Of course, once they called Planter in to Ela's office, closed the door, and started to explain, Ender realized that talking to a brother was hardly an improvement. Even after thirty years of living and working with them, Ender still wasn't good at reading any but the crudest and most obvious of pequenino body language. Planter listened in seeming unconcern as Ender explained what they had thought of during the conversation with Jane and Wang-mu. He wasn't impassive. Rather he seemed to sit as restlessly in his chair as a small boy, constantly shifting, looking away from them, gazing off into space as if their words were unspeakably boring. Ender knew, of course, that eye contact didn't mean the same thing to the pequeninos that it did to humans; they neither sought it nor avoided it. Where you looked while you were listening was almost completely unimportant to them. But usually the pequeninos who worked closely with humans tried to act in ways that human beings would interpret as paying attention. Planter was good at it, but right now he wasn't even trying.
Not till they had explained it all did Ender realize how much self-restraint Planter had shown even to remain on the chair until they were done. The moment they told him they were finished, he bounded off the chair and began to run– no, to scamper around the room, touching everything. Not striking it, not lashing out with violence as a human being might have, hitting things, throwing things. Rather he was stroking everything he found, feeling the textures. Ender stood, wanting to reach out to him, to offer some comfort– for he knew enough of pequenino behavior to recognize this as such aberrant behavior that it could only mean great distress.
Planter ran until he was exhausted, and then he went on, lurching around the room drunkenly until at last he bumped into Ender and threw his arms around him, clinging to him. For a moment Ender thought to embrace him back, but then he remembered that Planter wasn't human. An embrace didn't call for an answering embrace. Planter was clinging to him as he would cling to a tree. Seeking the comfort of a trunk. A safe place to hold onto until the danger passed. There would be less, not more comfort if Ender responded like a human and hugged him back. This was a time when Ender had to answer like a tree. So he held still and waited. Waited and held still. Until at last the trembling stopped.
When Planter pulled away from him, both their bodies were covered with sweat. I guess there's a limit to how treelike I can be, thought Ender. Or do brothertrees and fathertrees give off moisture to the brothers who cling to them?
“This is very surprising,” whispered Planter.
The words were so absurdly mild, compared to the scene that had just played out before them, that Ender couldn't help laughing aloud.
“Yes,” said Ender. “I imagine it is.”
“It's not funny to them,” Ela said.
“He knows that,” said Valentine.
“He mustn't laugh, then,” she said. “You can't laugh when Planter's in so much pain.” And then she burst into tears.
Valentine put a hand on her shoulder. “He laughs, you cry,” she said. “Planter runs around and climbs trees. What strange animals we all are.”
“Everything comes from the descolada,” said Planter. “The third life, the mothertree, the fathertrees. Maybe even our minds. Maybe we were only tree rats when the descolada came and made false ramen out of us.”
“Real ramen,” said Valentine.
“We don't know it's true,” said Ela. “It's a hypothesis.”
“It's very very very very very true,” said Planter. “Truer than truth.”
“How do you know?”
“Everything fits. Planetary regulation– I know about this, I studied gaialogy and the whole time I thought, how can this teacher tell us these things when every pequenino can look around and see that they're false? But if we know that the descolada is changing us, making us act to regulate the planetary systems–”
“What can the descolada possibly make you do that could regulate the planet?” said Ela.
“You haven't known us long enough,” said Planter. “We haven't told you everything because we were afraid you'd think we were silly. Now you'll know that we aren't silly, we're just acting out what a virus tells us to do. We're slaves, not fools.”
It startled Ender to realize that Planter had just confessed that the pequeninos still took some pains to try to impress human beings. “What behaviors of yours have anything to do with planetary regulation?”
“Trees,” said Planter. “How many forests are there, all over the world? Transpiring constantly. Turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When there's more of it in the atmosphere, the world gets warmer. So what would we do to make the world get cooler?”
“Plant more forests,” said Ela. “To use up more CO2 so that more heat could escape into space.”
“Yes,” said Planter. “But think about how we plant our trees.”
The trees grow from the bodies of the dead, thought Ender. “War,” he said.
“There are quarrels between tribes, and sometimes they make small wars,” said Planter. “Those would be nothing on a planetary scale. But the great wars that sweep across the whole world– millions and millions of brothers die in these wars, and all of them become trees. Within months the forests of the world could double in size and number. That would make a difference, wouldn't it?”
“Yes,” said Ela.
“A lot more efficiently than anything that would happen through natural evolution,” said Ender.
“And then the wars stop,” said Planter. “We always think there are great causes for these wars, that they're struggles between good and evil. And now all the time they are nothing but planetary regulation.”
“No,” said Valentine. “The need to fight, the rage, that might come from the descolada, but it doesn't mean the causes you fought for are–”
“The cause we fight for is planetary regulation,” said Planter. “Everything fits. How do you think we help with warming the planet?”
“I don't know,” said Ela. “Even trees eventually die of old age.”
“You don't know because you've come during a warm time, not a cold one. But when the winters get bad, we build houses. The brothertrees give themselves to us to make houses. All of us, not just the ones who live in cold places. We all build houses, and the forests are reduced by half, by three-quarters. We thought this was a great sacrifice the brothertrees made for the sake of the tribe, but now I see that it's the descolada, wanting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to warm the planet.”
“It's still a great sacrifice,” said Ender.
“All our great epics,” said Planter. “All our heroes. Just brothers acting out the will of the descolada.”
“So what?” said Valentine.
“How can you say that? I learn that our lives are nothing, that we're only tools used by a virus to regulate the global ecosystem, and you call it nothing?”
“Yes, I call it nothing,” said Valentine. “We human beings are no different. It may not be a virus, but we still spend most of our time acting out our genetic destiny. Take the differences between males and females. Males naturally tend toward a broadcast strategy of reproduction. Since males make an almost infinite supply of sperm and it costs them nothing to deploy it–”
“Not nothing,” said Ender.
“Nothing,” said Valentine, “just to deploy it. Their most sensible reproductive strategy is to deposit it in every available female– and to make special efforts to deposit it in the healthiest females, the ones most likely to bring their offspring to adulthood. A male does best, reproductively, if he wanders and copulates as widely as possible.”
“I've done the wandering,” said Ender. “Somehow I missed out on the copulating.”
"I'm speaking of overall trends," said Valentine. "There are always strange individuals who don't follow the norms. The female strategy is just the opposite, Planter. Instead of millions and millions of sperm, they only have one egg a month, and each child represents an enormous investment of effort. So female
s need stability. They need to be sure there'll always be plenty of food. We also spend large amounts of time relatively helpless, unable to find or gather food. Far from being wanderers, we females need to establish and stay. If we can't get that, then our next best strategy is to mate with the strongest and healthiest possible males. But best of all is to get a strong healthy male who'll stay and provide, instead of wandering and copulating at will.
"So there are two pressures on males. The one is to spread their seed, violently if necessary. The other is to be attractive to females by being stable providers– by suppressing and containing the need to wander and the tendency to use force. Likewise, there are two pressures on females. The one is to get the seed of the strongest, most virile males so their infants will have good genes, which would make the violent, forceful males attractive to them. The other is to get the protection of the most stable males, nonviolent males, so their infants will be protected and provided for and as many as possible will reach adulthood.
"Our whole history, all that I've ever found in all my wanderings as an itinerant historian before I finally unhooked myself from this reproductively unavailable brother of mine and had a family– it can all be interpreted as people blindly acting out those genetic strategies. We get pulled in those two directions.
"Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts– those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.
“And the tribes of wandering barbarians outside the reach of civilization, those follow the mainly male strategy. Spread the seed. Within the tribe, the strongest, most dominant males take possession of the best females, either through formal polygamy or spur-of-the-moment copulations that the other males are powerless to resist. But those low-status males are kept in line because the leaders take them to war and let them rape and pillage their brains out when they win a victory. They act out sexual desirability by proving themselves in combat, and then kill all the rival males and copulate with their widowed females when they win. Hideous, monstrous behavior– but also a viable acting-out of the genetic strategy.”
Ender found himself very uncomfortable, hearing Valentine talk this way. He knew all this was true as far as it went, and he had heard it all before, but it still, in a small way, made him as uncomfortable as Planter was to learn similar things about his own people. Ender wanted to deny it all, to say, Some of us males are naturally civilized. But in his own life, hadn't he performed the acts of dominance and war? Hadn't he wandered? In that context, his decision to stay on Lusitania was really a decision to abandon the male-dominant social model that had been engrained in him as a young soldier in battle school, and become a civilized man in a stable family.
Yet even then, he had married a woman who turned out to have little interest in having more children. A woman with whom marriage had turned out to be anything but civilized, in the end. If I follow the male model, then I'm a failure. No child anywhere who carries on my genes. No woman who accepts my rule. I'm definitely atypical.
But since I haven't reproduced, my atypical genes will die with me, and thus the male and female social models are safe from such an in-between person as myself.
Even as Ender made his own private evaluations of Valentine's interpretation of human history, Planter showed his own response by lying back in his chair, a gesture that spoke of scorn. “I'm supposed to feel better because humans are also tools of some genetic molecule?”
“No,” said Ender. “You're supposed to realize that just because a lot of behavior can be explained as responses to the needs of some genetic molecule, it doesn't mean that all pequenino behavior is meaningless.”
“Human history can be explained as the struggle between the needs of women and the needs of men,” said Valentine, “but my point is that there are still heroes and monsters, great events and noble deeds.”
“When a brothertree gives his wood,” said Planter, “it's supposed to mean that he sacrifices for the tribe. Not for a virus.”
“If you can look beyond the tribe to the virus, then look beyond the virus to the world,” said Ender. “The descolada is keeping this planet habitable. So the brothertree is sacrificing himself to save the whole world.”
“Very clever,” said Planter. “But you forget– to save the planet, it doesn't matter which brothertrees give themselves, as long as a certain number do it.”
“True,” said Valentine. “It doesn't matter to the descolada which brothertrees give their lives. But it matters to the brothertrees, doesn't it? And it matters to the brothers like you, who huddle into those houses to keep warm. You appreciate the noble gesture of the brothertrees who died for you, even if the descolada doesn't know one tree from another.”
Planter didn't answer. Ender hoped that meant they were making some headway.
“And in the wars,” said Valentine, “the descolada doesn't care who wins or loses, as long as enough brothers die and enough trees grow from the corpses. Right? But that doesn't change the fact that some brothers are noble and some are cowardly or cruel.”
“Planter,” said Ender, “the descolada may cause you all to feel– to come more quickly to a murderous rage, for instance– so that disputes erupt into warfare instead of being settled among the fathertrees. But that doesn't erase the fact that some forests are fighting in self-defense and others are simply bloodthirsty. You still have your heroes.”
“I don't give a damn about heroes,” said Ela. “Heroes tend to be dead, like my brother Quim. Where is he now, when we need him? I wish he hadn't been a hero.” She swallowed hard, holding down the memory of recent grief.
Planter nodded– a gesture he had learned in order to communicate with humans. “We live in Warmaker's world now,” he said. “What is he, except a fathertree acting as the descolada instructs? The world is getting too warm. We need more trees. So he's filled with fervor to expand the forests. Why? The descolada makes him feel that way. That's why so many brothers and fathertrees listened to him– because he offered a plan to satisfy their hunger to spread out and grow more trees.”
“Does the descolada know that he was planning to put all these new trees on other planets?” said Valentine. “That wouldn't do much to cool Lusitania.”
“The descolada puts hunger in them,” said Planter. “How can a virus know about starships?”
“How can a virus know about mothertrees and fathertrees, brothers and wives, infants and little mothers?” said Ender. “This is a very bright virus.”
“Warmaker is the best example of my point,” said Valentine. “His name suggests that he was deeply involved and successful in the last great war. Once again there's pressure to increase the number of trees. Yet Warmaker chose to turn this hunger to a new purpose, spreading new forests by reaching out to the stars instead of plunging into wars with other pequeninos.”
“We were going to do it no matter what Warmaker said or did,” said Planter. “Look at us. Warmaker's group was preparing to spread out and plant new forests on other worlds. But when they killed Father Quim, the rest of us were so filled with rage that we planned to go and punish them. Great slaughter, and again, trees would grow. Still doing what the descolada demanded. And now that humans have burned our forest, Warmaker's people are going to prevail after all. One way or another, we must spread out and propagate. We'll snatch up any excuse we can find. The descolada will have its way with us. We're tools, pathetically trying to find some way to convince ourselves that our actions are our own idea.”
He sounded so hopeless. Ender couldn't think of anything to say that Valentine or he hadn't already said, to try to wean him away from his conclusion that pequenino life was unfree and meaningless.
So it was Ela who spoke next, and in a tone of calm speculation that seemed incongruous, as if she had forgotten the terrible anxiety that Planter was
experiencing. Which was probably the case, as all this discussion had led her back to her own specialty. “It's hard to know which side the descolada would be on, if it were aware of all this,” said Ela.
“Which side of what?” asked Valentine.
“Whether to induce global cooling by having more forests planted here, or to use that same instinct for propagation to have the pequeninos take the descolada out to other worlds. I mean, which would the virus makers have wanted most? To spread the virus or regulate the planet?”
“The virus probably wants both, and it's likely to get both,” said Planter. “Warmaker's group will win control of the ships, no doubt. But either before or after, there'll be a war over it that leaves half the brothers dead. For all we know, the descolada is causing both things to happen.”
“For all we know,” said Ender.
“For all we know,” said Planter, “we may be the descolada.”
So, thought Ender, they are aware of that concern, despite our decision not to broach it with the pequeninos yet.
“Have you been talking to Quara?” demanded Ela.
“I talk to her every day,” said Planter. “But what does she have to do with this?”
“She had the same idea. That maybe pequenino intelligence comes from the descolada.”
“Do you think after all your talk about the descolada being intelligent that it hasn't occurred to us to wonder that?” said Planter. “And if it's true, what will you do then? Let all of your species die so that we can keep our little second-rate brains?”
Ender protested at once. “We've never thought of your brains as–”
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