“We still haven’t had any success blocking the cascade reaction?” she asked the tech.
“We can slow the cascade,” he answered, “but it doesn’t help in the long run. Just delays the inevitable. We can keep rats alive for up to ten days now, but the virus wins every time.”
Ten days? That was an improvement.
“So we know enough to trigger a transformation, but not enough to stop it?”
The tech nodded. “We can inject an LC-8 host with KTS to trigger a transformation early, but after that it spreads exponentially. We can slow the spread by injecting chemicals in the blood that bind to KTS and are flushed out by the kidneys, but it’s not enough.”
Lien frowned. “Well, keep trying. There has to be a way.”
The man opened his mouth, probably to voice his doubts, but a glare from Lien silenced him. He nodded, and left the room.
A quiet chime alerted Lien that she had a new message from an Important contact. Pulling it up, she saw it was from the museum in Austria.
Your recent interest in the journals of Alfons von Waldstein led me to reorganize our files from this period. While doing so, I found another journal which mentions him frequently. I am not sure if it is of any interest to you, but I am attaching the data file.
Curious, Lien opened the file. It was written in German in what appeared to be a child’s awkward scrawl. Lien knew almost no German, but the first line was fairly easy to guess: Mein Name ist Nyima.
Was she really looking at a copy of Nyima’s journal?
Kyodo News (Japan)
24 April 2057
Student Suicide Linked to Escalating Kunming Fears
Endo Moriko, age 21, was found dead in her dormitory last Friday. Autopsy reports confirm suicide by hanging. Her friend, Rie Isobe, reveals a shocking explanation for the unexpected death. “She stayed home from classes Thursday because of a fever. Then she started getting the rash. She called me in hysterics, and I told her to meet me at the hospital. She never came. I went to her dorm, but it was too late.”
Autopsy reports indicate Moriko was not suffering from a Kunming incident, but rather an aggressive case of the chicken pox.
Lien changed Bao into his day clothes and started cooking rice porridge for breakfast. Checking her work mail, she saw the new journal translation had uploaded. As Bao ate his porridge Lien read through the entries quickly. Maybe Nyima herself could offer some insight that Alfons had overlooked.
Lien laughed as she read Nyima’s first few entries. “Today I ate cake. It was good.” Lien scanned the passages quickly, looking for trigger words. When she came to a passage titled, “My Favorite Goat” she almost skipped it. But when she turned the page she noticed the word “Mara.” Maybe it was worth her time after all.
My Favorite Goat
My favorite goat was named Alpa because he was so small. He had brown fur and white spots and loved to run in the tall grass. When Alpa was a baby he got very sick. Mama said that Mara had come to take him away. I cried and cried. When I saw Mara’s daughters in Alpa’s fur I knew that mama was right, and I said goodbye to my friend. But Alpa did not die. Mama said he was lucky. We gave him a new name. Avinash. It means “cannot be destroyed.” When he got old I would not let anyone eat him. Mama complained. She said that Mara would take him if we didn’t eat him soon. But Mara never came for him.
Lien read the story over and over, not sure how to interpret it. Alfons had mentioned Avinash in several of his own entries—a scarred goat that followed Nyima everywhere. Lien remembered an entry that mentioned the age of the goat being unusual. At the time, she had thought nothing of it. But now it seemed to imply something incredibly significant. Had Avinash really survived the Kunming virus? It seemed unlikely. Too many pieces of the story didn’t add up. First off, the goat had developed symptoms as a baby, which wasn’t how the virus worked at all. Second, “Mara’s daughters” always appeared in large swarms and devoured the host quickly. And finally, if the goat did carry the viral genes, then it should have manifested the disease eventually. And yet, Nyima seemed confident the goat had been struck by Mara, and equally confident it had survived.
Have you triggered the cascade in any baby rats?” Lien asked the lab tech. Her mind had come back to this possibility over and over. What had made Nyima’s goat unique was the early transformation. It had been practically a newborn when the Kunming virus manifested. Maybe this was the key to surviving.
The tech looked at her with an odd expression on his face.
“Um. No. I don’t think so. We have been trying to recreate the real-world conditions as closely as possible.”
Lien smiled at him. This was exactly what she had hoped he would say. “This week I want you to do something for me. Inject KTS in rats with a variety of ages. Start freshly born and work your way up.”
30 April 2057
NIMPE Lab Report
SUMMARY: If the KTS cascade is initiated in the extremely young, it is possible for the host rat to survive the Kunming Transformation. Extrapolations for humans estimate 95% success at age 24 months and 80% success at age 36 months. However, it is unknown whether these survivors will trigger a second transformation when they reach adulthood.
Lien popped the protective plastic cover off the needle. This was it, the point of no return. Am I doing the right thing? If this really was the cure, then yes. But what if …
She looked at Bao, asleep on the couch while a cartoon rooster sang a counting song on TV. An empty bowl of mango pudding rested on the couch beside him, pudding that had been laced with Tryptofluorizine.
Her son was almost twenty-seven months old—past the five percent mortality threshold. And each day the percentage of larval cells in his body was increasing. What she was about to do was a medical version of Russian roulette. True, the odds were in his favor, and they would only get worse if she waited. But still, pulling the trigger when you knew there was a bullet somewhere in the cylinder …
Lien shook her head. No. She was not going to let doubt get in her way. Both Alfons and Nyima had mentioned the age of Avinash. For some reason, the goat had triggered early. Then it had grown and passed the age of transformation unharmed.
Lien crossed the room and stood in front of her family shrine. Setting down the needle, she lit two candles in front of Tuan’s photo and started a fresh stick of incense. Tuan watched the proceedings with that goofy grin he always wore in photos. Please. Lien prayed. Please let this work. She watched as her prayer wafted up toward heaven. Then she grabbed the needle, crossed the room, and injected Bao’s thigh.
5 August 2060
Viet Nam
Lien held a hand to her mouth in disgust. What was Bao doing?
The other five-year-olds were content to simply pet the animals. But Bao insisted on feeding each and every one of them. And he thought it was hilarious when they tried to swallow his hand as well. She hoped that donkey didn’t have lung worms. When a goat licked Bao’s face, a man laughed loudly. This is so embarrassing.
A young mother darted forward and grabbed her daughter. “No, Bihn. Don’t touch it. It’s dirty.” The frazzled woman was also clutching an infant in her arms. Both children bore the now familiar scars of the Kunming vaccine, but they would fade with time.
“Goats aren’t bad,” said Bao in surprise as the woman pulled her daughter away from the dangerous animal. “A goat saved the world. My mom and dad helped too.”
The woman smiled. “Children say such funny things.”
“I want a goat, Mom,” said Bao, patting the creature on its head. “Can we get a goat?”
Lien paused, trying to think of a way to change the subject.
Bao grinned up at her, “I think Dad would like it if I had a goat.”
Her son was one tough negotiator, but two could play at this game. “How about we start with a rat,” said Lien. “You know, the
y helped to save the world too.”
Theme
by Orson Scott Card
* * *
Orson Scott Card is the author of the award-winning novels Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools. His most recent series, the young adult Pathfinder series (Pathfinder, Ruins, Visitors) and the fantasy Mither Mages series (Lost Gate, Gate Thief, Gatefather) are taking readers in new directions.
Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with Seventh Son), poetry (An Open Book), and many plays and scripts, including his “freshened” Shakespeare scripts for Romeo & Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice.
Card has won numerous awards including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. He was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he teaches occasional classes and workshops and directs plays. He frequently teaches writing and literature courses at Southern Virginia University.
Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, where his primary activities are writing a review column for the local Rhinoceros Times and feeding birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, and raccoons on the patio.
Orson Scott Card has been a judge of the Writers of the Future Contest since 1994, having earlier served as a guest instructor at the Writers’ Workshops, at both Sag Harbor, Long Island and Pepperdine University in Los Angeles. He was also the featured essayist in volumes four and twenty-two of the Writers of the Future anthology.
Theme
A few years ago, I wrote a book called Shadows in Flight. It was designed to be a half-length novel, so I couldn’t sprawl in my world creation and character development. The story followed a father with a genetic disorder that made him astonishingly intelligent and creative, but also afflicted him with gigantism that would, unchecked, eventually kill him.
Before the story began, he took off on a near-lightspeed voyage with those of his children who had the same disorder, in hopes that they could stay alive until somebody found a way to treat or cure the gigantism without losing the brainpower.
Along the way, they run across an ancient colony ship from an alien culture, one that had never reached its destination and now continued as an ecosystem without a purpose, since the colonists were all dead.
As with all far-future science fiction, the burden of world creation takes up a huge amount of expository space—a burden that someone who sets a novel in “San Francisco, 1968” or “an American elementary school in 2009” does not face.
Even though such real-world fiction does require research, it does not require anything like the level of invention that a writer must reach in order to offer the readers a believable story milieu.
Ever since Robert Heinlein taught us all how to deliver the far-future setting to the readers in dribs and drabs, we don’t have the huge expository lumps that used to mar early sci-fi: “As you know, Bob, because this planet has so much ammonia/helium/nitrogen/flaming plasma, we’ll have to wear our spacesuits/fire-retardant gear/Halloween masks during our entire exploration.”
But the fact that our invented world can be delivered to the readers more or less painlessly does not change the hardest burden: the need to invent that world. Everything that a writer of contemporary fiction can simply draw from memory, the sci-fi writer has to invent. Whatever we change here will have repercussions there, and somehow we must hold it all in our heads while we’re writing.
Now that sci-fi readers also expect at least some level of plausible characterization—which requires well-drawn, interesting relationships between people in the story—the writer must also come up with people and communities that ring true, even if there have been significant changes in human beings.
Add to this the peculiar tensions inside a spaceship containing only three hyper-genius children and their dying father, and you can easily imagine that all my concentration was on these relationships and their work on a self-cure and the workings of the alien colony ship.
The questions that mattered to me were: Why do the characters do what they do? How will they respond to each other’s decisions and actions? What is the life cycle of the surviving species on the alien ship? How can the genetic disorder in this family be corrected or compensated for? What happens to someone who can’t stop growing, even in a weightless environment? Since each of these questions implies hundreds of others, I didn’t have any time or concentration to waste on nonsense unconnected with the story.
In other words, the furthest thing from my mind was to come up with an extraneous “theme,” even though this is clearly the main thing that schoolteachers and professors require their literature students to detect and explain.
I know this because I have received so many letters from students that ask, sometimes in these exact words, “What is the theme of [insert book title here]?”
My answer usually has two parts:
I’m not in school anymore, so I don’t have to think or talk about themes. That’s your burden.
I only think about themes when I’m writing essays. When I write stories, I think only about story. So if you find a theme, I’m happy for you, but I can assure you that it is entirely a natural outgrowth of storytelling or the result of your own personal preoccupations, and not at all the author’s intention.
At the end of Shadows in Flight, I felt that I had dealt with world and character creation reasonably well. And, near the end, as I showed the father’s few steps in a gravity environment, I felt that I had brought that character to fruition—after developing him across five previous novels.
Months later, as we neared the novel’s publication date, the producer of the audiobook, Stefan Rudnicki of Skyboat Media, brought together a group of brilliant narrators who had participated in the production of Shadows in Flight.
I’ve been fortunate in having my books narrated by some of the most talented readers in the history of audiobooks, and Stefan (a frequent narrator of my books himself) recorded a round table discussion involving me, Stefan, Emily Rankin, Scott Brick, Gabrielle de Cuir, and Kirby Heyborne.
You can see the discussion at Skyboat Media’s website: skyboatmedia.com/enders-game/.
During the discussion, Scott Brick and Kirby Heyborne, in particular, commented on how much the story meant to them as fathers. One of them even referred to it as a “fatherhood book.”
That was the first moment that it occurred to me that Shadows in Flight was, in fact, this old man’s meditation on what fatherhood means to a man nearing the end of his life. It blindsided me, emotionally, especially because one of these great narrators was my eldest daughter, Emily Janice Card, now Rankin.
This was not the first time that I discovered the “theme” of a story of mine well after the fact. At no point in the writing of Shadows in Flight did I think, I’m going to turn this into an exploration of fatherhood.
This has happened often in my career. I remember a professional-writers workshop at which my story Lost Boys was discussed. Only as some participants commented on the story did I realize that the child who haunts his family after his death was in reality my “exploration” of my relationship with my second son, who, because of his severe cerebral palsy, never took a step, never sat up without aid, and never spoke a sentence in his life. In effect, I realized, I was using haunting as a means of expressing Charlie Ben’s place in our family: beloved, central to all of us, and yet scarcely able to influence the course of events.
Then there was the time when, at my first WorldCon, a reader saw my name tag and, recognizing my name, sai
d, “You wrote A Planet Called Treason, didn’t you?” I pled guilty (the novel is now available as Treason), and then he startled me by saying, “I bet you’re a Mormon.” When I asked him why he thought of that, he said, “As I was reading it, I thought, only a Mormon could have written this book.”
Now, having written and produced many plays dealing with Mormon culture, history, and scriptural stories, I had resolved, when I first started writing sci-fi, that I would keep my fiction free of all Mormon references, ideas, or doctrine. I knew that science fiction, like science, is resolutely areligious—everything must have natural or mechanical causes, and can never include a transcendent deity.
So I was stunned at the thought that my totally secular story in A Planet Called Treason somehow revealed some subset of my personal beliefs to at least one reader. At first I assumed he simply noticed the reference in my bio to my having served an LDS mission in Brazil—but no, the hardcover he read had no jacket and therefore no bio.
Only upon rereading the novel with this conversation in mind did I realize that several completely unconscious, story-centered decisions I had made in developing the world and characters tapped into my personal core: Things I believe about how the world works, which happen to reflect aspects of LDS doctrine that I have internalized so completely that I no longer notice them when they crop up in my work.
Through experiences like this, I have come to realize something important: A storyteller does not need to think up a theme. Themes will emerge in the process of natural storytelling, without any conscious effort on the part of the author.
In fact, I’ll go further. If you write in order to demonstrate some deliberate theme, your story will inevitably be bent to accommodate it. The reader is therefore quite likely to notice that theme and be distracted by it.
You know what I mean: It’s that moment in a movie or TV show or novel when you realize, ah, the writer is preaching to me, and here’s the moral lesson I’m supposed to receive.