Hidden Empire

by Orson Scott Card

  "I needed an incident," said Torrent. "I needed a Lusitania, a provocation. But I didn't understand just how debilitated you all were from the nictovirus. I thought that at least a few of our soldiers would be up to fighting them off. I thought it would be bloody but we'd win."

  "We did," said Cole.

  "Too late to save Cecily's boy," said Torrent.

  Cole wondered—is he a good enough liar to fake the tears coming down his cheeks?

  "Cole, it bought me a chance to remake the most troubled continent."

  "And you took that chance," said Cole, "and you're doing it."

  Torrent dropped Benny's handgun. "You're not my enemy."

  "Oh, I hate you, sir. I'm so angry I could cry. I could scream. I could hit something, even kill. But I'm a soldier, sir. I understand that there are casualties in war. Collateral damage. I understand that commanders give orders that sometimes have terrible consequences for many of their own, that they often lose their best, and yet they must give those orders."

  "So knowing what you know, you'll still support me?"

  "I think that's the gist of it, sir."

  "No matter what you say, Cecily will never—"

  "I will never tell Cecily, sir," said Cole. "It would destroy her and accomplish nothing."

  Torrent turned to the side, leaning back against the table saw. He touched his hand to his forehead. "I'm glad," said Torrent. "I didn't want to kill you. You're one of the best I've got."

  "But you would have done it, if it had been necessary," said Cole.

  "You know that I can't do this without reducing democracy to a sham, at least for a while," said Torrent.

  "It already is," said Cole. "Whatever we have, it hasn't been democracy for decades."

  "I still have to take on Russia and China, not to mention the loonies," said Torrent. "I could still lose."

  "Qin Shi Huangdi was overthrown and his dynasty terminated. But the empire he founded lasted two thousand years. He built well. He didn't have to have a long and happy life himself, did he?"

  "So you're with me?"

  "No sir," said Cole. "I will support your cause. I will work toward the same objectives as you. But I am not and never will be with a lying snake like you, sir."

  Torrent nodded. "Just remember, Cole. Until the snake did his work, Adam and Eve were perpetual babies. The snake started the whole thing going."

  "Where can I ditch this thing?" asked Cole, indicating the EMP device.

  "I kept it down here," said Torrent. "It's why I ran here when you gave me warning. It goes up on that shelf. The carpenters know I keep it here. I told the head carpenter it was my last line of defense, and he accepted that without further questions."

  "So do I, sir," said Cole.

  "You could have died protecting me," said Torrent, "and you could have died at my hand."

  "But I didn't," said Cole. "Aren't you glad?"

  "You killed all your friends."

  "I killed three of them," said Cole. "Your security forces took care of the others. And the moment they raised their hands to try to stop the work you're doing, they stopped being my friends."

  "What do you hope to gain from this, Cole?"

  "The same thing as you, sir. Peace on Earth." Cole stowed the EMP device up on the top shelf. Then he rebooted Benny's Bones manually. "You took him by surprise, sir, with the nail gun, just as he was coming through the door." Cole glanced to make sure the cord on the thing was long enough that it was even possible. It was. "And then I arrived and finished him off."

  "That's how it happened," said Torrent.

  "I'm calling everybody now."

  "Yes, go ahead."

  Cole clicked open the connection with Jeep.

  "What happened, Colonel Coleman?" Jeep demanded.

  "We weren't sure we had them all, Jeep. I had to patrol the floor before I wanted to announce where we were. I was afraid they were keying in on my communications somehow."

  "Is the President all right?"

  "The President actually saved his own life," said Cole. "He took down Benny with a nail gun in the carpenters' shop."

  "You can actually kill with that?"

  "I don't know. I said he took him down. I took him out."

  Security forces came rushing in from everywhere. Cole sat down on the floor of the basement hall, leaning his back against the wall. Since he was dressed exactly like the would-be assassins, he got more than a few startled glances, until a Secret Service agent realized the problem and sat down beside him. So that it would be clear that he was either an okay dude, or in custody.

  "I wish we could pretend these guys were a bunch of foreign assassins," said Cole glumly.

  "I know," said the agent. "You knew them, right?"

  "They were my team," said Cole. "But they got distracted from the mission."

  "What mission?"

  "Preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States," said Cole. "No matter what you think of the President, assassinating him does not preserve and protect anything."

  "I think our president is a great man," said the agent. "I've seen them come and go, but he's the first I've ever said that about."

  "Great men," said Cole. "They can be hard to take, sometimes, don't you think?"

  "Not to me," said the agent.

  They pushed the gurney carrying Benny's body out of the carpenters' shop and past where Cole and the agent sat.

  "Sic semper," said Cole to Benny as he passed.

  "What was that? I thought that was Marine Corps."

  "Marine Corps is Semper fi. Semper fidelis. 'Always faithful.'"

  "So what's 'sic semper'?"

  "What John Wilkes Booth shouted after he shot Lincoln and jumped down onto the stage. 'Sic semper tyrannis.' May this happen to all tyrants. Lincoln was a great president. But to some people, greatness in a president looks like tyranny."

  "I'm sorry your friends went bad."

  "I don't know," said Cole. "They didn't think they were bad. They thought they were doing the right thing for their country. That's why this stinks. They really thought they were good guys."

  "So do terrorists," said the agent.

  "Yeah," said Cole.

  And so do presidents and the people who help them do their work. You place your bet and see how history plays it out.

  What if I watch Torrent and find out that they were right after all, and I was wrong? That sometimes a ruler needs to be killed to save the people? That democracy is more important than peace after all?

  Was this what Mark and Reuben died for? To bring this man into power and keep him there? Is that what I should live for? Or am I betraying my country right now, sitting here, knowing that I've killed the only guys who really had a chance of stopping this man?

  I upheld the law. I fulfilled my oath. And even though I know he was perfectly willing to kill me if he thought he had to, I also know that when I gave him a reason not to, he took it, and I'm alive. That says something about him. He really does not want to kill. He really does want to have people around him that he can trust.

  I guess I just put myself on that list. For now.

  We did our best to keep this virus from our shores. The quarantine bought the world a year in which to prepare. Some nations did, some didn't.

  We have stockpiles of the medications that help.

  We have thousands of volunteers who went to Africa, learned how to care for disease victims to enhance their chances of survival, and now they are home again, immune to the disease and ready to help.

  We have used every means at our disposal to teach people all that we can about how to treat the nictovirus.

  And even now, our scientists are racing to try to find a vaccine that will reliably prevent the disease without causing it.

  Whether they succeed or not, we will weather this together. We will not panic, we will not shut down our economy, we will keep food flowing into our cities and we will buy and sell throughout the world. We will not lock our doors agains
t our neighbors, but we will follow the example of those brave volunteers and help those who need our help.

  In the long run, we cannot avoid this disease. But we don't have to let it destroy us. Many will die, and we will grieve for them. But most will live. America will live. And we will remain a beacon of hope and peace, democracy and charity, for the world.

  It was full summer again. Chinma finally understood what all those words meant—summer, fall, winter, spring. In Nigeria there had been only rainy and not-rainy.

  Now when he climbed the massive oak in the back yard of the Malich house—of his house now, he finally believed—he knew what it had been like without its leaves, slick with snow, completely unclimbable when encased in ice. He shared the trees here with squirrels instead of monkeys, and all the birds were different. But he still liked to climb.

  He had walked this whole neighborhood, though no one else did. They ran, dressed in jogging clothes, but they were going nowhere, accomplishing nothing. What a strange land, where people had to invent hard work for their bodies instead of trying to avoid it. But he could eat the food now, and he drank the tap water without distrust, and he was used to the idea that the electricity was on all the time, and not just a few hours a day.

  Most important to Chinma, however, was his eyesight. Cole and Mrs. Malich had both noticed the trouble he had reading and, even more, writing. The way he would track back over letters he had already written, or write them twice. Here in America they didn't assume he was stupid or lazy, the way the teacher in the village had. They assumed he was dyslexic, that letters appeared in the wrong order for him. But the reading tutor they found for him said that she could find no such problem.

  It was Lettie who saw what no one else had noticed. He was struggling to read one of his textbooks and, as usual, having a terrible time, when Lettie said, "Why do you move your eyes like that?"

  He didn't know what she meant.

  "You sweep back and forth across the page. Why don't you just look at it!"

  "I am looking at it."

  "No you're not. You're looking past it. Sweep, sweep, sweep. It's like trying to use a broom to drive in a screw. Sweep sweep."

  He thought she was making fun of him, and so he held his tongue and kept his face from showing anything.

  "No I'm not making fun of you, Chinma, I'm trying to understand what you're doing. Why don't you hold your eyes still when you read?"

  "Nobody does," said Chinma. "Everybody reads the letters in a row, sweep sweep."

  "Right, like this. Look at my eyes. I'm reading. See how my eyes barely move? But you read like this." She moved them back and forth far more quickly, and traveling farther each time.

  "When I don't do that, the letters hide," said Chinma.

  "Hide?"

  "They disappear. I have to keep going past them to catch them before they disappear."

  "They don't disappear. That's just crazy. Look, here's what you've been reading. All the letters are there. None missing!"

  "I didn't say they disappear forever," said Chinma. "Just when I look at them." And then, because he was feeling like part of the family now, he went ahead and said what he might have said to an annoying little half-sister. "I wish I could look at you and make you disappear."

  Lettie whooped with laughter. "Oh, you're a brat after all," she said. "I was wondering if you had any feelings."

  But later, she must have talked to Mrs. Malich, because she took him to an ophthalmologist, who did a complete examination. They touched his eye with things, and shone too many bright lights in, but he did what they asked and in the end, the doctor said, "I can't tell with these instruments whether it was congenital or he burned his retina by staring into the sun as a baby, but there is a gap in the rods and cones exactly at the focal point of the lens. It doesn't affect his far vision, only near vision, and anything larger than a normal-size letter on a page would be visible at the fringes. But normal-size letters completely disappear when he focuses on them."

  They found large-print editions of everything they could, and what they couldn't find readily available, the school district paid someone to scan into a computer and make it larger. The letters now had a hole in the middle of them, but they were there and he could read them. He was also allowed to write very large letters on the papers he turned in, or type them into the computer where his word processor had a very large font. His schoolwork improved dramatically.

  Mrs. Malich was all for seeking a doctor who could do surgery to correct the problem, while Cole thought that it wouldn't be such a terrible burden for Chinma to work with large print his whole life.

  Chinma didn't really care how the argument turned out. He had found out he wasn't stupid and that other people read better because the letters never disappeared for them.

  Meanwhile, Lettie had spent the past few months becoming tolerable. She even climbed trees with him, though she was careless enough that when she was with him he wouldn't do any really hard climbs. She would follow him no matter what he said, so he simply didn't go as high as he might have. And they would talk about things. Or about nothing. Just talk. He found out that she really wasn't mean. She was just direct—her word—and said what was on her mind.

  "There are worse things in the world," she said. "I could lie and pretend only to have nice thoughts and happy feelings, and then one day I'd start poisoning all my teachers and they'd say, She was a loner, she kept to herself, we always thought she was strange."

  "You are strange," said Chinma.

  "At least I don't have an accent."

  "Yes you do," he said. "An American one."

  "Can you teach me some Ayere words?"

  So whenever they were in a tree together, he would teach her words in Ayere, and to his surprise, she remembered them all. She would add them to her English conversation, to the annoyance of Nick and Annie. But J.P. loved it and laughed when she did it. "That was Ayere, wasn't it?" he'd say, and then mutter the new word to himself over and over.

  "Why are you learning Ayere?" Annie asked Lettie and J.P. one day. Lettie didn't have an answer—a rare thing for her. It was J.P. who said, "We're his tribe now, aren't we?"

  The monkey sickness was coming here to America. Already there were cases reported in Miami and Los Angeles and along the Mexican border. There was no more attempt at quarantine. It was going to have its way with the world, this disease that a sick and frightened monkey had sneezed into Chinma's face more than a year ago. Something that had struck him first was going to strike everybody.

  Cole and Mrs. Malich had gone over it with the children, what to expect, how it felt. "I won't kid you," said Cole, "it makes your head hurt like somebody was driving screws into it from inside your skull. But I promise you, it passes, it ends."

  "And if we bleed, we die," said Annie. "That's what a teacher at school said."

  "If you bleed," said Cole, "then you have a really bad case, so yes, you're more likely to die. But your mother bled. As badly as anyone I've ever seen. But they got an IV in her and something to thicken up her blood, and your mom is tough. She stopped bleeding after only a few hours, and she got better so she could come back, make cookies, and yell at you for leaving your bikes on the lawn."

  "We don't do that anymore," said Nick.

  "Chinma does," said Lettie.

  Everyone knew that was a joke, since Chinma was compulsively tidy.

  Chinma went with Cole when he took the train to New Jersey to bring Aunt Margaret back. "You might as well give up and come," said Cole. "If you don't, the whole family will just come up here to take care of you, and that'll disrupt the children's schooling."

  "It's summer vacation, I am not sick yet, and when I do get sick I don't mind dying. I've been breathing for a very long time now, and this virus is as good an occasion to retire from the occupation as any."

  "You're not even sixty yet."

  "It's better to die before you have to start lying about your age."

  Chinma didn't know of anyone
ever winning an argument with Aunt Margaret, but Cole figured out just what bothered her. "It's the constipation and the diarrhea, isn't it?" he said. "You just don't want anybody to see your bony old butt."

  "As a matter of fact I don't," said Aunt Margaret, "and nobody wants to see it, either. Especially not covered with doo-doo when I'm thrashing around with delirium tremens."

  "Lay off the booze and you won't get the d.t.s."

  "I meant just delirium. You are so literal. Everybody hates you for that, Cole. I tell you this as a friend, in the nicest possible way."

  Chinma tried to imagine anyone in his village talking like that to one of the old women, especially Father's mother, who thought she was queen of the universe and snapped at everyone who did anything for her because they didn't do it exactly as she wanted. She always got her way because she could complain to Father and he'd make people do what she wanted. He could imagine Cole talking to her about her butt, or booze. He'd never get out of the house alive.

  But Aunt Margaret came with them. Chinma listened to them talking all the way back to Virginia. He sat on the seat ahead of them in the train, reading Fablehaven on the Kindle with the typeface at its largest setting. The book was good because it had all kinds of dangers that were enjoyable to read about because they couldn't happen in the real world, and yet the bravery and cleverness of the children were real, and Chinma liked them. But he also listened to the adults behind him. He learned a lot that way. He also had to keep waking the Kindle up because he'd go so long between turning pages.

  Everybody on the train was wearing masks. Chinma didn't see the point, but maybe it made them feel better to believe they would be the one person who didn't catch it.

  Cole and Aunt Margaret also kept talking about how smooth the new tracks were, and how comfortable the new electric train was, and how wonderful it was that President Torrent was finally bringing the American rail system up to European standards. Chinma had no point of comparison. It was certainly better than the buses in Nigeria. And the trains arrived at the station and left again exactly at the time on the schedule.

  Today, up in the tree, he watched as Lettie came out to call him in for dinner. He could have come down before she spoke to him, but he liked watching her come all the way across the back lawn and climb halfway up the tree before he admitted he had seen her. And he suspected that she liked it, too, which is why she didn't even try to yell at him from down below. Any excuse to get up in a tree with him. Well, that was fine with him.