The Lost Gate

by Orson Scott Card

  But as he started to form the gate down near Veevee, on impulse he made the beginning of it be the exact point where the first gate exited, and the endpoint the exact beginning of the original gate. Wasn’t that what Leslie had asked about? What would happen if he made gates with the exact same start and end points, only going opposite directions? He’d never tried to make two gates exactly overlap before. But it wasn’t hard—he could clearly see the exact points where the gate was anchored at both ends.

  Down below, Veevee’s hands clapped to the side of her face like a mime portraying stunned surprise. She reached out a finger to the endpoint of the gate and then she was beside him on the balcony. “You little devil, you didn’t tell me you could do that!”

  “Do what?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t pretend with me.”

  “I know I made the beginning and endpoint coincide with the first gate, just in reverse,” said Danny, “but wasn’t that the obvious thing to do?”

  “But that’s all? Because to me it looked as if the gate went from being a tiny tube to being the interstate. Well, not quite, but very big, and going both ways at once. It’s not as if you merely doubled it. It must be ten times bigger.”

  “Well ain’t that cool,” said Danny, impressed. Partly with himself, but mostly with the discovery about how gates worked.

  “Now it’s my turn,” said Veevee.

  “Your turn to do what?” asked Danny. “Do you think you can make a gate?”

  “The more I study what you do, the better my chances, don’t you think? But no, what I mean is that Keyfriends are sometimes Lockfriends, too.”

  “And that would mean…?”

  “If I can figure out how to close and lock one of your gates, maybe you can see what I’m doing and learn the skill from me!”

  “Since you’re the only one who can use my gates,” said Danny, “and any locking I did wouldn’t keep out a Keyfriend, what’s the point?”

  “To learn! Isn’t it fun just to learn? Come on, you aren’t one of those kids who hates school, are you?”

  Danny shrugged. “It’s worth it for you to know how to close them.”

  “Especially that one you just made. Because I think you’ve hit on how to make a gate public.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “A public gate is one that anyone can use—a Finder, of course, but also any drowther who happens to run into it.”

  “Oh,” said Danny. “So you mean a drowther could walk into that spot and just pop through the gate and be on your balcony.”

  “Honestly, that might be a pretty good way to get a date,” said Veevee.

  “Or a burglar,” said Danny.

  “Oh, I don’t need a burglar.” Then Veevee laughed. “Oh, have some fun with this!”

  “So we need to lock the gate—if it’s public—so that people won’t accidentally use it.”

  “Imagine if I had somebody over for lunch and they walked out on the balcony and then suddenly—poof! They think they somehow fell off this tower and lived!”

  “Okay,” said Danny. “Close the gate. Lock it. Whatever you do.”

  “If I can do it. Opening your gates was easy enough—I came, I saw, I poked it with my finger.”

  “Kind of like what you did to Marion and Leslie,” said Danny, for no better reason than he thought of it.

  Veevee whooped with laughter. “That’s exactly what I did! Oh, Danny, you have such a dirty mind for a child.”

  Dirty? Danny had no idea what she was talking about.

  “All right, let me fiddle around for a little while trying to close the gate, and you do it too.”

  “Do what?”

  “Close it!”

  “Do you think I haven’t tried? I’m like a little kid trying to wish really hard. I make my hands into fists, I close my mouth and squinch my eyes shut and then I puff out my cheeks and think, ‘I wish I wish I wish.’ ”

  Veevee didn’t laugh this time. “I know,” she said. “That’s what I spent more of my life doing. Couldn’t raise a clant, couldn’t find my outself. But I made a lot of wisecracks and played tricks on people and learned foreign languages easily, so I thought, I must be a gatemage! Then I did just what you described, or the mental equivalent. Wished really hard that I could make a gate.”

  “So you know that isn’t the most likely way to succeed,” said Danny.

  “We give up, then? And hope nobody ever walks into the gate on my balcony?”

  “I’ll move this end of it, if you want,” said Danny.

  “See, that’s the strange thing. Nobody ever talks about moving gates. They just talk about closing them or gathering them in.” Then she started to laugh. “Yes, Danny. Move the gate. By all means. Move it straight into the middle of your own body.”

  Danny closed his eyes and thought for a moment. “Not to put a damper on your idea or anything, but that would only send me through the gate. That’s how I force other people through, anyway—I move the gate to them. Almost like I use one end of it to eat them.”

  “Now, that’s an interesting thought. Which end do you bring to them?”

  “The mouth end, of course. The entrance.”

  “What if you moved the exit to them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Danny. “Want me to try it on you?”

  Apparently she didn’t. “What if you moved the exit right to the entrance?”

  “Then I wouldn’t be closing the gate, I’d be making it useless,” said Danny.

  “Well, that would be something, anyway, wouldn’t it?”

  “Now that I think about it, there’s all kinds of weird things I could do,” said Danny. “What if somebody was falling off a cliff, and I make a gate under him and the exit is over him. So he falls into the lower gate, comes out of the upper one, and falls down and keeps going back up, like a yo-yo!”

  She almost fell on the floor laughing about that one.

  “Of course it would have to be a public gate,” said Danny. “If that’s what we’ve actually got here. Something that anyone could fall into, and not just a Finder.”

  “Think that would make the news?” said Veevee. “ ‘Man jumps off building in suicide attempt, keeps changing mind.’ ”

  Danny laughed, too. She had the same sense of humor he had. Or close to it, anyway.

  “Of course, you’d probably just make a gate with the exit back up on top of the building or whatever, and then move the mouth of it over him to catch him and drag him up,” said Veevee. “That’s what a good person would do, anyway.”

  Danny caught something she said, though he had used the term himself only moments before. When she said it, though, it triggered a chain of thought in his mind. “The mouth of the gate,” he said.

  “Just a figure of speech,” said Veevee.

  “Not in English, it’s not,” said Danny. “People don’t talk about gates having mouths. I mean, to them a gate is just a gate—you step through it and you’re in the same place, plus a step. There’s no mouth, there’s no entrance and exit. So why did you call it a mouth?”

  “Well, the kind of gate you make isn’t really a gate, like in a picket fence. In some ways it’s like a tunnel. Tunnels have mouths.”

  “And maybe that’s all there is to it,” said Danny. “But when you said it just then, it made me think of something I read. Something very old.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It is called a mouth in some of the legends and histories I’ve found. That’s what gates are called in several of the Persian inscriptions, and there’s one tantalizing Hittite passage—I’ve been reading so many of them for so many years—you’d be surprised how much there is about gates in the ancient writings, if you know how to read them. Which, as a gatemage, I do.”

  “So let me tell you a runic inscription I read in the Library of Congress.”

  “I’ve already been there,” said Veevee. “Many times. Which one do you mean?”

  Danny started to recite it. “ ‘Here Tiu d
ashed the ships of Carthage against the rocks, because they would not pay tribute to the valkyrie.’ ”

  “Ships of Carthage?” she said. “I’ve never read this.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Danny. “It was an untranslated copy embedded in a Danish book about something else.”

  Veevee listened closely as he repeated his English translation. Then she walked to where her laptop sat on the kitchen table, right by the napkin holder, the salt and pepper shakers, and a butter dish. She turned it on and brought up her word processor and then said, “Tell it again.”

  She typed as he dictated. When it was all recorded, and he affirmed that she had it exactly right, though there were a few unfamiliar words whose meaning he had guessed at, she printed out two copies and they sat there looking at them.

  “I think this is practically a manual,” said Veevee.

  “It didn’t make any sense to me, but I was still new at making gates and my mind was on other stuff,” said Danny. “And at the time I hadn’t figured out how to move the mouth of a gate over somebody to force them through it. But see, when you call it a mouth then you’re eating them, right? Or your gate is, or whatever. So when it says that the ‘dark gate of Bel carried off the hearts of brave men to eat at his feasting table,’ we’re talking about Bel moving the mouth of that dark gate over people and passing them through, right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Veevee. “It’s the thing about hearts that makes me wonder. ‘The Carthaginians had eaten the old gate,’ right? So that means a gate eating a gate—do you think that’s possible?”

  “I don’t know,” said Danny. “Should I try it?”

  “No, let’s just sit here and theorize until we die,” said Veevee.

  Danny made a gate right there on the table. It was short—a foot long. He moved the mouth of it over the butter dish and it popped over to the exit, near the napkins. “There’s the gate,” said Danny. Then he took the mouth of the gate to the exit and moved it back and forth over it. “Nothing,” said Danny.

  “You were moving the mouth of the gate over its own tail, right?” said Veevee. “Only it isn’t a tunnel and it isn’t a snake, so you can’t tie it in a knot.”

  Once again Danny felt a little thrill at the thought that somebody else could actually see, or at least sense, what he was doing. “Yes,” he said.

  “So a gate can’t eat itself. Why not make another gate and try to use the mouth of it to eat the first gate.”

  So Danny tried it.

  The first gate—the whole thing, both ends of it—went through the new gate and popped out the other end.

  “Wow,” said Danny.

  “Wowee zowee,” said Veevee. “You ate a gate.”

  “No, I moved a gate.”

  “Why not call it eating? Anybody who was using the first gate regularly wouldn’t know where it was anymore. To them, that gate got eaten!”

  “I’d already shrunk that first gate down to nothing, trying to get it to eat itself,” said Danny. He turned toward where he had made the public gate on the terrace. Even though he couldn’t actually see the terrace itself—there was a wall in the way—he could still sense the location of the gate. So could Veevee, though perhaps not as clearly, since it wasn’t hers.

  He created a new gate with its mouth inches from the public gate down to the beach. The exit of the new gate was right there in the kitchen with them. Then he moved the mouth of the new gate over the entrance to the public gate.

  That entrance popped into the kitchen.

  Meanwhile, though, Danny pushed the mouth of the new gate over the public gate’s other end, too, on the beach below—and now both ends of the public gate were there in the kitchen.

  Veevee laughed and slid a chair into the public gate. It reappeared a few inches away—as if it had suddenly hit a patch of oil and slid incredibly swiftly and silently across the floor.

  Danny was in awe. “So a gate that was six stories high—I mean the entrances were six stories apart—I ate both ends, and now they’re only a few inches apart.”

  “Why are they apart at all?” asked Veevee. “You passed both ends of the gate through the same mouth and out the same exit. Shouldn’t they have ended up in the exact same spot?”

  “I don’t know the rules yet,” said Danny.

  “This is so weird,” said Veevee. She shuddered and then laughed again. “It’s creeping me out! I’ve only known about gates for a day and suddenly I’m finding out they do the coolest things!”

  “But we still don’t really understand that inscription,” said Danny. “The bit about the jaws of Bel seizing Loki’s heart, but instead Loki’s heart holds the jaws, and then when he finds the gate of Bel he moves it—I’m trying to picture what he was doing.”

  “The heart of Loki—is it his outself?”

  “How can it be, if the sun has a heart, too? Do stars have outselves?”

  Having asked the question, Danny immediately tried to answer it. He closed his eyes and thought back to the book and the inscription—the actual runes and the Fistalk words he had read them as. Enough time had passed that his mental picture of it wasn’t perfect. And he had to check to make sure that he hadn’t blown his translation. Was it really the Fistalk word for heart every time?

  Maybe. Danny just couldn’t be sure if he was really seeing the signs for the syllables for heart when it referred to the sun, or something else. It certainly seemed like something else, now that he examined it. He didn’t recognize it, whatever it was, though for all he knew it was a trick of memory. An eidetic memory didn’t mean you really took a photograph. It was subject to all the ordinary flaws of memory—including the tendency to insert into the picture exactly what you want or expect to see.

  “Maybe we’re onto something and maybe we’re not,” said Danny. “We set out trying to close gates, and we ended up capturing them and moving both ends. Is that ‘eating a gate’? The thing is, it was my own gate I ‘ate,’ so I already knew where both ends were. And all I did was bring them into the same room as me. I didn’t eat them.”

  “Yes you did,” insisted Veevee.

  “Okay, maybe that’s all that’s meant by ‘eating’ a gate. But there still has to be a way to close a gate—or what would being a Lockfriend even mean?”

  “But we know what the last Loki did, don’t you see? He took all the gates in the world—just the way you took that public gate—and he ate them. Moved them. They aren’t where they used to be—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t somewhere.”

  Danny saw it, too. “But what good would it be to find them? They’re out of place. They’ve been moved. They don’t lead whence or whither they did before.” Then he grinned, because in all the world, only another gatemage would delight in using the old words as much as he did.

  “Are we looking for those stolen gates?” asked Veevee. “What’s our project here, to restore all the gates that Loki stole? I don’t think so!”

  “Loki stole gates,” said Danny. “But what about this Gate Thief who tears the outselves out of gatemages? Just strips them so they can never make another gate.”

  Veevee read aloud from the sheet with Danny’s translation of the four runic inscriptions. “The jaws of Bel seized his heart to carry it away.”

  “Is that the Gate Thief?” asked Danny. “The ancient god of the Carthaginians? Gatemages can break their outselves into fragments, leaving bits here and there as gates—but we must hold the rest of them inside us somehow. Maybe Bel can find the unspent hoard of the gatemage’s outself and swallow it up in a gate. Maybe he just moves it out of the gatemage’s reach, as if he had spent his whole outself on gates and then forgotten where they were.”

  “Do you think it might be vengeance?” asked Veevee. “Maybe this inscription—maybe we’re still living in that story. Maybe Bel has taken thousands of years to get even.”

  “Or maybe it wasn’t Loki who closed all the gates back in 632 A.D.,” said Danny. “It’s not as if anybody saw him do it. I
t’s not like he left a note. What if Bel recovered from what that earlier Loki had done to him, and then came back and ate all the Westilian gates as retaliation—and then found the newer Loki and stripped him or even killed him. Maybe we’ve been blaming him all these years, and it wasn’t his fault, he was the victim.”

  “Wouldn’t that be ironic,” said Veevee. “Yet it would make a perverse kind of sense.”

  “Especially if we think of spacetime as a trickster,” said Danny. “Loki gets blamed for his own demise, and so the Westilians deprive themselves of the only kind of mage that could fight Bel.”

  “Oh, that bastard spacetime,” said Veevee. “You gotta love his sense of irony.”

  “And ever since then, Bel—or the fiftieth-generation mage called Bel—watches the Westilians and eats the whole outself of any gatemage who tries to make a Great Gate.”

  “You think he’s still getting vengeance thirteen hundred years later?”

  “Like the Families don’t hold grudges at least that long?” said Danny.

  “Yes, why shouldn’t Bel be as mentally unstable as those inbred Families,” said Veevee.

  “I’m the result of one of the most ridiculously inbred marriages ever,” said Danny.

  “Sorry, I really didn’t mean to insult you,” said Veevee.

  “I’m not insulted,” said Danny. “I was proving your point.”

  She jumped up and gave him a hug and kissed his cheek resoundingly. “If you were any smarter or funnier or cuter I’d eat you alive.” Then she giggled. “Oh, this whole thing has given completely new meanings to sayings with ‘eat’ in them. ‘Eat your heart out.’ ‘Eat this.’ ‘Eat me.’ ”

  Danny joined in. “ ‘Have your cake and eat it, too’?”

  “Have your soul and eat it, too, you mean.”

  “You eat everything on your plate or you won’t get dessert,” said Danny.

  Veevee shook her head. “I think I already did all the funny ones.”

  “Maybe,” said Danny, a little embarrassed.