Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card

  All the way up to the surface, Valentine struggled to make sense of what had happened. She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.

  They crawled out of the building into the sunlight, blinking, laughing in relief, all of them. "Not fun," said Ender. "But you insisted, Val. Had to see her right away."

  "So I'm a fool," said Valentine. "Is that news?"

  "It was beautiful," said Plikt.

  Miro only lay on his back in the capim and covered his eyes with his arm.

  Valentine looked at him lying there and caught a glimpse of the man he used to be, the body he used to have. Lying there, he didn't stagger; silent, there was no halting in his speech. No wonder his fellow xenologer had fallen in love with him. Ouanda. So tragic to discover that her father was also his father. That was the worst thing revealed when Ender spoke for the dead in Lusitania thirty years ago. This was the man that Ouanda had lost; and Miro had also lost this man that he was. No wonder he had risked death crossing the fence to help the piggies. Having lost his sweetheart, he counted his life as worthless. His only regret was that he hadn't died after all. He had lived on, broken on the outside as he was broken on the inside.

  Why did she think of these things, looking at him? Why did it suddenly seem so real to her?

  Was it because this was how he was thinking of himself right now? Was she capturing his image of himself? Was there some lingering connection between their minds?

  "Ender," she said, "what happened down there?"

  "Better than I hoped," said Ender.

  "What was?"

  "The link between us."

  "You expected that?"

  "Wanted it." Ender sat on the side of the car, his feet dangling in the tall grass. "She was hot today, wasn't she?"

  "Was she? I wouldn't know how to compare."

  "Sometimes she's so intellectual--it's like doing higher mathematics in my head, just talking to her. This time--like a child. Of course, I've never been with her when she was laying queen eggs. I think she may have told us more than she meant to."

  "You mean she didn't mean her promise?"

  "No, Val, no, she always means her promises. She doesn't know how to lie."

  "Then what did you mean?"

  "I was talking about the link between me and her. How they tried to tame me. That was really something, wasn't it? She was furious there for a moment, when she thought that you might have been the link they needed. You know what that would have meant to them--they wouldn't have been destroyed. They might even have used me to communicate with the human governments. Shared the galaxy with us. Such a lost opportunity."

  "You would have been--like a bugger. A slave to them."

  "Sure. I wouldn't have liked it. But all the lives that would have been saved--I was a soldier, wasn't I? If one soldier, dying, can save the lives of billions . . ."

  "But it couldn't have worked. You have an independent will," said Valentine.

  "Sure," said Ender. "Or at least, more independent than the hive queen can deal with. You too. Comforting, isn't it?"

  "I don't feel very comforted right now," said Valentine. "You were inside my head down there. And the hive queen--I feel so violated--"

  Ender looked surprised. "It never feels that way to me."

  "Well, it's not just that," said Valentine. "It was exhilarating, too. And frightening. She's so--large inside my head. Like I'm trying to contain someone bigger than myself."

  "I guess," said Ender. He turned to Plikt. "Was it like that for you, too?"

  For the first time Valentine realized how Plikt was looking at Ender, with eyes full, a trembling gaze. But Plikt said nothing.

  "That strong, huh?" said Ender. He chuckled and turned to Miro.

  Didn't he see? Plikt had already been obsessed with Ender. Now, having had him inside her mind, it might have been too much for her. The hive queen talked of taming rogue workers. Was it possible that Plikt had been "tamed" by Ender? Was it possible that she had lost her soul inside his?

  Absurd. Impossible. I hope to God it isn't so.

  "Come on, Miro," said Ender.

  Miro allowed Ender to help him to his feet. Then they climbed back onto the car and headed home to Milagre.

  Miro had told them that he didn't want to go to mass. Ender and Novinha went without him. But as soon as they were gone, he found it impossible to remain in the house. He kept getting the feeling that someone was just outside his range of vision. In the shadows, a smallish figure, watching him. Encased in smooth hard armor, only two clawlike fingers on its slender arms, arms that could be bitten off and cast down like brittle kindling wood. Yesterday's visit to the hive queen had bothered him more than he dreamed possible.

  I'm a xenologer, he reminded himself. My life has been devoted to dealing with aliens. I stood and watched as Ender flayed Human's mammaloid body and I didn't even flinch, because I'm a dispassionate scientist. Sometimes maybe I identify too much with my subjects. But I don't have nightmares about them, I don't start seeing them in shadows.

  Yet here he was, standing outside the door of his mother's house because in the grassy fields, in the bright sunlight of a Sunday morning, there were no shadows where a bugger could wait to spring.

  Am I the only one who feels this way?

  The hive queen isn't an insect. She and her people are warm-blooded, just like the pequeninos. They respirate, they sweat like mammals. They may carry with them the structural echoes of their evolutionary link with insects, just as we have our resemblances to lemurs and shrews and rats, but they created a bright and beautiful civilization. Or at least a dark and beautiful one. I should see them the way Ender does, with respect, with awe, with affection.

  And all I managed, barely, was endurance.

  There's no doubt that the hive queen is raman, capable of comprehending and tolerating us. The question is whether I am capable of comprehending and tolerating her. And I can't be the only one. Ender was so right to keep the knowledge of the hive queen from most of the people of Lusitania. If they once saw what I saw, or even caught a glimpse of a single bugger, the fear would spread, each one's terror would feed on everyone else's dread, until--until something. Something bad. Something monstrous.

  Maybe we're the varelse. Maybe xenocide is built into the human psyche as into no other species. Maybe the best thing that could happen for the moral good of the universe is for the descolada to get loose, to spread throughout the human universe and break us down to nothing. Maybe the descolada is God's answer to our unworthiness.

  Miro found himself at the door of the cathedral. In the cool morning air it stood open. Inside, they had not yet come to the eucharist. He shuffled in, took his place near the back. He had no desire to commune with Christ today. He simply needed the sight of other people. He needed to be surrounded by human beings. He knelt, crossed himself, then stayed there, clinging to the back of the pew in front of him, his head bowed. He would have prayed, but there was nothing in the Pai Nosso to deal with his fear. Give us this day our daily bread? Forgive us our trespasses? Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven? That would be good. God's kingdom, in which the lion could dwell with the lamb.

  Then there came to his mind an image of St. Stephen's vision: Christ sitting at the right hand of God. But on the left hand was someone else. The Queen of Heaven. Not the Holy Virgin but the hive queen, with whitish slime quivering on the tip of her abdomen. Miro clenched his hands on the wood of the pew before him. God take this vision from me. Get thee behind me, Enemy.

  Someone came a
nd knelt beside him. He didn't dare to open his eyes. He listened for some sound that would declare his companion to be human. But the rustling of cloth could just as easily be wing casings sliding across a hardened thorax.

  He had to force this image away. He opened his eyes. With his peripheral vision he could see that his companion was kneeling. From the slightness of the arm, from the color of the sleeve, it was a woman.

  "You can't hide from me forever," she whispered.

  The voice was wrong. Too husky. A voice that had spoken a hundred thousand times since last he heard it. A voice that had crooned to babies, cried out in the throes of love, shouted at children to come home, come home. A voice that had once, when it was young, told him of a love that would last forever.

  "Miro, if I could have taken your cross upon myself, I would have done it."

  My cross? Is that what it is I carry around with me, heavy and sluggish, weighing me down? And here I thought it was my body.

  "I don't know what to tell you, Miro. I grieved--for a long time. Sometimes I think I still do. Losing you--our hope for the future, I mean--it was better anyway--that's what I realized. I've had a good family, a good life, and so will you. But losing you as my friend, as my brother, that was the hardest thing, I was so lonely, I don't know if I ever got over that."

  Losing you as my sister was the easy part. I didn't need another sister.

  "You break my heart, Miro. You're so young. You haven't changed, that's the hardest thing, you haven't changed in thirty years."

  It was more than Miro could bear in silence. He didn't lift his head, but he did raise his voice. Far too loudly for the middle of mass, he answered her: "Haven't I?"

  He rose to his feet, vaguely aware that people were turning around to look at him.

  "Haven't I?" His voice was thick, hard to understand, and he was doing nothing to make it any clearer. He took a halting step into the aisle, then turned to face her at last. "This is how you remember me?"

  She looked up at him, aghast--at what? At Miro's speech, his palsied movements? Or simply that he was embarrassing her, that it didn't turn into the tragically romantic scene she had imagined for the past thirty years?

  Her face wasn't old, but it wasn't Ouanda, either. Middle-aged, thicker, with creases at the eyes. How old was she? Fifty now? Almost. What did this fifty-year-old woman have to do with him?

  "I don't even know you," said Miro. Then he lurched his way to the door and passed out into the morning.

  Some time later he found himself resting in the shade of a tree. Which one was this, Rooter or Human? Miro tried to remember--it was only a few weeks ago that he left here, wasn't it?--but when he left, Human's tree was still only a sapling, and now both trees looked to be about the same size and he couldn't remember for sure whether Human had been killed uphill or downhill from Rooter. It didn't matter--Miro had nothing to say to a tree, and they had nothing to say to him.

  Besides, Miro had never learned tree language; they hadn't even known that all that beating on trees with sticks was really a language until it was too late for Miro. Ender could do it, and Ouanda, and probably half a dozen other people, but Miro would never learn, because there was no way Miro's hands could hold the sticks and beat the rhythms. Just one more kind of speech that was now useless to him.

  "Que dia chato, meu filho."

  That was one voice that would never change. And the attitude was unchanging as well: What a rotten day, my son. Pious and snide at the same time--and mocking himself for both points of view.

  "Hi, Quim."

  "Father Estevao now, I'm afraid." Quim had adopted the full regalia of a priest, robes and all; now he gathered them under himself and sat on the worn-down grass in front of Miro.

  "You look the part," said Miro. Quim had matured well. As a kid he had looked pinched and pious. Experience with the real world instead of theological theory had given him lines and creases, but the face that resulted had compassion in it. And strength. "Sorry I made a scene at mass."

  "Did you?" asked Miro. "I wasn't there. Or rather, I was at mass--I just wasn't at the cathedral."

  "Communion for the ramen?"

  "For the children of God. The church already had a vocabulary to deal with strangers. We didn't have to wait for Demosthenes."

  "Well, you don't have to be smug about it, Quim. You didn't invent the terms."

  "Let's not fight."

  "Then let's not butt into other people's meditations."

  "A noble sentiment. Except that you have chosen to rest in the shade of a friend of mine, with whom I need to have a conversation. I thought it was more polite to talk to you first, before I start beating on Rooter with sticks."

  "This is Rooter?"

  "Say hi. I know he was looking forward to your return."

  "I never knew him."

  "But he knew all about you. I don't think you realize, Miro, what a hero you are among the pequeninos. They know what you did for them, and what it cost you."

  "And do they know what it's probably going to cost us all, in the end?"

  "In the end we'll all stand before the judgment bar of God. If a whole planetful of souls is taken there at once, then the only worry is to make sure no one goes unchristened whose soul might have been welcomed among the saints."

  "So you don't even care?"

  "I care, of course," said Quim. "But let's say that there's a longer view, in which life and death are less important matters than choosing what kind of life and what kind of death we have."

  "You really do believe all this, don't you," said Miro.

  "Depending on what you mean by 'all this,' yes, I do."

  "I mean all of it. A living God, a resurrected Christ, miracles, visions, baptism, transubstantiation . . ."

  "Yes."

  "Miracles. Healing."

  "Yes."

  "Like at the shrine to Grandfather and Grandmother."

  "Many healings have been reported there."

  "Do you believe in them?"

  "Miro, I don't know--some of them might have been hysterical. Some might have been a placebo effect. Some purported healings might have been spontaneous remissions or natural recoveries."

  "But some were real."

  "Might have been."

  "You believe that miracles are possible. "

  "Yes."

  "But you don't think any of them actually happen."

  "Miro, I believe that they do happen. I just don't know if people accurately perceive which events are miracles and which are not. There are no doubt many miracles claimed which were not miracles at all. There are also probably many miracles that no one recognized when they occurred."

  "What about me, Quim?"

  "What about you?"

  "Why no miracle for me?"

  Quim ducked his head, pulled at the short grass in front of him. It was a habit when he was a child, trying to avoid a hard question; it was the way he responded when their supposed father, Marcao, was on a drunken rampage.

  "What is it, Quim? Are miracles only for other people?"

  "Part of the miracle is that no one knows why it happens."

  "What a weasel you are, Quim."

  Quim flushed. "You want to know why you don't get a miraculous healing? Because you don't have faith, Miro."

  "What about the man who said, Yes Master, I believe--forgive my unbelief?"

  "Are you that man? Have you even asked for a healing?"

  "I'm asking now," said Miro. And then, unbidden, tears came to his eyes. "O God," he whispered. "I'm so ashamed."

  "Of what?" asked Quim. "Of having asked God for help? Of crying in front of your brother? Of your sins? Of your doubts?"

  Miro shook his head. He didn't know. These questions were all too hard. Then he realized that he did know the answer. He held out his arms from his sides. "Of this body," he said.

  Quim reached out and took his arms near the shoulder, drew them toward him, his hands sliding down Miro's arms until he was clasping Miro's wrists. "
This is my body which is given for you, he told us. The way you gave your body for the pequeninos. For the little ones."

  "Yeah, Quim, but he got his body back, right?"

  "He died, too."

  "Is that how I get healed? Find a way to die?"

  "Don't be an ass," said Quim. "Christ didn't kill himself. That was Judas's ploy."

  Miro's anger exploded. "All those people who get their colds cured, who get their migraines miraculously taken from them--are you telling me they deserve more from God than I do?"

  "Maybe it isn't based on what you deserve. Maybe it's based on what you need."

  Miro lunged forward, seizing the front of Quim's robe between his half-spastic fingers. "I need my body back!"

  "Maybe," said Quim.

  "What do you mean maybe, you simpering smug asshole!"

  "I mean," said Quim mildly, "that while you certainly want your body back, it may be that God, in his great wisdom, knows that for you to become the best man you can be, you need to spend a certain amount of time as a cripple."

  "How much time?" Miro demanded.

  "Certainly no longer than the rest of your life."

  Miro grunted in disgust and released Quim's robe.

  "Maybe less," said Quim. "I hope so."

  "Hope," said Miro contemptuously.

  "Along with faith and pure love, it's one of the great virtues. You should try it."

  "I saw Ouanda."

  "She's been trying to speak to you since you arrived."

  "She's old and fat. She's had a bunch of babies and lived thirty years and some guy she married has plowed her up one side and down the other all that time. I'd rather have visited her grave!"

  "How generous of you."

  "You know what I mean! Leaving Lusitania was a good idea, but thirty years wasn't long enough."

  "You'd rather come back to a world where no one knows you."

  "No one knows me here, either."

  "Maybe not. But we love you, Miro."

  "You love what I used to be."

  "You're the same man, Miro. You just have a different body."

  Miro struggled to his feet, leaning against Rooter for support as he got up. "Talk to your tree friend, Quim. You've got nothing to say that I want to hear."