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

by Orson Scott Card

  Ender had no trouble dealing with Human as a person, for he had spoken with this father tree many times. What he could not manage was to think of this tree as the same person he had known as the pequenino named Human. Ender might understand intellectually that it was will and memory that made up a person's identity, and that will and memory had passed intact from the pequenino into the father tree. But intellectual understanding did not always bring visceral belief. Human was so alien now.

  Yet still he was Human, and he was still Ender's friend; Ender touched the bark of the tree as he passed. Then, taking a few steps out of his way, Ender walked to the older father tree named Rooter, and touched his bark also. He had never known Rooter as a pequenino— Rooter had been killed by other hands, and his tree was already tall and well-spread before Ender arrived on Lusitania. There was no sense of loss to trouble him when Ender talked to Rooter.

  At Rooter's base, among the roots, lay many sticks. Some had been brought here; some were shed from Rooter's own branches. They were talking sticks. Pequeninos used them to beat a rhythm on the trunk of a father tree; the father tree would shape and reshape the hollow areas inside his own trunk to change the sound, to make a slow kind of speech. Ender could beat the rhythm— clumsily, but well enough to get words from the trees.

  Today, though, Ender wanted no conversation. Let Planter tell the father trees that another experiment had failed. Ender would talk to Rooter and Human later. He would talk to the hive queen. He would talk to Jane. He would talk to everybody. And after all the talking, they would be no closer to solving any of the problems that darkened Lusitania's future. Because the solution to their problems now did not depend on talk. It depended on knowledge and action— knowledge that only other people could learn, actions that only other people could perform. There was nothing that Ender could do himself to solve anything.

  All he could do, all he had ever done since his final battle as a child warrior, was listen and talk. At other times, in other places, that had been enough. Not now. Many different kinds of destruction loomed over Lusitania, some of them set in motion by Ender himself, and yet not one of them could now be solved by any act or word or thought of Andrew Wiggin. Like all the other citizens of Lusitania, his future was in the hands of other people. The difference between him and them was that Ender knew all the danger, all the possible consequences of every failure or mistake. Who was more cursed, the one who died, unknowing until the very moment of his death, or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?

  Ender left the father trees and walked on down the well-beaten path toward the human colony. Through the gate, through the door of the xenobiology lab. The pequenino who served as Ela's most trusted assistant— named Deaf, though he was definitely not hard of hearing— led him at once to Novinha's office, where Ela, Novinha, Quara, and Grego were already waiting. Ender held up the pouch containing the fragment of potato plant.

  Ela shook her head; Novinha sighed. But they didn't seem half as disappointed as Ender had expected. Clearly there was something else on their minds.

  "I guess we expected that," said Novinha.

  "We still had to try," said Ela.

  "Why did we have to try?" demanded Grego. Novinha's youngest son— and therefore Ender's stepson— was in his mid-thirties now, a brilliant scientist in his own right; but he did seem to relish his role as devil's advocate in all the family's discussions, whether they dealt with xenobiology or the colour to paint the walls. "All we're doing by introducing these new strains is teaching the descolada how to get around every strategy we have for killing it. If we don't wipe it out soon, it'll wipe us out. And once the descolada is gone, we can grow regular old potatoes without any of this nonsense."

  "We can't!" shouted Quara. Her vehemence surprised Ender. Quara was reluctant to speak out at the best of times; for her to speak so loudly now was out of character. "I tell you that the descolada is alive."

  "And I tell you that a virus is a virus," said Grego.

  It bothered Ender that Grego was calling for the extermination of the descolada— it wasn't like him to so easily call for something that would destroy the pequeninos. Grego had practically grown up among the pequenino males— he knew them better, spoke their language better, than anyone.

  "Children, be quiet and let me explain this to Andrew," said Novinha. "We were discussing what to do if the potatoes failed, Ela and I, and she told me— no, you explain it, Ela."

  "It's an easy enough concept. Instead of trying to grow plants that inhibit the growth of the descolada virus, we need to go after the virus itself."

  "Right," said Grego.

  "Shut up," said Quara.

  "As a kindness to us all, Grego, please do as your sister has so kindly asked," said Novinha.

  Ela sighed and went on. "We can't just kill it because that would kill all the other native life on Lusitania. So what I propose is trying to develop a new strain of descolada that continues to act as the present virus acts in the reproductive cycles of all the Lusitanian life forms, but without the ability to adapt to new species."

  "You can eliminate that part of the virus?" asked Ender. "You can find it?"

  "Not likely. But I think I can find all the parts of the virus that are active in the piggies and in all the other plant-animal pairs, keep those, and discard everything else. Then we'd add a rudimentary reproductive ability and set up some receptors so it'll respond properly to the appropriate changes in the host bodies, put the whole thing in a little organelle, and there we have it— a substitute for the descolada so that the pequeninos and all the other native species are safe, while we can live without worry."

  "Then you'll spray all the original descolada virus to wipe them out?" asked Ender. "What if there's already a resistant strain?"

  "No, we don't spray them, because spraying wouldn't wipe out the viruses that are already incorporated into the bodies of every Lusitanian creature. This is the really tricky part—"

  "As if the rest were easy," said Novinha, "making a new organelle out of nothing—"

  "We can't just inject these organelles into a few piggies or even into all of them, because we'd also have to inject them into every other native animal and tree and blade of grass."

  "Can't be done," said Ender.

  "So we have to develop a mechanism to deliver the organelles universally, and at the same time destroy the old descolada viruses once and for all."

  "Xenocide," said Quara.

  "That's the argument," said Ela. "Quara says the descolada is sentient."

  Ender looked at his youngest stepdaughter. "A sentient molecule?"

  "They have language, Andrew."

  "When did this happen?" asked Ender. He was trying to imagine how a genetic molecule— even one as long and complex as the descolada virus— could possibly speak.

  "I've suspected it for a long time. I wasn't going to say anything until I was sure, but—"

  "Which means she isn't sure," said Grego triumphantly.

  "But I'm almost sure now, and you can't go destroying a whole species until we know."

  "How do they speak?" asked Ender.

  "Not like us, of course," said Quara. "They pass information back and forth to each other at a molecular level. I first noticed it as I was working on the question of how the new resistant strains of the descolada spread so quickly and replaced all the old viruses in such a short time. I couldn't solve that problem because I was asking the wrong question. They don't replace the old ones. They simply pass messages."

  "They throw darts," said Grego.

  "That was my own word for it," said Quara. "I didn't understand that it was speech."

  "Because it wasn't speech," said Grego.

  "That was five years ago," said Ender. "You said the darts they send out carry the needed genes and then all the viruses that receive the darts revise their own structure to include the new gene. That's hardly language."

  "But that isn't the o
nly time they send darts," said Quara. "Those messenger molecules are moving in and out all the time, and most of the time they aren't incorporated into the body at all. They get read by several parts of the descolada and then they're passed on to another one."

  "This is language?" asked Grego.

  "Not yet," said Quara. "But sometimes after a virus reads one of these darts, it makes a new dart and sends it out. Here's the part that tells me it's a language: The front part of the new dart always begins with a molecular sequence similar to the back tag of the dart that it's answering. It holds the thread of the conversation together."

  "Conversation," said Grego scornfully.

  "Be quiet or die," said Ela. Even after all these years, Ender realised, Ela's voice still had the power to curb Grego's snottiness— sometimes, at least.

  "I've tracked some of these conversations for as many as a hundred statements and answers. Most of them die out much sooner than that. A few of them are incorporated into the main body of the virus. But here's the most interesting thing— it's completely voluntary. Sometimes one virus will pick up that dart and keep it, while most of the others don't. Sometimes most of the viruses will keep a particular dart. But the area where they incorporate these message darts is exactly that area that has been hardest to map. It's hardest to map because it isn't part of their structure, it's their memory, and individuals are all different from each other. They also tend to weed out a few memory fragments when they've taken on too many darts."

  "This is all fascinating," said Grego, "but it isn't science. There are plenty of explanations for these darts and the random bonding and shedding—"

  "Not random!" said Quara.

  "None of this is language," said Grego.

  Ender ignored the argument, because Jane was whispering in his ear through the jewel-like transceiver he wore there. She spoke to him more rarely now than in years past. He listened carefully, taking nothing for granted. "She's on to something," Jane said. "I've looked at her research and there's something going on here that doesn't happen with any other sub-cellular creature. I've run many different analyses on the data, and the more I simulate and test this particular behaviour of the descolada, the less it looks like genetic coding and the more it looks like language. At the moment we can't rule out the possibility that it is voluntary."

  When Ender turned his attention back to the argument, Grego was speaking. "Why do we have to turn everything we haven't figured out yet into some kind of mystical experience?" Grego closed his eyes and intoned, "I have found new life! I have found new life!"

  "Stop it!" shouted Quara.

  "This is getting out of hand," said Novinha. "Grego, try to keep this at the level of rational discussion."

  "It's hard to, when the whole thing is so irrational. At‚ agora quem ja imaginou microbiologista que se torna namorada de uma molcula?" Who ever heard of a microbiologist getting a crush on a molecule?

  "Enough!" said Novinha sharply. "Quara is as much a scientist as you are, and—"

  "She was," muttered Grego.

  "And— if you'll kindly shut up long enough to hear me out— she has a right to be heard." Novinha was quite angry now, but, as usual, Grego seemed unimpressed. "You should know by now, Grego, that it's often the ideas that sound most absurd and counter-intuitive at first that later cause fundamental shifts in the way we see the world."

  "Do you really think this is one of those basic discoveries?" asked Grego, looking them in the eye, each in turn. "A talking virus? Se Quara sabe tanto, porque ela nao diz o que e que aqueles bichos dizem?" If she knows so much about it, why doesn't she tell us what these little beasts are saying? It was a sign that the discussion was getting out of hand, that he broke into Portuguese instead of speaking in Stark, the language of science— and diplomacy.

  "Does it matter?" asked Ender.

  "Matter!" said Quara.

  Ela looked at Ender with consternation. "It's only the difference between curing a dangerous disease and destroying an entire sentient species. I think it matters."

  "I meant," said Ender patiently, "does it matter whether we know what they're saying."

  "No," said Quara. "We'll probably never understand their language, but that doesn't change the fact that they're sentient. What do viruses and human beings have to say to each other, anyway?"

  "How about, 'Please stop trying to kill us'?" said Grego. "If you can figure out how to say that in virus language, then this might be useful."

  "But Grego," said Quara, with mock sweetness, "do we say that to them, or do they say that to us?"

  "We don't have to decide today," said Ender. "We can afford to wait awhile."

  "How do you know?" said Grego. "How do you know that tomorrow afternoon we won't all wake up itching and hurting and puking and burning up with fever and finally dying because overnight the descolada virus figured out how to wipe us out once and for all? It's us or them."

  "I think Grego just showed us why we have to wait," said Ender. "Did you hear how he talked about the descolada? It figures out how to wipe us out. Even he thinks the descolada has a will and makes decisions."

  "That's just a figure of speech," said Grego.

  "We've all been talking that way," said Ender. "And thinking that way, too. Because we all feel it— that we're at war with the descolada. That it's more than just fighting off a disease— it's like we have an intelligent, resourceful enemy who keeps countering all our moves. In all the history of medical research, no one has ever fought a disease that had so many ways to defeat the strategies used against it."

  "Only because nobody's been fighting a germ with such an oversized and complex genetic molecule," said Grego.

  "Exactly," said Ender. "This is a one-of-a-kind virus, and so it may have abilities we've never imagined in any species less structurally complex than a vertebrate."

  For a moment Ender's words hung in the air, answered by silence; for a moment, Ender imagined that he might have served a useful function in this meeting after all, that as a mere talker he might have won some kind of agreement.

  Grego soon disabused him of this idea. "Even if Quara's right, even if she's dead on and the descolada viruses all have doctorates of philosophy and keep publishing dissertations on screwing-up-humans-till-they're-dead, what then? Do we all roll over and play dead because the virus that's trying to kill us all is so damn smart?"

  Novinha answered calmly. "I think Quara needs to continue with her research— and we need to give her more resources to do it— while Ela continues with hers."

  It was Quara who objected this time. "Why should I bother trying to understand them if the rest of you are still working on ways to kill them?"

  "That's a good question, Quara," said Novinha. "On the other hand, why should you bother trying to understand them if they suddenly figure out a way to get past all our chemical barriers and kill us all?"

  "Us or them," muttered Grego.

  Novinha had made a good decision, Ender knew— keep both lines of research open, and decide later when they knew more. In the meantime, Quara and Grego were both missing the point, both assuming that everything hinged on whether or not the descolada was sentient. "Even if they're sentient," said Ender, "that doesn't mean they're sacrosanct. It all depends whether they're raman or varelse. If they're raman— if we can understand them and they can understand us well enough to work out a way of living together— then fine. We'll be safe, they'll be safe."

  "The great peacemaker plans to sign a treaty with a molecule?" asked Grego.