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

by Orson Scott Card

  Of course that was no answer at all. Though the gods most often chose the children of the god spoken, they had been known to speak to some whose parents had never heard the voice of the gods. Yet it was a common belief that if your parents were of very low status, the gods would have no interest in you, and in fact it was very rare for the gods to speak to those whose parents were not well educated.

  "What's your name?" asked Qing-jao.

  "Si Wang-mu," said the girl.

  Qing-jao gasped and covered her mouth, to forbid herself from laughing. But Wang-mu did not look angry— she only grimaced and looked impatient.

  "I'm sorry," said Qing-jao, when she could speak. "But that is the name of—"

  "The Royal Mother of the West," said Wang-mu. "Can I help it that my parents chose such a name for me?"

  "It's a noble name," said Qing-jao. "My ancestor-of-the-heart was a great woman, but she was only mortal, a poet. Yours is one of the oldest of the gods."

  "What good is that?" asked Wang-mu. "My parents were too presumptuous, naming me for such a distinguished god. That's why the gods will never speak to me."

  It made Qing-jao sad, to hear Wang-mu speak with such bitterness. If only she knew how eagerly Qing-jao would trade places with her. To be free of the voice of the gods! Never to have to bow to the floor and trace the grain of the wood, never to wash her hands except when they got dirty...

  Yet Qing-jao couldn't explain this to the girl. How could she understand? To Wang-mu, the god spoken were the privileged elite, infinitely wise and unapproachable. It would sound like a lie if Qing-jao explained that the burdens of the god spoken were far greater than the rewards.

  Except that to Wang-mu, the god spoken had not been unapproachable— she had spoken to Qing-jao, hadn't she? So Qing-jao decided to say what was in her heart after all. "Si Wang-mu, I would gladly live the rest of my life blind, if only I could be free of the voice of the gods."

  Wang-mu's mouth opened in shock, her eyes widened.

  It had been a mistake to speak. Qing-jao regretted it at once. "I was joking," said Qing-jao.

  "No," said Wang-mu. "Now you're lying. Then you were telling the truth." She came closer, slogging carelessly through the paddy, trampling rice plants as she came. "All my life I've seen the god spoken borne to the temple in their sedan chairs, wearing their bright silks, all people bowing to them, every computer open to them. When they speak their language is music. Who wouldn't want to be such a one?"

  Qing-jao could not answer openly, could not say: Every day the gods humiliate me and make me do stupid, meaningless tasks to purify myself, and the next day it starts again. "You won't believe me, Wang-mu, but this life, out here in the fields, this is better."

  "No!" cried Wang-mu. "You have been taught everything. You know all that there is to know! You can speak many languages, you can read every kind of word, you can think of thoughts that are as far above mine as my thoughts are above the thoughts of a snail."

  "You speak very clearly and well," said Qing-jao. "You must have been to school."

  "School!" said Wang-mu scornfully. "What do they care about school for children like me? We learned to read, but only enough to read prayers and street signs. We learned our numbers, but only enough to do the shopping. We memorised sayings of the wise, but only the ones that taught us to be content with our place in life and obey those who are wiser than we are."

  Qing-jao hadn't known that schools could be like that. She thought that children in school learned the same things that she had learned from her tutors. But she saw at once that Si Wang-mu must be telling the truth— one teacher with thirty students couldn't possibly teach all the things that Qing-jao had learned as one student with many teachers.

  "My parents are very low," said Wang-mu. "Why should they waste time teaching me more than a servant needs to know? Because that's my highest hope in life, to be washed very clean and become a servant in a rich man's house. They were very careful to teach me how to clean a floor."

  Qing-jao thought of the hours she had spent on the floors of her house, tracing wood grains from wall to wall. It had never once occurred to her how much work it was for the servants to keep the floors so clean and polished that Qing-jao's gowns never got visibly dirty, despite all her crawling.

  "I know something about floors," said Qing-jao.

  "You know something about everything," said Wang-mu bitterly. "So don't tell me how hard it is to be god spoken. The gods have never given a thought to me, and I tell you that is worse!"

  "Why weren't you afraid to speak to me?" asked Qing-jao.

  "I decided not to be afraid of anything," said Wang-mu. "What could you do to me that's worse than my life will already be anyway?"

  I could make you wash your hands until they bleed every day of your life.

  But then something turned around in Qing-jao's mind, and she saw that this girl might not think that was worse. Perhaps Wang-mu would gladly wash her hands until there was nothing left but a bloody fringe of tattered skin on the stumps of her wrists, if only she could learn all that Qing-jao knew. Qing-jao had felt so oppressed by the impossibility of the task her father had set for her, yet it was a task that, succeed or fail, would change history. Wang-mu would live her whole life and never be set a single task that would not need to be done again the next day; all of Wang-mu's life would be spent doing work that would only be noticed or spoken of if she did it badly. Wasn't the work of a servant almost as fruitless, in the end, as the rituals of purification?

  "The life of a servant must be hard," said Qing-jao. "I'm glad for your sake that you haven't been hired out yet."

  "My parents are waiting in the hope that I'll be pretty when I become a woman. Then they'll get a better hiring bonus for putting me out for service. Perhaps a rich man's body servant will want me for his wife; perhaps a rich lady will want me for her secret maid."

  "You're already pretty," said Qing-jao.

  Wang-mu shrugged. "My friend Fan-liu is in service, and she says that the ugly ones work harder, but the men of the house leave them alone. Ugly ones are free to think their own thoughts. They don't keep having to say pretty things to their ladies."

  Qing-jao thought of the servants in her father's house. She knew her father would never bother any of the serving women. And nobody had to say pretty things to her. "It's different in my house," she said.

  "But I don't serve in your house," said Wang-mu.

  Now, suddenly, the whole picture became clear. Wang-mu had not spoken to her by impulse. Wang-mu had spoken to her in hopes of being offered a place as a servant in the house of a god spoken lady. For all she knew, the gossip in town was all about the young god spoken lady Han Qing-jao who was through with her tutors and had embarked on her first adult task— and how she still had neither a husband nor a secret maid. Si Wang-mu had probably wangled her way onto the same righteous labour crew as Qing-jao in order to have exactly this conversation.

  For a moment Qing-jao was angry. Then she thought: Why shouldn't Wang-mu do exactly as she has done? The worst that could happen to her is that I'd guess what she was doing, become angry, and not hire her. Then she'd be no worse off than before. And if I didn't guess what she was doing, and so started to like her and hired her, she'd be secret maid to a god spoken lady. If I were in her place, wouldn't I do the same?

  "Do you think you can fool me?" asked Qing-jao. "Do you think I don't know that you want me to hire you for my servant?"

  Wang-mu looked flustered, angry, afraid. Wisely, though, she said nothing.

  "Why don't you answer me with anger?" asked Qing-jao. "Why don't you deny that you spoke to me only so I'd hire you?"

  "Because it's true," said Wang-mu. "I'll leave you alone now."

  That was what Qing-jao hoped to hear— an honest answer. She had no intention of letting Wang-mu go. "How much of what you told me is true? About wanting a good education? Wanting to do something better in your life than serving work?"

  "All of it," Wang-mu sa
id, and there was passion in her voice. "But what is that to you? You bear the terrible burden of the voice of the gods."

  Wang-mu spoke her last sentence with such contemptuous sarcasm that Qing-jao almost laughed aloud; but she contained her laughter. There was no reason to make Wang-mu any angrier than she already was. "Si Wang-mu, daughter-of-the-heart to the Royal Mother of the West, I will hire you as my secret maid, but only if you agree to the following conditions. First, you will let me be your teacher, and study all the lessons I assign to you. Second, you will always speak to me as an equal and never bow to me or call me 'holy one.' And third—"

  "How could I do that?" said Wang-mu. "If I don't treat you with respect others will say I'm unworthy. They'd punish me when you weren't looking. It would disgrace us both."

  "Of course you'll use respect when others can see us," said Qing-jao. "But when we're alone, just you and me, we'll treat each other as equals or I'll send you away."

  "The third condition?"

  "You'll never tell another soul a single word I say to you."

  Wang-mu's face showed her anger plainly. "A secret maid never tells. Barriers are placed in our minds."

  "The barriers help you remember not to tell," said Qing-jao. "But if you want to tell, you can get around them. And there are those who will try to persuade you to tell." Qing-jao thought of her father's career, of all the secrets of Congress that he held in his head. He told no one; he had no one he could speak to except, sometimes, Qing-jao. If Wang-mu turned out to be trustworthy, Qing-jao would have someone. She would never be as lonely as her father was. "Don't you understand me?" Qing-jao asked. "Others will think I'm hiring you as a secret maid. But you and I will know that you're really coming to be my student, and I'm really bringing you to be my friend."

  Wang-mu looked at her in wonder. "Why would you do this, when the gods have already told you how I bribed the foreman to let me be on your crew and not to interrupt us while I talked to you?"

  The gods had told her no such thing, of course, but Qing-jao only smiled. "Why doesn't it occur to you that maybe the gods want us to be friends?"

  Abashed, Wang-mu clasped her hands together and laughed nervously; Qing-jao took the girl's hands in hers and found that Wang-mu was trembling. So she wasn't as bold as she seemed.

  Wang-mu looked down at their hands, and Qing-jao followed her gaze. They were covered with dirt and muck, dried on now because they had been standing so long, their hands out of the water. "We're so dirty," said Wang-mu.

  Qing-jao had long since learned to disregard the dirtiness of righteous labour, for which no penance was required. "My hands have been much filthier than this," said Qing-jao. "Come with me when our righteous labour is finished. I will tell our plan to my father, and he will decide if you can be my secret maid."

  Wang-mu's expression soured. Qing-jao was glad that her face was so easy to read. "What's wrong?" said Qing-jao.

  "Fathers always decide everything," said Wang-mu.

  Qing-jao nodded, wondering why Wang-mu would bother to say something so obvious. "That's the beginning of wisdom," said Qing-jao. "Besides, my mother is dead."

  Righteous labour always ended early in the afternoon. Officially this was to give people who lived far from the fields time to return to their homes. Actually, though, it was in recognition of the custom of making a party at the end of righteous labour. Because they had worked right through the afternoon nap, many people felt giddy after righteous labour, as if they had stayed up all night. Others felt sluggish and surly. Either one was an excuse for drinking and dining with friends and then collapsing into bed hours early to make up for the lost sleep and the hard labour of the day.

  Qing-jao was of the kind who felt out of sorts; Wang-mu was obviously of the giddy kind. Or perhaps it was simply the fact that the Lusitania Fleet weighed heavily on Qing-jao's mind, while Wang-mu had just been accepted as secret maid by a god spoken girl. Qing-jao led Wang-mu through the process of applying for employment with the House of Han— washing, fingerprinting, the security check— until she finally despaired of listening to Wang-mu's bubbling voice another moment and withdrew.

  As she walked up the stairs to her room, Qing-jao could hear Wang-mu asking fearfully, "Have I made my new mistress angry?" And Ju Kung-mei, the guardian of the house, answered, "The god spoken answer to other voices than yours, little one." It was a kind answer. Qing-jao often admired the gentleness and wisdom of those her father had hired into his house. She wondered if she had chosen as wisely in her first hiring.

  No sooner did she think of this worry than she knew she had been wicked to make such a decision so quickly, and without consulting with her father beforehand. Wang-mu would be found to be hopelessly unsuitable, and Father would rebuke her for having acted foolishly.

  Imagining Father's rebuke was enough to bring the immediate reproof of the gods. Qing-jao felt unclean. She rushed to her room and closed the door. It was bitterly ironic that she could think over and over again how hateful it was to perform the rituals the gods demanded, how empty their worship was— but let her think a disloyal thought about Father or Starways Congress, and she had to do penance at once.

  Usually she would spend a half hour, an hour, perhaps longer, resisting the need for penance, enduring her own filthiness. Today, though, she hungered for the ritual of purification. In its own way, the ritual made sense, it had a structure, a beginning and end, rules to follow. Not at all like the problem of the Lusitania Fleet.

  On her knees, she deliberately chose the narrowest, faintest grain in the palest board she could see. This would be a hard penance; perhaps then the gods would judge her clean enough that they could show her the solution to the problem Father had set for her. It took her half an hour to make her way across the room, for she kept losing the grain and had to start over each time.

  At the end, exhausted from righteous labour and eyesore from line-tracing, she wanted desperately to sleep; instead, she sat on the floor before her terminal and called up the summary of her work so far. After examining and eliminating all the useless absurdities that had cropped up during the investigation, Qing-jao had come up with three broad categories of possibility. First, that the disappearance was caused by some natural event that, at lightspeed, had simply not become visible yet to the watching astronomers. Second, that the loss of ansible communications was the result of either sabotage or a command decision in the fleet. Third, that the loss of ansible communications was caused by some planet side conspiracy. The first category was virtually eliminated by the way the fleet was travelling. The starships were simply not close enough together for any known natural phenomenon to destroy them all at once. The fleet had not rendezvoused before setting out— the ansible made such things a waste of time. Instead, all the ships were moving toward Lusitania from wherever they happened to be when they were assigned to the fleet. Even now, with only a year or so of travel left before all were in orbit around Lusitania's star, they were so far apart that no conceivable natural event could possibly have affected them all at once.

  The second category was made almost as unlikely by the fact that the entire fleet had disappeared, without exception. Could any human plan possibly work with such perfect efficiency— and without leaving any evidence of advance planning in any of the databases or personality profiles or communications logs that were maintained in planet side computers? Nor was there the slightest evidence that anyone had altered or hidden any data, or masked any communications to avoid leaving behind a trail of evidence. If it was a fleet side plan, there was neither evidence nor concealment nor error.

  The same lack of evidence made the idea of a planet side conspiracy even more unlikely. And making all these possibilities still less possible was the sheer simultaneity of it. As near as anyone could determine, every single ship had broken off ansible communications at almost exactly the same time. There might have been a time lag of seconds, perhaps even minutes— but never as long as five minutes, never a gap long enough for someo
ne on one ship to remark about the disappearance of another.