Wyrms

by Orson Scott Card

  It was inevitable: in his passage through the crowd, the young gaunt did his brush-against-the-crotch routine to Angel. But then Patience noticed a curious thing. Angel acted exactly like all the others: a moment of startlement, a look of pleasant surprise at the beauty of the gauntling, a smile of recognition at the sight of the handbill, a look of wistful disappointment when the boyok moved away.

  To Patience, though to no one else, this clearly showed that Angel was not surprised. For if he had really been surprised, he would have shown no emotion at all for a few moments, until he was certain what the encounter meant. Then he might have imitated the natural response, but not so perfectly. Obviously, then, he had been aware of the gauntling, but did not want anyone to notice that he had been aware. It disturbed Patience deeply, because no one in the gaming room would have paid the slightest attention except Angel's traveling companions, including her. For some reason, Angel had been aware of the boyok, and yet did not want her to know he had been aware.

  So Patience walked over to Angel, who now was watching the slither being prepared for the next game, and whispered, "What was he selling? The little whore with the advertisement?"

  Angel shrugged. "I dropped it somewhere-"

  Patience saw the curl of paper on the floor, picked it up. It was written in glyphs instead of alphabetics, which explained why it was written on the single vertical strip.

  The glyphs were easy ones, though, enhanced with graphic drawings. "Lord Strings and His Wandering Wonder Machine at the Melting Snow. Private Boxes. By Invitation Only."

  "Just a sex show," said Angel. "Nothing worth seeing."

  "You've been abroad in the world," said Patience.

  "What's tedious to you might be interesting to me."

  "You're only fifteen."

  "With a lover," she said.

  He frowned.

  "Waiting for me on ice," she added. She put enough insistence in her voice that he would know she was serious.

  His frown faded. "If you want to."

  And she knew that this was what he wanted. Had he intended her to see his deceptive response before? Or was he planning some more indirect maneuver? For some reason, Angel wanted to go to the Melting Snow to see whatever entertainment Lord Strings had prepared. As so often before in her life, she was puzzled. What had he seen in that little gauntling that made him decide to go?

  Angel placed bets-large ones, but not large enough to attract undue attention-on the upcoming game. He bet on the slither by five centimeters. It was daring to give such a wide margin, but the payoff would be so much the greater if he happened to win. Patience had never seen Angel gamble, though she had watched Father often enough. She had never figured out, in Father's case, whether he really enjoyed playing, or merely pretended to enjoy it for diplomatic purposes.

  The slither was dropped through a dekameter of open air into the fighting tank. The shock of the air shriveled it; once in the tank, its body immediately began to expand as it took on nutrients from the surrounding culture.

  It was a fast one; in the three seconds before the worms' release, it more than doubled in size.

  The worms were slow and stupid at first, swimming languidly and aimlessly. The instant that the first of them bumped into the slither, however, all of them became purposeful and quick. They fastened to the surface of the creature and began to eat their way in.

  The slither noticed them, too, of course, and in its eclectic fashion it considered the worms to be as welcome a meal as any other. The slither walls grew out around the worms, enwombing them in the semirigid gel of its interior. The worms immediately began to twist and corkscrew in agony as the slither's digestive fluids ate into their bodies. Yet their writhing was not directionless.

  They moved from the edge of the slither inward, toward the yolk that included its primitive intelligence and all its reproductive system. If they reached it, the worms would deposit their own genetic molecules, which would take over the slither's body and make it a device for reproducing worms. But this slither had grown too quickly, and its yolk was by chance quite far from the side where all the worms had penetrated. The worms were all dead before any had reached the yolk. However, the nearest worm had come within four centimeters.

  Angel showed no reaction at all. He just reached out his hand in a grandfatherly way and said, "Come along, little lady. We'd better eat before I lose everything." A few people chuckled-it wasn't likely that anyone would actually say such a thing unless there wasn't the remotest possibility of bankrupting.

  They ate at a place with glass walls that looked out over the lake and forest on one side, and faced a delicate and beautiful cliff garden on the other. The food was as good as anything Patience had eaten in King's Hill, though many of the fruits were dwarfed and surprisingly tart, and the meat was flavored with liquors that she didn't know.

  And then, when dinner was over and darkness had come. Angel made a show of inquiring where to find the Melting Snow. The master of tables cast a long and disapproving glance toward Patience-the Melting Snow was apparently a place where decent people, even plea- sure-seekers in Freetown, did not take virginal girls.

  Angel was unabashed.

  "Why are we really going?" she finally asked him.

  They walked along wooden runways that hung precariously over rooftops and gardens three stories down. The geblings were close behind, but not close enough to hear.

  Will and Sken were too large to walk abreast of anyone; they filed along to the rear.

  "Didn't you see?" asked Angel. "The little fellow sought us out. From the time he came into the gaming room. As soon as he gave me the message, he left."

  "What does it mean, then?"

  "Gaunts have no will, Patience. They sense the desires of the people nearest them, and try to satisfy whatever desire is strongest. They make notoriously undependable messengers, since they can be distracted so easily.

  But this one was unwavering."

  "Unwyrm?"

  "It occurred to me that he would be able to keep a gaunt focused on a single purpose."

  "Then we should avoid this place."

  "As I have futilely tried to tell you before, Unwyrm is trying to get us into his lair, and we are trying to get there. It isn't until we arrive that our purposes diverge."

  It was a hopelessly stupid answer. Unwyrm wanted Patience there, but he didn't want anyone else. Obviously, then, the danger was not to Patience, but to everyone who accompanied her; if Unwyrm could, he would strip them all away so that she would come unaccompanied into his presence.

  She didn't have time to find out why Angel had said such nonsense, however, for they arrived at the Melting Snow and Angel at once began to arrange a table. Patience supposed that he still thought her so childish he could fob off a stupid answer while he kept his real reasoning to himself. After all this time, he still underestimated her. Or did he? Perhaps the reason for what he was doing was obvious, and only Unwyrm's pressure kept her from understanding. She would not notice if Unwyrm impaired her thinking, but Angel would, and perhaps he had already seen that her judgment was unreliable.

  It frightened her, and Unwyrm's joy surged within her.

  The show was just ending as the boxmaster seated them in a grill-fronted box overlooking the circular stage.

  The boy ok from the gaming room was there, along with two tarks and an unusually tall, sad-looking gaunt with long, grease-gray hair. They were all naked, all fragilely, ethereally beautiful as gaunts were supposed to be. But in the final minutes of the dance. Patience realized that this was no mere sex show, designed to warm the couches in the boxes around the stage. There was a story being enacted through the dance. The sad-looking gaunt was not even aroused. He just stood, tall and straight, yet with his head hanging limply to one side, hair falling unkempt across his face, as if his shoulders were suspended by taut wires from the ceiling, but nothing held up his head at all. The boyok was trying to reach the old gaunt; the tarks, just as young as he, and almost as boy
ish, tried to hold him back with touches and strokes that were at once violent restraint and gentle provocation.

  The boyok was aroused-the customers were paying for it, weren't they?-but he seemed uninterested in what the tarks were doing. Finally, as the music climaxed, the boyok reached the old gaunt. Patience steeled herself for some unpleasantly coarse pornographic climax, but instead the gauntling climbed the old fellow as if he were a tree, knelt on his shoulders-his balance was precarious and yet he did not so much as waver-and then lifted the old gaunt's head by the hair, until it was upright and alert as the rest of his erect body.

  Silence. The end.

  The audience applauded, but not with enthusiasm. Obviously, they had noticed what Patience had seen: that this was not a sex show at all, but rather dance with an erotic theme. The climax had been aesthetic, not orgasmic.

  The audience was, quite properly, disappointed.

  They had been cheated.

  But Patience did not feel cheated. It had kindled in her, in those few moments, a longing that defied her self-control and brought tears to her eyes. It was not the sort of passion that Unwyrm put in her, not a compelling, coercive urge. It was, rather, a melancholy longing for something not physical at all. She wanted desperately to have her father back again, to have him smile at her; she longed for her mother's embrace. It was love that the dance had aroused in her, love as the Vigilants spoke of it: a pure need for someone else to take joy in you. And almost without thought, she turned to look at Will, who stood near the door at the back of the box. She saw in his guileless face a perfect mirror of the longing that she felt; and she rejoiced, for he was also looking at her, searching for the same thing in her.

  Then she turned back to look at the stage. The applause had died, but still the four gaunts held their final pose. Wasn't the show over, after all? The music was gone; there was only silence, except for the breathing and murmuring of the audience in their boxes and in the cheap open seats on the floor. For a long few seconds, the pose remained perfect. Then, slowly, the old gaunt began to sag. The boyok pulled upward on his hair, as if trying to hold him up, but the gaunt sank from the shoulders, as if the boyok's weight were too much for him.

  As he sank, he turned, so that when he finally stretched full length on the floor, propped barely on an elbow, with the boyok supine across him, still gripping his hair and pulling his head up, the old gaunt's face was directly toward the box where Patience sat. Indeed, his eyes seemed to see her, and her only, looking at her with supplication. Yes, she said silently. This is the perfect ending for the dance. In silence, in collapse, and yet with the boyok's effort unabated, the head still up, the face still skyward.

  Then, as if her unspoken approval were the cue, the lamps were snuffed out all at once. The darkness lasted only a second or two, but when the lamps were rekindled, the stage was clear. Patience applauded, and some in the audience joined her; most had lost interest. "I want to meet them," said Patience. "Gaunts or not, that was beautiful."

  "I'll go get them," said Will.

  "I will," said Angel.

  "Then give the money to me," said Will.

  "I won't be robbed," said Angel.

  "I've been here before," said Will. "You're safe on the open street, but not in the passageways of a house like this."

  Angel paused a crucial moment, then gave two purses to Will. Patience knew that he had probably kept most of the money anyway, but it was a compromise, and there was no point in arguing over something stupid.

  If the show had been a success, there would have been little hope of getting even one of the gaunts up into their boxes, not without a serious effort to bribe the boxmaster.

  But since it had failed, only the two tarks had been spoken for-a tark was a tark, after all. Both the old gaunt and the boyok from the gaming room followed Angel when he returned to their box.

  Another, more predictable show was beginning on the stage; Patience drew the curtain to shut out the sight of it and muffle the sound. Will opened the candle-window all the way, so they could see each other.

  "Did you like it?" asked the old gaunt.

  "Very much," said Patience.

  "Yes, yes, you're the one I felt. You're the one who needed to see the real ending. So many were disappointed, but I felt you, stronger than any.

  "How does it usually end?" asked Sken.

  "Oh, with an audience like this, we usually touch each other three ways each. Scum. No sense of art." He smiled at Patience. "That was the best the ending has ever been. The collapse, with my head still up-ah, thank you, lady."

  It had not occurred to Patience, though she should have realized it. Gaunts always respond to the strongest desire. No wonder they had pleased her so perfectly.

  Unwyrm's intrusion had made all her passions so much more intense that of course she was the most dominating person in the theatre.

  Yet even though the impulse for the ending had come from her, the execution of it was theirs. "You were beautiful," she said.

  "You don't even want a taste of Kristiano here, do you?" said the old gaunt, pointing to the boyok. His surprise was obvious.

  "No," she said.

  "Or me. But you're hot as a bitch in heat, lady. I could feel it before you came in the building."

  "Never mind," snapped Angel. Patience saw just a flicker of movement from Will, too, as if he had been prepared to stop the conversation even more abruptly than Angel.

  "Who are you?" Patience asked.

  "Strings," he said. "Not really Lord Strings, of course. I never heard of a gaunt being a lord, did you? Just-Strings. And Kristiano, my dear boyok, best I ever had."

  "The finest artist from ice to Cranwater," said Kristiano.

  It was a slogan, of course, but the gauntling believed it.

  "We travel," said Strings.

  "Where are you going? We'll go with you, and perform for you every night. Your need is very strong, and you guide us into beauty we crave to create."

  Reck and Ruin had remained silent throughout this human entertainment. It was well known that geblings felt contempt for the human fascination with sex. Their own couplings were informed by empathy, so that each knew when and how the other was satisfied. They didn't hunger, as humans did, for some relief from isolation, for some reassurance that what one felt, the other felt.

  So it was not surprising that Ruin immediately spoke against the suggestion. "We have companions enough for our purposes."

  Angel coldly corrected him. "We have more than enough companions, sir."

  At once Strings looked a bit ill. "I really don't enjoy disputes, if you please."

  "It was a pleasure to watch you," Patience said. "But my gebling friend is right. We're here to sample the pleasures of Freetown, and then be on our way."

  Strings laughed.

  Kristiano touched her knee. "Lady, great lady, Strings can't be deceived, not by someone whose need shouts so clearly."

  "I know where you're going," said Strings, "and I know the way."

  Will spoke softly. "Let's leave here. Now."

  Patience was uncertain. Obviously this gaunt was unusually adept at empathy. Yet how could empathy tell him her destination? There were no words in it, no images.

  As if in answer to her question, Strings let his head rock backward at an impossible angle, as if all the muscles in his neck had gone slack. Then he began to murmur, his words an incantation. "I'm not so old now that I can forget the taste of the need like a knife in your heart. I've tasted the hunger, the yearning to climb to the ice where he waits, where he waits, where he waits. And the lady he calls is the one that he waits for, he calls you more strongly than any before you, but under the layers of pain that he sends you I feel something stronger than ever before. You are his enemy. You are his lover. And I am your guide to his lovemaking chamber."

  During the speech, Kristiano had almost unconsciously begun to move, as if the words were lyrics and he the visual music. Even in the confines of the box, the shape and mov
ement of the boyok's body were exquisite. He oriented himself, perhaps instinctively, so that the light from the candle-window played off his arms and hands, profiled his face, and made shadows that became part of the dance.

  How can one so young be so experienced already in the most difficult of arts? No sooner had she asked herself the question than Patience saw an answer to it:

  Kristiano was enacting the dance that Strings gave him.

  Strings-and Kristiano his puppet. But that would mean that Kristiano was responding to a gaunt as if the gaunt were a human or gebling, with a powerful will.

  "How does a gaunt put a dance into a gauntling?" she asked.

  Strings came out of his trance, looking confused.

  "Dance?" Then he looked at Kristiano, as if he had been unaware the boyok was dancing. "Not now," he said.

  Kristiano at once relaxed his pose.

  "You gave him a dance as you spoke to me," she said. "How can you do it, when you have no will?"

  He was preparing to lie; she could see that. But if he was indeed Unwyrm's guide up the mountain-for the Wise who had come before her, and now for the seventh seventh seventh daughter-then she had to have the truth from him, and for some reason she knew that this was the question that mattered.

  His face contorted. "Lady, you torture me with your desire."

  "Then ease yourself, and answer me."

  "I am a monster among gaunts," he said.

  "Because you have a will, after all?"

  "Because I wish I had one. I wish. I take them up the mountain-from the time I was little I find these men and women with the hunger on them, and I take them up the mountain to the yellow door. It's where they want to go, but they never come down. And you, such beauty you gave me, do you think I can forgive you far being such a lifegiver? Like the water down the mountain out of his palace, a lifegiver, and I'll take you up the mountain like all the others and you'll never come down and what am I to do then? How are we ever to dance again, now that we've found the audience that can bring us to life?"