Gatefather

by Orson Scott Card

  “I can see you not trusting Wheeler,” said Laurette, “because he’s, like, the human ambassador to the roaches.”

  “He’s a roach prince who just needs our social security numbers to help him receive his inheritance,” said Sin.

  “Slug prince,” said Xena. “Nematode prince.”

  “We introverta,” said Hal, “are quietly proud to count the nematoda among us.”

  “Science puns,” said Laurette with a shudder.

  “May I interrupt this punfest plus envython to point out something to Danny that he may not have noticed and that nobody else can see?” asked Pat.

  “That sounds rude,” said Laurette. “Like rich people comparing their bank balances in front of homeless people.”

  “Which they do all the time,” said Pat. “Danny, the free prets are clustering around all of them, but Wheeler’s are the ones I was noticing. One or two would kind of divebomb his ka, and then he’d pop up with some bit of grossness or envy or, you know, a Wheelerism.”

  Danny hadn’t noticed, but as she spoke, he could see—or sense—the hovering clouds of undifferentiated prets, and saw many of them zip inward toward Wheeler’s ka.

  Wheeler whirled around and flared at Pat. “Oh, do I have some mark of Cain on me? Something that makes me an animal that doesn’t understand English, that can’t feel the contempt you have for me, Pat? You with your windmagery and your gate travel, you with the love of your life who happens to be a god panting along beside you, do you find a lonely guy like me disgusting? Ugly? Horrible?”

  “You’re inverting cause and effect,” said Laurette.

  Danny held up a hand, watching how more of the prets moved in close to Wheeler’s ka, which seemed to welcome them. They weren’t even orbiting, they were practically attached to him.

  It occurred to Danny that gates—or any kind of outself, really—consisted of prets that were bonded to somebody’s ka. He knew that they came with human kas when they left Duat and were born on Earth. But these unattached prets—they weren’t part of anything. Not part of atoms or molecules, not part of any person or animal.

  “Sutahites,” whispered Pat.

  Exactly, thought Danny. The prets that followed Set to Mittlegard when he was thrown out of Duat, permanently bodiless. Set had the ability to take possession of a human, to control his actions one way or another. But the other Sutahites were far weaker. More limited. They could only … suggest. Remind.

  But if they were like gates that had no gatemage, could he gather them in the way that he had taken all of the Gate Thief’s own gates and captive gates back last fall?

  No. That gathering motion didn’t work, because they weren’t used to being part of anything. They didn’t respond to any kind of law.

  But that didn’t mean Danny had to give up.

  He could see Pat raising her hand to keep the others from speaking, from interrupting his concentration. And even though Wheeler was seething, Danny could see how he controlled himself and did not keep on acting out his anger and hurt. He just waited, as the Sutahites kept trying to entice him to act in a destructive way.

  So Wheeler did have the power to resist them, when he had a stronger desire for something else. The desire to see what Danny was going to do.

  What Danny did was invite the Sutahites to come to him. He was afraid that he might be repeating his mistake of inviting Set to come into him, but no. He wasn’t asking them to enter him, to enter his body. He was asking them to attach themselves to his ka, as if they were becoming his gates.

  But not his gates. He couldn’t “make” them as gates because they didn’t know how. They were lawless. They didn’t know how to do anything except move to him, attach to him.

  He could feel them coming. It wasn’t hard to lure them away from Wheeler. None of them had a very strong will of its own. Danny’s own ka was so strong, so … charismatic?… that they could hardly resist the invitation, if in fact any of them tried.

  When they attached to him, he could sense them like a distant clamor of voices, like a crowd moving through a street on the other side of a large building. It wasn’t words, really. They had learned how to trigger emotions, and Danny could feel them jostling him that way. Tiny pinpricks of envy, lust, greed, disgust, pride, resentment, ambition, even affection and humor. And the desire to hurt people. That was underlying almost all of them. Not rage, really. Just a desire to cause damage.

  But it was all so very faint and weak. And Danny’s own will overpowered them. They gave into him. Accepted his rule. Made him their king, became part of his domain.

  And when the last of them was gone from Wheeler, he turned back around. “I was such a jerk, guys,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Xena. “You didn’t mean what you said.”

  “Oh, I meant it,” said Wheeler, “because I really am a jerk. But … I knew better than to say it. Danny’s my friend, man. I wouldn’t say stuff like that to a friend, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I do,” said Pat. “And I know why you’re not thinking it now. Because Danny just took away the tiny things that were prompting you to say those things. To feel them.”

  “Oh, get real,” said Hal. “Next thing you’ll tell me is we really do have a tiny angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, like in cartoons.”

  “We do,” said Pat, “except … no angel.”

  The others looked to Danny for confirmation. “It’s hard to explain it when you can’t see it. Sense it. But yes, Pat saw it and I didn’t till she pointed it out. That creature I had inside me, when I wasn’t acting like me—”

  “Set,” said Laurette and Xena together. “The Belmage,” said Sin at the same time.

  “When he was expelled from Duat and came to Earth without a human body, there were millions that came with him. Also without bodies. Smaller than microscopic. More like geometric points. But they joined in Set’s cause, which was to make human beings as miserable as possible, to make us destroy each other.”

  “So the devil made me do it,” said Wheeler, halfway between scorn and hope.

  “Not made you,” said Danny. “They would if they could, but no, they can only sort of trigger you. Remind you of something you already felt or thought. Every angry word you said to me was something you truly thought of. But it wasn’t all you thought about me. Just the parts that might destroy our friendship.”

  “Why would they care if I had you as a friend?” asked Wheeler.

  “Any bonds between people—they’re real, even if they’re insubstantial. We bind ourselves to each other in friendship, in families. And the Sutahites want us all to act in ways that tear that down.”

  Xena blushed. “So when we tried to, like, seduce you—”

  “When we threw ourselves at you like discount whores,” said Sin.

  “Clearance-table harlots,” said Laurette.

  “Sutahites were working on us?” asked Xena.

  “I don’t know,” said Danny. “I couldn’t see the prets then. But I think, probably so.”

  “Do we have them now?” asked Laurette.

  “When you guys were competing to find the most disgustingly clever way to describe your own behavior,” said Pat, “each time you had a couple or three sort of divebomb your ka, your inself.”

  “Great,” said Sin. “So whenever I’m clever, it’s really the devil that’s clever and I’m just his puppet.”

  “No,” said Danny. “You’re never a puppet. They can’t make you say or do anything. You have no strings to pull. I mean, when you’re hungry and you pass the bakery department at Walmart—”

  “Nothing there makes me hungry,” said Sin.

  “Liar,” said Xena.

  “Is your sudden rush of hunger forcing you to stop and pick up something to eat?” asked Danny. “You can just walk by, and when you’re broke, that’s exactly what you do. Your brain doesn’t switch off, you can still choose.”

  “So Wheeler was responsible for ev
ery mean thing he said?” Xena asked.

  “Just as you’re responsible for that mean thing,” said Pat. “But Danny just gathered up the ones that were hovering around Wheeler.”

  “So if I say something nasty now, it just came from me,” said Wheeler.

  “Or from habit,” said Danny. “Look, I don’t understand this yet, we just saw something and I tried something.”

  “But I’m clean,” said Wheeler. “I got none of them anymore?”

  “No,” said Pat. “Already you’ve picked up some new ones. Maybe they were strays, maybe they came from somebody else.”

  “So … my pure-thoughts phase was, like, ninety seconds long,” said Wheeler.

  “Your thoughts were never pure,” said Pat. “You still had your full dosage of testosterone.”

  “He’s only got half a dose,” said Hal. “I thought you all knew that.”

  “Not true,” said Wheeler, “but funny.”

  “You mean they didn’t know?” asked Hal.

  “When you say something mean to a friend,” said Pat, “you can pretend you’re joking, but you thought of it, you had the mean idea, and then you chose to say it. Laughing doesn’t erase that. Not your laughter and not Wheeler’s.”

  “Can you take them away from all of us?” asked Laurette. “Because you have no idea how many bitchy things I’ve thought of to say in the last three minutes.”

  “And I’m just dying to say, ‘You mean besides the ones you did say?’” said Sin.

  “Very busy Sutahites,” said Pat.

  “I don’t know that it does any good to take them,” said Danny. “More come anyway. I think there are probably millions. Billions maybe. I don’t know if I can gather them all. I sort of hear them, they do to me whatever they were doing to you. Probably not as strongly, maybe because they don’t know me as well as they got to know you. I’m just saying … it won’t necessarily do you any long-term good.”

  “Because they can’t become a part of you,” said Pat, “people can’t take these Sutahites with them when they pass through a gate. Or a Great Gate. They get stripped away and left behind. I think what the Gate Thief fears about Great Gates is that Set will get through, and if he gets through, he can bring all the Sutahites with him, and the people of Westil have never had to deal with them. They really might become slaves.”

  “Not that they haven’t been perfectly capable of coming up with horrors and evils on their own,” said Danny.

  “Seriously,” said Hal. “We’re supposed to believe that our heads are surrounded by a cloud of gnats that tell us to do bad things.”

  “Let’s see,” said Laurette. “We’ve seen people disappear in one place and appear in another. Injuries healed in an instant. Kids flying up a mile above Buena Vista and coming back down not dead. A girl we’ve known half our lives suddenly being able to whip up dust devils and tornados. But you’re right—clouds of tiny creatures around our heads is way too much to swallow.”

  “It just feels so childish,” said Hal.

  “Shut up,” said Sin. “Not you, Hal, Xena. She was about to start that stupid ‘wildest childish’ tongue twister again.”

  “Do you know how it feels to me?” asked Wheeler. “Weirdly quiet. It’s not like I heard actual voices or words or anything. But it’s like something that used to keep me agitated all the time has taken a vacation.”

  “Will that make Wheeler less weird?” asked Laurette.

  “Doubtful,” said Pat.

  “This is what makes me so frustrated,” said Danny. “We do this banter all the time, everybody does it, insulting each other, mocking each other, only … it hurts, doesn’t it? We hurt each other. Can’t we just stop? Can’t we just be kind? Wheeler’s not weird, he’s just another human trying to figure out how he can belong to a tribe. And in this group he doesn’t exactly stand out for weirdness, does he? Look at us. The ‘popular’ kids call us weird, because we don’t obey them and dress like them and worship them, but screw them, they’re nasty and stupid. We’re smart and … let’s stop treating each other the way they treat us. Because we don’t deserve it.”

  They were all silent for a while.

  “I didn’t know it bothered you,” said Laurette.

  “It didn’t. I didn’t even notice it till now. But here’s Wheeler telling us that he used to be agitated all the time, and Pat and I are telling you that he was plagued with these things from outside himself, trying to make him unhappy and self-destructive, and then you have to call him weird?”

  “I’m the one who said it,” said Laurette, “and I was asking if it would make him less weird—”

  “I know what you said, Laurette, and it wasn’t just you. Everybody laughed. Including me!”

  “But not Pat. She never laughs,” said Xena.

  “Yes, she does,” said Danny. “All the time.”

  “With you,” said Sim.

  “At you,” said Hal. “No, erase that, sorry. It’s just such a habit!”

  “It’s how we know we’re part of the group,” said Laurette. “The popular kids, they make fun of people outside their group. We tease each other, but we’re never mean to people outside.”

  “Yes, we are,” said Sin.

  “We’re as vicious as the popular kids,” said Xena.

  “Yes, but we’re smarter, so the things we say about them are actually funny.”

  “I didn’t mean to disrupt everything,” said Danny. “I’m not mad, and I’m not blaming you or anybody because I do it too. It just felt wrong, right at that moment, for us to mock Wheeler. It’s like, we found out he had a hidden wound, a dagger sticking out of his ribs, and I pulled out the dagger and then we started laughing at him for bleeding.”

  “That was a really bad analogy,” said Laurette.

  “It was only a little bad,” said Danny. “It was also a little accurate. Of course we can tease each other. If we didn’t poke each other, yeah, how would we even know that we belonged. I just wish we could stop poking each other right in the bleeding wounds. Let’s try to heal the wounds, and poke somewhere else.”

  “I’ll try,” said Pat. “But we’re high-school kids, you know.”

  “We haven’t all aced the SAT and the ACT,” said Hal.

  “You know that those tests measure nothing except your ability to take tests,” said Danny.

  “But since college consists of passing a whole bunch of tests for four years, that’s a good skill to have,” said Sin.

  “I wish we were smarter so we could form a team like Scorpion,” said Wheeler.

  “Which one are you?” asked Hal. “Sylvester?”

  “I wish,” said Wheeler. “I’m more like … one of the civilians who gets in the way.”

  “I’m Paige,” said Laurette. “I’m the normal one who helps them communicate with humans.”

  “So Danny is Walter?” asked Wheeler. “The genius?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Danny.

  “You so need to get cable in that little house of yours,” said Xena. “Scorpion. It’s a TV show about a team of geniuses who don’t get along, only they really need each other so they keep almost breaking up but then they can’t survive without each other.”

  “We don’t keep almost breaking up,” said Danny.

  “We also don’t have to get ratings every week so we can stay on the air,” said Pat. “It’s always got all this fake conflict, only I find myself caring even though I know it’s just writers manipulating me.”

  “It’s the little boy, Ralph,” said Xena. “That’s what makes me care.”

  “Danny isn’t Walter,” said Hal. “Danny is Cade. The grownup with real power in the real world, who comes in and saves their asses time and again.”

  “But also he’s the one who keeps getting them into danger in the first place,” said Laurette. “Sorry, Danny, but … kind of true.”

  “We’re discussing a TV show,” said Pat.

  “Because it applies to us,” sai
d Hal. “Come on, Pat, we can’t just sit around thinking serious thoughts and discussing Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and the Elder Eddas.”

  “Where did Kierkegaard come from?” asked Pat. “Who’s heard of Kierkegaard?”

  Sin had her phone out, trying to remember how to spell Kierkegaard—if she had ever known. Hal started helping her.

  “Danny doesn’t need cable,” said Wheeler. “He needs a tablet.”

  “But to stream any shows, he’d have to get wi-fi, which he doesn’t have unless he gets cable, and then he’d have cable,” said Xena.

  Sin started reading. “‘Boredom is the root of all evil—the despairing refusal to be oneself.’”

  “I have no idea what that means,” said Danny.

  “Neither do I,” said Sin, “but Kierkegaard said it.”

  Hal started reading off her phone. “‘Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the windowpanes, which vanish with the warmth.’”

  “Sounds like a depressed Dane,” said Pat.

  “But he’s a great Dane,” said Wheeler.

  “Woof,” said Xena.

  Sin was reading again. “OK, here’s one. ‘Don’t forget to love yourself.’”

  “Maybe Danes need to be reminded of that. Especially in winter,” said Pat. “But Americans usually need to be reminded to love somebody besides themselves.”

  “‘The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays,’” said Sin.

  “If Danny’s a god,” said Wheeler, “I wonder if anybody prays to him.”

  Danny held up his hand, knowing that somebody would start doing it just to be cute. “Please don’t. Please be my friends and don’t ever call me a god. I don’t act like I think I’m a god, do I? I try not to.”

  “You just, like, cast out Wheeler’s devils,” said Xena. “You may not be a god but you’re something.”

  Danny buried his head in his hands. “I’m Danny North, and I’ve got way more power than any human being should have, but I still can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do with it. A lot of terrible things are happening and worse ones are coming and it’s partly my fault, so I think it’s my job to stop them but I don’t know how and, hell, I don’t even know how things are supposed to look when I set everything to rights, because the world kind of sucked before I found out I was a gatemage, and I know that wasn’t my fault. So do I scale back the suckage until it only sucks as much as usual? Or am I supposed to fix the whole thing? Or just stop the worst suckathons and then crawl in a hole somewhere like Loki did after he closed all the gates?”