Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card

  "But that experiment had only a single species over the whole face of the planet," said Wang-mu. "When the sun grew too hot, then white daisies grew to reflect the light back into space, and when the sun grew too cool, dark daisies grew to absorb the light and hold it as heat." Wang-mu was proud that she could remember Daisyworld so clearly.

  "No no no," said Qing-jao. "You have missed the point, of course. The point is that there must already have been dark daisies, even when the light daisies were dominant, and light daisies when the world was covered with darkness. Evolution can't produce new species on demand. It is creating new species constantly, as genes drift and are spliced and broken by radiation and passed between species by viruses. Thus no species ever 'breeds true.'"

  Wang-mu didn't understand the connection yet, and her face must have revealed her puzzlement.

  "Am I still your teacher, after all? Must I keep my side of the bargain, even though you have given up on yours?"

  Please, said Wang-mu silently. I would serve you forever, if you would only help your father in this work.

  "As long as the whole species is together, interbreeding constantly," said Qing-jao, "individuals never drift too far, genetically speaking; their genes are constantly being recombined with other genes in the same species, so the variations are spread evenly through the whole population with each new generation. Only when the environment puts them under such stress that one of those randomly drifting traits suddenly has survival value, only then will all those in that particular environment who lack that trait die out, until the new trait, instead of being an occasional sport, is now a universal definer of the new species. That's the fundamental tenet of gaialogy--constant genetic drift is essential for the survival of life as a whole. According to these documents, Lusitania is a world with absurdly few species, and no possibility of genetic drift because these impossible viruses are constantly correcting any changes that might come up. Not only could such a system never evolve, but also it would be impossible for life to continue to exist--they couldn't adapt to change."

  "Maybe there are no changes on Lusitania."

  "Don't be so foolish, Wang-mu. It makes me ashamed to think I ever tried to teach you. All stars fluctuate. All planets wobble and change in their orbits. We have been observing many worlds for three thousand years, and in that time we have learned what Earthbound scientists in the years before that could never learn--which behaviors are common to all planets and stellar systems, and which are unique to the Earth and the Sol System. I tell you that it is impossible for a planet like Lusitania to exist for more than a few decades without experiencing life-threatening environmental change--temperature fluctuations, orbital disturbances, seismic and volcanic cycles--how would a system of really only a handful of species ever cope with that? If the world has only light daisies, how will it ever warm itself when the sun cools? If its life-forms are all carbon dioxide users, how will they heal themselves when the oxygen in the atmosphere reaches poisonous levels? Your so-called friends in Lusitania are fools, to send you nonsense like this. If they were real scientists, they would know that their results are impossible."

  Qing-jao pressed a key and the display over her terminal went blank. "You have wasted time that I don't have. If you have nothing better than this to offer, do not come to me again. You are less than nothing to me. You are a bug floating in my waterglass. You defile the whole glass, not just the place where you float. I wake up in pain, knowing you are in this house."

  Then I'm hardly "nothing" to you, am I? said Wang-mu silently. It sounds to me as if I'm very important to you indeed. You may be very brilliant, Qing-jao, but you do not understand yourself any better than anybody else does.

  "Because you are a stupid common girl, you do not understand me," said Qing-jao. "I have told you to leave."

  "But your father is master of this house, and Master Han has asked me to stay."

  "Little stupid-person, little sister-of-pigs, if I cannot ask you to leave the whole house, I have certainly implied that I would like you to leave my room."

  Wang-mu bowed her head till it almost--almost--touched the floor. Then she backed out of the room, so as not to show her back parts to her mistress. If you treat me this way, then I will treat you like a great lord, and if you do not detect the irony in my actions, then who of the two of us is the fool?

  Master Han was not in his room when Wang-mu returned. He might be at the toilet and return in a moment. He might be performing some ritual of the godspoken, in which case he could be gone for hours. Wang-mu was too full of questions to wait for him. She brought up the project documents on the terminal, knowing that Jane would be watching, monitoring her. That Jane had no doubt monitored all that happened in Qing-jao's room.

  Still, Jane waited for Wang-mu to phrase the questions she had got from Qing-jao before she started trying to answer. And then Jane answered first the question of veracity.

  "The documents from Lusitania are genuine enough," said Jane. "Ela and Novinha and Ouanda and all the others who have studied with them are deeply specialized, yes, but within their specialty they're very good. If Qing-jao had read the Life of Human, she would see how these dozen species-pairs function."

  "But what she says is still hard for me to understand," said Wang-mu. "I've been trying to think how it could all be true--that there are too few species for a real gaialogy to develop, and yet the planet Lusitania is still well-enough regulated to sustain life. Could it possibly be that there is no environmental stress on Lusitania?"

  "No," said Jane. "I have access to all the astronomical data from the satellites there, and in the time humanity has been present in the Lusitania system, Lusitania and its sun have shown all the normal fluctuations. Right now there seems to be an overall trend of global cooling."

  "Then how will the life forms on Lusitania respond?" asked Wang-mu. "The descolada virus won't let them evolve--it tries to destroy anything strange, which is why it's going to kill the humans and the hive queen, if it can."

  Jane, whose small image sat in lotus position in the air over Master Han's terminal, held up a hand. "One moment," she said.

  Then she lowered her hand. "I have been reporting your questions to my friends, and Ela is very excited."

  A new face appeared in the display, just behind and above the image of Jane. She was a dark-skinned, Negroid-looking woman; or some mix, perhaps, since she was not that dark, and her nose was narrow. This is Elanora, thought Wang-mu. Jane is showing me a woman on a world many lightyears away; is she also showing my face to her? What does this Ela make of me? Do I seem hopelessly stupid to her?

  But Ela clearly was thinking nothing about Wang-mu at all. She was speaking, instead, of Wang-mu's questions. "Why doesn't the descolada virus permit variety? That should be a trait with negative survival value, and yet the descolada survives. Wang-mu must think I'm such an idiot, not to have thought of this before. But I'm not a gaialogist, and I grew up on Lusitania, so I never questioned it, I just figured that whatever the Lusitanian gaialogy was, it worked--and then I kept studying the descolada. What does Wang-mu think?"

  Wang-mu was appalled to hear these words from this stranger. What had Jane told Ela about her? How could Ela even imagine that Wang-mu would think Ela was an idiot, when she was a scientist and Wang-mu was only a servant girl?

  "How can it matter what I think?" said Wang-mu.

  "What do you think?" said Jane. "Even if you can't think why it might matter, Ela wants to know."

  So Wang-mu told her speculations. "This is very stupid to think of, because it's only a microscopic virus, but the descolada must be doing it all. After all, it contains the genes of every species within it, doesn't it? So it must take care of evolution by itself. Instead of all that genetic drift, the descolada must do the drifting. It could, couldn't it? It could change the genes of a whole species, even while the species is still alive. It wouldn't have to wait for evolution."

  There was a pause again, with Jane holding up her hand. Sh
e must be showing Wang-mu's face to Ela, letting her hear Wang-mu's words from her own lips.

  "Nossa Senhora," whispered Ela. "On this world, the descolada is Gaia. Of course. That would explain everything, wouldn't it? So few species, because the descolada only permits the species that it has tamed. It turned a whole planetary gaialogy into something almost as simple as Daisyworld itself."

  Wang-mu thought it was almost funny, to hear a highly-educated scientist like Ela refer back to Daisyworld, as if she were still a new student, a half-educated child like Wang-mu.

  Another face appeared next to Ela's, this time an older Caucasian man, perhaps sixty years old, with whitening hair and a very quieting, peaceful look to his face. "But part of Wang-mu's question is still unanswered," said the man. "How could the descolada ever evolve? How could there have ever been proto-descolada viruses? Why would such a limited gaialogy have survival preference over the slow evolutionary model that every other world with life on it has had?"

  "I never asked that question," said Wang-mu. "Qing-jao asked the first part of it, but the rest of it is his question."

  "Hush," said Jane. "Qing-jao never asked the question. She used it as a reason not to study the Lusitanian documents. Only you really asked the question, and just because Andrew Wiggin understands your own question better than you do doesn't mean it isn't still yours."

  So this was Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead. He didn't look ancient and wise at all, not the way Master Han did. Instead this Wiggin looked foolishly surprised, the way all round-eyes did, and his face changed with every momentary mood, as if it were out of control. Yet there was that look of peace about him. Perhaps he had some of the Buddha in him. Buddha, after all, had found his own way onto the Path. Maybe this Andrew Wiggin had found a way onto the Path, even though he wasn't Chinese at all.

  Wiggin was still asking the questions that he thought were Wang-mu's. "The odds against the natural occurrence of such a virus are--unbelievable. Long before a virus evolved that could link species together and control a whole gaialogy, the proto-descoladas would have destroyed all life. There wasn't any time for evolution--the virus is just too destructive. It would have killed everything in its earliest form, and then died out itself when it ran out of organisms to pillage."

  "Maybe the pillaging came later," said Ela. "Maybe it evolved in symbiosis with some other species that benefited from its ability to genetically transform all the individuals within it, all within a matter of days or weeks. It might only have extended to other species later."

  "Maybe," said Andrew.

  A thought occurred to Wang-mu. "The descolada is like one of the gods," she said. "It comes and changes everybody whether they like it or not."

  "Except the gods have the decency to go away," said Wiggin.

  He responded so quickly that Wang-mu realized that Jane must now be transmitting everything that was done or said instantaneously across the billions of kilometers of space between them. From what Wang-mu had learned about ansible costs, this sort of thing would be possible only for the military; a business that tried a realtime ansible linkup would pay enough money to provide housing for every poor person on an entire planet. And I'm getting this for free, because of Jane. I'm seeing their faces and they're seeing mine, even at the moment they speak.

  "Do they?" asked Ela. "I thought the whole problem that Path was having is that the gods won't go away and leave them alone."

  Wang-mu answered with bitterness. "The gods are like the descolada in every way. They destroy anything they don't like, and the people they do like they transform into something that they never were. Qing-jao was once a good and bright and funny girl, and now she's spiteful and angry and cruel, all because of the gods."

  "All because of genetic alteration by Congress," said Wiggin. "A deliberate change introduced by people who were forcing you to fit their own plan."

  "Yes," said Ela. "Just like the descolada."

  "What do you mean?" asked Wiggin.

  "A deliberate change introduced here by people who were trying to force Lusitania to fit their own plan."

  "What people?" asked Wang-mu. "Who would do such a terrible thing?"

  "It's been at the back of my mind for years," said Ela. "It bothered me that there were so few life forms on Lusitania--you remember, Andrew, that was part of the reason we discovered that the descolada was involved in the pairing of species. We knew that there was a catastrophic change here that wiped out all those species and restructured the few survivors. The descolada was more devastating to most life on Lusitania than a collision with an asteroid. But we always assumed because we found the descolada here that it evolved here. I knew it made no sense--just what Qing-jao said--but since it had obviously happened, then it didn't matter whether it made sense or not. But what if it didn't happen? What if the descolada came from the gods? Not god gods, of course, but some sentient species that developed this virus artificially?"

  "That would be monstrous," said Wiggin. "To create a poison like that and send it out to other worlds, not knowing or caring what you kill."

  "Not a poison," said Ela. "If it really does handle planetary systems regulation, couldn't the descolada be a device for terraforming other worlds? We've never tried terraforming anything--we humans and the buggers before us only settled on worlds whose native life forms had brought them to a stasis that was similar to the stasis of Earth. An oxygen-rich atmosphere that sucked out carbon dioxide fast enough to keep the planet temperate as the star burns hotter. What if there's a species somewhere that decided that in order to develop planets suitable for colonization, they should send out the descolada virus in advance--thousands of years in advance, maybe--to intelligently transform planets into exactly the conditions they need? And then when they arrive, ready to set up housekeeping, maybe they have the countervirus that switches off the descolada so that they can establish a real gaialogy."

  "Or maybe they developed the virus so that it doesn't interfere with them or the animals they need," said Wiggin. "Maybe they destroyed all the nonessential life on every world."

  "Either way, it explains everything. The problems I've been facing, that I can't make sense of the impossibly unnatural arrangements of molecules within the descolada--they continue to exist only because the virus works constantly to maintain all those internal contradictions. But I could never conceive of how such a self-contradictory molecule evolved in the first place. All this is answered if I know that somehow it was designed and made. What Wang-mu said Qing-jao complained about, that the descolada couldn't evolve and Lusitania's gaialogy couldn't exist in nature. Well, it doesn't exist in nature. It's an artificial virus and an artificial gaialogy."

  "You mean this actually helps?" asked Wang-mu.

  Their faces showed that they had virtually forgotten she was still part of the conversation, in their excitement.

  "I don't know yet," said Ela. "But it's a new way of looking at it. For one thing, if I can start with the assumption that everything in the virus has a purpose, instead of the normal jumble of switched-on and switched-off genes that occur in nature--well, that'll help. And just knowing it was designed gives me hope that I can undesign it. Or redesign it."

  "Don't get ahead of yourself," said Wiggin. "This is still just a hypothesis."

  "It rings true," said Ela. "It has the feel of truth. It explains so much."

  "I feel that way, too," said Wiggin. "But we have to try it out with the people who are most affected by it."

  "Where's Planter?" asked Ela. "We can talk to Planter."

  "And Human and Rooter," said Wiggin. "We have to try this idea with the fathertrees."

  "This is going to hit them like a hurricane," said Ela. Then she seemed to realize the implications of her own words. "It is, really, not just a figure of speech, it's going to hurt. To find out that their whole world is a terraforming project."

  "More important than their world," said Wiggin. "Themselves. The third life. The descolada gave them everything the
y are and the most fundamental facts of their life. Remember, our best guess is that they evolved as mammal-like creatures who mated directly, male to female, the little mothers sucking life from the male sexual organs, a half-dozen at a time. That's who they were. Then the descolada transformed them, and sterilized the males until after they died and turned into trees."

  "Their very nature--"

  "It was a hard thing for human beings to deal with, when we first realized how much of our behavior arose from evolutionary necessity," said Wiggin. "There are still numberless humans who refuse to believe it. Even if it turns out to be absolutely true, do you think that the pequeninos will embrace this idea as easily as they swallowed wonders like space travel? It's one thing to see creatures from another world. It's another thing to find out that neither God nor evolution created you--that some scientist of another species did."

  "But if it's true--"

  "Who knows if it's true? All we'll ever know is if the idea is useful. And to the pequeninos, it may be so devastating that they refuse to believe it forever."

  "Some will hate you for telling them," said Wang-mu. "But some will be glad for it."

  They looked at her again--or at least Jane's computer simulation showed them looking at her. "You would know, wouldn't you," said Wiggin. "You and Han Fei-tzu just found out that your people had been artificially enhanced."

  "And shackled, all at once," said Wang-mu. "For me and Master Han, it was freedom. For Qing-jao . . ."

  "There'll be many like Qing-jao among the pequeninos," said Ela. "But Planter and Human and Rooter won't be among them, will they? They're very wise."

  "So is Qing-jao!" said Wang-mu. She spoke more hotly than she meant to. But the loyalty of a secret maid dies slowly.

  "We didn't mean to say she isn't," said Wiggin. "But she certainly isn't being wise about this, is she?"

  "Not about this," said Wang-mu.

  "That's all we meant. No one likes to find out that the story he always believed about his own identity is false. The pequeninos, many of them, believe that God made them something special, just as your godspoken believe."