The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “Too bad. Terrifying brilliance would be useful right now.”

 

  “We humans get slower as we age. Give me a few more years and I’ll be downright cozy.”

 

  Ender didn’t want this to become another conversation about mortality or any of the other aspects of human life that so fascinated the hive queen. There was still one question that had occurred to him during the hive queen’s story. An intriguing possibility.

  “The bridge you made. Where was it? In the computer?”

 

  “But not part of me.”

 

  “Could it control the computer?”

 

  “How long did you use this bridge? How long was it there?”

 

  “But it was still there the whole time you were studying me.”

 

  “How long would it last?”

 

  “But what body was the bridge in?”

 

  “This thing was inside me?”

 

  “No. To you it was like—a bodily function. Like balling up your fist to hit somebody. You did it, and then when you didn’t need it you didn’t notice whether your fist was still there or not.”

 

  “It’s still alive, isn’t it?”

 

  “But it would still be linked to the computer, wouldn’t it? A connection between me and the computer. Only the pattern could have grown, couldn’t it? It could include other people, too. Think of it being linked to Miro—the young man I brought with me—”

 

  “And instead of being linked to that one computer, linked to thousands and thousands of them, through the ansible links between worlds.”

 

  “And I always thought—Jane and I always thought that she was—that she had somehow come to exist in the ansible connections between worlds. That’s probably where she feels herself, the place that feels like the center of her—body, I was going to say.”

 

  “Like trying to find a particular muscle that you’ve been using all your life but never by itself.”

 

  “The comparison?”

 

  “Jane,” whispered Ender. “You’re a big girl now.”

  Jane’s voice came in answer: “You’re cheating, Ender. I can’t hear what she’s saying to you. I can only feel your heart pounding and your rapid breathing.”

 

  “Neither is Jane.”

 

  “She’s the bridge. You made her.”

 

  “You reached out across the lightyears and found me because I was looking for you. And then you found a pattern and called a creature from another space who grasped the pattern and possessed it and became Jane. All of this instantaneously. Faster than light.”

 

  “I know. I know. This may not help us answer the question I came here with. But I had another question, just as important to me, that I never thought would have anything to do with you, and here you had the answer to it all along. Jane’s real, alive the whole time, and her self isn’t out there in space, it’s inside me. Connected to me. They can’t kill her by switching her off. That’s something.”

 

  “But they can’t kill the whole pattern, don’t you see? It doesn’t depend on the ansibles after all. It depends on me and on the link between me and the computers. They can’t cut the link between me and the computers here and in the satellites orbiting Lusitania. And maybe she doesn’t need the ansibles, either. After all, you don’t need them to reach me through her.”

 

  “I’ll leave you, then. But this will help. This has to help. If Jane can find a way to survive because of this, then that’s a real victory. The first victory, when I was beginning to think there wasn’t any victory to be had in this.”

  The moment he left the presence of the hive queen, he began talking to Jane, telling her everything he could remember of what the hive queen could explain. Who Jane was, how she was created.

  And as he talked, she analyzed herself in light of what he said. Began to discover things about herself that she had never guessed. By the time Ender got back to the human colony, she had verified as much of his story as she could. “I never found this because I always started with the wrong assumptions,” she said. “I imagined my center to be out in space somewhere. I should have guessed I was inside you from the fact that even when I was furious with you, I had to come back to you to be at peace.”

  “And now the hive queen says that you’ve grown so big and complex that she can’t hold the pattern of you in her mind anymore.”

  “Must have gone through a growth spurt, back during my years of puberty.”

  “Right.”

  “Could I help it that humans kept adding computers and linking them up?”

  “But it isn’t the hardware, Jane. It’s the programs. The mentation.”

  “I have to have the physical memory to hold all of that.”

  “You have the memory. The question is, can you access it without the ansibles?”

  “I can try. As you said to her, it’s like learning to flex a muscle I never knew I had.”

  “Or learning to live without one.”

  “I’ll see what’s possible.”

  What’s pos
sible. All the way home, the car floating over the capim, he was also flying, exhilarated to know that something was possible after all, when till now he had felt nothing but despair. Coming home, though, seeing the burnt-over forest, the two solitary fathertrees with the only greenery left, the experimental farm, the new hut with the cleanroom where Planter lay dying, he realized how much there still was to lose, how many would still die, even if now they had found a way for Jane to live.

  It was the end of the day. Han Fei-tzu was exhausted, his eyes hurting from all that he had read. He had adjusted the colors on the computer display a dozen times, trying to find something restful, but it didn’t help. The last time he had worked so intensely was as a student, and then he had been young. Then, too, he had always found results. I was quicker, then, brighter. I could reward myself by achieving something. Now I’m old and slow, I’m working in areas that are new to me, and it may be that these problems have no solutions. So there’s no reward to bolster me. Only the weariness. The pain at the top of my neck, the puffy, tired feeling in my eyes.

  He looked at Wang-mu, curled up on the floor beside him. She tried so hard, but her education had begun too recently for her to be able to follow most of the documents that passed through the computer display as he searched for some conceptual framework for faster-than-light travel. At last her weariness triumphed over her will; she was sure she was useless, because she couldn’t understand enough even to ask questions. So she gave up and slept.

  But you are not useless, Si Wang-mu. Even in your perplexity you’ve helped me. A bright mind to which all things are new. Like having my own lost youth perched at my elbow.

  As Qing-jao was, when she was little, before piety and pride claimed her.

  Not fair. Not right to judge his own daughter that way. Until these last weeks, hadn’t he been perfectly satisfied with her? Proud of her beyond all reason? The best and brightest of the godspoken, everything her father had worked for, everything her mother had hoped.

  That was the part that chafed. Until a few weeks ago, he had been proudest of all of the fact that he had accomplished his oath to Jiang-qing. This was not an easy accomplishment, to bring up his daughter so piously that she never went through a period of doubt or rebellion against the gods. True, there were other children just as pious—but their piety was usually achieved at the expense of their education. Han Fei-tzu had let Qing-jao learn everything, and then had so deftly led her understanding of it that all fit well with her faith in the gods.

  Now he had reaped his own sowing. He had given her a worldview that so perfectly preserved her faith that now, when he had discovered that the gods’ “voices” were nothing but the genetic chains with which Congress had shackled them, nothing could convince her. If Jiang-qing had lived, Fei-tzu would no doubt have been in conflict with her over his loss of faith. In her absence, he had done so well at raising their daughter as Jiang-qing would have that Qing-jao was able to take her mother’s view flawlessly.

  Jiang-qing would also have left me, thought Han Fei-tzu. Even if I had not been widowed, I would have been wifeless on this day.

  The only companion left to me is this servant girl, who pushed her way into my household only just in time to be the one spark of life in my old age, the one flicker of hope in my dark heart.

  Not my daughter-of-the-body, but perhaps there will be time and opportunity, when this crisis is past, to make Wang-mu my daughter-of-the-mind. My work with Congress is finished. Shall I not be a teacher, then, with a single disciple, this girl? Shall I not prepare her to be the revolutionary who can lead the common people to freedom from the tyranny of the godspoken, and then lead Path to freedom from Congress itself? Let her be such a one, and then I can die in peace, knowing that at the end of my life I have created the undoing of all my earlier work that strengthened Congress and helped overcome all opposition to its power.

  The soft breathing of the girl Wang-mu was like his own breath, like a baby’s breath, like the sound of a breeze through tall grass. She is all motion, all hope, all freshness.

  “Han Fei-tzu, I think you are not asleep.”

  He was not; but he had been half-dozing, for the sound of Jane’s voice coming from the computer startled him as if he were waking up.

  “No, but Wang-mu is,” he said.

  “Wake her, then,” said Jane.

  “What is it? She’s earned her rest.”

  “She’s also earned the right to hear this.”

  Ela’s face appeared beside Jane’s in the display. Han Fei-tzu knew her at once as the xenobiologist who had been entrusted with the study of the genetic samples he and Wang-mu had collected. There must have been a breakthrough.

  He bowed himself down, reached out, shook the girl’s hip as she lay there sleeping. She stirred. She stretched. Then, no doubt remembering her duty, she sat bolt upright. “Have I overslept? What is it? Forgive me for falling asleep, Master Han.”

  She might have bowed herself in her confusion, but Fei-tzu wouldn’t let her. “Jane and Ela asked me to wake you. They wanted you to hear.”

  “I will tell you first,” said Ela, “that what we hoped for is possible. The genetic alterations were crude and easily discovered—I can see why Congress has done its best to keep any real geneticists from working with the human population of Path. The OCD gene wasn’t in the normal place, which is why it wasn’t identified at once by natologists, but it works almost exactly as naturally-occurring OCD genes work. It can easily be treated separately from the genes that give the godspoken enhanced intellectual and creative abilities. I have already designed a splicer bacterium that, if injected into the blood, will find a person’s sperm or ova, enter them, remove the OCD gene, and replace it with a normal one, leaving the rest of the genetic code unaffected. Then the bacterium will die out quickly. It’s based on a common bacterium that should already exist in many labs on Path for normal immunology and birth-defect-prevention work. So any of the godspoken who wish to give birth to children without the OCD can do it.”

  Han Fei-tzu laughed. “I’m the only one on this planet who would wish for such a bacterium. The godspoken have no pity on themselves. They take pride in their affliction. It gives them honor and power.”

  “Then let me tell you the next thing we found. It was one of my assistants, a pequenino named Glass, who discovered this—I’ll admit that I wasn’t paying much personal attention to this project since it was relatively easy compared to the descolada problem we’re working on.”

  “Don’t apologize,” said Fei-tzu. “We are grateful for any kindness. All is undeserved.”

  “Yes. Well.” She seemed flustered by his courtesy. “Anyway, what Glass discovered is that all but one of the genetic samples you gave us sort themselves neatly into godspoken and non-godspoken categories. We ran the test blind, and only afterward checked the sample lists against the identity lists you gave us—the correspondence was perfect. Every godspoken had the altered gene. Every sample that lacked the altered gene was also not on your list of godspoken.”

  “You said all but one.”

  “This one baffled us. Glass is very methodical—he has the patience of a tree. He was sure that the one exception was a clerical error or an error in interpreting the genetic data. He went over it many times, and had other assistants do the same. There is no doubt. The one exception is clearly a mutation of the godspoken gene. It naturally lacks the OCD, while still retaining all of the other abilities Congress’s geneticists so thoughtfully provided.”

  “So this one person already is what your splicer bacterium is designed to create.”

  “There are a few other mutated regions that we aren’t quite sure of at the moment, but they have nothing to do with the OCD or the enhancements. Nor are they involved in any of the vital processes, so this person should be able to have healthy offspring that carry the trait. In fact, if this person should mate with a person who has been treated with the splicer bacterium, all her offspring will almost certainly carry the enhance
ments, and there’d be no chance of any of them having the OCD.”

  “How lucky for him,” said Han Fei-tzu.

  “Who is it?” asked Wang-mu.

  “It’s you,” said Ela. “Si Wang-mu.”

  “Me?” She seemed baffled.

  But Han Fei-tzu was not confused. “Ha!” he cried. “I should have known. I should have guessed! No wonder you have learned as quickly as my own daughter learned. No wonder you have had insights that helped us all even when you barely understood the subject you were studying. You are as godspoken as anyone on Path, Wang-mu—except that you alone are free of the shackles of the cleansing rituals.”

  Si Wang-mu struggled to answer, but instead of words, tears came, silently drifting down her face.

  “Never again will I permit you to treat me as your superior,” said Han Fei-tzu. “From now on you are no servant in my house, but my student, my young colleague. Let others think of you however they want. We know that you are as capable as anyone.”

  “As Mistress Qing-jao?” Wang-mu whispered.

  “As anyone,” said Fei-tzu. “Courtesy will require you to bow to many. But in your heart, you need bow to no one.”

  “I am unworthy,” said Wang-mu.

  “Everyone is worthy of his own genes. A mutation like that is much more likely to have crippled you. But instead, it left you the healthiest person in the world.”

  But she would not stop her silent weeping.

  Jane must have been showing this to Ela, for she kept her peace for some time. Finally, though, she spoke. “Forgive me, but I have much to do,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Han Fei-tzu. “You may go.”

  “You misunderstand me,” said Ela. “I don’t need your permission to go. I have more to say before I go.”

  Han Fei-tzu bowed his head. “Please. We are listening.”