Chapter 15
Life and Death
< We have questions, too, you know.>
< You're a scavenger. We're supplicants .>
Valentine showed up unbidden at Olhado's door. It was early morning. He wouldn't go to work till afternoon-- he was a shift manager at the small brickworks. But he was already up and about, probably because his family was. The children were trooping out the door. I used to see this on television back in the ancient days, thought Valentine. The family going out the door in the morning, all at the same time, and Dad last of all with the briefcase. In their own way, my parents acted out that life. Never mind how deeply weird their children were. Never mind how after we paraded off to school in the morning, Peter and I went prowling through the nets, trying to take over the world through the use of pseudonyms. Never mind that Ender was torn away from the family as a little boy and never saw any of them again, even on his one visit to Earth-- except me. I think my parents still imagined they were doing it right, because they went through a ritual they had seen on TV.
And here it is again. The children bursting through the door. That boy must be Nimbo, the one who was with Grego at the confrontation with the mob. But here he is, just a cliché child-- no one would guess that he had been part of that terrible night only a little while ago.
Mother gave them each a kiss. She was still a beautiful young woman, even with so many children. So ordinary, so like the cliché, and yet a remarkable woman, for she had married their father, hadn't she? She had seen past the deformity.
And Dad, not yet off to work, so he could stand there, watching them, patting them, kissing them, saying a few words. Light, clever, loving-- the predictable father. So, what's wrong with this picture? The dad is Olhado. He has no eyes. Just the silvery metal orbs punctuated with two lens apertures in the one eye, and the computer I/0 outlet in the other. The kids don't seem to notice. I'm still not used to it.
"Valentine," he said, when he saw her.
"We need to talk," she said.
He ushered her inside. He introduced his wife, Jaqueline. Skin so black it was almost blue, laughing eyes, a beautiful wide smile that you wanted to dive into, it was so welcoming. She brought a limonada, ice-cold and sweating in the morning heat, and then discreetly withdrew. "You can stay," said Valentine. "This isn't all that private." But she didn't want to stay. She had work to do, she said. And she was gone.
"I've wanted to meet you for a long time," said Olhado.
"I was meetable," she said.
"You were busy."
"I have no business," said Valentine.
"You have Andrew's business."
"We're meeting now, anyway. I've been curious about you, Olhado. Or do you prefer your given name, Lauro?"
"In Milagre, your name is whatever people call you. I used to be Sule, for my middle name, Suleimdão."
"Solomon the wise."
"But after I lost my eyes, I was Olhado, then and forever."
"'The watched one'?"
"Olhado could mean that, yes, past participle of olhar, but in this case it means 'The guy with the eyes.'"
"And that's your name."
"My wife calls me Lauro," he said. "And my children call me Father."
"And I?"
"Whatever.
"Sule, then."
"Lauro, if you must. Sule makes me feel like I'm six."
"And reminds you of the time when you could see."
He laughed. "Oh, I can see now, thanks very much. I see very well."
"So Andrew says. That's why I've come to you. To find out what you see."
"Want me to play back a scene for you? A blast from the past? I have all my favorite memories stored on computer. I can plug in and play back anything you want. I have, for instance, Andrew's first visit in my family's home. I also have some top-flight family quarrels. Or do you prefer public events? Every Mayor's inaugural since I got these eyes? People do consult me about things like that-- what was worn, what was said. I often have trouble convincing them that my eyes record vision, not sound-- just like their eyes. They think I should be a holographer and record it all for entertainment."
"I don't want to see what you see. I want to know what you think."
"Do you, now?"
"Yes, I do."
"I have no opinions. Not on anything you'd be interested in. I stay out of the family quarrels. I always have."
"And out of the family business. The only one of Novinha's children not to go into science."
"Science has brought everyone else so much happiness, it's hard to imagine why I wouldn't have gone into it."
"Not hard to imagine," said Valentine. And then, because she had found that brittle-sounding people will talk quite openly if goaded, she added a little barb. "I imagine that you simply didn't have the brains to keep up."
"Absolutely true," said Olhado. "I only have wit enough to make bricks."
"Really?" said Valentine. "But you don't make bricks."
"On the contrary. I make hundreds of bricks a day. And with everyone knocking holes in their houses to build the new chapel, I foresee a booming business in the near future."
"Lauro," said Valentine, "you don't make bricks. The laborers in your factory make bricks."
"And I, as manager, am not part of that?"
"Brickmakers make bricks. You make brickmakers."
"I suppose. Mostly I make brickmakers tired."
"You make other things," said Valentine. "Children."
"Yes," said Olhado, and for the first time in the conversation he relaxed. "I do that. Of course, I have a partner."
"A gracious and beautiful woman."
"I looked for perfection, and found something better." It wasn't just a line of patter. He meant it. And now the brittleness was gone, the wariness too. "You have children. A husband."
"A good family. Maybe almost as good as yours. Ours lacks only the perfect mother, but the children will recover from that."
"To hear Andrew talk about you, you're the greatest human being who ever lived."
"Andrew is very sweet. He could also get away with saying such things because I wasn't here."
"Now you are here," said Olhado. "Why?"
"It happens that worlds and species of ramen are at a cusp of decision, and the way events have turned out, their future depends in large part on your family. I don't have time to discover things in a leisurely way-- I don't have time to understand the family dynamics, why Grego can pass from monster to hero in a single night, how Miro can be both suicidal and ambitious, why Quara is willing to let the pequeninos die for the descolada's sake--"
"Ask Andrew. He understands them all. I never could."
"Andrew is in his own little hell right now. He feels responsible for everything. He's done his best, but Quim is dead, and the one thing your mother and Andrew both agree on is that somehow it's Andrew's fault. Your mother's leaving him has torn him up."
"I know."
"I don't even know how to console him. Or even which, as his loving sister, to hope for-- that she'll come back into his life, or leave him forever."
Olhado shrugged. All the brittleness was back.
"Do you really not care?" asked Valentine. "Or have you decided not to care?"
"Maybe I decided long ago, and now I really don't."
Part of being a good interviewer, too, is knowing when to be silent. Valentine waited.
But Olhado was also good at waiting. Valentine almost gave up and said something. She even toyed with the idea of confessing failure and leaving.
Then he spoke. "When they replaced my eyes, they also took out the tear ducts. Natural tears would interfere with the industrial lubricants they put in my eyes. "
"Industrial?"
"My little joke," said Olhado. "I seem to be very dispassionate all the time, because my eyes never well up with tears. And people can't read my expressions. It's funny, you know. The actual eyeball doesn't have any ability to change shape and show an expression. It just sits there. Yes, your eyes dart around-- they either keep steady eye contact or look down or up-- but my eyes do that, too. They still move with perfect symmetry. They still point in the direction I'm looking. But people can't stand to look at them. So they look away. They don't read the expressions on my face. And therefore they think there are no expressions. My eyes still sting and redden and swell a little at times when I would have cried, if I still had tears."
"In other words," said Valentine, "you do care."
"I always cared," he said. "Sometimes I thought I was the only one who understood, even though half the time I didn't know what it was that I was understanding. I withdrew and watched, and because I didn't have any personal ego on the line in the family quarrels, I could see more clearly than any of them. I saw the lines of power-- Mother's absolute dominance even though Marcão beat her when he was angry or drunk. Miro, thinking it was Marcão he was rebelling against, when always it was Mother. Grego's meanness-- his way of handling fear. Quara, absolutely contrary by nature, doing whatever she thought the people who mattered to her didn't want her to do. Ela, the noble martyr-- what in the world would she be, if she couldn't suffer? Holy, righteous Quim, finding God as his father, on the premise that the best father is the invisible kind who never raises his voice."
"You saw all this as a child?"
"I'm good at seeing things. We passive, unbelonging observers always see better. Don't you think?"
Valentine laughed. "Yes, we do. The same role, then, you think? You and I, both historians?"
"Till your brother came. From the moment he walked in the door, it was obvious that he saw and understood everything, just the way I saw it. It was exhilarating. Because of course I had never actually believed my own conclusions about my family. I never trusted my own judgments. Obviously no one saw things the way I did, so I must be wrong. I even thought that I saw things so peculiarly because of my eyes. That if I had real eyes I would have seen things Miro's way. Or Mother's."
"So Andrew confirmed your judgments."
"More than that. He acted on them. He did something about them."
"Oh?"
"He was here as a speaker for the dead. But from the moment he walked in the door, he took-- he took--"
"Over?"
"Took responsibility. For change. He saw all the sicknesses I saw, but he started healing them as best he could. I saw how he was with Grego, firm but kind. With Quara, responding to what she really wanted instead of what she claimed to want. With Quim, respecting the distance he wanted to keep. With Miro, with Ela, with Mother, with everybody."
"With you?"
"Making me part of his life. Connecting with me. Watching me jack into my eye and still talking to me like a person. Do you know what that meant to me?"
"I can guess."
"Not the part about me. I was a hungry little kid, I'll admit; the first kind person could have conned me, I'm sure. It's what he did about us all. It's how he treated us all differently, and yet remained himself. You've got to think about the men in my life. Marcão, who we thought was our father-- I had no idea who he was. All I ever saw was the liquor in him when he was drunk, and the thirst when he was sober. Thirst for alcohol but also a thirst for respect that he could never get. And then he dropped over dead. Things got better at once. Still not good, but better. I thought, the best father is the one who isn't there. Only that wasn't true, either, was it? Because my real father, Libo, the great scientist, the martyr, the hero of research, the love of my mother's life-- he had sired all these delightful children on my mother, he could see the family in torment, and yet he did nothing."
"Your mother didn't let him, Andrew said."
"That's right-- and one must always do things Mother's way, mustn't one?"
"Novinha is a very imposing woman."
"She thinks she's the only one in the world ever to suffer," said Olhado. "I say that without rancor. I have simply observed that she is so full of pain, she's incapable of taking anyone else's pain seriously."
"Try saying something rancorous next time. It might be more kind."
Olhado looked surprised. "Oh, you're judging me? Is this motherhood solidarity or something? Children who speak ill of their mothers must be slapped down? But I assure you, Valentine, I meant it. No rancor. No grudges. I know my mother, that's all. You said you wanted me to tell you what I saw-- that's what I see. That's what Andrew saw, too. All that pain. He's drawn to it. Pain sucks him like a magnet. And Mother had so much she almost sucked him dry. Except that maybe you can't suck Andrew dry. Maybe the well of compassion inside him is bottomless."
His passionate speech about Andrew surprised her. And pleased her, too. "You say Quim turned to God for the perfect invisible father. Who did you turn to? Not someone invisible, I think."
"No, not someone invisible."
Valentine studied his face in silence.
"I see everything in bas-relief," said Olhado. "My depth perception is very poor. If we'd put a lens in each eye instead of both in one, the binocularity would be much improved. But I wanted to have the jack. For the computer link. I wanted to be able to record the pictures, to be able to share them. So I see in bas-relief. As if everybody were a slightly rounded cardboard cutout, sliding across a flat painted background. In a way it makes everybody seem so much closer together. Sliding over each other like sheets of paper, rubbing on each other as they pass."
She listened, but said nothing for a while longer.
"Not someone invisible," he said, echoing, remembering. "That's right. I saw what Andrew did in our family. I saw that he came in and listened and watched and understood who we were, each individual one of us. He tried to discover our need and then supply it. He took responsibility for other people and it didn't seem to matter to him how much it cost him. And in the end, while he could never make the Ribeira family normal, he gave us peace and pride and identity. Stability. He married Mother and was kind to her. He loved us all. He was always there when we wanted him, and seemed unhurt by it when we didn't. He was firm with us about expecting civilized behavior, but never indulged his whims at our expense. And I thought: This is so much more important than science. Or politics, either. Or any particular profession or accomplishment or thing you can make. I thought: If I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to other children, their whole lives, what Andrew was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.
"So you're a career father," said Valentine.
"Who works at a brick factory to feed and clothe the family. Not a brickmaker who also has kids. Lini also feels the same way."
"Lini?"
"Jaqueline. My wife. She followed her own road to the same place. We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books."
"You'd be surprised," said Valentine.
"It's a boring life, to read about," said Olhado. "Not to live, though."
"So the secret that you protect from your tormented siblings is-- happiness."
"Peace. Beauty. Love. All the great abstractions. I may see them in bas-relief, but I see them up close."
"And you learned it from Andrew. Does he know?"
"I think so," said Olhado. "Do you want to know my most closely guarded secret? When we're alone together, just him and me, or me and Lini and him-- when we're alone, I call him Papa, and he calls me Son."
Valentine made no effort to stop her tears from flowing, as if they flowed half for him and half for her. "So Ender does have children, after all," she said.
"I learned how to be a father from him, and I'm a damned good one."
Valentine leaned forward. It was time to get down to business. "That means that you, more than any of the others, stand to lose something truly beautiful and fine if we don't succeed in our endeavors."
"I know," said Olhado. "My choice was a selfish one in the long run. I'm happy, but I can't do anything to help save Lusitania."
"Wrong," said Valentine. "You just don't know yet."
"What can I do?"
"Let's talk a while longer, and see if we can find out. And if it's all right with you, Lauro, your Jaqueline should stop eavesdropping from the kitchen now, and come on in and join us."
Bashfully, Jaqueline came in and sat beside her husband. Valentine liked the way they held hands. After so many children-- it reminded herself of holding hands with Jakt, and how glad it made her feel.
"Lauro," she said, "Andrew tells me that when you were younger, you were the brightest of all the Ribeira children. That you spoke to him of wild philosophical speculations. Right now, Lauro, my adoptive nephew, it is wild philosophy we need. Has your brain been on hold since you were a child? Or do you still think thoughts of great profundity?"
"I have my thoughts," said Olhado. "But I don't even believe them myself."
"We're working on faster-than-light flight, Lauro. We're working on discovering the soul of a computer entity. We're trying to rebuild an artificial virus that has self-defense capabilities built into it. We're working on magic and miracles. So I'd be glad of any insights you can give me on the nature of life and reality."
"I don't even know what ideas Andrew was talking about," said Olhado. "I quit studying physics, I--"
"If I want studies, I'll read books. So let me tell you what we told a very bright Chinese servant girl on the world of Path: Let me know your thoughts, and I'll decide for myself what's useful and what isn't."
"How? You're not a physicist either."
Valentine walked to the computer waiting quietly in the corner. "May I turn this on?"
"Pois não," he said. Of course.
"Once it's on, Jane will be with us."
"Ender's personal program."
"The computer entity whose soul we're trying to locate."
"Ah," he said. "Maybe you should be telling me things."
"I already know what I know. So start talking. About those ideas you had as a child, and what has become of them since."
Quara had a chip on her shoulder from the moment Miro entered the room. "Don't bother," she said.
"Don't bother what?"
"Don't bother telling me my duty to humanity or to the family-- two separate, non-overlapping groups, by the way."
"Is that what I came for?" asked Miro.
"Ela sent you to persuade me to tell her how to castrate the descolada."
Miro tried a little humor. "I'm no biologist. Is that possible?"
"Don't be cute," said Quara. "If you cut out their ability to pass information from one virus to another, it's like cutting out their tongues and their memory and everything that makes them intelligent. If she wants to know this stuff, she can study what I studied. It only took me five years of work to get there."
"There's a fleet coming."
"So you are an emissary."
"And the descolada may figure out how to--"
She interrupted him, finished his sentence. "Circumvent all our strategies to control it, I know."
Miro was annoyed, but he was used to people getting impatient with his slowness of speech and cutting him off. And at least she had guessed what he was driving at. "Any day," he said. "Ela feels time pressure."
"Then she should help me learn to talk to the virus. Persuade it to leave us alone. Make a treaty, like Andrew did with the pequeninos. Instead, she's cut me off from the lab. Well, two can play that game. She cuts me off, I cut her off."
"You were telling secrets to the pequeninos."
"Oh, yes, Mother and Ela, the guardians of truth! They get to decide who knows what. Well, Miro, let me tell you a secret. You don't protect the truth by keeping other people from knowing it."
"I know that," said Miro.
"Mother completely screwed up our family because of her damned secrets. She wouldn't even marry Libo because she was determined to keep a stupid secret, which if he'd known might have saved his life."
"I know," said Miro.
This time he spoke with such vehemence that Quara was taken aback. "Oh, well, I guess that was a secret that bothered you more than it did me. But then you should be on my side in this, Miro. Your life would have been a lot better, all our lives would have been, if Mother had only married Libo and told him all her secrets. He'd still be alive, probably."
Very neat solutions. Tidy little might-have-beens. And false as hell. If Libo had married Novinha, he wouldn't have married Bruxinha, Ouanda's mother, and thus Miro wouldn't have fallen unsuspectingly in love with his own half-sister because she would never had existed at all. That was far too much to say, however, with his halting speech. So he confined himself to saying "Ouanda wouldn't have been born," and hoped she would make the connections.
She considered for a moment, and the connection was made. "You have a point," she said. "And I'm sorry. I was only a child then."
"It's all past," said Miro.
"Nothing is past," said Quara. "We're still acting it out, over and over again. The same mistakes, again and again. Mother still thinks that you keep people safe by keeping secrets from them."
"And so do you," said Miro.
Quara thought about that for a moment. "Ela was trying to keep the pequeninos from knowing that she was working on destroying the descolada. That's a secret that could have destroyed the whole pequenino society, and they weren't even being consulted. They were preventing the pequeninos from protecting themselves. But what I'm keeping secret is-- maybe-- a way to intellectually castrate the descolada-- to make it half-alive."
"To save humanity without destroying the pequeninos."
"Humans and pequeninos, getting together to compromise on how to wipe out a helpless third species!"
"Not exactly helpless."
She ignored him. "Just the way Spain and Portugal got the Pope to divide up the world between their Catholic Majesties back in the old days right after Columbus. A line on a map, and poof-- there's Brazil, speaking Portuguese instead of Spanish. Never mind that nine out of ten Indians had to die, and the rest lose all their rights and power for centuries, even their very languages--"
It was Miro's turn to become impatient. "The descolada isn't the Indians."
"It's a sentient species."
"It isn't," said Miro.
"Oh?" asked Quara. "And how are you so sure? Where's your certificate in microbiology and xenogenetics? I thought your studies were all in xenology. And thirty years out of date."
Miro didn't answer. He knew that she was perfectly aware of how hard he had worked to bring himself up to speed since he got back here. It was an ad hominem attack and a stupid appeal to authority. It wasn't worth answering. So he sat there and studied her face. Waiting for her to get back into the realm of reasonable discussion.
"All right," she said. "That was a low blow. But so is sending you to try to crack open my files. Trying to play on my sympathies."
"Sympathies?" asked Miro.
"Because you're a-- because you're--"
"Damaged," said Miro. He hadn't thought of the fact that pity complicated everything. But how could he help it? Whatever he did, it was a cripple doing it.
"Well, yes."
"Ela didn't send me," said Miro.
"Mother, then."
"Not Mother."
"Oh, you're a freelance meddler? Or are you going to tell me that all of humanity has sent you? Or are you a delegate of an abstract value? 'Decency sent me.'"
"If it did, it sent me to the wrong place."
She reeled back as if she had been slapped.
"Oh, am I the indecent one?"
"Andrew sent me," said Miro.
"Another manipulator."
"He would have come himself."
"But he was so busy, doing his own meddling. Nossa Senhora, he's a minister, mixing himself up in scientific matters that are so far above his head that--"
"Shut up," said Miro.
He spoke forcefully enough that she actually did fall silent-- though she wasn't happy about it.
"You know what Andrew is," Miro said. "He wrote The Hive Queen and--"
"The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and The Life of Human."
"Don't tell me he doesn't know anything."
"No. I know that isn't true," said Quara. "I just get so angry. I feel like everybody's against me."
"Against what you're doing, yes," said Miro.
"Why doesn't anybody see things my way?"
"I see things your way," said Miro.
"Then how can you--"
"I also see things their way."
"Yes. Mr. Impartial. Make me feel like you understand me. The sympathetic approach."
"Planter is dying to try to learn information you probably already know."
"Not true. I don't know whether pequenino intelligence comes from the virus or not."
"A truncated virus could be tested without killing him."
"Truncated-- is that the word of choice? It'll do. Better than castrated. Cutting off all the limbs. And the head, too. Nothing but the trunk left. Powerless. Mindless. A beating heart, to no purpose."
"Planter is--"
"Planter's in love with the idea of being a martyr. He wants to die."
"Planter is asking you to come and talk to him."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Come on, Miro. They send a cripple to me. They want me to come talk to a dying pequenino. As if I'd betray a whole species because a dying friend-- a volunteer, too-- asks me with his dying breath."
"Quara."
"Yes, I'm listening."
"Are you?"
"Disse que sim!" she snapped. I said I am.
"You might be right about all this."
"How kind of you."
"But so might they."
"Aren't you the impartial one."
"You say they were wrong to make a decision that might kill the pequeninos without consulting them. Aren't you--"
"Doing the same thing? What should I do, do you think? Publish my viewpoint and take a vote? A few thousand humans, millions of pequeninos on your side-- but there are trillions of descolada viruses. Majority rule. Case closed."
"The descolada is not sentient," said Miro.
"For your information," said Quara, "I know all about this latest ploy. Ela sent me the transcripts. Some Chinese girl on a backwater colony planet who doesn't know anything about xenogenetics comes up with a wild hypothesis, and you all act as if it were already proved."
"So-- prove it false."
"I can't. I've been shut out of the lab. You prove it true."
"Occam's razor proves it true. Simplest explanation that fits the facts."
"Occam was a medieval old fart. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is always, God did it. Or maybe-- that old woman down the road is a witch. She did it. That's all this hypothesis is-- only you don't even know where the witch is."
"The descolada is too sudden."
"It didn't evolve, I know. Had to come from somewhere else. Fine. Even if it's artificial, that doesn't mean it isn't sentient now."
"It's trying to kill us. It's varelse, not raman."
"Oh, yes, Valentine's hierarchy. Well, how do I know that the descolada is the varelse, and we're the ramen? As far as I can tell, intelligence is intelligence. Varelse is just the term Valentine invented to mean Intelligence - that - we've - decided - to - kill, and raman means Intelligence - that - we - haven't - decided - to - kill - yet."
"It's an unreasoning, uncompassionate enemy."
"Is there another kind?"
"The descolada doesn't have respect for any other life. It wants to kill us. It already rules the pequeninos. All so it can regulate this planet and spread to other worlds."
For once, she had let him finish a long statement. Did it mean she was actually listening to him?
"I'll grant you part of Wang-mu's hypothesis," said Quara. "It does make sense that the descolada is regulating the gaialogy of Lusitania. In fact, now that I think about it, it's obvious. It explains most of the conversations I've observed-- the information-- passing from one virus to another. I figure it should take only a few months for a message to get to every virus on the planet-- it would work. But just because the descolada is running the gaialogy doesn't mean that you've proved it's not sentient. In fact, it could go the other way-- the descolada, by taking responsibility for regulating the gaialogy of a whole world, is showing altruism. And protectiveness, too-- if we saw a mother lion lashing out at an intruder in order to protect her young, we'd admire her. That's all the descolada is doing-- lashing out against humans in order to protect her precious responsibility. A living planet."
"A mother lion protecting her cubs."
"I think so."
"Or a rabid dog, devouring our babies."
Quara paused. Thought for a moment. "Or both. Why can't it be both? The descolada's trying to regulate a planet here. But humans are getting more and more dangerous. To her, we're the rabid dog. We root out the plants that are part of her control system, and we plant our own, unresponsive plants. We make some of the pequeninos behave strangely and disobey her. We burn a forest at a time when she's trying to build more. Of course she wants to get rid of us!"
"So she's out to destroy us."
"It's her privilege to try! When will you see that the descolada has rights?"
"Don't we? Don't the pequeninos?"
Again she paused. No immediate counterargument. It gave him hope that she might actually be listening.
"You know something, Miro?"
"What?"
"They were right to send you."
"Were they?"
"Because you're not one of them."
That's true enough, thought Miro. I'll never be "one of" anything again.
"Maybe we can't talk to the descolada. And maybe it really is just an artifact. A biological robot acting out its programming. But maybe it isn't. And they're keeping me from finding out."
"What if they open the lab to you?"
"They won't," said Quara. "If you think they will, you don't know Ela and Mother. They've decided that I'm not to be trusted, and so that's that. Well, I've decided they're not to be trusted, either."
"Thus whole species die for family pride."
"Is that all you think this is, Miro? Pride? I'm holding out because of nothing nobler than a petty quarrel?"
"Our family has a lot of pride."
"Well, no matter what you think, I'm doing this out of conscience, no matter whether you want to call it pride or stubbornness or anything else."
"I believe you," said Miro.
"But do I believe you when you say that you believe me? We're in such a tangle." She turned back to her terminal. "Go away now, Miro. I told you I'd think about it, and I will.
"Go see Planter."
"I'll think about that, too." Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "He is my friend, you know. I'm not inhuman. I'll go see him, you can be sure of that. "
"Good."
He started for the door.
"Miro," she said.
He turned, waited.
"Thanks for not threatening to have that computer program of yours crack my files open if I didn't open them myself."
"Of course not," he said.
"Andrew would have threatened that, you know. Everybody thinks he's such a saint, but he always bullies people who don't go along with him."
"He doesn't threaten."
"I've seen him do it."
"He warns."
"Oh. Excuse me. Is there a difference?"
"Yes," said Miro.
"The only difference between a warning and a threat is whether you're the person giving it or the person receiving it," said Quara.
"No," said Miro. "The difference is how the person means it."
"Go away," she said. "I've got work to do, even while I'm thinking. So go away."
He opened the door.
"But thanks," she said.
He closed the door behind him.
As he walked away from Quara's place, Jane immediately piped up in his ear. "I see you decided against telling her that I broke into her files before you even came."
"Yes, well," said Miro. "I feel like a hypocrite, for her to thank me for not threatening to do what I'd already done."
"I did it."
"We did it. You and me and Ender. A sneaky group."
"Will she really think about it?"
"Maybe," said Miro. "Or maybe she's already thought about it and decided to cooperate and was just looking for an excuse. Or maybe she's already decided against ever cooperating, and she just said this nice thing at the end because she's sorry for me."
"What do you think she'll do?"
"I don't know what she'll do," said Miro. "I know what I'll do. I'll feel ashamed of myself every time I think about how I let her think that I respected her privacy, when we'd already pillaged her files. Sometimes I don't think I'm a very good person."
"You notice she didn't tell you that she's keeping her real findings outside the computer system, so the only files I can reach are worthless junk. She hasn't exactly been frank with you, either."
"Yes, but she's a fanatic with no sense of balance or proportion."
"That explains everything."
"Some traits just run in the family," said Miro.
The Hive Queen was alone this time. Perhaps exhausted from something-- mating? Producing eggs? She spent all her time doing this, it seemed. She had no choice. Now that workers had to be used to patrol the perimeter of the human colony, she had to produce even more than she had planned. Her offspring didn't have to be educated-- they entered adulthood quickly, having all the knowledge that any other adult had. But the process of conception, egg-laying, emergence, and cocooning still took time. Weeks for each adult. She produced a prodigious number of young, compared to a single human. But compared to the town of Milagre, with more than a thousand women of childbearing age, the bugger colony had only one producing female.
It had always bothered Ender, made him feel uneasy to know that there was only one queen. What if something happened to her? But then, it made the Hive Queen uncomfortable to think of human beings having only a bare handful of children-- what if something happened to them? Both species practiced a combination of nurturance and redundancy to protect their genetic heritage. Humans had a redundancy of parents, and then nurtured the few offspring. The Hive Queen had a redundancy of offspring, who then nurtured the parent. Each species had found its own balance of strategy.
"Because we're at a dead end. Because everybody else is trying, and you have as much at stake as we do."
"The descolada threatens you as much as it threatens us. Someday you probably aren't going to be able to control it, and then you're gone."
"No." It was the problem of faster-than-light flight. Grego had been wracking his brains. In jail there was nothing else for him to think about. The last time Ender had spoken with him, he wept-- as much from exhaustion as frustration. He had covered reams of papers with equations, spreading them all over the secure room that was used as a cell. "Don't you care about faster-than-light flight?"
The mildness of her response almost hurt, it so deeply disappointed him. This is what despair is like, he thought. Quara a brick wall on the nature of descolada intelligence. Planter dying of descolada deprivation. Han Fei-tzu and Wang-mu struggling to duplicate years of higher study in several fields, all at once. Grego worn out. And nothing to show for it.
She must have heard his anguish as clearly as if he had howled it.
"You've done it," he said. "It must be possible."
"You projected an action across light-years. You found me."
"Not so," he said. "I never even knew we had made mental contact until I found the message you had left for me." It had been the moment of greatest strangeness in his life, to stand on an alien world and see a model, a replication of the landscape that had existed in only one other place-- the computer on which he had played his personalized version of the Fantasy Game. It was like having a total stranger come up to you and tell you your dream from the night before. They had been inside his head. It made him afraid, but it also excited him. For the first time in his life, he felt known. Not known of-- he was famous throughout humanity, and in those days his fame was all positive, the greatest hero of all time. Other people knew of him. But with this bugger artifact, he discovered for the first time that he was known.
"How did you find me, then?"
"I wasn't searching for you. I was studying you." Watching every vid they had at the Battle School, trying to understand the way the bugger mind worked. "I was imagining you."
"And that was all?"
He was having trouble making sense of what they were saying. What kind of network was he connected to?
"I wasn't connected. They were my soldiers, that's all."
"But humans are individuals, not like your workers."
Not helpful at all. Nothing to do with faster-than-light flight. It all sounded like mumbo-jumbo, not like science at all. Nothing that Grego could express mathematically.
Ender didn't understand how establishing an ansible link with his brain could be like hatching out a new queen. "Explain it to me."
"But what are you doing when you do it?"
"And what do you always do?"
"Then remember what you do, and show it to me."
It was true. She had tried only a couple of times, when he was very young and had first discovered her cocoon. He simply couldn't cope with it, couldn't make sense of it. Flashes, a few glimpses were clear, but it was so disorienting that he panicked, and probably fainted, though he was alone and couldn't be sure what had happened, clinically speaking.
"If you can't tell me, we have to do something."
"No. I'll tell you to stop. It didn't kill me before."
"Try, yes."
She gave him no time to reflect or prepare. At once he felt himself seeing out of compound eyes, not many lenses with the same vision, but each lens with its own picture. It gave him the same vertiginous feeling as so many years before. But this time he understood a little better-- in part because she was making it less intense than before, and in part because he knew something about the Hive Queen now, about what she was doing to him.
The many different visions were what each of the workers was seeing, as if each were a single eye connected to the same brain. There was no hope of Ender making sense of so many images at once.
Most of the visions dropped out immediately. Then, one by one, the others were sorted out. He imagined that she must have some organizing principle for the workers. She could disregard all those who weren't part of the queen-making process. Then, for Ender's sake, she had to sort through even the ones who were part of it, and that was harder, because usually she could sort the visions by task rather than by the individual workers. At last, though, she was able to show him a primary image and he could focus on it, ignoring the flickers and flashes of peripheral visions.
A queen being hatched. She had shown him this before, in a carefully-planned vision when he had first met her, when she was trying to explain things to him. Now, though, it wasn't a sanitized, carefully orchestrated presentation. The clarity was gone. It was murky, distracted, real. It was memory, not art.
"So you can talk to her?"
"She doesn't grow her intelligence until cocooning?"
"So you have to teach her."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Then stop showing me anything, if it depends on another sense. Eyes are too important to humans; if I see anything it'll mask out anything but clear speech and I don't think there's much of that at a queen-making."
"I'm still seeing something."
"Then explain it. Help me make sense of it."
"So then you find her?"
"Then what are you searching for?"
"You mean there's something else? Something besides the queen's body?"
"No, I never saw it."
"I didn't know to look for anything else. I saw the making of the queen when you first showed it to me years ago. I thought I understood then."
"So if the queen's just a body, who are you?"
"But you've always talked as if you were the Hive Queen."
"But this center-thing, this binder-together--"
"You call it. What is it?"
"Yes, what is it?"
It was almost unbearably frustrating. So much of what the Hive Queen did was instinctive. She had no language and so she had never had a need to develop clear explanations of that which had never needed explaining till now. So he had to help her find a way to clarify what he couldn't perceive directly.
"Where do you find it?"
"But how do you call?"
"So you're calling some other creature to come and take possession of the queen."
"So where does it come from?"
"But where is that?"
"Fine, I believe you. But where does it come from?"
"You forget?"
"What kind of thing is this binder-together?"
Ender couldn't help shuddering. All this time he had thought that he was speaking to the Hive Queen herself. Now he realized that the thing that talked to him in his mind was only using that body the way it used the buggers. Symbiosis. A controlling parasite, possessing the whole Hive Queen system, using it.
"I don't understand. What was it like?"
"Then how did you know that you aren't just the Hive Queen?"
The vision the Hive Queen had been giving him faded. It wasn't helping anyway, or at least not in any way he could grasp. Nevertheless, a mental image was coming clear for Ender now, one that came from his own mind to explain all the things she was saying. The other Hive Queens-- not physically present, most of them, but linked philotically to the one queen who had to be there-- they held the pattern of the relationship between Hive Queen and workers in their minds, until one of these mysterious memoryless creatures was able to contain the pattern in its mind and therefore take possession of it.
"But where do these things come from? Where do you have to go to get them?"
"So they're everywhere?"
"But you said you don't have to go anywhere to get them."
"What are the doorways like?"
Now he realized that doorway was the word his brain called forth to label the concept they were putting in his mind. And suddenly he was able to grasp an explanation that made sense.
"They're not in the same space-time continuum as ours. But they can enter ours at any point."
"But this is incredible. You're calling forth some being from another place, and--"
"Philotes," said Ender. "The things out of which all other things are made."
"Because I'm only just making the connection. We never meant what you've described, but the thing we did mean, that might be the thing you described."
"Join the club."
"So when you make a Hive Queen, you already have the biological body, and this new thing-- this philote that you call out of the non-place where philotes are-- it has to be one that's able to comprehend the complex pattern that you have in your minds of what a Hive Queen is, and when one comes that can do it, it takes on that identity and possesses the body and becomes the self of that body--"
"But there are no workers yet, when the Hive Queen is first made."
"We're talking about a passage from another kind of space. A place where philotes already are."
"And you say that we're made of the same things?"
"But you said that finding me was like making a Hive Queen."
"The Fantasy Game," said Ender. "You made a pattern out of the Fantasy Game."
"And when you called ..."
"But when a philote takes possession of a new Hive Queen, it controls it, queen-body and worker-bodies. Why didn't this bridge you made take control of me?"
"Why didn't it work?"
"But you could still use it to read my mind."
"More complicated than you expected?"
"But we didn't know that. How could we know?"
"Too bad. Terrifying brilliance would be useful right now."
"We humans get slower as we age. Give me a few more years and I'll be downright cozy."
Ender didn't want this to become another conversation about mortality or any of the other aspects of human life that so fascinated the Hive Queen. There was still one question that had occurred to him during the Hive Queen's story. An intriguing possibility.
"The bridge you made. Where was it? In the computer?"
"But not part of me."
"Could it control the computer?"
"How long did you use this bridge? How long was it there?"
"But it was still there the whole time you were studying me."
"How long would it last?"
"But what body was the bridge in?"
"This thing was inside me?"
"No. To you it was like-- a bodily function. Like balling up your fist to hit somebody. You did it, and then when you didn't need it you didn't notice whether your fist was still there or not."
"It's still alive, isn't it?"
"But it would still be linked to the computer, wouldn't it? A connection between me and the computer. Only the pattern could have grown, couldn't it? It could include other people, too. Think of it being linked to Miro-- the young man I brought with me--"
"And instead of being linked to that one computer, linked to thousands and thousands of them, through the ansible links between worlds."
"And I always thought-- Jane and I always thought that she was-- that she had somehow come to exist in the ansible connections between worlds. That's probably where she feels herself, the place that feels like the center of her-- body, I was going to say."
"Like trying to find a particular muscle that you've been using all your life but never by itself."
"The comparison?"
"Jane," whispered Ender. "You're a big girl now."
Jane's voice came in answer: "You're cheating, Ender. I can't hear what she's saying to you. I can only feel your heart pounding and your rapid breathing."
"Neither is Jane."
"She's the bridge. You made her."
<Called her. You made the pattern. She possessed it. What she is, this Jane, this bridge, she began with the pattern we discovered in you and the Fantasy Game, yes, but she has imagined herself to be much larger. She must have been a very strong and powerful-- philote, if your word is the right name-- to be able to change her own pattern and still remember to be herself.>
"You reached out across the light-years and found me because I was looking for you. And then you found a pattern and called a creature from another space who grasped the pattern and possessed it and became Jane. All of this instantaneously. Faster than light."
"I know. I know. This may not help us answer the question I came here with. But I had another question, just as important to me, that I never thought would have anything to do with you, and here you had the answer to it all along. Jane's real, alive the whole time, and her self isn't out there in space, it's inside me. Connected to me. They can't kill her by switching her off. That's something."
"But they can't kill the whole pattern, don't you see? It doesn't depend on the ansibles after all. It depends on me and on the link between me and the computers. They can't cut the link between me and the computers here and in the satellites orbiting Lusitania. And maybe she doesn't need the ansibles, either. After all, you don't need them to reach me through her."
"I'll leave you, then. But this will help. This has to help. If Jane can find a way to survive because of this, then that's a real victory. The first victory, when I was beginning to think there wasn't any victory to be had in this."
The moment he left the presence of the Hive Queen, he began talking to Jane, telling her everything he could remember of what the Hive Queen could explain. Who Jane was, how she was created.
And as he talked, she analyzed herself in light of what he said. Began to discover things about herself that she had never guessed. By the time Ender got back to the human colony, she had verified as much of his story as she could. "I never found this because I always started with the wrong assumptions," she said. "I imagined my center to be out in space somewhere. I should have guessed I was inside you from the fact that even when I was furious with you, I had to come back to you to be at peace."
"And now the Hive Queen says that you've grown so big and complex that she can't hold the pattern of you in her mind anymore."
"Must have gone through a growth spurt, back during my years of puberty."
"Right."
"Could I help it that humans kept adding computers and linking them up?"
"But it isn't the hardware, Jane. It's the programs. The mentation."
"I have to have the physical memory to hold all of that."
"You have the memory. The question is, can you access it without the ansibles?"
"I can try. As you said to her, it's like learning to flex a muscle I never knew I had."
"Or learning to live without one."
"I'll see what's possible."
What's possible. All the way home, the car floating over the capim, he was also flying, exhilarated to know that something was possible after all, when till now he had felt nothing but despair. Coming home, though, seeing the burnt-over forest, the two solitary fathertrees with the only greenery left, the experimental farm, the new hut with the cleanroom where Planter lay dying, he realized how much there still was to lose, how many would still die, even if now they had found a way for Jane to live.
It was the end of the day. Han Fei-tzu was exhausted, his eyes hurting from all that he had read. He had adjusted the colors on the computer display a dozen times, trying to find something restful, but it didn't help. The last time he had worked so intensely was as a student, and then he had been young. Then, too, he had always found results. I was quicker, then, brighter. I could reward myself by achieving something. Now I'm old and slow, I'm working in areas that are new to me, and it may be that these problems have no solutions. So there's no reward to bolster me. Only the weariness. The pain at the top of my neck, the puffy, tired feeling in my eyes.
He looked at Wang-mu, curled up on the floor beside him. She tried so hard, but her education had begun too recently for her to be able to follow most of the documents that passed through the computer display as he searched for some conceptual framework for faster-than-light travel. At last her weariness triumphed over her will; she was sure she was useless, because she couldn't understand enough even to ask questions. So she gave up and slept.
But you are not useless, Si Wang-mu. Even in your perplexity you've helped me. A bright mind to which all things are new. Like having my own lost youth perched at my elbow.
As Qing-jao was, when she was little, before piety and pride claimed her.
Not fair. Not right to judge his own daughter that way. Until these last weeks, hadn't he been perfectly satisfied with her? Proud of her beyond all reason? The best and brightest of the godspoken, everything her father had worked for, everything her mother had hoped.
That was the part that chafed. Until a few weeks ago, he had been proudest of all of the fact that he had accomplished his oath to Jiang-qing. This was not an easy accomplishment, to bring up his daughter so piously that she never went through a period of doubt or rebellion against the gods. True, there were other children just as pious-- but their piety was usually achieved at the expense of their education. Han Fei-tzu had let Qing-jao learn everything, and then had so deftly led her understanding of it that all fit well with her faith in the gods.
Now he had reaped his own sowing. He had given her a worldview that so perfectly preserved her faith that now, when he had discovered that the gods' "voices" were nothing but the genetic chains with which Congress had shackled them, nothing could convince her. If Jiang-qing had lived, Fei-tzu would no doubt have been in conflict with her over his loss of faith. In her absence, he had done so well at raising their daughter as Jiang-qing would have that Qing-jao was able to take her mother's view flawlessly.
Jiang-qing would also have left me, thought Han Fei-tzu. Even if I had not been widowed, I would have been wifeless on this day.
The only companion left to me is this servant girl, who pushed her way into my household only just in time to be the one spark of life in my old age, the one flicker of hope in my dark heart.
Not my daughter-of-the-body, but perhaps there will be time and opportunity, when this crisis is past, to make Wang-mu my daughter-of-the-mind. My work with Congress is finished. Shall I not be a teacher, then, with a single disciple, this girl? Shall I not prepare her to be the revolutionary who can lead the common people to freedom from the tyranny of the godspoken, and then lead Path to freedom from Congress itself? Let her be such a one, and then I can die in peace, knowing that at the end of my life I have created the undoing of all my earlier work that strengthened Congress and helped overcome all opposition to its power.
The soft breathing of the girl Wang-mu was like his own breath, like a baby's breath, like the sound of a breeze through tall grass. She is all motion, all hope, all freshness.
"Han Fei-tzu, I think you are not asleep."
He was not; but he had been half-dozing, for the sound of Jane's voice coming from the computer startled him as if he were waking up.
"No, but Wang-mu is," he said.
"Wake her, then," said Jane.
"What is it? She's earned her rest."
"She's also earned the right to hear this."
Ela's face appeared beside Jane's in the display. Han Fei-tzu knew her at once as the xenobiologist who had been entrusted with the study of the genetic samples he and Wang-mu had collected. There must have been a breakthrough.
He bowed himself down, reached out, shook the girl's hip as she lay there sleeping. She stirred. She stretched. Then, no doubt remembering her duty, she sat bolt upright. "Have I overslept? What is it? Forgive me for falling asleep, Master Han."
She might have bowed herself in her confusion, but Fei-tzu wouldn't let her. "Jane and Ela asked me to wake you. They wanted you to hear."
"I will tell you first," said Ela, "that what we hoped for is possible. The genetic alterations were crude and easily discovered-- I can see why Congress has done its best to keep any real geneticists from working with the human population of Path. The OCD gene wasn't in the normal place, which is why it wasn't identified at once by natologists, but it works almost exactly as naturally-occurring OCD genes work. It can easily be treated separately from the genes that give the godspoken enhanced intellectual and creative abilities. I have already designed a splicer bacterium that, if injected into the blood, will find a person's sperm or ova, enter them, remove the OCD gene, and replace it with a normal one, leaving the rest of the genetic code unaffected. Then the bacterium will die out quickly. It's based on a common bacterium that should already exist in many labs on Path for normal immunology and birth-defect-prevention work. So any of the godspoken who wish to give birth to children without the OCD can do it."
Han Fei-tzu laughed. "I'm the only one on this planet who would wish for such a bacterium. The godspoken have no pity on themselves. They take pride in their affliction. It gives them honor and power."
"Then let me tell you the next thing we found. It was one of my assistants, a pequenino named Glass, who discovered this-- I'll admit that I wasn't paying much personal attention to this project since it was relatively easy compared to the descolada problem we're working on."
"Don't apologize," said Fei-tzu. "We are grateful for any kindness. All is undeserved. "
"Yes. Well." She seemed flustered by his courtesy. "Anyway, what Glass discovered is that all but one of the genetic samples you gave us sort themselves neatly into godspoken and non-godspoken categories. We ran the test blind, and only afterward checked the sample lists against the identity lists you gave us-- the correspondence was perfect. Every godspoken had the altered gene. Every sample that lacked the altered gene was also not on your list of godspoken."
"You said all but one."
"This one baffled us. Glass is very methodical-- he has the patience of a tree. He was sure that the one exception was a clerical error or an error in interpreting the genetic data. He went over it many times, and had other assistants do the same. There is no doubt. The one exception is clearly a mutation of the godspoken gene. It naturally lacks the OCD, while still retaining all of the other abilities Congress's geneticists so thoughtfully provided."
"So this one person already is what your splicer bacterium is designed to create."
"There are a few other mutated regions that we aren't quite sure of at the moment, but they have nothing to do with the OCD or the enhancements. Nor are they involved in any of the vital processes, so this person should be able to have healthy offspring that carry the trait. In fact, if this person should mate with a person who has been treated with the splicer bacterium, all her offspring will almost certainly carry the enhancements, and there'd be no chance of any of them having the OCD."
"How lucky for him," said Han Fei-tzu.
"Who is it?" asked Wang-mu.
"It's you," said Ela. "Si Wang-mu."
"Me?" She seemed baffled.
But Han Fei-tzu was not confused. "Ha!" he cried. "I should have known. I should have guessed! No wonder you have learned as quickly as my own daughter learned. No wonder you have had insights that helped us all even when you barely understood the subject you were studying. You are as godspoken as anyone on Path, Wang-mu-except that you alone are free of the shackles of the cleansing rituals."
Si Wang-mu struggled to answer, but instead of words, tears came, silently drifting down her face.
"Never again will I permit you to treat me as your superior," said Han Fei-tzu. "From now on you are no servant in my house, but my student, my young colleague. Let others think of you however they want. We know that you are as capable as anyone."
"As Mistress Qing-jao?" Wang-mu whispered.
"As anyone," said Fei-tzu. "Courtesy will require you to bow to many. But in your heart, you need bow to no one."
"I am unworthy," said Wang-mu.
"Everyone is worthy of his own genes. A mutation like that is much more likely to have crippled you. But instead, it left you the healthiest person in the world."
But she would not stop her silent weeping.
Jane must have been showing this to Ela, for she kept her peace for some time. Finally, though, she spoke. "Forgive me, but I have much to do," she said.
"Yes," said Han Fei-tzu. "You may go."
"You misunderstand me," said Ela. "I don't need your permission to go. I have more to say before I go."
Han Fei-tzu bowed his head. "Please. We are listening."
"Yes," whispered Wang-mu. "I'm listening too."
"There is a possibility-- a remote one, as you will see, but a possibility nonetheless-- that if we are able to decode the descolada virus and tame it, we can also make an adaptation that could be useful on Path."
"How so?" asked Han Fei-tzu. "Why should we want this monstrous artificial virus here?"
"The whole business of the descolada is entering a host organism's cells, reading the genetic code, and reorganizing it according to the descolada's own plan. When we alter it, if we can, we'll remove its own plan from it. We'll also remove almost all of its self-defense mechanisms, if we can find them. At that point, it may be possible to use it as a super-splicer. Something that can effect a change, not just on the reproductive cells, but on all the cells of a living creature."
"Forgive me," said Han Fei-tzu, "but I have been reading in this field lately, and the concept of a super-splicer has been rejected, because the body starts to reject its own cells as soon as they're genetically altered."
"Yes," said Ela. "That's how the descolada kills. The body rejects itself to death. But that only happened because the descolada had no plan for dealing with humans. It was studying the human body as it went, making random changes and seeing what happened. It had no single plan for us, and so each victim ended up with many different genetic codes in his or her cells. What if we made a super-splicer that worked according to a single plan, transforming every cell in the body to conform with a single new pattern? In that case, our studies of the descolada assure us that the change could be effected in each individual person within six hours, usually-half a day at the most."
"Fast enough that before the body can reject itself--"
"It will be so perfectly unified that it will recognize the new pattern as itself."
Wang-mu's crying had stopped. She seemed as excited now as Fei-tzu felt, and despite all her self-discipline, she could not contain it. "You can change all the godspoken? Free even the ones who are already alive?"
"If we are able to decode the descolada, then not only would we be able to remove the OCD from the godspoken, we would also be able to install all the enhancements in the common people. It would have the most effect in the children, of course-- older people have already passed the growth stages where the new genes would have the most effect. But from that time on, every child born on Path would have the enhancements."
"What then? Would the descolada disappear?"
"I'm not sure. I think we would have to build into the new gene a way for it to destroy itself when its work is done. But we would use Wang-mu's genes as a model. Not to stretch the point, Wang-mu, you would become a sort of genetic co-parent of the entire population of your world."
She laughed. "What a wonderful joke to play on them! So proud to be chosen, and yet their cure will come from one such as me!" At once, though, her face fell and she covered her face with her hands. "How could I say such a thing. I have become as haughty and arrogant as the worst of them."
Fei-tzu laid his hand on her shoulder. "Say nothing so harsh. Such feelings are natural. They come and go quickly. Only those who make them a way of life are to be condemned for them." He turned back to Ela. "There are ethical problems here."
"I know. And I think those problems should be addressed now, even though it may never be possible even to do this. We're talking about the genetic alteration of an entire population. It was an atrocity when Congress secretly did it to Path without the consent or knowledge of the population. Can we undo an atrocity by following the same path?"
"More than that," said Han Fei-tzu. "Our entire social system here is based on the godspoken. Most people will interpret such a transformation as a plague from the gods, punishing us. If it became known that we were the source, we would be killed. It's possible, though, that when it becomes known that the godspoken have lost the voice of the gods-- the OCD-- the people will turn on them and kill them. How will freeing them from the OCD have helped them then, if they're dead?"
"We've discussed this," said Ela. "And we have no idea what's the right thing to do. For now the question is moot because we haven't decoded the descolada and may never be able to. But if we develop the capability, we believe that the choice of whether to use it should be yours."
"The people of Path?"
"No," said Ela. "The first choices are yours, Han Fei-tzu, Si Wang-mu, and Han Qing-jao. Only you know of what has been done to you, and even though your daughter doesn't believe it, she does fairly represent the viewpoint of the believers and the godspoken of Path. If we get the capability, put the question to her. Put the question to yourselves. Is there some plan, some way to bring this transformation to Path, that would not be destructive? And if it can be done, should it be done? No-- say nothing now, decide nothing now. Think about it yourselves. We are not part of this. We will only inform you when or whether we learn how to do it. From there it will be up to you."
Ela's face disappeared.
Jane lingered a moment longer. "Worth waking up for?" she asked.
"Yes!" cried Wang-mu.
"Kind of nice to discover that you're a lot more than you ever thought you were, isn't it?" said Jane.
"Oh, yes," said Wang-mu.
"Now go back to sleep, Wang-mu. And you, Master Han-- your fatigue is showing very clearly. You're useless to us if you lose your health. As Andrew has told me, over and over-- we must do all we can do without destroying our ability to keep doing it."
Then she was gone, too.
Wang-mu immediately began to weep again. Han Fei-tzu slid over and sat beside her on the floor, cradled her head against his shoulder, and rocked gently back and forth. "Hush, my daughter, my sweet one, in your heart you already knew who you were, and so did I, so did I. Truly your name was wisely given. If they perform their miracles on Lusitania, you will be the Royal Mother of all the world."
"Master Han," she whispered. "I'm crying also for Qing-jao. I have been given more than I ever hoped for. But who will she be, if the voice of the gods is taken from her?"
"I hope," said Fei-tzu, "that she will be my true daughter again. That she will be as free as you, the daughter who has come to me like a petal on the winter river, borne to me from the land of perpetual spring."
He held her for many long minutes more, until she began to doze on his shoulder. Then he laid her back on her mat, and he retired to his own corner to sleep, with hope in his heart for the first time in many days.
When Valentine came to see Grego in prison, Mayor Kovano told her that Olhado was with him. "Aren't these Olhado's working hours?"
"You can't be serious," said Kovano. "He's a good manager of brickmakers, but I think saving the world might be worth an afternoon of somebody else covering for him on management."
"Don't get your expectations too high," said Valentine. "I wanted him involved. I hoped he might help. But he isn't a physicist."
Kovano shrugged. "I'm not a jailer, either, but one does what the situation requires. I have no idea whether it has to do with Olhado being in there or Ender's visit a little while ago, but I've heard more excitement and noise in there than-- well, than I've ever heard when the inmates were sober. Of course, public drunkenness is what people are usually jailed for in this town."
"Ender came?"
"From the Hive Queen. He wants to talk to you. I didn't know where you were."
"Yes. Well, I'll go see him when I leave here." Where she had been was with her husband. Jakt was getting ready to go back into space on the shuttle, to prepare his own ship for quick departure, if need be, and to see whether the original Lusitanian colony ship could possibly be restored for another flight after so many decades without maintenance of the stardrive.
The only thing it had been used for was storage of seeds and genes and embryos of Earthborn species, in case they were someday needed. Jakt would be gone for at least a week, possibly longer, and Valentine couldn't very well let him go without spending some time with him. He would have understood, of course-- he knew the terrible pressure that everyone was under. But Valentine also knew that she wasn't one of the key figures in these events. She would only be useful later, writing the history of it.
When she left Jakt, however, she had not come straight to the mayor's office to see Grego. She had taken a walk through the center of town. Hard to believe that only a short time ago-- how many days? Weeks? --the mob had formed here, drunken and angry, working themselves up to a murderous rage. Now it was so quiet. The grass had even recovered from the trampling, except for one mudhole where it refused to grow back.
But it wasn't peaceful here. On the contrary. When the town had been at peace, when Valentine first arrived, there had been bustle and business here in the heart of the colony, all through the day. Now a few people were out and about, yes, but they were glum, almost furtive. Their eyes stayed down, looking at the ground before their feet, as if everyone were afraid that if they didn't watch every step they'd fall flat.
Part of the glumness was probably shame, thought Valentine. There was a hole in every building in town now, where blocks or bricks had been torn out to use in the building of the chapel. Many of the gaps were visible from the praça where Valentine walked.
She suspected, however, that fear more than shame had killed the vibrancy in this place. No one spoke of it openly, but she caught enough comments, enough covert glances toward the hills north of town that she knew. What loomed over this colony wasn't the fear of the coming fleet. It wasn't shame over the slaughter of the pequenino forest. It was the buggers. The dark shapes only occasionally visible on the hills or out in the grass surrounding the town. It was the nightmares of the children who had seen them. The sick dread in the hearts of the adults. Historicals that took place set in the Bugger War period were continously checked out from the library as people became obsessed with watching humans achieve victory over buggers. And as they watched, they fed their worst fears. The theoretical notion of the hive culture as a beautiful and worthy one, as Ender had depicted it in his first book, The Hive Queen, disappeared completely for many of the people here, perhaps most of them, as they dwelt in the unspoken punishment and imprisonment enforced by the Hive Queen's workers.
Is all our work in vain, after all? thought Valentine. I, the historian, the philosopher Demosthenes, trying to teach people that they need not fear all aliens, but can see them as raman. And Ender, with his empathic books The Hive Queen, the Hegemon, The Life of Human-- what force did they really have in the world, compared with the instinctive terror at the sight of these dangerous oversized insects? Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we'll use the moment it comes close enough.
Now she was back in a clean, safe place, not so disquieting even if it did serve as a prison as well as the center of city government. A place where the buggers were seen as allies-- or at least as an indispensable peacekeeping force, holding antagonists apart for their mutual protection. There are people, Valentine reminded herself, who are able to transcend their animal origins.
When she opened the cell door, Olhado and Grego were both sprawled on bunks, papers strewn on the floor and table between them, some flat, some wadded up. Papers even covered the computer terminal, so that if the computer was on, the display couldn't possibly function. It looked like a typical teenager's bedroom, complete with Grego's legs stretching up the walls, his bare feet dancing a weird rhythm, twisting back and forth, back and forth in the air. What was his inner music?
"Boa tarde, Tia Valentina," said Olhado.
Grego didn't even look up.
"Am I interrupting?"
"Just in time," said Olhado. "We're on the verge of reconceptualizing the universe. We've discovered the illuminating principle that wishing makes it so and all living creatures pop out of nowhere whenever they're needed."
"If wishing makes it so," said Valentine, "can we wish for faster-than-light flight?"
"Grego's doing math in his head right now," said Olhado, "so he's functionally dead. But yes. I think he's on to something-- he was shouting and dancing a minute ago. We had a sewing-machine experience."
"Ah," said Valentine.
"It's an old science-class story," said Olhado. "People who wanted to invent sewing machines kept failing because they always tried to imitate the motions of hand-sewing, pushing the needle through the fabric and drawing the thread along behind through the eye at the back end of the needle. It seemed obvious. Until somebody first thought of putting the eye in the nose of the needle and using two threads instead of just one. A completely unnatural, indirect approach that when it comes right down to it, I still don't understand."
"So we're going to sew our way through space?"
"In a way. The shortest distance between two points isn't necessarily a line. It comes from something Andrew learned from the Hive Queen. How they call some kind of creature from an alternate spacetime when they create a new Hive Queen. Grego jumped on that as proof that there was a real non-real space. Don't ask me what he means by that. I make bricks for a living."
"Unreal realspace," said Grego. "You had it backward."
"The dead awake," said Olhado.
"Have a seat, Valentine," said Grego. "My cell isn't much, but it's home. The math on this is still crazy but it seems to fit. I'm going to have to spend some time with Jane on it, to do the really tight calculations and run some simulations, but if the Hive Queen's right, and there's a space so universally adjacent to our space that philotes can pass into our space from the other space at any point, and if we postulate that the passage can go the other way, and if the Hive Queen is also right that the other space contains philotes just as ours does, only in the other space-- call it Outside-- the philotes aren't organized according to natural law, but are instead just possibilities, then here's what might work--"
"Those are awfully big ifs," said Valentine.
"You forget," said Olhado. "We start from the premise that wishing makes it so."
"Right, I forgot to mention that," said Grego. "We also assume that the Hive Queen is right that the unorganized philotes respond to patterns in someone's mind, immediately assuming whatever role is available in the pattern. So that things that are comprehended Outside will immediately come to exist there."
"All this is perfectly clear," said Valentine. "I'm surprised you didn't think of it before."
"Right," said Grego. "So here's how we do it. Instead of trying to physically move all the particles that compose the starship and its passengers and cargo from Star A to Star B, we simply conceive of them all-- the entire pattern, including all the human contents-- as existing, not Inside, but Outside. At that moment, all the philotes that compose the starship and the people in it disorganize themselves, pop through into the Outside, and reassemble themselves there according to the familiar pattern. Then we do the same thing again, and pop back Inside-- only now we're at Star B. Preferably a safe orbiting distance away."
"If every point in our space corresponds to a point Outside," said Valentine, "don't we just have to do our traveling there instead of here?"
"The rules are different there," said Grego. "There's no whereness there. Let's assume that in our space, whereness-- relative location-- is simply an artifact of the order that philotes follow. It's a convention. So is distance, for that matter. We measure distance according to the time it takes to travel it-- but it only takes that amount of time because the philotes of which matter and energy are comprised follow the conventions of natural law. Like the speed of light."
"They're just obeying the speed limit."
"Yes. Except for the speed limit, the size of our universe is arbitrary. If you looked at our universe as a sphere, then if you stood outside the sphere, it could as easily be an inch across or a trillion lightyears or a micron."
"And when we go Outside--"
"Then the Inside universe is exactly the same size as any of the disorganized philotes there-- no size at all. Furthermore, since there is no whereness there, all philotes in that space are equally close or nonclose to the location of our universe. So we can reenter Inside space at any point."
"That makes it sound almost easy," said Valentine.
"Yes, well," said Grego.
"It's the wishing that's hard," said Olhado.
"To hold the pattern, you really have to understand it," said Grego. "Each philote that rules a pattern comprehends only its own part of reality. It depends on the philotes within its pattern to do their job and hold their own pattern, and it also depends the philote that controls the pattern that it's a part of to keep it in its proper place. The atom philote has to trust the neutron and proton and electron philotes to hold their own internal structures together, and the molecule philote to hold the atom in its proper place, while the atom philote concentrates on his own job, which is keeping the parts of the atom in place. That's how reality seems to work-- in this model, anyway."
"So you transplant the whole thing to Outside and back Inside again," said Valentine. "I understood that."
"Yes, but who? Because the mechanism for sending requires that the whole pattern for the ship and all its contents be established as a pattern of its own, not just an arbitrary conglomeration. I mean, when you load a cargo on a ship and the passengers embark, you haven't created a living pattern, a philotic organism. It's not like giving birth to a baby-- that's an organism that can hold itself together. The ship and its contents are just a collection. They can break apart at any point. So when you move all the philotes out into disorganized space, lacking whereness or thisness or any organizing principle, how do they reassemble? And even if they reassemble themselves into the structures they know, what do you have? A lot of atoms. Maybe even living cells and organisms-- but without spacesuits or a starship, because those aren't alive. All the atoms and maybe even the molecules are floating around, probably replicating themselves like crazy as the unorganized philotes out there start copying the pattern, but you've got no ship."
"Fatal."
"No, probably not," said Grego. "Who can guess? The rules are all different out there. The point is that you can't possibly bring them back into our space in that condition, because that definitely would be fatal."
"So we can't."
"I don't know. Reality holds together in Inside space because all the philotes that it's comprised of agree on the rules. They all know each other's patterns and follow the same patterns themselves. Maybe it can all hold together in Outside space as long as the spaceship and its cargo and passengers are fully known. As long as there's a knower who can hold the entire structure in her head."
"Her?"
"As I said, I have to have Jane do the calculations. She has to see if she has access to enough memory to contain the pattern of relationships within a spaceship. She has to then see if she can take that pattern and imagine its new location."
"That's the wishing part," said Olhado. "I'm very proud of it, because I'm the one who thought of needing a knower to move the ship."
"This whole thing is really Olhado's," said Grego, "but I intend to put my name first on the paper because he doesn't care about career advancement and I have to look good enough for people to overlook this felony conviction if I'm going to get a job at a university on another world somewhere."
"What are you talking about?" said Valentine.
"I'm talking about getting off this two-bit colony planet. Don't you understand? If this is all true, if it works, then I can fly to Rheims or Baia or-- or Earth and come back here for weekends. The energy cost is zero because we're stepping outside natural laws entirely. The wear and tear on the vehicles is nothing."
"Not nothing," said Olhado. "We've still got to taxi close to the planet of destination."
"As I said, it all depends on what Jane can conceive of. She has to be able to comprehend the whole ship and its contents. She has to be able to imagine us Outside and Inside again. She has to be able to conceive of the exact relative positions of the startpoint and endpoint of the journey."
"So faster-than-light travel depends completely on Jane," said Valentine.
"If she didn't exist, it would be impossible. Even if they linked all the computers together, even if someone could write the program to accomplish it, it wouldn't help. Because a program is just a collection, not an entity. It's just parts. Not a-- what was the word Jane found for it? An aiúa."
"Sanskrit for life," Olhado explained to Valentine. "The word for the philote who controls a pattern that holds other philotes in order. The word for entities-- like planets and atoms and animals and stars-- that have an intrinsic, enduring form."
"Jane is an aiúa, not just a program. So she can be a knower. She can incorporate the starship as a pattern within her own pattern. She can digest it and contain it and it will still be real. She makes it part of herself and knows it as perfectly and unconsciously as your aiúa knows your own body and holds it together. Then she can carry it with her Outside and back Inside again."
"So Jane has to go?" asked Valentine.
"If this can be done at all, it'll be done because Jane travels with the ship, yes," said Grego.
"How?" asked Valentine. "We can't exactly go pick her up and carry her with us in a bucket."
"This is something Andrew learned from the Hive Queen," said Grego. "She actually exists in a particular place-- that is, her aiúa has a specific location in our space."
"Where?"
"Inside Andrew Wiggin."
It took a while for them to explain to her what Ender had learned about Jane from the Hive Queen. It was strange to think of this computer entity as being centered inside Ender's body, but it made a kind of sense that Jane had been created by the Hive Queens during Ender's campaign against them. To Valentine, though, there was another, immediate consequence. If the faster-than-light ship could only go where Jane took it, and Jane was inside Ender, there could be only one conclusion.
"Then Andrew has to go?"
"Claro. Of course," said Grego.
"He's a little old to be a test pilot," said Valentine.
"In this case he's only a test passenger," said Grego. "He just happens to hold the pilot inside him."
"It's not as if the voyage will have any physical stress," said Olhado. "If Grego's theory works out exactly right, he'll just sit there and after a couple of minutes or actually a microsecond or two, he'll be in the other place. And if it doesn't work at all, he'll just stay right here, with all of us feeling foolish for thinking we could wish our way through space."
"And if it turns out Jane can get him Outside but can't hold things together there, then he'll be stranded in a place that doesn't even have any placeness to it," said Valentine.
"Well, yes," said Grego. "If it works halfway, the passengers are effectively dead. But since we'll be in a place without time, it won't matter to us. It'll just be an eternal instant. Probably not enough time for our brains to notice that the experiment failed. Stasis."
"Of course, if it works," said Olhado, "then we'll carry our own spacetime with us, so there would be duration. Therefore, we'll never know if we fail. We'll only notice if we succeed."
"But I'll know if he never comes back," said Valentine.
"Right," said Grego. "If he never comes back, then you'll have a few months of knowing it until the fleet gets here and blasts everything and everybody all to hell."
"Or until the descolada turns everybody's genes inside out and kills us all," added Olhado.
"I suppose you're right," said Valentine. "Failure won't kill them any deader than they'll be if they stay."
"But you see the deadline pressure that we're under," said Grego. "We don't have much time left before Jane loses her ansible connections. Andrew says that she might well survive it after all-- but she'll be crippled. Brain-damaged."
"So even if it works, the first flight might be the last."
"No," said Olhado. "The flights are instantaneous. If it works, she can shuttle everybody off this planet in no more time than it takes people to get in and out of the starship."
"You mean it can take off from a planet surface?"
"That's still iffy," said Grego. "She might only be able to calculate location within, say ten thousand kilometers. There's no explosion or displacement problem, since the philotes will reenter Inside space ready to obey natural laws again. But if the starship reappears in the middle of a planet it'll still be pretty hard to dig to the surface."
"But if she can be really precise-- within a couple of centimeters, for instance-- then the flights can be surface-to-surface," said Olhado.
"Of course we're dreaming," said Grego. "Jane's going to come back and tell us that even if she could turn all the stellar mass in the galaxy into computer chips, she couldn't hold all the data she'd have to know in order to make a starship travel this way. But at the moment, it still sounds possible and I am feeling good!"
At that, Grego and Olhado started whooping and laughing so loud that Mayor Kovano came to the door to make sure Valentine was all right. To her embarrassment, he caught her laughing and whooping right along with them.
"Are we happy, then?" asked Kovano.
"I guess," said Valentine, trying to recover her composure.
"Which of our many problems have we solved?"
"Probably none of them," said Valentine. "It would be too idiotically convenient if the universe could be manipulated to work this way."
"But you've thought of something."
"The metaphysical geniuses here have a completely unlikely possibility," said Valentine. "Unless you slipped them something really weird in their lunch."
Kovano laughed and left them alone. But his visit had had the effect of sobering them again.
"Is it possible?" asked Valentine.
"I would never have thought so," said Grego. "I mean, there's the problem of origin."
"It actually answers the problem of origin," said Olhado. "The Big Bang theory's been around since--"
"Since before I was born," said Valentine.
"I guess," said Olhado. "What nobody's been able to figure out is why a Big Bang would ever happen. This way it makes a weird kind of sense. If somebody who was capable of holding the pattern of the entire universe in his head stepped Outside, then all the philotes there would sort themselves out into the largest place in the pattern that they could control. Since there's no time there, they could take a billion years or a microsecond, all the time they needed, and then when it was sorted out, bam, there they are, the whole universe, popping out into a new Inside space. And since there's no distance or position-- no whereness-- then the entire thing would begin the size of a geometric point--"
"No size at all," said Grego.
"I remember my geometry," said Valentine.
"And immediately expand, creating space as it grew. As it grew, time would seem to slow down-- or do I mean speed up?"
"It doesn't matter," said Grego. "It all depends whether you're Inside the new space or Outside or in some other Inspace."
"Anyway, the universe now seems to be constant in time while it's expanding in space. But if you wanted to, you could just as easily see it as constant in size but changing in time. The speed of light is slowing down so that it takes longer to get from one place to another, only we can't tell that it's slowing down because everything else slows down exactly relative to the speed of light. You see? All a matter of perspective. For that matter, as Grego said before, the universe we live in is still, in absolute terms, exactly the size of a geometric point-- when you look at it from Outside. Any growth that seems to take place on the Inside is just a matter of relative location and time."
"And what kills me," said Grego, "is that this is the kind of thing that's been going on inside Olhado's head all these years. This picture of the universe as a dimensionless point in Outside space is the way he's been thinking all along. Not that he's the first to think of it. Just that he's the one who actually believed it and saw the connection between that and the non-place where Andrew says the Hive Queen goes to find aiúas."
"As long as we're playing metaphysical games," said Valentine, "then where did this whole thing begin? If what we think of as reality is just a pattern that somebody brought Outside, and the universe just popped into being, then whoever it was is probably still wandering around giving off universes wherever she goes. So where did she come from? And what was there before she started doing it? And how did Outside come to exist, for that matter?"
"That's Inspace thinking," said Olhado. "That's the way you conceive of things when you still believe in space and time as absolutes. You think of everything starting and stopping, of things having origins, because that's the way it is in the observable universe. The thing is, Outside there're no rules like that at all. Outside was always there and always will be there. The number of philotes there is infinite, and all of them always existed. No matter how many of them you pull out and put into organized universes, there'll be just as many left as there always were."
"But somebody had to start making universes."
"Why?" asked Olhado.
"Because-- because I--"
"Nobody ever started. It's always been going on. I mean, if it weren't already going on, it couldn't start. Outside where there aren't any patterns, it would be impossible to conceive of a pattern. They can't act, by definition, because they literally can't even find themselves."
"But how could it always have been going on?"
"Think of it as if this moment in time, the reality we live in at this moment, this condition of the entire universe-- of all the universes--"
"You mean now."
"Right. Think of it as if now were the surface of a sphere. Time is moving forward through the chaos of Outside like the surface of an expanding sphere, a balloon inflating. On the outside, chaos. On the inside, reality. Always growing-- like you said, Valentine. Popping up new universes all the time."
"But where did this balloon come from?"
"OK, you've got the balloon. The expanding sphere. Only now think of it as a sphere with an infinite radius."
Valentine tried to think what that would mean. "The surface would be completely flat."
"That's right."
"And you could never go all the way around it."
"That's right, too. Infinitely large. Impossible even to count all the universes that exist on the reality side. And now, starting from the edge, you get on a starship and start heading inward toward the center. The farther in you go, the older everything is. All the old universes, back and back. When do you get to the first one?"
"You don't," said Valentine. "Not if you're traveling at a finite rate."
"You don't reach the center of a sphere of infinite radius, if you're starting at the surface, because no matter how far you go, no matter how quickly, the center, the beginning, is always infinitely far away."
"And that's where the universe began."
"I believe it," said Olhado. "I think it's true."
"So the universe works this way because it's always worked this way," said Valentine.
"Reality works this way because that's what reality is. Anything that doesn't work this way pops back into chaos. Anything that does, comes across into reality. The dividing line is always there."
"What I love," said Grego, "is the idea that after we've started tootling around at instantaneous speeds in our reality, what's to stop us from finding others? Whole new universes?"
"Or making others," said Olhado.
"Right," said Grego. "As if you or I could actually hold a pattern for a whole universe in our minds."
"But maybe Jane could," said Olhado. "Couldn't she?"
"What you're saying," said Valentine, "is that maybe Jane is God."
"She's probably listening right now," said Grego. "The computer's on, even if the display is blocked. I'll bet she's getting a kick out of this."
"Maybe every universe lasts long enough to produce something like Jane," said Valentine. "And then she goes out and creates more and--"
"It goes on and on," said Olhado. "Why not?"
"But she's an accident," said Valentine.
"No," said Grego. "That's one of the things Andrew found out today. You've got to talk to him. Jane was no accident. For all we know there are no accidents. For all we know, everything was all part of the pattern from the start."
"Everything except ourselves," said Valentine. "Our-- what's the word for the philote that controls us?"
"Aiúa," said Grego. He spelled it out for her.
"Yes," she said. "Our will, anyway, which always existed, with whatever strengths and weaknesses it has. And that's why, as long as we're part of the pattern of reality, we're free."
"Sounds like the ethicist is getting into the act," said Olhado.
"This is probably complete bobagem," said Grego. "Jane's going to come back laughing at us. But Nossa Senhora, it's fun, isn't it?"
"Hey, for all we know, maybe that's why the universe exists in the first place," said Olhado. "Because going around through chaos popping out realities is a lark. Maybe God's been having the best time."
"Or maybe he's just waiting for Jane to get out there and keep him company," said Valentine.
It was Miro's turn with Planter. Late-- after midnight. Not that he could sit by him and hold his hand. Inside the cleanroom, Miro had to wear a suit, not to keep contamination out, but to keep the descolada virus he carried inside himself from getting to Planter.
If I just cracked my suit a little bit, thought Miro, I could save his life.
In the absence of the descolada, the breakdown of Planter's body was rapid and devastating. They all knew that the descolada had messed with the pequenino reproductive cycle, giving the pequeninos their third life as trees, but until now it hadn't been clear how much of their daily life depended on the descolada. Whoever designed this virus was a coldhearted monster of efficiency. Without the descolada's daily, hourly, minutely intervention, cells began to become sluggish, the production of vital energy-storing molecules stopped, and-- what they feared most-- the synapses of the brain fired less rapidly. Planter was rigged with tubes and electrodes, and he lay inside several scanning fields, so that from the outside Ela and her pequenino assistants could monitor every aspect of his dying. In addition, there were tissue samples every hour or so around the clock. His pain was so great that when he slept at all, the taking of tissue samples didn't wake him. And yet through all this-- the pain, the quasi-stroke that was afflicting his brain-- Planter remained doggedly lucid. As if he were determined by sheer force of will to prove that even without the descolada, a pequenino could be intelligent. Planter wasn't doing this for science, of course. He was doing it for dignity.
The real researchers couldn't spare time to take a shift as the inside worker, wearing the suit and just sitting there, watching him, talking to him. Only people like Miro, and Jakt's and Valentine's children-- Syfte, Lars, Ro, Varsam-- and the strange quiet woman Plikt; people who had no other urgent duties to attend to, who were patient enough to endure the waiting and young enough to handle their duties with precision-- only such people were given shifts. They might have added a fellow pequenino to the shift, but all the brothers who knew enough about human technologies to do the job right were part of Ela's or Ouanda's teams, and had too much work to do. Of all those who spent time inside the cleanroom with him, taking tissue samples, feeding him, changing bottles, cleaning him up, only Miro had known pequeninos well enough to communicate with them. Miro could speak to him in Brothers' Language. That had to be of some comfort to him, even if they were virtual strangers, Planter having been born after Miro left Lusitania on his thirty-year voyage.
Planter was not asleep. His eyes were half-open, looking at nothing, but Miro knew from the movement of his lips that he was speaking. Reciting to himself passages from some of the epics of his tribe. Sometimes he chanted sections of the tribal genealogy. When he first started doing this, Ela had worried that he was becoming delirious. But he insisted that he was doing it to test his memory. To make sure that in losing the descolada he wasn't losing his tribe-- which would be the same as losing himself.
Right now, as Miro turned up the volume inside his suit, he could hear Planter telling the story of some terrible war with the forest of Skysplitter, the "tree who called thunder." There was a digression in the middle of the war-story that told how Skysplitter got his name. This part of the tale sounded very old and mythic, a magical story about a brother who carried little mothers to the place where the sky fell open and the stars tumbled through onto the ground. Though Miro had been lost in his own thoughts about the day's discoveries-- the origin of Jane, Grego's and Olhado's idea of travel-by-wish-- for some reason he found himself paying close attention to the words that Planter was saying. And as the story ended, Miro had to interrupt.
"How old is that story?"
"Old," whispered Planter. "You were listening?"
"To the last part of it." It was all right to talk to Planter at length. Either he didn't grow impatient with the slowness of Miro's speech-- after all, Planter wasn't going anywhere-- or his own cognitive processes had slowed to match Miro's halting pace. Either way, Planter let Miro finish his own sentences, and answered him as if he had been listening carefully. "Did I understand you to say that this Skysplitter carried little mothers with him?"
"That's right," whispered Planter.
"But he wasn't going to the fathertree."
"No. He just had little mothers on his carries. I learned this story years ago. Before I did any human science."
"You know what it sounds like to me? That the story might come from a time when you didn't carry little mothers to the fathertree. When the little mothers didn't lick their sustenance from the sappy inside of the mothertree. Instead they hung from the carries on the male's abdomen until the infants matured enough to burst out and take their mothers' place at the teat."
"That's why I chanted it for you," said Planter. "I was trying to think of how it might have been, if we were intelligent before the descolada came. And finally I remembered that part in the story of Skysplitter's War."
"He went to the place where the sky broke open."
"The descolada got here somehow, didn't it?"
"How old is that story?"
"Skysplitter's War was twenty-nine generations ago. Our own forest isn't that old. But we carried songs and stories with us from our father-forest."
"The part of the story about the sky and the stars, that could be a lot older, though, couldn't it?"
"Very old. The fathertree Skysplitter died long ago. He might have been very old even when the war took place."
"Do you think it might be possible that this is a memory of the pequenino who first discovered the descolada? That it was brought here by a starship, and that what he saw was some kind of reentry vehicle?"
"That's why I chanted it."
"If that's true, then you were definitely intelligent before the coming of the descolada."
"All gone now," said Planter.
"What's all gone? I don't understand."
"Our genes of that time. Can't even guess what the descolada took away from us and threw out."
It was true. Each descolada virus might contain within itself the complete genetic code for every native life form on Lusitania, but that was only the genetic code as it was now, in its descolada-controlled state. What the code was before the descolada came could never be reconstructed or restored.
"Still," said Miro. "It's intriguing. To think that you already had language and songs and stories before the virus." And then, though he knew he shouldn't, he added, "Perhaps that makes it unnecessary for you to try to prove the independence of pequenino intelligence."
"Another attempt to save the piggy," said Planter.
A voice came over the speaker. A voice from outside the cleanroom.
"You can move on out now." It was Ela. She was supposed to be asleep during Miro's shift.
"My shift isn't over for three hours," said Miro.
"I've got somebody else coming in."
"There are plenty of suits."
"I need you out here, Miro." Ela's voice brooked no possibility of disobedience. And she was the scientist in charge of this experiment.
When he came out a few minutes later, he understood what was going on. Quara stood there, looking icy, and Ela was at least as furious. They had obviously been quarreling again-- no surprise there. The surprise was that Quara was here at all.
"You might as well go back inside," said Quara as soon as Miro emerged from the sterilization chamber.
"I don't even know why I left," said Miro.
"She insists on having a private conversation," said Ela.
"She'll call you out," said Quara, "but she won't disconnect the auditory monitoring system."
"We're supposed to be documenting every moment of Planter's conversation. For lucidity."
Miro sighed. "Ela, grow up."
She almost exploded. "Me! Me grow up! She comes in here like she thinks she's Nossa Senhora on her throne--"
"Ela," said Miro. "Shut up and listen. Quara is Planter's only hope of living through this experiment. Can you honestly say that it wouldn't serve the purpose of this experiment to let her--"
"All right," said Ela, cutting him off because she already grasped his argument and bowed to it. "She's the enemy of every living sentient being on this planet, but I'll cut off the auditory monitoring because she wants to have a private conversation with the brother that she's killing."
That was too much for Quara. "You don't have to cut off anything for me," she said. "I'm sorry I came. It was a stupid mistake."
"Quara!" shouted Miro.
She stopped at the lab door.
"Get the suit on and go talk to Planter. What does he have to do with her?"
Quara glared once again at Ela, but she headed toward the sterilization room from which Miro had just emerged.
He felt greatly relieved. Since he knew that he had no authority at all, and that both of them were perfectly capable of telling him what he could do with his orders, the fact that they complied suggested that in fact they really wanted to comply. Quara really did want to speak to Planter. And Ela really did want her to do it. They might even be growing up enough to stop their personal differences from endangering other people's lives. There might be hope for this family yet.
"She'll just switch it back on as soon as I'm inside," said Quara.
"No she won't," said Miro.
"She'll try," said Quara.
Ela looked at her scornfully. "I know how to keep my word."
They said nothing more to each other. Quara went inside the sterilization chamber to dress. A few minutes later she was out in the cleanroom, still dripping from the descolada-killing solution that had been sprayed all over the suit as soon as she was inside it.
Miro could hear Quara's footsteps.
"Shut it off," he said.
Ela reached up and pushed a button. The footsteps went silent.
Inside his ear, Jane spoke to him. "Do you want me to play everything they say for you?"
He subvocalized. "You can still hear inside there?"
"The computer is linked to several monitors that are sensitive to vibration. I've picked up a few tricks about decoding human speech from the slightest vibrations. And the instruments are very sensitive."
"Go ahead then," said Miro.
"No moral qualms about invasion of privacy?"
"Not a one," said Miro. The survival of a world was at stake. And he had kept his word-- the auditory monitoring equipment was off. Ela couldn't hear what was being said.
The conversation was nothing at first. How are you? Very sick. Much pain? Yes.
It was Planter who broke things out of the pleasant formalities and into the heart of the issue.
"Why do you want all my people to be slaves?"
Quara sighed-- but, to her credit, it didn't sound petulant. To Miro's practiced ear, it sounded as though she were really emotionally torn. Not at all the defiant face she showed to her family. "I don't," she said.
"Maybe you didn't forge the chains, but you hold the key and refuse to use it."
"The descolada isn't a chain," she said. "A chain is a nothing. The descolada is alive."
"So am I. So are all my people. Why is their life more important than ours?"
"The descolada doesn't kill you. Your enemy is Ela and my mother. They're the ones who would kill all of you in order to keep the descolada from killing them."
"Of course," said Planter. "Of course they would. As I would kill all of them to protect my people."
"So your quarrel isn't with me."
"Yes it is. Without what you know, humans and pequeninos will end up killing each other, one way or another. They'll have no choice. As long as the descolada can't be tamed, it will eventually destroy humanity or humanity will have to destroy it-- and us along with it."
"They'll never destroy it," said Quara.
"Because you won't let them."
"Any more than I'd let them destroy you. Sentient life is sentient life."
"No," said Planter. "With ramen you can live and let live. But with varelse, there can be no dialogue. Only war."
"No such thing," Quara said. Then she launched into the same arguments she had used when Miro talked to her.
When she was finished, there was silence for a while.
"Are they talking still?" Ela whispered to the people who were watching in the visual monitors. Miro didn't hear an answer-- somebody probably shook his head no.
"Quara," whispered Planter.
"I'm still here," she answered. To her credit, the argumentative tone was gone from her voice again. She had taken no joy from her cruel moral correctness.
"That's not why you're refusing to help," he said.
"Yes it is."
"You'd help in a minute if it weren't your own family you had to surrender to."
"Not true!" she shouted.
So-- Planter struck a nerve.
"You're only so sure you're right because they're so sure you're wrong."
"I am right!"
"When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?"
"I have doubts," whispered Quara.
"Listen to your doubts," said Planter. "Save my people. And yours."
"Who am I to decide between the descolada and our people?"
"Exactly," said Planter. "Who are you to make such a decision?"
"I'm not," she said. "I'm withholding a decision."
"You know what the descolada can do. You know what it will do. Withholding a decision is a decision."
"It's not a decision. It's not an action."
"Failing to try to stop a murder that you might easily stop-- how is that not murder?"
"Is this why you wanted to see me? One more person telling me what to do?"
"I have the right."
"Because you took it upon yourself to become a martyr and die?"
"I haven't lost my mind yet," said Planter.
"Right. You've proved your point. Now let them get the descolada back in here and save you."
"No."
"Why not? Are you so sure you're right?"
"For my own life, I can decide. I'm not like you-- I don't decide for others to die."
"If humanity dies, I die with them," said Quara.
"Do you know why I want to die?" said Planter.
"Why?"
"So I don't have to watch humans and pequeninos kill each other ever again."
Quara bowed her head.
"You and Grego-- you're both the same."
Tears dropped onto the faceplate of the suit. "That's a lie."
"You both refuse to listen to anybody else. You know better about everything. And when you're both done, many many innocent people are dead."
She stood up as if to go. "Die, then," she said. "Since I'm such a murderer, why should I cry over you?" But she didn't take a step. She doesn't want to go, thought Miro.
"Tell them," said Planter.
She shook her head, so vigorously that tears flipped outward from her eyes, spattering the inside of the mask. If she kept that up, soon she wouldn't be able to see a thing.
"If you tell what you know, everybody is wiser. If you keep a secret, then everyone is a fool."
"If I tell, the descolada will die!"
"Then let it!" cried Planter.
The exertion was an extraordinary drain on him. The instruments in the lab went crazy for a few moments. Ela muttered under her breath as she checked with each of the technicians monitoring them.
"Is that how you'd like me to feel about you?" asked Quara.
"It is how you feel about me," whispered Planter. "Let him die."
"No," she said.
"The descolada came and enslaved my people. So what if it's sentient or not! It's a tyrant. It's a murderer. If a human being behaved the way the descolada acts, even you would agree he had to be stopped, even if killing him were the only way. Why should another species be treated more leniently than a member of your own?"
"Because the descolada doesn't know what it's doing," said Quara. "It doesn't understand that we're intelligent."
"It doesn't care," said Planter. "Whoever made the descolada sent it out not caring whether the species it captures or kills are sentient or not. Is that the creature you want all my people and all your people to die for? Are you so filled with hate for your family that you'll be on the side of a monster like the descolada?"
Quara had no answer. She sank onto the stool beside Planter's bed.
Planter reached out a hand and rested it on her shoulder. The suit was not so thick and impermeable that she couldn't feel the pressure of it, even though he was very weak.
"For myself, I don't mind dying," he said. "Maybe because of the third life, we pequeninos don't have the same fear of death that you short-lived humans do. But even though I won't have the third life, Quara, I will have the kind of immortality you humans have. My name will live in the stories. Even if I have no tree at all, my name will live. And what I did. You humans can say that I'm choosing to be a martyr for nothing, but my brothers understand. By staying clear and intelligent to the end, I prove that they are who they are. I help show that our slavemasters didn't make us who we are, and can't stop us from being who we are. The descolada may force us to do many things, but it doesn't own us to the very center. Inside us there is a place that is our true self. So I don't mind dying. I will live forever in every pequenino that is free."
"Why are you saying this when only I can hear?" said Quara.
"Because only you have the power to kill me completely. Only you have the power to make it so my death means nothing, so that all my people die after me and there's no one left to remember. Why shouldn't I leave my testament with you alone? Only you will decide whether or not it has any worth."
"I hate you for this," she said. "I knew you'd do this."
"Do what?"
"Make me feel so terrible that I have to-- give in!"
"If you knew I'd do this, why did you come?"
"I shouldn't have! I wish I hadn't!"
"I'll tell you why you came. You came so that I would make you give in. So that when you did it, you'd be doing it for my sake, and not for your family."
"So I'm your puppet?"
"Just the opposite. You chose to come here. You are using me to make you do what you really want to do. At heart you are still human, Quara. You want your people to live. You would be a monster if you didn't."
"Just because you're dying doesn't make you wise," she said.
"Yes it does," said Planter.
"What if I tell you that I'll never cooperate in the killing of the descolada?"
"Then I'll believe you," said Planter.
"And hate me."
"Yes," said Planter.
"You can't."
"Yes I can. I'm not a very good Christian. I am not able to love the one who chooses to kill me and all my people."
She said nothing.
"Go away now," he said. "I've said all that I can say. Now I want to chant my stories and keep myself intelligent until death finally comes."
She walked away from him, into the sterilization chamber.
Miro turned toward Ela. "Get everybody out of the lab," he said.
"Why?"
"Because there's a chance that she'll come out and tell you what she knows."
"Then I should be the one to go, and everybody else stay," said Ela.
"No," said Miro. "You're the only one that she'll ever tell."
"If you think that, then you're a complete--"
"Telling anyone else wouldn't hurt her enough to satisfy her," said Miro. "Everybody out."
Ela thought for a moment. "All right," she said to the others. "Get back to the main lab and monitor your computers. I'll bring us up on the net if she tells me anything, and you can see what she enters as we put it in. If you can make sense of what you're seeing, start following it up. Even if she actually knows anything, we still won't have much time to design a truncated descolada so we can get it to Planter before he dies. Go."
They went.
When Quara emerged from the sterilization chamber, she found only Ela and Miro waiting for her.
"I still think it's wrong to kill the descolada before we've even tried to talk to it," she said.
"It may well be," said Ela. "I only know that I intend to do it if I can."
"Bring up your files," said Quara. "I'm going to tell you everything I know about descolada intelligence. If it works and Planter lives through this, I'm going to spit in his face."
"Spit a thousand times," said Ela. "Just so he lives."
Her files came up into the display. Quara began pointing to certain regions of the model of the descolada virus. Within a few minutes, it was Quara sitting before the terminal, typing, pointing, talking, as Ela asked questions.
In his ear, Jane spoke up again. "The little bitch," she said. "She didn't have her files in another computer. She kept everything she knew inside her head."
By late afternoon the next day, Planter was at the edge of death and Ela was at the edge of exhaustion. Her team had worked through the night; Quara had helped, constantly, indefatigably reading over everything Ela's people came up with, critiquing, pointing out errors. By midmorning, they had a plan for a truncated virus that should work. All of the language capability was gone, which meant the new viruses wouldn't be able to communicate with each other. All the analytical ability was gone as well, as near as they could tell. But safely in place were all the parts of the virus that supported bodily functions in the native species of Lusitania. As near as they could possibly tell without having a working sample of the virus, the new design was exactly what was needed-- a descolada that was completely functional in the life cycles of the Lusitanian species, including the pequeninos, yet completely incapable of global regulation and manipulation. They named the new virus recolada. The old one had been named for its function of tearing apart; the new one for its remaining function, holding together the species-pairs that made up the native life of Lusitania.
Ender raised one objection-- that since the descolada must have been putting the pequeninos into a belligerent, expansive mode, the new virus might lock them into that particular condition. But Ela and Quara answered together that they had deliberately used an older version of the descolada as their model, from a time when the pequeninos were more relaxed-- more "themselves." The pequeninos working on the project had agreed to this; there was little time to consult anyone else except Human and Rooter, who also concurred.
With the things that Quara had taught them about the workings of the descolada, Ela also had a team working on a killer bacterium that would spread quickly through the entire planet's gaialogy, finding the normal descolada in every place and every form, tearing it to bits and killing it. It would recognize the old descolada by the very elements that the new descolada would lack. Releasing the recolada and the killer bacterium at the same time should do the job.
There was only one problem remaining-- actually making the new virus. That was Ela's direct project from midmorning on. Quara collapsed and slept. So did most of the pequeninos. But Ela struggled on, trying to use all the tools she had to break apart the virus and recombine it as she needed.
But when Ender came late in the afternoon to tell her that it was now or never, if her virus was to save Planter, she could only break down and weep from exhaustion and frustration.
"I can't," she said.
"Then tell him that you've achieved it but you can't get it ready in time and--"
"I mean it can't be done."
"You've designed it."
"We've planned it, we've modeled it, yes. But it can't be made. The descolada is a really vicious design. We can't build it from scratch because there are too many parts that can't hold together unless you have those very sections already working to keep rebuilding each other as they break down. And we can't do modifications of the present virus unless the descolada is at least marginally active, in which case it undoes what we're doing faster than we can do it. It was designed to police itself constantly so it can't be altered, and to be so unstable in all its parts that it's completely unmakable."
"But they made it."
"Yes, but I don't know how. Unlike Grego, I can't completely step outside my science on some metaphysical whim and make things up and wish them into existence. I'm stuck with the rules of nature as they are here and now, and there's no rule that will let me make it."
"So we know where we need to go, but we can't get there from here."
"Until last night I didn't know enough to guess whether we could design this new recolada or not, and therefore I had no way of guessing whether we could make it. I figured that if it was designable, it was makable. I was ready to make it, ready to act the moment Quara relented. All we've achieved is to know, finally, completely, that it can't be done. Quara was right. We definitely found out enough from her to enable us to kill every descolada virus on Lusitania. But we can't make the recolada that could replace it and keep Lusitanian life functioning."
"So if we use the viricide bacterium--"
"All the pequeninos in the world would be where Planter is now within a week or two. And all the grass and birds and vines and everything. Scorched earth. An atrocity. Quara was right." She wept again.
"You're just tired." It was Quara, awake now and looking terrible, not refreshed at all by her sleep.
Ela, for her part, couldn't answer her sister.
Quara looked like she might be thinking of saying something cruel, along the lines of what did I tell you? But she thought better of it, and came and put her hand on Ela's shoulder. "You're tired, Ela. You need to sleep."
"Yes," said Ela.
"But first let's tell Planter."
"Say good-bye, you mean."
"Yes, that's what I mean."
They made their way to the lab that contained Planter's cleanroom. The pequenino researchers who had slept were awake again; all had joined the vigil for Planter's last hours. Miro was inside with Planter again, and this time they didn't make him leave, though Ender knew that both Ela and Quara longed to be inside with him. Instead they both spoke to him over the speakers, explaining what they had found. The half-success that was worse, in its way, than complete failure, because it could easily lead to the destruction of all the pequeninos, if the humans of Lusitania became desperate enough.
"You won't use it," whispered Planter. The microphones, sensitive as they were, could barely pick up his voice.
"We won't," said Quara. "But we're not the only people here."
"You won't use it," he said. "I'm the only one who'll ever die like this."
The last of his words were voiceless; they read his lips later, from the holo recording, to be sure of what he said. And, having said it, having heard their good-byes, he died.
The moment the monitoring machines confirmed his death, the pequeninos of the research group rushed into the cleanroom. No need for sterilization now. They wanted the descolada with them. Brusquely moving Miro out of the way, they set to work, injecting the virus into every part of Planter's body, hundreds of injections in moments. They had been preparing for this, obviously. They would respect Planter's sacrifice in life-- but once he was dead, his honor satisfied, they had no compunctions about trying to save him for the third life if they could.
They took him out into the open space where Human and Rooter stood, and laid him on a spot already marked, forming an equilateral triangle with those two young fathertrees. There they flayed his body and staked it open. Within hours a tree was growing, and there was hope, briefly, that it might be a fathertree. But it took only a few days more for the brothers, who were adept at recognizing a young fathertree, to declare that the effort had failed. There was a kind of life, containing his genes, yes; but the memories, the will, the person who was Planter was lost. The tree was mute; there would be no mind joining the perpetual conclave of the fathertrees. Planter had determined to free himself of the descolada, even if it meant losing the third life that was the descolada's gift to those it possessed. He succeeded, and, in losing, won.
He had succeeded in something else, too. The pequeninos departed from their normal pattern of forgetting quickly the name of mere brothertrees. Though no little mother would ever crawl its bark, the brothertree that had grown from his corpse would be known by the name of Planter and treated with respect, as if it were a fathertree, as if it were a person. Moreover, his story was told and told again throughout Lusitania, wherever pequeninos lived. He had proved that pequeninos were intelligent even without the descolada; it was a noble sacrifice, and speaking the name of Planter was a reminder to all pequeninos of their fundamental freedom from the virus that had put them in bondage.
But Planter's death did not give any pause to the preparations for pequenino colonization of other worlds. Warmaker's people had a majority now, and as rumors spread that the humans had a bacterium capable of killing all the descolada, they had an even greater urgency. Hurry, they told the Hive Queen again and again. Hurry, so we can win free of this world before the humans decide to kill us all.
"I can do it, I think," said Jane. "If the ship is small and simple, the cargo almost nothing, the crew as few as possible, then I can hold the pattern of it in my mind. If the voyage is brief, the stay in Outspace very short. As for holding the locations of the start and finish in my mind, that's easy, child's play, I can do it within a millimeter, less. If I slept, I could do it in my sleep. So there's no need for it to endure acceleration or provide extended life support. The starship can be simple. A sealed environment, places to sit, light, heat. If in fact we can get there and I can hold it all together and bring us back, then we won't be out in space long enough to use up the oxygen in a small room."
They were all gathered in the Bishop's office to listen to her-- the whole Ribeira family, Jakt's and Valentine's family, the pequenino researchers, several priests and Filhos, and perhaps a dozen other leaders of the human colony. The Bishop had insisted on having the meeting in his office. "Because it's large enough," he had said, "and because if you're going to go out like Nimrod and hunt before the Lord, if you're going to send a ship like Babel out to heaven to seek the face of God, then I want to be there to plead with God to be merciful to you."
"How much of your capacity is left?" Ender asked Jane.
"Not much," she said. "As it is, every computer in the Hundred Worlds will be sluggish while we do it, as I use their memory to hold the pattern."
"I ask, because we want to try to perform an experiment while we're out there."
"Don't waffle about it, Andrew," said Ela. "We want to perform a miracle while we're there. If we get Outside it means that Grego and Olhado are probably right about what it's like out there. And that means that the rules are different. Things can be created just by comprehending the pattern of them. So I want to go. There's a chance that while I'm there, holding the pattern of the recolada virus in my mind, I might be able to create it. I might be able to bring back a virus that can't be made in realspace. Can you take me? Can you hold me there long enough to make the virus?"
"How long is that?" asked Jane.
"It should be instantaneous," said Grego. "The moment we arrive, whatever full patterns we hold in our minds should be created within a period of time too brief for humans to notice. The real time will be taken analyzing to see if, in fact, she's got the virus she wanted. Maybe five minutes."
"Yes," said Jane. "If I can do this at all, I can do it for five minutes."
"The rest of the crew," said Ender.
"The rest of the crew will be you and Miro," said Jane. "And no one else."
Grego protested loudest, but he was not alone.
"I'm a pilot," said Jakt.
"I'm the only pilot of this ship," said Jane.
"Olhado and I thought of it," said Grego.
"Ender and Miro will come because it can't be done safely without them. I dwell within Ender-- where he goes, he carries me with him. Miro, on the other hand, has become so close to me that I think he might be part of the pattern that is myself. I want him there because I may not be whole without him. No one else. I can't have anyone else in the pattern. Ela is the only one beyond these two."
"Then that's the crew," said Ender.
"With no argument," added Mayor Kovano.
"Will the Hive Queen build the ship?" asked Jane.
"She will," said Ender.
"Then I have only one more favor to ask. Ela, if I can give you the five minutes, can you also hold the pattern of another virus in your mind?"
"The virus for Path?" she asked.
"We owe them that, if we can, for the help they gave to us."
"I think so," she said, "or at least the differences between it and the normal descolada. That's all I can possibly hold of anything-- the differences."
"And how soon will all this happen?" asked the Mayor.
"However fast the Hive Queen can build the ship," said Jane. "We have only forty-eight days until the Hundred Worlds shut down their ansibles. I will survive that day, we know that now, but it will cripple me. It will take me awhile to relearn all my lost memories, if I ever can. Until that's happened, I can't possibly sustain the pattern of a ship to go Outside."
"The Hive Queen can have a ship as simple as this one built long before then," said Ender. "In a ship so small there's no chance of shuttling all the people and pequeninos off Lusitania before the fleet arrives, let alone before the ansible cut-off keeps Jane from being able to fly the ship. But there'll be time to take new, descolada-free pequenino communities-- a brother, a wife, and many pregnant little mothers-- to a dozen planets and establish them there. Time to take new Hive Queens in their cocoons, already fertilized to lay their first few hundred eggs, to a dozen worlds as well. If this works at all, if we don't just sit there like idiots in a cardboard box wishing we could fly, then we'll come back with peace for this world, freedom from the danger of the descolada, and safe dispersal for the genetic heritage of the other species of ramen here. A week ago, it looked impossible. Now there's hope."
"Graças a deus," said the Bishop.
Quara laughed.
Everyone looked at her.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I was just thinking-- I heard a prayer, not many weeks ago. A prayer to Os Venerados, Grandfather Gusto and Grandmother Cida. That if there wasn't a way to solve the impossible problems facing us, they would petition God to open up the way."
"Not a bad prayer," said the Bishop. "And perhaps God has granted it."
"I know," said Quara. "That's what I was thinking. What if all this stuff about Outspace and Inspace, what if it was never real before. What if it only came to be true because of that prayer?"
"What of it?" asked the Bishop.
"Well, don't you think that would be funny?"
Apparently no one did.
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