Children of the Mind

by Orson Scott Card

  Did Aimaina Hikari understand what he had asked Yasujiro to do? He was at the cusp of his career. If he did well, he would begin to move from world to world, one of the elite caste of managers who were cut loose from time and sent into the future through the time-dilation effect of interstellar travel. But if he was judged to be a second-rater, he would be moved sideways or down within the organization here on Divine Wind. He would never leave, and so he would continuously face the pity of those who would know that he was one who did not have what it took to rise from one small lifetime into the freefloating eternity of upper management.

  Probably Aimaina knew all about this. But even if he had not known how fragile Yasujiro's position was, finding out would not have stopped him. To save another species from needless annihilation--that was worth a few careers. Could Aimaina help it that it was not his own career that would be ruined? It was an honor that Aimaina had chosen Yasujiro, that he had thought him wise enough to recognize the moral peril of the Yamato people and courageous enough to act on that knowledge regardless of personal cost.

  Such an honor--Yasujiro hoped it would be sufficient to make him happy if all else slipped away. For he meant to leave the Tsutsumi company if he was rebuked. If they did not act to avert the peril then he could not remain. Nor could he remain silent. He would speak out and include Tsutsumi in his condemnation. He would not threaten to do this, for the family rightly viewed all threats with contempt. He would simply speak. Then, for his disloyalty, they would work to destroy him. No company would hire him. No public appointment would long remain in his hands. It was no jest when he told Aimaina that he would come to live with him. Once Tsutsumi decided to punish, the miscreant would have no choice but to throw himself on the mercy of his friends--if he had any friends who were not themselves terrified by the Tsutsumi wrath.

  All these dire scenarios played themselves out in Yasujiro's mind as he waited, waited, hour after hour. Surely they had not simply ignored his message. They must be reading and discussing it even now.

  He finally dozed off. The ansible operator awakened him--a woman who had not been on duty when he fell asleep. "Are you by any chance the honorable Yasujiro Tsutsumi?"

  The conference was already under way; despite his best intention, he was indeed the last to arrive. The cost of such an ansible conference in realtime was phenomenal, not to mention the annoyance. Under the new computer system every participant in a conference had to be present at the ansible, since no conference would be possible if they had to wait for the built-in time delay between each comment and its reply.

  When Yasujiro saw the identification bands under the faces shown in the terminal display he was both thrilled and horrified. This matter had not been delegated to secondary or tertiary officials in the home office on Honshu. Yoshiaki-Seiji Tsutsumi himself was there, the ancient man who had led Tsutsumi all of Yasujiro's life. This must be a good sign. Yoshiaki-Seiji--or "Yes Sir," as he was called, though not to his face, of course--would never waste his time coming to an ansible merely to slap down an upstart underling.

  Yes Sir himself did not speak, of course. Rather it was old Eiichi who did the talking. Eiichi was known as the conscience of Tsutsumi--which some said, rather cynically, meant he must be a deaf mute.

  "Our young brother has been bold, but he was wise to pass on to us the thoughts and feelings of our honored teacher, Aimaina Hikari. While none of us here on Honshu has been privileged personally to know the Guardian of Yamato, we have all been aware of his words. We were not prepared to think of the Japanese as being responsible, as a people, for the Lusitania Fleet. Nor were we prepared to think of Tsutsumi as having any special responsibility toward a political situation with no obvious connection to finances or the economy in general.

  "Our young brother's words were heartfelt and outrageous, and if they had not come from one who has been properly modest and respectful for all his years of work with us, careful and yet bold enough to take risks when the time was right, we might not have heeded his message. But we did heed it; we studied it and found from our government sources that the Japanese influence on Starways Congress was and continues to be pivotal on this issue in particular. And in our judgment there is no time for us to try to build a coalition of other companies or to change public opinion. The fleet might arrive at any moment. Our fleet, if Aimaina Hikari is correct; and even if he is not, it is a human fleet, and we are humans, and it might just be within our power to stop it. A quarantine will easily do all that is necessary to protect the human species from annihilation by the descolada virus. Therefore we wish to inform you, Yasujiro Tsutsumi, that you have proven yourself worthy of the name that was given you at birth. We will commit all the resources of the Tsutsumi family to the task of convincing a sufficient number of Congressmen to oppose the fleet--and to oppose it so vigorously that they force an immediate vote to recall the fleet and forbid it to strike against Lusitania. We may succeed in this task or we may fail, but either way, our younger brother Yasujiro Tsutsumi has served us well, not only through his many achievements in company management, but also because he knew when to listen to an outsider, when to put moral questions into a position of primacy over financial considerations, and when to risk all in order to help Tsutsumi be and do what is right. Therefore we summon Yasujiro Tsutsumi to Honshu, where he will serve Tsutsumi as my assistant." At this Eiichi bowed. "I am honored that such a distinguished young man is being trained to be my replacement when I die or retire."

  Yasujiro bowed gravely. He was relieved, yes, that he was being called directly to Honshu--no one had ever been summoned so young. But to be Eiichi's assistant, groomed to replace him--that was not the life's work Yasujiro had dreamed of. It was not to be a philosopher-cum-ombudsman that he had worked so hard and served so faithfully. He wanted to be in the thick of management of the family enterprises.

  But it would be years of starflight before he arrived on Honshu. Eiichi might well be dead. Yes Sir would surely be dead by then as well. Instead of replacing Eiichi, he might as easily be given a different assignment better suited to his real abilities. So Yasujiro would not refuse this strange gift. He would embrace his fate and follow where it led.

  "O Eiichi my father, I bow before you and before all the great fathers of our company, most particularly Yoshiaki-Seiji-san. You honor me beyond anything I could ever deserve. I pray that I will not disappoint you too much. And I also give thanks that at this difficult time the Yamato spirit is in such good protecting hands as yours."

  With his public acceptance of his orders, the meeting ended--it was expensive, after all, and the Tsutsumi family was careful to avoid waste if it could help it. The ansible conference ended. Yasujiro sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was trembling.

  "Oh, Yasujiro-san," said the ansible attendant. "Oh, Yasujiro-san."

  Oh, Yasujiro-san, thought Yasujiro. Who would have guessed that Aimaina's visit to me would lead to this? So easily it could have gone the other way. Now he would be one of the men of Honshu. Whatever his role, he would be among the supreme leaders of Tsutsumi. There was no happier outcome. Who would have guessed.

  Before he rose from his chair beside the ansible, Tsutsumi representatives were talking to all the Japanese Congressmen, and many who were not Japanese but nevertheless followed the Necessarian line. And as the tally of compliant politicians rose, it became clear that support for the fleet was shallow indeed. It would not be all that expensive to stop the fleet after all.

  The pequenino on duty monitoring the satellites that orbited Lusitania heard the alarm going off and at first had no idea what was happening. The alarm had never, to his knowledge, sounded. At first he assumed it was some kind of dangerous weather pattern that had been detected. But it was nothing of the kind. It was the outward-searching telescopes that had triggered the alarm. Dozens of armed starships had just appeared, traveling at very high but nonrelativistic speeds, on a course that would allow them to launch the Little Doctor within the hour.

&nb
sp; The duty officer gave the urgent message to his colleagues, and very quickly the mayor of Milagre was notified and the rumor began to spread throughout what was left of the village. Anyone who doesn't leave within the hour will be destroyed, that was the message, and within minutes hundreds of human families were gathered around the starships, anxiously waiting to be taken in. Remarkably, it was only humans insisting on these last-minute runs. Faced with the inevitable death of their own forests of fathertrees, mothertrees, and brothertrees, the pequeninos felt no urgency to save their own lives. Who would they be without their forest? Better to die among loved ones than as perpetual strangers in a distant forest that was not and never could be their own.

  As for the Hive Queen, she had already sent her last daughter-queen and had no particular interest in trying to leave herself. She was the last of the hive queens who had been alive before Ender's destruction of their home planet. She felt it fitting that she, too, should submit to the same kind of death three thousand years later. Besides, she told herself, how could she bear to live when her great friend, Human, was rooted to Lusitania and could not leave it? It was not a queenly thought, but then, no hive queen before her had ever had a friend. It was a new thing in the world, to have someone to talk to who was not substantially yourself. It would grieve her too much to live on without Human. And since her survival was no longer crucial to the perpetuation of her species, she would do the grand, brave, tragic, romantic, and least complicated thing: She would stay. She rather liked the idea of being noble in human terms; and it proved, to her own surprise, that she had not been utterly unchanged by her close contact with humans and pequeninos. They had transformed her quite against her own expectations. There had been no Hive Queen like her in all the history of her people.

  Human told her.

  But for once she did not answer him.

  Jane was adamant. The team working on the language of the descoladores had to leave Lusitania and get back to work in orbit around the descolada planet. Of course that included herself, but no one was foolish enough to begrudge the survival of the person who was making all the starships go, nor of the team that would perhaps save all of humanity from the descoladores. But Jane was on shakier moral ground when she also insisted that Novinha, Grego, and Olhado and his family be taken to a place of safety. Valentine, too, was informed that if she did not go with her husband and children and their crew and friends to Jakt's starship, Jane would be forced to waste precious mental resources by transporting them bodily against their will, sans spacecraft if necessary.

  "Why us?" demanded Valentine. "We haven't asked for special treatment."

  "I don't care what you do or do not ask for," said Jane. "You are Ender's sister. Novinha is his widow, her children are his adopted children; I will not stand by and let you be killed when I have it in my power to save the family of my friend. If that seems unfairly preferential to you, then complain about it to me later, but for now get yourselves into Jakt's spaceship so I can lift you off this world. And you will save more lives if you don't waste another moment of my attention with useless argument."

  Feeling ashamed at having special privileges, yet grateful they and their loved ones would live through the next few hours, the descoladores team gathered in the shuttle-turned-starship, which Jane had relocated away from the crowded landing area; the others hurried toward Jakt's landing craft, which she had also moved to an isolated spot.

  In a way, for many of them at least, the appearance of the fleet was almost a relief. They had lived for so long in its shadow that to have it here at last gave respite from the endless anxiety. Within an hour or two, the issue would be decided.

  In the shuttle that hurtled along in a high orbit above the planet of the descoladores, Miro sat numbly at his terminal. 'I can't work," he said at last. "I can't concentrate on language when my people and my home are on the brink of destruction." He knew that Jane, strapped into her bed in the back of the shuttle, was using her whole concentration to move ship after ship from Lusitania to other colony worlds that were ill-prepared to receive them. While all he could do was puzzle over molecular messages from inscrutable aliens.

  "Well I can," said Quara. "After all, these descoladores are just as great a threat, and to all of humanity, not just to one small world."

  "How wise of you," said Ela dryly, "to take the long view."

  "Look at these broadcasts we're getting from the descoladores," said Quara. "See if you recognize what I'm seeing here."

  Ela called up Quara's display on her own terminal; so did Miro. However annoying Quara might be, she was good at what she did.

  "See this? Whatever else this molecule does, it's exactly designed to work at precisely the same location in the brain as the heroin molecule."

  It could not be denied that the fit was perfect. Ela, though, found it hard to believe. "The only way they could do this," she said, "is if they took the historical information contained in the descolada descriptions we sent them, used that information to build a human body, studied it, and found a chemical that would immobilize us with mindless pleasure while they do whatever they want to us. There's no way they've had time to grow a human since we sent that information."

  "Maybe they don't have to build the whole human body," said Miro. "Maybe they're so adept at reading genetic information that they can extrapolate everything there is to know about the human anatomy and physiology from our genetic information alone."

  "But they didn't even have our DNA set," Ela said.

  "Maybe they can compress the information in our primitive, natural DNA," said Miro. "Obviously they got the information somehow, and obviously they figured out what would make us sit as still as stones with dumb, happy smiles."

  "What's even more obvious to me," said Quara, "is that they meant us to read this molecule biologically. They meant us to take this drug instantly. As far as they're concerned, we're now sitting here waiting for them to come take us over."

  Miro immediately changed displays over his terminal. "Damn, Quara, you're right. Look--they have three ships closing in on us already."

  "They've never even approached us before," said Ela.

  "Well, they're not going to approach us now," said Miro. "We've got to give them a demonstration that we didn't fall for their trojan horse." He got up from his seat and fairly flew back down the corridor to where Jane was sleeping. "Jane!" he shouted even before he got there. "Jane!"

  It took a moment, and then her eyes fluttered open.

  "Jane," he said. "Move us about a hundred miles over and drop us into a closer orbit."

  She looked at him quizzically, then must have decided to trust him because she asked nothing. She closed her eyes again, as Firequencher shouted from the control room, "She did it! We moved!"

  Miro drifted back to the others. "Now I know they can't do that," he said. Sure enough, his display now reported that the alien ships were no longer approaching, but rather were poised warily a dozen miles off in three--no, four now--directions. "Got us nicely framed in a tetrahedron," said Miro.

  "Well, now they know that we didn't succumb to their die-happy drug," said Quara.

  "But we're no closer to understanding them than we were before."

  "That's because," said Miro, "we're so stupid."

  "Self-vilification won't help us now," said Quara, "even if in your case it happens to be true."

  "Quara," said Ela sharply.

  "It was a joke, dammit!" said Quara. "Can't a girl tease her big brother?"

  "Oh, yeah," said Miro dryly. "You're such a tease."

  "What did you mean by saying we're stupid?" said Firequencher.

  "We'll never decipher their language," said Miro, "because it's not a language. It's a set of biological commands. They don't talk. They don't abstract. They just make molecules that do things to each other. It's as if the human vocabulary consisted of bricks and sandwiches. Throw a brick or give a sandwich, punish or reward.
If they have abstract thoughts we're not going to get them through reading these molecules."

  "I find it hard to believe that a species with no abstract language could possibly create spaceships like those out there," said Quara scornfully. "And they broadcast these molecules the way we broadcast vids and voices."

  "What if they all have organs inside their bodies that directly translate molecular messages into chemicals or physical structures? Then they could--"

  "You're missing my point," insisted Quara. "You don't build up a fund of common knowledge by throwing bricks and sharing sandwiches. They need language in order to store information outside their bodies so that they can pass knowledge from person to person, generation after generation. You don't get out into space or make broadcasts using the electromagnetic spectrum on the basis of what one person can be persuaded to do with a brick."

  "She's probably right," said Ela.

  "So maybe parts of the molecular messages they send are memory sets," said Miro. "Again, not a language--it stimulates the brain to 'remember' things that the sender experienced but the receiver did not."

  "Listen, whether you're right or not," said Firequencher, "we have to keep trying to decode the language."

  "If I'm right, we're wasting our time," said Miro.

  "Exactly," said Firequencher.

  "Oh," said Miro. Firequencher's point was well taken. If Miro was right, their whole mission was useless anyway--they had already failed. So they had to continue to act as if Miro was wrong and the language could be decoded, because if it couldn't, there was nothing they could do anyway.

  And yet . . .

  "We're forgetting something," said Miro.