Capitol

by Orson Scott Card

  "Fellow Americans," Jerry said, "I'm sorry. I made a terrible mistake. I was wrong. There's nothing wrong with the Russians. I let an innocent man be killed. Forgive me. The government has been kinder to me than I deserve." And so on. For an hour Jerry babbled, insisting that he was craven, that he was guilty, that he was worthless, that the government was vying with God for respectability.

  And when he was through, the prosecutor came back in, shaking his head.

  "Mr. Crove, you can do better than that.

  "Nobody in the audience believed you for one minute. Nobody in the test sample, not one person, believed that you were the least bit sincere. You still think the government ought to be deposed. And so we have to try the treatment again."

  "Let me try to confess again."

  "A screen test is a screen test, Mr. Crove. We have to give you a little more experience with death before we can permit you to have any involvement with life.

  This time Jerry screamed right from the beginning. He made no attempt at all to bear it well. They hung him by the armpits over a long cylinder filled with boiling oil. They slowly lowered him. Death came when the oil was up to his chest-- by then his legs had been completely cooked and the meat was falling off the bones in large chunks.

  They made him come in and, when the oil had cooled enough to touch, fish out the pieces of his own corpse.

  He wept all through his confession this time, but the test audience was completely unconvinced. "The man's a phony," they said. "He doesn't believe a word of what he's saying."

  "We have a problem," said the prosecutor. "You seem so willing to cooperate after your death. But you have reservations. You aren't speaking from the heart. We'll have to help you again."

  Jerry screamed and struck out at the prosecutor. When the guards had pulled him away (and the prosecutor was nursing an injured nose), Jerry shouted, "Of course I'm lying! No matter how often you kill me it won't change the fact that this is a government of fools by vicious, lying bastards!"

  "On the contrary," said the prosecutor, trying to maintain his good manners and cheerful demeanor despite the blood pouring out of his nose, "if we kill you enough, you'll completely change your mind."

  "You can't change the truth!"

  "We've changed it for everyone else who's gone through this. And you are far from being the first who had to go to a third clone. But this time, Mr. Crove, do try to forget about being a hero."

  They skinned him alive, arms and legs first, and then, finally, they castrated him and ripped the skin off his belly and chest. He died silently when they cut his larynx out-- no, not silently. just voiceless. He found that without a voice he could still whisper a scream that rang in his ears when he awoke and was forced to go in and carry his bloody corpse to the disposal room. He confessed again, and the audience was not convinced.

  They slowly crushed him to death, and he had to scrub the blood out of the crusher when he awoke, but the audience only commented. "Who does the jerk think he's fooling?"

  They disemboweled him and burned his guts in front of him. They infected him with rabies and let his death linger for two weeks. "They crucified him and let exposure and thirst kill him. They dropped him a dozen tirnes from the roof of a one-story building until he died.

  Yet the audience knew that Jerry Crove had not repented.

  "My God, Crove, how long do you think I can keep doing this?" asked the prosecutor. He did not seem cheerful. In fact, Jerry thought he looked almost desperate.

  "Getting a little tough on you?" Jerry asked, grateful for the conversation because it meant there would be a few minutes between deaths.

  "What kind of man do you think I am? We'll bring him back to life in a minute anyway, I tell myself, but I didn't get into this business in order to find new, hideous ways of killing people."

  "You don't like it? And yet you have such a natural talent for it."

  The prosecutor looked sharply at Crove. "Irony? Now you can joke? Doesn't death mean anything to you?

  Jerry did not answer, only tried to blink back the tears that these days came unbidden every few minutes.

  "Crove, this is not cheap. Do you think it's cheap? We've spent literally billions of rubles on you. And even with inflation, that's a hell of a lot of money."

  "In a classless society there's no need for money."

  "What is this, dammit! Now you're getting rebellious? Now you're trying to be a hero?"

  "No."

  "No wonder we've had to kill you eight times! You keep thinking up clever arguments against us!"

  "I'm sorry. Heaven knows I'm sorry."

  "I've asked to be released from this assigrunent. I obviously can't crack you."

  "Crack me! As if I didn't long to be cracked."

  "You're costing too much. There's a definite benefit in having criminals convincingly recant on television. But you're getting too expensive. The cost-benefit ratio is ridiculous now. There's a limit to how much we can spend on you."

  "I have a way for you to save money."

  "So do I. Convince the damned audience!"

  "Next time you kill me, don't put a helmet on my head."

  The prosecutor looked absolutely shocked. "That would be final. That would be capital punishment. We're a humane government. We never kill anybody permanently."

  They shot him in the gut and let him bleed to death. They threw him from a cliff into the sea. They let a shark eat him alive. They hung him upside down so that just his head was under water, and when he finally got too tired to hold his head out of the water he drowned.

  But through all this, Jerry had become more inured to the pain. His mind had finally learned that none of these deaths was permanent after all. And now when the moment of death came, though it was still terrible, he endured it better. He screamed less. He approached death with greater calm. He even hastened the process, deliberately inhaling great draughts of water, deliberately wriggling to attract the shark. When they had the guards kick him to death he kept yelling, "Harder," until he couldn't yell anymore.

  And finally when they set up a screen test, he fervently told the audience that the Russian government was the most terrifying empire the world had ever known, because this time they were efficient at keeping their power, because this time there was no outside for barbarians to come from, and because they had seduced the freest people in history into loving slavery. His speech was from the heart-- he loathed the Russians and loved the memory that once there had been freedom and law and a measure of justice in America.

  And the prosecutor came into the room ashenfaced.

  "You bastard," he said.

  "Oh. You mean the audience was live this time?"

  "A hundred loyal citizens. And you corrupted all but three of them."

  "Corrupted?"

  "Convinced them."

  Silence for a moment, and then the prosecutor sat down and buried his head in his hands.

  "Going to lose your job?" Jerry asked.

  "Of course."

  "I'm sorry. You're good at it."

  The prosecutor looked at him with loathing. "No one ever failed at this before. And I had never had to take anyone beyond a second death. You've died a dozen times, Crove, and you've got used to it."

  "I didn't mean to."

  "How did you do it?"

  "I don't know."

  "What kind of animal are you, Crove? Can't you make up a lie and believe it?"

  Crove chuckled. (In the old days, at this level of amusement he would have laughed uproariously. But inured to death or not, he had scars. And he would never laugh loudly again.) "It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of disbelief."

  The door opened and a very important looking man in a military uniform covered with medals came in, followed by four Russian soldiers. The prosecutor sighed and stood up. "Good-bye, Crove."

  "Good-bye," Jerry said.

  "You're a very strong man."

  "So, " said Jerry, "are you. " And the prosecutor le
ft.

  The soldiers took Jerry out of the prison to a different place entirely. A large complex of buildings in Florida. Cape Canaveral. They were exiling him, Jerry realized.

  "What's it like?" he asked the technician who was preparing him for the flight.

  "Who knows?" the technician asked. "No one's ever come back. Hell, no one's ever arrived yet."

  "After I sleep on somec, will I have any trouble waking up?"

  "In the labs, here on earth, no. Out there, who knows?"

  "But you think we'll live?"

  "We send you to planets that look like they might be habitable. If they aren't, so sorry. You take your chances. The worst that can happen is you die."

  "Is that all?" Jerry murmured.

  "Now lie down and let me tape your brain."

  Jerry lay down and the helmet, once again, recorded his thoughts. It was irresistible, of course: when you are conscious that your thoughts are being taped, Jerry realized, it is impossible not to try to think something important. As if you wer performing. Only the audience would consist of just one person. Yourself when you woke up.

  But he thought this: That this starship and the others that would be and had been sent out to colonize in prison worlds were not really what the Russians thought they were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some would survive.

  I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and transferred it to tape.

  Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the Hun. My child will be Mohammed. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.

  One of us, someday, will sack Rome.

  Then the somec was injected, and it swept through him, taking consciousness with it, and Jerry realized with a shock of recognition that this, too, was death: but a welcome death, and he didn't mind. Because this time when he woke up he would be free.

  He hummed cheerfully until he couldn't remember how to hum, and then they put his body with hundreds of others on a starship and pushed them all out into space, where they fell upward endlessly into the stars. Going home.

  SKIPPING STONES

  Unreal friendship may turn to real. But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended.

  -- T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

  Bergen Bishop wanted to be an artist.

  Because he said so when he was seven, he was promptly given pencils, paper, charcoal, watercolors, oils, canvas, a palette, an exquisite assortment of brushes, and an instructor who came and taught him once a week. In short, he was given all the paraphernalia money can buy.

  The instructor was smart enough to know that when one hopes to make a living teaching the children of the rich, one learns when to be honest and when to lie. Thus, the words "the child has talent" had often passed his lips before. But this time he meant them, and it was difficult to find a way to make the lying words now express the truth.

  "The boy has talent!" he declared. "The boy has talent!"

  "No one supposed that he hadn't," the boy's mother said, a bit surprised at how effusive the teacher was. The father said nothing, just wondered if the instructor thought he'd get a bonus for declaring it with such fervor.

  "That boy has talent. Potential. Great potential," the teacher said (again), and mother, finally grown weary of the effusion of praise, said, "My dear fellow, we don't mind a bit if he has talent. He may keep it. Now come again next Tuesday. Thank you."

  Yet despite his parents' unconcern, Bergen applied himself to learning to paint with some vigor. In a short time he had acquired technique well beyond his years.

  He was a good-tempered boy with a strong sense of justice. Many young men of his class on the planet Crove used their serving-men as whipping boys. After all, since brothers were out of fashion one had to have someone to pick on. And the serving-men (who were boys the same age as their masters) learned very early that if they defended themselves, they would soon face far worse than their youthful master could mete out.

  Bergen, however, was not unfair. Because he was unquarrelsome, he and his serving-man, Dal Vouls, never had harsh words or blows. And because he was fair, when Dal shyly mentioned that he, too, would like to learn to paint, Bergen immediately shared his equipment and his instructor.

  The instructor didn't mind teaching the two boys at once-- Dal was obedient and quiet and didn't ask questions. But he was too aware of the possibilities for added income not to mention to Bergen's father that it was customary to give an added stipend when there were two pupils instead of one.

  "Dal, have you been wasting the instructor's time?" Locken Bishop asked his son's serving-man.

  Dal remained silent, too afraid to speak quickly. Bergen answered. "It was my idea. To have him taught. It doesn't take the teacher any longer."

  "The teacher's dunning me for more. You've got to learn the value of money, Bergen. Either you take the lessons alone, or you take them not at all."

  Even so, Bergen forced the teacher ("I'll see you're fired and blackballed throughout the city. Throughout the world!") to let Dal sit quietly to one side, just watching. Dal didn't set pencil to paper in the sessions, however.

  When he was nine, Bergen tired of painting and dismissed the teacher. He took up riding this time, years before most children did, but this time he insisted and his father purchased two horses; and so Dal rode with Bergen.

  It's too easy to depict childhood as an idyll. Certainly there were some frustrations, some times when Dal and Bergen didn't see eye-to-eye. But those times were buried in an avalanche of other memories, so that they were soon forgotten. The rides took them far from Bergen's father's house, but there was no direction in which they could ride and leave his father's land and return home the same day.

  And because Bergen was able to forget for hours at a time that he was heir and Dal was only a contracted serving-man, they became friends.

  Together they poured hot wax on the stairway, which nearly killed Bergen's sister when she slipped on it-- and Bergen stoically took the full blame, since he would be confined to his room and Dal, if caught, would be beaten and dismissed. Together they hid in the bushes and watched as a couple who had ridden nude on horseback copulated in the gravel on the edge of a cliff-- they marveled for days at the thought that this was what Bergen's parents did behind closed doors. Together they swam in every untrustworthy waterhole on the estate and started fires in every likely corner, saving each other's lives so often they lost track of who was ahead.

  And then, when Bergen was fourteen, he remembered that he had painted as a boy. An uncle visited and said, "And this is Bergen, the boy who paints."

  "His painting was just a childish whim," Bergen's mother said. "He outgrew it."

  Bergen was not accustomed to getting angry with his mother. But at fourteen, few boys are able to accept the word childish without wrath. Bergen immediately said, "Did I, Mother? Then why is it that I still paint?"

  "Where?" she said, disbelieving.

  "In my room."

  "Show me some of your work then, little artist." The word little was infuriating.

  "I burn them. They aren't yet representative of my best work."

  At that his mother and the uncle laughed uproariously, and Bergen stomped off to his room, Dal a shadow behind him.

  "Where the hell is it!" he said angrily, hunting through the cupboard where the art supplies had been.

  Dal coughed. "Bergen, Sir," he said (at twelve Bergen had halfway come of age, and it was the law that he had to be called sir by anyone under contract to him or his father), "I thought you weren't using your painting stuff anymore. I've got it."

  Bergen turned in amazement. "I wasn't using it. But I didn't know you were."

  "I'm sorry, sir. But I didn't get much chance to try while the instructor was coming. I've been using the materials ever since."

  "Did you use them up?"

  "There was a go
od supply. There's no more paper, but there's plenty of canvas. I'll get it."

  He went and got it, brought it into the big house in two trips, being careful to use the back stairways so Bergen's parents wouldn't see. "I didn't think you'd mind," Dal said, when it was all brought back.

  Bergen looked puzzled. "Of course I don't mind. It's just the old biddy's taken it into her head that I'm still a child. I'm going to paint again. I don't know why I ever quit. I've always wanted to be an artist."

  And he set up the easel at the window, so he could see the yard below, dotted with the graceful whiptrees; of Crove that rose fifty meters straight up into the air-- and then, in a storm, lay over completely on the ground, so that no farmer of the Plains could ever be free of the worry of having a whiptree crash against his house in the wind. He began with an undercoat of green and blue, and Dal watched. Bergen hesitated now and then, but it came back quickly, and, in fact, the long separation from art had done him no harm. His eye was truer. His colors were deeper. But still an amateur.

  "Perhaps if there were more magenta in the sky under the clouds," Dal offered.

  Bergen turned to him coldly. "I'm not through with the sky."

  "Sorry."

  And Bergen painted on. Everything went well enough, except that he couldn't seem to get the whiptrees right. They kept looking so brown and solid, which wasn't right at all. And when he tried to draw them bent, they were awkward, not true to life. Finally he swore and threw the brush out the window, leaped to his feet and stormed away.

  Dal walked to the painting and said, "Bergen, sir, it isn't bad. Not at all. It's good. Just the whiptrees."

  "I know about the damned whiptrees," Bergen snarled, furious at his failure to be perfect in his first attempt in years. And he turned to see Dal taking swipes at the canvas, quick strokes with a slender brush. And then Dal turned around, and said, "Perhaps like that, sir."

  Bergen walked up to the canvas. The whiptrees were there, by far the most lifelike, most dynamic, most beautiful thing in the painting. Bergen looked at them-- how effortless they seemed, how effortlessly Dal had stroked them into the painting. This was not how it should be. It was Bergen who was going to be the artist, not Dal. It was not just or right or fair that Dal should be able to paint whiptrees.