“And when he died, Demosthenes—his sister—she was the only one who knew the secret! Isn’t it wonderful? We’ve found it. All we have to do is wipe all those programs out of memory!”
“Only to have the programs instantly restored through the ansible by other copies of the program on other worlds,” said Father. “It must have happened a thousand times before over the centuries, a computer breaking down and the secret program restoring itself on the new one.”
“Then we have to cut off all the ansibles at the same time,” said Qing-jao. “On every world, have a new computer ready that has never been contaminated by any contact with the secret program. Shut the ansibles down all at once, cut off the old computers, bring the new computers online, and wake up the ansibles. The secret program can’t restore itself because it isn’t on any of the computers. Then the power of Congress will have no rival to interfere!”
“You can’t do it,” said Wang-mu.
Qing-jao looked at her secret maid in shock. How could the girl be so illbred as to interrupt a conversation between two of the godspoken in order to contradict them?
But Father was gracious—he was always gracious, even to people who had overstepped all the bounds of respect and decency. I must learn to be more like him, thought Qing-jao. I must allow servants to keep their dignity even when their actions have forfeited any such consideration.
“Si Wang-mu,” said Father, “why can’t we do it?”
“Because to have all the ansibles shut off at the same time, you would have to send messages by ansible,” said Wang-mu. “Why would the program allow you to send messages that would lead to its own destruction?”
Qing-jao followed her father’s example by speaking patiently to Wang-mu. “It’s only a program—it doesn’t know the content of messages. Whoever rules the program told it to hide all the communications from the fleet, and to conceal the tracks of all the messages from Demosthenes. It certainly doesn’t read the messages and decide from their contents whether to send them.”
“How do you know?” asked Wang-mu.
“Because such a program would have to be—intelligent!”
“But it would have to be intelligent anyway,” said Wang-mu. “It has to be able to hide from any other program that would find it. It has to be able to move itself around in memory to conceal itself. How would it be able to tell which programs it had to hide from, unless it could read them and interpret them? It might even be intelligent enough to rewrite other programs so they wouldn’t look in the places where this program was hiding.”
Qing-jao immediately thought of several reasons why a program could be smart enough to read other programs but not intelligent enough to understand human languages. But because Father was there, it was his place to answer Wang-mu. Qing-jao waited.
“If there is such a program,” said Father, “it might be very intelligent indeed.”
Qing-jao was shocked. Father was taking Wang-mu seriously. As if Wang-mu’s ideas were not those of a naive child.
“It might be so intelligent that it not only intercepts messages, but also sends them.” Then Father shook his head. “No, the message came from a friend. A true friend, and she spoke of things that no one else could know. It was a real message.”
“What message did you receive, Father?”
“It was from Keikoa Amaauka; I knew her face to face when we were young. She was the daughter of a scientist from Otaheiti who was here to study genetic drift of Earthborn species in their first two centuries on Path. They left—they were sent away quite abruptly …” He paused, as if considering whether to say something. Then he decided, and said it: “If she had stayed she might have become your mother.”
Qing-jao was both thrilled and frightened to have Father speak of such a thing to her. He never spoke of his past. And now to say that he once loved another woman besides his wife who gave birth to Qing-jao, this was so unexpected that Qing-jao didn’t know what to say.
“She was sent somewhere very far away. It’s been thirty-five years. Most of my life has passed since she left. But she only just arrived, a year ago. And now she has sent me a message telling me why her father was sent away. To her, our parting was only a year ago. To her, I’m still—”
“Her lover,” said Wang-mu.
The impertinence! thought Qing-jao. But Father only nodded. Then he turned to his terminal and paged through the display. “Her father had stumbled onto a genetic difference in the most important Earthborn species on Path.”
“Rice?” asked Wang-mu.
Qing-jao laughed. “No, Wang-mu. We are the most important Earthborn species on this world.”
Wang-mu looked abashed. Qing-jao patted her shoulder. This was as it should be—Father had encouraged Wang-mu too much, had led her to think she understood things that were still far beyond her education. Wang-mu needed these gentle reminders now and then, so she did not get her hopes too high. The girl must not allow herself to dream of being the intellectual equal of one of the godspoken, or her life would be filled with disappointment instead of contentment.
“He detected a consistent, inheritable genetic difference in some of the people of Path, but when he reported it, his transfer came almost immediately. He was told that human beings were not within the scope of his study.”
“Didn’t she tell you this before she left?” asked Qing-jao.
“Keikoa? She didn’t know. She was very young, of an age when most parents don’t burden their children with adult affairs. Your age.”
The implications of this sent another thrill of fear through Qing-jao. Her father had loved a woman who was the same age as Qing-jao; thus Qing-jao was, in her father’s eyes, the age when she might be given in marriage. You cannot send me away to another man’s house, she cried out inside; yet part of her also was eager to learn the mysteries between a man and a woman. Both feelings were beneath her; she would do her duty to her father, and no more.
“But her father told her during the voyage, because he was very upset about the whole thing. As you can imagine—for his life to be disrupted like this. When they got to Ugarit a year ago, however, he plunged into his work and she into her education and tried not to think about it. Until a few days ago, when her father ran across an old report about a medical team in the earliest days of Path, which had also been exiled suddenly. He began to put things together, and confided them to Keikoa, and against his advice she sent me the message I got today.”
Father marked a block of text on the display, and Qing-jao read it. “That earlier team was studying OCD?” she said.
“No, Qing-jao. They were studying behavior that looked like OCD, but couldn’t possibly have been OCD because the genetic tag for OCD was not present and the condition did not respond to OCD-specific drugs.”
Qing-jao tried to remember what she knew about OCD. That it caused people to act inadvertently like the godspoken. She remembered that between the first discovery of her handwashing and her testing, she had been given those drugs to see if the handwashing went away. “They were studying the godspoken,” she said. “Trying to find a biological cause for our rites of purification.” The idea was so offensive she could hardly say the words.
“Yes,” said Father. “And they were sent away.”
“I should think they were lucky to get away with their lives. If the people heard of such sacrilege …”
“This was early in our history, Qing-jao,” said Father. “The godspoken were not yet fully known to be—communing with the gods. And what about Keikoa’s father? He wasn’t investigating OCD. He was looking for genetic drift. And he found it. A very specific, inheritable alteration in the genes of certain people. It had to be present on the gene from one parent, and not overridden by a dominant gene from the other; when it came from both parents, it was very strong. He thinks now that the reason he was sent away was because every one of the people with this gene from both parents was godspoken, and not one of the godspoken he sampled was without at least one copy of th
e gene.”
Qing-jao knew at once the only possible meaning of this, but she rejected it. “This is a lie,” she said. “This is to make us doubt the gods.”
“Qing-jao, I know how you feel. When I first realized what Keikoa was telling me, I cried out from my heart. I thought I was crying out in despair. But then I realized that my cry was also a cry of liberation.”
“I don’t understand you,” she said, terrified.
“Yes you do,” said Father, “or you wouldn’t be afraid. Qing-jao, these people were sent away because someone didn’t want them discovering what they were about to discover. Therefore whoever sent them away must already have known what they would find out. Only Congress—someone with Congress, anyway—had the power to exile these scientists, and their families. What was it that had to stay hidden? That we, the godspoken, are not hearing gods at all. We have been altered genetically. We have been created as a separate kind of human being, and yet that truth is being kept from us. Qing-jao, Congress knows the gods speak to us—that is no secret from them, even though they pretend not to know. Someone in Congress knows about it, and allows us to continue doing these terrible, humiliating things—and the only reason I can think of is that it keeps us under control, keeps us weak. I think—Keikoa thinks so, too—that it’s no coincidence that the godspoken are the most intelligent people of Path. We were created as a new subspecies of humanity with a higher order of intelligence; but to stop such intelligent people from posing a threat to their control over us, they also spliced into us a new form of OCD and either planted the idea that it was the gods speaking to us or let us continue to believe it when we came up with that explanation ourselves. It’s a monstrous crime, because if we knew about this physical cause instead of believing it to be the gods, then we might turn our intelligence toward overcoming our variant form of OCD and liberating ourselves. We are the slaves here! Congress is our most terrible enemy, our masters, our deceivers, and now will I lift my hand to help Congress? I say that if Congress has an enemy so powerful that he—or she—controls our very use of the ansible then we should be glad! Let that enemy destroy Congress! Only then will we be free!”
“No!” Qing-jao screamed the word. “It is the gods!”
“It’s a genetic brain defect,” Father insisted. “Qing-jao, we are not godspoken, we’re hobbled geniuses. They’ve treated us like caged birds; they’ve pulled our primary wing feathers so we’ll sing for them but never fly away.” Father was weeping now, weeping in rage. “We can’t undo what they’ve done to us, but by all the gods we can stop rewarding them for it. I will not raise my hand to give the Lusitania Fleet back to them. If this Demosthenes can break the power of Starways Congress, then the worlds will be better for it!”
“Father, no, please, listen to me!” cried Qing-jao. She could hardly speak for the urgency, the terror at what her father was saying. “Don’t you see? This genetic difference in us—it’s the disguise the gods have given for their voices in our lives. So that people who are not of the Path will still be free to disbelieve. You told me this yourself, only a few months ago—the gods never act except in disguise.”
Father stared at her, panting.
“The gods do speak to us. And even if they have chosen to let other people think that they did this to us, they were only fulfilling the will of the gods to bring us into being.”
Father closed his eyes, squeezing the last of his tears between his eyelids.
“Congress has the mandate of heaven, Father,” said Qing-jao. “So why shouldn’t the gods cause them to create a group of human beings who have keener minds—and who also hear the voices of the gods? Father, how can you let your mind become so clouded that you don’t see the hand of the gods in this?”
Father shook his head. “I don’t know. What you’re saying, it sounds like everything that I’ve believed all my life, but—”
“But a woman you once loved many years ago has told you something else and you believe her because you remember your love for her, but Father, she’s not one of us, she hasn’t heard the voice of the gods, she hasn’t—”
Qing-jao could not go on speaking, because Father was embracing her. “You’re right,” he said, “you’re right, may the gods forgive me, I have to wash, I’m so unclean, I have to …”
He staggered up from his chair, away from his weeping daughter. But without regard for propriety, for some mad reason known only to herself, Wang-mu thrust herself in front of him, blocked him. “No! Don’t go!”
“How dare you stop a godspoken man who needs to be purified!” roared Father; and then, to Qing-jao’s surprise, he did what she had never seen him do—he struck another person, he struck Wang-mu, a helpless servant girl, and his blow had so much force that she flew backward against the wall and then dropped to the floor.
Wang-mu shook her head, then pointed back at the computer display. “Look, please, Master, I beg you! Mistress, make him look!”
Qing-jao looked, and so did her father. The words were gone from the computer display. In their place was the image of a man. An old man, with a beard, wearing the traditional headdress; Qing-jao recognized him at once, but couldn’t remember who he was.
“Han Fei-tzu!” whispered Father. “My ancestor of the heart!”
Then Qing-jao remembered: This face showing above the display was the same as the common artist’s rendering of the ancient Han Fei-tzu for whom Father was named.
“Child of my name,” said the face in the computer, “let me tell you the story of the Jade of Master Ho.”
“I know the story,” said Father.
“If you understood it, I wouldn’t have to tell it to you.”
Qing-jao tried to make sense of what she was seeing. To run a visual program with such perfect detail as the head floating above the terminal would take most of the capacity of the house computer—and there was no such program in their library. There were two other sources she could think of. One was miraculous: The gods might have found another way to speak to them, by letting Father’s ancestor-of-the-heart appear to him. The other was hardly less awe-inspiring: Demosthenes’ secret program might be so powerful that it monitored their very speech in the same room as any terminal, and, having heard them reach a dangerous conclusion, took over the house computer and produced this apparition. In either case, however, Qing-jao knew that she must listen with one question in mind: What do the gods mean by this?
“Once a man of Qu named Master Ho found a piece of jade matrix in the Qu Mountains and took it to court and presented it to King Li.” The head of the ancient Han Fei-tzu looked from Father to Qing-jao, and from Qing-jao to Wang-mu; was this program so good that it knew to make eye contact with each of them in order to assert its power over them? Qing-jao saw that Wang-mu did in fact lower her gaze when the apparition’s eyes were upon her. But did Father? His back was to her; she could not tell.
“King Li instructed the jeweler to examine it, and the jeweler reported, ‘It is only a stone.’ The king, supposing that Ho was trying to deceive him, ordered that his left foot be cut off in punishment.
“In time King Li passed away and King Wu came to the throne, and Ho once more took his matrix and presented it to King Wu. King Wu ordered his jeweler to examine it, and again the jeweler reported, ‘It is only a stone.’ The king, supposing that Ho was trying to deceive him as well, ordered that his right foot be cut off.
“Ho, clasping the matrix to his breast, went to the foot of the Qu Mountains, where he wept for three days and nights, and when all his tears were cried out, he wept blood in their place. The king, hearing of this, sent someone to question him. ‘Many people in the world have had their feet amputated—why do you weep so piteously over it?’ the man asked.”
At this moment, Father drew himself upright and said, “I know his answer—I know it by heart. Master Ho said, ‘I do not grieve because my feet have been cut off. I grieve because a precious jewel is dubbed a mere stone, and a man of integrity is called a deceiver. This is wh
y I weep.”’
The apparition went on. “Those are the words he said. Then the king ordered the jeweler to cut and polish the matrix, and when he had done so a precious jewel emerged. Accordingly it was named ‘The Jade of Master Ho.’ Han Fei-tzu, you have been a good son-of-the-heart to me, so I know you will do as the king finally did: You will cause the matrix to be cut and polished, and you, too, will find that a precious jewel is inside.”
Father shook his head. “When the real Han Fei-tzu first told this story, he interpreted it to mean this: The jade was the rule of law, and the ruler must make and follow set policies so that his ministers and his people do not hate and take advantage of each other.”
“That is how I interpreted the story then, when I was speaking to makers of law. It’s a foolish man who thinks a true story can mean only one thing.”
“My master is not foolish!” To Qing-jao’s surprise, Wang-mu was striding forward, facing down the apparition. “Nor is my mistress, nor am I! Do you think we don’t recognize you? You are the secret program of Demosthenes. You’re the one who hid the Lusitania Fleet! I once thought that because your writings sounded so just and fair and good and true that you must be good—but now I see that you’re a liar and a deceiver! You’re the one who gave those documents to the father of Keikoa! And now you wear the face of my master’s ancestor-of-the-heart so you can better lie to him!”
“I wear this face,” said the apparition calmly, “so that his heart will be open to hear the truth. He was not deceived; I would not try to deceive him. He knew who I was from the first.”
“Be still, Wang-mu,” said Qing-jao. How could a servant so forget herself as to speak out when the godspoken had not bidden her?
Abashed, Wang-mu bowed her head to the floor before Qing-jao, and this time Qing-jao allowed her to remain in that posture, so she would not forget herself again.
The apparition shifted; it became the open, beautiful face of a Polynesian woman. The voice, too, changed; soft, full of vowels, the consonants so light as almost to be missed. “Han Fei-tzu, my sweet empty man, there is a time, when the ruler is alone and friendless, when only he can act. Then he must be full, and reveal himself. You know what is true and what is not true. You know that the message from Keikoa was truly from her. You know that those who rule in the name of Starways Congress are cruel enough to create a race of people who, by their gifts, should be rulers, and then cut off their feet in order to hobble them and leave them as servants, as perpetual ministers.”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 103
