Last Shadow (9781250252135)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “Then I won’t worry about you,” said Sprout.

  “But if I ask you to take me to another world,” asked Dog, “will you do it?”

  “Jane would have to show me where it is, first,” said Sprout. “Then I can find it again.”

  “Visit all the colonies,” said Dog. “Tell me about them when you do.”

  “Me too?” asked Blue.

  “You can’t detour yet,” said Sprout.

  “But you can take me with you,” said Blue.

  “Why not?” said Sprout.

  “Why not indeed,” said Dog. “Blue may learn how to Travel just from doing it frequently with you.”

  Blue grinned. Sprout worried.

  “You’ll always be needed, Sprout,” said Dog. “Don’t begrudge your brother the chance to have a power you like having.”

  “Right,” said Sprout. “That would be wrong, for me to even want to keep it from him.”

  “None of the other humans know that we’re here,” said Phoenix. “Will you tell them now, or keep it secret?”

  “What do you want us to do?” said Blue.

  “I don’t know,” said Dog. “I would like to see Peter and Wang-Mu again, so you could tell them. And Jane and Miro—of course they should know.”

  “The only Traveler you haven’t mentioned,” said Sprout, “is Thulium.”

  “She’s a remarkable human,” said Dog. “Even cleverer than you.”

  “I know,” said Sprout.

  “But still somewhere between crazy and stupid,” said Phoenix.

  “You’re wrong,” said Sprout. “Neither one. But frightened sometimes and wildly overconfident at other times.”

  “Therefore crazy,” said Phoenix.

  “And she sometimes overestimates her own knowledge and skills,” said Sprout.

  “Therefore stupid,” said Phoenix. “You only reject ‘stupid’ and ‘crazy’ because they’re on your list of not-nice words.”

  “Are you telling me not to tell her?” asked Sprout. “Because I think she would benefit from talking to you often. I think it would help her learn how to be less … crazy and stupid.”

  “Tell her, then,” said Dog. “Or better yet, bring her here without telling her.”

  “How will I know when you’re here?” asked Sprout.

  “Where else would we be?” asked Phoenix.

  “One of us will always be nearby,” said Dog, “and will call the other if you come.”

  “The Council of Ravens, back on Nest,” said Sprout. “Now I wonder—were there a bunch of other ravens there, meeting in those trees? Or were you talking to them all in your mind, from a great distance?”

  “It was rarely more ravens than me and Phoenix,” said Dog. “We’re not crows. They’re such annoying extroverts.”

  “Were there crows on Nest?”

  “Almost every kind of bird except the ratites and the raptors,” said Dog. “The Huapaya couldn’t deal with giant birds inside a spaceship. And no condors or other birds with vast wingspans were awake for the trip.”

  “You have a long and amazing history,” said Sprout.

  Dog paused before answering. “Our history is completely dependent on humans for our transportation through space. But we honor humans for letting us ravens breed ourselves. Humans were not good at recognizing the traits we value most.”

  They regarded each other in silence for a long time.

  “Come speak to me from time to time,” said Dog. “Either of you, together or separately. I want to learn from you about the special humans called leguminids. We have a lot of knowledge that you’ll never hear from Ruqyaq, because he doesn’t know it.”

  “We have some stories, too,” said Blue. “We had our own voyage in the Herodotus, for more centuries than the Folk of the Ark.”

  “Then we will also listen to your tales,” said Dog. “Good-bye.”

  With that, she took wing and flew away. But instead of going into the trees, she spiraled upward, then began a show of acrobatic moves in the air, she and Phoenix dancing together, or so it seemed. It was beautiful to watch these large birds flying on their broad wings, black crosses in the sky.

  And then they swooped down and went into the shadows of the trees. They disappeared the moment they entered the shadows.

  “Thanks for taking me with you today,” said Blue.

  “Thanks for noticing the ravens, so we could go to them,” said Sprout.

  “I think they would have sought us out whether I saw them or not,” said Blue. “They know you.”

  “Maybe,” said Sprout.

  They headed back toward the gate in the fence, because it was getting on toward mealtime.

  “Do I have to call you Brussels?” said Blue.

  “No,” said Sprout. “Not yet.”

  “Not ever. Please?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “You sound like an idiotic grownup when you say that.”

  “What’s idiotic about it?” asked Sprout.

  “It’s a grownup way to say no, without a child realizing their request has been rejected.”

  “Yes,” said Sprout. “But apparently it doesn’t work on you anymore.”

  “Never did,” said Blue.

  “Always did till now,” said Sprout.

  24

  Quara: I understand that as a matter of interplanetary peace, we can never return to Nest. Especially now that we’ve taken so many refugees with us.

  Ela: Then what is this conversation about?

  Quara: We’re not diplomats. We’re not a government. We’re not even a military force. We’re scientists. And we haven’t finished our work. We have no definitive answers about the descolada virus.

  Ela: Do you still believe such answers are to be found on Nest?

  Quara: When they thought of us as enemies, they attacked us. A biological attack. Why should we be sure that they didn’t alter the Recorder virus to function as the descolada?

  Ela: And then they launched it into space with no concern about where this terrible weapon would land? Their attack on us was directed against a particular threat that landed on their world, uninvited.

  Jane: They did invite us to dinner.

  Quara: Finding the descolada, its source, the likelihood of running into it again on other worlds—how can we abandon that work and leave the whole human species—all the sentient species—exposed to this terrible bioweapon?

  Ela: Don’t beg the question, Quara. The whole issue is whether it was made as a bioweapon, so don’t talk as if that had already been decided.

  Quara: We have a responsibility.

  Thulium: Stop. All these points have been made now. It’s time to think.

  Quara: Your specialty, yes?

  Ela: Don’t be mean to a child, Quara.

  Thulium: What if we already have all the data we need? What if we simply haven’t analyzed it right? What if we need to conduct experiments to test hypotheses?

  Quara: What experiments can we possibly conduct? Spread a very fine net across a hundred light-years of space and see how many descolada viruses we catch?

  Thulium: I can think of a few useful things to try. So can you, if you open your mind to possibilities you haven’t already thought of—or to some you already rejected.

  —Excerpt from transcript: Ela, Quara, Jane, Thulium, Sprout as quoted in Plikt, Leguminidae

  Some of the experiments could only be performed in computer simulations. The descolada virus was too virulent and too intelligent, if that was the right term, for experiments with the actual virus to be safe.

  But the simulations were solid—they’d proved accurate many times before—so Sprout took over running the many iterations of the sim to determine what the result would be if only one of the two key genes on the Recorder virus was broken. They were able to confirm that each break would always result in some descolada-like behaviors; only when both were broken did Recorder become descolada.

  Then they ran simulated cosmic radiation damage, to
see what the probability was of striking those particular genes during passage through space. Then the resulting deformed molecules had to be simmed to see how the descolada would perform with those breaks.

  The result was that no other mutation they found, no other broken genes, resulted in a viable infectious agent like the descolada. Any other changes either did nothing or killed the virus.

  “I think that proves it was made to be a weapon, deliberately,” said Quara, when Sprout presented his results.

  “It proves nothing,” said Thulium. “We’re scientists, remember? We’re not trying to prove anything. We’re trying to disprove our own hypotheses, and then if we fail we regard it as temporary possible confirmation of our guesses.”

  “What’s your alternate hypothesis, then, Thulium?” said Quara. “Why were these two genes broken, and no others?”

  “I have an idea,” said Blue.

  Thulium looked impatient.

  Sprout intervened. “Blue knows way more about the descolada than we knew six months ago.”

  “Tell us your idea, Blue,” said Ela.

  “It’s not a simulation,” said Blue. “We don’t understand either the descolada or the Recorder virus well enough to build a decent sim. But we have vacuum chambers, don’t we?”

  Everyone knew the answer was yes.

  “The descolada responds to its environment,” said Blue. “It knows when it’s inside a host’s body, when it’s in sunlight, when it’s in water or atmosphere.”

  “It seemed to, on Lusitania,” said Fingers, who had been helping Sprout run the simulations. And since he carried a version of the descolada in his body, because pequenino reproduction and transformation still depended on it, he had a special claim on their attention.

  “What we’ve only guessed at,” said Blue, “is whether the descolada or the Recorder can survive in cold hard space.”

  “Put the viruses in the vacuum chamber?” said Quara. “That won’t show anything.”

  “Said the omniscient Quara,” said Miro.

  “Shut up,” said Quara. But she made no more protest.

  “Don’t use the descolada or any version of it,” said Blue. “Use the Recorder and see what happens to it.”

  “We can’t possibly see the molecule inside the chamber, and the moment we take it out to examine it, it won’t be in vacuum anymore,” said Thulium.

  “Such a Schrodinger moment,” said Miro.

  “Not the big vacuum chamber,” said Blue. “The little one, with the clear window into it.”

  “Shrink it down more inside,” said Sprout. “Make it so the Recorder virus has to be right up near the window.”

  “Might work,” said Ela. “Worth trying.”

  Because it was Blue’s idea, he supervised the crew working on building the tiny vacuum chamber and inserting a version of Recorder. The back wall was a color-killing black, while a series of variable-colored lights could play through the field from different angles. The microscopes were snapping high-speed pictures and taking vids at every useful depth of field. Finally Blue said, “That should be enough as a test of concept.”

  Sprout was proud of his little brother, but also afraid what it might do to him if his experiment turned out to show nothing.

  It took a while to find which stills showed the clearest pictures. The equipment couldn’t show individual atoms, but it gave a fuzzy picture of the shape of the whole molecule. At first they looked at the most recognizable stills—Recorder exactly as it existed on Nest.

  But Thulium quickly scanned through the stills with that sort of image and snorted. “All of the stills we’ve chosen are from the first second after insertion. We’re seeing only what we put into the vacuum, not how it responded.”

  Now they looked at the later pictures. The images seemed to resist clear resolution. “It looks like the viruses have shrunk down to a tiny fraction of their regular size,” said Quara.

  “But thicker,” said Blue.

  “And all of the images from later in the process show the same thing. Shrunken or cut-down viruses,” said Miro.

  “Or reconfigured ones,” said Thulium. “Time for the vids, even though the resolution won’t be as good.”

  It took many viewings of the first five seconds after insertion before they began to understand what they were seeing. It was Ela who finally put it into words. “In a vacuum, the Recorder folds itself repeatedly, like a fan, like pleats.”

  “More like a string being folded back and forth upon itself,” said Blue.

  “What we need to do now is determine what that means to exposure to cosmic radiation,” said Thulium. “Here’s my guess, based entirely on Blue’s insight. The way the Recorder virus folds, only the outside of each bend is exposed to radiation, and therefore mutations would be most likely to occur at those fold points.”

  They had to run the experiment several times, and at one point Peter and Wang-Mu went to another world to buy a higher-resolution microscope. Finally, though, they had clear enough images to see that Thulium was exactly right. Instead of the break points in the descolada being two among billions of genes, they were two among 88 genes exposed and weakened at the fold points.

  “Any genes broken by radiation during transit through hard space,” said Quara, “would kill the virus, except those two. But the chance of those two occurring randomly, given the configuration of the folded virus, is not unlikely. Those are the only mutations that would result in a living but changed virus. Now I can believe the descolada was not deliberately weaponized.”

  “I think there’s some kind of encapsulation going on, after it’s folded,” said Blue. “Can we run some different colors?”

  By the end of the next day, they understood that once the Recorder virus hit near-vacuum, it folded up and then built a microthin film around itself, to protect it and, perhaps, contain it so it wouldn’t spontaneously unfold.

  “It’s an amazing design,” said Sprout. “No spaceship needed. Just go out into space, eject a few million Recorder viruses in the general direction you want, and they’ll build their own tiny life-support and isolation chambers.”

  “Why didn’t we see it before?” asked Carlotta. “We’re supposed to have decoded most of the genome.”

  “It’s probably controlled by the sequences we couldn’t decode,” said Ender. “It happens.”

  “We should have seen it,” insisted Carlotta.

  “It’s not a failure of leguminids or of Ribeiras,” said Jane. “It’s just the simple fact that until you think of a thing, you haven’t thought of it yet.”

  They all sat or stood around, maybe thinking of how profound yet obvious Jane’s aphorism was. But Sprout was thinking, Good work, Delft Delphiki. You’ve earned your place among the scientists for sure.

  “Good work,” said Ela. “Everybody get something to eat and a good night’s sleep. No celebration, just sleep, because we’ve got some decisions to make tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The decision was the obvious one. Had they solved the whole descolada question? Thulium was the one who said, “Science isn’t done until it’s published,” and everyone agreed that they needed to send several short reports and a long, detailed paper demonstrating the differences between Recorder and descolada, how the descolada on Lusitania was neutralized, and describing the behavior of Recorder in a vacuum.

  They put the names of the entire research team, including those of the pequeninos who had worked with them. The Formics who had been part of the project had no names, and since they could not reveal the existence of Formics anyway, no harm done. Ela’s name came first, as head of the team. But everyone was aware of which bits of research each person had done. “Dead ends are part of the achievement,” said Ela, “because until we exhaust many possibilities, we can’t have any confidence in our results.”

  When it was all written up and ready to transmit by ansible to the Hundred Worlds, Jane made them wait. “This will have little impact unless it comes with a story.�
� So they waited for Plikt and Valentine to draw up some fairly brief monographs that included accounts of the work of the Ribeira family and the leguminids. Jane was never mentioned; nor was detouring; and no account mentioned Nest in any way. The Hundred Worlds had heard plenty about the terrible danger of the descolada, so they would have a context for the stories that were sent along with the scientific papers.

  On the day when Jane said, “All done. All sent. Getting acknowledgment of receipt from some. Many,” Ela made a simple proposal. “There are a whole lot of superb geneticists on Lusitania right now, and there’s still plenty of follow-up work to do. Nevertheless, I declare the descolada project to be at an end. We never found the point of origin, but it doesn’t matter. We now understand the benign intent of the makers, and we have disseminated a course of action for any world that runs across a mutated Recorder virus. So the project is complete, and you’re all fired.”

  They laughed and applauded and a few of them wept.

  Then, over the next few days, they started forming up in small teams to research this and that. About half the former team members asked to be transported to one or another of the new colony worlds, to study the native flora and, if there was any, fauna. The rest were happy to stay on Lusitania, which now had most of the best equipment available in the Hundred Worlds. Only four considered and then decided to leave Lusitania and go to one of the older worlds with great and famous universities.

  They worried that they had no credentials, but Jane only laughed. “I’ll send you copies of the reviews of older papers that have had your names inserted as co-author. You have all the credentials you’ll need, as long as you want to study xenology or genetics.”

  The leguminid cousins had their own meeting, and grudgingly permitted their parents and Miro to attend, insofar as parents were available. Thulium was fine being an orphan, and she accepted Carlotta and Yuuto as foster parents.

  “We’re children,” said Little Mum. “That’s how we look, and despite our manifest brilliance, that’s what we are.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Thulium.

  “I can’t imagine a stupider waste of time than going to some civilized world,” said Boss, “picking an elementary school, and trying to tolerate the company of children who don’t know anything about calculus or the Peloponnesian War.”