The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) Read online

  I happened to be listening, during this time, to a course on ancient Egypt from the Great Courses series. When I heard the description of Thoth as being very much like Hermes and Mercury, including healing, I realized that I could benefit greatly by adapting a version of Egyptian lore to my literalizing of Indo-european gods. Ka and ba corresponded—or could be made to correspond—with the way I was already using “inself” and “outself” in the Mithermages series. That allowed me to name the Belgod I had taken from Semitic and biblical tradition. Set made a lovely, dangerous enemy. And as I invented more and more of the lore surrounding him, tying him to the dragon in the book of Revelation, the workings of manmagic became something rich and fascinating, and very close to what I had already developed for gatemagic. In other words, they made a consistent whole, and one that I believe corresponds with the real world in significant metaphorical ways.

  Having invented the world I needed, I then had to find a way to make it clear to readers. What made it especially difficult was my determination that all the communication between ka and ba had to be on a pre- or sub-verbal level. We don’t talk to our own minds and bodies in language, and so when I had Wad-Loki’s ba trying to share his memories with Danny North’s ka, I had to put it on a nonverbal level. Yet books are written in words. Finding a means of representing non-speech in speech was daunting. I hope that for most readers, I succeeded.

  As I learned more about manmages, the character of Anonoei began to grow. I began this novel with no idea that Anonoei would be important in it; she insisted on growing into something important, she and her sons, and so they will be major figures in the third and final volume.

  Another problem was to keep from getting so caught up in the lore of magery that I lost track of the real world—our world, and Danny’s place in it. It was very important to me that his friends become memorable individuals, and that Danny fall in love in a serious way. These high school students should not be merely Danny’s foils, people he can talk to in order for us to learn what he is thinking. In this novel, they represent us, the drowthers, ordinary people who are in awe of the gods, if we believe in them; and I have met few people who didn’t have some conception of a god, whether they would apply that title to it or not. How would these teenagers respond to having the new kid turn out to be the equivalent of Hermes and Mercury and Loki and Thoth?

  One theme that runs through mythology is the amazing fecundity of the gods—the world seems half-populated by their bastards. While a few of these are rapes (in the old sense of “carrying off” the human female, whether the sex turned out to be consensual or not), it’s also a fact of human life that there are certain women who are irresistibly drawn to powerful males. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This is not true for all women, or for all powerful people. But Danny North would not have to look like a young George Clooney or Robert Redford in order to attract the notice—let alone the eager desire—of a certain contingent of young women. His power, his intelligence, and, I must add, his innate goodness would make him desirable to many girls, for reasons as various as the girls themselves.

  The result was that my original outline for this book is now an amusing cast-off; that which survives from it will be in the third volume, while most of what’s valuable in this book was not in the outline. Stories are invented as you go along, if you’re writing them properly, and that means that characters and situations that come out of nowhere can blossom into productive mines that bring out tramloads of metal-rich ore. My skill as a refiner is a different issue. But I think the ore I smelted to make this book is of a much finer metal than what I originally planned.

  How can we tell, though? The earlier version was never written, not a word of it. It existed in my head, so I think of it as real; but no graduate student will ever pore over the differences between drafts, because the book you just read is the only draft that actually hit the paper.

  How do you unfold the tale in an order which will be clear and interesting to readers who obviously begin the book knowing almost nothing about the story, and must end it understanding all? I regard it as the essence of good structure that all the key information will have been presented earlier in the book, so when you move through the climactic scenes at the end, everything is already clear to the reader, because it was so well explained earlier on. This means that the exposition is front-loaded. But readers won’t tolerate (nor should they) a story that begins with nothing but exposition.

  The device that works best is for the point-of-view character to know little more than the reader does. Thus when the viewpoint character learns it, so does the reader.

  But what if the viewpoint character’s learning is also vague and highly subjective? And how much information is too much for a given scene? Boredom and inclarity are the ways to drive readers out of a book, to make them close it and never open it again. The goal, then, is to provide the light with enough sweetness at every stage that the reader will stay with you, learning constantly but also getting the rewards of a good story along the way. This is not a trick—here are the good bits, so you’ll keep reading the boring bits. On the contrary, the good bits require the explanations, but the explanations themselves need to be part of the action, so that it never feels as if the story has stopped cold while the reader is brought up to speed. This is such a delicate dance that most writers fail at it most of the time. And most of us realize that we will never find the perfect way to tell a story; it’s likely that there is no such thing. We just keep dancing as fast as we can, hoping to take you far enough into the workings of the world that, when you move from one event to the next in the story, you always know where you are and what’s happening, and you always understand just what is at stake.

  This is hard enough with fiction that takes place in the “real” world; when the world itself must also be explained, the expository burden becomes dreadfully heavy. The result is that some writers skimp on world development, coasting along by borrowing the stereotypes of earlier writers in the field. Others include every detail of their world creation, whether it’s relevant to the plot or not, as if they wanted to make all their readers memorize The Silmarillion before they were worthy to read The Lord of the Rings.

  This is a long way of saying that the better your world creation, the heavier the expository burden. And sometimes your world creation is so deep and rich that the actual story never measures up to it.

  In the effort to create a story that does measure up, sometimes you’re late; but that does not imply that being late will make your story better. My most popular book was written in a single swath, more quickly than I could have imagined possible. This does not imply that moving quickly through a tale will make it better, either. Each story poses its own unique set of problems. It merely happens that the problems I had to solve in order to tell this story were some of the hardest, creatively and technically, that I’ve ever faced in my writing career.

  That’s the problem with growing older and more experienced. Decisions that would have been “good enough” when I was thirty now seem like cheap shortcuts to me at sixty-one. I know how to write better than I did before; but knowing better usually means that I have to work harder, invent more, and find solutions to ever-more-difficult expository problems. This is why writers never retire. If we’re doing our job right, we’re always just figuring out how this thing is done; we’re always novice writers flailing about to find some kind of solid ground for moving forward.

  BY ORSON SCOTT CARD

  FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  Empire

  The Folk of the Fringe

  Future on Fire

  (editor)

  Future on Ice

  (editor)

  Hidden Empire

  Invasive Procedures

  (with Aaron Johnston)

  Keeper of Dreams

  Lovelock

  (with Kathryn Kidd)

  Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

 
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

  Saints

  Songmaster

  Treason

  The Worthing Saga

  Wyrms

  THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER

  Seventh Son

  Red Prophet

  Prentice Alvin

  Alvin Journeyman

  Heartfire

  The Crystal City

  ENDER

  The First Formic War

  Earth Unaware

  Earth Afire

  Ender’s Game

  Ender’s Shadow

  Shadow of the Hegemon

  Shadow Puppets

  Shadow of the Giant

  Speaker for the Dead

  Xenocide

  Children of the Mind

  First Meetings

  Ender in Exile

  Shadows in Flight

  HOMECOMING

  The Memory of Earth

  The Call of Earth

  The Ships of Earth

  Earthfall

  Earthborn

  WOMEN OF GENESIS

  Sarah

  Rebekah

  Rachel & Leah

  THE MITHERMAGES

  The Lost Gate

  The Gate Thief

  FROM OTHER PUBLISHERS

  Enchantment

  Homebody

  Lost Boys

  Magic Street

  Stonefather

  Stone Tables

  Treasure Box

  How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

  Characters and Viewpoint

  Pathfinder

  Ruins

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Orson Scott Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, and their youngest child, Zina Margaret.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE GATE THIEF

  Copyright © 2013 by Orson Scott Card

  All rights reserved.

  Portions of The Gate Thief appeared in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issues 30 and 31, as the short story “Flying Children.”

  Cover art by Trevillion Images

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2658-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781429947039 (e-book)

  First Edition: March 2013