Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  It was slow going, but they made steady progress, and Todd did a fair job of estimating how the breeze would influence their flight. It was kind of exhilarating, to leap out into the air and drift only slowly downward, over the rushing water.

  And as they moved around the water, they found that it was flowing out of a huge house. The crashing sound had been the stone front wall of the house giving way, crumbling from the pressure of the thick fog. Which seemed absurd. Except that the water would be coming so hard and fast out of the hose on this end that it wasn’t water pressure that knocked down the wall, it was the explosive force of air pressure.

  He heard shouting behind him, which wasn’t a surprise; but it was growing closer, which was. Most of the people had fled from the flood when they saw it coming at them through the wrought-iron fence. But now there was someone plunging ahead through the water. It was easier for him than it would have been for Todd or Mom—the water was only fog to him, though it was a very thick one.

  It was Eggo. And he was aiming something at them.

  A gun. He had a gun.

  Eggo fired. The bullet passed through Todd. He felt it, but not as pain. More like a belch, a rumbling. But that didn’t mean the damage wasn’t real.

  “Why are you doing this!” shouted Todd.

  He could see that Eggo didn’t hear him. “Keep going toward that house, Mother.” He let go of her hand. “Go! Don’t make all this a wasted effort!”

  She went, looking at him once in anguish but plunging ahead.

  Todd headed straight toward Eggo, who was reloading the thing. It was a muzzle-loader. He only had a musket. Thank heaven he hadn’t figured out how to make an AK-47.

  “Don’t be stupid!” shouted Todd. “Stop it!”

  Now the elf heard him. “No!” he shouted. “You wrecked everything!”

  “The sooner we get back home, the sooner this flood will stop!”

  “I don’t care!” shouted Eggo. “That’s the king’s house, you fool! You destroyed the king’s house!”

  “And you can save it by driving us out of here! Let us go, and be the hero who ended the flood!”

  Eggo’s gun was loaded and he was pointing it right at Todd, who was close enough now that he thought this time it would probably hurt.

  But Eggo didn’t fire the thing. “All right!” he said. “Go! I’ll shoot past you. Just get out of here. And act like you’re afraid of me!”

  “I won’t be acting,” murmured Todd.

  But he couldn’t change direction in midair, and he knew if he once got into that water, he’d never be able to take off again.

  “Give me a push!” he shouted at Eggo.

  Eggo ran at him and held up the barrel of his musket. Todd grabbed it, barely clung to it with his attenuated fingers, and then hung on for dear life as the elf swung him and threw him toward the palace, where Mom was just reaching the huge gap through which water was flowing.

  Soon they were inside, grabbing sconces and chandeliers and furniture to keep them moving forward through the air over the flood. And finally they found it, the place where a huge, thick hose-end was spewing out an incredible volume of icy, jet-speed water. Todd made the mistake of being in the path of the blast and it felt like it had broken half his ribs. He dropped down into the water. Mom screamed and pulled herself down to help him, which saved her from getting blasted by another whip-like pass from the hose.

  “We’ve got to get under it,” he said. “Look for where the hose comes out of nothing. We have to climb the hose into the worm’s mouth!”

  Now it was Mom’s turn to drag Todd, through the water, barely raising their heads above the surface to breathe. Finally they got behind the hose-end, and even though it was whipping around, the base of it, the place where it came out of nowhere, was fairly solidly in place.

  The hose was exactly the right size for Todd to grip it. “You first!” he shouted to Mom. “Climb up the hose! When you get to the end, tell them to turn it off, but don’t pull it out till I climb down after you!”

  Mom gripped the house and when her hand inched up past the place where the hose disappeared, it also vanished. “Keep climbing,” Todd urged her. “Don’t stop no matter what you see. Don’t let go!”

  As Mom disappeared, he turned around to avoid watching her, and to take one last look around the room. There were soldiers in flamboyantly colored uniforms gathered in the doorways, aiming arrows at him. Oh, good, he thought. They don’t have guns.

  The chain saw lay discarded on the lawn. Jared stood near it, straddling the hose, watching as Dad wrestled with it like a python. He couldn’t keep it from being thrust back at him, no matter how tightly he held it against the spot where it became invisible. Suddenly a loop of it would extrude and Dad would have to grasp it again, at the new endpoint. Already several coils were on the floor. What if Mom and Todd weren’t anywhere near the point where it emerged on the other side? What if all of this was for nothing?

  And then, along with a coil of hose, a hand emerged out of nothingness in the shed.

  Dad let go of the hose and took the hand, dragged at it.

  Mother’s head emerged from the wormhole. “Turn off the water!” she croaked. “Turn it off, but keep the hose—”

  Jared was already rushing for the faucet. He turned it off, turned back to face her, and . . .

  The hose lay completely on the ground, Mom tangled up in it. Nothing was poking into the worm’s anus now. How would Todd get back?

  Mom and Dad were hugging while at the same time Dad was trying to wrap a shirt around her, to cover her.

  “What about Todd!” Jared shouted.

  “He’s coming,” said Mom. “He’s right behind me.”

  “The hose is out of the worm!”

  Apparently they hadn’t realized it until now. Father lunged for the hose-end, still dripping, and tried frantically to reinsert it. Mother, half-wearing the shirt now, tried to help him, but she was panting heavily and then she collapsed onto the hose.

  Dad cried out and dropped the hose-end. “He’s right behind me,” Mom whispered.

  Jared helped him get Mom up. She wasn’t unconscious; once Dad was holding her, she could shuffle along. Dad led her toward the house.

  Jared took up the hose again and started trying to feed it through. Finding the hole was hard; pushing the hose was harder.

  Until he realized: It doesn’t have to be the hose anymore. We aren’t trying to pump water anymore.

  He found the rake and fed the handle of it into the gap in the air. Rigid, the handle went in much more easily—which was to say, it took all of Jared’s strength, but he could do it. He jammed the handle in all the way up to the metal of the rake and then held it there, gripping it tightly and bracing his feet against the lowest shelf on the wall of the shed.

  The rake kept lunging toward him, pressing at him, shoving him backward, but he’d push it in again. It went on until he was too tired to hold it any longer and his belly and hips hurt where the rake had jabbed him, but still he held.

  And then a hand came out of the hole along with a shove of the rake, and this time Jared shoved back only long enough to get out from behind the rake. It was practically shot out of the wormhole, and along with it came Todd.

  Todd was bleeding all over from vicious-looking puncture wounds. “They shot me,” he said, and then he fell into unconsciousness.

  Mother spent two days in the hospital, rehydrating and recovering. They pumped her with questions about what had happened, where she was for four years and four months, but she told them over and over that she couldn’t remember, that one minute she was putting Jared to bed, and the next minute she was lying out in the shed, gasping for breath, feeling as if someone had stretched her so thin that a gust of wind could blow her away.

  They questioned Jared, too. And Dad. What did you see? How did you find them? Did you see who hurt your brother? And all they could say, either of them, was “Mom was just there in the shed. And after we helped he
r back into the house, we came out and Todd was there, too, bleeding, and we called 911.”

  Because Dad had told Mom and Jared, “No lies. Tell the truth. Up to Mom going and after Mom and Todd reappeared. No explanations. No guesses. Nothing. We don’t know anything, we don’t remember anything.”

  Jared didn’t bother telling him that “I don’t remember” was a huge lie. He knew enough to realize that telling the truth would convince everybody that they were liars, and only lies would convince anybody they were telling the truth.

  Todd didn’t recover consciousness after the surgery for three days, and then he was in and out as his body fought off a devastating fever and an infection that antibiotics didn’t seem to help. So delirious that nothing he said made sense—to the cops and the doctors, anyway. Men with arrows. Elves. Eggo waffles. Worms with mouths and anuses. Flying through space. Floods and flying and . . . definitely delirium.

  The cops found what looked like bloodstains on the chain saw, but since Todd’s wounds were punctures and the stains turned out not to react properly to any of the tests for blood, the evidence led them nowhere. It might end up in somebody’s X file, but what the whole event would not do was end up in court.

  When Todd woke up for real, Dad and Jared were there by his bed. Dad only had time to say, “It’s a shame if you don’t remember anything at all,” before the detective and the doctor were both all over him, asking how it happened, who did it, where the injuries were inflicted.

  “On another planet,” said Todd. “I flew through space to get there and I never let go of the hose but then it got sucked away from me and I was lost until I got jabbed in the shoulder with the rake and I held on and rode it home.”

  That was even better than amnesia, since the doctor assumed he was still delirious and they left Todd and Dad and Jared alone. Later, when Todd was clearly not delirious, he was ready with his own amnesia story, along with tales of weird dreams he had while in a coma.

  The doctor’s report finally said that Todd’s injuries were consistent with old-fashioned arrows, the kind with barbs, only there were no removal injuries. It was as if the arrows had entered his body and dissolved somehow. And as to where Mom had been all those years, they hadn’t a clue, and except for dehydration and some serious but generalized weight loss, she seemed to be in good health.

  And when at last they were home together, they didn’t talk about it much. One time through the story so everybody would know what happened to everybody else, but then it was done.

  Mom couldn’t get over how many years she had missed, how much bigger and older Todd and Jared had become. She started blaming herself for being gone that whole time, but Dad wouldn’t let her. “We all did what made sense to us at the time,” he said. “The best we could. And we’re back together now. Todd has some interesting scars. You have to take calcium pills to recover from bone loss. There’s only one thing left to take care of.”

  The mouth of the worm in the closet. The anus of the worm in the shed.

  The solution wasn’t elegant, but it worked. First they hooked the anus with the rake one last time, covered the top with a tarpaulin, and dragged it to the car. They drove to the lake and dragged the thing up to the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the water, then shoved it as far as they could over the edge, with Dad and Mom gripping Todd tightly so he wouldn’t fall.

  Let Eggo come back if he wanted. Given how tough he was, it probably wouldn’t hurt him much, but it would be a very inconvenient location.

  The mouth in the closet was harder, because they couldn’t move it from their end. But a truckload of manure dumped on the front lawn allowed them to bring wheelbarrows full of it into the house and on into the bedroom, where they took turns shoveling it into the maw.

  On the other side, they knew, it would be a fine mist of manure, spreading with the wind out across the town. Huge volumes of it, coming thick and fast.

  And sure enough, by the time the manure pile was half gone, the mouth disappeared. Eggo must have moved it from his end. Which was all they wanted.

  Of course, then they had to get the smell out of the house and spread a huge amount of leftover manure over the lawn and across the garden, and the neighbors were really annoyed with the stench in the neighborhood until a couple of rains had settled it down. But they had a great lawn the next spring.

  Only one thing that Todd had to know. He asked Mom when they were alone one night, watching the last installment of the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice after Dad and Jared had fallen asleep.

  “What did you see?” he asked. “During the passage?” When she seemed baffled, he added, “Between worlds.”

  “See?” asked Mom. “What did you see?”

  “It was like I was in space,” said Todd, “only I could breathe. Faster than light I was going, stars everywhere, and then I zoomed down to the planet and . . . there I was.”

  She shook her head. “I guess we each saw what we wanted to see. Needed to see, maybe. No outer space for me. No stars. Just you and Jared and your dad, waiting for me. Beckoning to me. Telling me to come home.”

  “And the hose?”

  “Never saw it,” she said. “During the whole passage. I could feel it, hold tightly to it, but all I saw was . . . home.”

  Todd nodded. “OK,” he said. “But it was another planet, just the same. Even if I didn’t really see my passage through space. It was a real place, and I was there.”

  “You were there,” said Mom.

  “And you know what?” said Todd.

  “I hope you’re not telling me you ever want to go back.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Todd. “I’ve had my fill of space travel. I’m done.”

  “There’s no place like home,” said Mom, clicking her heels together.

  NOTES ON “SPACE BOY”

  The assignment from editors Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann was simple enough. Write an old-time adventure story that puts kids in space.

  Hey, kids in space—isn’t that what Card does?

  I took on the assignment with the firm intention of fulfilling it literally. In fact, I was expecting that I’d write a story set in Battle School, so that it would not only be a kids-in-space adventure, it would be tied to the Ender’s Game universe.

  But then the deadline rolled around, and I hadn’t thought of a single idea that worked well enough for me to be ready to write it. What I had was a weird story in which there was a monster in the closet, and it actually ate a kid’s mom. But what does that have to do with kids in space? It’s kids in the bedroom, for pete’s sake!

  Still . . . as I’ve told writing students for many years, the best stories often come from the juxtaposition of completely unrelated ideas. My own career is full of them. For instance:

  My second novel, Treason, came from a map I doodled on which I started naming my imaginary countries with surnames from our present world; I combined it with a separate idea about people who could regenerate limbs at will, including limbs that weren’t actually missing, so they’d come to parties with an extra arm or leg or other body part.

  Hart’s Hope came from an idea session with the very first writing class I taught, in which magical power came from blood, with the most power going to a woman who killed her own child; I combined it with an intriguing map I had drawn of a city in which, depending on what gate you enter through, you find a completely different place.

  Even the original “Ender’s Game” story came from one idea—a safe “battle room” in which soldiers trained for combat in space, but with walls to keep them from drifting away and getting lost; and then another idea, in which children are playing a complex space videogame but their commands get turned into orders followed by real pilots in a faraway space battle.

  It’s in the tension between these ideas, the struggle to make them fit, that creativity gets stimulated and you start to come up with stuff that’s really cool—ideas that weren’t going to come to you out of the blue.

  So it was wi
th this story. I had the monster-in-closet-eats-mom idea, and the need to have a kid travel from planet to planet. So . . . what if the monster in the closet is actually a living creature that, like an earthworm, survives on the energy differential between different universes? The same worm has both a mouth and an anus on both worlds, and objects that enter through one end are spewed out the other, intact—the creature “digests” only energy in a purer form. Solid objects and living creatures are just fiber.

  I wrote to Gardner about this one, because it still didn’t fit the parameters of the anthology. He told me to go ahead—perhaps because it was better than finding somebody else at such a late date—and I ended up with a story that I liked even more than I expected. After it first appeared in Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space, “Space Boy” went on to become a Young Adult book on its own, from Subterranean Press, and I’m developing it into a film project. You never know what the desperation before a deadline can lead to.

  ANGLES

  3000

  Hakira enjoyed coasting the streets of Manhattan. The old rusted-out building frames seemed like the skeleton of some ancient leviathan that beached and died, but he could hear the voices and horns and growling machinery of crowded streets and smell the exhaust and cooking oil, even if all that he saw beneath him were the tops of the trees that had grown up in the long-vanished streets. With a world as uncrowded as this one, there was no reason to dismantle the ruins, or clear the trees. It could remain as a monument, for the amusement of the occasional visitor.

  There were plenty of places in the world that were still crowded. As always, most people enjoyed or at least needed human company, and even recluses usually wanted people close enough to reach from time to time. Satellites and landlines still linked the world together, and ports were busy with travel and commerce of the lighter sort, like bringing out-of-season fruits and vegetables to consumers who preferred not to travel to where the food was fresh. But as the year 3000 was about to pass away, there were places like this that made the planet Earth seem almost empty, as if humanity had moved on.