Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
By Orson Scott Card from Tom Doherty Associates
Empire
The Folk of the Fringe
Future on Fire (editor)
Future on Ice (editor)
Invasive Procedures (with Aaron Johnston)
Keeper of Dreams
Lovelock (with Kathryn Kidd)
Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
Saints
Songmaster
Treason
A War of Gifts
The Worthing Saga
Wyrms
THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER
Seventh Son
Red Prophet
Prentice Alvin
Alvin Journeyman
Heartfire
The Crystal City
ENDER
Ender’s Game
Ender’s Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
First Meetings
HOMECOMING
The Memory of Earth
The Call of Earth
The Ships of Earth
Earthfall
Earthborn
WOMEN OF GENESIS
Sarah
Rebekah
Rachel & Leah
From Other Publishers
Enchantment
Homebody
Lost Boys
Magic Street
Stone Tables
Treasure Box
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
Characters and Viewpoint
Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
Edmund R. Schubert
and
Orson Scott Card
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
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Copyright Acknowledgments
“In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat,” by Bradley P. Beaulieu
First appeared in IGMS Issue #2
Copyright © March 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Mazer in Prison,” by Orson Scott Card
First appeared in IGMS Issue #1
Copyright © October 2005, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Tabloid Reporter to the Stars,” by Eric James Stone
First appeared in IGMS Issue #4
Copyright © February 2007, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Audience,” by Ty Franck
First appeared in IGMS Issue #2
Copyright © March 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“The Mooncalfe,” by David Farland
First appeared in IGMS Issue #2
Copyright © March 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Cheater,” by Orson Scott Card
First appeared in IGMS Issue #3
Copyright © October 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Dream Engine,” by Tim Pratt
First appeared in IGMS Issue #3
Copyright © October 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Hats Off,” by David Lubar
First appeared in IGMS Issue #3
Copyright © October 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Eviction Notice,” by Scott M. Roberts
First appeared in IGMS Issue #1
Copyright © October 2005, Hatrack River Enterprises
“To Know All Things That Are in the Earth,” by James Maxey
First appeared in IGMS Issue #3
Copyright © October 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Beats of Seven,” by Peter Orullian
First appeared in IGMS Issue #4
Copyright © February 2007, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Pretty Boy,” by Orson Scott Card
First appeared in IGMS Issue #2
Copyright © March 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Respite,” by Rachel Ann Dryden
First appeared in IGMS Issue #1
Copyright © October 2005, Hatrack River Enterprises
“The Box of Beautiful Things,” by Brian Dolton
First appeared in IGMS Issue #3
Copyright © October 2006, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Taint of Treason,” by Eric James Stone
First appeared in IGMS Issue #1
Copyright © October 2005, Hatrack River Enterprises
“Call Me Mr. Positive,” by Tom Barlow
First appeared in IGMS Issue #4
Copyright © February 2007, Hatrack River Enterprises
“A Young Man with Prospects,” by Orson Scott Card
First appeared in IGMS Issue #4
Copyright © February 2007, Hatrack River Enterprises
All reprint rights reassigned to authors.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Copyright Acknowledgments
Foreword
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Introduction
BY EDMUND R. SCHUBERT
In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat
BY BRADLEY P. BEAULIEU
Mazer in Prison
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Tabloid Reporter to the Stars
BY ERIC JAMES STONE
Audience
BY TY FRANCK
The Mooncalfe
BY DAVID FARLAND
Cheater
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Dream Engine
BY TIM PRATT
Hats Off
BY DAVID LUBAR
Eviction Notice
BY SCOTT M. ROBERTS
To Know All Things That Are in the Earth
BY JAMES MAXEY
Beats of Seven
BY PETER ORULLIAN
Pretty Boy
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Respite
BY RACHEL ANN DRYDEN
The Box of Beautiful Things
BY BRIAN DOLTON
Taint of Treason
BY ERIC JAMES STONE
Call Me Mr. Positive
BY TOM BARLOW
A Young Man with Prospects
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Credits for the Illustrations
Copyright
Foreword
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
The Medicine wagon rolls into town. With brightly painted signs, it advertises cures for every ailment, from cancer to impotence to senility to drought. The man on the wagon can do miracles.
Of course, they’re all fake. You’ll get a bottle of something, but it’s a sure thing it won’t cure any of the things he’s said it will cure.
He’ll keep only one of his promises, and that one is the unstated one: He’ll put on a great show.
He stops the wagon; he stands on top of it, or at the top step at its back, and he makes his pitch.
And here’s where his talents have to shine. He has to h
ave a voice that can be heard all through a town square, in order to draw a crowd. He has to have a face that knows how to zero in on an audience, member by member, so that they take his words seriously, so that their eyes are drawn to him and can’t escape.
Even if they know he’s lying, even if they’re determined not to believe, they can’t bear to miss the show.
We fiction writers are all medicine men. All we have to sell are lies. Everyone knows they’re lies. We admit they’re lies. If somebody sues us for libel, we insist they’re lies. We made it up. None of it ever happened anywhere, to anybody.
So why do people buy these tales of ours?
One reason is the voice. We fiction writers speak with confidence. We declare that we know the answers to the great mysteries, and we can tell you with certainty:
Why people do the strange, hurtful, terrible, wonderful, cruel, kind things they do.
That’s the miracle of our made-up stories. When we tell you why a person does something, nobody can argue with us. Nobody can say, “No, the real reason he did it is something else entirely.”
Because the person doesn’t exist. It’s a character, existing only in the storyteller’s mind. There is no authority but the author.
And yet…when the author gets it right, the characters he made up resonate with us. They feel true and right: Yes, this is why people do what they do. Now I understand. Things make sense. And in the midst of fiction, awash with lies, we tie ourselves to the mast of a kind of truth we cannot ever find in the real world.
So we authors speak with a voice of command. And as we weave our tales out of thin air, if you believe in them, you allow us to spin threads in your own mind and begin to weave a fabric in your memory. It is composed of pieces of your own experience that we cannot see, but when we say certain things, your own memories are awakened and fibers of this and that from your real life get twisted into the threads and woven into the textiles that our text creates.
It’s magic. When we’re done, you have memories implanted in your minds—vivid ones, powerful ones, treasured ones, if we’ve done our job aright—and these memories we’ve given you are clearer than anything in real life.
That’s the medicine in our bottles. That’s the show we put on.
Short stories are the treasurehouse of fiction. Few writers are ready to tackle a novel as their first venture into fiction. It is in the short stories that they can try out their voice, make their first tentative explorations into new worlds, and test new ideas to see if there’s any truth in them.
In recent years, the market for short fiction has shrunk to a shocking degree. Yet the need for it has not. I believe that the reason is not that the audience does not want short stories, but rather that the marketplace offers no easy way to reach an audience.
Printing magazines is expensive—even on the cheap pulp paper that has typified the magazines in the speculative fiction genre. Publishing online carries far less risk, and a far higher percentage of earnings can go to the writers.
That’s why I launched Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show a few years ago, at http://www.oscIGMS.com.
From the start, I determined that even though it’s expensive, our stories would all be illustrated. For me, that’s one of the hallmarks of magazine publication. The story begins with a splash of evocative art to set the tone.
At first I edited the magazine myself, but quickly discovered that editing a magazine takes more time than I could devote to the task—not if I wanted to do it well. I was doing a bad job of keeping up with submissions and getting issues out on time. So I fired me.
That’s when I invited Ed Schubert to take the helm. He is doing a superb job, except, of course, for the problem of working with me. I have promised an Ender’s Game story in every issue, in the hopes that we can draw some of the readers of that series of books to this magazine. Sometimes Ed has to wring my ear a little to squeeze the story out anywhere near the due date. But that’s why he gets the big bucks.
Oh, wait. He doesn’t get big bucks. He gets paid with bags of dirt. But it’s good dirt. Magical dirt. Dirt just right for growing magic beans. If you know where to get magic beans.
Even with the low overhead of an online magazine, there are few ways to get the word out that the website even exists. That’s why I proposed to my publisher, Tom Doherty of Tor, that we bring out an anthology of stories that will show the variety and quality of what our magazine offers.
So please, don’t just sample our wares here in this book. Come to our website and see the latest issues and read the latest stories. We think you’ll find that our kind of patent medicine really does deliver.
Introduction
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORIES BY EDMUND R. SCHUBERT
Everyone loves the line from the end of The Wizard of Oz when the wizard booms out in his most ominous voice, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
But if you think for a moment, you’ll recall that the wizard’s booming quickly turned to blustering and ultimately did nothing to stop Dorothy and her friends from pulling back the curtain to see what secrets it hid.
That’s because there’s something basic to human nature that wants—almost needs—to know what’s going on behind the veil. Even when the wizard turns out to be a charlatan, there’s something about a charlatan behind the veil that is far more interesting than a wizard in front of it.
That’s why when it comes to short story collections and anthologies, my favorites have always been those filled with stories written by the late, great Dr. Isaac Asimov. I know that sounds terribly disjointed, but stay with me for a moment. Did I seek out the good doctor’s collections because he wrote such wonderful stories? (He did, there’s no question about that.)
No, the reason those collections enthralled me so was because Asimov always took the time to write anywhere from a few lines to a few paragraphs about each story. The story behind his stories.
To get a glimpse into Asimov’s mind, to find out what he was trying to accomplish, or why he wrote a particular story, or the trials and tribulations the story endured on its way to publication—that fascinated me. I couldn’t get enough. And given how much I have always loved stories—long, short, printed, on the big screen, it doesn’t matter; I just love stories—the opportunity to be a fly on Isaac Asimov’s wall was a beautiful gift.
Why, maybe it was that secret part of my soul that, even at the age of fourteen, longed to be a writer, a storyteller. Or maybe it was nothing more than the fundamental aspect of human nature that simply relishes feeling like we’re “in” on someone else’s secrets. Or maybe it was: C) all of the above. Did it matter? Not really. Not to me. I freely admit I was addicted.
To me the best stories have a life of their own. They breathe, they think, they move, and in so doing they move me. You should also have no trouble, then, understanding why it was absolutely necessary, once I had found these living, breathing stories, to find out how they came to be born and what kinds of lives they’ve led before arriving on my doorstep.
The problem, I must confess, is that I enjoy these moments of insight so much that sometimes, going back to Asimov’s collections, for instance, I’d go through his books and read all the essays before I read any of the stories.
If you are also the kind of person who does that sort of thing, let me take this opportunity to warn you against doing so in this anthology. With this assemblage of stories, all of the authors have written their “stories behind the stories.” The catch is that some of these essays contain spoilers—tidbits of information you don’t want to know until after you’ve read the stories. That’s why the essays are published as afterwords, not introductions. Trust me when I say there are a few stories herein where you really don’t want to spoil the surprise. Just a couple, but if I tell you which ones, we both know you’ll go look. So no peeking, now. I mean it.
The afterwords will make re-reading these stories even richer—and there are stories here that you will defini
tely want to read more than once—but let them stand on their own the first time around.
Yes, even though they’re standing behind a curtain and the wizard just told you to pay them no attention…
Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat
BY BRADLEY P. BEAULIEU
Al-Ashmar sat cross-legged in the tent of Gadn ak Hulavar and placed his patient, a spotted cat, onto a velvet pillow. Gadn lounged on the far side of the spacious tent, puffing on his hookah and waiting for the diagnosis of his grossly thin cat.
Al-Ashmar held his fingers near the cat’s nose. She sniffed his hand and raked her whiskers over his knuckles. When the cat raised her head and stared into his eyes, Al-Ashmar found a brown, triangle-shaped splotch in the right eye, along the left side of the green-and-gold iris. The location of the mark indicated the cat’s liver, but in this case it was the strong color that was most disturbing.
“What have you been feeding her?” Al-Ashmar asked as he stroked the cat, noting its muscle tone.
Gadn shrugged his massive shoulders. “Nothing. Cats find food.”
Al-Ashmar smiled, if only to hide his annoyance. The wealthy always wanted cats of status, but when it came time to care for them, they hadn’t an idea worth its weight in sand.
“Not this one,” Al-Ashmar said as he picked up the cat and stood, absently continuing to stroke its ears. “Please, go to the bazaar; buy a large cage and some swallows. Once a day, put her in the cage with one bird. The activity should interest her enough to induce appetite. Do this for a week and her normal eating pattern should return. If it doesn’t, send me word.”
A bald servant boy rushed into the room and bowed deeply. “Master, if you please, there is a messenger.”
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