Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 3 - Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card

  And here I am again, thought Valentine, back in the business of politics.

  She spoke sharply, in the clipped voice that told her terminal that she was giving it a command. "Transmit," she said.

  The word transmitting appeared in the air above her essay. Ordinarily, back when she was writing scholarly works, she would have had to specify a destination— submit the essay to a publisher through some roundabout pathway so that it could not readily be traced to Valentine Wiggin. Now, though, a subversive friend of Ender's, working under the obvious code name of "Jane," was taking care of all that for her— managing the tricky business of translating an ansible message from a ship going at near-light speed to a message readable by a planet bound ansible for which time was passing more than five hundred times faster.

  Since communicating with a starship ate up huge amounts of planet side ansible time, it was usually done only to convey navigational information and instructions. The only people permitted to send extended text messages were high officials in the government or the military. Valentine could not begin to understand how "Jane" managed to get so much ansible time for these text transmissions— and at the same time keep anyone from discovering where these subversive documents were coming from. Furthermore, "Jane" used even more ansible time transmitting back to her the published responses to her writings, reporting to her on all the arguments and strategies the government was using to counter Valentine's propaganda. Whoever "Jane" was— and Valentine suspected that "Jane" was simply the name for a clandestine organisation that had penetrated the highest reaches of government— she was extraordinarily good. And extraordinarily foolhardy. Still, if Jane was willing to expose herself— themselves— to such risks, Valentine owed it to her— them— to produce as many tracts as she could, and as powerful and dangerous as she could make them.

  If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.

  But she was still a woman; even revolutionaries are allowed to have a life, aren't they? Moments of joy— or pleasure, or perhaps only relief— stolen here and there. She got up from her seat, ignoring the pain that came from moving after sitting so long, and twisted her way out of the door of her tiny office— a storage bin, really, before they converted the starship to their own use. She was a little ashamed of how eager she was to get to the room where Jakt would be waiting. Most of the great revolutionary propagandists in history would have been able to endure at least three weeks of physical abstinence. Or would they? She wondered if anyone had done a study of that particular question.

  She was still imagining how a researcher would go about writing a grant proposal for such a project when she got to the four-bunk compartment they shared with Syfte and her husband, Lars, who had proposed to her only a few days before they left, as soon as he realised that Syfte really meant to leave Trondheim. It was hard to share a cabin with newly-weds— Valentine always felt like such an intruder, using the same room. But there was no choice. Though this starship was a luxury yacht, with all the amenities they could hope for, it simply hadn't been meant to hold so many bodies. It had been the only starship near Trondheim that was remotely suitable, so it had to do.

  Their twenty-year-old daughter, Ro, and Varsam, their sixteen-year-old son, shared another compartment with Plikt, who had been their lifelong tutor and dearest family friend. The members of the yacht's staff and crew who had chosen to make this voyage with them— it would have been wrong to dismiss them all and strand them on Trondheim— used the other two.

  The bridge, the dining room, the galley, the salon, the sleeping compartments— all were filled with people doing their best not to let their annoyance at the close quarters get out of hand.

  None of them were in the corridor now, however, and Jakt had already taped a sign to their door:

  STAY OUT OR DIE.

  It was signed, "The proprietor." Valentine opened the door. Jakt was leaning against the wall so close to the door that she was startled and gave a little gasp.

  "Nice to know that the sight of me can make you cry out in pleasure."

  "In shock."

  "Come in, my sweet seditionist."

  "Technically, you know, I'm the proprietor of this starship."

  "What's yours is mine. I married you for your property."

  She was inside the compartment now. He closed the door and sealed it.

  "That's all I am to you?" she asked. "Real estate?"

  "A little plot of ground where I can plough and plant and harvest, all in their proper season." He reached out to her; she stepped into his arms. His hands slid lightly up her back, cradled her shoulders. She felt contained in his embrace, never confined.

  "It's late in the autumn," she said. "Getting on toward winter."

  "Time to harrow, perhaps," said Jakt. "Or perhaps it's already time to kindle up the fire and keep the old hut warm before the snow comes."

  He kissed her and it felt like the first time.

  "If you asked me to marry you all over again today, I'd say yes," said Valentine.

  "And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask."

  They had said the same words many, many times before. Yet they still smiled to hear them, because they were still true.

  ***

  The two starships had almost completed their vast ballet, dancing through space in great leaps and delicate turns until at last they could meet and touch. Miro Ribeira had watched the whole process from the bridge of his starship, his shoulders hunched, his head leaned back on the headrest of the seat. To others this posture always looked awkward. Back on Lusitania, whenever Mother caught him sitting that way she would come and fuss over him, insist on bringing him a pillow so he could be comfortable. She never seemed to grasp the idea that it was only in that hunched, awkward-seeming posture that his head would remain upright without any conscious effort on his part.

  He would endure her ministrations because it wasn't worth the effort to argue with her. Mother was always moving and thinking so quickly, it was almost impossible for her to slow down enough to listen to him. Since the brain damage he had suffered passing through the disruptor field that separated the human colony and the piggies' forest, his speech had been unbearably slow, painful to produce and difficult to understand. Miro's brother Quim, the religious one, had told him that he should be grateful to God that he was able to speak at all— the first few days he had been incapable of communicating except through alphabetic scanning, spelling out messages letter by letter. In some ways, though, spelling things out had been better. At least then Miro had been silent; he hadn't had to listen to his own voice. The thick, awkward sound, the agonising slowness of it. Who in his family had the patience to listen to him? Even the ones who tried— his next-younger sister, Ela; his friend and stepfather, Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead; and Quim, of course— he could feel their impatience. They tended to finish his sentences for him. They needed to hurry things. So even though they said they wanted to talk with him, even though they actually sat and listened as he spoke, he still couldn't speak freely to them. He couldn't talk about ideas; he couldn't speak in long, involved sentences, because by the time he got to the end his listeners would have lost track of the beginning.

  The human brain, Miro had concluded, just like a computer, can only receive data at certain speeds. If you get too slow, the listener's attention wanders and the information is lost.

  Not just the listeners, either. Miro had to be fair— he was as impatient with himself as they were. When he thought of the sheer effort involved in explaining a complicated idea, when he anticipated trying to form the words with lips and tongue and jaws that wouldn't obey him, when he thought of how long it would all take, he usually felt too weary to speak. His mind raced on and on, as fast as ever, thinking so many thoughts that at times Miro wanted his brain to shut down, to be silent and give him peace. But his thoughts remained his own, unshared.

  Except with Jane. He could speak to Jane. She had come to him first on his t
erminal at home, her face taking form on the screen. "I'm a friend of the Speaker for the Dead," she had told him. "I think we can get this computer to be a little more responsive." From then on, Miro had found that Jane was the only person he could talk to easily. For one thing, she was infinitely patient. She never finished his sentences. She could wait for him to finish them himself, so that he never felt rushed, never felt that he was boring her.

  Perhaps even more important, he didn't have to form his words as fully for her as he did for human listeners. Andrew had given him a personal terminal— a computer transceiver encased in a jewel like the one Andrew wore in his own ear. From that vantage point, using the jewel's sensors, Jane could detect every sound he made, every motion of the muscles in his head. He didn't have to complete each sound, he had only to begin it and she would understand. So he could be lazy. He could speak more quickly and be understood.

  And he could also speak silently. He could sub-vocalise— he didn't have to use that awkward, barking, yowling voice that was all his throat could produce now. So that when he was talking to Jane, he could speak quickly, naturally, without any reminder that he was crippled. With Jane he could feel like himself.

  Now he sat on the bridge of the cargo ship that had brought the Speaker for the Dead to Lusitania only a few months ago. He dreaded the rendezvous with Valentine's ship. If he could have thought of somewhere else to go, he might have gone there— he had no desire to meet Andrew's sister Valentine or anybody else. If he could have stayed alone in the starship forever, speaking only to Jane, he would have been content.

  No he wouldn't. He would never be content again.

  At least this Valentine and her family would be somebody new. On Lusitania he knew everybody, or at least everybody that he valued— all the scientific community there, the people of education and understanding. He knew them all so well that he could not help but see their pity, their grief, their frustration at what had become of him. When they looked at him all they could see was the difference between what he was before and what he was now. All they could see was loss.

  There was a chance that new people— Valentine and her family— would be able to look at him and see something else.

  Even that was unlikely, though. Strangers would look at him and see less, not more, than those who had known him before he was crippled. At least Mother and Andrew and Ela and Ouanda and all the others knew that he had a mind, knew that he was capable of understanding ideas. What will new people think when they see me? They'll see a body that's already atrophying, hunched over; they'll see me walk with a shuffling gait; they'll watch me use my hands like paws, clutching a spoon like a three-year-old; they'll hear my thick, half-intelligible speech; and they'll assume, they'll know, that such a person cannot possibly understand anything complicated or difficult.

  Why did I come?

  I didn't come. I went. I wasn't coming here, to meet these people. I was leaving there. Getting away. Only I tricked myself. I thought of leaving on a thirty-year voyage, which is only how it will seem to them. To me I've been gone only a week and a half. No time at all. And already my time of solitude is over. My time of being alone with Jane, who listens to me as if I were still a human being, is done.

  Almost. Almost he said the words that would have aborted the rendezvous. He could have stolen Andrew's starship and taken off on a voyage that would last forever without having to face another living soul.

  But such a nihilistic act was not in him, not yet. He had not yet despaired, he decided. There might yet be something he could do that might justify his continuing to live in this body. And perhaps it would begin with meeting Andrew's sister.

  The ships were now joining, the umbilicals snaking outward and searching, groping till they met each other. Miro watched on the monitors and listened to the computer reports of each successful linkage. The ships were joining in every possible way so that they could make the rest of the voyage to Lusitania in perfect tandem. All resources would be shared. Since Miro's ship was a cargo vessel, it couldn't take on more than a handful of people, but it could take some of the other ship's life-support supplies; together, the two ship's computers were figuring out a perfect balance.

  Once they had calculated the load, they worked out exactly how fast each ship should accelerate as they made the park shift to get them both back to near-lightspeed at exactly the same pace. It was an extremely delicate and complicated negotiation between two computers that had to know almost perfectly what their ships carried and how they could perform. It was finished before the passage tube between the ships was fully connected.

  Miro heard the footsteps scuffing along the corridor from the tube. He turned his chair— slowly, because he did everything slowly— and saw her coming toward him. Stooped over, but not very much, because she wasn't that tall to begin with. Hair mostly white, with a few strands of mousy brown. When she stood he looked at her face and judged her. Old but not elderly. If she was nervous about this meeting it didn't show. But then, from what Andrew and Jane had told him about her, she had met a lot of people who were a good deal more fearsome than a twenty-year-old cripple.

  "Miro?" she asked.

  "Who else?" he said.

  It took a moment, just a heartbeat, for her to process the strange sounds that came out of his mouth and recognise the words. He was used to that pause now, but he still hated it.

  "I'm Valentine," she said.

  "I know," he answered. He wasn't making this any easier, with his laconic replies, but what else was there to say? This wasn't exactly a meeting between heads of state with a list of vital decisions to make. But he had to make some effort, if only not to seem hostile.

  "Your name, Miro— it means 'I look,' doesn't it?"

  "'I look closely.' Maybe 'I pay attention.'"

  "It's really not that hard to understand you," said Valentine.

  He was startled that she addressed the matter so openly.

  "I think I'm having more problems with your Portuguese accent than with the brain damage."

  For a moment it felt like a hammer in his heart— she was speaking more frankly about his situation than anyone except Andrew. But then she was Andrew's sister, wasn't she? He should have expected her to be plain-spoken.

  "Or do you prefer that we pretend that it isn't a barrier between you and other people?"

  Apparently she had sensed his shock. But that was over, and now it occurred to him that he probably shouldn't be annoyed, that he should probably be glad that they wouldn't have to sidestep the issue. Yet he was annoyed, and it took him a moment to think why. Then he knew.

  "My brain damage isn't your problem," he said.

  "If it makes it hard for me to understand you, then it's a problem I have to deal with. Don't get prickly with me already, young man. I have only begun to bother you, and you have only begun to bother me. So don't get steamed up because I happened to mention your brain damage as being somehow my problem. I have no intention of watching every word I say for fear I'll offend an over-sensitive young man who thinks the whole world revolves around his disappointments."

  Miro was furious that she had judged him already, and so harshly. It was unfair— not at all what the author of Demosthenes' hierarchy ought to be like. "I don't think the whole world revolves around my disappointments! But don't you think you can come in here and run things on my ship!" That's what annoyed him, not her words. She was right— her words were nothing. It was her attitude, her complete self-confidence. He wasn't used to people looking at him without shock or pity.

  She sat down in the seat next to him. He swivelled to face her. She, for her part, did not look away. Indeed, she pointedly scanned his body, head to toe, looking him over with an air of cool appraisal. "He said you were tough. He said you had been twisted but not broken."

  "Are you supposed to be my therapist?"