Wyrms

by Orson Scott Card

  "For some reason it sticks in my mind."

  He raised an eyebrow."! Don't remember it."

  "Now more than ever you remember."

  "God help me, if I must remember that night, then have the grace to take me from this rack and let me die."

  "That night when you opened the first sack and saw what it was, you shouted, 'I'll never go, I'll never let you have her, not my daughter, not ever.' Who were you shouting at? What was it that made you so afraid? You trembled, Father. I never saw you tremble before or since."

  "I was afraid of King Oruc, of course."

  "You never were afraid of him. And lying does you no good-see what the headworms do with you?"

  Abruptly he changed tactics. He smiled, and wryly said, "Even the headkeeper had some mercy. Now I feel like I've been constipated for a month and a diarrhea attack is beginning. You have no idea how bad these worms can be."

  "Tell me now and have your ease."

  Lightly he said, as if it didn't matter, "I feared the call to Cranning. It was the caller that I shouted at, whoever it was."

  "Who else could it be but the gebling king?" asked Patience.

  "Oh, you think you've solved it?"

  "Angel told me that the gebling kings have always been able to command their people without a word. From mind to mind."

  "Did Angel tell you that this power of the geblings has never touched a human being? We're deaf as a post when the geblings cry out to each other."

  "The Cranning call-if it isn't the geblings, who is it, and why do you fear it?"

  "I don't know who it is, but I fear him. I fear what he can do to people. The Wise of Grandfather's day were brilliant and strong, the greatest minds in the history of the world, working together, building on each other's learning, until they did things that had never been done on any world. Here, where iron is so hard to find that we can never rely on the machines that have always made humans powerful, they unlocked the powers of life. They weren't just petty breeders, like the Tassaliki, like the ancient scientists who created these headworms and gools four thousand years ago-those were mountebanks by comparison. The Wise of Grandfather's day had taught the chromosomes to name themselves in crystals, atom for atom, in patterns that could be seen and read by the naked eye. They had found how passion fish mate with clams to make cressid plants. And when I was born, they changed me so that I could never sire anything but sons."

  Patience thought about that for a moment. "They did it so the prophecy wouldn't be fulfilled. So there'd be no seventh seventh seventh daughter."

  "That was the plan."

  "Why did you change your mind? Why did you have Angel undo what they did? Surely you didn't become a Watcher."

  "No, not a Watcher. The Wise did this to me when I was still a child. As soon as they had made my body incapable of siring girlchildren, the Cranning call began.

  One by one, the best of them began to leave. They would go off to teach somewhere. They would retire to a country home. They would be sent as ambassadors or governors.

  But they would never arrive at their destination.

  Instead they would be seen along the rivers and roads leading to Cranning."

  "Your father was Heptarch then?"

  "Not yet. My father watched what happened to the empire, as all the able men disappeared. He went to them and begged them not to go. The ones who hadn't yet felt the Cranning call vowed most solemnly to stay. The ones who had felt it, though-they promised anything but they broke all their promises. And Grandfather did nothing to stop it. It was a frightening time, with provinces in rebellion, the army in disarray. Father finally had Grandfather arrested and took over the government."

  "So the Usurper wasn't the first to overthrow a Heptarch."

  "For the good of the King's House, even treason.

  Yes. But it was too late. Even when he tortured some of them, even when he killed some as an example, they went. Even when he cut off their heads and put them here, in Slaves' Hall, the Cranning call was so strong in their minds that the headworms had no power over them.

  The Cranning call was more urgent than anything the headworms could do to them."

  "What were they wanted for?"

  "Do you think Father didn't try to find out? But they themselves didn't know. And no one ever knew what became of them, once they got to Cranning. Father's spies never came back. And after a few years, the empire was lost. Twelve of the Fourteen Families were in revolt.

  Oruc's father led it. But he wasn't called the Usurper then. He was called the Liberator. He came, he said, to restore Grandfather to his rightful place on the Heptarch's throne."

  "Ah."

  "Father should have killed Grandfather."

  "As Oruc should have killed us?"

  "Grandfather wasn't the-seventh seventh seventh daughter." Lord Peace closed his eyes. Patience knew that if he still had his body, he would put his fingertips together, then touch them to his mouth; she could almost see his hands rise. She felt the grief for his death well up in her for the first time, seeing him half-alive like this, remembering him whole.

  She shook off the feeling. "How was I born, Father?"

  "My father lost the city of Heptam before I came of age. I led one army, he led another. He lost and was captured and killed. I never lost. I wandered the wilderness with an ever-shrinking guerrilla band. One by one my sons came to adulthood. One by one they were killed. The enemy seemed to find my boys so easily-as if some traitor led them. It was as if some terrible invisible power guided them to destroy everyone but me.

  Everyone but me. My first wife, my father, my children, and I alone was alive."

  "So you could sire the daughter of prophecy."

  "I studied the chronicles. I realized that my family's fall began almost the moment they undaughtered me.

  That was the crime for which the Wise were taken and the throne was lost. You see, Patience, the prophecies that these men of science had long thought were mere superstition-someone or something of great power meant to have them fulfilled. And we thought-perhaps if we find a way to undo what was done. Perhaps if I could have a girlchild, then the Wise would come home, and all could be restored as it was. Peace could be restored to the world. But how could we undo the work of the Wise, so my daughter could be born? Who would know how to do it, when the Wise were all gone?"

  "Angel," said Patience. "I know this story."

  "I was in my forties then. He came to me, a very young man then, and said he had been studying the journals of the great men, and he thought he knew a way to refresh and revivify my woman-making sperm. He explained, but I could not understand it-I know what every educated man knows about genetics, but he was deep in the chemistry and mathematics of it, catalysts and countercatalysts and inducers and blocks. I said to him, 'You know too much. You've become one of the Wise. The Cranning call will come to you.' He only smiled and said, 'Lord Peace, my Heptarch, if the caller wants you to have a daughter, then he will leave me here.' "

  "So my birth ... served the purpose of the Cranning call."

  "Angel and I argued over it. Better to be castrated than to give in to what this enemy wants, I said. But it came to this: We didn't know what purpose the Cranning call might have for you, but we knew that as long as you remained unborn, the world was in turmoil. We were at Ilium at the time, under the protection of Lady Hekat.

  She told us, 'The prophecies are ambiguous. The seventh seventh seventh daughter is called the destruction of the world, and the salvation of the world. Why not let her be born, and then teach her to be a savior?' So I took Lady Hekat as my second wife, and Angel made the change in me, and you were born."

  "Lady Hekat." Patience saw her mother's face as it had been the last time she saw her. Weeping as the soldiers took Patience away from her. Crying out, My daughter, my daughter, my child, God be with you, always with you; and then the knock on Father's door, and the sudden cry of agony as father looked into the bag that was delivered there. I saw his face. His face
, Mother's face, the same agony. "And you trained me to be an assassin," she said.

  "I taught you to serve the King's House. However much you think you hate me now, I know you. You will always act for the good of the King's House. You are the hope of humanity. Not as the Watchers and Vigilants believe, as the mere mother of some imagined god. You yourself. I know it."

  "I'm a child, fifteen years old. I'm the hope of nothing.

  I have no great purpose."

  "If you have no purpose of your own, then you will fulfill the purpose of the Cranning call. It waits for you, Daughter. But Angel and I have done all we could to teach you what the Heptarch lives for. If you haven't learned it, we could do no more."

  "You don't know anything Father. You don't know who is calling from Cranning, you don't know what he wants me for, and you don't even know me."

  "How could I know you, Patience? I felt the Cranning call, too. Are you surprised? I never felt it until you were born, but then it began. A terrible urgency to take you there, to carry you to Skyfoot and give you-to whatever waits there. Whenever I was with you, all your life, I have felt a longing worse than anything these petty worms can do to me. So I have spent as little time with you as I could, for fear I would break under the pain of it, and carry you off before you were ready."

  "Ready for what?"

  "To face whatever waits there."

  "Am I ready now?"

  "How can I know? But you're as ready as I could make you in my life. Trust Angel now. He is the last of the Wise, the only one who can protect you from the thing that calls. From Unwyrm."

  "You know its name?"

  "One prophecy says that you will take the world into Unwyrm's lair and give it to him, and all mankind will die and be reborn. It's the only prophecy that gives a name."

  "Who made the prophecy?"

  "A prophet, I suppose. What matters is that the Cranning call is proof that the prophecies are true-or some undefeatable power wants to make them true, which amounts to the same thing."

  "There's no such thing as an undefeatable power," said Patience. "You always taught me that."

  "Go now, Patience. I've told you everything. Now don't let them find you here, or my whole life was for nothing. And if they ask me, I'll have to tell them that I saw you. It'll give them a fresh trail."

  Almost she obeyed him. But then she realized that he had not fully answered her. There was still a twitching in his face, a sign that he was resisting, that he had not told her all that she had asked for.

  "One more story," she said.

  "No more."

  "The one you don't want to tell me."

  The face grimaced as the head tried to resist the urging of the worms. "Leave me in peace, child! Let my name be something more than a terrible irony."

  "Whatever you want so badly not to tell, that is the thing I most badly need to know."

  "You're wrong, you fool! If you needed to know I would have told you! Leave me this one secret to take to the grave."

  "I'll have it from you, Father! I'll have it, or wait here until Oruc takes me!"

  Finally, sweating and weeping, the head spoke. Patience pumped steadily, but the voice was high and strange.

  "The priests say that the Starship Captain was taken in the spirit by God, made some prophecies, and then disappeared into heaven."

  "I know the tales."

  "I know the truth. The captain of the starship Konkeptoine went mad as our ancestors orbited the world. It's true that he wrote the prophecy with his right hand in the ship's log. He also drew the map of the world, showing all the great deposits of iron and coal, the stuff that steel is made of. Then he .used the ship's powers to destroy those deposits. In that one act he determined the future of the world. Imakulata is not naturally poor in iron. Because of his insane act of destruction, we children of the great engine builders are deprived of steel. We have no great machines. We are weaker in this world than human beings have ever been before."

  "If he was insane enough to do that, why did anyone think he was a prophet?"

  "Because his map was more accurate than the one the ship's own mind drew. He knew things about the world that could not be known. They said at the time he seemed to be possessed. I who have felt the Cranning call know now that this was probably true. Whatever controlled him in the ship, that compulsive power is still alive. He left the ship in a landing craft and was never seen again. His craft was never found."

  "If something like this happened, why isn't it in any of the histories?"

  "There are stories passed from Heptarch to Heptarch that none of the historians know. I meant you to know this much, anyway; I told Angel, and he was to tell you.

  The priests know only of the map he drew with his right hand, and the words he spoke with his mouth. The words that his possessor wanted us to believe. Words about how Kristos would come to Imakulata and make the human race new and perfect. But his daughter Irena, the first Heptarch, she saw something that only the Heptarchs know: As he spoke the prophecy and drew the map with his right hand, his left hand slowly tapped out into the mind of the ship, 'Save my daughter from the lair of the wyrms, or they will devour all mankind.' "

  "His daughter-"

  "Not Irena, child. You. His distant daughter. At first they didn't know how distant. There were prophecies that it would be the seventh seventh daughter. Magic numbers.

  Only in the last thousand years have there been prophets who said that the Daughter of Prophecy, the Mother of God, is to be the seventh seventh seventh daughter of the Starship Captain."

  "Then there's no reason to believe that the prophecy is anything more than the raving of a Vigilant."

  "Of course. Except that the Cranning call obviously intends to fulfill that prophecy. I have no doubt that you are the daughter that needs saving, as the Starship Captain warned."

  "But what is the lair of the worms-this? The headworms?"

  "He wrote a word that in Star Speech, the most ancient of languages, means 'monster,' and not just any ' monster, but the most dangerous and cunning and powerful of enemies. An enemy powerful enough to take control of the Starship Captain's mind while the Konkeptoine still orbited Imakulata. An enemy powerful enough to call all the Wise to Cranning. Do you understand the danger of the world, Patience? We are facing an enemy that formed its plans seven thousand years ago, when we first arrived here. Whatever ruled Imakulata before humankind came here wants to rule again."

  "A gebling then. They were the highest native life, as intelligent as humankind-"

  "Were they? Then why is Geblic merely another corrupt form of Star Speech? And Dwelf and Gauntish, why did they have to take their language from mankind? They rose to where they are when humanity arrived; there was, something more powerful, an intelligence older than they.

  I meant for Angel to warn you of this. I didn't mean for you to be ignorant of it. But that's all now. That's all, now go."

  But even now, there was more, she could see what the headworms told her, that he was hiding still another secret from her. The headkeeper hadn't broken him. His power of resistance was still strong. But she would do what the headkeeper had failed to do. She would break him and have from him the tale he didn't want to tell.

  "I know you better than that, Father," she said. "If I am such a danger to the world, you would have killed me in my childhood."

  "The Starship Captain didn't say to kill his daughter.

  He said to save her. And even if he had not said so, I could not have killed you. Anyone else could die, child, anyone at all, but you would live. To destroy mankind or to save the world, I cannot guess, but you would live, whatever the cost."

  "Why! Not because I'm your daughter-so why!"

  His face twisted in agony. She had asked him the unbearable question, and the headworms would torture the answer from him. But even as she realized this, she also remembered something else. This was the expression on his face the night of Mother's death. This was the mask of pain he wore. "In all your
talking, Father, you never told me what you meant when you cried out on the night they brought Mother's body to you."

  His mouth opened wide to form a scream that never sounded.

  "The Cranning call. For me, the need wasn't for me to come. It was to bring you. Whole and alive. When I wasn't with you, I felt no call at all."

  "That doesn't answer my-"

  "Your mother was always with you. She was also called. She was weaker than I was. She tried to take you.

  That's why I carried you away from her. She vowed she would never rest until she had you back, that she would do anything to get you away from me."

  Even now, though the dread was thick within her, she could not bring herself to understand what he meant.

  "Listen, foolish girl! Didn't Angel and I teach you how to listen? My father was weak enough to let Grandfather live, when he should have died. I was stronger than my father was. Hekat meant to take you to Cranning.

  I had no strength to kill you, against the Cranning call, but I still had strength."

  Patience stopped pumping breath for him.

  "You," she whispered. "You told me it was a group of soldiers trying to curry favor with Oruc. You told me-they were even executed for it-but it was you."

  His lips formed words as he ran out of air. I never meant to tell you. His eyes accused her. You made me tell you, and you didn't need to know.

  It was more than she could bear.

  "Why didn't you let her take me to Cranning. I would rather have suffered anything, and have her live."

  "The King's House is all the world," said his lips.

  "You weren't the Heptarch! You didn't have any responsibility for the whole world! You didn't have to kill my mother!" And she swept him from the table, spilling him to the floor. At once she rushed to him, to lift the head back to the table, restore the gel that would keep his gools alive.

  But he looked at her steadily as she knelt over him, and his lips moved and said, Let me die.

  So she did the only thing she could do. She took Lord Peace by the jaw and tore the head away from the rack that held it. The headworms wriggled in the open air and the gools slid off and slopped onto the floor. All the time her father's eyes looked at her in gratitude and love.