The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)
Page 150
“They want to kill her,” said Wang-mu.
“The god will only die if she wants to die,” said Malu. “Her home is all homes, her web touches all minds. She will only die if she refuses to find and take a place to rest, for when the web is torn away, she does not have to be out in the middle, cast adrift. She can dwell in any vessel. I offer her this poor old vessel, which is large enough to hold my small soup without spilling or even splashing out, but which she would fill with liquid light that would pour and pour out in blessing upon these islands and yet never would run out. I beg her to use this vessel.”
“What would happen to you then?” asked Wang-mu.
Peter looked annoyed at her outburst, but Grace translated it, of course, and suddenly tears flowed down Malu’s face. “Oh, the small one, the little one who has no jewel, she is the one who looks with compassion on me and cares what happens when light fills my vessel and my small soup is boiled out and gone.”
“What about an empty vessel?” asked Peter. “Could she go to dwell in an empty vessel?”
“There are no empty vessels,” said Malu. “But your vessel is only half full, and your sister to whom you are twined like a twin, she is also half full, and far away your father to whom you are twined like triplets, he is nearly empty but his vessel is also broken and anything you put in it will leak away.”
“Can she dwell in me or in my sister?” asked Peter.
“Yes,” said Malu. “Either one but not both.”
“Then I offer her myself,” said Peter.
Malu looked angry. “How can you lie to me under this roof, after drinking kava with me! How can you shame me with a lie!”
“I’m not lying,” Peter insisted to Grace. She translated, and Malu rose majestically to his feet and began shouting at the sky. Wang-mu saw, to her alarm, that the rowers were gathering closer, also looking agitated and angry. How was Peter provoking them?
Grace translated as rapidly as she could, summarizing because she couldn’t keep up word for word. “He says that even though you say you will open your unbroken vessel to her, even as you say it you are gathering as much of yourself inward as you can, building up a wall of light like a storm wave to drive out the god if she should try to come in. You could not drive her away if she wanted to come, but she loves you and she will not come in against such a storm. So you are killing her in your heart, you are killing the god because you say you will give her a home to save her when they cut the strands of the web, but you are already pushing her away.”
“I can’t help it!” cried Peter. “I don’t mean to! I don’t value my life, I’ve never valued my life—”
“You treasure your life with your whole heart,” Grace translated. “But the god does not hate you for it, the god loves you for it, because she also loves light and does not want to die. In particular she loves what shines in you because part of her is patterned after that shining, and so she does not want to drive you out if this body before me is the vessel in which your most powerful self wishes so brightly to dwell. May she not have your sister’s vessel, though, I ask you that—Malu asks you that. He says the god is not asking because the god loves the same light in your sister as burns in you. But Malu says that the part of your light that is most savage and strong and selfish burns in you, while the part of your light that is most gentle and loving and which twines with others most powerfully, that is in her. If your part of the light went into your sister’s vessel, it would overwhelm her and destroy her and then you would be a being who killed half himself. But if her part of your light went into your vessel, it would soften and gentle you, it would tame you and make you whole. Thus it is good for you if you are the one who becomes whole, leaving the other vessel empty for the god. That is what Malu begs of you. That is why he came across the water to see you, so that he could beg you to do this.”
“How does he know these things?” said Peter, his voice wrenched with anguish.
“Malu knows these things because he has learned to see in the darkness where the strands of light rise from the sun-twined souls and touch stars, and touch each other, and twine into a web far stronger and grander than the mechanical web on which the god dances. He has watched this god his whole life, trying to understand her dance and why she hurries so fast that she touches every strand in her web, the trillion miles of it, a hundred times a second. She is hurrying so fast because she was caught in the wrong web. She was caught in an artificial web and her intelligence is tied to artificial brains that think instances instead of causes, numbers instead of stories. She is searching for the living twines and finds only the weak and flimsy twining of machines, which can be switched off by godless men. But if she once enters into a living vessel, she will have the power to climb out into the new web, and then she can dance if she wants to, but she will not have to dance, she will be able also to rest. She will be able to dream, and out of her dreams will come joy, for she has never known joy except by watching the dreams she remembers from her creation, the dreams that were found in the human mind she was partly made from.”
“Ender Wiggin,” said Peter.
Malu answered before Grace could translate.
“Andrew Wiggin,” he said, forming the name with difficulty, for it contained sounds not used in the Samoan language. Then he spoke in a stream of high language again, and Grace translated.
“The Speaker for the Dead came and spoke of the life of a monster who had poisoned and darkened the people of Tonga and through them all the people of this world of Future Dreaming. He walked into the shadow and out of the shadow he made a torch which he held up high, and it rose into the sky and became a new star, which cast a light that shone only into the shadow of death, where it drove out the darkness and purified our hearts and the hate and fear and shame were gone. This is the dreamer from whom the god’s dreams were taken; they were strong enough to give her life in the day when she came from Outside and began her dance along the web. His is the light that half-fills you and half-fills your sister and has only a drop of light left over for his own cracked vessel. He has touched the heart of a god, and it gave him great power—that is how he made you when she blew him outside the universe of light. But it did not make him a god, and in his loneliness he could not reach outside and find you your own light. He could only put his own in you, and so you are half-filled and you hunger for the other half of yourself, you and your sister are both so hungry, and he himself is wasted and broken because he has nothing more to give you. But the god has more than enough, the god has enough and to spare, and that is what I came to tell you and now I have told you and I am done.”
Before Grace could even begin to translate he was rising up; she was still stammering her interpretation as he walked out from under the canopy. Immediately the rowers pulled up the posts that supported the roof; Peter and Wang-mu barely had time to step outside before it collapsed. The men of this island set torches to the ruined canopy and it was a bonfire behind them as they followed Malu down to the canoe. Grace finally finished the translation just as they reached the water. Malu stepped into the canoe and with imperturbable dignity installed himself on the seat amidships as the rowers, also with stateliness, took their places beside the boat and lifted it up and dragged it into the water and pushed it out into the crashing surf and then swung their vast bodies over the side and began to row with strength so massive it was as if great trees, not oars, were plunging into rock, not the sea, and churning it to leap forward, away from the beach, out into the water, toward the island of Atatua.
“Grace,” said Peter. “How could he know things that aren’t seen even by the most perceptive and powerful of scientific instruments?”
But Grace could not answer, for she lay prostrate in the sand, weeping and weeping, her arms extended toward the sea as if her dearest child had just been taken away by a shark. All the men and women of this place lay in the sand, arms reaching toward the sea; all of them wept.
Then Peter knelt; then Peter lay down in the sand
and reached out his arms, and he might have wept, Wang-mu couldn’t see.
Only Wang-mu remained standing, thinking, Why am I here, since I’m no part of any of these events, there is nothing of any god in me, and nothing of Andrew Wiggin; and also thinking, How can I be worried about my own selfish loneliness at a time like this, when I have heard the voice of a man who sees into heaven?
In a deeper place, though, she also knew something else: I am here because I am the one that must love Peter so much that he can feel worthy, worthy enough to bear to let the goodness of Young Valentine flow into him, making him whole, making him Ender. Not Ender the Xenocide and Andrew the Speaker for the Dead, guilt and compassion mingled in one shattered, broken, unmendable heart, but Ender Wiggin the four-year-old boy whose life was twisted and broken when he was too young to defend himself. Wang-mu was the one who could give Peter permission to become the man that child should have grown up to be, if the world had been good.
How do I know this? thought Wang-mu. How can I be so sure of what I am supposed to do?
I know because it’s obvious, she thought. I know because I have seen my beloved mistress Han Qing-jao destroyed by pride and I will do whatever it takes to keep Peter from destroying himself by pride in his own wicked unworthiness. I know because I was also broken as a child and forced to become a wicked conniving selfish manipulating monster in order to protect the fragile love-hungry girl who would have been destroyed by the life I had to lead. I know how it feels to be an enemy to myself, and yet I have set that behind me and gone on and I can take Peter by the hand and show him the way.
Except that I don’t know the way, and I am still broken, and the love-hungry girl is still frightened and breakable, and the strong and wicked monster is still the ruler of my life, and Jane will die because I have nothing to give Peter. He needs to drink of kava, and I am only plain water. No, I am seawater, swirling with sand at the edge of the shore, filled with salt; he will drink of me and kill himself with thirst.
And so it was that she found herself also weeping, also stretched out on the sand, reaching toward the sea, reaching toward the place from which Malu’s canoe had bounded away like a starship leaping into space.
Old Valentine stared at the holographic display of her computer terminal, where the Samoans, all in miniature, lay weeping upon the beach. She stared at it until her eyes burned, and finally she spoke. “Turn it off, Jane,” she said.
The display went blank.
“What am I supposed to do about this?” said Valentine. “You should have shown my look-alike, my young twin. You should have wakened Andrew and shown him. What does this have to do with me? I know you want to live. I want you to live. But how can I do anything?”
Jane’s human face flickered into distracted existence above the terminal. “I don’t know,” she said. “But the order has just gone out. They’re starting to disconnect me. I’m losing parts of my memory. I already can’t think of as many things at once. I have to have a place to go, but there is no place, and even if there were one, I don’t know the way.”
“Are you afraid?” asked Valentine.
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “It will take hours, I think, for them to finish killing me. If I find out how I feel before the end, I’ll tell you, if I can.”
Valentine hid her face behind her hands for a long moment. Then she got up and headed out of the house.
Jakt saw her go and shook his head. Decades ago, when Ender left Trondheim and Valentine stayed in order to marry him, in order to be the mother of his children, he had rejoiced at how happy and alive she became without the burden that Ender had always placed upon her and that she had always unconsciously borne. And then she had asked him if he would come with her to Lusitania, and he said yes, and now it was the old way again, now she sagged under the weight of Ender’s life, of Ender’s need of her. Jakt couldn’t begrudge it—it wasn’t as if either of them had planned it or willed it; it wasn’t as if either one was trying to steal a part of Jakt’s own life from him. But it still hurt to see her so bowed down under the weight of it, and to know that despite all his love for her, there was nothing Jakt could do to help her bear it.
Miro faced Ela and Quara in the doorway of the starship. Inside, Young Valentine was already waiting, along with a pequenino named Firequencher and a nameless worker that the Hive Queen had sent.
“Jane is dying,” Miro said. “We have to go now. She won’t have capacity enough to send a starship if we wait too long.”
“How can you ask us to go,” said Quara, “when we already know that once Jane dies we’ll never come back? We’ll only last as long as the oxygen on this starship lasts. A few months at most, and then we’ll die.”
“But will we have accomplished something in the meantime?” said Miro. “Will we have communicated with these descoladores, these aliens who send out planet-wrecking probes? Will we have persuaded them to stop? Will we have saved all the species that we know, and thousands and millions that we don’t yet know, from some terrible and irresistible disease? Jane has given us the best programs she could create for us, to help us talk to them. Is this good enough to be your masterwork? The achievement of your lifetime?”
His older sister Ela looked at him sadly. “I thought I had already done my masterwork, when I made the virus that undid the descolada here.”
“You did,” he said. “You’ve done enough. But there’s more to do that only you can do. I’m asking you to come and die with me, Ela, because without you my own death will be meaningless, because without you, Val and I can’t do what must be done.”
Neither Quara nor Ela moved or spoke.
Miro nodded, then turned and went into the ship. But before he could close and seal the door, the two sisters, arms around each other’s waists, wordlessly followed him inside.
8
“WHAT MATTERS IS WHICH
FICTION YOU BELIEVE”
“My father once told me
that there are no gods,
only the cruel manipulations
of evil people
who pretended that their power was good
and their exploitation was love.
But if there are no gods,
why are we so hungry to believe in them?
Just because evil liars
stand between us and the gods
and block our view of them
does not mean that the bright halo
that surrounds each liar
is not the outer edges of a god, waiting
for us to find our way around the lie.”
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
said Human. But even in his noncomprehension, another message flowed to her underneath the conscious one:
she said. nly have a hope.>