The Lost Gate

by Orson Scott Card

  Danny listened to the whole thing, not dropping his innocent, needy, wide-eyed expression. This used to get laughs from the Aunts, but not for a long time—they stopped thinking Danny was funny quite some time ago.

  “I can see by that pitiful act you’re putting on that you’re not listening to a word I say,” said Eric.

  “That sounds word for word like somebody’s mom talking,” said Danny.

  Eric’s face went grim with anger. “Say that again and I will leave you.”

  Danny shrugged. What Eric didn’t know—and Danny wasn’t going to tell him—was that Danny wasn’t going to get caught by anybody. Not child molesters and not cops or social workers. It was too easy to make a gate and get away.

  Eric didn’t know this—couldn’t know it—wouldn’t believe it if Danny told him. Instead, he glared for a long moment and then walked away.

  All right, Danny wanted to say. All right, we’ll do it your way.

  But after a moment or two, the sense of being abandoned left him. He had done all right in the Wal-Mart before he met Eric. He would do all right here. And Eric’s company wasn’t worth giving up any choice in what they did. Either Eric would come back or he wouldn’t. Meanwhile, Danny wanted to see the Mall.

  Their ride had left them off not far from the Vietnam Memorial, so Danny walked the length of the Mall. He could see that other people’s eyes filled with tears—and not just the ones in their fifties and sixties, who would have known some of the names on the wall. And there were little artifacts left at the base of the wall—flowers, plastic and real; one little plastic army man; letters and notes and cards. But to Danny, this all meant nothing. The wars and suffering of drowthers rarely had anything to do with the Families, except when they were using the drowthers as puppets to act out the Family battles. Drowthers simply did these things—fought over things that never seemed to be important. The pride of nations? Who would get to rule over this or that obscure people? Freedom? What difference did it make to drowthers whether they were ruled by this set of clowns or that one? None of them were free, because they couldn’t do anything.

  Danny felt a twinge at this thought, because it hadn’t been that long since Danny himself thought he would probably end up one of them—if he lived at all. But now he was full of his power as a gatemage. Of course, Danny had no idea whether he was a weakish Pathbrother or a powerful Gatefather—but whatever he was, even if he had been only a meager Sniffer like the Greek girl, he was far more powerful than any of these people gathered at the Vietnam Wall.

  At the same time, he had studied history from American books; he had followed the news, when that was possible, from American websites. It didn’t make him feel the ancient anguish of these people for their war dead. But it made him wish that he felt it.

  What was the Family’s equivalent to this wall? Hammernip Hill?

  Danny walked west, as if lost in his thoughts, though he didn’t actually have anything in his mind coherent enough to be called “thought,” until he reached the Lincoln Memorial. He climbed the stairs, walked into the lofty chamber, and looked up at the heroic-scale statue of a man sitting in a chair. Or was it a throne? An ugly man, gaunt as a zombie in a bad movie. Just a statue anyway, not the man himself. A face that was on every penny—the cheapest coin.

  This is the god that the drowthers worship, thought Danny—echoing, he realized, the contempt that the Aunts had for drowther heroes.

  So, in defiance of their dismissal of all that the drowthers valued, Danny stayed and read everything that was inscribed on the walls.

  At first, by reflex, he mocked. Government of the people, by the people, for the people? What were these people, and who cared who governed them!

  But Danny had now spent two full days among the drowthers. He had asked them for money and food and rides, and half the time they had shared with him what they had. Why? No one in the Family would do that for anyone who was not one of the Norths. Danny doubted anyone but, say, Auntie Uck would even notice that some drowther kid was asking for a few bucks.

  Of course, Danny had lied to them every time—but even if what he said was true, what business was it of theirs? Why should they care whether somebody else’s kid was hungry or got home?

  The god of these Americans wasn’t one of the old pantheons of the Norths or the Greeks or the Indians or Persians or Gauls or Hittites or Latins or Goths or any of the other bands that had been thriving until Loki closed the Gates. The god was the people themselves. Imagine—a nation that worshiped each other. Not individually, but as an idea. The highest ideal was to make sure that every other drowther in this place had his freedom and enough to provide for his family. Other people mattered.

  Danny had been on the receiving end of his family’s callousness. And he had just run away from the fiercest sort of thoughtless cruelty—the end of his life because he was the wrong sort of mage. This Abraham, this Lincoln—would he have fought for the rights of such a one as Danny? A gatemage who had the misfortune of being born when gatemages were treated as the enemies of the gods?

  What would it have mattered if he had? There was little enough a drowther like Lincoln could do for Danny, even with a whole nation—or half of one, anyway—arrayed behind him and armed for battle. Any drowther’s life could be snuffed out whenever a powerful mage noticed he was alive.

  Besides, the drowthers themselves snuffed out Lincoln’s life without even waiting for the gods-in-residence in the North Family compound.

  Too much thinking. Too much time spent standing in one place. The need to run came upon him.

  Danny whirled around and ran from the building. He nearly flew down the steps, three at a time; barefoot as he was, with his feet horned and callused, he was surefooted, he could feel everything he stepped on yet feared nothing. No one here could catch him; the ground could not hurt him. Danny ran the length of the reflecting pool, ran around the hill of the Washington Monument, then dodged his way across the few streets that crossed the Mall. He ignored the White House when he passed it on his left. It was the opposite end of the Mall he wanted. Not the Capitol—what was the Capitol to him? What was behind the Capitol: the Library of Congress.

  He was a little out of breath when he got there, but only because it was uphill most of the way, and he hadn’t eaten anything since morning, and Eric had all the money—that had been a bad plan, hadn’t it? Besides, he had his backpack on, which changed his gait a little, which wearied him.

  It was only as he approached the entrance to the library that he realized that he was still dressed for begging. And barefoot! Drowthers had a thing about shoes.

  Where could he change clothes?

  He jogged around behind the building—a surprisingly long way—till he came to a long street with row houses lining the other side. Most of them had stairways up to the front door, and several of them had basement entrances under the stoop. Danny looked for a house that looked unoccupied at the moment, then lightly vaulted the iron fence and ducked under the stoop. It didn’t take him long to swap clothes. Now he looked newer. Closer to normal. And he had shoes on.

  The trouble was, he was still a kid. Would they even let him in?

  The answer was simple enough.

  No.

  “What do you think I’m going to do, steal stuff?” asked Danny.

  “Or color on the walls,” said the security guy—but with a smile, as if to say, I don’t make the rules and I know they shouldn’t apply to you, but that’s how things are.

  And Danny couldn’t explain: I’m hoping that somewhere in here—the Library that has everything—I’ll be able to find something about gatemages. Even if it’s written about as a collection of folklore or ancient legends, I need to find out what I’m supposed to be able to do and maybe find some clue about how to do it. Gatemages are supposed to be really powerful and dangerous, but except for getting out of tight situations, I can’t think of anything remotely perilous that I can do with my gatemaking. So I need a book. I need a clue. />
  He thought of the library in the old house in the North compound. All the answers he wanted were there, he knew it. And what would any book in the Library of Congress be able to tell him? The best he could hope for would be ancient legends, treated by modern authors as mere folklore or even fantasy, but containing some kernel of truth that might guide him.

  Every other kind of mage got training from others with his skill. Treemages were introduced to the trees by a Treefriend, beastmages to their beasts by an Eyefriend or Clawbrother.

  The unfairness of it, the frustration, it all struck home at that moment and he felt tears come into his eyes. He brushed them away.

  “Crying isn’t getting you in here,” said the security guy. But he wasn’t smiling now.

  “I know,” said Danny. And, though his emotion had been real, he immediately thought of ways he might exploit it, lies he might tell. In the next moment, he rejected the lies. This drowther was a decent guy. It was his job to keep out unaccompanied children who might damage things. If he let Danny in he would be risking his job. Why should Danny bring so much trouble into his life? Especially considering that there was another way. For a gatemage, there was always another way into or out of a place.

  Danny stepped back from the security gate and peered through into the room. There were no visible books, but he could see that there was a kind of alcove. Leading to restrooms. He fixed the location in his mind so he could come back to it later, by other means. Then he turned and left.

  Outside the building, he stood for a while looking up at the Capitol dome. Drowthers might have no magery, but they built this. What mage had ever built anything? All right, yes, mages worked with the natural world, so great artificial things like this building were not even interesting to a mage. But still—without any particular powers except the skill of their hands and the thoughts in their minds, the drowthers had built great and beautiful things. Ugly things, too—but the Aunts always spoke of drowthers as if all they ever made were wars and stinks and stupidity. But it was not true. Drowthers also sometimes made things that were beautiful or mighty or clever or useful, or all of these at once.

  Maybe Loki noticed this, too. Maybe Loki came to care about the drowthers and realized that if he closed all the gates, tying the gods to the place they were in and taking away the vast increase in power that came from gating between the worlds, then the drowthers could come into their own. The world would belong to them, and not to the mages anymore.

  But he still had to learn how to be a gatemage. Because he was going to open a gate to the other world. To Westil, the ancient homeland of the mages. Loki might have been moved by compassion for the drowthers, but it had been nearly fourteen centuries, and the drowthers had come into their might and power. Surely now a Great Gate could be opened. What else was Danny born for, if not for that?

  I’m not another Loki, he thought. I’m the anti-Loki, the opposite. What he closed, I’ll open. What he broke, I’ll fix. What he hid, I’ll find.

  He opened a gate into the Library of Congress and found himself standing in the restroom alcove. He could see, not all that far away, the guard who had denied him entrance. But the man’s attention was directed toward the outside and the other guards near him. He was not scanning for intruders who had somehow slipped in behind him.

  As long as he was there, Danny used the restroom. It felt good to wash his hands and face. Days without washing were good for begging, bad for personal comfort.

  A man came into the restroom and stopped and looked at Danny. No, not at Danny, at his backpack.

  “How did you get that in here?” he asked.

  Danny remembered the signs outside, that all bags and backpacks had to be scanned. Nothing about their being prohibited. But apparently the fear of book-stealing meant that it was suspicious for a kid to have a backpack with him in the restroom. And this guy looked like the kind of jerk who would be delighted to drag Danny out by the ear and have him arrested for stealing, simply for the sheer pleasure of adding to the sum of human misery in the world.

  So Danny opened his backpack, showing that there was nothing inside but clothes.

  The man nodded. “All right, but check that bag at the desk before you go anywhere else.” Then the man went into a stall, dropped his pants, and began to stink up the place.

  Danny’s first impulse was to flee—to make a gate to the outside, or at least to get out of the now-unpleasant room and into a place with cleaner air. Instead, he stood there contemplating the problem of the backpack. He couldn’t have it with him, but he didn’t want to lose it. He could go back outside and hide it somewhere and then return, but he ran the risk of someone finding it and stealing it while he was gone. Besides, it just felt … wrong. Inelegant, perhaps, as Auntie Tweng used to say of kludgy solutions to math or programming problems. “Yes, it works,” she would say, “but it’s not elegant. Truth is simple and elegant. That’s how you know it when you see it.”

  What Danny needed to do was find a place to put the bag where no one would find it. Couldn’t a gatemage open a way into some small compartment—like the paper towel dispenser?—and push something through it?

  Danny had never yet made a gate without pushing himself through it in the process. But he certainly couldn’t push himself into the towel dispenser, not without blowing it all up when he tried to put himself into the same space as the wall—or breaking every bone in his body to make himself fit.

  So he stood there, ignoring the man’s groans and stinks as he continued to relieve himself copiously. Danny thought: The guy really is full of shit.

  He stood in front of the paper towel dispenser and contemplated it. It was embedded in the wall, a tall metal contraption that was mostly wastebasket below and towel dispenser above. The wastebasket was overflowing. Still, it was the obvious place to stash the backpack. Danny thought of just jamming it down into the trash, but by now he was committed to at least trying to create a gate without going through it. A tiny gate that would simply let him push the backpack through a thin sheet of metal into a narrow enclosed space.

  What could go wrong? The worst that could happen would be a huge nuclear explosion when the atoms of the backpack tried to occupy the same space as the atoms of the dispenser, the wall, and the trash. And in that case, he wouldn’t care anymore. Heck, he wouldn’t even be in trouble, because they’d blame it on some terrorist or foreign power and it would trigger a devastating war that would slaughter millions or billions of drowthers. Doing some stupid impulsive thing that caused the death of drowthers was practically a family tradition. The only unusual thing would be that Danny would die as a consequence of his own stupidity.

  But the fact that there were no legends about huge explosions from the idiotic actions of untrained gatemages suggested that either it could be done safely or it couldn’t be done at all.

  So he stood there, trying to make a gate without going through it. The trouble was, he didn’t really understand what he was doing when he made a gate of any kind. He just knew how it felt—what he was doing inside himself while thinking of a place he wanted to be. How could he feel that way, including visualizing the inside of the trash receptacle, without moving himself into the place?

  The man in the stall sighed with relief. How nice for him, thought Danny.

  “Oh, damn,” whispered the man. “Damn damn damn.”

  Danny pressed the backpack against the trash receptacle and tried to think of it being inside. Nothing happened.

  I might as well cross my fingers and wish, thought Danny.

  “Are you still there?” asked the man.

  “Yes,” said Danny.

  “This stall is out of toilet paper. Can you get me some toilet paper from the other stall?”

  Danny set down the backpack and went into the other stall. Danny thought of unrolling long sheets of toilet paper and lofting them over the wall between stalls. Then he noticed that there was a spare roll of toilet paper behind the partial one. Only a thin sheet of me
tal stood between him and that entire roll.

  The idea formed in the process of carrying it out. Danny would move through a tiny gate in a metal sheet—but it would be just his hand, not his whole body. He reached out his hand while producing that gatish feeling inside himself and his hand pushed through the metal as if it weren’t there—though he could still see it. It was his hand that disappeared. He thought: Hi, I’m one-handed Danny, the gatemage who drops off pieces of himself in every metal box he passes.

  He felt his fingers close around the spare toilet paper roll. He pulled it out. It came easily. His hand was intact. So was the surface of the toilet paper dispenser.

  He pushed his hand back through the surface and there was no resistance. He could feel around the empty space where the spare roll had been. He pushed the roll back through and it went, fitting nicely into the space. Danny pulled his hand back out—the roll was where it belonged.

  “What are you doing?” demanded the man.

  “Getting toilet paper for you,” said Danny.

  “Can you hurry it up?”

  Danny wanted to say, You’re pretty snotty-sounding for a guy trapped on a toilet who needs a favor.

  Instead, Danny reached back into the little gate he had made. This time he had no gate-making feeling. The gate was simply … there. And he knew it was there, he could sense it, it was part of his mental map. He wondered if the gate would be there now for everyone else to use—if the janitor could now reload the dispenser without using his little key to open it up.

  “Come on!” the man insisted. And then, as if on cue, he let go with an enormous prolonged fart and there was another plop.

  What flashed into Danny’s mind was a perverse version of a line of Lady Macbeth’s: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much poo in him?” Auntie Uck would have been proud of him for finding just the right quote.

  Danny reached the roll of toilet paper to the top of the stall divider. “Catch,” he said.