Children of the Mind

by Orson Scott Card

  And yet he remembered sleeping with a woman curled against him. He remembered reaching across her, his arm like a sheltering bough.

  But he had never touched Wang-mu that way. Nor was it right for him to do it now--she was not his wife, only his . . . friend? Was she that? She had said she loved him--was that only a way to help him find his way into this body?

  Then, suddenly, he felt himself falling away from himself, felt himself recede from Peter and become something else, something small and bright and terrified, descending down into darkness, out into a wind too strong for him to stand against it--

  "Peter!"

  The voice called him, and he followed it, back along the almost-invisible philotic threads that connected him to . . . himself again. I am Peter. I have nowhere else to go. If I leave like that, I'll die.

  "Are you all right?" asked Wang-mu. "I woke up because I--I'm sorry, but I dreamed, I felt as if I was losing you. But I wasn't, because here you are."

  "I was losing my way," said Peter. "You could sense that?"

  "I don't know what I sensed or not. I just--how can I describe it?"

  "You called me back from darkness," said Peter.

  "Did I?"

  He almost said something, but then stopped. Then laughed, uncomfortable and frightened. "I feel so odd. A moment ago I was about to say something. Something very flippant--about how having to be Peter Wiggin was darkness enough by itself."

  "Oh yes," said Wang-mu. "You always say such nasty things about yourself."

  "But I didn't say it," said Peter. "I was about to, out of habit, but I stopped, because it wasn't true. Isn't that funny?"

  "I think it's good."

  "It makes sense that I should feel whole instead of being subdivided--perhaps more content with myself or something. And yet I almost lost the whole thing. I think it wasn't just a dream. I think I really was letting go. Falling away into--no, out of everything."

  "You had three selves for several months," said Wang-mu. "Is it possible your aiua hungers for the--I don't know, the size of what you used to be?"

  "I was spread all over the galaxy, wasn't I? Except I want to say, 'Wasn't he,' because that was Ender, wasn't it. And I'm not Ender because I don't remember anything." He thought a moment. "Except maybe I do remember some things a little more clearly now. Things from my childhood. My mother's face. It's very clear, and I don't think it was before. And Valentine's face, when we were all children. But I'd remember that as Peter, wouldn't I, so it doesn't mean it comes from Ender, does it? I'm sure this is just one of the memories Ender supplied for me in the first place." He laughed. "I'm really desperate, aren't I, to find some sign of him in me."

  Wang-mu sat listening. Silent, not making a great show of interest, but also content not to jump in with an answer or a comment.

  Noticing her made him think of something else. "Are you some kind of, what would you call it, an empath? Do you normally feel what other people are feeling?"

  "Never," said Wang-mu. "I'm too busy feeling what I'm feeling."

  "But you knew that I was going. You felt that."

  "I suppose," said Wang-mu, "that I'm bound up with you now. I hope that's all right, because it wasn't exactly voluntary on my part."

  "But I'm bound up with you, too," said Peter. "Because when I was disconnected, I still heard you. All my other feelings were gone. My body wasn't giving me anything. I had lost my body. Now, when I remember what it felt like, I remember 'seeing' things, but that's just my human brain making sense of things that it can't actually make sense of. I know that I didn't see at all, or hear, or touch or anything at all. And yet I knew you were calling. I felt you--needing me. Wanting me to come back. Surely that means that I am also bound up with you."

  She shrugged, looked away.

  "Now what does that mean?" he asked.

  "I'm not going to spend the rest of my life explaining myself to you," said Wang-mu. "Everyone else has the privilege of just feeling and doing sometimes without analyzing it. What did it look like to you? You're the smart one who's an expert on human nature."

  "Stop that," said Peter, pretending to be teasing but really wanting her to stop. "I remember we bantered about that, and I bragged I guess, but . . . well I don't feel that way now. Is that part of having all of Ender in me? I know I don't understand people all that well. You looked away, you shrugged when I said I was bound up with you. That hurt my feelings, you know."

  "And why is that?"

  "Oh, you can ask why and I can't, are those the rules now?"

  "Those have always been the rules," said Wang-mu. "You just never obeyed them."

  "Well it hurt my feelings because I wanted you to be glad that I'm tied up with you and you with me."

  "Are you glad?"

  "Well it only saved my life, I think I'd have to be the king of the stupid people not to at least find it convenient!"

  "Smell," she said, suddenly leaping to her feet.

  She is so young, he thought.

  And then, rising to his own feet, he was surprised to realize that he, too, was young, his body lithe and responsive.

  And then he was surprised again to realize that Peter never remembered being any other way. It was Ender who had experienced an older body, one that got stiff when sleeping on the ground, a body that did not rise so easily to its feet. I do have Ender in me. I have the memories of his body. Why not the memories of his mind?

  Perhaps because this brain has only the map of Peter's memories in it. All the rest of them are lurking just out of reach. And maybe I'll stumble on them now and then, connect them up, map new roads to get to them.

  In the meantime, he was still getting up, standing beside Wang-mu, sniffing the air with her; and he was surprised again to realize that both activities had had his full attention. He had been thinking continuously of Wang-mu, of smelling what she smelled, wondering all the while whether he could just rest his hand on that small frail shoulder that seemed to need a hand the size of his to rest upon it; and at the same time, he had been engaged completely in speculation on how and whether he would be able to recover Ender's memories.

  I could never do that before, thought Peter. And yet I must have been doing it ever since this body and the Valentine body were created. Concentrating on three things at once, in fact, not two.

  But I wasn't strong enough to think of three things. One of them always sagged. Valentine for a while. Then Ender, until that body died. But two things--I can think of two things at once. Is this remarkable? Or is it something that many humans could do, if only they had some occasion to learn?

  What kind of vanity is this! thought Peter. Why should I care whether I'm unique in this ability? Except that I always did pride myself on being smarter and more capable than the people around me. Didn't let myself say it aloud, of course, or even admit it to myself, but be honest with yourself now, Peter! It's good to be smarter than other people. And if I can think of two things at once, while they can only think of one, why not take some pleasure in it!

  Of course, thinking of two things is rather useless if both trains of thought are dumb. For while he played with questions of vanity and his competitive nature, he had also been concentrating on Wang-mu, and his hand had indeed reached out and touched her, and for a moment she leaned back against him, accepting his touch, until her head rested against his chest. And then, without warning or any provocation that he could think of, she suddenly pulled away from him and began to stride toward the Samoans who were gathered around Malu on the beach.

  "What did I do?" asked Peter.

  She turned around, looking puzzled. "You did just fine!" she said. "I didn't slap you or put my knee in your kintamas, did I? But it's breakfast--Malu is praying and they've got more food than they had two nights ago, when we thought we'd die from eating it!"

  And both of Peter's separate tracks of attention noticed that he was hungry, both severally and all at once. Neither he nor Wang-mu had eaten anything last night. For that matter, he had no
memory of leaving the beach and coming to lie down with her on these mats. Somebody must have carried them. Well, that was no surprise. There wasn't a man or woman on that beach who didn't look like he could pick Peter up and break him like a pencil. As for Wang-mu, as he watched her run lightly toward the mountain range of Samoans gathered at water's edge, he thought she was like a bird flying toward a flock of cattle.

  I'm not a child and never was one, not in this body, thought Peter. So I don't know if I'm even capable of childish longings and the grand romances of adolescence. And from Ender I have this sense of comfortableness in love; it isn't grand sweeping passions that I even expect to feel. Will the kind of love I have for you be enough, Wang-mu? To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you, your energy as you look up at these towering mound-people, speaking to them as an equal even though every movement of your hands, every fluting syllable of your speech cries out that you're a child--is it enough for you that I feel these loves for you? Because it's enough for me. And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.

  Plikt sat alone in her room, writing and writing. She had been preparing all her life for this day--to be writing the oration for Andrew Wiggin's funeral. She would speak his death--and she had the research to do it, she could speak for a solid week and still not exhaust a tenth of what she knew about him. But she would not speak for a week. She would speak for a single hour. Less than an hour. She understood him; she loved him; she would share with others who did not know him what he was, how he loved, how history was different because this man, brilliant, imperfect, but well-meaning and filled with a love that was strong enough to inflict suffering when it was needed--how history was different because he lived, and how also ten thousand, a hundred thousand, millions of individual lives were also different, strengthened, clarified, lifted up, brightened, or at least made more consonant and truthful because of what he had said and done and written in his life.

  And would she also tell this? Would she tell how bitterly one woman grieved alone in her room, weeping and weeping, not because of grief that Ender was gone, but because of shame at finally understanding herself. For though she had loved and admired him--no, worshiped this man--nevertheless when he died what she felt was not grief at all, but relief and excitement. Relief: The waiting is over! Excitement: My hour has come!

  Of course that's what she felt. She wasn't such a fool as to expect herself to be of more than human moral strength. And the reason she didn't grieve as Novinha and Valentine grieved was because a great part of their lives had just been torn away from them. What was torn away from mine? Ender gave me a few dollops of his attention, but little more. We had only a few months when he was my teacher on Trondheim; then a generation later our lives touched again for these few months here; and both times he was preoccupied, he had more important things and people to attend to than me. I was not his wife. I was not his sister. I was only his student and disciple--a man who was done with students and never wanted disciples. So of course no great part of my life was taken from me because he had only been my dream, never my companion.

  I forgive myself and yet I cannot stop the shame and grief I feel, not because Andrew Wiggin died, but because in the hour of his death I showed myself to be what I really am: utterly selfish, concerned only with my own career. I chose to be the speaker of Ender's death. Therefore the moment of his death can only be the fulfillment of my life. What kind of vulture does that make me? What kind of parasite, a leech upon his life . . .

  And yet her fingers continued to type, sentence after sentence, despite the tears flowing down her cheeks. Off in Jakt's house, Valentine grieved with her husband and children. Over in Olhado's house, Grego and Olhado and Novinha had gathered to comfort each other, at the loss of the man who had been husband and father to them. They had their relationship to him, and I have mine. They have their private memories; mine will be public. I will speak, and then I will publish what I said, and what I am writing now will give new shape and meaning to the life of Ender Wiggin in the minds of every person of a hundred worlds. Ender the Xenocide; Andrew the Speaker for the Dead; Andrew the private man of loneliness and compassion; Ender the brilliant analyst who could pierce to the heart of problems and of people without being deflected by fear or ambition or . . . or mercy. The man of justice and the man of mercy, coexisting in one body. The man whose compassion let him see and love the hive queens even before he ever touched one of them with his hands; the man whose fierce justice let him destroy them all because he believed they were his enemy.

  Would Ender judge me harshly for my ugly feelings on this day? Of course he would--he would not spare me, he would know the worst that is in my heart.

  But then, having judged me, he would also love me. He would say, So what? Get up and speak my death. If we waited for perfect people to be speakers for the dead, all funerals would be conducted in silence.

  And so she wrote, and wept; and when the weeping was done, the writing went on. When the hair that he had left behind was sealed in a small box and buried in the grass near Human's root, she would stand and speak. Her voice would raise him from the dead, make him live again in memory. And she would also be merciful; and she would also be just. That much, at least, she had learned from him.

  12

  "AM I BETRAYING ENDER?"

  "Why do people act as if war and murder were unnatural?

  What's unnatural is to go your whole life

  without ever raising your hand in violence."

  from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

  "We're going about this all wrong," said Quara.

  Miro felt the old familiar anger surge inside him. Quara had a knack for making people angry, and it didn't help that she seemed to know that she annoyed people and relished it. Anyone else in the ship could have said exactly the same sentence and Miro would have given them a fair hearing. But Quara managed to put an edge on the words that made it sound as if she thought everyone in the world but herself was stupid. Miro loved her as a sister, but he couldn't help it that he hated having to spend hour upon hour in her company.

  Yet, because Quara was in fact the one among them most knowledgeable about the ur-language she had discovered months before in the descolada virus, Miro did not allow his inward sigh of exasperation to become audible. Instead he swiveled in his seat to listen.

  So did the others, though Ela made less effort to hide her annoyance. Actually, she made none. "Well, Quara, why weren't we smart enough to notice our stupidity before."

  Quara was oblivious to Ela's sarcasm--or chose to appear oblivious, anyway. "How can we decipher a language out of the blue? We don't have any referents. But we do have complete records of the versions of the descolada virus. We know what it looked like before it adapted to the human metabolism. We know how it changed after each of our attempts to kill it. Some of the changes were functional--it was adapting. But some of them were clerical--it was keeping a record of what it did."

  "We don't know that," said Ela with perhaps too much pleasure in correcting Quara.

  "I know it," said Quara. "Anyway, it gives us a known context, doesn't it? We know what that language is about, even if we haven't been able to decode it."

  "Well, now that you've said all that," said Ela, "I still have no idea how this new wisdom will help us decode the language. I mean, isn't that precisely what you've been working on for months?"

  "Ah," said Quara. "I have. But what I haven't been able to do is speak the 'words' that the descolada virus recorded and see what answers we get back."

  "Too dangerous," said Jane at once. "Absurdly dangerous. These people are capable of making vi
ruses that completely destroy biospheres, and they're callous enough to use them. And you're proposing that we give to them precisely the weapon they used to devastate the pequeninos' planet? Which probably contains a complete record, not only of the pequeninos' metabolism, but of ours as well? Why not just slit our own throats and send them the blood?"

  Miro noticed that when Jane spoke, the others looked almost stunned. Part of their response might have been to the difference between Val's diffidence and the bold attitude that Jane displayed. Part of it, too, might have been because the Jane they knew was more computerlike, less assertive. Miro, however, recognized this authoritarian style from the way she had often spoken into his ear through the jewel. In a way it was a pleasure for him to hear her again; it was also disturbing to hear it coming from the lips of someone else. Val was gone; Jane was back; it was awful; it was wonderful.

  Because Miro was not so taken aback by Jane's attitude, he was the one to speak into the silence. "Quara's right, Jane. We don't have years and years to work this out--we might have only a few weeks. Or less. We need to provoke a linguistic response. Get an answer from them, analyze the difference in language between their initial statements to us and the later ones."

  "We're giving away too much," said Jane.

  "No risk, no gain," said Miro.

  "Too much risk, all dead," said Jane snidely. But in the snideness there was a familiar lilt, a kind of sauciness that said, I'm only playing. And that came, not from Jane--Jane had never sounded like that--but from Val. It hurt to hear it; it was good to hear it. Miro's dual responses to everything coming from Jane kept him constantly on edge. I love you, I miss you, I grieve for you, shut up; whom he was talking to seemed to change with the minutes.

  "It's only the future of three sentient species we're gambling with," added Ela.

  With that they all turned to Firequencher.

  "Don't look at me," he said. "I'm just a tourist."