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

by Orson Scott Card

  "It was never Qing-jao's plan for me to be dead already," answered Jane. "Her plan to destroy me is proceeding nicely, and I will no doubt die on schedule."

  "Why do you come to this house, then," asked Wang-mu, "when it was here that your death was set in motion?"

  "I have a lot of things to accomplish before I die," said Jane, "including the faint possibility of discovering a way to survive. It happens that the world of Path contains many thousands of people who are much more intelligent, on average, than the rest of humanity."

  "Only because of Congress's genetic manipulation," said Master Han.

  "True," said Jane. "The god spoken of Path are, properly speaking, not even human any more. You're another species, created and enslaved by Congress to give them an advantage over the rest of humanity. It happens, though, that a single member of that new species is somewhat free of Congress."

  "This is freedom?" said Master Han. "Even now, my hunger to purify myself is almost irresistible."

  "Then don't resist it," said Jane. "I can talk to you while you contort yourself."

  Almost at once, Master Han began to fling out his arms and twist them in the air in his ritual of purification. Wang-mu turned her face away.

  "Don't do that," said Master Han. "Don't hide your face from me. I can't be ashamed to show this to you. I'm a cripple, that's all; if I had lost a leg, my closest friends would not be afraid to see the stump."

  Wang-mu saw the wisdom in his words, and did not hide her face from his affliction.

  "As I was saying," said Jane, "it happens that a single member of this new species is somewhat free of Congress. I hope to enlist your help in the works I'm trying to accomplish in the few months left to me."

  "I'll do anything I can," said Master Han.

  "And if I can help, I will," said Wang-mu. Only after she said it did she realise how ridiculous it was for her to offer such a thing. Master Han was one of the god spoken, one of those with superior intellectual abilities. She was only an uneducated specimen of ordinary humanity, with nothing to offer.

  And yet neither of them mocked her offer, and Jane accepted it graciously. Such a kindness proved once again to Wang-mu that Jane had to be a living thing, not just a simulation.

  "Let me tell you the problems that I hope to resolve."

  They listened.

  "As you know, my dearest friends are on the planet Lusitania. They are threatened by the Lusitania Fleet. I am very interested in stopping that fleet from causing any irrevocable harm."

  "By now I'm sure they've already been given the order to use the Little Doctor," said Master Han.

  "Oh, yes, I know they have. My concern is to stop that order from having the effect of destroying not only the humans of Lusitania, but two other raman species as well." Then Jane told them of the hive queen, and how it came to be that buggers once again lived in the universe. "The hive queen is already building starships, pushing herself to the limit to accomplish as much as she can before the fleet arrives. But there's no chance that she can build enough to save more than a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of Lusitania. The hive queen can leave, or send another queen who shares all her memories, and it matters little to her whether her workers go with her or not. But the pequeninos and the humans are not so self-contained. I'd like to save them all. Especially because my dearest friends, a particular speaker for the dead and a young man suffering from brain damage, would refuse to leave Lusitania unless every other human and pequenino could be saved."

  "Are they heroes, then?" asked Master Han.

  "Each has proved it several times in the past," said Jane.

  "I wasn't sure if heroes still existed in the human race."

  Si Wang-mu did not speak what was in her heart: that Master Han himself was such a hero.

  "I am searching for every possibility," said Jane. "But it all comes down to an impossibility, or so humankind has believed for more than three thousand years. If we could build a starship that travelled faster than light, that travelled as quickly as the messages of the ansible pass from world to world, then even if the hive queen can build only a dozen starships, they could easily shuttle all the inhabitants of Lusitania to other planets before the Lusitania Fleet arrives."

  "If you could actually build such a starship," said Han Fei-tzu, "you could create a fleet of your own that could attack the Lusitania Fleet and destroy it before it could harm anyone."

  "Ah, but that is impossible," said Jane.

  "You can conceive of faster-than-light travel, and yet you can't imagine destroying the Lusitania Fleet?"

  "Oh, I can imagine it," said Jane. "But the hive queen wouldn't build it. She has told Andrew— my friend, the Speaker for the Dead—"

  "Valentine's brother," said Wang-mu. "He also lives?"

  "The hive queen has told him that she will never build a weapon for any reason."

  "Even to save her own species?"

  "She'll have the single starship she needs to get off planet, and the others will also have enough starships to save their species. She's content with that. There's no need to kill anybody."

  "But if Congress has its way, millions will be killed!"

  "Then that is their responsibility," said Jane. "At least that's what Andrew tells me she answers whenever he raises that point."

  "What kind of strange moral reasoning is this?"

  "You forget that she only recently discovered the existence of other intelligent life, and she came perilously close to destroying it. Then that other intelligent life almost destroyed her. But it was her own near brush with committing the crime of xenocide that has had the greater effect on her moral reasoning. She can't stop other species from such things, but she can be certain that she doesn't do it herself. She will only kill when that's the only hope she has of saving the existence of her species. And since she has another hope, she won't build a warship."

  "Faster-than-light travel," said Master Han. "Is that your only hope?"

  "The only one I can think of that has a glimmer of possibility. At least we know that something in the universe moves faster than light— information is passed down the philotic ray from one ansible to another with no detectable passage of time. A bright young physicist on Lusitania who happens to be locked in jail at the present time is spending his days and nights working on this problem. I perform all his calculations and simulations for him. At this very moment he is testing a hypothesis about the nature of philotes by using a model so complex that in order to run the program I'm stealing time from the computers of almost a thousand different universities. There's hope."

  "As long as you live, there's hope," said Wang-mu. "Who will do such massive experiments for him when you're gone?"

  "That's why there's so much urgency," said Jane.

  "What do you need me for?" asked Master Han. "I'm no physicist, and I have no hope of learning enough in the next few months to make any kind of difference. It's your jailed physicist who'll do it, if anyone can. Or you yourself."

  "Everyone needs a dispassionate critic to say, Have you thought of this? Or even, Enough of that dead-end path, get onto another train of thought. That's what I need you for. We'll report our work to you, and you'll examine it and say whatever comes to mind. You can't possibly guess what chance word of yours will trigger the idea we're looking for."

  Master Han nodded, to concede the possibility.

  "The second problem I'm working on is even knottier," said Jane. "Whether we achieve faster-than-light travel or not, some pequeninos will have starships and can leave the planet Lusitania. The problem is that they carry inside them the most insidious and terrible virus ever known, one that destroys every form of life it touches except those few that it can twist into a deformed kind of symbiotic life utterly dependent on the presence of that virus."

  "The descolada," said Master Han. "One of the justifications sometimes used for carrying the Little Doctor with the fleet in the first place."

  "And it may actually be a justification.
From the hive queen's point of view, it's impossible to choose between one life form and another, but as Andrew has often pointed out to me, human beings don't have that problem. If it's a choice between the survival of humanity and the survival of the pequeninos, he'd choose humanity, and for his sake so would I."

  "And I," said Master Han.

  "You can be sure the pequeninos feel the same way in reverse," said Jane. "If not on Lusitania then somewhere, somehow, it will almost certainly come down to a terrible war in which humans use the Molecular Disruption Device and the pequeninos use the descolada as the ultimate biological weapon. There's a good chance of both species utterly destroying each other. So I feel some urgency about the need to find a replacement virus for the descolada, one that will perform all the functions needed in the pequeninos' life cycle without any of its predatory, self-adapting capabilities. A selectively inert form of the virus."

  "I thought there were ways to neutralise the descolada. Don't they take drugs in their drinking water on Lusitania?"

  "The descolada keeps figuring out their drugs and adapting to them. It's a series of footraces. Eventually the descolada will win one, and then there won't be any more humans to race against."

  "Do you mean that the virus is intelligent?" asked Wang-mu.

  "One of the scientists on Lusitania thinks so," said Jane. "A woman named Quara. Others disagree. But the virus certainly acts as if it were intelligent, at least when it comes to adapting itself to changes in its environment and changing other species to fit its needs. I think Quara is right, personally. I think the descolada is an intelligent species that has its own kind of language that it uses to spread information very quickly from one side of the world to the other."

  "I'm not a virologist," said Master Han.

  "And yet if you could look at the studies being performed by Elanora Ribeira von Hesse—"

  "Of course I'll look. I only wish I had your hope that I can help."

  "And then the third problem," said Jane. "Perhaps the simplest one of all. The god spoken of Path."

  "Ah yes," said Master Han. "Your destroyers."

  "Not by any free choice," said Jane. "I don't hold it against you. But it's something I'd like to see accomplished before I die— to figure out a way to alter your altered genes, so that future generations, at least, can be free of that deliberately-induced OCD, while still keeping the extraordinary intelligence."

  "Where will you find genetic scientists willing to work on something that Congress would surely consider to be treason?" asked Master Han.

  "When you wish to have someone commit treason," said Jane, "it's best to look first among known traitors."

  "Lusitania," said Wang-mu.

  "Yes," said Jane. "With your help, I can give the problem to Elanora."

  "Isn't she working on the descolada problem?"

  "No one can work on anything every waking moment. This will be a change of pace that might actually help freshen her for her work on the descolada. Besides, your problem on Path may be relatively easy to solve. After all, your altered genes were originally created by perfectly ordinary geneticists working for Congress. The only barriers have been political, not scientific. Ela might find it a simple matter. She has already told me how we should begin. We need a few tissue samples, at least to start with. Have a medical technician here do a computer scan on them at the molecular level. I can take over the machinery long enough to make sure the data Elanora needs is gathered during the scan, and then I'll transmit the genetic data to her. It's that simple."

  "Whose tissue do you need?" asked Master Han. "I can't very well ask all the visitors here to give me a sample."

  "Actually, I was hoping you could," said Jane. "So many are coming and going. We can use dead skin, you know. Perhaps even faecal or urine samples that might contain body cells."

  Master Han nodded. "I can do that."

  "If it comes to faecal samples, I will do it," said Wang-mu.

  "No," said Master Han. "I am not above doing all that is necessary to help, even with my own hands."

  "You?" asked Wang-mu. "I volunteered because I was afraid you would humiliate other servants by requiring them to do it."

  "I will never again ask anyone to do something so low and debasing that I refuse to do it myself," said Master Han.

  "Then we'll do it together," said Wang-mu. "Please remember, Master Han— you will help Jane by reading and responding to reports, while manual tasks are the only way that I can help at all. Don't insist on doing what I can do. Instead spend your time on the things that only you can do."

  Jane interrupted before Master Han could answer. "Wang-mu, I want you to read the reports as well."

  "Me? But I'm not educated at all."

  "Nevertheless," said Jane.

  "I won't even understand them."

  "Then I'll help you," said Master Han.

  "This isn't right," said Wang-mu. "I'm not Qing-jao. This is the sort of thing she could do. It isn't for me."

  "I watched you and Qing-jao through the whole process that led to her discovery of me," said Jane. "Many of the key insights came from you, Si Wang-mu, not from Qing-jao."

  "From me? I never even tried to—"

  "You didn't try. You watched. You made connections in your mind. You asked questions."

  "They were foolish questions," said Wang-mu. Yet in her heart she was glad: Someone saw!

  "Questions that no expert would ever have asked," said Jane. "Yet they were exactly the questions that led Qing-jao to her most important conceptual breakthroughs. You may not be god spoken, Wang-mu, but you have gifts of your own."

  "I'll read and respond," said Wang-mu, "but I will also gather tissue samples. All of the tissue samples, so that Master Han does not have to speak to these god spoken visitors and listen to them praise him for a terrible thing that he didn't do."

  Master Han was still opposed. "I refuse to think of you doing—"

  Jane interrupted him. "Han Fei-tzu, be wise. Wang-mu, as a servant, is invisible. You, as master of the house, are as subtle as a tiger in a playground. Nothing you do goes unnoticed. Let Wang-mu do what she can do best."

  Wise words, thought Wang-mu. Why then are you asking me to respond to the work of scientists, if each person must do what he does best? Yet she kept silent. Jane had them begin by taking their own tissue samples; then Wang-mu set about gathering tissue samples from the rest of the household. She found most of what she needed on combs and unwashed clothing. Within days she had samples from a dozen god spoken visitors, also taken from their clothing. No one had to take faecal samples after all. But she would have been willing.

  Qing-jao noticed her, of course, but snubbed her. It hurt Wang-mu to have Qing-jao treat her so coldly, for they had once been friends and Wang-mu still loved her, or at least loved the young woman that Qing-jao had been before the crisis. Yet there was nothing Wang-mu could say or do to restore their friendship. She had chosen another path.

  Wang-mu kept all the tissue samples carefully separated and labelled. Instead of taking them to a medical technician, however, she found a much simpler way. Dressing in some of Qing-jao's old clothing, so that she looked like a god spoken student instead of a servant girl, she went to the nearest college and told them that she was working on a project whose nature she could not divulge, and she humbly requested that they perform a scan on the tissue samples she provided. As she expected, they asked no questions of a god spoken girl, even a complete stranger. Instead they ran the molecular scans, and Wang-mu could only assume that Jane had done as she promised, taking control of the computer and making the scan include all the operations Ela needed.