Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (12 page)

He remembered a play he saw once, written by someone who died long before they had talents and rankings. There was a character, who later died stupidly if Linus remembered correctly, who was strutting around onstage ranting about how all the world is a stage, and we are merely players on it. And sitting all alone in the darkened theater, Linus had thought,
All except me: I am the audience of one.

Afterword by Ty Franck

The seed of this story was planted when I read an article in a science magazine (I’ve forgotten which one) that described the increasing specialization in science, and the loss of the Thomas Edison–type generalist. This is not surprising, given the increasingly competitive nature of scientific investigation where multiple labs race for the same end result, and often millions or billions of dollars hang in the balance.

But we also see the always intimidating and sometimes outright predatory nature of the peer review process. You’d better know what you’re talking about when you publish your findings, or legions of competitors will rush to be the first to poke holes in your theory. Extreme specialization is the natural outcome of this environment, and the truth is that science has grown so vast and complicated that to achieve expertise in even a tiny portion of it is a lifetime’s work. And often, scientists in one narrow field of endeavor will be totally ignorant of the advances taking place in closely related fields.

I got another idea, the one that made me write the story, watching the early reality TV shows. We humans are so hungry for attention that we will suffer starvation on a desert island, eat live bugs, and sell ourselves into a marriage decided by a contest. As someone who writes and associates a great deal with writers, I know how desperate for recognition and validation the artistic personality can be.

These two ideas became “Audience.” What if everyone in the world is at the absolute top of their game? What if they are raised right from birth to be the very best at whatever it is that they have the greatest genetic predisposition toward? Who decides what the very best is?

We hear a lot about the mythical “everyman.” Joe Sixpack, who doesn’t do anything but buy the products or services that smarter or more talented people want to sell. While I dislike the cliché a great deal (I have yet to meet Joe), I decided to do what speculative fiction always does: take the extreme of an idea and make it real. Linus is Joe Everyman. Utterly lacking in talent himself, the one service he can provide to an ultra-competitive world is impartial observation and professional consumerism.

In a funny twist, it is that very desire to be appreciated that led to the sale of this story. Through a bulletin board we both frequented, I had developed an online friendship with a writer named Kathryn Kidd. After finishing the first draft of “Audience,” I sent it to her for feedback. Apparently, Card stays at her and her husband’s house when he’s in that part of the country, and he happened to be there not long after she received the story. Without asking me, she gave him the story. This led to him inviting me to participate in his Uncle Orson’s Literary Bootcamp. When he started his magazine a couple of years later, he asked me for a story, and I sent in a later draft of “Audience,” which he bought.

Thanks for liking the story, Kathy.

It was
late evening on a sultry summer’s day when three riders appeared at the edge of the woods on the road southwest of Tintagel castle. The sentries did not see them riding up the muddy track that led from Beronsglade. The knights merely appeared, just as the sun dipped below the sea, as if they’d coalesced from mist near a line of beech trees.

The manner of their appearance did not seem odd, on that day of oddities. The tide was very low, and the whole ocean lay as placid as a mountain pool. To the castle’s residents, who were used to the constant pounding of the surf upon the craggy rocks outside the castle walls, the silence seemed thunderous. Even the gulls had given up their incessant screeching and now huddled low on the rocks, making an easy dinner of cockles and green kelp crabs.

All around the castle, the air was somber. Smoke from cooking fires and from the candles hung in a blue haze all about Tintagel’s four towers. The air seemed leaden.

So it was that the sentries, when they spotted the three knights, frowned and studied the men’s unfamiliar garb. The leader of the trio wore a fantastical helm shaped like a dragon’s head, and his enameled mail glimmered red like a dragon’s scales. He rode a huge black destrier, and as for the device on his shield, he carried only blank iron strapped to a pack on a palfrey.

Beside him rode a big fellow in oiled ringmail, while the third knight wore nothing but a cuirass of boiled leather, yet carried himself with a calmness and certainty that made him more frightening than if he rode at the head of a Saxon horde.

“’Tis Uther Pendragon!” one of the boys at the castle walls cried at first. The lad hefted his halberd as if he would take a swing, but stepped back in fright.

Pendragon was, of course, the guards’ worst nightmare. At the Easter feast, King Uther Pendragon had made advances on the Duke Gorlois’s wife, the Lady Igraine. He had courted her in her husband’s company with all the grace and courtesy of a bull trying to mount a heifer. At last the duke felt constrained to flee the king’s presence. The king demanded that Gorlois return with his wife, but Gorlois knew that if he ever set foot in the king’s palace again, he’d lose his head. So he locked his wife safely in Tintagel, began fortifying his castles, and prayed that he could hire enough Irish mercenaries to back him before the king could bring him down.

Last anyone had heard, Duke Gorlois was holed up like a badger at his fortress in Dimilioc, where Uther Pendragon had laid siege. It was said that Pendragon had employed Welsh miners as sappers, vowing to dig down the castle walls and skin Gorlois for his pelt within forty days.

So when the lad atop the castle wall thought he saw Pendragon, immediately someone raised a horn and began to blow wildly, calling for reinforcements, though none would likely be needed. Tintagel was a small keep, situated by the sea on a pile of rocks that could only be reached over a narrow causeway. It was said that three men could hold it from an army of any size, and no fewer than two dozen guards now manned the wall.

The captain of the guard, a stout old knight named Sir Ventias who could no longer ride due to a game leg, squinted through the smoke that clung around the castle. Something seemed afoul. He knew fat King Pendragon’s features well, and as he peered through the gloom and the smoke that burned his eyes, he saw immediately that it was not Pendragon on the mount. It was a young man with a flaxen beard and a hatchet face.

Ventias squinted, trying to pierce the haze until he felt sure: It was Duke Gorlois. He rode in company with his true friend Sir Jordans and the stout knight Sir Brastias.

Ventias smiled. “Tell the duchess that her husband is home.”

The celebration that night was remarkable. The duke’s pennant was hoisted on the wall, and everywhere the people made merry. Sir Brastias himself told the miraculous tale of their escape—how they had spied Pendragon leave the siege and the duke had issued out from the castle with his knights. After a brief battle, Gorlois had broken Pendragon’s lines and had hurried toward Tintagel, only to discover Pendragon himself a few miles up the road, frolicking with some maiden in a pool. Since King Pendragon was naked and unarmed, it became an easy matter to capture the lecher, both arms and armor, and force his surrender.

Thus Gorlois rode home in Pendragon’s suit of mail.

So it was that the celebration began at Tintagel. Suckling pigs were spitted and cooked over a bonfire in the lower bailey, while every lad who had a hand with the pipe or the tambor made music as best he could. New ale flowed into mugs like golden honey. Young squires fought mock combats to impress their lord and entertain the audience. And everywhere the people began to dance.

But Duke Gorlois could not relish it. Instead, he went to his great hall before the festivities began and gazed upon his glorious young bride with a sultry stare. He never even took his seat at the head of the table. Instead, he studied her for less than a minute before he grabbed one of her breasts as if it were a third hand and began to lead her to the bedchamber.

This he did in front of some eighty people. When the priest quietly complained about this impropriety to the duke, Gorlois, who was normally a very reserved fellow, merely said, “Let the people frolic as they see fit, and I will frolic as I see fit.”

Though everyone was astonished at this crude display, no one other than the priest dared speak against it. Even Sir Jordans, a man who could normally be counted on to pass judgment fairly on any matter, merely sat in the great hall and did not eat. Instead, he played with his heavy serpent-handled dagger, stabbing it over and over again into the wooden table beside his trencher.

Then Duke Gorlois dragged his wife up the stairs against her will, stripping off his armor as he went.

Or at least that is the way that my mother tells the tale, and she should know, for she was a young woman who served tables there at Tintagel.

It seems
surprising that no one found it odd.

The evening star that night shone as red as a bloodstone, and all the dogs somehow quietly slipped from the castle gates.

There was a new horned moon, and though the people danced, they did not do so long. Somehow their feet seemed heavy, and the celebration seemed more trouble than it was worth, and so the crowds began to break off early.

Some went home, while most seemed more eager to drink themselves into a stupor. Yet no one at the time remarked about the queer mood at Castle Tintagel.

Late that night, my mother found Sir Jordans still on his bench, where he’d sat quietly for hours. He was letting the flame of a candle lick his left forefinger in a display that left my mother horrified and set her heart to hammering.

Dozens of knights lay drunk and snoring on the floor around him, while a pair of cats on the table gnawed the bones of a roast swan.

My mother wondered if Sir Jordans performed this remarkable feat for her benefit, as young men often will when trying to impress a young woman.

If so, he’d gone too far. She feared for Sir Jordan’s health, so she quietly scurried to the long oaken table. She could not smell burning flesh above the scents of ale and grease and fresh loaves, though Sir Jordans had been holding his finger under the flame for a long minute.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked in astonishment. “If it’s cooking yourself that you’re after, there’s a bonfire still burning out in the bailey!”

Sir Jordans merely sat at the table, a hooded traveling robe pulled low over his head, and held his finger beneath the flickering flame. Candlelight glimmered in his eyes. My mother thought the silence odd, for in the past Sir Jordans had always been such a garrulous fellow, a man whose laugh sounded like the winter’s surf booming on the escarpment at the base of the castle walls.

“Do you hear me? You’ll lose the finger,” my mother warned. “Are you drunk, or fey?” she asked, and she thought of rousing some besotted knight from the floor to help her subdue the man.

Sir Jordans looked up at her with a dreamy smile. “I’ll not lose my finger, nor burn it,” he said. “I could hold it thus all night. It is a simple trick, really. I could teach you—if you like?”

Something about his manner unnerved my mother. She was beautiful then. Though she was but a scullery maid, at the age of fourteen she was lovely—with long raven hair, eyes of smoke, and a full figure that drew appreciative gazes from men. Sir Jordans studied her now with open admiration, and she grew frightened.

She crossed herself. “This is no trick, this is sorcery!” my mother accused. “It’s evil! If the father found out, he’d make you do penance.”

But Sir Jordans merely smiled as if she were a child. He had a broad, pleasant face that could give no insult. “It’s not evil,” he affirmed reasonably. “Did not god save the three righteous Israelites when the infidels threw them into the fire?”

My mother wondered then. He was right, of course. Sir Jordans was a virtuous man, she knew, and if god could save men who were thrown whole into a fire, then surely Sir Jordans was upright enough so that god could spare his finger.

“Let me teach you,” Sir Jordans whispered.

My mother nodded, still frightened, but enticed by his gentle manner.

“The trick,” Sir Jordans said, withdrawing his finger from the candle flame, “is to learn to take the fire into yourself without getting burned.”

He held up his finger for her inspection, and my mother drew close, trying to see it in the dim light, to make sure that it was not oozing or blistered.

“Once you learn how to hold the fire within,” Sir Jordans whispered, “you must then learn to release the flames when—and how—you will. Like this…”

He reached out his finger then and touched between my mother’s ample breasts. His finger itself was cold to the touch, so cold that it startled her. Yet after he drew it away, she felt as if flames began to build inside her, pulsing through her breasts in waves, sending cinders of pleasure to burn hot in the back of her brain. Unimaginable embers, as hot as coals from a blacksmith’s forge, flared to life in her groin.

As the flames took her, she gasped in astonishment, so thoroughly inflamed by lust that she dropped to her knees in agony, barely able to suppress her screams.

Sir Jordans smiled at her and asked playfully, “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

Numb with pain, my mother nodded, and knelt before him, sweating and panting from desire. This is hell, she thought. This is how it will be, me burning with desires so staggering that they can never be sated. This is my destiny now and hereafter.

“I could teach you more,” Sir Jordans whispered, leaning close. “I could teach you how to make love, how to satisfy every sensual desire. There are arts to be learned—pleasurable beyond your keenest imagining. Only when I teach you can the flames inside you be quenched.”

My mother merely nodded, struck dumb with grief and lust. She would have given anything for one moment of release, for any degree of satisfaction. Sir Jordans smiled and leaned forward, until his lips met hers.

At dawn,
my mother woke outside the castle. She found herself sprawled dazed and naked like some human sacrifice upon a black rock on the ocean’s shore.

The whole world was silent, with a silence so profound that it seemed to weigh like an ingot of lead on her chest. The only noise came from the cries of gulls that winged about the castle towers, as if afraid to land.

She searched for a long while until she found her clothes, then made her way back to the castle.

Two hours later, riders came charging hard from Dimilioc. They bore the ill tidings that Duke Gorlois had been slain in battle the day before. Among the dead were found Sir Brastias and Sir Jordans.

Everyone at Tintagel took the news in awe, speaking well only because they feared to speak ill.

“’Twas a shade,” they said. “Duke Gorlois so loved his wife that he came at sunset to see her one last time.”

Even the Lady Igraine repeated this tale of shades as if it were true, for her husband had slipped from her bed before dawn, as if he were indeed a shade, as had the other dead men who walked in his retinue.

But my mother did not believe the tale. The man she’d slept with the night before had been clothed in flesh, and she felt his living seed burn her womb. She knew that she had been seduced by sorcery, under the horned moon.

Two children were conceived on that fell night. I was one of them, the girl.

You have surely heard of the boy.

King Uther Pendragon soon forced the widowed Igraine to be his wife and removed her to Canterbury. When the boy was born, Pendragon ripped the newborn son from its mother’s breast and gave it to a pale-eyed Welsh sorcerer who slung it over his back and carried it like a bundle of firewood into the forest.

I have heard it said that Igraine feared that the sorcerer would bury the infant alive, so she prayed ceaselessly that god would soften the sorcerer’s heart, so that he would abandon it rather than do it harm.

Some say that in time Igraine became deluded into believing that her son was being raised by peasants or wolves. She was often seen wandering the fairs, looking deep into the eyes of boy children, as if trying to find something of herself or Duke Gorlois there.

As for my mother, she fled Tintagel well before her stomach began to bulge. She loved a stableboy in Tintagel, and had even promised herself to him in marriage, so it was a hard thing for her to leave, and she slunk away one night without saying any good-byes.

For she constantly feared that the false Sir Jordans would return. It is well known, after all, that devils cannot leave their own offspring alone.

My mother went into labor three hundred and thirty-three days later, after a term so long that she knew there would be something wrong with me.

My mother took no midwife, for she rightly feared what I would look like. I would have a tail, she thought, and a goat’s pelt, and cloven hooves for feet. She feared that I might even be born with horns that would rip her as I came through the birth canal.