felt it withdrawing from her body, like a million-armed squid pulling its arms out of sucking mud.

  And the moment that the last link between Pat’s ka and her body was severed, Danny passed one of the captive gates over her body. Almost every cell in her body was still alive, even if the ka was missing. Her body healed.
<
br />   Danny gave the gate back to itself and it disappeared.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Set, using Danny’s lips. “You’re too late, you know that doesn’t work.”

  For a moment Danny thought her ka would leap back into her body, and perhaps it might have, except that he could feel her resist the impulse and let go. In that moment she chose to go ahead and die, even though he had given her the choice.

  Her ka hovered nearby. Am I holding you back? thought Danny. Is my light grip on you enough to keep you here instead of letting you return to Duat?

  Yet if I let you go, how can I follow you?

  No, my grip on her won’t hold her back—it’s my grip on my own body that keeps me here. It’s not enough for me to have a grasp on her. I have to let myself float free.

  As soon as his attention turned inward, he realized that the strongest anchor holding him to his body was not his own ka—it was the captive gates he still held within his hoard.

  So he made all those gates and gave each one back to itself, all of them in a few moments, all gone. Set screamed in rage until it hurt Danny’s throat and left him nearly voiceless.

  But Danny hardly felt it, for he was unburdened now. He had not understood what a heavy weight those prisoners had been to him.

  He could feel Pat tugging on him. She was trying to move away, trying to go to wherever dead souls go. To the planet Duat. But Danny’s grip still held her back.

  Yet now her pull on him began to draw him away from his own body. He could feel his own ka trying to suck its tendrils out of his flesh.

  “No!” Set shouted hoarsely.

  But he had no power to stop Danny from doing what he was doing now. It was Danny’s body that Set had overpowered, not Danny’s ka, and he could not stop Danny from discarding the skin and bones.

  If I die completely, thought Danny, can Set continue to use my body? He can’t make gates because all the gates are gone. Will he leave? Whose body would he take? What poor bastard will be his next victim?

  Plenty of time to answer that when Danny returned. If he returned.

  Besides, whoever Set possessed next would not be a gatemage. So if Danny’s death turned out to be permanent, the worlds were in far less danger than when Set owned a gatemage’s body.

  As more and more connections with his body pulled free, Danny could feel that the remaining ones became more attenuated. Thinner. Stretchier. Pat’s tugging drew him farther away, and faster, and faster, so that when he had only three connections left, his grasp on her stopped being any kind of barrier and he was with her, traveling on.

  He tried to talk to her but he had no mouth, no more power to make speech than when he was in a body controlled by Set. Instead of feeling liberated at losing most of the connection with his body, he felt imprisoned; it was the body that had given him so much strength and power. It was the body that ran, that ate, that ached, that slept, that healed. The body, with all its demands, had given him tremendous powers and now he didn’t know how to function without them. When possessed by Set, at least he had still felt things.

  Only when his grasp on Pat tightened and her movement slowed did he receive a communication from her. Not words—there were no words between two kas, just as Danny had not been able to use actual language to communicate with Loki’s gates when Danny held them. But he understood the sense of what she was trying to communicate: It worked. It’s working. Let’s keep going.

  Danny did not know what their movement consisted of, or how it was done, or how he even knew it was happening. He had no eyes to see. But he knew that they had left the world of six billion human kas and were in the vast space between worlds, between stars.

  And then they weren’t. Far faster than they could possibly have covered the actual distance, they were now approaching another world with trillions, quintillions of kas. More than the total number of people who had ever lived on Mittlegard and Westil combined. More than the total number of animals and plants. Enough to populate the worlds through all their history ten times over.

  He had no idea how he knew this. He could not identify or label or count any other ka besides his own and Pat’s. And yet he knew how many they were, a number for which he truly had no name. A number that could represent all the particles of any kind or size in the universe, and still have more left over. Yet because kas, like geometric points, had no dimension, there was room enough for them all on this world. On Duat.

  He could not see the world. He could not tell where life left off and rock began. Could it be a gas giant? Could Duat be the surface of a star? Unable to see, to sense heat or cold, to feel pain or even the hardness of a rock, Danny could sense only the life around him.

  He made sure his grasp on Pat remained firm, because he feared that if he ever lost his hold on her he would lose her in the chaos of this place.

  Not chaos. There was no chaos here. There was perfect order. A place for every ka, and every ka in its place.

  How did he know that?

  Without words, a powerful ka unfolded to him the answer: You knew because I gave you the knowledge. I put the wisdom into you, and now you have it as if you thought of it yourself.

  Though he understood this, he did not “hear” it. There was nothing sequential about it, nothing like the orderly flow of language, one word after another. Instead, the knowledge wasn’t there, and then it was.

  Who are you? Or at least it was Danny’s intention to ask that question.

  I am I.

  Or maybe it was, I’m myself. Or “me.” Or “this one.” There were no words, but Danny caught the idea of the deep self-understanding of the being who was talking to him. Danny had no such understanding of himself. By comparison to the depth of his guide’s self-knowledge, Danny was trivial, a bit of dust on a breeze, a grain of sand being churned in the belly of a wave.

  Except that because he was talking to This One, Danny was not wave-churned or windblown. He was very still. And tucked beside him, inside him, was Pat. He was also aware of her.

  Who is that? asked This One.

  Pat, Danny answered. Only there was no word Pat. Instead, his answer was to convey at once all that he knew of Pat, all he remembered, all they had meant to each other, the plan that Pat had come up with and acted on, the murder in the doorway of his house, done by Danny’s own hand but not by his will.

  You did not want her dead? asked This One.

  I want to be alive with her, answered Danny, and there flowed from him all that he hoped for out of life, the companionship of marriage and family, children to raise, friends and work and learning and making, all the things that have value in a mortal human life.

  Yes, said This One. That’s why we sent you there.

  I did not want Pat to die, Danny tried to explain. And yet she chose to come where death was waiting, and when Set killed her I stood by and let her die even though I could have healed her, so I consented to her death so she could bring me here. And she consented to her death because when I healed her body she could have leapt back into it and she didn’t. She is here by her own choice.

  And yet you hold her prisoner, answered This One.

  I enclose her because otherwise I would not know where she was.

  You would know, said This One.

  In that moment Danny knew that whatever This One told him, it had to be true; that in the telling of it This One made it true.

  So Danny let Pat go.

  The moment he did, Pat seemed to grow, to explode until her presence with him was almost overwhelming. It was not that she was greater or larger or brighter or louder—words that meant nothing here—but that she was vastly present to him. When he had held on to her, her ka seemed elusive and faint; now, set free of him, she was so powerfully focused on him that she seemed to fill half the space around him. By the intensity of her devotion to him, she made him greater than he had been.

  And this was not just some illusion. The other nearby kas sensed it too, and turned to him. Not a physical turning, bu
t a focusing of their attention, and he grew and glowed brighter and became warmer and saw farther and understood more because of the brightness of their attention. But brightest of all, Pat.

  Something like amusement from This One.

  No. Pat was not the brightest of them all. She was only the brightest of those close by who were not This One. This One’s attention to him was like the ocean compared with the single raindrop of Pat’s attention. And the perception of all the others was like flecks of mist compared to her.

  That is love, said This One.

  Pat loves me, I knew that, but why do you love me? And these others, whom I do not know, how can they love me?

  Because they saw you let go of Pat and set her free. They saw that you did it because you trusted my promise that you would know her even if you no longer held her. For those two things they love you, and because of their love you are larger than you were. And Pat is larger because she willingly died for you. For that love they are in awe of her.

  We don’t want to be dead, said Danny, and he understood that Pat was explaining the same thing in her own way at the same time.

  There are many here who did not wish to be dead. But here they are, content for the time being, content to be with me.

  Are you God? asked Danny.

  A being who makes others obey him against their will? Never. A creator out of nothingness? It cannot be. The absolute ruler of heaven and earth? No such, or if there is, I do not know it.

  Then who are you?

  Is that what you came here for? To know me?

  I don’t know. I came here to find out what I need to know in order to keep Set from overmastering two worlds and ruling with cruelty for ten thousand, a hundred thousand years. Forever.

  In this place you will never learn how to force another to bend to your will against his own inclination. Have you learned nothing of power?

  Danny thought of all the teaching of the Mithermages: To gain power from trees, you must love the trees: Pay them attention, serve their needs, protect them from their enemies. As you show your love for them, they give you whatever power they can share with you, because they trust you to act in their interest. Then the eagle lets you ride inside him, and follows your wishes as if they were commands, because his life means more obeying you than it ever did in his solitary freedom. But if you betray that trust, then you are worse off than those who have no influence with plants or eagles, rock or rain.