Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  “It was very loyal of you to do that,” Stattor said.

  “I don’t remember it. It couldn’t have hurt me badly. The good of humankind is important. I’ve served that.”

  “You’re the only person who could say that that I would believe. That’s why I put you in prison.”

  She had her drink halfway to her lips—her gnarled hands stopped there.

  “Because of your idealism,” Stattor explained. “That’s why you spent twenty years in prison.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Stattor shrugged and sipped his drink. “Let’s talk about the old days for a minute. Do you remember the Setback? When we lost nearly all of our secret council?”

  Her face went suddenly grim. “I remember. On Perda, every year, we have half a day off to remember and study the works of those we lost. And to read the story of Kenda Dean, the informer.”

  “You knew Kenda well, didn’t you?”

  “I never suspected he could do such a thing—or that the government had been paying him the whole time. I accept it now, but I never understood it.”

  “You never understood it because he didn’t do it. I did it. I informed.”

  She looked at him as though he were still speaking. Then, suddenly, she laughed, and he remembered how, long ago, she had laughed. He remembered her lips as she had come up from the lakeside. He remembered her hands and he remembered the morning they had awakened in each other’s arms.

  “It’s true,” he said. “I informed on them all.”

  “You didn’t. You couldn’t have.”

  “The government police had been paying me for almost a year prior to that. I used the police to eliminate opposition to my chairmanship of the movement.”

  “You couldn’t—”

  “I did it for myself. I have always done everything for myself.”

  “This is some kind of test,” she said. “You’re testing me in some clever way. You could never do such a thing. You’ve led the human race to dominance in the galaxy. You’ve devoted your life to—”

  “To the acquisition of power,” he said. “I did it for myself.”

  “I won’t believe this.”

  “Believe it. I did it because I wanted everything, and everything is mine now.” He grinned. “Everything. You’re mine.”

  “That isn’t true, It’s a lie, a test.”

  “It isn’t wise, Usko, to tell Supervisor Stattor that he is lying. Normally, those who accuse me of lying are thrown into the core of the station. He smiled a bit more fiercely. “Then we can turn our thermostats up a few degrees.”

  “You couldn’t have done that.”

  “If you don’t tell me that you believe me, Usko, you’ll be back cutting out your ninety-six pieces of shoe leather before the day is over. You’ll do it till you die.” He paused. “By the way, do you know where your ‘leather’ comes from?”

  “Animals,” she said tentatively.

  “If you think your supervisor is incapable of betrayal and cruelty, I’ll tell you where your shoe leather comes from.” He waited for her response, but she said nothing. He leaned forward and the desk creaked under his weight. “Do you believe me?”

  “Whatever you did, you did for the advancement of knowledge and for the security of the human race.”

  “I did it because I don’t like competition, either from humans or trashlife. I had your friends butchered because they were in my way.”

  “You can’t make me believe this,” she said firmly. She sat up straighter and reached forward to put her drink on the edge of his desk. “We all sacrificed for our people, not for ourselves. I knew you well.”

  “You never knew me,” he said. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his rolled stomach. For a moment, he seemed to be chewing something. “You’re overburdened with misinformation. Let me clarify your situation. You have a choice. You can tell me that you believe me—that I informed on your friends and as a result they were sliced. Then you can walk out of here, have a warm place to live, and 500,000 credits a year. Or you can believe that this is a test, that Supervisor Stattor is lying to you, and that, Usko, is treason. For treason, you will spend the rest of your life dying on Perda, cutting shoe soles out of ‘leather’.”

  Whatever small thing Stattor had sucked out of his teeth, he swallowed.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Her age, her fear, and her dread pushed her deeper into her chair. She had lowered her head and Stattor could see the dry frizzy hair that grew there in erratic patches.

  She looked up. Above the mouth that was twisted by paralysis, her eyes sparkled as though they were filled with chips of silver. “You brought me here to offer me comfort and disgrace or a slow death for a wasted life. Why?”

  “I’m an insecure man. I sleep better when I know that others operate from self-interest. Your idealism makes me…uneasy.” Stattor smiled. “When you accept my offer of generosity, you’ll be as corrupt as the rest of us. There’s no reason for you to go back to prison now, because the ideal you sacrificed for was an illusion.”

  “You’re taking the one thing…”

  Stattor smiled even harder. “And we used to think human nature was so damned mysterious.” He pressed the call button on the autovox and Zallon entered immediately. “See that Ms. Imani has priority transportation to the rehabilitation center. Her welfare is of special importance to me.”

  “I understand.”

  “That’s gratifying,” Stattor said.

  As Zallon helped her out of her chair, she said, “If I were strong enough to use these hands—”

  “We mustn’t let our lives be spoiled with regrets,” Stattor said pleasantly.

  As Zallon helped Usko through the door, she looked back once, it was just a glimpse, and Stattor was reminded of the other reason he had sent her to prison. It happened so many years ago, when they had awakened in each other’s arms. She had slept so beautifully, her smooth, translucent eyelids closed over her quiet eyes—and then she had awakened and her eyes had opened suddenly and she had looked at him. There, wrapped in the sheets, with the morning sun streaming across the room, she had looked at him with that same expression—a kind of horrified surprise.

  The door irised shut behind them, and Stattor nodded to himself. Yes, it was probably at that moment, with the sun filling the room—and he remembered there was a bowl of oranges on a table, radiant with sunlight—it was at that moment that he decided that some way, somehow, he would do this to her, and not long after that he began giving information to the government police.

  So now it had all worked out. The loose end was tied to everything else.

  He swept his hand across the lower part of his stomach. He did not feel so bad now. Neither his arms nor his legs ached, and his stomach did not seem filled with bile.

  Stattor turned in his chair and gazed out the transparent bubble at the churning hub of the galaxy and then at his globular cluster. But beyond those stars, in the textureless black, there was what drew his eyes. When he looked into it, he almost felt his soul drawn out of his bloated and diseased body and sent into a place where there was neither light nor matter nor decay nor care.

  The autovox chirped.

  “Supervisor,” Zallon’s voice said gently, “there is the matter of the dispersal list.”

  Stattor grunted and spun his chair to face the desk again. The list lay there, face up, awaiting his final decision whether or not to exempt any of the condemned. He thought of Aros waiting in some detention cell, old, haggard, half dead, and then he thought of himself and Usko, there beside the lake, so long ago. She had brought a bouquet of colored weeds up from the shoreline, and Aros had stood up, laughing, his arms wide to receive her—

  His eyes stopped on the autovox.

  Zallon had overstepped his limits. Stattor could barely see the green blossom of his nebula behind it. His emotionless aide, that sunken-eyed reptile, never revealed his feelings about anything, so how could he be trusted? He was an unk
nown.

  Excepting no one from execution, Stattor pushed the list away from him. He had never liked Aros. Nor Zallon. With his fatted hand, Stattor retrieved the list and entered Zallon’s name at the bottom. One way or another, so many people tried to stand in his way, to annoy him, or to prevent the grand and mysterious thing that was about to happen to him. It was very close. He could feel it come nearer every hour.

  For a moment, his stomach did not burn and the beta-blocker made his life easier. He leaned back in his chair and again turned to face the absorbing blackness beyond the galaxy, and he was content to know that soon, so very soon, his flesh would turn to myth.

  Rat

  by James Patrick Kelly

  Introduction

  You wouldn’t know it from this story, but James Patrick Kelly is a gentle man. I met him at the first Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop, and one of the reasons I look forward to returning each year is that I will see him again. We have not become friends in the social sense, but in the emotionally charged community that forms around that workshop table, Kelly is the ground, the place where all the sparks are gathered in and brought to earth. There are no fools at Sycamore Hill; Kelly is not the only wise critic in the group. His gift is to understand what the author is trying to do, and see where, in the structure of the story, the author has kept himself from succeeding. His criticism is frank, but never brutal. Even as he tells you how desperately this draft of your story has failed, Kelly also implicitly assures you that success is possible; the tale is worth telling; and if you only follow up this abandoned thread, drop this digression, show this scene and summarize that one, the tale will work. At the end, you never feel like a victim. Instead you’re full of hope, eager to discover what the new draft will be.

  Kelly does all this without posture or importunity. Nothing’s more obnoxious at a workshop than a participant—usually the least gifted critic, alas—who attempts to summarize what everyone else has said and offer the final word on what the author ought to do. And nothing’s more tempting, as a critic, than to try to argue forcefully for your point of view, as if you had a stake in how the author finally decides to revise his work. I’ve never seen Kelly do either. And yet, when he’s through, you often feel as if he has reached to the crux of the story, the fulcrum on which all else will balance easily; and even though he speaks mildly, not attempting to bully you into seeing things his way, his vision of your story is always so clear that you are invariably persuaded.

  In fact, if Kelly didn’t have such an outstanding career as a writer, he could easily make a living as a story doctor, coming to the rescue when some other author is baffled by his story’s failure. That’s how George S. Kaufman got his name on half the best American comedies of the 1930s—it’s too bad for us that most of us authors aren’t humble enough to know when it’s time to cry out for help!

  I believe, though, that Kelly’s gifts as a critic are founded, not in his intellect or talent or experience, but rather in his soul. He is intelligent, but so are many others; he is talented, but talent is cheap; he has experience, but so does everyone whoever wrote a Sweet Valley Twins installment. Kelly is a fundamentally charitable man, in the best and highest sense of that word. He approaches other people with unstinting love, hoping to receive their best, eager to understand their intent, ready to help them along the path. It is that attitude toward other people that gives him the ability to see to the heart of their stories—for authors, wittingly or not, put their souls into every tale they tell. I feel, whenever Kelly reads and responds to a manuscript I lay on the workshop table, that he has found my most secret self within those pages; that he has found me, not monstrous, but acceptable; that if I will only trust him, he can lead me out of the labyrinth of my own confusion and doubt.

  Does my language sound, perhaps, overemotional? A good writers workshop is a time of heightened emotion, and Sycamore Hill is the best I’ve heard of, the best I’ve seen. I have shouted and been shouted at; I have slashed and been attacked in turn; tears are shed at that table, and some of them have been mine. When we leave after a week of such intensity, the memory fades, our relationships calm down and assume normal proportions. But during that week, we are stripped of our bark like trees awaiting a graft. Many a public façade is stripped away; latent paranoia blossoms; some wounds inflicted there are so deep they never seem to heal. Under such circumstances, Jim Kelly is invariably revealed to be even kinder, even more perceptive, even wiser than he seemed before.

  One of the delights of writing this introduction is that everything I’ve said, while true, leaves you absolutely unprepared for the story you’re about to read. “Rat,” if filmed, would make Miami Vice seem languid; would make Bladerunner’s city seem to be a kinder, gentler place. There are other stories that I might have chosen, stories that would clearly show you the James Patrick Kelly I have just described. But that would be playing fair.

  Rat had stashed the dust in four plastic capsules and then swallowed them. From the stinging at the base of his ribs, he guessed they were now squeezing into his duodenum. Still plenty of time. The bullet train had been shooting though the vacuum of the TransAtlantic tunnel for almost two hours now; they would arrive at Port Authority/Koch soon. Customs had already been fixed, according to the maréchal. All Rat had to do was to get back to his nest, lock the smart door behind him, and put the word out on his protected nets. He had enough Algerian Yellow to dust at least half the cerebrums on the East Side. If he could turn this deal, he would be rich enough to bathe in Dom Perignon and dry himself with Gromaire tapestries. Another pang shot down his left flank. Instinctively his hind leg came off the seat and scratched at air.

  There was only one problem; Rat had decided to cut the maréchal out. That meant he had to lose the old man’s spook before he got home.

  The spook had attached herself to him at Marseilles. She braided her blonde hair in pigtails. She had freckles, wore braces on her teeth. Tiny breasts nudged a modest silk turtleneck. She looked to be between twelve and fourteen. Cute. She had probably looked that way for twenty years, would stay the same another twenty if she did not stop a slug first or get cut in half by some automated security laser that tracked only heat and could not read—or be troubled by—cuteness. Their passports said they were Mr. Sterling Jaynes and daughter Jessalynn, of Forest Hills, New York. She was typing in her notebook, chubby fingers curled over the keys. Homework? A letter to a boyfriend? More likely she was operating on some corporate database with scalpel code of her own devising.

  “Ne fais pas semblant d’étudier, ma petite,” Rat said, “Que fais-tu?”

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said, pouting, “can’t we go back to plain old English? After all, we’re almost home.” She tilted her notebook so that he could see the display. It read: “Two rows back, second seat from aisle. Fed. If he knew you were carrying, he’d cut the dust out of you and wipe his ass with your pelt.” She tapped the Return key, and the message disappeared.

  “All right, dear.” He arched his back, fighting a surge of adrenaline that made his incisors click. “You know, all of a sudden I feel hungry. Should we do something here on the train or wait until we get to New York?” Only the spook saw him gesture back toward the fed.

  “Why don’t we wait for the station? More choice there.”

  “As you wish dear.” He wanted her to take the fed out now, but there was nothing more he dared say. He licked his hands nervously and groomed the fur behind his short, thick ears to pass the time.

  The International Arrivals Hall at Koch Terminal was unusually quiet for a Thursday night. It smelled to Rat like a setup. The passengers from the bullet shuffled through the echoing marble vastness toward the row of customs stations. Rat was unarmed; if they were going to put up a fight, the spook would have to provide the firepower. But Rat was not a fighter, he was a runner. Their instructions were to pass through Station Number Four. As they waited in line, Rat spotted the federally appointed vigilante behind them. The classic invisible man: n
either handsome nor ugly, five-ten, about one-seventy, brown hair, dark suit, white shirt. He looked bored.

  “Do you have anything to declare?” The customs agent looked bored, too. Everybody looked bored except Rat, who had two million new dollars’ worth of illegal drugs in his gut and a fed ready to carve them out of him.

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” said Rat, “that all men are created equal.” He managed a feeble grin—as if this were a witticism and not the password.

  “Daddy, please!” The spook feigned embarrassment. “I’m sorry, ma’am; it’s his idea of a joke. It’s the Declaration of Independence, you know.”

  The customs agent smiled as she tousled the spook’s hair. “I know that, dear. Please put your luggage on the conveyor.” She gave a perfunctory glance at her monitor as their suitcases passed through the scanner, and then nodded at Rat. “Thank you, sir, and have a pleasant…” The insincere thought died on her lips as she noticed the fed pushing through the line toward them. Rat saw her spin toward the exit at the same moment that the spook thrust her notebook computer into the scanner. The notebook stretched a blue finger of point discharge toward the magnetic lens just before the overhead lights novaed and went dark. The emergency backup failed as well. Rat’s snout filled with the acrid smell of electrical fire. Through the darkness came shouts and screams, thumps and cracks—the crazed pounding of a stampede gathering momentum.

  He dropped to all fours and skittered across the floor. Koch Terminal was his territory. He had crisscrossed its many levels with scent trails. Even in total darkness he could find his way. But in his haste he cracked his head against a pair of stockinged knees, and a squawking weight fell across him, crushing the breath from his lungs. He felt an icy stab on his hindquarters and scrabbled at it with his hind leg. His toes came away wet and he squealed. There was an answering scream, and the point of a shoe drove into him, propelling him across the floor. He rolled left and came up running. Up a dead escalator, down a carpeted hall. He stood upright and stretched to his full twenty-six inches, hands scratching until they found the emergency bar across the fire door. He hurled himself at it, a siren shrieked, and with a whoosh the door opened, dumping him into an alley. He lay there for a moment, gasping, half in and half out of Koch Terminal. With the certain knowledge that he was bleeding to death, he touched the coldness on his back. A sticky purple substance; he sniffed, then tasted it. Ice cream. Rat threw back his head and laughed. The high squeaky sound echoed in the deserted alley.