The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “The first one only,” said Jane. “At least to start.”

  “And when they answer,” said Ela, “I’ll try to run a simulation of what would happen if we constructed and ingested the molecule they send us.”

  “If they send us one,” said Miro. “If we’re even on the right track.”

  “Well aren’t you Mr. Cheer,” said Quara.

  “I’m Mr. Scared-From-Ass-To-Ankles,” said Miro. “Whereas you are just plain old Miss Ass.”

  “Can’t we all get along?” said Jane, whining, teasing. “Can’t we all be friends?”

  Quara whirled on her. “Listen, you! I don’t care what kind of superbrain you used to be, you just stay out of family conversations, do you hear?”

  “Look around, Quara!” Miro snapped at her. “If she stayed out of family conversations, when could she talk?”

  Firequencher raised his hand. “I’ve been staying out of family conversations. Do I get credit for that?”

  Jane gestured to quell both Miro and Firequencher. “Quara,” she said quietly, “I’ll tell you the real difference between me and your brother and sister here. They’re used to you because they’ve known you all your life. They’re loyal to you because you and they went through some lousy experiences in your family. They’re patient with your childish outbursts and your asinine bullheadedness because they tell themselves, over and over, she can’t help it, she had such a troubled childhood. But I’m not a family member, Quara. I, however, as someone who has observed you in times of crisis for some time, am not afraid to tell you my candid conclusions. You are quite brilliant and very good at what you do. You are often perceptive and creative, and you drive toward solutions with astonishing directness and perseverence.”

  “Excuse me,” said Quara, “are you telling me off or what?”

  “But,” said Jane, “you are not smart and creative and clever and direct and perseverent enough to make it worth putting up with more than fifteen seconds of the egregious bullshit you heap on your family and everyone else around you every minute you’re awake. So you had a lousy childhood. That was a few years ago, and you are expected now to put that behind you and get along with other people like a normally courteous adult.”

  “In other words,” said Quara, “you don’t like having to admit that anybody but you might be smart enough to have an idea that you didn’t think of.”

  “You aren’t understanding me,” said Jane. “I’m not your sister. I’m not even, technically speaking, human. If this ship ever gets back to Lusitania, it will be because I, with my mind, send it there. Do you get that? Do you understand the difference between us? Can you send even one fleck of dust from your lap to mine?”

  “I don’t notice you sending starships anywhere right at the moment,” said Quara triumphantly.

  “You continue to attempt to score points off me without realizing that I am not having an argument with you or even a discussion. What you say to me right now is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what I’m saying to you. And I’m saying that while your siblings put up with the unendurable from you, I will not. Keep on the way you’re going, you spoiled little baby, and when this starship goes back to Lusitania you might not be on it.”

  The look on Quara’s face almost made Miro laugh aloud. He knew, however, that this would not be a wise moment to express his mirth.

  “She’s threatening me,” said Quara to the others. “Do you hear this? She’s trying to coerce me by threatening to kill me.”

  “I would never kill you,” said Jane. “But I might be unable to conceive of your presence on this starship when I push it Outside and then pull it back In. The thought of you might be so unendurable that my unconscious mind would reject that thought and exclude you. I really don’t understand, consciously, how the whole thing works. I don’t know how it relates to my feelings. I’ve never tried to transport anybody I really hated before. I would certainly try to bring you along with the others, if only because, for reasons passing understanding, Miro and Ela would probably be testy with me if I didn’t. But trying isn’t necessarily succeeding. So I suggest, Quara, that you expend some effort on trying to be a little less loathsome.”

  “So that’s what power is to you,” said Quara. “A chance to push other people around and act like the queen.”

  “You really can’t do it, can you?” said Jane.

  “Can’t what?” said Quara. “Can’t bow down and kiss your feet?”

  “Can’t shut up to save your own life.”

  “I’m trying to solve the problem of communicating with an alien species, and you’re busy worrying about whether I’m nice enough to you.”

  “But Quara,” said Jane, “hasn’t it ever occurred to you that once they get to know you, even the aliens will wish you had never learned their language?”

  “I’m certainly wishing you had never learned mine,” said Quara. “You’re certainly full of yourself, now that you have this pretty little body to play around with. Well, you’re not queen of the universe and I’m not going to dance through hoops for you. It wasn’t my idea to come on this voyage, but I’m here—I’m here, the whole obnoxious package—and if there’s something about me that you don’t like, why don’t you shut up about it? And as long as we’re making threats, I think that if you push me too far I’ll rearrange your face more to my liking. Is that clear?”

  Jane unstrapped herself from her seat and drifted from the main cabin into the corridor leading into the storage compartments of the shuttle. Miro followed her, ignoring Quara as she said to the others, “Can you believe how she talked to me? Who does she think she is, judging who’s too irritating to live?”

  Miro followed Jane into a storage compartment. She was clinging to a handhold on the far wall, bent over and heaving in a way that made Miro wonder if she was throwing up. But no. She was crying. Or rather, she was so enraged that her body was sobbing and producing tears from the sheer uncontainability of the emotion. Miro touched her shoulder to try to calm her. She recoiled.

  For a moment he almost said, Fine, have it your way; then he would have left, angry himself, frustrated that she wouldn’t accept his comfort. But then he remembered that she had never been this angry before. She had never had to deal with a body that responded like this. At first, when she began rebuking Quara, Miro had thought, It’s about time somebody laid it on the line. But when the argument went on and on, Miro realized that it wasn’t Quara who was out of control, it was Jane. She didn’t know how to deal with her emotions. She didn’t know when it wasn’t worth going on. She felt what she was feeling, and she didn’t know how to do anything but express it.

  “That was hard,” Miro said. “Cutting off the argument and coming in here.”

  “I wanted to kill her,” said Jane. Her voice was almost unintelligible from the weeping, from the savage tension in her body. “I’ve never felt anything like it. I wanted to get out of the chair and tear her apart with my bare hands.”

  “Welcome to the club,” said Miro.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I really wanted to do it. I felt my muscles flexing, I was ready to do it. I was going to do it.”

  “As I said. Quara makes us all feel that way.”

  “No,” said Jane. “Not like this. You all stay calm, you all stay in control.”

  “And you will, too,” said Miro, “when you have a little more practice.”

  Jane lifted her head, leaned it back, shook it. Her hair swung weightlessly free in the air. “Do you really feel this?”

  “All of us do,” said Miro. “That’s why we have a childhood—to learn to get over our violent tendencies. But they’re in us all. Chimps and baboons do it. All the primates. We display. We have to express our rage physically.”

  “But you don’t. You stay so calm. You let her spout off and say these horrible—”

  “Because it’s not worth the trouble of stopping her,” said Miro. “She pays the price for it. She’s desperately lonely and nobody d
eliberately seeks an opportunity to spend time in her company.”

  “Which is the only reason she isn’t dead.”

  “That’s right,” said Miro. “That’s what civilized people do—they avoid the circumstance that enrages them. Or if they can’t avoid it, they detach. That’s what Ela and I do, mostly. We just detach. We just let her provocations roll over us.”

  “I can’t do it,” said Jane. “It was so simple before I felt these things. I could tune her out.”

  “That’s it,” said Miro. “That’s what we do. We tune her out.”

  “It’s more complicated than I thought,” said Jane. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t have much choice right now, do you,” he said.

  “Miro, I’m so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement.”

  “It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It’s the neighborly way to live.”

  It took a moment—a sob, and then a hiccough—but then she did laugh. A sweet, soft chuckle that was such a welcome sound to Miro. Welcome because it was a voice he knew and loved, a laugh that he liked to hear. And it was his dear friend who was doing the laughing. His dear friend Jane. The laugh, the voice of his beloved Val. One person now. After all this time, he could reach out his hand and touch Jane, who had always been impossibly far away. Like having a friendship over the telephone and finally meeting face-to-face.

  He touched her again, and she took his hand and held it.

  “I’m sorry I let my own weakness get in the way of what we’re doing,” said Jane.

  “You’re only human,” said Miro.

  She looked at him, searched his face for irony, for bitterness.

  “I mean it,” said Miro. “The price of having these emotions, these passions, is that you have to control them, you have to bear them when they’re too strong to bear. You’re only human now. You’ll never make these feelings go away. You just have to learn not to act on them.”

  “Quara never learned.”

  “Quara learned, all right,” said Miro. “It’s just my opinion, but Quara loved Marcão, adored him, and when he died and the rest of us felt so liberated, she was lost. What she does now, this constant provocation—she’s asking somebody to abuse her. To hit her. The way Marcão always hit Mother whenever he was provoked. I think in some perverse way Quara was always jealous of Mother when she got to go off alone with Papa, and even though she finally figured out that he was beating her up, when Quara wanted her papa back the only way she knew of to demand his attention was—this mouth of hers.” Miro laughed bitterly. “It reminds me of Mother, to tell the truth. You’ve never heard her, but in the old days, when she was trapped in marriage with Marcão and having Libo’s babies—oh, she had a mouth on her. I’d sit there and listen to her provoking Marcão, goading him, stabbing at him, until he’d hit her—and I’d think, Don’t you dare lay a hand on my mother, and at the same time I’d absolutely understand his impotent rage, because he could never, never, never say anything that would shut her up. Only his fist could do it. And Quara has that mouth, and needs that rage.”

  “Well, how happy for us all, then, that I gave her just what she needed.”

  Miro laughed. “But she didn’t need it from you. She needed it from Marcão, and he’s dead.”

  And then, suddenly, Jane burst into real tears. Tears of grief, and she turned to Miro and clung to him.

  “What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, Miro,” she said. “Ender’s dead. I’ll never see him again. I have a body at last, I have eyes to see him, and he isn’t there.”

  Miro was stunned. Of course she missed Ender. She had thousands of years with him, and only a few years, really, with me. How could I have thought she could love me? How can I ever hope to compare with Ender Wiggin? What am I, compared to the man who commanded fleets, who transformed the minds of trillions of people with his books, his speakings, his insight, his ability to see into the hearts of other people and speak their own most private stories back to them? And yet even as he resented Ender, even as he envied him because Jane would always love him more and Miro couldn’t hope to compete with him even in death, despite these feelings it finally came home to him that yes, Ender was dead. Ender, who had transformed his family, who had been a true friend to him, who had been the only man in Miro’s life that he longed with all his heart to be, Ender was gone. Miro’s tears of grief flowed along with Jane’s.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jane. “I can’t control any of my emotions.”

  “Yes, well, it’s a common failing, actually,” said Miro.

  She reached up and touched the tears on his cheek. Then she touched her damp finger to her own cheek. The tears commingled. “Do you know why I thought of Ender right then?” she said. “Because you’re so much like him. Quara annoys you as much as she annoys anyone, and yet you look past that and see what her needs are, why she says and does these things. No, no, relax, Miro, I’m not expecting you to be like Ender, I’m just saying that one of the things I liked best about him is also in you—that’s not bad, is it? The compassionate perception—I may be new at being human, but I’m pretty sure that’s a rare commodity.”

  “I don’t know,” said Miro. “The only person I’m feeling compassion for right now is me. They call it self-pity, and it isn’t an attractive trait.”

  “Why are you feeling sorry for yourself?”

  “Because you’ll go on needing Ender all your life, and all you’ll ever find is poor substitutes, like me.”

  She held him tighter then. She was the one giving comfort now. “Oh, Miro, maybe that’s true. But if it is, it’s true the way it’s true that Quara is still trying to get her father’s attention. You never stop needing your father or your mother, isn’t that right? You never stop reacting to them, even when they’re dead.”

  Father? That had never crossed Miro’s mind before. Jane loved Ender, deeply, yes, loved him forever—but as a father?

  “I can’t be your father,” said Miro. “I can’t take his place.” But what he was really doing was making sure he had understood her. Ender was her father?

  “I don’t want you to be my father,” said Jane. “I still have all these old Val-feelings, you know. I mean, you and I were friends, right? That was very important to me. But now I have this Val body, and when you touch me, it keeps feeling like the answer to a prayer.” At once she regretted saying it. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miro, I know you miss her.”

  “I do,” said Miro. “But then, it’s hard to miss her quite the way I might, since you do look a lot like her. And you sound like her. And here I am holding you the way I wanted to hold her, and if that sounds awful because I’m supposedly comforting you and I shouldn’t be thinking of base desires, well then I’m just an awful kind of guy, right?”

  “Awful,” she said. “I’m ashamed to know you.” And she kissed him. Sweetly, awkwardly.

  He remembered his first kiss with Ouanda years ago, when he was young and didn’t know how badly things could turn out. They had both been awkward then, new, clumsy. Young. Jane, now, Jane was one of the oldest creatures in the universe. But also one of the youngest. And Val—there would be no reflexes in the Val body for Jane to draw upon, for in Val’s short life, what chance had she had to find love?

  “Was that even close to the way humans do that?” asked Jane.

  “That was exactly the way humans sometimes do it,” said Miro. “Which isn’t surprising, since we’re both human.”

  “Am I betraying Ender, to grieve for him one moment, and then be so happy to have you holding me the next?”

  “Am I betraying him, to be so happy only hours after he died?”

  “Only he’s not dead,” said Jane. “I know where he is. I chased him there.”


  “If he’s exactly the same person he was,” said Miro, “then what a shame. Because good as he was, he wasn’t happy. He had his moments, but he was never—what, he was never really at peace. Wouldn’t it be nice if Peter could live out a full life without ever having to bear the guilt of xenocide? Without ever having to feel the weight of all of humanity on his shoulders?”

  “Speaking of which,” said Jane, “we have work to do.”

  “We also have lives to live,” said Miro. “I’m not going to be sorry we had this encounter. Even if it took Quara’s bitchiness to make it happen.”

  “Let’s do the civilized thing,” said Jane. “Let’s get married. Let’s have babies. I do want to be human, Miro, I want to do everything. I want to be part of human life from edge to edge. And I want to do it all with you.”

  “Is this a proposal?” asked Miro.

  “I died and was reborn only a dozen hours ago,” said Jane. “My—hell, I can call him my father, can’t I?—my father died, too. Life is short, I feel how short it is: after three thousand years, all of them intense, it still feels too short. I’m in a hurry. And you, haven’t you wasted enough time, too? Aren’t you ready?”

  “But I don’t have a ring.”

  “We have something much better than a ring,” said Jane. She touched her cheek again, where she had put his tear. It was still damp; still damp, too, when she touched the finger now to his cheek. “I’ve had your tears with mine, and you’ve had mine with yours. I think that’s more intimate even than a kiss.”

  “Maybe,” said Miro. “But not as fun.”

  “This emotion I’m feeling now, this is love, right?”

  “I don’t know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you’re with me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s influenza,” said Miro. “Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.”

  She shoved him, and in the weightless starship the movement sent him helplessly into midair until he struck another surface. “What?” he said, pretending innocence. “What did I say?”