Children of the Mind

CHAPTER 15

"WE'RE GIVING YOU A SECOND CHANCE"

"When I was a little girl, I used to believe

that if I could please the gods well enough,

they would go back and do my life over,

and this time they would not take

my mother away from me."

from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

A satellite orbiting Lusitania detected the launch of the M.D. Device and the divergence of its course toward Lusitania, as the starship disappeared from the satellite's instruments. The most dreaded event was happening. There had been no attempt to communicate or negotiate. Clearly the fleet had never intended anything but the obliteration of this world, and with it an entire sentient race. Most people had hoped, and many had expected, that there would be a chance to tell them that the descolada had been completely tamed and no longer posed a threat to anyone; that it was too late to stop anything anyway, since several dozen new colonies of humans, pequeninos, and hive queens had already been started on as many different planets. Instead there was only death hurtling toward them on a course that gave them no more than an hour to survive, and probably less, since the Little Doctor would no doubt be detonated some distance from the planet's surface.

It was pequeninos manning all the instruments now, since all but a handful of humans had fled to the starships. So it was that a pequenino cried out the news over the ansible to the starship at the descolada planet; and by chance it was Firequencher who was at the ansible terminal to hear his report. He immediately began keening, his high voice liquid with the music of grief.

When Miro and his sisters understood what had happened, he went at once to Jane. "They launched the Little Doctor," he said, shaking her gently.

He waited only a few moments. Her eyes came open. "I thought we had beaten them," she whispered. "Peter and Wang-mu, I mean. Congress voted to establish a quarantine and specifically denied the fleet the authority to launch the M.D. Device. And yet still they launched."

"You look so tired," said Miro.

"It takes everything I have," she said. "Over and over again. And now I lose them, the mothertrees. They're a part of myself, Miro. Remember how you felt when you lost control of your body, when you were crippled and slow? That's what will happen to me when the mothertrees are gone."

She wept.

"Stop it," said Miro. "Stop it right now. Get control of your emotions, Jane, you don't have time for this."

At once she freed herself from the straps that held her. "You're right," she said. "It's almost too strong to control, sometimes, this body."

"The Little Doctor has to be close to a planet for it to have any effect on it -- the field dissipates fairly quickly unless it has mass to sustain it. So we have time, Jane. Maybe an hour. Certainly more than half an hour."

"And in that time, what do you imagine I can do?"

"Pick the damn thing up," said Miro. "Push it Outside and don't bring it back!"

"And if it goes off Outside?" asked Jane. "If something that destructive is echoed and repeated out there? Besides, I can't pick things up that I haven't had a chance to examine. There's no one near it, no ansible connected to it, nothing to lead me to find it in the dead of space."

"I don't know," said Miro. "Ender would know. Damn that he's dead!"

"Well, technically speaking," said Jane. "But Peter hasn't found his way into any of his Ender memories. If he has them."

"What's to remember?" said Miro. "This has never happened before."

"It's true that it is Ender's aiúa. But how much of his brilliance was the aiúa, and how much was his body and brain? Remember that the genetic component was strong -- he was born in the first place because tests showed the original Peter and Valentine came so close to being the ideal military commander."

"Right," said Miro. "And now he's Peter."

"Not the real Peter," said Jane.

"Look, it's sort of Ender and it's sort of Peter. Can you find him? Can you talk to him?"

"When our aiúas meet, we don't talk. We sort of -- what, dance around each other. It's not like Human and the Hive Queen."

"Doesn't he still have the jewel in his ear?" asked Miro, touching his own.

"But what can he do? He's hours distant from his starship --"

"Jane," said Miro. "Try."

Peter looked stricken. Wang-mu touched his arm, leaned close to him. "What's wrong?"

"I thought we made it," he said. "When Congress voted to revoke the order to use the Little Doctor."

"What do you mean?" said Wang-mu, though she already knew what he meant.

"They launched it. The Lusitania Fleet disobeyed Congress. Who could have guessed? We have less than an hour before it detonates."

Tears leapt to Wang-mu's eyes, but she blinked them away. "At least the pequeninos and the hive queens will survive."

"But not the network of mothertrees," said Peter. "Starflight will end until Jane finds some other way to hold all that information in memory. The brothertrees are too stupid, the fathertrees have egos far too strong to share their capacity with her -- they would if they could, but they can't. You think Jane hasn't explored all the possibilities? Faster-than-light flight is over."

"Then this is our home," said Wang-mu.

"No it isn't," said Peter.

"We're hours away from the starship, Peter. We'll never get there before it detonates."

"What's the starship? A box with a lightswitch and a tight-sealing door. For all we know, we don't even need the box. I'm not staying here, Wang-mu."

"You're going back to Lusitania? Now?"

"If Jane can take me," he said. "And if she can't, then I guess this body goes back where it came from -- Outside."

"I'm going with you," said Wang-mu.

"I've had three thousand years of life," said Peter. "I don't actually remember them too well, but you deserve better than to disappear from the universe if Jane can't do this."

"I'm going with you," said Wang-mu, "so shut up. There's no time to waste."

"I don't even know what I'm going to do when I get there," said Peter.

"Yes you do," said Wang-mu.

"Oh? What is it I'm planning?"

"I have no idea."

"Well isn't that a problem? What good is this plan of mine if nobody knows it?"

"I mean that you are who you are," said Wang-mu. "You are the same will, the same tough resourceful boy who refused to be beaten down by anything they threw at him in Battle School or Command School. The boy who wouldn't let bullies destroy him -- no matter what it took to stop them. Naked with no weapons except the soap on his body, that's how Ender fought Bonzo Madrid in the bathroom at Battle School."

"You've been doing your research."

"Peter," said Wang-mu, "I don't expect you to be Ender, his personality, his memories, his training. But you are the one who can't be beaten down. You are the one who finds a way to destroy the enemy."

Peter shook his head. "I'm not him, I'm truly not."

"You told me back when we first met that you weren't yourself. Well, now you are. The whole of you, one man, intact in this body. Nothing is missing from you now. Nothing has been stolen from you, nothing is lost. Do you understand? Ender lived his life under the shadow of having caused xenocide. Now is the chance to be the opposite. To live the opposite life. To be the one who prevents it."

Peter closed his eyes for a moment. "Jane," he said. "Can you take us without a starship?" He listened for a moment. "She says the real question is, can we hold ourselves together. It's the ship she controls and moves around, plus our aiúas -- our own bodies are held together by us, not by her."

"Well, we do that all the time anyway, so it's fine," said Wang-mu.

"It's not fine," said Peter. "Jane says that inside the starship, we have visual clues, we have a sense of safety. Without those walls, without the light, in the deep emptiness, we can lose our place. We can forget where we are relative to our own body. We really have to hold on."

"Does it help if we're so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?" asked Wang-mu.

"I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes," said Peter.

"Then let's do it. That's us in spades."

Finding Peter's aiúa was easy for Jane. She had been inside his body, she had followed his aiúa -- or chased it -- until she knew it without searching. Wang-mu was a different case. Jane didn't know her all that well. The voyages she had taken her on before had been inside a starship whose location Jane already knew. But once she located Peter's -- Ender's -- aiúa, it turned out to be easier than she thought. For the two of them, Peter and Wang-mu, were philotically twined. There was a tiny web in the making between them. Even without the box around them, Jane could hold onto them, both at once, as if they were one entity.

And as she pushed them Outside she could feel how they clung all the more tightly to each other -- not just the bodies, but also the invisible links of the deepest self. Outside they went together, and together they came back In. Jane felt a stab of jealousy -- just as she had been jealous of Novinha, though without feeling the physical sensation of grief and rage that her body now brought to the emotion. But she knew it was absurd. It was Miro that Jane loved, as a woman loves a man. Ender was her father and her friend, and now he was barely Ender anymore. He was Peter, a man who remembered only the past few months of association with her. They were friends, but she had no claim on his heart.

The familiar aiúa of Ender Wiggin and the aiúa of Si Wang-mu were even more tightly bound together than ever when Jane set them down on the surface of Lusitania.

They stood in the midst of the starport. The last few hundred humans trying to escape were frantically trying to understand why the starships had stopped flying just when the M.D. Device was launched.

"The starships here are all full," Peter said.

"But we don't need a starship," said Wang-mu.

"Yes we do," said Peter. "Jane can't pick up the Little Doctor without one."

"Pick it up?" said Wang-mu. "Then you do have a plan."

"Didn't you say I did?" said Peter. "I can't make a liar out of you." He spoke then to Jane through the jewel. "Are you here again? Can you talk to me through the satellites here on -- all right. Good. Jane, I need you to empty one of these starships for me." He paused a moment. "Take the people to a colony world, wait for them to get out, and then bring it back over here by us, away from the crowd."

Instantly, one of the starships disappeared from the starport. A cheer arose from the crowds as everyone rushed to get into one of the remaining ships. Peter and Wang-mu waited, waited, knowing that with every minute that it took to unload that starship on the colony world, the Little Doctor came closer to detonation.

Then the wait was over. A boxy starship appeared beside them. Peter had the door open and both of them were inside before any of the other people at the starport even realized what was happening. A cry went up then, but Peter closed and sealed the door.

"We're inside," said Wang-mu. "But where are we going?"

"Jane is matching the velocity of the Little Doctor."

"I thought she couldn't pick it up without the starship."

"She's getting the tracking data from the satellite. She'll predict exactly where it will be at a certain moment, and then push us Outside and bring us back In at exactly that point, going exactly that speed."

"The Little Doctor will be inside this ship? With us?" asked Wang-mu.

"Stand over here by the wall," he said. "And hold on to me. We're going to be weightless. So far you've managed to visit four planets without ever having that experience."

"Have you had that experience before?"

Peter laughed, then shook his head. "Not in this body. But I guess at some level I remembered how to handle it because --"

At that moment they became weightless and in the air in front of them, not touching the sides or walls of the starship, was the mammoth missile that carried the Little Doctor. If its rockets had still been firing, they would have been incinerated. Instead it was hurtling on at the speed it had already achieved; it seemed to hover in the air because the starship was going exactly the same speed.

Peter hooked his feet under a bench bolted to the wall, then reached out his hands and touched the missile. "We need to bring it into contact with the floor," he said.

Wang-mu tried to reach for it, too, but immediately she came loose from the wall and started drifting. Intense nausea began immediately, as her body desperately searched for some direction that would serve as down.

"Think of the device as downward," said Peter urgently. "The device is down. You're falling toward the device."

She felt herself reorient. It helped. And as she drifted closer she was able to take hold of it and cling. She could only watch, grateful simply not to be vomiting, as Peter slowly, gently pushed the mass of the missile toward the floor. When they touched, the whole ship shuddered, for the mass of the missile was probably greater than the mass of the ship that now surrounded it.

"Okay?" Peter asked.

"I'm fine," said Wang-mu. Then she realized he had been talking to Jane, and his "okay" was part of that conversation.

"Jane is tracing the thing right now," said Peter. "She does it with the starships, too, before she ever takes them anywhere. It used to be analytical, by computer. Now her aiúa sort of tours the inner structure of the thing. She couldn't do it till it was in solid contact with something she knew: the starship. Us. When she gets a sense of the inner shape of the thing, she can hold it together Outside."

"We're just going to take it there and leave it?" asked Wang-mu.

"No," said Peter. "It would either hold together and detonate, or it would break apart, and either way, who knows what the damage would be out there? How many little copies of it would wink into existence?"

"None at all," said Wang-mu. "It takes an intelligence to make something new."

"What do you think this thing is made of? Just like every bit of your body, just like every rock and tree and cloud, it's all aiúas, and there'll be other unconnected aiúas out there desperate to belong, to imitate, to grow. No, this thing is evil, and we're not taking it out there."

"Where are we taking it?"

"Home to meet its sender," said Peter.

Admiral Lands stood glumly alone on the bridge of his flagship. He knew that Causo would have spread the word by now -- the launch of the Little Doctor had been illegal, mutinous; the Old Man would be court-martialed or worse when they got back to civilization. No one spoke to him; no one dared look at him. And Lands knew that he would have to relieve himself of command and turn the ship over to Causo, as his X.O., and the fleet to his second-in-command, Admiral Fukuda. Causo's gesture in not arresting him immediately was kind, but it was also useless. Knowing the truth of his disobedience, it would be impossible for the men and officers to follow him and unfair to ask it of them.

Lands turned to give the order, only to find his X.O. already heading toward him. "Sir," said Causo.

"I know," said Lands. "I relieve myself of command."

"No sir," said Causo. "Come with me, sir."

"What do you plan to do?" asked Lands.

"The cargo officer has reported something in the main hold of the ship."

"What is it?" asked Lands.

Causo just looked at him. Lands nodded, and they walked together from the bridge.

Jane had taken the box of the starship, not into the weapons bay of the flagship, for that could hold only the Little Doctor, not the box around it, but rather into the main hold, which was much more copious and which also lacked any practical means of relaunching the weapon.

Peter and Wang-mu stepped out of the starship and into the hold.

Then Jane took away the starship, leaving Peter, Wang-mu, and the Little Doctor behind.

Back on Lusitania, the starship would reappear. But no one would get into it. No one needed to. The M.D. Device was no longer heading for Lusitania. Now it was in the hold of the flagship of the Lusitania Fleet, traveling at a relativistic speed toward oblivion. The proximity sensor on the Little Doctor would not be triggered, of course, since it was nowhere near an object of planetary mass. But the timer was still chugging away.

"I hope they notice us soon," said Wang-mu.

"Oh, don't worry. We have whole minutes left."

"Has anyone seen us yet?"

"There was a fellow in that office," said Peter, pointing toward an open door. "He saw the starship, then he saw us, then he saw the Little Doctor. Now he's gone. I don't think we'll be alone much longer."

A door high up the front wall of the hold opened. Three men stepped onto the balcony that overlooked the hold on three sides.

"Hi," said Peter.

"Who the hell are you?" asked the one with the most ribbons and trim on his uniform.

"I'm betting you're Admiral Bobby Lands," said Peter. "And you must be the executive officer, Causo. And you must be the cargo officer, Lung."

"I said who the hell are you!" demanded Admiral Lands.

"I don't think your priorities are straight," said Peter. "I think there'll be plenty of time for us to discuss my identity after you deactivate the timer on this weapon that you so carelessly tossed out into space perilously close to a settled planet."

"If you think you can --"

But the Admiral didn't finish his sentence, because the X.O. was diving over the rail and jumping down to the deck of the cargo hold, where he immediately began twisting the fingerbolts that held the casing over the timer. "Causo," said Lands, "that can't be the --"

"It's the Little Doctor, all right, sir," said Causo.

"We launched it!" shouted the Admiral.

"But that must have been a mistake," said Peter. "An oversight. Because Starways Congress revoked your authorization to launch it."

"Who are you and how did you get here?"

Causo stood up, sweat dripping off his brow. "Sir, I am pleased to report that with more than two minutes' leeway, I have managed to prevent our ship from being blown into its constituent atoms."

"I'm glad to see that you didn't have any nonsense about requiring two separate keys and a secret combination to get that thing switched off," said Peter.

"No, it was designed to make turning it off pretty easy," said Causo. "There are directions on how to do it all over this thing. Now, turning it on -- that's hard."

"But somehow you managed to do it," said Peter.

"Where is your vehicle?" said the Admiral. He was climbing down a ladder to the deck. "How did you get here?"

"We came in a nice box, which we discarded when it was no longer needed," said Peter. "Haven't you gathered, yet, that we did not come to be interrogated by you?"

"Arrest these two," Lands ordered.

Causo looked at the admiral as if he were crazy. But the cargo officer, who had followed the admiral down the ladder, moved to obey, taking a couple of steps toward Peter and Wang-mu.

Instantly, they disappeared and reappeared up on the balcony where the three officers had come in. Of course it took a moment or two for the officers to find them. The cargo officer was merely baffled. "Sir," he said. "They were right here a second ago."

Causo, on the other hand, had already decided that something unusual was going on for which there was no appropriate military response. So he was responding according to another pattern. He crossed himself and began murmuring a prayer.

Lands, however, took a few steps backward, until he bumped into the Little Doctor. He clung to it, then suddenly pulled his hands away from it with loathing, perhaps even with pain, as if the surface of it had suddenly become scorching hot to his hands. "Oh God," he said. "I tried to do what Ender Wiggin would have done."

Wang-mu couldn't help it. She laughed aloud.

"That's odd," said Peter. "I was trying to do exactly the same thing."

"Oh God," said Lands again.

"Admiral Lands," said Peter, "I have a suggestion. Instead of spending a couple of months of realtime trying to turn this ship around and launch this thing illegally again, and instead of trying to establish a useless, demoralizing quarantine around Lusitania, why don't you just head on back to one of the Hundred Worlds -- Trondheim is close -- and in the meantime, make a report to Starways Congress. I even have some ideas about what the report might say, if you want to hear them."

In answer, Lands took out a laser pistol and pointed it at Peter.

Immediately, Peter and Wang-mu disappeared from where they were and reappeared behind Lands. Peter reached out and deftly disarmed the Admiral, unfortunately breaking two of his fingers in the process. "Sorry, I'm out of practice," said Peter. "I haven't had to use my martial arts skills in -- oh, thousands of years."

Lands sank to his knees, nursing his injured hand.

"Peter," Wang-mu said, "can we stop having Jane move us around like that? It's really disorienting."

Peter winked at her. "Want to hear my ideas about your report?" Peter asked the admiral.

Lands nodded.

"Me too," said Causo, who clearly foresaw that he would be commanding this ship for some time.

"I think you need to use your ansible to report that due to a malfunction, it was reported that a launch of the Little Doctor took place. But in fact, the launch was aborted in time, and to prevent further mishap, you had the M.D. Device moved to the main hold where you disarmed and disabled it. You get the part about disabling it?" Peter asked Causo.

Causo nodded. "I'll do it at once, sir." He turned to the cargo officer. "Get me a tool kit."

While the cargo officer went to pull a kit out of the storage bin on the wall, Peter continued. "Then you can report that you entered into contact with a native of Lusitania -- that's me -- who was able to satisfy you that the descolada virus was completely under control and that it no longer poses a threat to anybody."

"And how do I know that?" said Lands.

"Because I carry what's left of the virus, and if it weren't utterly killed, you would catch the descolada and die of it in a couple of days. Now, in addition to certifying that Lusitania poses no threat, your report should also state that the rebellion of Lusitania was no more than a misunderstanding, and that far from there being any human interference in the pequenino culture, the pequeninos exercised their free rights as sentient beings on their own planet to acquire information and technology from friendly visiting aliens -- namely, the human colony of Milagre. Since that time, many of the pequeninos have become very adept at much human science and technology, and at some reasonable time in the future they will send ambassadors to Starways Congress and hope that Congress will return the courtesy. Are you getting this?"

Lands nodded. Causo, working on taking apart the firing mechanism of the Little Doctor, grunted his assent.

"You may also report that the pequeninos have entered into alliance with yet another alien race, which contrary to various premature reports, was not completely extinguished in the notorious xenocide of Ender Wiggin. One cocooned hive queen survived, she being the source of all the information contained in the famous book The Hive Queen, whose accuracy is now proved to be unassailable. The Hive Queen of Lusitania, however, does not wish to exchange ambassadors with Starways Congress at the present time, and prefers instead that her interests be represented by the pequeninos."

"There are still buggers?" asked Lands.

"Ender Wiggin did not, technically speaking, commit xenocide after all. So if your launch of this missile, here, hadn't been aborted, you would have been the cause of the first xenocide, not the second one. And as it stands right now, however, there has never been a xenocide, though not for lack of trying both times, I must admit."

Tears coursed down Lands's face. "I didn't want to do it. I thought it was the right thing. I thought I had to do it to save --"

"Let's say you take that up with the ship's therapist at some later time," said Peter. "We still have one more point to address. We have a technology of starflight that I think the Hundred Worlds would like to have. You've already seen a demonstration of it. Usually, though, we prefer to do it inside our rather unstylish and boxy-looking starships. Still, it's a pretty good method and it lets us visit other worlds without losing even a second of our lives. I know that those who hold the keys to our method of starflight would be delighted, over the next few months, to instantaneously transport all relativistic starships currently in flight to their destinations."

"But there's a price for it," said Causo, nodding.

"Well, let's just say that there's a precondition," said Peter. "A key element of our instantaneous starflight includes a computer program that Starways Congress recently tried to kill. We found a substitute method, but it's not wholly adequate or satisfactory, and I think I can safely say that Starways Congress will never have the use of instantaneous starflight until all the ansibles in the Hundred Worlds are reconnected to all the computer networks on every world, without delays and without those pesky little snoop programs that keep yipping away like ineffectual little dogs."

"I don't have any authority to --"

"Admiral Lands, I didn't ask you to decide. I merely suggested the contents of the message you might want to send, by ansible, to Starways Congress. Immediately."

Lands looked away. "I don't feel well," he said. "I think I'm incapacitated. Executive Officer Causo, in front of Cargo Officer Lung, I hereby transfer command of this ship to you, and order you to notify Admiral Fukuda that he is now commander of this fleet."

"Won't work," said Peter. "The message I've described has to come from you. Fukuda isn't here and I don't intend to go repeat all of this to him. So you will make the report, and you will retain command of fleet and ship, and you will not weasel out of your responsibility. You made a hard choice a while back. You chose wrong, but at least you chose with courage and determination. Show the same courage now, Admiral. We haven't punished you here today, except for my unfortunate clumsiness with your fingers, for which I really am sorry. We're giving you a second chance. Take it, Admiral."

Lands looked at Peter and tears began to flow down his cheeks. "Why did you give me a second chance?"

"Because that's what Ender always wanted," said Peter. "And maybe by giving you a second chance, he'll get one, too."

Wang-mu took Peter's hand and squeezed it.

Then they disappeared from the cargo hold of the flagship and reappeared inside the control room of a shuttle orbiting the planet of the descoladores.

Wang-mu looked around at a room full of strangers. Unlike Admiral Lands's starship, this craft had no artificial gravity, but by holding onto Peter's hand Wang-mu kept from either fainting or throwing up. She had no idea who any of these people were, but she did know that Firequencher had to be a pequenino and the nameless worker at one of the computer terminals was a creature of the kind once hated and feared as the merciless buggers.

"Hi, Ela, Quara, Miro," said Peter. "This is Wang-mu."

Wang-mu would have been terrified, except that the others were so obviously terrified to see them.

Miro was the first to recover enough to speak. "Didn't you forget your spaceship?" he asked.

Wang-mu laughed.

"Hi, Royal Mother of the West," said Miro, using the name of Wang-mu's ancestor-of-the-heart, a god worshiped on the world of Path. "I've heard all about you from Jane," Miro added.

A woman drifted in through a corridor at one end of the control room.

"Val?" said Peter.

"No," answered the woman. "I'm Jane."

"Jane," whispered Wang-mu. "Malu's god."

"Malu's friend," said Jane. "As I am your friend, Wang-mu." She reached Peter and, taking him by both hands, looked him in the eye. "And your friend too, Peter. As I've always been your friend."