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

by Orson Scott Card

  It took a moment for her to realise why she was so sure. It was because she had seen Ender do exactly the same thing, moving his lips and jaw, when he was issuing sub-vocalized commands to the computer terminal built into the jewel he wore in his ear. Of course: Miro has the same computer hookup Ender has, so he'll speak to it the same way.

  In a moment it became clear what command Miro had given to his jewel. It must have been tied in to the ship's computer, because immediately afterward one of the display screens cleared and then showed Miro's face. Only there was none of the slackness that marred his face in person. Valentine realised: It was Miro's face as it used to be. And when the computer image spoke, the sound coming from the speakers was surely Miro's voice as it used to be— clear. Forceful. Intelligent. Quick.

  "You know that when philotes combine to make a durable structure— a meson, a neutron, an atom, a molecule, an organism, a planet— they twine up."

  "What is this?" demanded Jakt. He hadn't yet figured out why the computer was doing the talking.

  The computer image of Miro froze on the screen and fell silent. Miro himself answered. "I've been playing with this," he said. "I tell it things, and it remembers and speaks for me."

  Valentine tried to imagine Miro experimenting until the computer program got his face and voice just right. How exhilarating it must have been, to re-create himself as he ought to be. And also how agonising, to see what he could have been and know that it could never be real. "What a clever idea," said Valentine. "Sort of a prosthesis for the personality."

  Miro laughed— a single "Ha!"

  "Go ahead," said Valentine. "Whether you speak for yourself or the computer speaks for you, we'll listen."

  The computer image came back to life, and spoke again in Miro's strong, imaginary voice. "Philotes are the smallest building blocks of matter and energy. They have no mass or dimension. Each philote connects itself to the rest of the universe along a single ray, a one-dimensional line that connects it to all the other philotes in its smallest immediate structure— a meson. All those strands from the philotes in that structure are twined into a single philotic thread that connects the meson to the next larger structure— a neutron, for instance. The threads in the neutron twine into a yarn connecting it to all the other particles of the atom, and then the yarns of the atom twine into the rope of the molecule. This has nothing to do with nuclear forces or gravity, nothing to do with chemical bonds. As far as we can tell, the philotic connections don't do anything. They're just there."

  "But the individual rays are always there, present in the twines," said Valentine.

  "Yes, each ray goes on forever," answered the screen.

  It surprised her— and Jakt, too, judging from the way his eyes widened— that the computer was able to respond immediately to what Valentine said. It wasn't just a pre-set lecture. This had to be a sophisticated program anyway, to simulate Miro's face and voice so well; but now to have it responding as if it were simulating Miro's personality ...

  Or had Miro given some cue to the program? Had he sub-vocalized the response? Valentine didn't know— she had been watching the screen. She would stop doing that now— she would watch Miro himself.

  "We don't know if the ray is infinite," said Valentine. "We only know that we haven't found where the ray ends."

  "They twine together, a whole planetful, and each planet's philotic twine reaches to its star, and each star to the centre of the galaxy—"

  "And where does the galactic twine go?" said Jakt. It was an old question— schoolchildren asked it when they first got into philotics in high school. Like the old speculation that maybe galaxies were really neutrons or mesons inside a far vaster universe, or the old question, If the universe isn't infinite, what is beyond the edge?

  "Yes, yes," said Miro. This time, though, he spoke from his own mouth. "But that's not where I'm going. I want to talk about life."

  The computerised voice— the voice of the brilliant young man— took over. "The philotic twines from substances like rock or sand all connect directly from each molecule to the centre of the planet. But when a molecule is incorporated into a living organism, its ray shifts. Instead of reaching to the planet, it gets twined in with the individual cell, and the rays from the cells are all twined together so that each organism sends a single fibre of philotic connections to twine up with the central philotic rope of the planet."

  "Which shows that individual lives have some meaning at the level of physics," said Valentine. She had written an essay about it once, trying to dispel some of the mysticism that had grown up about philotics while at the same time using it to suggest a view of community formation. "But there's no practical effect from it, Miro. Nothing you can do with it. The philotic twining of living organisms simply is. Every philote is connected to something, and through that to something else, and through that to something else— living cells and organisms are simply two of the leels where those connections can be made."

  "Yes," said Miro. "That which lives, twines."

  Valentine shrugged, nodded. It probably couldn't be proven, but if Miro wanted that as a premise in his speculations, that was fine.

  The computer-Miro took over again. "What I've been thinking about is the endurance of the twining. When a twined structure is broken— as when a molecule breaks apart— the old philotic twining remains for a time. Fragments that are no longer physically joined remain philotically connected for a while. And the smaller the particle, the longer that connection lasts after the breakup of the original structure, and the more slowly the fragments shift to new twinings."

  Jakt: frowned. "I thought the smaller things were, the faster things happened."

  "It is counter-intuitive," said Valentine.

  "After nuclear fission it takes hours for the philotic rays to sort themselves back out again," said the computer-Miro. "Split a smaller particle than an atom, and the philotic connection between the fragments will last much longer than that."

  "Which is how the ansible works," said Miro.

  Valentine looked at him closely. Why was he talking sometimes in his own voice, sometimes through the computer? Was the program under his control or wasn't it?

  "The principle of the ansible is that if you suspend a meson in a powerful magnetic field," said computer-Miro, "split it, and carry the two parts as far away as you want, the philotic twining will still connect them. And the connection is instantaneous. If one fragment spins or vibrates, the ray between them spins and vibrates, and the movement is detectable at the other end at exactly the same moment. It takes no time whatsoever for the movement to be transmitted along the entire length of the ray, even if the two fragments are carried light-years away from each other. Nobody knows why it works, but we're glad it does. Without the ansible, there'd be no possibility of meaningful communication between human worlds."

  "Hell, there's no meaningful communication now," said Jakt. "And if it wasn't for the ansibles, there'd be no war-fleet heading for Lusitania right now."

  Valentine wasn't listening to Jakt, though. She was watching Miro. This time Valentine saw when he moved his lips and jaw, slightly, silently. Sure enough, after he sub-vocalized, the computer image of Miro spoke again. He was giving commands. It had been absurd for her to think otherwise— who else could be controlling the computer?

  "It's a hierarchy," said the image. "The more complex the structure, the faster the response to change. It's as if the smaller the particle is, the stupider it is, so it's slower to pick up on the fact that it's now part of a different structure."

  "Now you're anthropomorphizing," said Valentine.

  "Maybe," said Miro. "Maybe not."

  "Human beings are organisms," said the image. "But human philotic twinings go way beyond those of any other life form."

  "Now you're talking about that stuff that came from Ganges a thousand years ago," said Valentine. "Nobody's been able to get consistent results from those experiments." The researchers— Hindus all, and devout ones— cl
aimed that they had shown that human philotic twinings, unlike those of other organisms, did not always reach directly down into the planet's core to twine with all other life and matter. Rather, they claimed, the philotic rays from human beings often twined with those of other human beings, most often with families, but sometimes between teachers and students, and sometimes between close co-workers— including the researchers themselves. The Gangeans had concluded that this distinction between humans and other plant and animal life proved that the souls of some humans were literally lifted to a higher plane, nearer to perfection. They believed that the Perfecting Ones had become one with each other the way that all of life was one with the world. "It's all very pleasingly mystical, but nobody except Gangean Hindus takes it seriously any more."

  "I do," said Miro.

  "To each his own," said Jakt.

  "Not as a religion," said Miro. "As science."

  "You mean metaphysics, don't you?" said Valentine.

  It was the Miro-image that answered. "The philotic connections between people change fastest of all, and what the Gangeans proved is that they respond to human will. If you have strong feelings binding you to your family, then your philotic rays will twine and you will be one, in exactly the same way that the different atoms in a molecule are one."

  It was a sweet idea— she had thought so when she first heard it, perhaps two thousand years ago, when Ender was speaking for a murdered revolutionary on Mindanao. She and Ender had speculated then on whether the Gangean tests would show that they were twined, as brother and sister. They wondered whether there had been such a connection between them as children, and if it had persisted when Ender was taken off to Battle School and they were separated for six years. Ender had liked that idea very much, and so had Valentine, but after that one conversation the subject never came up again. The notion of philotic connections between people had remained in the pretty-idea category in her memory. "It's nice to think that the metaphor of human unity might have a physical analogue," said Valentine.

  "Listen!" said Miro. Apparently he didn't want her to dismiss the idea as "nice."

  Again his image spoke for him. "If the Gangeans are right, then when a human being chooses to bond with another person, when he makes a commitment to a community, it is not just a social phenomenon. It's a physical event as well. The philote, the smallest conceivable physical particle— if we can call something with no mass or inertia physical at all— responds to an act of the human will."

  "That's why it's so hard for anyone to take the Gangean experiments seriously."

  "The Gangean experiments were careful and honest."

  "But no one else ever got the same results."

  "No one else ever took them seriously enough to perform the same experiments. Does that surprise you?"

  "Yes," said Valentine. But then she remembered how the idea had been ridiculed in the scientific press, while it was immediately picked up by the lunatic fringe and incorporated into dozens of fringe religions. Once that happened, how could a scientist hope to get funding for such a project? How could a scientist expect to have a career if others came to think of him as a proponent of a metaphysical religion? "No, I suppose it doesn't."

  The Miro-image nodded. "If the philotic ray twines in response to the human will, why couldn't we suppose that all philotic twining is willed? Every particle, all of matter and energy, why couldn't every observable phenomenon in the universe be the willing behaviour of individuals?"

  "Now we're beyond Gangean Hinduism," said Valentine. "How seriously am I supposed to take this? What you're talking about is Animism. The most primitive kind of religion. Everything's alive. Stones and oceans and—"

  "No," said Miro. "Life is life."

  "Life is life," said the computer program. "Life is when a single philote has the strength of will to bind together the molecules of a single cell, to entwine their rays into one. A stronger philote can bind together many cells into a single organism. The strongest of all are the intelligent beings. We can bestow our philotic connections where we will. The philotic basis of intelligent life is even clearer in the other known sentient species. When a pequenino dies and passes into the third life, it's his strong-willed philote that preserves his identity and passes it from the mammaloid corpse to the living tree."

  "Reincarnation," said Jakt. "The philote is the soul."

  "It happens with the piggies, anyway," said Miro.

  "The hive queen as well," said the Miro-image. "The reason we discovered philotic connections in the first place was because we saw how the buggers communicated with each other faster than light— that's what showed us it was possible. The individual buggers are all part of the hive queen; they're like her hands and feet, and she's their mind, one vast organism with thousands or millions of bodies. And the only connection between them is the twining of their philotic rays."

  It was a picture of the universe that Valentine had never conceived of before. Of course, as a historian and biographer she usually conceived of things in terms of peoples and societies; while she wasn't ignorant of physics, neither was she deeply trained in it. Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.

  And she liked the idea well enough to wish it were true. Of the trillion lovers who had whispered to each other, We are one, could it be that some of them really were? Of the billions of families who had bonded together so closely they felt like a single soul, wouldn't it be lovely to think that at the most basic level of reality it was so?

  Jakt, however, was not so caught up in the idea. "I thought we weren't supposed to talk about the existence of the hive queen," he said. "I thought that was Ender's secret."

  "It's all right," said Valentine. "Everyone in this room knows."

  Jakt gave her his impatient look. "I thought we were coming to Lusitania to help in the struggle against Starways Congress. What does any of this have to do with the real world?"

  "Maybe nothing," said Valentine. "Maybe everything."

  Jakt buried his face in his hands for a moment, then looked back up at her with a smile that wasn't really a smile. "I haven't heard you say anything so transcendental since your brother left Trondheim."

  That stung her, particularly because she knew it was meant to. After all these years, was Jakt still jealous of her connection with Ender? Did he still resent the fact that she could care about things that meant nothing to him? "When he went," said Valentine, "I stayed." She was really saying, I passed the only test that mattered. Why should you doubt me now?

  Jakt was abashed. It was one of the best things about him, that when he realised he was wrong he backed down at once. "And when you went," said Jakt, "I came with you." Which she took to mean, I'm with you, I'm really not jealous of Ender any more, and I'm sorry for sniping at you. Later, when they were alone, they'd say these things again openly. It wouldn't do to reach Lusitania with suspicions and jealousy on either's part.

  Miro, of course, was oblivious to the fact that Jakt and Valentine had already declared a truce. He was only aware of the tension between them, and thought he was the cause of it. "I'm sorry," said Miro. "I didn't mean to..."

  "It's all right," said Jakt. "I was out of line."

  "There is no line," said Valentine, with a smile at her husband. Jakt smiled back.

  That was what Miro needed to see; he visibly relaxed.

  "Go on," said Valentine.

  "Take all that as a given," said the Miro-image.

  Valentine couldn't help it— she laughed out loud. Partly she laughed because this mystical Gangean philote-as-soul business was such an absurdly large premise to swallow. Partly she laughed to release the tension between her and Jakt. "I'm sorry," she said. "That's an awfully big 'given.' If that's the preamble, I can't wait to hear the conclusion."

&n
bsp; Miro, understanding her laughter now, smiled back. "I've had a lot of time to think," he said. "That really was my speculation on what life is. That everything in the universe is behavior. But there's something else we want to tell you about. And ask you about, too, I guess." He turned to Jakt. "And it has a lot to do with stopping the Lusitania Fleet."