“A million times,” said Jane. “I’ve looked at all of it.”
“Do you see anything in there to give you the illusion of free will?”
“No,” she said. “But you haven’t found the free-will gene in humans, either.”
“Because there isn’t one,” said Miro. “Like Andrew said. What we are, at the core, in our essence, what we are is one philote that’s been twined in with all the trillions of philotes that make up the atoms and molecules and cells of our bodies. And what you are is a philote, too, just like us.”
“Not likely,” said Jane. Her face was now in the display, a shadowy face with the simulated philotic rays passing right through her head.
“We’re not taking odds on it,” said Ender. “Nothing that actually happens is likely until it exists, and then it’s certain. You exist.”
“Whatever it is that I am,” said Jane.
“Right now we believe that you are a self-existing entity,” said Ender, “because we’ve seen you act in ways that we’ve learned to associate with free will. We have exactly as much evidence of your being a free intelligence as we have of ourselves being free intelligences. If it turns out that you’re not, we have to question whether we are, either. Right now our hypothesis is that our individual identity, what makes us ourself, is the philote at the center of our twining. If we’re right, then it stands to reason you might have one, too, and in that case we have to figure out where it is. Philotes aren’t easy to find, you know. We’ve never detected one. We only suppose they exist because we’ve seen evidence of the philotic ray, which behaves as if it had two endpoints with a specific location in space. We don’t know where you are or what you’re connected to.”
“If she’s like us,” said Miro, “like human beings, then her connections can shift and split. Like when that mob formed around Grego. I’ve talked to him about how that felt. As if those people were all part of his body. And when they broke away and went off on their own, he felt as if he had gone through an amputation. I think that was philotic twining. I think those people really did connect to him for a while, they really were partly under his control, part of his self. So maybe Jane is like that, too, all those computer programs twined up to her, and she herself connected to whoever she has that kind of allegiance to. Maybe you, Andrew. Maybe me. Or partly both of us.”
“But where is she,” said Ender. “If she actually has a philote—no, if she actually is a philote—then it has to have a specific location, and if we could find it, maybe we could keep the connections alive even when all the computers are cut off from her. Maybe we can keep her from dying.”
“I don’t know,” said Miro. “She could be anywhere.” He gestured toward the display. Anywhere in space, is what he meant. Anywhere in the universe. And there in the display was Jane’s head, with the philotic rays passing through it.
“To find out where she is, we have to find out how and where she began,” said Ender. “If she really is a philote, she got connected up somehow, somewhere.”
“A detective following up a three-thousand-year-old trail,” said Jane. “Won’t this be fun, watching you do all this in the next few months.”
Ender ignored her. “And if we’re going to do that, we have to figure out how philotes work in the first place.”
“Grego’s the physicist,” said Miro.
“He’s working on faster-than-light travel,” said Jane.
“He can work on this, too,” said Miro.
“I don’t want him distracted by a project that can’t succeed,” said Jane.
“Listen, Jane, don’t you want to live through this?” said Ender.
“I can’t anyway, so why waste time?”
“She’s just being a martyr,” said Miro.
“No I’m not,” said Jane. “I’m being practical.”
“You’re being a fool,” said Ender. “Grego can’t come up with a theory to give us faster-than-light travel just by sitting and thinking about the physics of light, or whatever. If it worked that way, we would have achieved faster-than-light travel three thousand years ago, because there were hundreds of physicists working on it then, back when philotic rays and the Park Instantaneity Principle were first thought of. If Grego thinks of it it’s because of some flash of insight, some absurd connection he makes in his mind, and that won’t come from concentrating intelligently on a single train of thought.”
“I know that,” said Jane.
“I know you know it. Didn’t you tell me you were bringing those people from Path into our projects for that specific reason? To be untrained, intuitive thinkers?”
“I just don’t want you to waste time.”
“You just don’t want to get your hopes up,” said Ender. “You just don’t want to admit that there’s a chance that you might live, because then you’d start to fear death.”
“I already fear death.”
“You already think of yourself as dead,” said Ender. “There’s a difference.”
“I know,” murmured Miro.
“So, dear Jane, I don’t care whether you’re willing to admit that there’s a possibility of your survival or not,” said Ender. “We will work on this, and we will ask Grego to think about it, and while we’re at it, you will repeat our entire conversation here to those people on Path—”
“Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu.”
“Them,” said Ender. “Because they can be thinking about this, too.”
“No,” said Jane.
“Yes,” said Ender.
“I want to see the real problems solved before I die—I want Lusitania to be saved, and the godspoken of Path to be freed, and the descolada to be tamed or destroyed. And I won’t have you slowing that down by trying to work on the impossible project of saving me.”
“You aren’t God,” said Ender. “You don’t know how to solve any of these problems anyway, and so you don’t know how they’re going to be solved, and so you have no idea whether finding out what you are in order to save you will help or hurt those other projects, and you certainly don’t know whether concentrating on those other problems will get them solved any sooner than they would be if we all went on a picnic today and played lawn tennis till sundown.”
“What the hell is lawn tennis?” asked Miro.
But Ender and Jane were silent, glaring at each other. Or rather, Ender was glaring at the image of Jane in the computer display, and that image was glaring back at him.
“You don’t know that you’re right,” said Jane.
“And you don’t know that I’m wrong,” said Ender.
“It’s my life,” said Jane.
“The hell it is,” said Ender. “You’re part of me and Miro, too, and you’re tied up with the whole future of humanity, and the pequeninos and the hive queen too, for that matter. Which reminds me—while you’re having Han what’s-his-name and Si Wang whoever-she-is—”
“Mu.”
“—work on this philotic thing, I’m going to talk to the hive queen. I don’t think I’ve particularly discussed you with her. She’s got to know more about philotes than we do, since she has a philotic connection with all her workers.”
“I haven’t said I’m going to involve Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu in your silly save-Jane project.”
“But you will,” said Ender.
“Why will I?”
“Because Miro and I both love you and need you and you have no right to die on us without at least trying to live.”
“I can’t let things like that influence me.”
“Yes you can,” said Miro. “Because if it weren’t for things like that I would have killed myself long ago.”
“I’m not going to kill myself.”
“If you don’t help us try to find a way to save you, then that’s exactly what you’re doing,” said Ender.
Jane’s face disappeared from the display over the terminal.
“Running away won’t help, either,” said Ender.
“Leave me alone,” said Jan
e. “I have to think about this for a while.”
“Don’t worry, Miro,” said Ender. “She’ll do it.”
“That’s right,” said Jane.
“Back already?” asked Ender.
“I think very quickly.”
“And you’re going to work on this, too?”
“I consider it my fourth project,” said Jane. “I’m telling Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu about it right now.”
“She’s showing off,” said Ender. “She can carry on two conversations at once, and she likes to brag about it to make us feel inferior.”
“You are inferior,” said Jane.
“I’m hungry,” said Ender. “And thirsty.”
“Lunch,” said Miro.
“Now you’re bragging,” said Jane. “Showing off your bodily functions.”
“Alimentation,” said Ender. “Respiration. Excretion. We can do things you can’t do.”
“In other words, you can’t think very well, but at least you can eat and breathe and sweat.”
“That’s right,” said Miro. He pulled out the bread and cheese while Ender poured the cold water, and they ate. Simple food, but it tasted good and they were satisfied.
14
VIRUS MAKERS
“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 godspoken by Congress. No, my mistress, I’m asking you to remember your proper duty to your father, which even the godspoken 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 labor 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 labor 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 t
han 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 paired 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?”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 113
