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Card, Orson Scott - Cruel Miracles
CRUEL MIRACLES
Short stories by Orson Scott Card
v1.1 (Jan-30-2000)
If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute.
CONTENTS
Mortal Gods
Jan 1979, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Saving Grace
Night Cry 2:5, 1987
Eye for Eye
March 1987, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine
St. Amy's Tale
Dec. 1980, Omni
Kingsmeat
Analog Yearbook, ed. Ben Bova (Baronet, 1978)
Holy
New Dimensions 10, ed. Robert Silverberg (Harper & Row, 1980)
MORTAL GODS
The first contact was peaceful, almost uneventful: sudden landings near
government buildings all over the world, brief discussions in the native
languages, followed by treaties allowing the aliens to build certain
buildings in certain places in exchange for certain favors-- nothing
spectacular. The technological improvements that the aliens brought helped
make life better for everyone, but they were improvements that were already
well within the reach of human engineers within the next decade or two. And
the greatest gift of all was found to be a disappointment-- space travel.
The aliens did not have faster-than-light travel. Instead, they had
conclusive proof that faster-than-light travel was utterly impossible. They
had infinite patience and incredibly long lives to sustain them in their
snail's-pace crawl among the stars, but humans would be dead before even
the shortest space flight was fairly begun.
And after only a little while, the presence of aliens was regarded as quite
the normal thing. They insisted that they had no further gifts to bring,
and simply exercised their treaty rights to build and visit the buildings
they had made.
The buildings were all different from each other, but had one thing in
common: by the standards of the local populace, the new alien buildings
were all clearly recognizable as churches.
Mosques. Cathedrals. Shrines. Synagogues. Temples. All unmistakably
churches.
But no congregation was invited, though any person who came to such a place
was welcomed by whatever aliens happened to be there at the time, who
engaged in charming discussion totally related to the person's own
interests. Farmers conversed about farming, engineers about engineering,
housewives about motherhood, dreamers about dreams, travelers about
travels, astronomers about the stars. Those who came and talked went away
feeling good. Feeling that someone did, indeed, attach importance to their
lives-- had come trillions of kilometers through incredible boredom (five
hundred years in space, they said!) just to see them.
And gradually life settled into a peaceful routine. Scientists, it is true,
kept on discovering, and engineers kept on building according to those
discoveries, and so changes did come. But knowing now that there was no
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great scientific revolution just around the corner, no tremendous discovery
that would open up the stars, men and women settled down, by and large, to
the business of being happy.
It wasn't as hard as people had supposed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Willard Crane was an old man, but a content one. His wife was dead, but he
did not resent the brief interregnum in his life in which he was solitary
again, a thing he had not been since he came home from the Vietnam War with
half a foot missing and found his girl waiting for him anyway, foot or no
foot. They had lived all their married lives in a house in the Avenues of
Salt Lake City, which, when they moved there, had been a shabby,
dilapidated relic of a previous century, but which now was a splendid
preservation of a noble era in architecture. Willard was in that
comfortable area between heavy wealth and heavier poverty; enough money to
satisfy normal aspirations, but not enough money to tempt him to
extravagance.
Every day he walked from 7th Avenue and L Street to the cemetery, not far
away, where practically everyone had been buried. It was there, in the
middle of the cemetery, that the alien building stood-- an obvious mimic of
old Mormon temple architecture, meaning it was a monstrosity of conflicting
periods that somehow, perhaps through intense sincerity, managed to be
beautiful anyway.
And there he sat among the gravestones, watching as occasional people
wandered into and out of the sanctuary where the aliens came, visited,
left.
Happiness is boring as hell, he decided one day. And so, to provoke a
little delightful variety, he decided to pick a fight with somebody.
Unfortunately, everyone he knew at all well was too nice to fight. And so
he decided that he had a bone to pick with the aliens.
When you're old, you can get away with anything.
He went to the alien temple and walked inside.
On the walls were murals, paintings, maps; on the floor, pedestals with
statues; it seemed more a museum than anything else. There were few places
to sit, and he saw no sign of aliens. Which wouldn't be a disaster; just
deciding on a good argument had been variety enough, noting with pride the
fine quality of the work the aliens had chosen to display.
But there was an alien there, after all.
"Good morning, Mr. Crane," said the alien.
"How the hell you know my name?"
"You perch on a tombstone every morning and watch as people come in and go
out. We found you fascinating. We asked around." The alien's voicebox was
very well programmed-- a warm, friendly, interested voice. And Willard was
too old and jaded with novelty to get much excited about the way the alien
slithered along the floor and slopped on the bench next to him like a
large, self-moving piece of seaweed.
"We wished you would come in."
"I'm in."
"And why?"
Now that the question was put, his reaso seemed trivial to him; but he
decided to play the game all'the way through. Why not, after all? "I have a
bone to pick with you."
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"Heavens," said the alien, with mock horror.
"I have some questions that have never been answered to my satisfaction."
"Then I trust we'll have some answers."
"All right then." But what were his questions? "You'll have to forgive me
if my mind gets screwed around. The brain dies first, as you know."
"We know."
"Why'd you build a temple here? How come you build churches?"
"Why, Mr. Crane, we've answered that a thousand times. We like churches. We
find them the most graceful and beautiful of all human architecture."
"I don't believe you," Willard said. "You're dodging my question. So let me
put it another way. How come you have the time to sit around and talk to
half-assed imbeciles like me? Haven't you got anything better to do?"
"Human beings are unusually good company. It's a most pleasant way to pass
the time which does, after many years, weigh rather heavily on our, um,
hands." And the alien tried to gesture with his pseudopodia, which was
amusing, and Willard laughed.
"Slippery bastards, aren't you?" he inquired, and the alien chuckled. "So
let me put it this way, and no dodging, or I'll know you have something to
hide. You're pretty much like us, right? You have the same gadgets, but you
can travel in space because you don't croak after a hundred years like we
do; whatever, you do pretty much the same kinds of things we do. And
yet-yet--"
"There's always an 'and yet,'" the alien sighed.
"And yet. You come all the way out here, which ain't exactly Main Street,
Milky Way, and all you do is build these churches all over the place and
sit around and jaw with whoever the hell comes in. Makes no sense, sir,
none at all."
The alien oozed gently toward him. "Can you keep a secret?"
"My old lady thought she was the only woman I ever slept with in my life.
Some secrets I can keep."
"Then here is one to keep. We come, Mr. Crane, to worship."
"Worship who?"
"Worship, among others, you."
Willard laughed long and loud, but the alien looked (as only aliens can)
terribly earnest and sincere.
"Listen, you mean to tell me that you worship people?"
"Oh, yes. It is the dream of everyone who dares to dream on my home planet
to come here and meet a human being or two and then live on the memory
forever."
And suddenly it wasn't funny to Willard anymore. He looked around-- human
art in prominent display, the whole format, the choice of churches. "You
aren't joking."
"No, Mr. Crane. We've wandered the galaxy for several million years, all
told, meeting new races and renewing acquaintance with old. Evolution is a
tedious old highway-- carbon-based life always leads to certain patterns
and certain forms, despite the fact that we seem hideously different to
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you--"
"Not too bad, Mister, a little ugly, but not too bad--"
"All the-- people like us that you've seen-- well, we don't come from the
same planet, though it has been assumed so by your scientists. Actually, we
come from thousands of planets. Separate, independent evolution, leading
inexorably to us. Absolutely, or nearly absolutely, uniform throughout the
galaxy. We are the natural endproduct of evolution."
"So we're the oddballs."
"You might say so. Because somewhere along the line, Mr. Crane, deep in
your past, your planet's evolution went astray from the normal. It created
something utterly new."
"Sex?"
"We all have sex, Mr. Crane. Without it, how in the world could the race
improve? No, what was new on your planet, Mr. Crane, was death."
The word was not an easy one for Willard to hear. His wife had, after all,
meant a great deal to him. And he meant even more to himself. Death already
loomed in dizzy spells and shortened breath and weariness that refused to
turn into sleep.
"Death?"
"We don't die, Mr. Crane. We reproduce by splitting off whole sections of
ourselves with identical DNA-- you know about DNA?"
"I went to college."
"And with us, of course, as with all other life in the universe,
intelligence is carried on the DNA, not in the brain. One of the byproducts
of death, the brain is. We don't have it. We split, and the individual,
complete with all memories, lives on in the children, who are made up of
the actual flesh of my flesh, you see? I will never die."
"Well, bully for you," Willard said, feeling strangely cheated, and
wondering why he hadn't guessed.
"And so we came here and found people whose life had a finish; who began as
unformed creatures without memory and, after an incredibly brief span,
died."
"And for that you worship us? I might as well go worshiping bugs that die a
few minutes after they're born."
The alien chuckled, and Willard resented it.
"Is that why you come here? To gloat?"
"What else would we worship, Mr. Crane? While we don't discount the
possibility of invisible gods, we really never have invented any. We never
died, so why dream of immortality? Here we found a people who knew how to
worship, and for the first time we found awakened in us a desire to do
homage to superior beings."
And Willard noticed his heartbeat, realized that it would stop while the
alien had no heart, had nothing that would ever end. "Superior, hell."
"We," said the alien, "remember everything, from the first stirrings of
intellect to the present. When we are 'born,' so to speak, we have no need
of teachers. We have never learned to write-- merely to exchange RNA. We
have never learned to create beauty to outlast our lives because nothing
outlasts our lives. We live to see all our works crumble. Here, Mr. Crane,
we have found a race that builds for the sheer joy of building, that
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creates beauty, that writes books, that invents the lives of never-known
people to delight others who know they are being lied to, a race that
devises immortal gods to worship and celebrates its own mortality with
immense pomp and glory. Death is the foundation of all that is great about
humanity, Mr. Crane."
"Like hell it is," said Willard. "I'm about to die, and there's nothing
great about it."
"You don't really believe that, Mr. Crane," the alien said. "None of you
do. Your lives are built around death, glorifying it. Postponing it as long
as possible, to be sure, but glorifying it. In the earliest literature, the
death of the hero is the moment of greatest climax. The most potent myth."
"Those poems weren't written by old men with flabby bodies and hearts that
only beat when they feel like it."
"Nonsense. Everything you do smacks of death. Your poems have beginnings
and endings, and structures that limit the work. Your paintings have edges,
marking off where the beauty begins and ends. Your sculptures isolate a
moment in time. Your music starts and finishes. All that you do is mortal--
it is all born. It all dies. And yet you struggle against mortality and
have overcome it, building up tremendous stores of shared knowledge through
your finite books and your finite words. You put frames on everything."
"Mass insanity, then. But it explains nothing about why you worship. You
must come here to mock us."
"Not to mock you. To envy you."
"Then die. I assume that your protoplasm or whatever is vulnerable."
"You don't understand. A human being can die-- after he has reproduced--
and all that he knew and all that he has will live on after him. But if I
die, I cannot reproduce. My knowledge dies with me. An awesome
responsibility. We cannot assume it. I am all the paintings and writings
and songs of a million generations. To die would be the death of a
civilization. You have cast yourselves free of life and achieved greatness.
"And that's why you come here."
"If ever there were gods. If ever there was power in the universe. You are
those gods. You have that power."
"We have no power."
"Mr. Crane, you are beautiful."
And the old man shook his head, stood with difficulty, and doddered out of
the temple and walked away slowly among the graves.
"You tell them the truth," said the alien to no one in particular (to
future generations of himself who would need the memory of the words having
been spoken), "and it only makes it worse."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was only seven months later, and the weather was no longer spring, but
now blustered with the icy wind of late autumn. The trees in the cemetery
were no longer colorful; they were stripped of all but the last few brown
leaves. And into the cemetery walked Willard Crane again, his arms half
enclosed by the metal crutches that gave him, in his old age, four points
of balance instead of the precarious two that had served him for more than
ninety years. A few snowflakes were drifting lazily down, except when the
wind snatched them and spun them in crazy dances that had neither rhythm
nor direction.
Willard laboriously climbed the steps of the temple.
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Inside, an alien was waiting.
"I'm Willard Crane," the old man said.
"And I'm an alien. You spoke to me-- or my parent, however you wish to
phrase it-- several months ago."
"Yes."
"We knew you'd come back."
"Did you? I vowed I never would."
"But we know you. You are well known to us all, Mr. Crane. There are
billions of gods on Earth for us to worship, but you are the noblest of
them all."
"I am?"
"Because only you have thought to do us the kindest gift. Only you are
willing to let us watch your death."
And a tear leaped from the old man's eye as he blinked heavily.
"Is that why I came?"
"Isn't it?"
"I thought I came to damn your souls to hell, that's why I came, you
bastards, coming to taunt me in the final hours of my life."
"You came to us."
"I wanted to show you how ugly death is."
"Please. Do."
And, seemingly eager to oblige them, Willard's heart stopped and he, in
brief agony, slumped to the floor in the temple.
The aliens all slithered in, all gathered around closely, watching him
rattle for breath.
"I will not die!" he savagely whispered, each breath an agony, his face
fierce with the heroism of struggle.
And then his body shuddered and he was still.
The aliens knelt there for hours in silent worship as the body became cold.
And then, at last, because they had learned this from their gods-- that
words must be said to be remembered-- one of them spoke:
"Beautiful," he said tenderly. "Oh Lord my God," he said worshipfully.
And they were gnawed within by the grief of knowing that this greatest gift
of all gifts was forever out of their reach.
SAVING GRACE
And he looked into her eyes, and lo! when her gaze fell upon him he did
verity turn to stone, for her visage was wondrous ugly. Praise the Lord.
Mother came home depressed as hell with a bag full of groceries and a
headache fit to turn her hair turn to snakes. Billy, he knew when Mommy was
like that, he could tell as soon as she grumped through the living room.
But if she was full of hellfire, he had the light of heaven, and so he
said, "Don't be sad, Mother, Jesus loves you."
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Mother put the margarine into the fridge and wiped the graham cracker
crumbs off the table and dumped them in the sink even though the disposal
hadn't worked for years. "Billy," she said quietly, "you been saved again?"
"I only was just going to look inside."
"Ought to sue those bastards. Burn down their tent or something. Why can't
they do their show from a studio like everybody else?"
"I felt my sins just weighing me down and then he reached out and Jesus
come into my heart and I had to be baptized."
At the word baptized, Mommy slammed the kitchen counter. The mixing bowl
bounced. "Not again, you damn near got pneumonia the last time!"
"This time I dried my hair."
"It isn't sanitary!"
"I was the first one in. Everybody was crying."
"Well, you just listen! I tell you not to go there, and I mean it! You look
at me when I'm talking to you, young man."
Her irresistible fingers lifted up his chip. Billy felt like he was living
in a Bible story. He could almost hear Bucky Fay himself telling the tale:
And he looked into her eyes, and lo! when her gaze fell upon him he did
verily turn to stone, and he could not move though he sorely feared that he
might wet his pants, for her visage was wondrous ugly. Praise the Lord.
"Now you promise me you won't go into that tent anymore, ever, because you
got no resistance at all, you just come straight home, you hear me?"
He could not move until at last she despaired and looked away, and then he
found his voice and said, "What else am I supposed to do after school?"
Today was different from all the other times they had this argument: this
time his mother leaned on the counter and sobbed into the waffle mix. Billy
came and put his arm around her and leaned his head on her hip. She turned
and held him close and said, "If that son-of-a-bitch hadn't left me you
might've had some brothers and sisters to come home to." They made waffles
together, and while Billy pried pieces of overcooked waffle out of the
waffle iron with a bent table knife, he vowed that he would not cause his
mother such distress again. The revival tent could flap its wings and lift
up its microwave dish to take part in the largess of heaven, but Billy
would look the other way for his mother's sake, for she had suffered
enough.
Yet he couldn't keep his thoughts away from the tent, because when they
were telling what was coming up soon they had said that Bucky Fay was
coming. Bucky Fay, the healer of channel 49, who had been known to exorcise
that demon cancer and cast out kidney stones in the name of the Lord; Bucky
Fay, who looked to Billy like the picture Mommy kept hidden in the back of
her top drawer, the picture of his father, the son-of-a-bitch. Billy wanted
to see the man with the healing hands, see him in the flesh.
"Mommy," he said. On TV the skinny people were praising Diet Pepsi.
"Mm?" Mommy didn't look up.
"I wish my foot was all twisted up so I couldn't walk."
Now she looked up. "My Lord, what for!"
"So Jesus could turn it around."
"Billy, that's disgusting."
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"When the miracle goes through you, Mommy, it knocks you on the head and
then you fall down and get all better. A little girl with no arm got a new
arm from God. They said so."
"Child, they've turned you superstitious."
"I wish I had a club foot, so Jesus would do a miracle on me."
God moves in mysterious ways, but this time he was pretty direct. Of all
the half-assed wishes that got made and prayers that got said, Billy's got
answered. Billy's mother was brooding about how the boy was going off the
deep end. She decided she had to get him out doing things that normal kids
do. The movie playing at the local family-oriented moviehouse was the
latest go-round of Pollyanna. They went and watched and Billy learned a
lesson. Billy saw how good this little girl was, and how preachers liked
her, and first thing you know he was up on the roof, figuring out how to
fall off just right so you smash your legs but don't break your back.
Never did get it right. Broke his back, clean as could be, spinal cord
severed just below the shoulders, and there he was in a wheelchair, wearing
diapers and pissing into a plastic bag. In the hospital he watched TV, a
religious station that had God's chosen servants on all day, praising and
praying and saving. And they had Bucky Fay himself, praise the Lord, Bucky
Fay himself making the deaf to hear and the arthritic to move around and
the audience to be generous, and there sat Billy, more excited than he had
ever been before, because now he was ripe and ready for a miracle.
"Not a chance in the world," his mother said. "By God I'm going to get you
uncrazy, and the last place I'm going to take you is anywhere in earshot of
those lying cheating hypocritical so-called healers."
But there's not many people in the world can say no more than two or three
times to a paralyzed kid in a wheelchair, especially if he's crying, and
besides, Mommy thought, maybe there's something to faith. Lord knows the
boy's got that, even if he doesn't have a single nerve in his legs. And if
there's even a chance of maybe giving him back some of his body, what harm
can it do?
Once inside the tent, of course, she thought of other things. What if it is
a fraud, which of course it is, and what happens when the boy finds out?
What then? So she whispered to him, "Billy, now don't go expecting too
much."
"I'm not." Just a miracle, that's all. They do them all the time, Mommy.
"I just don't want you to be disappointed when nothing happens."
"I won't be disappointed, Mommy." No. He'll fix me right up.
And then the nice lady leaned over and asked, "You here to be healed?"
Billy only nodded, recognizing her as Bucky Fay's helper lady who always
said "Oh, my sweet Lord Jesus you're so kind" when people got healed, said
it in a way that made your spine tingle. She was wearing a lot of makeup.
Billy could see she had a moustache with makeup really packed onto it. He
wondered if she was really secretly a man as she wheeled him up to the
front. But why would a man wear a dress? He was wondering about that as she
got him in place, lined up with the other wheelchair people on the front
row.
A man came along and knelt down in front of him. Billy got ready to pray,
but the man just talked normal, so Billy opened his eyes. "Now this one's
going on TV," the man said, "and for the TV show we need you to be real
careful, son. Don't say anything unless Bucky asks you a direct question,
and then you just tell him real quick. Like when he asks you how come you
got in a wheelchair, what'll you tell him?"
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"I'll say-- I'll say--"
"Now don't go freezing up on him, or it'll look real bad. This is on TV,
remember. Now you just tell me how come you got in a wheelchair."
"So I could get healed by the power of Jesus."
The man looked at him a moment, and then he said, "Sure. I guess you'll do
just fine. Now when it's all over, and you're healed, I'll be right there,
holding you by the arm. Now don't say Thank the Lord right off. You wait
till I squeeze your arm, and then you say it. Okay?"
"Okay."
"For the TV, you know."
"Yeah."
"Don't be nervous."
"I won't."
The man went away but he was back in just a second looking worried. "You
can feel things in your arms, can't you?"
Billy lifted his arms and waved them up and down. "My arms are just fine."
The man nodded and went away again.
There was nothing to do but watch, then, and Billy watched, but he didn't
see much. On the TV, all you could see was Bucky Fay, but here the camera
guys kept getting in front of him, and people were going back and forth all
during the praising time and the support this ministry time so Billy could
hardly keep track of what was going on. Till the man who talked to him came
over to him again, and this time a younger guy was with him, and they
lifted Billy out of his chair and carried him over toward where the lights
were so bright, and the cameras were turned toward him, and Bucky Fay was
saying, "And now who is first, thanks be to the Lord? Are you that
righteous young man who the devil has cursed to be a homophiliac? Come
here, boy! God's going to give you a blood transfusion from the hemoglobin
of the Holy Spirit!"
Billy didn't know what to do. If he said anything before Bucky Fay asked
him a question, the man would be mad, but what good would it do if Bucky
Fay ordered up the wrong miracle? But then he saw how the man who had
talked to him turned his face away from the camera and mouthed,
"Paralyzed," and Bucky Fay caught it and went right on, saying "Do you
think the Saviour is worried? Paralyzed you are, too, completely helpless,
and yet when the miracle comes into your body, do you think the Holy Spirit
needs the doctor's diagnosis? No, praise the Lord, the Holy Spirit goes all
through you, hunting down every place where the devil has hurt you, where
the devil that great serpent has poisoned you, where the devil that mighty
dragon has thought he could destroy you-- boy, are you saved?"
It was a direct question. "Uh huh."
"Has the Lord come to you in the waters of baptism and washed away your
sins and made you clean?"
Billy wasn't sure what that all meant, but after a second the man squeezed
his arm, and so Billy said, "Thank the Lord."
"What the baptism did to the outside of your body, the miracle will do to
the inside of your body. Do you believe that Jesus can heal you?"
Billy nodded.
"Oh, be not ashamed, little child. Speak so all the millions of our
television friends can hear you. Can Jesus heal you?"
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"Yes! I know he can!"
Bucky Fay smiled, and his face went holy; he spat on his hands, clapped
twice, and then slapped Billy in the forehead, splashing spit all over his
face, just that very second the two men holding him sort of half-dropped
him, and as he clutched forward with his hands he realized that all those
times when people seemed to be overcome by the Holy Spirit, they were just
getting dropped, but that was probably part of the miracle. They got him
down on the floor and Bucky Fay went on talking about the Lord knowing the
pure in heart, and then the two men picked him up and this time stood him
on his legs. Billy couldn't feel a thing, but he did know that he was
standing. They were helping him balance, but his weight was on his legs,
and the miracle had worked. He almost praised God right then, but he
remembered in time, and waited.
"I bet you feel a little weak, don't you," said Bucky Fay.
Was that a direct question? Billy wasn't sure, so he just nodded his head.
"When the Holy Spirit went through the Apostle Paul, didn't he lie upon the
ground? Already you are able to stand upon your legs, and after a good
night's sleep, when your body has strengthened itself after being inhabited
by the Spirit of the Lord, you'll be restored to your whole self, good as
new!"
Then the man squeezed Billy's arm. "Praise the Lord," Billy said. But that
was wrong-- it was supposed to be thank the Lord, and so he said it even
louder, "Thank the Lord."
And now with the cameras on him, the two men holding him worked the real
miracle, for they turned him and leaned him forward, and pulled him along
back to the wheelchair. As they pulled him, they rocked him back and forth,
and under him Billy could hear his shoes scuffing the ground, left, right,
left, right, just as if he was walking. But he wasn't walking. He couldn't
feel a thing. And then he knew. All those miracles, all those walkIng
people-- they had men beside them, leaning them left, leaning them right,
making their legs fall forward, just like dolls, just like dummies, real
dummies. And Billy cried. They got the camera real close to him then, to
show the tears streaking down his face. The crowd applauded and praised.
"He's new at walking," Bucky Fay shouted into the microphone. "He isn't
used to so much exercise. Let that boy ride in his chair again until he has
a chance to build up his strength. But praise the Lord! We know that the
miracle is done, Jesus has given this boy his legs and healed his
hemophobia, too!" As the woman wheeled him down the aisle, the people
reached out to touch him, said kind and happy things to him, and he cried.
His mother was crying for joy. She embraced him and said, "You walked," and
Billy cried harder. Out in the car he told her the truth. She looked off
toward the brightly lit door of that flamboyant, that seductive tent, and
she said, "God damn him to burn in hell forever." But Billy was quite,
quite sure that God would do no such thing.
Not that Billy doubted God. No, God had all power, God was a granter of
prayers. God was even fair-minded, after his fashion. But Billy knew now
that when God set himself to balance things in the world, he did it sneaky.
He did it tricky. He did it ass-backward, so that anybody who wanted to
could see his works in the world and still doubt God. After all, what good
was faith if God went around leaving plain evidence of his goodness in the
world? No, not God. His goodness would be kept a profound secret, Billy
knew that. Just a secret God kept to himself.
And sure enough, when God set out to even things up for Billy, he didn't do
the obvious thing. He didn't let the nerves heal, he didn't send the
miracle of feeling, the blessing of pain into Billy's empty legs. Instead
God, who probably had a bet on with Satan about this one, gave Billy
another gift entirely, an unlooked-for blessing that would break his heart.
Side 10
摘要：

Card, Orson Scott - Cruel Miracles                               CRUEL MIRACLES                     Short stories by Orson Scott Card                             v1.1 (Jan-30-2000)   If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version                      number by 0.1 and redistri...

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