“It’s all right,” said Qing-jao.
Wang-mu was already gone; Qing-jao didn’t know whether her servant had even heard her reassurance. Never mind, thought Qing-jao. If Wang-mu was offended, I’ll make it up to her later. It was sweet of the girl to think she could help me with my task; I’ll make sure she knows I’m glad she has such an eager heart.
With Wang-mu out of the room, Qing-jao went back to her terminal. She idly flipped the reports through her terminal’s display. She had looked at all of them before, and she had found nothing useful. Why should this time be different? Maybe these reports and summaries showed her nothing because there was nothing to show. Maybe the fleet disappeared because of some god-gone-berserk; there were stories of such things in ancient times. Maybe there was no evidence of human intervention because a human didn’t do it. What would Father say about that, she wondered. How would Congress deal with a lunatic deity? They couldn’t even track down that seditious writer Demosthenes—what hope did they have of tracking and trapping a god?
Whoever Demosthenes is, he’s laughing right now, thought Qing-jao. All his work to persuade people that the government was wrong to send the Lusitania Fleet, and now the fleet has stopped, just as Demosthenes wanted.
Just as Demosthenes wanted. For the first time, Qing-jao made a mental connection that was so obvious she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. It was so obvious, in fact, that the police in many a city had assumed that those who were already known to follow Demosthenes must surely have been involved in making the fleet disappear. They had rounded up everyone suspected of sedition and tried to force confessions out of them. But of course they hadn’t actually questioned Demosthenes, because nobody knew who he was.
Demosthenes, so clever he has evaded discovery for years, despite all the searching of the Congress Police; Demosthenes, who is every bit as elusive as the cause of the disappearance of the fleet. If he could work the one trick, why not the other? Maybe if I find Demosthenes, I’ll find out how the fleet was cut off. Not that I have any idea even where to start looking. But at least it’s a different avenue of approach. At least it won’t mean reading the same empty, useless reports over and over again.
Suddenly Qing-jao remembered who had said almost exactly the same thing, only moments before. She felt herself blushing, the blood hot in her cheeks. How arrogant I was, to condescend to Wang-mu, to patronize her for imagining she could help me with my lofty task. And now, not five minutes later, the thought she planted in my mind has blossomed into a plan. Even if the plan fails, she was the one who gave it to me, or at least started me thinking of it. Thus I was the fool to think her foolish. Tears of shame filled Qing-jao’s eyes.
Then she thought of some famous lines from a song by her ancestor-of-the-heart:
I want to call back
the blackberry flowers
that have fallen
though pear blossoms remain
The poet Li Qing-jao knew the pain of regretting words that have already fallen from our lips and can never be called back. But she was wise enough to remember that even though those words are gone, there are still new words waiting to be said, like the pear blossoms.
To comfort herself for the shame of having been so arrogant, Qing-jao repeated all the words of the song; or at least she started to. But when she got to the line her mind drifted to the Lusitania Fleet, imagining all those starships like riverboats, painted so fiercely, and yet drifting now with the current, so far from the shore that they can no longer be heard no matter how loud they shout.
dragon boats on the river
From dragon boats her thoughts turned to dragon kites, and now she thought of the Lusitania Fleet as kites with broken strings, carried along by the wind, no longer tethered to the child who first gave them flight. How beautiful, to see them free; yet how terrifying it must be for them, who never wished for freedom.
I did not fear the mad winds and violent rain
The words of the song came back to her again. I did not fear. Mad winds. Violent rain. I did not fear as
we drank to good fortune
with warm blackberry wine
now I cannot conceive
how to retrieve
that time
My ancestor-of-the-heart could drink away her fear, thought Qing-jao, because she had someone to drink with. And even now,
alone on my mat with a cup
gazing sadly into nothingness
the poet remembers her gone companion. Whom do I remember now? thought Qing-jao. Where is my tender love? What an age it must have been then, when the great Li Qing-jao was still mortal, and men and women could be together as tender friends without any worry about who was godspoken and who was not. Then a woman could live such a life that even in her loneliness she had memories. I can’t even remember my mother’s face. Only the flat pictures; I can’t remember seeing her face turn and move while her eyes looked at me. I have only my Father, who is like a god; I can worship him and obey him and even love him but I can never be playful with him, not really; when I tease him I’m always watching to be sure he approves of the way I tease him. And Wang-mu; I talked so firmly about how we would be friends, and yet I treat her like a servant, I never for a moment forget who is godspoken and who is not. It’s a wall that can never be crossed. I’m alone now and I’m alone forever.
a clear cold comes through
the window curtains
crescent moon beyond the golden bars
She shivered. I and the moon. Didn’t the Greeks think of their moon as a cold virgin, a huntress? Is that not what I am now? Sixteen years old and untouched
and a flute sounds
as if someone were coming
I listen and listen but never hear the melody of someone coming …
No. What she heard were the distant sounds of a meal being readied; a clattering of bowls and spoons, laughter from the kitchen. Her reverie broken, she reached up and wiped the foolish tears from her cheeks. How could she think of herself as lonely, when she lived in this full house where everyone had cared for her all her life? I sit here reciting to myself scraps of old poetry when I have work to do.
At once she began to call up the reports that had been made about investigations into the identity of Demosthenes.
The reports made her think for a moment that this was a dead end, too. More than three dozen writers on almost as many worlds had been arrested for producing seditious documents under that name. Starways Congress had reached the obvious conclusion: Demosthenes was simply the catchall name used by any rebel who wanted to get attention. There was no real Demosthenes, not even an organized conspiracy.
But Qing-jao had doubts about that conclusion. Demosthenes had been remarkably successful in stirring up trouble on every world. Could there possibly be someone of so much talent among the traitors on every planet? Not likely.
Besides, thinking back to when she had read Demosthenes, Qing-jao remembered noticing the coherence of his writings. The singularity and consistency of his vision—that was part of what made him so seductive. Everything seemed to fit, to make sense together.
Hadn’t Demosthenes also devised the Hierarchy of Foreignness? Utlanning, framling, raman, varelse. No; that had been written many years ago—it had to be a different Demosthenes. Was it because of that earlier Demosthenes’ hierarchy that the traitors were using the name? They were writing in support of the independence of Lusitania, the only world where intelligent nonhuman life had been found. It was only appropriate to use the name of the writer who had first taught humanity to realize that the universe wasn’t divided between humans and nonhumans, or between intelligent and non-intelligent species.
Some strangers, the earlier Demosthenes had said, were framlings—humans from another world. Some were ramen—of another intelligent species, yet able to communicate with human beings, so that we could work out differences and make decisions together. Others were varelse, “wise beasts,” clearly intelligent and yet compl
etely unable to reach a common ground with humankind. Only with varelse would war ever be justified; with raman, humans could make peace and share the habitable worlds. It was an open way of thinking, full of hope that strangers might still be friends. People who thought that way could never have sent a fleet with Dr. Device to a world inhabited by an intelligent species.
This was a very uncomfortable thought: that the Demosthenes of the hierarchy would also disapprove of the Lusitania Fleet. Almost at once Qing-jao had to counter it. It didn’t matter what the old Demosthenes thought, did it? The new Demosthenes, the seditious one, was no wise philosopher trying to bring peoples together. Instead he was trying to sow dissension and discontent among the worlds—provoke quarrels, perhaps even wars between framlings.
And seditious Demosthenes was not just a composite of many rebels working on different worlds. Her computer search soon confirmed it. True, many rebels were found who had published on their own planet using the name Demosthenes, but they were always linked to small, ineffective, useless little publications—never to the really dangerous documents that seemed to turn up simultaneously on half the worlds at once. Each local police force, however, was very happy to declare their own petty “Demosthenes” the perpetrator of all the writings, take their bows, and close the case.
Starways Congress had been only too happy to do the same thing with their own investigation. Having found several dozen cases where local police had arrested and convicted rebels who had incontrovertibly published something under the name Demosthenes, the Congress investigators sighed contentedly, declared that Demosthenes had proved to be a catchall name and not one person at all, and then stopped investigating.
In short, they had all taken the easy way out. Selfish, disloyal—Qing-jao felt a surge of indignation that such people were allowed to continue in their high offices. They should be punished, and severely, too, for having let their private laziness or their desire for praise lead them to abandon the investigation of Demosthenes. Didn’t they realize that Demosthenes was truly dangerous? That his writings were now the common wisdom of at least one world, and if one, then probably many? Because of him, how many people on how many worlds would rejoice if they knew that the Lusitania Fleet had disappeared? No matter how many people the police had arrested under the name Demosthenes, his works kept appearing, and always in that same voice of sweet reasonableness. No, the more she read the reports, the more certain Qing-jao became that Demosthenes was one man, as yet undiscovered. One man who knew how to keep secrets impossibly well.
From the kitchen came the sound of the flute; they were being called to dinner. She gazed into the display space over her terminal, where the latest report still hovered, the name Demosthenes repeated over and over. “I know you exist, Demosthenes,” she whispered, “and I know you are very clever, and I will find you. When I do, you will stop your war against the rulers, and you will tell me what has happened to the Lusitania Fleet. Then I will be done with you, and Congress will punish you, and Father will become the god of Path and live forever in the Infinite West. That is the task that I was born for, the gods have chosen me for it, you might just as well show yourself to me now as later, for eventually all men and women lay their heads under the feet of the gods.”
The flute played on, a breathy low melody, drawing Qing-jao out of herself and toward the company of the household. To her, this half-whispered music was the song of the inmost spirit, the quiet conversation of trees over a still pond, the sound of memories arising unbidden into the mind of a woman in prayer. Thus were they called to dine in the house of the noble Han Fei-tzu.
Having heard Qing-jao’s challenge, Jane thought: This is what fear of death tastes like. Human beings feel this all the time, and yet somehow they go on from day to day, knowing that at any moment they may cease to be. But this is because they can forget something and still know it; I can never forget, not without losing the knowledge entirely. I know that Han Qing-jao is on the verge of finding secrets that have stayed hidden only because no one has looked hard for them. And when those secrets are known, I will die.
“Ender,” she whispered.
Was it day or night on Lusitania? Was he awake or asleep? For Jane, to ask a question is either to know or not-know. So she knew at once that it was night. Ender had been asleep, but now he was awake; he was still attuned to her voice, she realized, even though many silences had passed between them in the past thirty years.
“Jane,” he whispered.
Beside him his wife, Novinha, stirred in her sleep. Jane heard her, felt the vibration of her movement, saw the changing shadows through the sensor that Ender wore in his ear. It was good that Jane had not yet learned to feel jealousy, or she might have hated Novinha for lying there, a warm body beside Ender’s own. But Novinha, being human, was gifted at jealousy, and Jane knew how Novinha seethed whenever she saw Ender speaking to the woman who lived in the jewel in his ear. “Hush,” said Jane. “Don’t wake people up.”
Ender answered by moving his lips and tongue and teeth, without letting anything louder than a breath pass his lips. “How fare our enemies in flight?” he said. He had greeted her this way for many years.
“Not well,” said Jane.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t have blocked them. We would have found a way. Valentine’s writings—”
“Are about to have their true authorship uncovered.”
“Everything’s about to be uncovered.” He didn’t say: because of you.
“Only because Lusitania was marked for destruction,” she answered. She also didn’t say: because of you. There was plenty of blame to go around.
“So they know about Valentine?”
“A girl is finding out. On the world of Path.”
“I don’t know the place.”
“A fairly new colony, a couple of centuries. Chinese. Dedicated to preserving an odd mix of old religions. The gods speak to them.”
“I lived on more than one Chinese world,” said Ender. “People believed in the old gods on all of them. Gods are alive on every world, even here in the smallest human colony of all. They still have miracles of healing at the shrine of Os Venerados. Rooter has been telling us of a new heresy out in the hinterland somewhere. Some pequeninos who commune constantly with the Holy Ghost.”
“This business with gods is something I don’t understand,” said Jane. “Hasn’t anyone caught on yet that the gods always say what people want to hear?”
“Not so,” said Ender. “The gods often ask us to do things we never desired, things that require us to sacrifice everything on their behalf. Don’t underestimate the gods.”
“Does your Catholic God speak to you?”
“Maybe he does. I never hear him, though. Or if I do, I never know that it’s his voice I’m hearing.”
“And when you die, do the gods of every people really gather them up and take them off somewhere to live forever?”
“I don’t know. They never write.”
“When I die, will there be some god to carry me away?”
Ender was still for a moment, and then he began to address her in his storytelling manner. “There’s an old tale of a dollmaker who never had a son. So he made a puppet that was so lifelike that it looked like a real boy, and he would hold the wooden boy on his lap and talk to it and pretend it was his son. He wasn’t crazy—he still knew it was a doll—he called it Pinehead. But one day a god came and touched the puppet and it came to life, and when the dollmaker spoke to it, Pinehead answered. The dollmaker never told anyone about this. He kept his wooden son at home, but he brought the boy every tale he could gather and news of every wonder under heaven. Then one day the dollmaker was coming home from the wharf with tales of a far-off land that had just been discovered, when he saw that his house was on fire. Immediately he tried to run into the house, crying out, ‘My son! My son!’ But his neighbors stopped him, saying, ‘Are you mad? You have no son!’ He watched the house burn to the ground, and when it was over he plunged into the
ruins and covered himself with hot ashes and wept bitterly. He refused to be comforted. He refused to rebuild his shop. When people asked him why, he said his son was dead. He stayed alive by doing odd jobs for other people, and they pitied him because they were sure the fire had made him a lunatic. Then one day, three years later, a small orphan boy came to him and tugged on his sleeve and said, ‘Father, don’t you have a tale for me?’”
Jane waited, but Ender said no more. “That’s the whole story?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
“Why did you tell me this? It’s all dreams and wishes. What does it have to do with me?”
“It was the story that came to mind.”
“Why did it come to mind?”
“Maybe that’s how God speaks to me,” said Ender. “Or maybe I’m sleepy and I don’t have what you want from me.”
“I don’t even know what I want from you.”
“I know what you want,” said Ender. “You want to be alive, with your own body, not dependent on the philotic web that binds the ansibles together. I’d give you that gift if I could. If you can figure out a way for me to do it, I’ll do it for you. But Jane, you don’t even know what you are. Maybe when you know how you came to exist, what makes you yourself, then maybe we can save you from the day when they shut down the ansibles to kill you.”
“So that’s your story? Maybe I’ll burn down with the house, but somehow my soul will end up in a three-year-old orphan boy?”
“Find out who you are, what you are, your essence, and we’ll see if we can move you somewhere safer until all this is over. We’ve got an ansible. Maybe we can put you back.”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 97
