Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card

  The humans would see it. Their satellites would show them how the pequeninos dealt with treaty-breakers and cowardly murderers. Then the humans would trust the pequeninos again. Then the pequeninos could lift up their heads without shame in the presence of a human.

  Gradually Miro realized that they were not just letting him overhear their conversations and deliberations. They were making sure he heard and understood all they were doing. They expect me to take the word back to the city. They expect me to explain to the humans of Lusitania exactly how the pequeninos plan to punish Quim's murderers.

  Don't they realize that I'm a stranger here now? Who would listen to me, among the humans of Lusitania--me, a crippled boy out of the past, whose speech is so slow and hard to follow. I have no influence over other humans. I barely have influence over my own body.

  Still, it was Miro's duty. He got up slowly, unknotting himself from his place amid Human's roots. He would try. He would go to Bishop Peregrino and tell him what the pequeninos were planning. Bishop Peregrino would spread the word, and then the people could all feel better knowing that thousands of innocent pequenino infants would be killed to make up for the death of one man.

  What are pequenino babies, after all? Just worms living in the dark belly of a mothertree. It would never occur to these people that there was scant moral difference between this mass murder of pequenino babies and King Herod's slaughter of the innocents at the time of Jesus' birth. This was justice they were pursuing. What is the complete obliteration of a tribe of pequeninos compared with that?

  Grego: standing in the middle of the grassy square, the crowd alert around me, each of them connected to me by a taut invisible wire so that my will is their will, my mouth speaks their words, their hearts beat to my rhythm. I have never felt this before, this kind of life, to be part of a group like this, and not just part of it, but the mind of it, the center, so that my self includes all of them, hundreds of them, my rage is their rage, their hands are my hands, their eyes see only what I show them.

  The music of it, the cadence of invocation, answer, invocation, answer:

  "The Bishop says that we'll pray for justice, but is that enough for us?"

  "No!"

  "The pequeninos say that they'll destroy the forest that murdered my brother, but do we believe them?"

  "No!"

  They complete my phrases; when I have to stop to breathe in, they shout for me, so that my voice is never stilled, but rises out of the throats of five hundred men and women. The Bishop came to me, full of peace and patience. The Mayor came to me with his warnings of police and riot and his hints of prison. Valentine came to me, all icy intellect, speaking of my responsibility. All of them know my power, power I never even knew I had, power that began only when I stopped obeying them and finally spoke what was in my heart to the people themselves. Truth is my power. I stopped deceiving the people and gave them the truth and now see what I've become, what we've become together.

  "If anybody punishes the swine for killing Quim, it should be us. A human life should be avenged by human hands! They say that the sentence for the murderers is death--but we're the only ones who have the right to appoint the executioner! We're the ones who have to make sure the sentence is carried out!"

  "Yes! Yes!"

  "They let my brother die in the agony of the descolada! They watched his body burn from the inside out! Now we'll burn that forest to the ground!"

  "Burn them! Fire! Fire!"

  See how they strike matches, how they tear up tufts of grass and light them. The flame we'll light together!

  "Tomorrow we'll leave on the punitive expedition--"

  "Tonight! Tonight! Now!"

  "Tomorrow--we can't go tonight--we have to collect water and supplies--"

  "Now! Tonight! Burn!"

  "I tell you we can't get there in a single night, it's hundreds of kilometers away, it'll take days to get there--"

  "The piggies are right over the fence!"

  "Not the ones that killed Quim--"

  "They're all murdering little bastards!"

  "These are the ones that killed Libo, aren't they?"

  "They killed Pipo and Libo!"

  "They're all murderers!"

  "Burn them tonight!"

  "Burn them all!"

  "Lusitania for us, not for animals!"

  Are they insane? How can they think that he would let them kill these piggies--they haven't done anything. "It's Warmaker! Warmaker and his forest that we have to punish!"

  "Punish them!"

  "Kill the piggies!"

  "Burn!"

  "Fire!"

  A momentary silence. A lull. An opportunity. Think of the right words. Think of something to bring them back, they're slipping away. They were part of my body, they were part of my self, but now they're sliding away out from under me, one spasm and I've lost control if I ever had control; what can I say in this split second of silence that will bring them back to their senses?

  Too long. Grego waited too long to think of something. It was a child's voice that filled the brief silence, the voice of a boy not yet into his manhood, exactly the sort of innocent voice that could cause the brimming holy rage within their hearts to erupt, to flow into irrevocable action. Cried the child: "For Quim and Christ!"

  "Quim and Christ! Quim and Christ!"

  "No!" shouted Grego. "Wait! You can't do this!"

  They lurch around him, stumble him down. He's on all fours, someone stepping on his hand. Where is the stool he was standing on? Here it is, cling to that, don't let them trample me, they're going to kill me if I don't get up, I have to move with them, get up and walk with them, run with them or they'll crush me.

  And then they were gone, past him, roaring, shouting, the tumult of feet moving out of the grassy square into the grassy streets, tiny flames held up, the voices crying "Fire" and "Burn" and "Quim and Christ," all the sound and sight of them flowing like a stream of lava from the square outward toward the forest that waited on the not-so-distant hill.

  "God in heaven what are they doing!"

  It was Valentine. Grego knelt by the stool, leaning on it, and there she stood beside him, looking at them flow away from this cold empty crater of a place where the conflagration began.

  "Grego, you self-righteous son-of-a-bitch, what have you done?"

  Me? "I was going to lead them to Warmaker. I was going to lead them to justice."

  "You're the physicist, you idiot boy. Haven't you ever heard of the uncertainty principle?"

  "Particle physics. Philotic physics."

  "Mob physics, Grego. You never owned them. They owned you. And now they've used you up and they're going to destroy the forest of our best friends and advocates among the pequeninos and what will any of us do then? It's war between humans and pequeninos, unless they have inhuman self-restraint, and it will be our fault."

  "Warmaker killed Quim."

  "A crime. But what you've started here, Grego, this is an atrocity."

  "I didn't do it!"

  "Bishop Peregrino counseled with you. Mayor Kovano warned you. I begged you. And you did it anyway."

  "You warned me about a riot, not about this--"

  "This is a riot, you fool. Worse than a riot. It's a pogrom. It's a massacre. It's baby-killing. It's the first step on the long terrible road to xenocide."

  "You can't blame all that on me!"

  Her face is so terrible in the moonlight, in the light from the doors and windows of the bars. "I blame on you only what you did. You started a fire on a hot, dry, windy day, despite all warnings. I blame you for that, and if you don't hold yourself responsible for all the consequences of your own acts, then you are truly unworthy of human society and I hope you lose your freedom forever."

  She's gone. Where? To do what? She can't leave him alone here. It's not right to leave him alone. A few moments ago, he was so large, with five hundred hearts and minds and mouths, a thousand hands and feet, and now it was all gone, as if his huge new body
had died and he was left as a quivering ghost of a man, this single slender worm of a soul bereft of the powerful flesh it used to rule. He had never been so terrified. They almost killed him in their rush to leave him, almost trampled him into the grass.

  They were his, though, all the same. He had created them, made a single mob of them, and even though they had misunderstood what he created them for, they were still acting according to the rage he had provoked in them, and with the plan he had put in their minds. Their aim was bad, that's all--otherwise they were doing exactly what he had wanted them to do. Valentine was right. It was his responsibility. What they did now, he had done as surely as if he were still in front of them leading the way.

  So what could he do?

  Stop them. Get control again. Stand in front of them and beg them to stop. They weren't setting off to burn the distant forest of the mad fathertree Warmaker, they were going to slaughter pequeninos that he knew, even if he didn't like them much. He had to stop them, or their blood would be on his hands like sap that couldn't be washed or rubbed away, a stain that would stay with him forever.

  So he ran, following the muddy swath of their footprints through the streets, where grass was trampled down into the mire. He ran until his side ached, through the place where they had stopped to break down the fence--where was the disruption field when we needed it? Why didn't someone turn it on?--and on to where already flames were leaping into the sky.

  "Stop! Put the fire out!"

  "Burn!"

  "For Quim and Christ!"

  "Die, pigs!"

  "There's one, getting away!"

  "Kill it!"

  "Burn it!"

  "The trees aren't dry enough--the fire's not taking!"

  "Yes it is!"

  "Cut down the tree!"

  "There's another!"

  "Look, the little bastards are attacking!"

  "Break them in half!"

  "Give me that scythe if you aren't going to use it!"

  "Tear the little swine apart!"

  "For Quim and Christ!"

  Blood sprays in a wide arc and spatters into Grego's face as he lunges forward, trying to stop them. Did I know this one? Did I know this pequenino's voice before it was torn into this cry of agony and death? I can't put this back together again, they've broken him. Her. Broken her. A wife. A never-seen wife. Then we must be near the middle of the forest, and that giant must be the mothertree.

  "Here's a killer tree if I ever saw one!"

  Around the perimeter of the clearing where the great tree stood, the lesser trees suddenly began to lean, then toppled down, broken off at the trunks. For a moment Grego thought that it was humans cutting them down, but now he realized that no one was near those trees. They were breaking off by themselves, throwing themselves down to their deaths in order to crush the murdering humans under their trunks and branches, trying to save the mothertree.

  For a moment it worked. Men screamed in agony; perhaps a dozen or two were crushed or trapped or broken under the falling trees. But then all had fallen that could, and still the mothertree stood there, her trunk undulating strangely, as if some inner peristalsis were at work, swallowing deeply.

  "Let it live!" cried Grego. "It's the mothertree! She's innocent!"

  But he was drowned out by the cries of the injured and trapped, and by the terror as they realized that the forest could strike back, that this was not all a vengeful game of justice and retribution, but a real war, with both sides dangerous.

  "Burn it! Burn it!" The chant was loud enough to drown out the cries of the dying. And now the leaves and branches of the fallen trees were stretched out toward the mothertree; they lighted those branches and they burned readily. A few men came to their senses enough to realize that a fire that burned the mothertree would also burn the men pinned under the fallen brothertrees, and they began to try to rescue them. But most of the men were caught up in the passion of their success. To them the mothertree was Warmaker, the killer; to them it was everything alien in this world, the enemy who kept them inside a fence, the landlord who had arbitrarily restricted them to one small plot of land on a world so wide. The mothertree was all oppression and all authority, all strangeness and danger, and they had conquered it.

  Grego recoiled from the screaming of the trapped men who watched the fire approaching, from the howls of the men the fire had reached, the triumphant chanting of the men who had done this murder. "For Quim and Christ! For Quim and Christ!" Almost Grego ran away, unable to bear what he could see and smell and hear, the bright orange flames, the smell of roasting manflesh, and the crackling of the living wood ablaze.

  But he did not run. Instead he worked beside the others who dashed forward to the very edge of the flame to pry living men out from under the fallen trees. He was singed, and once his clothing caught on fire, but the hot pain of that was nothing, it was almost merciful, because it was the punishment that he deserved. He should die in this place. He might even have done it, might even have plunged himself so deeply into the fire that he could never come out until his crime was purged out of him and all that was left was bone and ash, but there were still broken people to pull out of the fire's reach, still lives to save. Besides, someone beat out the flames on his shoulder and helped him lift the tree so the boy who lay under it could wriggle free and how could he die when he was part of something like this, part of saving this child?

  "For Quim and Christ!" the boy whimpered as he crab-crawled out of the way of the flames.

  Here he was, the boy whose words had filled the silence and turned the crowd into this direction. You did it, thought Grego. You tore them away from me.

  The boy looked up at him and recognized him. "Grego!" he cried, and lunged forward. His arms enfolded Grego around the thighs, his head pressed against Grego's hip. "Uncle Grego!"

  It was Olhado's oldest boy, Nimbo.

  "We did it!" cried Nimbo. "For Uncle Quim!"

  The flames crackled. Grego picked up the boy and carried him, staggering out of the reach of the hottest flames, and then farther out, into the darkness, into a place where it was cool. All the men were driven this way, the flames herding them, the wind driving the flames. Most were like Grego, exhausted, frightened, in pain from the fire or helping someone else.

  But some, many perhaps, were still untouched except by the inner fire that Grego and Nimbo had ignited in the square. "Burn them all!" The voices here and there, smaller mobs like tiny eddies in a larger stream, but they now held brands and torches from the fires raging in the forest's heart. "For Quim and Christ! For Libo and Pipo! No trees! No trees!"

  Grego staggered onward.

  "Set me down," said Nimbo.

  And onward.

  "I can walk."

  But Grego's errand was too urgent. He couldn't stop for Nimbo, and he couldn't let the boy walk, couldn't wait for him and couldn't leave him behind. You don't leave your brother's son behind in a burning forest. So he carried him; and after awhile, exhausted, his legs and arms aching from the exertion, his shoulder a white sun of agony where he had been burned, he emerged from the forest into the grassy space before the old gate, where the path wound down from the wood to join the path from the xenobiology labs.

  The mob had gathered here, many of them holding torches, but for some reason they were still a distance away from the two isolated trees that stood watch here: Human and Rooter. Grego pushed his way through the crowd, still holding Nimbo; his heart was racing, and he was filled with fear and anguish and yet a spark of hope, for he knew why the men with torches had stopped. And when he reached the edge of the mob, he saw that he was right.

  There were gathered around those last two fathertrees perhaps two hundred pequenino brothers and wives, small and beleaguered, but with an air of defiance about them. They would fight to the death on this spot, rather than let these last two trees be burned--but burn they would, if the mob decided so, for there was no hope of pequeninos standing in the way of men determined to do murder.


  But between the piggies and the men there stood Miro, like a giant compared to the pequeninos. He had no weapon, and yet he had spread his arms as if to protect the pequeninos, or perhaps to hold them back. And in his thick, difficult speech he was defying the mob.

  "Kill me first!" he said. "You like murder! Kill me first! Just like they killed Quim! Kill me first!"

  "Not you!" said one of the men holding torches. "But those trees are going to die. And all those piggies, too, if they haven't got the brains to run away."

  "Me first," said Miro. "These are my brothers! Kill me first!"

  He spoke loudly and slowly, so his sluggish speech could be understood. The mob still had anger in it, some of them at least. Yet there were also many who were sick of it all, many who were already ashamed, already discovering in their hearts the terrible acts they had performed tonight, when their souls were given over to the will of the mob. Grego still felt it, that connection with the others, and he knew that they could go either way--the ones still hot with rage might start one last fire tonight; or the ones who had cooled, whose only inner heat was a blush of shame, they might prevail.

  Grego had this one last chance to redeem himself, at least in part. And so he stepped forward, still carrying Nimbo.

  "Me too," he said. "Kill me too, before you raise a hand against these brothers and these trees!"

  "Out of the way, Grego, you and the cripple both!"

  "How are you different from Warmaker, if you kill these little ones?"

  Now Grego stood beside Miro.

  "Out of the way! We're going to burn the last of them and have done." But the voice was less certain.

  "There's a fire behind you," said Grego, "and too many people have already died, humans and pequeninos both." His voice was husky, his breath short from the smoke he had inhaled. But he could still be heard. "The forest that killed Quim is far away from here, and Warmaker still stands untouched. We haven't done justice here tonight. We've done murder and massacre."

  "Piggies are piggies!"

  "Are they? Would you like that if it went the other way?" Grego took a few steps toward one of the men who looked tired and unwilling to go on, and spoke directly to him, while pointing at the mob's spokesman. "You! Would you like to be punished for what he did?"