The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “But my master was,” said Wang-mu, trying to defend Han Fei-Tzu.

  “As is my master,” said Grace. “As you will see, when you meet him.”

  “Time’s up,” said Jane.

  Miro and Val looked up, bleary-eyed, from the documents they were poring over at Miro’s computer, to see that in the air above Val’s computer, Jane’s virtual face now hovered, watching them.

  “We’ve been passive observers as long as they’ll let us,” said Jane. “But now there are three spacecraft up in the outer atmosphere, rising toward us. I don’t think any of them are merely remote-controlled weapons, but I can’t be certain of it. And they seem to be directing some transmissions to us in particular, the same messages over and over.”

  “What message?”

  “It’s the genetic molecule stuff,” said Jane. “I can tell you the composition of the molecules, but I haven’t a clue what they mean.”

  “When do their interceptors reach us?”

  “Three minutes, plus or minus. They’re zig-zagging evasively, now that they’ve escaped the gravity well.”

  Miro nodded. “My sister Quara was convinced that much of the descolada virus consisted of language. I think now we can conclusively say that she was right. It does carry a meaning. She was wrong about the virus being sentient, though, I think. My guess now is that the descolada kept recomposing those sections of itself that constituted a report.”

  “A report,” echoed Val. “That makes sense. To tell its makers what it has done with the world it . . . probed.”

  “So the question is,” said Miro, “do we simply disappear and let them ponder the miracle of our sudden arrival and vanishing? Or do we first have Jane broadcast to them the entire, um, text of the descolada virus?”

  “Dangerous,” said Val. “The message it contains may also tell these people everything they want to know about human genes. After all, we’re one of the creatures the descolada worked on, and its message is going to tell all of our strategies for controlling it.”

  “Except the last one,” said Miro. “Because Jane won’t send them the descolada as it exists now, completely tamed and controlled—that would be inviting them to revise it to circumvent our alterations.”

  “We won’t send them a message and we won’t go back to Lusitania, either,” said Jane. “We don’t have time.”

  “We don’t have time not to,” said Miro. “However urgent you might think this is, Jane, it doesn’t do a lick of good for me and Val to be here to do this without help. My sister Ela, for instance, who actually understands this virus stuff. And Quara, despite her being the second most pig-headed being in the known universe—don’t beg for flattery, Val, by asking who the first is—we could use Quara.”

  “And let’s be fair about this,” said Val. “We’re meeting another sentient species. Why should humans be the only ones represented? Why not a pequenino? Why not a hive queen—or at least a worker?”

  “Especially a worker,” said Miro. “If we are stuck here, having a worker with us would enable us to communicate with Lusitania—ansible or not, Jane or not, messages could—”

  “All right,” said Jane. “You’ve persuaded me. Even though the last-minute flurry with the Starways Congress tells me they’re about to shut down the ansible network at any moment.”

  “We’ll hurry,” said Miro. “We’ll make them all rush to get the right people aboard.”

  “And the right supplies,” said Val. “And—”

  “So start doing it,” said Jane. “You just disappeared from your orbit around the descolada planet. And I did broadcast a small fragment of the descolada. One of the sections that Quara pegged as language, but the one that was least altered during mutations as the descolada tried to fight with humans. It should be enough to let them know which of their probes reached us.”

  “Oh, good, so they can launch a fleet,” said Miro.

  “The way things are going,” said Jane dryly, “by the time any fleet they send could get anywhere at all, Lusitania is the safest address they could have. Because it won’t exist anymore.”

  “You’re so cheerful,” said Miro. “I’ll be back in an hour with the people. Val, you get the supplies we’ll need.”

  “For how long?”

  “Get as much as will fit,” said Miro. “As someone once said, life is a suicide mission. We have no idea how long we’ll be trapped there, so we can’t possibly know how much is enough.” He opened the door of the starship and stepped out onto the landing field near Milagre.

  7

  “I OFFER HER THIS POOR

  OLD VESSEL”

  “How do we remember?

  Is the brain a jar that holds our memories?

  Then when we die, does the jar break?

  Are our memories spilled on the ground

  and lost?

  Or is the brain a map

  that leads down twisted paths

  and into hidden corners?

  Then when we die, the map is lost

  but perhaps some explorer

  could wander through that strange landscape

  and find out the hiding places

  of our misplaced memories.”

  from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

  The seagoing canoe glided toward the shore. At first and for the longest time, it seemed hardly to be moving at all, so slowly did it come closer, the rowers rising higher and looking just a little larger each time Wang-mu could see them over the waves. Then, near the end of the voyage, the canoe suddenly seemed huge, it seemed abruptly to speed up, to lunge through the sea, to leap toward shore with each wave; and even though Wang-mu knew that it was going no faster now than before, she wanted to cry out for them to slow down, to be careful, the canoe was going too quickly to be controlled, it would be dashed to bits against the beach.

  At last the canoe breasted the last breaking wave and the nose of it slid into sand under the rushing shorewater and the rowers jumped out and dragged the canoe like a child’s limp doll up the beach to the high-tide line.

  When the canoe was on dry sand, an older man arose slowly from his seat amidships. Malu, thought Wang-mu. She had expected him to be wizened and shrunken like old men on Path, who, bent with age, curved like prawns over their walking sticks. But Malu was as erect as any of the young men, and his body was still massive, broad of shoulder and thick with muscle and fat like any of the younger men. If it were not for a few more decorations in his costume and the whiteness of his hair, he would have been indistinguishable from the rowers.

  As she watched these large men, she realized that they did not move like fat people she had known before. Nor did Grace Drinker, she remembered now. There was a stateliness to their movements, a grandeur like the motion of continents, like icebergs moving across the face of the sea; yes, like icebergs, moving as if three-fifths of their vast bulk were invisible underground, pushing through earth like an iceberg through the sea as they drifted along above. All the rowers moved with vast gracefulness, and yet all of them seemed as busy as hummingbirds, as frantic as bats, compared to the dignity of Malu. Yet dignity was not something he put on, it was not a façade, an impression he was trying to create. Rather it was that he moved in perfect harmony with his surroundings. He had found the right speed for his steps, the right tempo for his arms to swing as he walked. He vibrated in consonance with the deep, slow rhythms of the earth. I am seeing how a giant walks the earth, thought Wang-mu. For the first time in my life, I have seen a man who in his body shows greatness.

  Malu came, not toward Peter and Wang-mu, but toward Grace Drinker; they enveloped each other in a huge tectonic embrace. Surely mountains shuddered when they met. Wang-mu felt the quaking in her own body. Why am I trembling? Not for fear. I’m not afraid of this man. He won’t harm me. And yet I tremble to see him embrace Grace Drinker. I don’t want him to turn toward me. I don’t want him to cast his gaze upon me.

  Malu turned toward her. His eyes locked on hers. His face showed no exp
ression. He simply owned her eyes. She did not look away, but her steady gaze at him was not defiance or strength, it was simply her inability to look at anything else while he commanded her attention.

  Then he looked at Peter. Wang-mu wanted to turn and see how he responded, whether he also felt the power in this man’s eyes. But she could not turn. Still, after a long moment, when Malu finally looked away, she heard Peter murmur, “Son of a bitch,” and she knew that, in his own coarse way, he had been touched.

  It took many long minutes for Malu to be seated on a mat under a roof built just that morning for this moment, and which, Grace assured them, would be burnt when Malu left, so that no one else would ever sit under the roof again. Food was brought to Malu then; and Grace had also warned them that no one would eat with Malu or watch him eat.

  But Malu would not taste the food. Instead, he beckoned to Wang-mu and Peter.

  The men were shocked. Grace Drinker was shocked. But Grace at once came to them, beckoning. “He calls you.”

  “You said we couldn’t eat with him,” said Peter.

  “Unless he asks you. How can he ask you? I don’t know what this means.”

  “Is he setting us up to be killed for sacrilege?” asked Peter.

  “No, he’s not a god, he’s a man. A holy man, a wise and great man, but offending him is not sacrilege, it’s just unbearable bad manners, so don’t offend him, please come.”

  They went to him. As they stood across from him, the food in bowls and baskets between them, he let loose a stream of Samoan.

  Or was it Samoan? Peter looked puzzled when Wang-mu glanced at him, and he murmured, “Jane doesn’t understand what he’s saying.”

  Jane didn’t understand, but Grace Drinker did. “He’s addressing you in the ancient holy language. The one that has no English or other European words. The language that is spoken only to the gods.”

  “Then why is he saying it to us?” asked Wang-mu.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t think that you’re gods. Not the two of you, though he does say you bring a god to him. He wants you to sit down and taste the food first.”

  “Can we do that?” asked Peter.

  “I beg you to do it,” said Grace.

  “Am I getting the impression that there’s no script here?” said Peter. Wang-mu heard a slight weakness in his voice and realized that his attempt at humor was pure bravado, to hide his fear. Perhaps that’s what it always was.

  “There’s a script,” said Grace. “But you’re not writing it and I don’t know what it is either.”

  They sat down. They reached into each bowl, tasted from each basket as Malu offered it to them. Then he dipped, took, tasted after them, chewing what they chewed, swallowing what they swallowed.

  Wang-mu had little appetite. She hoped he did not expect her to eat the portions that she had seen other Samoans eat. She would throw up long before she got to that point.

  But the meal was not so much a feast as a sacrament, apparently. They tasted everything, but completed nothing. Malu spoke to Grace in the high language and she relayed the command in common speech; several men came and carried away the baskets.

  Then Grace’s husband came out with a jar of something. A liquid, for Malu took it in his hands and sipped it. Then he offered it to them. Peter took it, tasted. “Jane says it must be kava. A mild intoxicant, but it’s holy and hospitable here.”

  Wang-mu tasted it. It was fruity and it made her eyes water, and there was both sweetness and bitterness in the aftertaste.

  Malu beckoned to Grace, who came and knelt in the thick matted grass outside the shelter of the roof. She was to interpret, not to be part of the ceremony.

  Malu emitted a long stream of Samoan. “The high language again,” Peter murmured.

  “Say nothing please, that isn’t intended for Malu’s ears,” Grace said softly. “I must translate everything and it will cause grave insult if your words are not pertinent.”

  Peter nodded.

  “Malu says that you have come with the god who dances on spiderwebs. I have never heard of this god myself, and I thought I knew all the lore of my people, but Malu knows many things that no one else knows. He says that it is to this god that he speaks, for he knows that she is on the verge of death, and he will tell her how she may be saved.”

  Jane, Wang-mu said silently. He knows about Jane. How could he possibly? And how could he, caring nothing for technology, tell a computer-based entity how to save itself?

  “Now he will tell you what must happen, and let me warn you right now that this will be long and you must sit still for it all and make no attempt to hurry the process,” said Grace. “He must put it in context. He must tell you the story of all living things.”

  Wang-mu knew that she could sit on a mat for hours with little or no movement, for she had done it all her life. But Peter was used to sitting folded, and this posture was awkward for him. He must already be uncomfortable.

  Apparently Grace saw this in his eyes, or simply knew about westerners. “You can move from time to time, but do so slowly without taking your eyes from him.”

  Wang-mu wondered how many of these rules and requirements Grace was making up as she went along. Malu himself seemed more relaxed. After all, he had fed them when Grace thought no one but him could eat; she didn’t know the rules any better than they did.

  But she didn’t move. And she didn’t take her eyes from Malu.

  Grace translated: “Today the clouds flew across the sky with the sun chasing them, and yet no rain has fallen. Today my boat flew across the sea with the sun leading it, and yet there was no fire when we touched the shore. So it was on the first day of all days, when God touched a cloud in the sky and spun it so fast that it turned to fire and became the sun, and then all the other clouds began to spin and turn in circles around the sun.”

  This can’t have been the original legend of the Samoan people, thought Wang-mu. No way did they know the Copernican model of the solar system until westerners taught it to them. So Malu may know the ancient lore, but he’s also learned some new things and fit them in.

  “Then the outer clouds turned into rain and poured in upon themselves until they were rained out, and all that was left was spinning balls of water. Inside that water swam a great fish of fire, which ate every impurity in the water and then defecated it all in great gouts of flame, which spouted up from the sea and fell back down as hot ash and poured back down as rivers of burning rock. From these turds of the firefish grew the islands of the sea, and out of the turds there crawled worms, which squirmed and slithered through the rock until the gods touched them and some became human beings and others became the other animals.

  “Every one of the other animals was tied to the earth by strong vines that grew up to embrace them. No one saw these vines because they were godvines.”

  Philotic theory, thought Wang-mu. He learned that all living things have twining philotes that bond downward, linking them to the center of the earth. Except human beings.

  Sure enough, Grace translated the next strand of language: “Only humans were not tied to the earth. It was not vines that bound them down, it was a web of light woven by no god that connected them upward to the sun. So all the other animals bowed down before the humans, for the vines dragged them down, while the lightweb lifted up the human eyes and heart.

  “Lifted up the human eyes but yet they saw little farther than the beasts with downcast eyes; lifted up the human heart yet the heart could only hope for it could only see up to the sky in the daytime, and at night when it could see the stars it grew blind to close things for a man can scarcely see his own wife in the shadow of his house even when he can see stars so distant their light travels for a hundred lifetimes before it kisses the eyes of the man.

  “All these centuries and generations, these hoping men and women looked with their half-blind eyes, staring into the sun and sky, staring into the stars and shadows, knowing that there were invisible things beyond those walls but not gue
ssing what they were.

  “Then in a time of war and terror, when all hope seemed lost, weavers on a far distant world, who were not gods but who knew the gods and each one of the weavers was itself a web with hundreds of strands reaching out to their hands and feet, their eyes and mouths and ears, these weavers created a web so strong and large and fine and far-reaching that they meant to catch up all human beings in that web and hold them to be devoured. But instead the web caught a distant god, a god so powerful that no other god had dared to know her name, a god so quick that no other god had been able to see her face; this god was stuck to the web they caught. Only she was too quick to be held in one place to be devoured. She raced and danced up and down the strands, all the strands, any strands that twine from man to man, from man to star, from weaver to weaver, from light to light, she dances along the strands. She cannot escape but she does not want to, for now all gods see her and all gods know her name, and she knows all things that are known and hears all words that are spoken and reads all words that are written and by her breath she blows men and women beyond the reach of the light of any star, and then she sucks inward and the men and women come back, and when they come sometimes they bring new men and women with them who never lived before; and because she never holds still along the web, she blows them out at one place and then sucks them in at another, so that they cross the spaces between stars faster than any light can go, and that is why the messengers of this god were blown out from the house of Grace Drinker’s friend Aimaina Hikari and were sucked back down to this island to this shore to this roof where Malu can see the red tongue of the god where it touches the ear of her chosen one.”

  Malu fell silent.

  “We call her Jane,” said Peter.

  Grace translated, and Malu answered with a stream of high language. “Under this roof I hear a name so short and yet before it is half said the god has run from one end of the universe to the other a thousand times, so quickly does she move. Here is the name I call her: god that moves quickly and forever so that she never rests in one place yet touches all places and is bound to all who look upward to the sun and not downward into the earth. That is a long name, longer than the name of any god whose name I know, yet it is not the tenth part of her true name, and even if I could say the whole name it would not be as long as the length of the strands of the web on which she dances.”