Children of the Mind

said the Hive Queen.

said the Hive Queen.

Plikt stood beside Ender's bed because she could not bear to sit, could not bear to move. He was going to die without uttering another word. She had followed him, had given up home and family to be near him, and what had he said to her? Yes, he let her be his shadow sometimes; yes, she was a silent observer of many of his conversations over the past few weeks and months. But when she tried to speak to him of things more personal, of deep memories, of what he meant by the things that he had done, he only shook his head and said -- kindly, because he was kind, but firmly also because he did not wish her to misunderstand -- said to her, "Plikt, I'm not a teacher anymore."

Yes you are, she wanted to say to him. Your books go on teaching even where you have never been. The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and already The Life of Human seems likely to take its place beside them. How can you say you're through with teaching, when there are other books to write, other deaths to speak? You have spoken the deaths of killers and saints, aliens, and once the death of a whole city swallowed up in a cataclysmic volcano. But in telling these stories of others, where was your story, Andrew Wiggin? How can I speak your death if you never explained it to me?

Or is this your last secret -- that you never knew any more about the people whose deaths you spoke than I know about you today. You force me to invent, to guess, to wonder, to imagine -- is this what you also did? Discover the most widely believed story, then find an alternate explanation that made sense to others and had meaning and the power to transform, and then tell that tale -- even though it was also a fiction, and no truer than the story everyone believed? Is that what I must say as I speak the death of the Speaker for the Dead? His gift was not to discover truth, it was to invent it; he did not unfold, unknot, untwist the lives of the dead, he created them. And so I create his. His sister says he died because he tried to follow his wife with perfect loyalty, into the life of peace and seclusion that she hungered for; but the very peace of that life killed him, for his aiúa was drawn into the lives of the strange children that sprang fullgrown from his mind, and his old body, despite all the years most likely left in it, was discarded because he hadn't the time to pay enough attention to keep the thing alive.

He wouldn't leave his wife or let her leave him; so he was bored to death and hurt her worse by staying with her than he ever would have done by letting her go without him.

There, is that brutal enough, Ender? He wiped out the hive queens of dozens of worlds, leaving only one survivor of that great and ancient people. He also brought her back to life. Does saving the last of your victims atone for having slain the others? He did not mean to do it, that is his defense; but dead is dead, and when the life is cut off in its prime, does the aiúa say, Ah, but the child who killed me, he thought that he was playing a game, so my death counts less, it weighs less? No, Ender himself would have said, no, the death weighs the same, and I carry that weight on my shoulders. No one has more blood on their hands than I have; so I will speak with brutal truth of the lives of those who died without innocence, and show you that even these can be understood. But he was wrong, they can't be understood, none of them are understood, speaking for the dead is only effective because the dead are silent and can't correct our mistakes. Ender is dead and he can't correct my mistakes, so some of you will think that I haven't made any, you will think that I tell the truth about him but the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they tell us is true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

Plikt stood and practiced speaking desperately, hopelessly beside Ender's coffin, though he was not yet in a coffin, he was still lying on a bed and air was pumping through a clear mask into his mouth and glucose solution into his veins and he was not yet dead. Just silent.

"A word," she whispered. "A word from you."

Ender's lips moved.

Plikt should have called the others at once. Novinha, who was exhausted with weeping -- she was only just outside the room. And Valentine, his sister; Ela, Olhado, Grego, Quara, four of his adopted children; and many others, in and out of the receiving room, wanting a glimpse of him, a word, to touch his hand. If they could send word to other worlds, how they would mourn, the people who remembered his speakings over the three thousand years of his journeys world to world. If they could proclaim his true identity -- Speaker for the Dead, author of the two -- no, the three -- great books of Speaking; and Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide, both selves in the same frail flesh -- oh, what shock waves would spread throughout the human universe.

Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.

His lips moved.

"Peter," he whispered.

He was silent again.

What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter, for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message? What should Plikt say about this word?

She moved from beside his bed. Walked to the door, opened it. "I'm sorry," she said quietly, facing a room full of people who had only rarely heard her speak, and some of whom had never heard a word from her. "He spoke before I could call anyone else to hear. But he might speak again."

"What did he say?" said Novinha, rising to her feet.

"A name is all," said Plikt. "He said 'Peter.'"

"He calls for the abomination he brought back from space, and not for me!" said Novinha. But it was the drugs the doctors had given her, that was what spoke, that was what wept.

"I think he calls for our dead brother," said Old Valentine. "Novinha, do you want to come inside?"

"Why?" Novinha said. "He hasn't called for me, he called for him."

"He's not conscious," said Plikt.

"You see, Mother?" said Ela. "He isn't calling for anyone, he's just speaking out of some dream. But it's something, he said something, and isn't that a good sign?"

Still Novinha refused to go into the room. So it turned out to be Valentine and Plikt and four of his adopted children who stood around his bed when his eyes opened.

"Novinha," he said.

"She's grieving outside," said Valentine. "Drugged to the gills, I'm afraid."

"That's all right," said Ender. "What happened? I take it I'm sick."

"More or less," said Ela. "'Inattentive' is the more exact description of the cause of your condition, as best we can tell."

"You mean I had some kind of accident?"

"I mean you're apparently paying too much attention to what's going on on a couple of other planets, and so your body here is on the edge of self-destruction. What I see under the microscopes are cells sluggishly trying to reconstruct breaks in their walls. You're dying by bits, all over your body."

"Sorry to be so much trouble," said Ender.

For a moment they thought this was the beginning of a conversation, the start of the process of healing. But having said this little bit, Ender closed his eyes and he was asleep again, the instruments unchanged from what they had said before he said a word.

Oh wonderful, thought Plikt. I beg him for a word, he gives it to me, and I know less now than I did before. We spent his few waking moments telling him what was going on instead of asking him the questions that we may never have the chance to ask again. Why do we all get stupider when we crowd around the brink of death?

But still she stood there, watching, waiting, as the others, in ones or twos, gave up and left the room again. Valentine came to her last of all and touched her arm. "Plikt, you can't stay here forever."

"I can stay as long as he can," she said.

Valentine looked into her eyes and must have seen something there that made her give up trying to persuade her. She left, and again Plikt was alone with the collapsing body of the man whose life was the center of her own.

Miro hardly knew whether to be glad or frightened by the change in Young Valentine since they had learned the true purpose of their search for new worlds. Where she had once been softspoken, even diffident, now she could hardly keep from interrupting Miro every time he spoke. The moment she thought she understood what he was going to say, she'd start answering -- and when he pointed out that he was really saying something else, she'd answer that almost before he could finish his explanation. Miro knew that he was probably being oversensitive -- he had spent a long time with speech so impaired that almost everyone interrupted him, and so he prickled at the slightest affront along those lines. And it wasn't that he thought there was any malice in it. Val was simply ... on. Every moment she was awake -- and she hardly seemed to sleep, at least Miro almost never saw her sleeping. Nor was she willing to go home between planets. "There's a deadline," she said. "They could give the signal to shut down the ansible networks any day now. We don't have time for needless rest."

Miro wanted to answer: Define "needless." He certainly needed more than he was getting, but when he said so, she merely waved him off and said, "Sleep if you want, I'll cover." And so he'd grab a nap and wake up to find that she and Jane had already eliminated three more planets -- two of which, however, bore the earmarks of descolada-like trauma within the past thousand years. "Getting closer," Val would say, and then launch into interesting facts about the data until she'd interrupt herself -- she was democratic about this, interrupting herself as easily as she interrupted him -- to deal with the data from a new planet.

Now, after only a day of this, Miro had virtually given up speaking. Val was so focused on their work that she spoke of nothing else; and on that subject, there was little Miro needed to say, except periodically to relay some information from Jane that came through his earpiece instead of over the open computers of the ship. His near silence, though, gave him time to think. This is what I asked Ender for, he realized. But Ender couldn't do it consciously. His aiúa does what it does because of Ender's deepest needs and desires, not because of his conscious decisions. So he couldn't give his attention to Val; but Val's work could become so exciting that Ender couldn't bear to concentrate on anything else.

Miro wondered: How much of this did Jane understand in advance?

And because he couldn't very well discuss it with Val, he subvocalized his questions so Jane could hear. "Did you reveal our mission to us now so that Ender would give his attention to Val? Or did you withhold it up until now so that Ender wouldn't?"

"I don't make that kind of plan," said Jane into his ear. "I have other things on my mind."

"But it's good for you, isn't it. Val's body isn't in any danger of withering away now."

"Don't be an ass, Miro. Nobody likes you when you're an ass."

"Nobody likes me anyway," he said, silently but cheerfully. "You couldn't have hidden out in her body if it was a pile of dust."

"I can't slip into it if Ender's there, utterly engrossed in what she's doing, either, can I," said Jane.

"Is he utterly engrossed?"

"Apparently so," said Jane. "His own body is falling apart. And more rapidly than Val's was."

It took Miro a moment to understand this. "You mean he's dying?"

"I mean Val is very much alive," said Jane.

"Don't you love Ender anymore?" asked Miro. "Don't you care?"

"If Ender doesn't care about his own life," said Jane, "why should I? We're both doing our best to set a very messy situation to rights. It's killing me, it's killing him. It very nearly killed you, and if we fail a whole lot of other people will be killed, too."

"You're a cold one," said Miro.

"Just a bunch of blips between the stars, that's what I am," said Jane.

"Merda de bode," said Miro. "What's this mood you're in?"

"I don't have feelings," said Jane. "I'm a computer program."

"We all know you have an aiúa of your own. As much of a soul, if that's what you want to call it, as anyone else."

"People with souls can't be switched off by unplugging a few machines."

"Come on, they're going to have to shut down billions of computers and thousands of ansibles all at once in order to do you in. I'd say that's pretty impressive. One bullet would do for me. An overgrown electric fence almost polished me off."

"I suppose I just wanted to die with some kind of splashing sound or cooking smell or something," said Jane. "If I only had a heart. You probably don't know that song."

"We grew up on classic videos," said Miro. "It drowned out a lot of other unpleasantness at home. You've got the brain and the nerve. I think you've got the heart."

"What I don't have is the ruby slippers. I know there's no place like home, but I can't get there," said Jane.

"Because Ender's using her body so intensely?" asked Miro.

"I'm not as set on using Val's body as you were to have me do it," said Jane. "Peter's will do as well. Even Ender's, as long as he's not using it. I'm not actually female. That was merely my choice of identity to get close to Ender. He had problems bonding readily with men. The dilemma I have is that even if Ender would let go of one of these bodies for me to use it, I don't know how to get there. I don't know where my aiúa is any more than you do. Can you put your aiúa where you want it? Where is it now?"

"But the Hive Queen is trying to find you. She can do that -- her people made you."

"Yes, she and her daughters and the fathertrees, they're building some kind of web, but it's never been done before -- catching something already alive and leading it into a body that is already owned by someone else's aiúa. It's not going to work, I'm going to die, but I'm dammed if I'm going to let those bastards who made the descolada come along after I'm dead and wipe out all the other sentient species I've known. Humans will pull the plug on me, yes, thinking I'm just a computer program run amok, but that doesn't mean I want someone else to pull the plug on humanity. Nor on the hive queens. Nor on the pequeninos. If we're going to stop them, we have to do it before I'm dead. Or at least I have to get you and Val there so you can do something without me."

"If we're there when you die, we'll never come home again."

"Bad luck, eh?"

"So we're a suicide mission."

"Life is a suicide mission, Miro. Check it out -- basic philosophy course. You spend your life running out of fuel and when you're finally out, you croak."

"You sound like Mother now," said Miro.

"Oh, no," said Jane. "I'm taking it with good humor. Your mother always thought her doom was tragic."

Miro was readying some retort when Val's voice interrupted his colloquy with Jane.

"I hate it when you do that!" she cried.

"Do what?" said Miro, wondering what she had just been saying before this outburst.

"Tune me out and talk to her."

"To Jane? I always talk to Jane."

"But you used to listen to me sometimes," said Val.

"Well, Val, you used to listen to me, too, but that's all changed now, apparently."

Val flung herself out of her chair and stormed over to loom above him. "Is that how it is? The woman you loved was the quiet one, the shy one, the one who always let you dominate every conversation. Now that I'm excited, now that I feel like I'm really myself, well, that's not the woman you wanted, is that it?"

"It's not about preferring quiet women or --"

"No, we couldn't admit to anything so recidivist as that, could we! No, we have to proclaim ourselves to be perfectly virtuous and --"

Miro rose to his feet -- not easy, with her so close to his chair -- and shouted right back in her face. "It's about being able to finish a sentence now and then!"

"And how many of my sentences did you --"

"Right, turn it right back on --"

"You wanted to have me dispossessed from my own life and put somebody else in --"

"Oh, is that what this is about? Well, be relieved, Val, Jane says --"

"Jane says, Jane says! You said you loved me, but no woman can compete with some bitch that's always there in your ear, hanging on every word you say and --"

"Now you sound like my mother!" shouted Miro. "Nossa Senhora, I don't know why Ender followed her into the monastery, she was always griping about how he loved Jane more than he loved her --"

"Well at least he tried to love a woman more than that overgrown appointment book!"

They stood there, face-to-face-or almost so, Miro being somewhat taller, but with his knees bent because he hadn't quite been able to get all the way out of his chair because she was standing so close and now with her breath in his face, the warmth of her body just a few centimeters away, he thought, This is the moment when ...

And then he said it aloud before he had even finished forming the thought, "This is the moment in all the videos when the couple that were screaming at each other suddenly look into each other's eyes and embrace each other and laugh at their anger and then kiss each other."

"Yeah, well, that's the videos," said Val. "If you lay a hand on me I'll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it'll take a heart surgeon to get them out."

She whirled around and returned to her chair.

Miro eased himself back into his own seat and said -- out loud this time, but softly enough that Val would know he wasn't talking to her -- "Now, Jane, where were we before the tornado struck."

Jane's answer was drawled out slowly; Miro recognized it as a mannerism of Ender's when he was being ironically subtle. "You can see now why I might have problems getting the use of any part of her body."

"Yeah, well, I'm having the same problem," said Miro silently, but he laughed aloud, a little chuckle that he knew would drive Val crazy. And from the way she stiffened but did not respond at all he knew that it was working.

"I don't need you two fighting," said Jane mildly. "I need you working together. Because you may have to work this out without me."

"As far as I can tell," said Miro, "you and Val have been working things out without me."

"Val has been working things out because she's so full of ... whatever she's full of right now."

"Ender is what she's full of," said Miro.

Val turned around in her chair and looked at him. "Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?"

"Ender is dying," said Miro. "Or did you already know?"

"Jane mentioned he seemed to be inattentive."

"Dying," said Miro again.

"I think it speaks very clearly about the nature of men," said Val, "that you and Ender both claim to love a flesh-and-blood woman, but in fact you can't give that woman even a serious fraction of your attention."

"Yes, well, you have my whole attention, Val," said Miro. "And as for Ender, if he's not paying attention to Mother it's because he's paying attention to you."

"To my work, you mean. To the task at hand. Not to me."

"Well, that's all you've been paying attention to, except when you took a break to rip on me about how I'm talking to Jane and not listening to you."

"That's right," said Val. "You think I don't see what's been going on with me this past day? How all of a sudden I can't shut up about things, I'm so intense I can't sleep, how I -- Ender's supposedly been the real me all along, only he left me alone till now and that was fine because what he's doing now is terrifying. Don't you see that I'm frightened? It's too much. It's more than I can stand. I can't hold that much energy inside me."

"So talk about it instead of screaming at me," said Miro.

"But you weren't listening. I was trying to and you were just subvocalizing to Jane and shutting me out."

"Because I was sick of hearing endless streams of data and analysis that I could just as easily catch in summary on the computer. How was I supposed to know that you'd take a break in your monologue and start talking about something human?"

"Everything's bigger than life right now and I don't have any experience with this. In case you forgot, I haven't been alive very long. I don't know things. There are a lot of things I don't know. I don't know why I care so much about you, for instance. You're the one trying to get me replaced as landlord of this body. You're the one who tunes me out or takes me over but I don't want that, Miro. I really need a friend right now."

"So do I," said Miro.

"But I don't know how to do it," said Val.

"I, on the other hand, know perfectly well how to do it," said Miro. "But the only other time it happened, I fell in love with her and then she turned out to be my half-sister because her father was secretly my mother's lover, and the man I had thought was my father turned out to be sterile because he was dying of some internally rotting disease. So you can see how I might be hesitant."

"Valentine was your friend. She is still."

"Yes," said Miro. "Yes, I was forgetting. I've had two friends."

"And Ender," said Val.

"Three," said Miro. "And my sister Ela makes four. And Human was my friend, so it's five."

"See? I think that makes you qualified to show me how to have a friend."

"To make a friend," said Miro, echoing his mother's intonations, "you have to be one."

"Miro," said Val. "I'm scared."

"Of what?"

"Of this world we're looking for, what we'll find there. Of what's going to happen to me if Ender dies. Or if Jane takes over as my -- what, my inner light, my puppeteer. Of what it will feel like if you don't like me anymore."

"What if I promise to like you no matter what?"

"You can't make a promise like that."

"Okay, if I wake up to find you strangling me or smothering me, then I'll stop liking you."

"What about drowning?"

"No, I can't open my eyes under water, so I'd never know it was you."

They both laughed.

"This is the time in the videos," said Val, "when the hero and the heroine laugh and then hold each other."

Jane's voice interrupted from both their computer terminals. "Sorry to break up a tender moment, but we've got a new world here and there are electromagnetic messages being relayed between the planet surface and orbiting artificial objects."

Immediately they both turned to their terminals and looked at the data Jane was throwing at them.

"It doesn't take any close analysis," said Val. "This one is hopping with technology. If it isn't the descolada planet, I'm betting they know where it is."

"What I'm worried about is, have they detected us and what are they going to do about it? If they've got the technology to put things in space, they might have the technology to shoot things out of space, too."

"I'm watching for incoming objects," said Jane.

"Let's see," said Val, "if any of these EM-waves are carrying anything that looks like language."

"Datastreams," said Jane. "I'm analyzing it for binary patterns. But you know that decoding computerized language requires three or four levels of decoding instead of the normal two and it isn't easy."

"I thought binary was simpler than spoken languages," said Miro.

"It is, when it's programs and numerical data," said Jane. "But what if it's digitized visuals? How long is a line if it's a rasterized display? How much of a transmission is header material? How much is error-correction data? How much of it is a binary representation of a written representation of a spoken language? What if it's further encrypted beyond that, to avoid interception? I have no idea what machine is producing the code and no idea what machine is receiving it. So using most of my capacity to work on the problem I'm having a very hard time except that this one --"

A diagram appeared on the front page of the display.

"-- I think this one is a representation of a genetic molecule."

"A genetic molecule?"

"Similar to the descolada," said Jane. "That is, similar in the way it's different from Earth and native Lusitanian genetic molecules. Do you think this is a plausible decoding of this?"

A mass of binary digits flashed into the air above their terminals. In a moment it resolved itself into hexadecimal notation. Then into a rasterized image that resembled static interference more than any kind of coherent picture.

"It doesn't scan well this way. But as a set of vector instructions, I find that it consistently gives me results like this."

And now picture after picture of genetic molecules appeared on the screen.

"Why would anyone be transmitting genetic information?" said Val.

"Maybe it's a kind of language," said Miro.

"Who could read a language like that?" asked Val.

"Maybe the kind of people who could create the descolada," said Miro.

"You mean they talk by manipulating genes?" said Val.

"Maybe they smell genes," said Miro. "Only they do it with incredible articulation. Subtlety and shade of meaning. Then when they started sending people up into space, they had to talk to them so they sent pictures and then from the pictures they reconstruct the message and, um, smell it."

"That's the most ass-backwards explanation I've ever heard," said Val.

"Well," said Miro, "like you said, you haven't lived very long. There are a lot of ass-backwards explanations in the world, and I doubt I hit the jackpot with that one."

"It's probably an experiment they're doing, sending data back and forth," said Val. "Not all the communications make up diagrams do they, Jane?"

"Oh, no, I'm sorry if I gave that impression. This was just a small class of data streams that I was able to decode in a meaningful way. There's this stuff that seems to me to be analog rather than digital, and if I make it into sound it's like this."

They heard the computers emit a series of staticky screeches and yips.

"Or if I translate it into bursts of light, it looks like this."

Whereupon their terminals danced with light, pulsing and shifting colors seemingly randomly.

"Who knows what an alien language looks or sounds like?" said Jane.

"I can see this is going to be difficult," said Miro.

"They do have some pretty good math skills," said Jane. "The math stuff is easy to catch and I see some glimpses that imply they work at a high level."

"Just an idle question, Jane. If you weren't with us, how long would it have taken us to analyze the data and get the results you've gotten so far? If we were using just the ship's computers?"

"Well, if you had to program them for every --"

"No, no, just assuming they had good software," said Miro.

"Somewhere upwards of seven human generations," said Jane.

"Seven generations?"

"Of course, you'd never try to do it with just two untrained people and two computers without any useful programs," said Jane. "You'd put hundreds of people on the project and then it would only take you a few years."

"And you expect us to carry on this work when they pull the plug on you?"

"I'm hoping to finish the translation problem before I'm toast," said Jane. "So shut up and let me concentrate for a minute."

Grace Drinker was too busy to see Wang-mu and Peter. Well, actually she did see them, as she shambled from one room to another of her house of sticks and mats. She even waved. But her son went right on explaining how she wasn't here right now but she would be back later if they wanted to wait, and as long as they were waiting, why not have dinner with the family? It was hard even to be annoyed when the lie was so obvious and the hospitality so generous.

Dinner went a long way toward explaining why Samoans tended to be so large in every dimension. They had to evolve such great size because smaller Samoans must simply have exploded after lunch. They could never have handled dinners. The fruit, the fish, the taro, the sweet potatoes, the fish again, more fruit -- Peter and Wang-mu. had thought they were well fed in the resort, but now they realized that the hotel chef was a second-rater compared to what went on in Grace Drinker's house.

She had a husband, a man of astonishing appetite and heartiness who laughed whenever he wasn't chewing or talking, and sometimes even then. He seemed to get a kick out of telling these papalagi visitors what different names meant. "My wife's name, now, it really means, 'Protector of Drunken People.'"

"It does not," said his son. "It means 'One Who Puts Things in Proper Order.'"

"For drinking!" cried the father.

"The last name has nothing to do with the first name." The son was getting annoyed now. "Not everything has a deep meaning."

"Children are so easily embarrassed," said the father. "Ashamed. Must put the best face on everything. The holy island, its name is really 'Ata Atua, which means, 'Laugh, God!'"

"Then it would be pronounced 'Atatua instead of Atatua," the son corrected again. "Shadow of the God, that's what the name really means, if it means anything besides just the holy island."

"My son is a literalist," said the father. "Everything so serious. Can't hear a joke when God shouts it in his ear."

"It's you always shouting jokes in my ear, Father," said the son with a smile. "How could I possibly hear the jokes of the God?"

This was the only time the father didn't laugh. "My son has a dead ear for humor. He thought that was a joke."

Wang-mu looked at Peter, who was smiling as if he understood what was so funny with these people all the time. She wondered if he had even noticed that no one had introduced these males, except by their relationship to Grace Drinker. Had they no names?

Never mind, the food is good, and even if you don't get Samoan humor, their laughter and good spirits were so contagious that it was impossible not to feel happy and at ease in their company.

"Do you think we have enough?" asked the father, when his daughter brought in the last fish, a large pink-fleshed sea creature garnished with something that glistened -- Wang-mu's first thought was a sugar glaze, but who would do that to a fish?

At once his children answered him, as if it were a ritual in the family: "Ua lava!"

The name of a philosophy? Or just Samoan slang for "enough already"? Or both at once?

Only when the last fish was half eaten did Grace Drinker herself come in, making no apology for not having spoken to them when she passed them more than two hours before. A breeze off the sea was cooling down the open-walled room, and, outside, light rain fell in fits and starts as the sun kept trying and failing to sink into the water to the west. Grace sat at the low table, directly between Peter and Wang-mu, who had thought they were sitting next to each other with no room for another person, especially not a person of such ample surface area as Grace. But somehow there was room, if not when she began to sit, then certainly by the time she finished the process, and once her greetings were done, she managed what the family had not -- she polished off the last fish and ended up licking her fingers and laughing just as maniacally as her husband at all the jokes he told.

And then, suddenly, Grace leaned over to Wang-mu and said, quite seriously, "All right, Chinese girl, what's your scam?"

"Scam?" asked Wang-mu.

"You mean I have to get the confession from the white boy? They train these boys to lie, you know. If you're white they don't let you grow up to adulthood if you haven't mastered the art of pretending to say one thing while actually intending to do another."

Peter was appalled.

Suddenly the whole family erupted in laughter. "Bad hospitality!" cried Grace's husband. "Did you see their faces? They thought she meant it!"

"But I do mean it," said Grace. "You both intend to lie to me. Arrived on a starship yesterday? From Moskva?" Suddenly she burst into what sounded like pretty convincing Russian, perhaps of the dialect spoken on Moskva.

Wang-mu had no idea how to respond. But she didn't have to. Peter was the one with Jane in his ear, and he immediately answered her, "I hope to learn Samoan while I'm assigned here on Pacifica. I won't accomplish that by babbling in Russian, however you might try to goad me with cruel references to my countrymen's amorous proclivities and lack of pulchritude."

Grace laughed. "You see, Chinese girl?" she said. "Lie lie lie. And so lofty-sounding as he does it. Of course he has that jewel in his ear to help him. Tell the truth, neither one of you speaks a lick of Russian."

Peter looked grim and vaguely sick. Wang-mu put him out of his misery -- though at the risk of infuriating him. "Of course it's a lie," said Wang-mu. "The truth is simply too unbelievable."

"But the truth is the only thing worth believing, isn't it?" asked Grace's son.

"If you can know it," said Wang-mu. "But if you won't believe the truth, someone has to help you come up with plausible lies, don't they?"

"I can make up my own," said Grace. "Day before yesterday a white boy and a Chinese girl visited my friend Aimaina Hikari on a world at least twenty years' voyage away. They told him things that disturbed his entire equilibrium so he could hardly function. Today a white boy and a Chinese girl, telling different lies from the ones told by his pair, of course, but nevertheless lying their lips off, these two come to me wanting to get my help or permission or advice about seeing Malu --"

"Malu means 'being calm,'" added Grace's husband cheerfully.

"Are you still awake?" asked Grace. "Weren't you hungry? Didn't you eat?"

"I'm full but fascinated," answered her husband. "Go on, expose them!"

"I want to know who you are and how you got here," said Grace.

"That would be very hard to explain," said Peter.

"We've got minutes and minutes," said Grace. "Millions of them, really. You're the ones who seem to have only a few. So much hurry that you jump the gulf from star to star overnight. It strains credulity, of course, since lightspeed is supposed to be an insuperable barrier, but then, not believing you're the same people my friend saw on the planet Divine Wind also strains credulity, so there we are. Supposing that you really can travel faster than light, what does that tell us about where you're from? Aimaina takes it for granted that you were sent to him by the gods, more specifically by his ancestors, and he may be right, it's in the nature of gods to be unpredictable and suddenly do things they've never done before. Myself, though, I find that rational explanations always work out better, especially in papers I hope to get published. So the rational explanation is that you come from a real world, not from some heavenly never-never land. And since you can hop from world to world in a moment or a day, you could come from anywhere. But my family and I think you come from Lusitania."

"Well, I don't," said Wang-mu.

"And I'm originally from Earth," said Peter. "If I'm from anywhere."

"Aimaina thinks you come from Outside," said Grace, and for a moment Wang-mu thought the woman must have figured out how Peter came into existence. But then she realized that Grace's words had a theological meaning, not a literal one. "The land of the gods. But Malu said he's never seen you there, or if he did he didn't know it was you. So that leaves me right back where I started. You're lying about everything, so what good does it do to ask you questions?"

"I told you the truth," said Wang-mu. "I come from Path. And Peter's origins, so far as they can be traced to any planet, are on Earth. But the vehicle we came in -- that originated on Lusitania."

Peter's face went white. She knew he was thinking, Why not just noose ourselves up and hand them the loose ends of the rope? But Wang-mu had to use her own judgment, and in her judgment they were in no danger from Grace Drinker or her family. Indeed, if she meant to turn them in to the authorities, wouldn't she already have done so?

Grace looked Wang-mu in the eyes and said nothing for a long while. Then: "Good fish, isn't it?"

"I wondered what the glaze was. Is there sugar in it?"

"Honey and a couple of herbs and actually some pig fat. I hope you aren't some rare combination of Chinese and Jew or Muslim, because if you are you're now ritually unclean and I would feel really bad about that, it's so much trouble getting purified again, or so I'm told, it certainly is in our culture."

Peter, heartened now by Grace's lack of concern with their miraculous spaceship, tried to get them back on the subject. "So you'll let us see Malu?"

"Malu decides who sees Malu, and he says you're the ones who'll decide, but that's just him being enigmatic."

"Gnomic," said Wang-mu. Peter winced.

"Not really, not in the sense of being obscure. Malu means to be perfectly clear and for him spiritual things aren't mystical at all, they're just a part of life. I myself have never actually walked with the dead or heard the heroes sing their own songs or had a vision of the creation, but I have no doubt that Malu has."

"I thought you were a scholar," said Peter.

"If you want to talk to the scholar Grace Drinker," she said, "read my papers and take a class. I thought you wanted to talk to me."

"We do," said Wang-mu quickly. "Peter's in a hurry. We have several deadlines."

"The Lusitania Fleet, now, I imagine that's one of them. But not quite so urgent as another. The computer shut-down that's been ordered.

Peter stiffened. "The order has been given?"

"Oh, it was given weeks ago," said Grace, looking puzzled. Then: "Oh, you poor dear, I don't mean the actual go-ahead. I mean the order telling us how to prepare. You surely knew about that one."

Peter nodded and relaxed, glum again.

"I think you want to talk to Malu before the ansible connections are shut down. Though why would that matter?" she said, thinking aloud. "After all, if you can travel faster than light, you could simply go and deliver your message yourself. Unless --"

Her son offered a suggestion: "They have to deliver their message to a lot of different worlds."

"Or a lot of different gods!" cried his father, who then laughed uproariously at what certainly seemed to Wang-mu to be a feeble joke.

"Or," said the daughter, who was now lying down beside the table, occasionally belching as she let the enormous dinner digest. "Or, they need the ansible connections in order to do their fast travel trick."

"Or," said Grace, looking at Peter, who had instinctively moved his hand to touch the jewel in his ear, "you're connected to the very virus that we're shutting down all the computers in order to eliminate, and that has something to do with your faster-than-light travel."

"It's not a virus," said Wang-mu. "It's a person. A living entity. And you're going to help Congress kill her, even though she's the only one of her kind and she's never harmed anybody."

"It makes them nervous when something -- or, if you prefer, somebody -- makes their fleet disappear."

"It's still there," said Wang-mu.

"Let's not fight," said Grace. "Let's just say that now that I've found you willing to tell the truth, perhaps it will be worthwhile for Malu to take the time to let you hear it."

"He has the truth?" asked Peter.

"No," said Grace, "but he knows where it's kept and he can get a glimpse now and then and tell us what he saw. I think that's still pretty good."

"And we can see him?"

"You'd have to spend a week purifying yourselves before you can set foot on Atatua --"

"Impure feet tickling the Gods!" cried her husband, laughing uproariously. "That's why they call it the Island of the Laughing God!"

Peter shifted uncomfortably.

"Don't you like my husband's jokes?" asked Grace.

"No, I think -- I mean, they're simply not -- I don't get them, that's all."

"Well, that's because they're not very funny," said Grace. "But my husband is cheerfully determined to keep laughing through all this so he doesn't get angry at you and kill you with his bare hands."

Wang-mu gasped, for she knew at once that this was true; without realizing it, she had been aware all along of the rage seething under the huge man's laughter, and when she looked at his calloused, massive hands, she realized that he could surely tear her apart without even breaking into a sweat.

"Why would you threaten us with death?" asked Peter, acting more belligerent than Wang-mu wished.

"The opposite!" said Grace. "I tell you that my husband is determined not to let rage at your audacity and blasphemy control his behavior. To try to visit Atatua without even taking the trouble to learn that letting you set foot there, uncleansed and uninvited, would shame us and filthy us as a people for a hundred generations -- I think he's doing rather well not to have taken a blood oath against you."

"We didn't know," said Wang-mu.

"He knew," said Grace. "Because he's got the all-hearing ear."

Peter blushed. "I hear what she says to me," he said, "but I can't hear what she chooses not to say."

"So... you were being led. And Aimaina is right, you do serve a higher being. Voluntarily? Or are you being coerced?"

"That's a stupid question, Mama," said her daughter, belching again. "If they are coerced, how could they possibly tell you?"

"People can say as much by what they don't say," answered Grace, "which you'd know if you'd sit up and look at their eloquent faces, these lying visitors from other planets."

"She's not a higher being," said Wang-mu. "Not like you mean it. Not a god. Though she does have a lot of control and she knows a lot of things. But she's not omnipotent or anything, and she doesn't know everything, and sometimes she's even wrong, and I'm not sure she's always good, either, so we can't really call her a god because she's not perfect."

Grace shook her head. "I wasn't talking about some Platonic god, some ethereal perfection that can never be understood, only apprehended. Not some Nicene paradoxical being whose existence is perpetually contradicted by his nonexistence. Your higher being, this jewel-friend your partner wears like a parasite -- except who is sucking life from whom, eh? -- she could well be a god in the sense that we Samoans use the word. You might be her hero servants. You might be her incarnation, for all I know."

"But you're a scholar," said Wang-mu. "Like my teacher Han Fei-tzu, who discovered that what we used to call gods were really just genetically induced obsessions that we interpreted in such a way as to maintain our obedience to --"

"Just because your gods don't exist doesn't mean mine don't," said Grace.

"She must have tromped through acres of dead gods just to get here!" cried Grace's husband, laughing uproariously. Only now that Wang-mu knew what his laughter really meant, his laugh filled her with fear.

Grace reached out and laid a huge, heavy arm across her slight shoulder. "Don't worry," she said. "My husband is a civilized man and he's never killed anybody."

"Not for lack of trying!" he bellowed. "No, that was a joke!" He almost wept with laughter.

"You can't go see Malu," said Grace, "because we would have to purify you and I don't think you're ready to make the promises you'd have to make -- and I especially don't believe you're ready to make them and actually mean what you say. And those are promises that must be kept. So Malu is coming here. He's being rowed to this island right now -- no motors for him, so I want you to know exactly how many people are sweating for hours and hours just so you can have your chat with him. I just want to tell you this -- you are being given an extraordinary honor, and I urge you not to look down your noses at him and listen to him with some sort of academic or scientific superciliousness. I've met a lot of famous people, some of them even rather smart, but this is the wisest man you'll ever know, and if you find yourself getting bored just keep this in mind: Malu isn't stupid enough to think you can isolate facts from their context and have them still be true. So he always puts the things he says in their full context, and if that means you'll have to listen to a whole history of the human race from beginning to now before he says anything you think is pertinent, well, I suggest you just shut up and listen, because most of the time the best stuff he says is accidental and irrelevant and you're damn lucky if you have brains enough to notice what it is. Have I made myself clear?"

Wang-mu wished with all her heart that she had eaten less. She felt quite nauseated with dread right now, and if she did throw up, she was sure it would take half an hour just to get it all back out of her.

Peter, though, simply nodded calmly. "We didn't understand, Grace, even though my partner read some of your writings. We thought we had come to speak to a philosopher, like Aimaina, or a scholar, like you. But now I see that we've come to listen to a man of wisdom whose experience reaches into realms that we have never seen or even dreamed of seeing, and we will listen silently until he asks us to ask him questions, and we'll trust him to know better than we know ourselves what it is we need to hear."

Wang-mu recognized complete surrender when she saw it, and she was grateful to see that everyone at the table was nodding happily and no one felt obliged to tell a joke.

"We're also grateful that the honorable one has sacrificed so much, as have so many others, to come personally to us and bless us with wisdom that we do not deserve to receive."

To Wang-mu's horror, Grace laughed out loud at her, instead of nodding respectfully.

"Overkill," Peter murmured.

"Oh, don't criticize her," said Grace. "She's Chinese. From Path, right? And I'll bet you used to be a servant. How could you possibly have learned the difference between respect and obsequiousness? Masters never are content with mere respect from their servants."

"But my master was," said Wang-mu, trying to defend Han Fei-Tzu.

"As is my master," said Grace. "As you will see, when you meet him."

"Time's up," said Jane.

Miro and Val looked up, bleary-eyed, from the documents they were poring over at Miro's computer, to see that in the air above Val's computer, Jane's virtual face now hovered, watching them.

"We've been passive observers as long as they'll let us," said Jane. "But now there are three spacecraft up in the outer atmosphere, rising toward us. I don't think any of them are merely remote-controlled weapons, but I can't be certain of it. And they seem to be directing some transmissions to us in particular, the same messages over and over."

"What message?"

"It's the genetic molecule stuff," said Jane. "I can tell you the composition of the molecules, but I haven't a clue what they mean."

"When do their interceptors reach us?"

"Three minutes, plus or minus. They're zig-zagging evasively, now that they've escaped the gravity well."

Miro nodded. "My sister Quara was convinced that much of the descolada virus consisted of language. I think now we can conclusively say that she was right. It does carry a meaning. She was wrong about the virus being sentient, though, I think. My guess now is that the descolada kept recomposing those sections of itself that constituted a report."

"A report," echoed Val. "That makes sense. To tell its makers what it has done with the world it ... probed."

"So the question is," said Miro, "do we simply disappear and let them ponder the miracle of our sudden arrival and vanishing? Or do we first have Jane broadcast to them the entire, um, text of the descolada virus?"

"Dangerous," said Val. "The message it contains may also tell these people everything they want to know about human genes. After all, we're one of the creatures the descolada worked on, and its message is going to tell all of our strategies for controlling it."

"Except the last one," said Miro. "Because Jane won't send them the descolada as it exists now, completely tamed and controlled -- that would be inviting them to revise it to circumvent our alterations."

"We won't send them a message and we won't go back to Lusitania, either," said Jane. "We don't have time."

"We don't have time not to," said Miro. "However urgent you might think this is, Jane, it doesn't do a lick of good for me and Val to be here to do this without help. My sister Ela, for instance, who actually understands this virus stuff. And Quara, despite her being the second most pig-headed being in the known universe -- don't beg for flattery, Val, by asking who the first is -- we could use Quara."

"And let's be fair about this," said Val. "We're meeting another sentient species. Why should humans be the only ones represented? Why not a pequenino? Why not a hive queen -- or at least a worker?"

"Especially a worker," said Miro. "If we are stuck here, having a worker with us would enable us to communicate with Lusitania -- ansible or not, Jane or not, messages could --"

"All right," said Jane. "You've persuaded me. Even though the last-minute flurry with the Starways Congress tells me they're about to shut down the ansible network at any moment."

"We'll hurry," said Miro. "We'll make them all rush to get the right people aboard."

"And the right supplies," said Val. "And --"

"So start doing it," said Jane. "You just disappeared from your orbit around the descolada planet. And I did broadcast a small fragment of the descolada. One of the sections that Quara pegged as language, but the one that was least altered during mutations as the descolada tried to fight with humans. It should be enough to let them know which of their probes reached us."

"Oh, good, so they can launch a fleet," said Miro.

"The way things are going," said Jane dryly, "by the time any fleet they send could get anywhere at all, Lusitania is the safest address they could have. Because it won't exist anymore."

"You're so cheerful," said Miro. "I'll be back in an hour with the people. Val, you get the supplies we'll need."

"For how long?"

"Get as much as will fit," said Miro. "As someone once said, life is a suicide mission. We have no idea how long we'll be trapped there, so we can't possibly know how much is enough." He opened the door of the starship and stepped out onto the landing field near Milagre.