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

by Orson Scott Card

  Besides species survival?

  When you send out your workers, even light-years away, you see through their eyes, don't you?

  And taste through their antennae, and feel the rhythm of every vibration. When they eat, I feel the crushing of the food within their jaws. That's why I almost always refer to myself as we, when I form my thoughts into a form that Andrew or you can understand, because I live my life in the constant presence of all that they see and taste and feel.

  It's not quite that way between the father trees. We have to try in order to experience each other's life. But we can do it. Here at least, on Lusitania.

  I can't see why the philotic connection would fail you.

  Then I, too, will feel all that they feel, and taste the light of another sun on my leaves, and hear the stories of another world. It will be like the wonderment that came when the humans first arrived here. We had never thought that anything could be different from the world we saw till then. But they brought strange creatures with them, and they were strange themselves, and they had machines that performed miracles. The other forests could hardly believe what our father trees of that time told them. I remember in fact that our father trees had a hard time believing what the brothers of the tribe told them about the humans. Rooter bore the brunt of that, persuading them to believe that it wasn't a lie or madness or a joke.

  A joke?

  There are stories of trickster brothers who lie to the father trees, but they're always caught and punished terribly.

  Andrew tells me that such stories are told in order to encourage civilised behaviour.

  It's always tempting to lie to the father trees. I did it sometimes myself. Not lying. Just exaggerating. They do it to me now, sometimes.

  And do you punish them?

  I remember which ones have lied.

  If we have a worker who doesn't obey, we make him be alone and he dies.

  A brother who lies too much has no chance of being a father tree. They know this. They only lie to play with us. They always end up telling us the truth.

  What if a whole tribe lies to their father trees? How would you ever know?

  You might better speak of a tribe cutting down its own father trees, or burning them.

  Has it ever happened?

  Have the workers ever turned against the hive queen and killed her?

  How could they? Then they would die.

  You see. There are some things too terrible to think about. Instead I'll think of how it will feel when a father tree first puts in his roots on another planet, and pushes out his branches into an alien sky, and drinks in sunlight from a strange star.

  You'll soon learn that there are no strange stars, no alien skies.

  No?

  Only skies and stars, in all their varieties. Each one with its own flavour, and all flavours good.

  Now you think like a tree. Flavours! Of skies!

  I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet.

  "You're asking me to help you in your rebellion against the gods?"

  Wang-mu remained bowed before her mistress— her former mistress— saying nothing. In her heart she had words she might have uttered. No, my mistress, I am asking you to help us in our struggle against the terrible bondage forced on the god spoken by Congress. No, my mistress, I'm asking you to remember your proper duty to your father, which even the god spoken may not ignore if they would be righteous. No, my mistress, I'm asking you to help us discover a way to save a decent and helpless people, the pequeninos, from xenocide.

  But Wang-mu said nothing, because this was one of the first lessons she learned from Master Han. When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man. Qing-jao was not hungry for wisdom from Wang-mu, and never would be. So silence was all that Wang-mu could offer. She could only hope that Qing-jao would find her own road to proper obedience, compassionate decency, or the struggle for freedom.

  Any motive would do, as long as Qing-jao's brilliant mind could be enlisted on their side. Wang-mu had never felt so useless in her life as now, watching Master Han labour over the questions that Jane had given him. In order to think about faster-than-light travel he was studying physics; how could Wang-mu help him, when she was only learning about geometry? To think about the descolada virus he was studying microbiology; Wang-mu was barely learning the concepts of gaialogy and evolution. And how could she be of any help when he contemplated the nature of Jane? She was a child of manual workers, and her hands, not her mind, held her future. Philosophy was as far above her as the sky was above the earth. "But the sky only seems to be far away from you," said Master Han, when she told him this. "Actually it is all around you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out, even when you labour with your hands in the mud. That is true philosophy." But she understood from this only that Master Han was kind, and wanted to make her feel better about her uselessness.

  Qing-jao, though, would not be useless. So Wang-mu had handed her a paper with the project names and passwords on them.

  "Does Father know you're giving these to me?"

  Wang-mu said nothing. Actually, Master Han had suggested it, but Wang-mu thought it might be better if Qing-jao didn't know at this point that Wang-mu came as an emissary from her father.

  Qing-jao interpreted Wang-mu's silence as Wang-mu assumed she would— that Wang-mu was coming secretly, on her own, to ask for Qing-jao's help.

  "If Father himself had asked me, I would have said yes, for that is my duty as a daughter," said Qing-jao.

  But Wang-mu knew that Qing-jao wasn't listening to her father these days. She might say that she would be obedient, but in fact her father filled her with such distress that, far from saying yes, Qing-jao would have crumpled to the floor and traced lines all day because of the terrible conflict in her heart, knowing that her father wanted her to disobey the gods.

  "I owe nothing to you," said Qing-jao. "You were a false and disloyal servant to me. Never was there a more unworthy and useless secret maid than you. To me your presence in this house is like the presence of dung beetles at the supper table."

  Again, Wang-mu held her tongue. However, she also refrained from deepening her bow. She had assumed the humble posture of a servant at the beginning of this conversation, but she would not now humiliate herself in the desperate kowtow of a penitent. Even the humblest of us have our pride, and I know, Mistress Qing-jao, that I have caused you no harm, that I am more faithful to you now than you are to yourself.

  Qing-jao turned back to her terminal and typed in the first project name, which was "UNGLUING," a literal translation of the word descolada. "This is all nonsense anyway," she said as she scanned the documents and charts that had been sent from Lusitania. "It is hard to believe that anyone would commit the treason of communicating with Lusitania only to receive nonsense like this. It is all impossible as science. No world could have developed only one virus that was so complex that it could include within it the genetic code for every other species on the planet. It would be a waste of time for me even to consider this."

  "Why not?" asked Wang-mu. It was all right for her to speak now— because even as Qing-jao declared that she was refusing to discuss the material, she was discussing it. "After all, evolution produced only one human race."

  "But on Earth there were dozens of related species. There is no species without kin— if you weren't such a stupid rebellious girl you would understand that. Evolution could never have produced a system as sparse as this one."

  "Then how do you explain these documents from the people of Lusitania?"

  "How do you know they actually come from there? You have only the word of this computer program. Maybe it thinks this is all. Or maybe the scientists there are very bad, with no sense of their duty to collect all possible information. There aren't two dozen species in this whole report— and look, they're all pai
red up in the most absurd fashion. Impossible to have so few species."

  "But what if they're right?"

  "How can they be right? The people of Lusitania have been confined in a tiny compound from the beginning. They've only seen what these little pig-men have shown them— how do they know the pig-men aren't lying to them?"

  Calling them pig-men— is that how you convince yourself, my mistress, that helping Congress won't lead to xenocide? If you call them by an animal name, does that mean that it's all right to slaughter them? If you accuse them of lying, does that mean that they're worthy of extinction? But Wang-mu said nothing of this. She only asked the same question again. "What if this is the true picture of the life forms of Lusitania, and how the descolada works within them?"

  "If it were true, then I would have to read and study these documents in order to make any intelligent comment about them. But they aren't true. How far had I taken you in your learning, before you betrayed me? Didn't I teach you about gaialogy?"

  "Yes, Mistress."

  "Well, there you are. Evolution is the means by which the planetary organism adapts to changes in its environment. If there is more heat from the sun, then the life forms of the planet must be able to adjust their relative populations in order to compensate and lower the temperature. Remember the classic Daisyworld thought-experiment?"

  "But that experiment had only a single species over the whole face of the planet," said Wang-mu. "When the sun grew too hot, then white daisies grew to reflect the light back into space, and when the sun grew too cool, dark daisies grew to absorb the light and hold it as heat." Wang-mu was proud that she could remember Daisyworld so clearly.

  "No no no," said Qing-jao. "You have missed the point, of course. The point is that there must already have been dark daisies, even when the light daisies were dominant, and light daisies when the world was covered with darkness. Evolution can't produce new species on demand. It is creating new species constantly, as genes drift and are spliced and broken by radiation and passed between species by viruses. Thus no species ever 'breeds true.'"

  Wang-mu didn't understand the connection yet, and her face must have revealed her puzzlement.

  "Am I still your teacher, after all? Must I keep my side of the bargain, even though you have given up on yours?"

  Please, said Wang-mu silently. I would serve you forever, if you would only help your father in this work.

  "As long as the whole species is together, interbreeding constantly," said Qing-jao, "individuals never drift too far, genetically speaking; their genes are constantly being recombined with other genes in the same species, so the variations are spread evenly through the whole population with each new generation. Only when the environment puts them under such stress that one of those randomly drifting traits suddenly has survival value, only then will all those in that particular environment who lack that trait die out, until the new trait, instead of being an occasional sport, is now a universal definer of the new species. That's the fundamental tenet of gaialogy— constant genetic drift is essential for the survival of life as a whole. According to these documents, Lusitania is a world with absurdly few species, and no possibility of genetic drift because these impossible viruses are constantly correcting any changes that might come up. Not only could such a system never evolve, but also it would be impossible for life to continue to exist— they couldn't adapt to change."

  "Maybe there are no changes on Lusitania."

  "Don't be so foolish, Wang-mu. It makes me ashamed to think I ever tried to teach you. All stars fluctuate. All planets wobble and change in their orbits. We have been observing many worlds for three thousand years, and in that time we have learned what Earthbound scientists in the years before that could never learn— which behaviours are common to all planets and stellar systems, and which are unique to the Earth and the Sol System. I tell you that it is impossible for a planet like Lusitania to exist for more than a few decades without experiencing life-threatening environmental change— temperature fluctuations, orbital disturbances, seismic and volcanic cycles— how would a system of really only a handful of species ever cope with that? If the world has only light daisies, how will it ever warm itself when the sun cools? If its lifeforms are all carbon dioxide users, how will they heal themselves when the oxygen in the atmosphere reaches poisonous levels? Your so-called friends in Lusitania are fools, to send you nonsense like this. If they were real scientists, they would know that their results are impossible."

  Qing-jao pressed a key and the display over her terminal went blank. "You have wasted time that I don't have. If you have nothing better than this to offer, do not come to me again. You are less than nothing to me. You are a bug floating in my water-glass. You defile the whole glass, not just the place where you float. I wake up in pain, knowing you are in this house."

  Then I'm hardly "nothing" to you, am I? said Wang-mu silently. It sounds to me as if I'm very important to you indeed. You may be very brilliant, Qing-jao, but you do not understand yourself any better than anybody else does.

  "Because you are a stupid common girl, you do not understand me," said Qing-jao. "I have told you to leave."

  "But your father is master of this house, and Master Han has asked me to stay."

  "Little stupid-person, little sister-of-pigs, if I cannot ask you to leave the whole house, I have certainly implied that I would like you to leave my room."

  Wang-mu bowed her head till it almost— almost— touched the floor. Then she backed out of the room, so as not to show her back parts to her mistress. If you treat me this way, then I will treat you like a great lord, and if you do not detect the irony in my actions, then who of the two of us is the fool?

  ***

  Master Han was not in his room when Wang-mu returned. He might be at the toilet and return in a moment. He might be performing some ritual of the god spoken, in which case he could be gone for hours. Wang-mu was too full of questions to wait for him. She brought up the project documents on the terminal, knowing that Jane would be watching, monitoring her. That Jane had no doubt monitored all that happened in Qing-jao's room.

  Still, Jane waited for Wang-mu to phrase the questions she had got from Qing-jao before she started trying to answer. And then Jane answered first the question of veracity.

  "The documents from Lusitania are genuine enough," said Jane. "Ela and Novinha and Ouanda and all the others who have studied with them are deeply specialised, yes, but within their specialty they're very good. If Qing-jao had read the Life of Human, she would see how these dozen species-pairs function."

  "But what she says is still hard for me to understand," said Wang-mu. "I've been trying to think how it could all be true— that there are too few species for a real gaialogy to develop, and yet the planet Lusitania is still well-enough regulated to sustain life. Could it possibly be that there is no environmental stress on Lusitania?"

  "No," said Jane. "I have access to all the astronomical data from the satellites there, and in the time humanity has been present in the Lusitania system, Lusitania and its sun have shown all the normal fluctuations. Right now there seems to be an overall trend of global cooling."

  "Then how will the life forms on Lusitania respond?" asked Wang-mu. "The descolada virus won't let them evolve— it tries to destroy anything strange, which is why it's going to kill the humans and the hive queen, if it can."

  Jane, whose small image sat in lotus position in the air over Master Han's terminal, held up a hand. "One moment," she said.

  Then she lowered her hand. "I have been reporting your questions to my friends, and Ela is very excited."

  A new face appeared in the display, just behind and above the image of Jane. She was a dark-skinned, Negroid-looking woman; or some mix, perhaps, since she was not that dark, and her nose was narrow. This is Elanora, thought Wang-mu. Jane is showing me a woman on a world many light years away; is she also showing my face to her? What does this Ela make of me? Do I seem hopelessly stupid to her?

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