Wyrms

by Orson Scott Card

  Yes, thought Patience. Come, puppet. Come, folded paper. Dance your dance, hold the shape we gave you.

  Until your usefulness is over. Then someone-the geblings, Unwyrm, perhaps some mad Vigilant along the way-someone will burn you up.

  Chapter 11. HEFFUFS HOUSE

  LATE ONE AFTERNOON THEY WERE TRIMMING SAIL AS THEY rounded a bend through a narrow channel between sandbars, when River clicked his tongue twice and the monkey began to screech. By now everyone knew this meant River wanted a quick change in course. They stopped all conversation and listened-River's voice was never loud.

  "Hard port!" he said. Will, who was at the helm, heeled the lever toward the starboard side, and almost at the same moment Sken grabbed Patience and a gebling and ran to the left side of the boat. Patience only had time to catch a glimpse of what they were avoiding-a large buoy, big enough that if they had collided head on, with their speed from such a brisk wind, it would have done real damage to buoy and boat alike. As it was, they still bumped into it, but side-on and slower.

  "That's supposed to be two mile upriver," said the pilot. "Last flood season must have dragged her anchor down here so far. Cast a line."

  Sken didn't hesitate. She knotted a rope onto a grappling hook, swung the hook above her head, and cast it against the buoy, now bobbing some dozen yards behind them. The hook caught on the first throw, but Patience didn't know whether that was remarkable or just what a competent riverwoman would be expected to do.

  "What are you doing with that!" demanded Ruin.

  "Putting it back where it belongs," said Sken, as if it were-a fact that should be obvious even to a child.

  "None of our affair," said Ruin.

  "There's too many on the river feels that way already," said Sken. "But River and me, we feel the same on this. When something's out of place that you can fix, then you fix it, so next pilot won't risk what almost got us."

  They got back on course through the channel and then it was clear sailing for a while. Long enough to take a better look at the buoy. It had a sign on it, at such an angle that you could just read it if you leaned out from the stern on the starboard side. In Geblic, Gauntish, Dwelf, and Agarant-the language all traveling humans used, regardless of their native tongue-the sign advertised a single thing for sale:

  ANSWERS

  Angel laughed aloud when Patience told him what it said. "When have you seen such arrogance before?"

  "Maybe they're not selling," said Reck. "Maybe they're buying."

  Patience did not laugh. It was too ironic. If there was anything she needed right now, it was answers. And here they were, offered hi trade.

  Two miles on, they dropped anchor and hauled in the buoy. Sken and Will lashed it to the boat, then hauled up the buoy's anchor and added a bag of ballast to it. It was an hour's work at most, but Patience took no part in it, so she had time to look for the place on shore where the answers might be found. It wasn't a heavily settled area, so it could only be the house well up on a hill, perhaps a quarter-mile walk from the river.

  If the house had been one of the common inns along the river, preying upon travelers with rigged games, indigestible food, and bug-ridden beds, Patience would not have had them put ashore. Instead, though, it was old and modest, and far enough back from the water that it couldn't be a money trap for travelers. If they hadn't anchored to fix the buoy, it would have been visible only for a moment in a gap between trees along the river's edge. To Patience, this suggested that the sign was sincere enough. It was a place for people who wanted truth enough to work to get it-out of the way, hard to reach, with only a single sign to tell them what it was, and only a single sight to tell them where.

  Of course, the moment she thought of stopping. Patience felt the pressure of the Cranning call within her, urging her to go on, faster, faster. It was no stronger now than before; Unwyrm was not trying to get her to avoid this place in particular. But because the need to hurry on was so great, and because she knew that someone else was producing that need within her, she resisted for the sake of resistance, the way that she had deliberately endured extra suffering as a child, to inure herself to hardship.

  When Will and Sken climbed aboard the boat and began unlashing the buoy, Patience spoke her decision.

  "Bring the boat ashore."

  "At that place!" said Sken. "I will not! We'll pass a dozen better inns before nightfall."

  Patience smiled and spoke to River. "The pilot sets the course, the captain rules the life aboard the ship, but the owner says what ports the ship will visit. Am I right?"

  River winked at her.

  Sken cursed, but instead of raising sail again, she and Will poled the boat to shore.

  They touched the ragged-looking pier that ran out into the river and tied the boat fast. Leaving Sken to keep watch over Angel, Patience led Will and the geblings ashore. Angel demanded to be taken along. Patience ignored him. She didn't feel the same need to defer to him that she had felt before he started lying to her.

  There wasn't much of a path up the hill. Patience let Ruin lead the way-he could find a trail on bare rock in a rainstorm, or so it seemed. Reck and Will fell into place behind her. It was as though she were truly Heptarch, with an escort before and behind; or a prisoner, with keepers to cut off all escape.

  The hilltop house was even shabbier than it had looked from below. The windows were unglazed and unshuttered, and the smell of the yard out back made it plain that the pigs were responsible for washing themselves. "Could it be that no one lives here now?" asked Patience.

  Ruin grunted. "Fire's lit."

  "And there's fresh water in the kitchen," added Reck.

  Patience turned to Will. "Is there anything they can't find out with their noses?"

  Will shrugged. Not too bright, thought Patience. But what could you expect of the sort of man who'd live with geblings?

  Their knock on the door brought a quick shout from inside. A female voice, and not a young one. "I'm coming!" The cry was in common speech, but the accent told Patience that it was not her native tongue. And sure enough, it was a dwelf, smaller than the geblings, with the half-size head that made them look spectacularly repulsive.

  "From a dwelf we're supposed to get answers?" asked Ruin, with his usual tact.

  The dwelf frowned at him. "To a goblin I'm supposed to give them?"

  "At least she speaks in complete sentences," said Reck.

  But it was Patience who reached out her hand for the dwelf to lick her fingers. Custom satisfied, the dwelf invited them in, and immediately led Patience to what was obviously the seat of honor near the fire. Will, as always, hung back to stand by the door. He never seemed to consider himself to be part of what was going on.

  Only a watcher, a listener. Or perhaps not even that, perhaps an accessory, like a horse, to be brought forward only when needed.

  The dwelt brought them boiling water and let them choose the leaves for the tea. Patience inquired about the possibility of getting rooms with closable windows for the night.

  "That depends," said the dwelf.

  "On what? Tell us the price."

  "Oh, the price, the price. The price is good answers for my questions, and good questions for my answers."

  "You can never communicate with a dwelf," said Ruin impatiently. "You get more intelligent conversation from trees."

  He spoke in Geblic, but it was obvious that the dwelf had at least caught the gist of what he said. Patience suspected that she actually understood Geblic, which would make her much brighter than usual for her kind.

  "Tell us," said Patience, "what sort of question you have in mind?"

  "Only the Wise stay here," said the dwelf. "The Wise from all lands, and they leave behind their wisest thoughts before they go."

  "Then we've come to the wrong place," said Patience.

  "All the Wise left our lands before I was born."

  "I know," said the dwelf sadly. "But I make do with what comes along nowadays. You wouldn't happen to be a
n astronomer, would you?"

  Patience shook her head.

  "You have an urgent need for one?" asked Reck.

  "Oh, not urgent, not urgent. It just seems to be a lost art, which should surprise you, considering that we all came from the stars."

  "She did, and the big one at the door," said Ruin. "The rest of us are native born."

  Tilt The dwelf smiled a little. "Oh," she said. "You think geblings are natives here?"

  Now, for the first time, Patience began to wonder if she shouldn't take this dwelt seriously, not just out of courtesy, but because she might know something of value. Certainly her hint that the geblings were also starborn & I implied that her ideas would at least be interesting. Interesting enough that Angel ought to be here. She might be annoyed with him, might not trust him, but Patience was not such a fool that she would reject the possibility of profiting from what truth he would tell her. She turned to Reck. "Do you think Will would go down and bring Angel up?"

  Reck looked annoyed. "I don't own Will," she said.

  Since Will acted far more like a slave than Angel did, Patience thought Reek's pretense of not controlling him was ridiculous. Will never did anything unless Reck had given him permission first. Still, Patience offered no retort, but merely turned to Will and asked if he thought he could carry Angel up to the inn. Will said nothing, but left immediately.

  "Why are you sending for more of your party," asked the dwelf, "when I haven't said that you could stay?"

  "Because Angel is the closest thing to a wise man we have with us. He's a mathematician."

  "He's a nothing, then. Numbers and more numbers. Even if you understand enough to ask the questions, the answers mean nothing at all."

  This delighted Patience, who had said much the same thing to Angel on more than one occasion. She could have recited Angel's answer, too, since she had memorized it from the sheer repetition. Instead, though, Patience took the dwelf at her word. She offered answers, so why not ask the question that mattered most? "Let me ask you a question. Who and what is Unwyrm, and what does he want?"

  The dwelf smiled in delight, jumped to her feet, and ran out of the room.

  "If she has the answer to that," said Reck, "then she knows what no other living soul knows."

  Soon the dwelf came bounding back into the room.

  "Unwyrm is the brother of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs, and the son of the Starship Captain's possessor," she said. "His mother once had the whole world, and he wants it back." She beamed with pride.

  Ruin cut in, impatiently. "Anybody could make up this kind of mix of truth and speculation-"

  "Hush," said Patience. Then, to the dwelt, she said, "I'm sorry, I missed part of that, where you said-"

  Before she could finish, the dwelf said it again. "Unwyrm is the brother of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs, and the son of the Starship Captain's possessor. His mother once had the whole world, and he wants it back." Again she smiled the identical smile. It was as if they had seen the same moment twice. The dwelf was giving an answer that she had memorized.

  Ruin looked at Reck, then smiled. "All right, now let us give you a question," said Ruin. "Where is the mindstone of the ancient gebling kings?"

  Patience had little trouble guessing the answer to this question herself, but controlled her own misgivings and feigned ignorance. "What's the mindstone?" she began.

  But the dwelf was already up and running out of the room. And while she was gone, Reck and Ruin kept touching each other's faces as if each were studiously forming the other's likeness in clay. Patience decided there was more to their question than a mere test. And sure enough, when the dwelf came back into the room, they turned to her and waited intently for her reply, showing more interest than Patience thought their stolid faces could ever show.

  "The mindstone of the gebling kings, which became the scepter of the Heptarchs, is imbedded in the shoulder nothing, trying to keep her face a mask of polite bafflement. There was no way this dwelf could possibly have known about her father's secret.

  Watching the silent tableau of geblings staring at the human girl, the dwelf began to giggle insanely. "And now you've answered my question, all of you."

  Patience turned to her politely. "And what is your question?"

  "My question of you is, who are you, and why do geblings and humans travel together this way?"

  "And what was our answer?" asked Reck.

  "Your answer was that you are the gebling king, the boy and girl of you, and you, human, are the daughter of Peace, the Heptarch, and he is dead, and you now have the mindstone and scepter. You're going into battle, but you aren't sure whether or not you're on the same side."

  This was no ordinary dwelf.

  Patience drew the slender glass rod of her blowgun from the cross at her neck. She also took the loop from her hair. She spoke quietly to Reck and Ruin, in a tone of calm, sure intention. "If you move from your places, you'll be dead before you take a step."

  "Oh, my," said the dwelf. "You shouldn't ask for answers that you don't want to hear. Let's not have any killings here. This is a place where the only traffic is in truth. Let me have your oath, all of you, that you'll wait to kill each other until you get back to the river."

  No one volunteered to take the oath.

  "What have I done? Trouble, trouble, that's what the truth is. You poor fools-you thought a dwelf could never know anything, and so you asked me the questions whose answer you thought no one could have. But I have all the answers. Every one of them."

  "Do you?" asked Reck. "Then tell us how to resolve our dilemma. However you knew the answer, Patience has as much as confessed that she has the most precious possession of the gebling kings. Now more than ever before in our history we must have it, we must know its secrets. We would gladly kill her to get it, and she would as gladly kill us to keep it for herself. When Will comes back, we'll have no difficulty killing her, so she'll have to kill us before he gets here."

  "I told you, take an oath," said the dwelf.

  "We would never keep an oath about the mindstone," said Ruin, "nor would we believe her if she made one."

  "I don't even know what it is," said Patience. "I only know that Father said to keep it at all costs, and Angel said to ask you to implant it in my brain."

  Ruin laughed. "He thought that once I had it in my hands, I would put it into you?"

  Reck, still not moving, silenced him with a hiss. Then she said, "Patience, my fool of a brother doesn't understand.

  Though the mindstone by rights belongs to us, it's no good to us now."

  "No good to us!" said Ruin.

  "When the humans first thought to put it in their brains, it drove them mad. There was too much gebling in it. But now we could never put it in our own minds- there's too much human in it."

  Ruin frowned. "There's a chance we could use it."

  "And there's a better chance we could destroy ourselves trying."

  Ruin looked furious. "After so many years-and we find it now at the time of greatest need, and you say we can't use it!" But his anger turned immediately to despair.

  "You say it, and it's true."

  Patience was skeptical. This could be a trick to lull her into complacency. So she turned to the dwelt for the only help she could think to ask for.

  "I have a question for you," she said. "Tell me what the scepter does when it's connected to the brain."

  "If I leave to get the answer," said the dwelf, "you'll probably kill each other before I get back, and then I can never ask you anything more."

  "If they don't leave their chairs, then I won't kill them," said Patience.

  "We won't leave our chairs," said Reck.

  "But don't be too sure you could kill us," said Ruin.

  Patience smiled. The dwelf shuddered and left the room. There was no spring in her step this time.

  She came back in muttering to herself. "It's long," she said.

  "I'm listening," said Patience.

  The dwelf began to
recite. "When implanted above the limbic node in the human brain, the organic crystal called the scepter or mindstone grows smaller crystals that penetrate to every portion of the brain. Most of these are passive, collecting important memories and thoughts.

  A few of them, however, allow the human to receive memories previously stored in the crystal by prior occupants.

  Since many of the memories belong to the first seven gebling kings, in whose brains the crystal originated, this can be most disorienting to the human. If the human is not able to gain control of the crystal, the alien memories can impinge on the mind in unwelcome and unmanageable ways, lending to confusion of identity, which is to say, madness. The safest way to use the crystal is to implant it in a protected place near a fairly important nerve. One or two chains of crystal will make their way to the brain, collecting memories but almost never supplying any to the human host. But there's bloody little chance that you'll ever meet anyone who needs this information, Heffiji."

  All of them laughed at the last sentence.

  "Whoever gave you that answer, dwelf, wasn't as wise as he thought."

  "I know," said the dwelf. "That's why I left it in, so you could see that I asked him a good question after all, even though he thought I didn't."

  "And what happens when it's implanted in a gebling's brain?" asked Patience.

  "But why would anyone do that?" asked the dwelf.

  "All a gebling has to do is-"

  "Silence!" whispered Ruin.

  "No," said Reck. "No, let her tell."

  "All a gebling has to do," said Heffiji, "is swallow it. The gebling body can break the crystal into its tiniest pieces, and it will form again exactly where it ought to be in the gebling's brain."

  "How could that happen?" asked Patience. "Why can geblings use it so easily, when humans-"

  "Because we're born with mindstones," said Ruin, scornfully. "We all have them. And we eat our parents' mindstones when they die, to carry on the memories that mattered most to them in their lives." He looked at Reck with bitter triumph, as if to say, Well, you said to tell her, and now I have.