Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (484 page)

(1951– )

After receiving wide critical acclaim for his novella “Ender’s Game” (1977) about a boy involved without his knowledge in an interstellar war, Orson Scott Card was able to turn critical success into financial success. He turned the novella into the Worthing Saga, a series of best-selling books beginning with the novel version of
Ender’s Game
(1985). But focusing on the best-sellers is misleading in that Card has excelled in many areas of the field, from the cyberpunk of “Dogwalker” to his excellent nonfiction on the craft of writing.

Born into a family of six children, Card was raised in Richmond, Virginia with a strong taste for both literature and the Mormon religion. Card discovered his interest in science fiction early, but was also widely read in history, war, and politics. As a boy Card gained a love of performance: singing, playing the French horn and the tuba, marching in school bands, and admiring the greats of Broadway.

Card won a thousand dollar scholarship from Great Books and a presidential scholarship to Brigham Young University. Though Card went to BYU as an archaeology major, he graduated as a theater major and studied poetry with Clinton F. Larson. During Card’s theater studies he began “doctoring” scripts, eventually writing his own one-act and full-length plays, several of which were produced by faculty directors at BYU. Soon after he turned to writing fiction stories that would evolve into The Worthing Saga. Card served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil in the early 1970s before his graduation from college.

When Card found himself unable to pay expenses from a failed repertory theater company and debts from his time at the BYU Press, he tried his hand at writing science fiction. Card’s first published fiction piece was the short story “Gert Fram,” which appeared in the July 1977 issue of
The Ensign
(the official magazine of the LDS church), where Card would later work as a staff editor. “Ender’s Game” came out that same year in the August issue of
Analog
.

Once Card became a full time writer he moved with his wife Kristine and three children to Sandy, Utah, and then Orem. They now reside in Greensboro North Carolina, an environment that has played a significant role in
Ender’s Game
and many other works. (Card moved there in 1983 to work with
Computel
magazine for a short period before his return to freelancing.)

Card has written under the pen names Byron Walley, Noam D. Pellume, and Brother Orson, producing the Ender, Shadow, and Homecoming Sagas, as well as The Tales of Alvin Maker, the Pastwatch, Mithermages, Worthing, and Empire series, the Mayflower trilogy and a number of stand-alone novels and short story collections. Along the way, he’s won four Hugos and many other awards. Card has also published plays, nonfiction, and books on creative writing.

first published in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, November 1989

I was an innocent pedestrian. Only reason I got in this in the first place was I got a vertical way of thinking and Dogwalker thought I might be useful, which was true, and also he said I might enjoy myself, which was a prefabrication, since people done a lot more enjoying on me than I done on them.

When I say I think vertical, I mean to say I’m metaphysical, that is, simular, which is to say, I’m dead but my brain don’t know it yet and my feet still move. I got popped at age nine just lying in my own bed when the goat next door shot at his lady and it went through the wall and into my head. Everybody went to look at them cause they made all the noise, so I was a quart low before anybody noticed I been poked.

They packed my head with supergoo and light pipe, but they didn’t know which neutron was supposed to butt into the next so my alchemical brain got turned from rust to diamond. Goo Boy. The Crystal Kid.

From that bright electrical day I never grew another inch, anywhere. Bullet went nowhere near my gonadicals. Just turned off the puberty switch in my head. Saint Paul said he was a eunuch for Jesus, but who am I a eunuch for?

Worst thing about it is here I am near thirty and I still have to take barkeepers to court before they’ll sell me beer. And it ain’t hardly worth it even though the judge prints out in my favor and the barkeep has to pay costs, because my corpse is so little I get toxed on six ounces and pass out pissing after twelve. I’m a lousy drinking buddy. Besides, anybody hangs out with me looks like a pederast.

No, I’m not trying to make you drippy-drop for me—I’m used to it, OK? Maybe the homecoming queen never showed me True Love in a four-point spread, but I got this knack that certain people find real handy and so I always made out. I dress good and I ride the worm and I don’t pay much income tax. Because I am the Password Man. Give me five minutes with anybody’s curriculum vitae, which is to say their autopsychoscopy, and nine times out of ten I’ll spit out their password and get you into their most nasty sticky sweet secret files. Actually it’s usually more like three times out of ten, but that’s still a lot better odds than having a computer spend a year trying to push out fifteen characters to make just the right P-word, specially since after the third wrong try they string your phone number, freeze the target files, and call the dongs.

Oh, do I make you sick? A cute little boy like me, engaged in critical unspecified dispopulative behaviors? I may be half glass and four feet high, but I can simulate you better than your own mama, and the better I know you, the deeper my books. I not only know your password now, I can write a word on a paper, seal it up, and then you go home and
change
your password and then open up what I wrote and there it’ll be, your new password, three times out of ten. I am vertical, and Dogwalker knowed it. Ten percent more supergoo and I wouldn’t even be legally human, but I’m still under the line, which is more than I can say for a lot of people who are a hundred percent zoo inside their head.

Dogwalker comes to me one day at Carolina Circle, where I’m playing pinball standing on a stool. He didn’t say nothing, just gave me a shove, so naturally he got my elbow in his balls. I get a lot of twelve-year-olds trying to shove me around at the arcades, so I’m used to teaching them lessons. Jack the Giant Killer. Hero of the fourth graders. I usually go for the stomach, only Dogwalker wasn’t a twelve-year-old, so my elbow hit low.

I knew the second I hit him that this wasn’t no kid. I didn’t know Dogwalker from God, but he gots the look, you know, like he been hungry before, and he don’t care what he eats these days.

Only he got no ice and he got no slice, just sits there on the floor with his back up against the Eat Shi’ite game, holding his boodle and looking at me like I was a baby he had to diaper. “I hope you’re Goo Boy,” he says, “cause if you ain’t, I’m gonna give you back to your mama in three little tupperware bowls.” He doesn’t sound like he’s making a threat, though. He sounds like he’s chief weeper at his own funeral.

“You want to do business, use your mouth, not your hands,” I says. Only I say it real apoplectic, which is the same as apologetic except you are still pissed.

“Come with me,” he says. “I got to go buy me a truss. You pay the tax out of your allowance.”

So we went to Ivey’s and stood around in children’s wear while he made his pitch. “One P-word,” he says, “only there can’t be no mistake. If there’s a mistake, a guy loses his job and maybe goes to jail.”

So I told him no. Three chances in ten, that’s the best I can do. No guarantees. My record speaks for itself, but nobody’s perfect, and I ain’t even close.

“Come on,” he says, “you got to have ways to make sure, right? If you can do three times out of ten, what if you find out more about the guy? What if you meet him?”

“OK, maybe fifty-fifty.”

“Look, we can’t go back for seconds. So maybe you can’t get it. But do you
know
when you ain’t got it?”

“Maybe half the time when I’m wrong, I know I’m wrong.”

“So we got three out of four that you’ll know whether you got it?”

“No,” says I. “Cause half the time when I’m right, I don’t know I’m right.”

“Shee-it,” he says. “This is like doing business with my baby brother.”

“You can’t afford me anyway,” I says. “I pull two dimes minimum, and you barely got breakfast on your gold card.”

“I’m offering a cut.”

“I don’t want a cut. I want cash.”

“Sure thing,” he says. He looks around, real careful. As if they wired the sign that said Boys Briefs Sizes 10–12. “I got an inside man at Federal Coding,” he says.

“That’s nothing,” I says. “I got a bug up the First Lady’s ass, and forty hours on tape of her breaking wind.”

I got a mouth. I know a got a mouth. I especially know it when he jams my face into a pile of shorts and says, “Suck on this, Goo Boy.”

I hate it when people push me around. And I know ways to make them stop. This time all I had to do was cry. Real loud, like he was hurting me. Everybody looks when a kid starts crying. “I’ll be good.” I kept saying it. “Don’t hurt me no more! I’ll be good.”

“Shut up,” he says. “Everybody’s looking.”

“Don’t you ever shove me around again,” I says. “I’m at least ten years older than you, and a hell of a lot more than ten years smarter. Now I’m leaving this store, and if I see you coming after me, I’ll start screaming about how you zipped down and showed me the pope, and you’ll get yourself a child-molesting tag so they pick you up every time some kid gets jollied within a hundred miles of Greensboro.” I’ve done it before, and it works, and Dogwalker was no dummy. Last thing he needed was extra reasons for the dongs to bring him in for questioning. So I figured he’d tell me to get poked and that’d be the last of it.

Instead he says, “Goo Boy, I’m sorry, I’m too quick with my hands.”

Even the goat who shot me never said he was sorry. My first thought was, what kind of sister is he, abjectifying right out like that. Then I reckoned I’d stick around and see what kind of man it is who emulsifies himself in front of a nine-year-old-looking kid. Not that I figured him to be purely sorrowful. He still just wanted me to get the P-word for him, and he knew there wasn’t nobody else to do it. But most street pugs aren’t smart enough to tell the right lie under pressure. Right away I knew he wasn’t your ordinary street hook or low arm, pugging cause they don’t have the sense to stick with any kind of job. He had a deep face, which is to say his head was more than a hairball, by which I mean he had brains enough to put his hands in his pickets without seeking an audience with the pope. Right then was when I decided he was my kind of no-good lying son-of-a-bitch.

“What are you after at Federal Coding?” I asked him. “A record wipe?”

“Ten clean greens,” he says. “Coded for unlimited international travel. The whole ID, just like a real person.”

“The President has a green card,” I says. “The Joint Chiefs have clean greens. But that’s all. The U.S. Vice-President isn’t even cleared for unlimited international travel.”

“Yes he is,” he says.

“Oh, yeah, you know everything.”

“I need a P. My guy could do us reds and blues, but a clean green has to be done by a burr-oak rat two levels up. My guy knows how it’s done.”

“They won’t just have it with a P-word,” I says. “A guy who can make green cards, they’re going to have his finger on it.”

“I know how to get the finger,” he says. “It takes the finger
and
the password.”

“You take a guy’s finger, he might report it. And even if you persuade him not to, somebody’s gonna notice that it’s gone.”

“Latex,” he says. “We’ll get a mold. And don’t start telling me how to do my part of the job. You get P-words, I get fingers. You in?”

“Cash,” I says.

“Twenty percent,” says he.

“Twenty percent of pus.”

“The inside guy gets twenty, the girl who brings me the finger, she gets twenty, and I damn well get forty.”

“You can’t just sell these things on the street, you know.”

“They’re worth a meg apiece,” says he, “to certain buyers.” By which he meant Orkish Crime, of course. Sell ten, and my twenty percent grows up to be two megs. Not enough to be rich, but enough to retire from public life and maybe even pay for some high-level medicals to sprout hair on my face. I got to admit that sounded good to me.

So we went into business. For a few hours he tried to do it without telling me the baroque rat’s name, just giving me data he got from his guy at Federal Coding. But that was real stupid, giving me secondhand face like that, considering he needed me to be a hundred percent sure, and pretty soon he realized that and brought me in all the way. He hated telling me anything, because he couldn’t stand to let go. Once I knew stuff on my own, what was to stop me from trying to go into business for myself? But unless he had another way to get the P-word, he had to get it from me, and for me to do it right, I had to know everything I could. Dogwalker’s got a brain in his head, even it if is all biodegradable, and so he knows there’s times when you got no choice but to trust somebody. When you just got to figure they’ll do their best even when they’re out of your sight.

He took me to his cheap condo on the old Guilford College campus, near the worm, which was real congenital for getting to Charlotte or Winston or Raleigh with no fuss. He didn’t have no soft floor, just a bed, but it was a big one, so I didn’t reckon he suffered. Maybe he bought it back in his old pimping days, I figured, back when he got his name, running a string of bitches with names like Spike and Bowser and Prince, real hydrant leg-lifters for the tweeze trade. I could see that he used to have money, and he didn’t anymore. Lots of great clothes, tailor-tight fit, but shabby, out of sync. The really old ones, he tore all the wiring out, but you could still see where the diodes used to light up. We’re talking neanderthal.

“Vanity, vanity, all is profanity,” says I, while I’m holding out the sleeve of a camisa that used to light up like an airplane coming in for a landing.

“They’re too comfortable to get rid of,” he says. But there’s a twist in his voice so I know he don’t plan to fool nobody.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” says I. “This is what happens when a walker don’t walk.”

“Walkers do steady work,” says he. “But me, when business was good, it felt bad, and when business was bad, it felt good. You walk cats, maybe you can take some pride in it. But you walk dogs, and you know they’re getting hurt every time—”

“They got a built-in switch, they don’t feel a thing. That’s why the dongs don’t touch you, walking dogs, cause nobody gets hurt.”

“Yeah, so tell me, which is worse, somebody getting tweezed till they scream so some old honk can pop his pimple, or somebody getting half their brain replaced so when the old honk tweezes her she can’t feel a thing? I had these women’s bodies around me and I knew that they used to be people.”

“You can be glass,” says I, “and still be people.”

He saw I was taking it personally. “Oh, hey,” says he, “you’re under the line.”

“So are dogs.” says I.

“Yeah well,” says he. “You watch a girl come back and tell about some of the things they done to her, and she’s
laughing
, you draw your own line.”

I look around his shabby place. “Your choice,” says I.

“I wanted to feel clean,” says he. “That don’t mean I got to stay poor.”

“So you’re setting up this grope so you can return to the old days of peace and prosperity.”

“Prosperity,” says he. “What the hell kind of word is that? Why do you keep using words like that?”

“Cause I know them,” says I.

“Well you
don’t
know them,” says he, “because half the time you get them wrong.”

I shows him my best little-boy grin. “I know,” says I. What I don’t tell him is that the fun comes from the fact that almost nobody ever
knows
I’m using them wrong. Dogwalker’s no ordinary pimp. But then the ordinary pimp doesn’t bench himself halfway through the game because of a sprained moral qualm, by which I mean that Dogwalker had some stray diagonals in his head, and I began to think it might be fun to see where they all hooked up.

Anyway we got down to business. The target’s name was Jesse H. Hunt, and I did a real job on him. The Crystal Kid really plugged in on this one. Dogwalker had about two pages of stuff—date of birth, place of birth, sex at birth (no changes since), education, employment history. It was like getting an armload of empty boxes. I just laughed at it. “You got a jack to the city library?” I asked him, and he shows me the wall outlet. I plugged right in, visual onto my pocket sony, with my own little crystal head for ee-i-ee-io-h. Not every goo-head can think clear enough to do this, you know, put out clean type just by thinking the right stuff out of my left ear interface port.