Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  “There was enormous pressure,” said Mother. “Not from outside, from inside the research community. When you have a cure for everything, how can you withhold it from the human race for ten years of longitudinal studies, while people die or have their lives wrecked by diseases that could be prevented with a simple inoculation.”

  “It had side effects,” I said, guessing the end.

  “Technically, no,” said Father. “It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It eradicated diseases with smaller-than-bacteria agents. Period. Nothing else. The only reason that they didn’t immediately spread the counter-infection throughout the world to save as many lives as possible was because of the one foreseeable hitch. Can you think of it? It’s obvious, really.”

  I thought. I wish I could say I came up with it quickly, but my parents were nothing if not patient. And I did come up with it after a few false tries, which I can’t remember now. The correct answer: “Aging is a disease. You get this counter-infection, you don’t die.”

  “We were concerned about a population explosion,” said Mother. “Even if people completely stopped having children, we weren’t sure that the existing ecosphere could sustain a population in which all the existing children grew up to be adults while none of the adults died off to make room for them. Imagine all the children entering the workforce, while the older generation, newly vigorous and extremely unlikely to die, refused to retire. It was a nightmare. So, by the mercy of God, the counter-infection was restricted to a large longitudinal study centered on Manhattan, a smallish college town in Kansas.”

  “There was a quarantine, of sorts,” said Father. “The participants accepted the rules—no physical contact with anyone outside the city during the two years of the study. In exchange, nobody dies of any kind of disease. They jumped at it.”

  “The counter-infection got loose!” I said.

  “No. Everybody kept to the rules. This was science, not the movies,” said Father. “But in the Manhattan Project, as we inevitably called it, for the first time the test included infants, newborns, children born after the study began, children conceived after the study began. We were so interested in the result with the aging population that it had never crossed our minds that . . . well, it did cure aging. The people who have it would never die of old age. The trouble was, the children were born—”

  “As neanderthals,” I said, making the obvious guess.

  “And over time,” said Father, “as cells were replaced, the adult bodies also tried to reshape themselves. It was fatal for them. You can’t take an existing body and make it into something else like that. You had a few years of perfect health, and then your bones destroyed themselves in the frantic effort to grow into new shapes. The little ones, the ones who were changed in the womb, only they survived.”

  “And that’s who I’m seeing out there,” I said.

  “It took fifteen years to find a way to sterilize them all without our counter-infection undoing the sterilization. By then there were so many of them that to keep them all in their natural habitat required a vast reserve. It really wasn’t all that hard to get the citizens of this area to evacuate. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near Manhattan, Kansas. So once again, Homo neanderthalensis has a plot of ground here on Earth. Homo neanderthalensis, the most intelligent toolmaking species ever to evolve naturally.”

  “But how could the counter-agent cause us to revert to an earlier stage of evolution?” I asked.

  “You weren’t listening,” said Father.

  I thought for a moment. “Homo neanderthalensis isn’t an earlier stage,” I said. “There was no more evolution after that.”

  “Only a disease,” said Father.

  It seemed too incredible to me, as an eleven-year-old who prided himself on understanding the world. “Human intelligence is an infection?”

  “Passed from mother to child through the ovum,” said Mother. “By a disease agent that alters the DNA in order to replicate itself. We should have realized it from the fact that in-utero development recapitulates evolution, but there is no stage in which the fetus passes through a habiline form. We didn’t evolve past it. The DNA is hijacked and we are born prematurely, grossly deformed by the disease. Neotonous, erect-standing, language-mad, lacking in sense of smell, too feeble to survive on our own even as adults, in need of clothing and shelter and community to a degree that the neanderthals never were. But . . . smart.”

  “So now,” said Father, “do you understand why medical science has to rely on inoculation to fight off cancer, so that a small percentage—far smaller than ever before in human history, but not zero—a small percentage dies? Elizio died because the only alternative we’ve found is for this race of perfectly healthy, immortal, dimwitted beings to inherit the Earth.”

  I stood there for a long time in silence, watching the neanderthals, trying to see how their behavior was different from ours. In the years since then I have come to realize that there was no important difference. Being smarter hasn’t made us act any differently from the neanderthals. We make better tools. We have a longer, more thorough collective memory in the form of libraries. We can talk much more fluently about the things we do. But we still do basically the same things. We are neanderthals, at heart.

  But I did not understand this at the time. I was, after all, only eleven. I had a much more practical—and heartless—question.

  “Why do we keep this park at all?” I asked. “I mean, they’re going to live forever. And all the time they’re alive, they pose a danger of this counter-infection getting loose outside the fence. Why haven’t they all been killed and their bodies nuked or something so that the counter-agent is eliminated?”

  Mother looked appalled at my ruthlessness, but Father only patted her arm and said, “Of course he thought of that, my love.”

  “But so young, to be so—”

  “Practical?” prompted Father. “There was a long debate over exactly this issue, and it resurfaced from time to time, though not for decades now. The ones who argued for keeping the Park talked about the necessity of studying our ancestors, and some people talked about the rights of these citizens who, after all, can’t help their medical condition and have committed no crime, but it was all a smokescreen. The real reason we didn’t destroy them all, as you suggested, was because we didn’t have the heart.”

  “They were our children,” said Mother, crying again.

  “At first,” said Father. “And later, when they weren’t children anymore, we still couldn’t kill them. Because they had become our ancient parents.”

  Now, though, I have come to think that while they were both right, the answer is even deeper. We didn’t kill them, and we continue not to kill them, despite the reality of all those dangers, because they are not “they” at all. There, but for the fact that we happen to be the tiniest bit ill, go we.

  I had troubling dreams for months afterward. I had mood swings, alternating between aggression and despair. There were times when my parents wished they had just answered my questions about Elizio by taking me to the priest and getting me on the roster of altar boys.

  But they were not wrong to take me there, any more than they had been wrong not to tell me up till then. I needed to know before my education was complete. Those who do not know, who continue through adulthood oblivious, in a sense remain children, forever naive. Within the fence of the North American Wild Animal Park is the Garden of Eden, and the people there eat freely of the Tree of Life. Here, outside, in this world of thorns, we dwell in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, madly eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, as much of it as we can get before we die.

  You cannot straddle the boundary. If you bring children into the world on this side of the fence, you must take them to eat the fruit of the tree—not too young, not before they’re able to bear it. But don’t wait too long, either. Let them see, before you die, that death is truly the gift of a merciful God.

  NOTES ON “HEAL THYSELF”

  This is
one of those stories that wanted to be a novel, but I couldn’t get a handle on it. To make an idea into a novel, you have to have a character strong enough to carry the reader through the whole ride. A mere idea isn’t enough for a whole book.

  But it’s enough for a story. It just hit me as I was reading up on the latest advances in the science of genetics: What if human intelligence, the vast jump from non-language-using animals to us talkers, came with a price?

  There’s a long tradition of great one-idea stories in science fiction. Think of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God.” It’s just a weird thought—it’s not as if Clarke actually believed in a religion where the purpose of the universe was for all of God’s names to be uttered. But it was a fun idea, and what did it cost?

  There were no characters in “Nine Billion Names,” just as there are no characters in “Heal Thyself.” Oh, yes, technically there are, but the whole point of the story isn’t any individual person’s choices, it’s about the social order. The characters exist only in order to have somebody see and understand this situation for the first time.

  I’m in good company here. There are no significant characters in Clarke’s “The Star” or Asimov’s “Nightfall” or Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Just an idea, which the author shows us in a short story.

  Of course, readers are the ones who decide whether the idea is interesting or truthful or fun enough to be worth the read. All I know is that I couldn’t let go of it until I wrote it down.

  SPACE BOY

  Todd memorized the solar system at the age of four. By seven, he knew the distance of every planet from the sun, including the perigee and apogee of Pluto’s eccentric orbit, and its degree of declension from the ecliptic. By ten, he had all the constellations and the names of the major stars.

  Mostly, though, he had the astronauts and cosmonauts, every one of them, the vehicles they rode in, the missions they accomplished, what years they flew and their ages at the time they went. He knew every kind of satellite in orbit and the distances and orbits that weren’t classified and, using the telescope Dad and Mom had given him for his sixth birthday, he was pretty sure he knew twenty-two separate satellites that were probably some nation’s little secret.

  He kept a shrine to all the men and women who had died in the space programs, on the launching pad, on landing, or beyond the atmosphere. His noblest heroes were the three Chinese voyagers who had set foot on Mars, but never made it home. He envied them, death and all.

  Todd was going into space. He was going to set foot on another planet.

  The only problem was that by the time he turned thirteen he knew he was never going to be particularly good at math. Or even average. Nor was he the kind of athletic kid who looked like an astronaut. He wasn’t skinny, he wasn’t fat, he was just kind of soft-bodied with slackish arms no matter how much he exercised. He ran to school every day, his backpack bumping on his back. He got bruises on his butt, but he didn’t get any faster.

  When he ran competitively in PE he was always one of the last kids back to the coach, and he couldn’t ever tell where the ball was coming when they threw to him, or, when it left his own hand, where it was likely to go. He wasn’t the last kid chosen for teams—not while Sol and Vawn were in his PE class. But no one thought of him as much of a prize, either.

  But he didn’t give up. He spent an hour a day in the back yard throwing a baseball against the pitchback net. A lot of the time, the ball missed the frame altogether, and sometimes it didn’t reach the thing at all, dribbling across the lawn.

  “If I had been responsible for the evolution of the human race,” he said to his father once, “all the rabbits would have been safe from my thrown stones and we would have starved. And the sabertooth tigers would have outrun whoever didn’t starve.”

  Father only laughed and said, “Evolution needs every kind of body. No one kind is best.”

  Todd wouldn’t be assuaged so easily. “If the human race was like me, then launching rockets and going into space would have to wait for the possums to do it.”

  “Well,” said Father, “that would mean smaller spaceships and less fuel. But where in a spacesuit would they stow that tail?”

  Really funny, Dad. Downright amusing. I actually thought about smiling.

  He couldn’t tell anybody how desperate and sad he was about the fact that he would probably have to become a high school drama teacher like his dad. Because if he did say how he felt, they’d make him go to a shrink again to deal with his “depression” or his “resentment of his father” the way they did after his mother disappeared when he was nine and Dad gave up on searching for her.

  The shrink just wouldn’t accept it when he screamed at him and said, “My mother’s gone and we don’t know where she went and everybody’s stopped looking! I’m not depressed, you moron, I’m sad. I’m pissed off!”

  To which the shrink replied with questions like, “Do you feel better when you get to call a grownup a ‘moron’ and say words like ‘pissed’?” Or, worse yet, “I think we’re beginning to make progress.” Yeah, I didn’t choke you for saying that, so I guess that’s progress.

  Nobody even remembered these days that sometimes people were just plain miserable because something really bad was going on in their lives and they didn’t need a drug, they needed somebody to say “Let’s go get your mother now, she’s ready to come home,” or “That was a great throw—look, after all these years, Todd’s become a terrific pitcher and he’s great at math so let’s make him an astronaut!”

  Ha ha, like that would ever happen.

  Instead, he took a kitchen timer with him out to the back yard every afternoon, and when it went off he’d drop what he was doing and go inside and fix dinner. Jared kept trying to help, which was OK because Jared wasn’t a complete idiot even though he was only seven and certifiably insane. Todd’s arm was usually pretty sore from misthrowing the ball, so Jared would take his turn stirring things.

  There was a lot of stirring, because when Todd cooked, he cooked. OK, he mostly opened soup cans or cans of beans or made mac and cheese, but he didn’t nuke them, he made them on the stove. He told Dad that it was because he liked the taste better when it was cooked that way, but one day when Jared said, “Mom always cooked on the stove,” Todd realized that’s why he liked to do it that way. Because Mom knew what was right.

  It wasn’t all soup or beans or macaroni. He’d make spaghetti starting with dry noodles and plain tomato sauce and hamburger in a frying pan, and Dad said it was great. Todd even made the birthday cakes for all their birthdays, including his own, and for the last few years he made them from recipes, not from mixes. Ditto with his chocolate chip cookies.

  Why was it he could calculate a half-recipe involving thirds of a cup, and couldn’t find n in the equation n = 5?

  He took a kind of weird pleasure from the way Dad’s face got when he bit into one of Todd’s cookies, because Todd had finally remembered or figured out all the things Mom used to do to make her cookies different from other people’s. So when Dad got all melancholy and looked out the window or closed his eyes while he chewed, Todd knew he was thinking about her and missing her even though Dad never talked about her. I made you remember her, Todd said silently. I win.

  Jared didn’t talk about Mom, but that was for a different reason. For a year after Mom left, Jared talked about her all the time. He would tell everybody that the monster in his closet ate her. At first people looked at him with fond indulgence. Later, they recoiled and changed the subject.

  He only stopped after Dad finally yelled at him. “There’s no monster in your closet!” It sounded like somebody had torn the words from him like pulling off a finger.

  Todd had been doing the dishes while Dad put Jared to bed, and by the time Todd got to the back of the house, Jared was in his room crying and Dad was sitting on the edge of his and Mom’s bed and he was crying and then Todd, like a complete fool, said, “And you send me to a shrink?
”

  Dad looked up at Todd with his face so twisted with pain that Todd could hardly recognize him, and then he buried his face in his hands again, and so Todd went in to Jared and put his arm around him and said, “You’ve got to stop saying that, Jared.”

  “But it’s true,” Jared said. “I saw her go. I warned her but she did the very exact thing I told her not to do because it almost got my arm the time I did it, and—”

  Todd hugged him closer. “Right, I know, Jared. I know. But stop saying it, OK? Because nobody’s ever going to believe it.”

  “You believe me, don’t you, Todd?”

  Todd said, “Of course I do. Where else could she have gone?” Why not agree with the crazy kid? Todd was already seeing a shrink. He had nothing to lose. “But if we talk about it, they’ll just think we’re insane. And it made Dad cry.”

  “Well he made me cry, too!”

  “So you’re even. But don’t do it anymore, Jared. It’s a secret.”

  “Same thing with the monster’s elf?”

  “The monster itself? What do you mean?”

  “The elf. Of the monster. I can’t talk about the elf?”

  Geeze louise, doesn’t he let up? “Same thing with the monster’s elf and his fairies and his dentist, too.”

  Jared looked at him like he was insane. “The monster doesn’t have a dentist. And there’s no such thing as fairies.”

  Oh, right, lecture me on what’s real and what’s not!

  So it went on, days and weeks and months, Todd fixing dinner and Dad getting home from after-school play practices and they’d sit down and eat and Dad would tell funny things that happened that day, doing all the voices. Sometimes he sang the stories, even when he had to have thirty words on the same note till he came up with a rhyme. They’d all laugh and it was great, they had a great life . . .

  Except Mom wasn’t there to sing harmony. The way they used to do it was they’d take turns singing a line and the other one would rhyme to it. Mom could always make a great rhyme that was exactly in rhythm with the song. Dad was funny about it, but Mom was actually good.