The Gate Thief

by Orson Scott Card

  No, no, he wasn’t remembering anymore. He was no longer in the trance. It was good to have language now. He needed to hear what they were saying and understand them.

  “He’s not hearing us,” said Veevee.

  “Tell me what I don’t know,” said Hermia.

  “We have to get him to Naples,” said Veevee.

  “There’s no gate to—oh, Naples, Florida. Let’s just concentrate on getting him back through this gate to the house he left from.”

  Danny staggered. His legs were beginning to get feeling again. An ecstasy of pins and needles. An agony of pain in his long-unmoved joints.

  “He’s trying to walk,” said Hermia.

  “He was just staring at the cave?”

  “Makes the Narcissus story make sense,” said Hermia. “Forced to stare at the same spot forever.”

  “Only not his own reflection.”

  “How do we know what he was seeing?”

  What was I seeing? Can I remember anything? Was this all wasted, because it didn’t enter my own mind in a way that I have any hope of making sense of?

  They got him down the sandy, rocky slope to the gate and suddenly they were indoors. Hal’s bedroom. Was that really the last place he had been? It didn’t matter which had been last. There was a gate from Hal’s room to the cave in Egypt, and that’s all that mattered. Hermia had found it. Then she had gone for Veevee to help her. Chaining from gate to gate.

  Hal was there. He swore, tried to help.

  Danny should have been able to walk easily. He should have been healed of everything by passing through a gate. Certainly the physical pain was gone. The feeling in his legs was back. But he was still having trouble walking.

  “We’re getting him back to his own house, dear,” said Veevee. “You were a great help, but we’ve got it from here.”

  “You’re sure that nobody made him do this?” asked Hermia.

  “He was completely normal,” said Hal. “For Danny, anyway. He had this project he was doing. It had something to do with Loki. He had to go to the desert and we had to dig out the cave. It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “But you don’t think anybody else was controlling him?” asked Hermia.

  “How would I know?” said Hal. “For all I know, somebody’s controlling you.” He was standing between them and the gate back to Danny’s house.

  “You’re such a dear,” said Veevee. “Please don’t worry. The gate already healed him. But he’s still not functioning properly, so we’re not sure what’s happening. If we take him to a hospital they’ll find nothing wrong and we’ll have to explain why we brought him in.”

  “I’m OK,” said Danny to Hal. “I’m just having trouble … using my body.”

  “He’s like a beastmage who got lost in his heartbound,” said Veevee.

  “Apparently, judging from his motor skills, his heartbound is a drunken slug.”

  Hal stopped blocking the way. They got him to and through the gate.

  Back in his own house, Danny wouldn’t let them take him to Naples. “No reason to go there,” said Danny.

  “We have to rehydrate you,” said Veevee. “Going through a gate doesn’t replace the water you lost. A day and a half in the desert sun. Not to mention a night in the desert. What were you thinking?”

  “I was doing research,” said Danny.

  “Into near-death experiences?” asked Hermia. She was tasting water from a glass in Danny’s kitchen. “You drink this stuff?”

  “Buena Vista’s finest,” said Danny. She handed him the glass and he drank it down in one long sloppy draught.

  “I can’t believe that your third-degree sunburn has turned into a tan,” said Veevee. “I think of all the lotions and hours in tanning booths and … all I needed to do was get a savage sunburn and go through a gate.”

  “Do you have any idea how you terrified us?” demanded Hermia. “Suddenly nobody can find you. Marion and Leslie have no idea. Nobody knows. Until Veevee finally thought of asking your high school fan club.”

  “My friends,” said Danny.

  “You are the world’s only Gatefather,” said Hermia, “and you don’t have the right to disappear without telling anybody.”

  “I told my friends,” said Danny. “And I was only going to be gone for a few hours.”

  “At least thirty-six hours,” said Veevee.

  “I didn’t know,” said Danny.

  “You could have died,” said Hermia. “Do you understand that? What drug did you take?”

  “No drug,” said Danny.

  “Don’t lie,” said Hermia. “It took forever to get you out of that trip you were on. Were you hallucinating?”

  “Not half well enough,” said Danny. “Instead of being mad at me, do you want to find out what I was doing? I warn you—in order to do that, you’ll have to actually listen to me.”

  “Oh, you’re telling me off?” said Hermia. “You do a foolish, stupid—”

  “Hermia,” said Veevee, “let’s listen to him and find out whether he was foolish or stupid.”

  “Now you’re on his side?” demanded Hermia.

  Danny and Veevee looked at her in silence.

  Hermia stood up straight, took a deep breath, and flopped down on the couch beside him. Veevee pulled up a kitchen chair. “So the old woman gets the straightback chair.”

  “You just went through a gate, you feel fine,” said Hermia.

  “You know I have Loki’s gates inside me,” said Danny.

  “You captured them, yes,” said Hermia.

  “But now he’s given them to me. So we … talk.”

  “You and Loki?” asked Veevee.

  “In a way. Maybe. But I think I’m just talking to his gates. They obey me now. But they’re still part of him, so maybe he knows and maybe he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. There are things in his memory that I need to know, and he’s not here. Plus, if I asked him I don’t think he’d tell me. He doesn’t seem really eager to teach me.”

  “But you can talk to the gates?”

  “I don’t know how it works,” said Danny. “Have you ever heard of anybody giving their gates to somebody else?”

  “That would be like giving away your outself,” said Veevee.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of that,” said Hermia. “Old family legend. Two friends who were so devoted to each other that they became each other’s heartbound.”

  “But it isn’t like that,” said Danny. “He’s not riding me, and I’m not riding him. He isn’t controlling me. He isn’t a manmage.”

  “Can you make his gates?” asked Hermia.

  “After what happened with the Wild Gate, I wouldn’t dare to try. But please, please let me tell you what I learned while I can still remember it.”

  “Learned?” asked Veevee.

  “I was there to act out the kinetic memory of the time when Loki learned some great secret from a Christian hermit in Egypt. A Coptic-speaker, but a scholar all the same. A collector of ancient Egyptian lore. Secret stuff that isn’t in the inscriptions, it isn’t in the books of the dead, it isn’t anywhere. It’s just known, and he told it to Loki, and the gates can’t give it to me in language, they can only help me recover Loki’s mental state when he learned it. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t think you understand, sweetie,” said Veevee.

  “I don’t,” said Danny. “But let me talk it through. Because it was working. There at the end when you shook me, I was finally getting it. After starting over again and again.”

  “Sorry I saved your life,” said Hermia.

  “Please, please let me tell it.” He almost cried with desperation.

  “He’s asking you to shut up, dear,” said Veevee.

  “I know what he’s asking.”

  “If you don’t want to listen,” said Veevee sweetly, “then will you please leave and let him tell me?”

  Hermia buried her face in her hands.

  “It’s going to be a jumble,” said Danny. “I feel i
t slipping away like a dream. It’s about the ka and the ba. The ka is the inself, the ba is the outself.”

  “Everybody knows that,” said Hermia.

  “I didn’t!” said Danny.

  “Shut up, please, Hermia,” said Veevee. Her voice sounded so sweet that it was clear she was murderously angry.

  “And it’s not the same. That was what was so hard,” said Danny. “We think of the ka as being tied to the body, part of the body. So we send out the ba into our heartbeasts, into our clants, into our gates. But neither ka nor ba is part of our body. Neither one.”

  “That’s absurd,” said Hermia. Then she clapped her own hand over her mouth.

  “This is what Loki heard that made him so excited and frightened,” said Danny. “I remember how he felt about it. I remember him understanding this. The ka and the ba are bound to each other. Together, they’re both the thing we actually are. The body is just—a dwelling place. A tool set. It has a life of its own, a mind of its own, but it isn’t us. Any of us. Mages and drowthers alike. We are ka, we are ba, we are not these animals that we wear.”

  “We’re listening,” said Veevee.

  “Sounds very gnostic,” said Hermia.

  “No it doesn’t,” said Danny. “It doesn’t sound gnostic at all. Or Coptic. It sounds like the thing that made Loki close all the gates.”

  “If the ka and ba aren’t part of our human body,” said Veevee, “then where do they come from?”

  “From the world of the Belmages,” said Danny.

  “In other words,” said Hermia, “from ‘heaven.’”

  Danny clamped his hands over his ears. “Please, please don’t pollute this. Let me say it first. Let me say it before you start trying to bend it to fit whatever shit you Greeks think you already know. Did any of you go closing gates? No? Loki did. So shut up and let me try to remember why.”

  “Sorry again,” said Hermia.

  “From the world of the Belmages,” said Danny. “It was a gate from their world that first turned these hairless apes into humans. But it was also these bodies that gave them the powers we turn into magery.”

  “No,” said Veevee. “I mean, I thought the powers came from the ka and ba.”

  “That’s the thing. Everybody has a ka and ba. It comes into the body when we’re born or … whenever. It comes in. But in the process, the body has a … a … an interface with the ka and the ba. When mine came into me, when Loki’s came into him, that’s what I mean, that’s what I remember, when Loki’s ka and ba entered his body, it fragmented his ba into all his gates. That’s when he became a gatemage. Body plus ka and ba. You see? There’s no magery without the body.”

  “So far this is so exciting I can see why you nearly died to learn it,” said Hermia.

  “I haven’t gotten to the exciting part yet,” said Danny. “It’s in the book of Revelation. ‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceives the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’”

  “I thought you said this was ancient Egyptian lore,” said Hermia.

  “Sounds like the King James version to me,” said Veevee.

  “The devil. Satan. That’s the Belmage. He was cast down—that means he was sent through a gate to Mittlegard. But he wasn’t put into a human body. He and his angels were sent here as naked ka and ba.”

  They pondered this. So did Danny. “I feel so much of what Loki understood slipping away from me. Now I don’t even know how much of this is what he concluded and how much of it I’m making up right now, trying to make sense of it.”

  “Just go ahead,” said Veevee. “I’m finally beginning to see why this matters.”

  “I’m not,” said Hermia.

  “Belmage is not a manmage. There are manmages, and what he does is very similar to manmagery, but he isn’t in a human body. He’s bodiless. But think what the devil keeps doing all the way through the New Testament. He possesses people’s bodies. He and the other devils. His angels, you see? Jesus was always casting them out.”

  “I thought that was just schizophrenia,” said Hermia.

  “Or multiple personality disorder,” said Veevee.

  “That’s the only thing today that looks like what the Bible describes. But there are all these bodiless kas and bas around. The Belmage is their boss. The big guy. The main enemy. That’s all ‘satan’ means—”

  “Don’t bother telling gatemages what words mean,” said Hermia.

  “So the Belmage hates us all, because our ka is joined to a body and it changed us. Gave us these powers. If we learn how to use them. The ability to use magery is hereditary. Tied to the body. But that’s why he wants to take possession of the bodies. Take over, get the power.”

  “But they aren’t joined to our body the way we are, are they?” asked Veevee.

  “No, they aren’t. They don’t get magery of their own. They get inside us and boss us around and get the use of our magery. That’s the danger of the Belmage. He’s not a guy who sends his ba into other people the way a manmage does. Persuading you, changing your perceptions. No, his whole ka and ba climb into you. He wears you like a puppet. He makes you use your powers to do his will. But when you die, he doesn’t die. In fact, he loves it when your ka gets separated from your body, because then he’s in sole control.”

  “So why doesn’t he just kill you and take over?” asked Veevee.

  “That’s the thing. The ancient Egyptians believed the Semitic gods could animate dead bodies. That’s why they emptied out the brains and internal organs of the people of great power, and put them in the canopic jars. So that the body wouldn’t work. So that the Belmage or his minions couldn’t animate your corpse and continue ruling in your place. Embalming wasn’t about living forever. It was about making damn sure you stayed dead.”

  “But can they?” asked Veevee. “That would be—zombies.”

  “No, no,” said Danny. “The hermit called that superstition. The Belmage can’t control a dead body unless he’s already in control when the ka leaves. People believe what they believe, right? But the Belmage needs to take control of a living body, and he wants powerful ones. He wants mages. Then he uses their magery.”

  “So when he possesses somebody, you have to kill the person he possessed?” asked Veevee. “That seems really final.”

  “It doesn’t even work,” said Danny. “The Belmage isn’t dead. You can’t kill the ka or the ba. They don’t die. I mean, the ones truly attached to human bodies die, but that only means they’re cut loose from the body. The ka and ba are still alive. That’s why we can still hold on to the gates of these mages who’ve been dead for a thousand years. They’re severed from a ka that’s still alive … somewhere. But the Belmage—he didn’t really have a body, so he’s not changed by the death of the body. He just goes on to another.”

  “You’re saying that these Belmages are the only ones who reincarnate.”

  “I don’t know, that’s not the way they discussed it. I don’t know what happens to regular people who die in the regular way. This is a memory so I couldn’t exactly ask questions,” said Danny. “And here’s the thing. The Belmages were really bad at this at first. They aren’t manmages. They aren’t any kind of mage. So they don’t have powers the way we do. What they have is a lot of practice. They’ve been diving into people, getting whatever control they can, for ten thousand years. Even Loki hasn’t lived that long. So the smartest, the best of them—the Belmage. The Enemy. The great Dragon. That one is the most powerful, the one that has acquired the greatest skill. He’s learned ways of getting inside people that are far more powerful than any of the other castoffs.”

  “So what Loki realized,” said Hermia.

  “What made him close the gates,” said Veevee.

  “W
as the realization that the Dragon had finally figured out how to attach himself so firmly to a person that he could ride him through a gate.”

  “Oh my,” said Veevee.

  “Think about it. The presence of a Belmage inside you, being possessed—that’s a disease. Isn’t it? Passing through a gate should cast him off.”

  “But people holding hands with other people can take them through a gate,” said Hermia.

  “Holding hands. Two people with their own bodies. But this extra, this rider, this possessor, he gets cast out. What do you think Jesus was? Healing people, casting out devils.”

  “Oh, you’re saying he was a Gatefather?” asked Veevee.

  “This isn’t from the hermit, we’re away from what Loki learned, the hermit wasn’t going to say anything that denied the divinity of Jesus. Let’s get back to what Loki knew. He realized that the Belmages were learning how to attach to people in such a way that they could go through gates. I think that’s what’s really going on with that passage from the Library of Congress. That Belmage had taken possession of a gatemage. The Loki of that time didn’t realize what was going on. He thought that the gatemage he saw in the body was his enemy. But it was the Belmage inside him. So when the Loki of that ancient time fought the Belmage, he actually killed the poor sap of a Gatefather that the Belmage had possessed. The Belmage himself never left this world. He couldn’t actually pass through a gate. He could use the power of the Gatefather he was controlling to make gates, but he couldn’t go through them. And sending him through one threw him out of the body.”

  “This isn’t what you remember from Loki,” said Hermia.

  “No, sorry, no, it just makes sense now, that’s all. And I don’t remember—I mean, I didn’t find out why Loki knew that the Belmage of his time was getting ready to go through gates. The Dragon was probably riding a Gatefather at the time, so Loki ate all that Gatefather’s gates—not killing him. That made the Gatefather useless to the Dragon. He’d leave him then, see? Because he was powerless. But he would just have found another gatemage. Or he would have gotten into anybody and then gone through a Great Gate and magnified his power and so—”