Children of the Mind

by Orson Scott Card

  "I'm not," said Quara.

  "Jane. She was created because the hive queens built a bridge between species."

  "Between humans and hive queens, not between unknown virus-spewing aliens and humans," said Quara.

  But Ela was interested. "The human way of communication--speech between equals--that was surely as foreign to the hive queens as this molecular language is to us. Maybe Jane can find some way to connect to them philotically."

  "Mind-reading?" said Quara. "Remember, we don't have a bridge."

  "It all depends," said Miro, "on how they deal with philotic connections. The Hive Queen talks all the time to Human, right? Because the fathertrees and the hive queens already both use philotic links to communicate. They speak mind to mind, without the intervention of language. And they're no more biologically similar than hive queens and humans are."

  Ela nodded thoughtfully. "Jane can't try anything like this now, not till the whole issue of the Congress fleet is resolved. But once she's free to return her attention to us, she can try, at least, to contact these . . . people directly."

  "If these aliens communicated through philotic links," said Quara, "they wouldn't have to use molecules."

  "Maybe these molecules," said Miro, "are how they communicate with animals."

  Admiral Lands could not believe what he was hearing. The First Speaker of Starways Congress and the First Secretary of the Starfleet Admiralty were both visible above the terminal, and their message was the same. "Quarantine, exactly," said the Secretary. "You are not authorized to use the Molecular Disruption Device."

  "Quarantine is impossible," said Lands. "We're going too rapidly. You know the battle plan I filed at the beginning of the voyage. It would take us weeks to slow down. And what about the men? It's one thing to take a relativistic voyage and then return to their home worlds. Yes, their friends and family are gone, but at least they aren't stuck off on permanent duty inside a starship! Keeping our velocity at near-relativistic speeds, I'm saving them months of their lives spent in acceleration and deceleration. You're talking about expecting them to give up years!"

  "Surely you're not saying," said the First Speaker, "that we should blow up Lusitania and wipe out the pequeninos and thousands of human beings so that your crews don't get depressed."

  "I'm saying that if you don't want us to blow up this planet, fine--but let us come home."

  "We can't do that," said the First Secretary. "The descolada is too dangerous to leave it unsupervised on a planet that has rebelled."

  "You mean you're canceling the use of the Little Doctor when nothing has been done to contain the descolada?"

  "We will send a landing team with due precautions to ascertain the exact conditions on the ground," said the First Secretary.

  "In other words, you'll send men into mortal danger from this disease with no knowledge of the situation on the ground, when the means exist to eliminate the danger without peril to any uninfected person."

  "Congress has reached the decision," said the First Speaker coldly. "We will not commit xenocide while any legitimate alternative remains. Are these orders received and understood?"

  "Yes sir," said Lands.

  "Will they be obeyed?" asked the First Speaker.

  The First Secretary looked aghast. You did not insult a flag officer by questioning whether he meant to obey orders.

  Yet the First Speaker did not withdraw the insult. "Well?"

  "Sir, I always have and always will live by my oath." With that, Lands broke the connection. He immediately turned to Causo, his X.O., the only other person present with him in the sealed communications office. "You are under arrest, sir," said Lands.

  Causo raised an eyebrow. "So you don't intend to comply with this order?"

  "Do not tell me your personal feelings on the matter," said Lands. "I know that you're of Portuguese ethnic heritage like the people of Lusitania--"

  "They're Brazilian," said the X.O.

  Lands ignored him. "I will have it on record that you were given no opportunity to speak and that you are utterly blameless in any action I might take."

  "What about your oath, sir?" asked Causo calmly.

  "My oath is to take all actions I am ordered to take in service of the best interests of humanity. I will invoke the war crimes clause."

  "They aren't ordering you to commit a war crime. They're ordering you not to."

  "On the contrary," said Lands. "To fail to destroy this world and the deadly peril on it would be a crime against humanity far worse than the crime of blowing it up." Lands drew his sidearm. "You are under arrest, sir."

  The X.O. put his hands on his head and turned his back. "Sir, you may be right and you may be wrong. But either choice could be monstrous. I don't know how you can make such a decision by yourself."

  Lands put the docility patch on the back of Causo's neck, and as the drug began feeding into his system, Lands said to him, "I had help in deciding, my friend. I asked myself, What would Ender Wiggin, the man who saved humanity from the buggers, what would he have done if suddenly, at the last minute, he had been told, This is no game, this is real. I asked myself, What if at the moment before he killed the boy Stilson or the boy Madrid in his infamous First and Second Killings, some adult had intervened and ordered him to stop. Would he have done it, knowing that the adult did not have the power to protect him later, when his enemy attacked him again? Knowing that it might well be this time or never? If the adults at Command School had said to him, We think there's a chance the buggers might not mean to destroy humanity, so don't kill them all, do you think Ender Wiggin would have obeyed? No. He would have done--he always did--exactly what was necessary to obliterate a danger and make sure it did not survive to pose a threat in the future. That is the person I consulted with. That is the person whose wisdom I will follow now."

  Causo did not answer. He just smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded.

  "Sit down and do not get up until I order you otherwise."

  Causo sat down.

  Lands switched the ansible to relay communications throughout the fleet. "The order has been given and we will proceed. I am launching the M.D. Device immediately and we will return to relativistic speeds forthwith. May God have mercy on my soul."

  A moment later, the M.D. Device separated from the Admiral's flagship and continued at just-under-relativistic speed toward Lusitania. It would take nearly an hour for it to arrive at the proximity that would automatically trigger it. If for some reason the proximity detector did not work properly, a timer would set it off just moments before its estimated time of collision.

  Lands accelerated his flagship above the threshold that cut it off from the timeframe of the rest of the universe. Then he pulled the docility patch from Causo's neck and replaced it with the antidote patch. "You may arrest me now, sir, for the mutiny that you witnessed."

  Causo shook his head. "No sir," he said. "You're not going anywhere, and the fleet is yours to command until we get home. Unless you have some stupid plan to try to escape the war crimes trial that awaits you."

  "No, sir," said Lands. "I will bear whatever penalty they impose on me. What I did has saved humankind from destruction, but I am prepared to join the humans and pequeninos of Lusitania as a necessary sacrifice to achieve that end."

  Causo saluted him, then sat back down on his chair and wept.

  15

  "WE'RE GIVING YOU A SECOND CHANCE"

  "When I was a little girl, I used to believe

  that if I could please the gods well enough,

  they would go back and do my life over,

  and this time they would not take

  my mother away from me."

  from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

  A satellite orbiting Lusitania detected the launch of the M.D. Device and the divergence of its course toward Lusitania, as the starship disappeared from the satellite's instruments. The most dreaded event was happening. There had been no attempt to communicate or negotiate. Clearly
the fleet had never intended anything but the obliteration of this world, and with it an entire sentient race. Most people had hoped, and many had expected, that there would be a chance to tell them that the descolada had been completely tamed and no longer posed a threat to anyone; that it was too late to stop anything anyway, since several dozen new colonies of humans, pequeninos, and hive queens had already been started on as many different planets. Instead there was only death hurtling toward them on a course that gave them no more than an hour to survive, and probably less, since the Little Doctor would no doubt be detonated some distance from the planet's surface.

  It was pequeninos manning all the instruments now, since all but a handful of humans had fled to the starships. So it was that a pequenino cried out the news over the ansible to the starship at the descolada planet; and by chance it was Firequencher who was at the ansible terminal to hear his report. He immediately began keening, his high voice liquid with the music of grief.

  When Miro and his sisters understood what had happened, he went at once to Jane. "They launched the Little Doctor," he said, shaking her gently.

  He waited only a few moments. Her eyes came open. "I thought we had beaten them," she whispered. "Peter and Wang-mu, I mean. Congress voted to establish a quarantine and specifically denied the fleet the authority to launch the M.D. Device. And yet still they launched."

  "You look so tired," said Miro.

  "It takes everything I have," she said. "Over and over again. And now I lose them, the mothertrees. They're a part of myself, Miro. Remember how you felt when you lost control of your body, when you were crippled and slow? That's what will happen to me when the mothertrees are gone."

  She wept.

  "Stop it," said Miro. "Stop it right now. Get control of your emotions, Jane, you don't have time for this."

  At once she freed herself from the straps that held her. "You're right," she said. "It's almost too strong to control, sometimes, this body."

  "The Little Doctor has to be close to a planet for it to have any effect on it--the field dissipates fairly quickly unless it has mass to sustain it. So we have time, Jane. Maybe an hour. Certainly more than half an hour."

  "And in that time, what do you imagine I can do?"

  "Pick the damn thing up," said Miro. "Push it Outside and don't bring it back!"

  "And if it goes off Outside?" asked Jane. "If something that destructive is echoed and repeated out there? Besides, I can't pick things up that I haven't had a chance to examine. There's no one near it, no ansible connected to it, nothing to lead me to find it in the dead of space."

  "I don't know," said Miro. "Ender would know. Damn that he's dead!"

  "Well, technically speaking," said Jane. "But Peter hasn't found his way into any of his Ender memories. If he has them."

  "What's to remember?" said Miro. "This has never happened before."

  "It's true that it is Ender's aiua. But how much of his brilliance was the aiua, and how much was his body and brain? Remember that the genetic component was strong--he was born in the first place because tests showed the original Peter and Valentine came so close to being the ideal military commander."

  "Right," said Miro. "And now he's Peter."

  "Not the real Peter," said Jane.

  "Look, it's sort of Ender and it's sort of Peter. Can you find him? Can you talk to him?"

  "When our aiuas meet, we don't talk. We sort of--what, dance around each other. It's not like Human and the Hive Queen."

  "Doesn't he still have the jewel in his ear?" asked Miro, touching his own.

  "But what can he do? He's hours distant from his starship--"

  "Jane," said Miro. "Try."

  Peter looked stricken. Wang-mu touched his arm, leaned close to him. "What's wrong?"

  "I thought we made it," he said. "When Congress voted to revoke the order to use the Little Doctor."

  "What do you mean?" said Wang-mu, though she already knew what he meant.

  "They launched it. The Lusitania Fleet disobeyed Congress. Who could have guessed? We have less than an hour before it detonates."

  Tears leapt to Wang-mu's eyes, but she blinked them away. "At least the pequeninos and the hive queens will survive."

  "But not the network of mothertrees," said Peter. "Starflight will end until Jane finds some other way to hold all that information in memory. The brothertrees are too stupid, the fathertrees have egos far too strong to share their capacity with her--they would if they could, but they can't. You think Jane hasn't explored all the possibilities? Faster-than-light flight is over."

  "Then this is our home," said Wang-mu.

  "No it isn't," said Peter.

  "We're hours away from the starship, Peter. We'll never get there before it detonates."

  "What's the starship? A box with a lightswitch and a tight-sealing door. For all we know, we don't even need the box. I'm not staying here, Wang-mu."

  "You're going back to Lusitania? Now?"

  "If Jane can take me," he said. "And if she can't, then I guess this body goes back where it came from--Outside."

  "I'm going with you," said Wang-mu.

  "I've had three thousand years of life," said Peter. "I don't actually remember them too well, but you deserve better than to disappear from the universe if Jane can't do this."

  "I'm going with you," said Wang-mu, "so shut up. There's no time to waste."

  "I don't even know what I'm going to do when I get there," said Peter.

  "Yes you do," said Wang-mu.

  "Oh? What is it I'm planning?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Well isn't that a problem? What good is this plan of mine if nobody knows it?"

  "I mean that you are who you are," said Wang-mu. "You are the same will, the same tough resourceful boy who refused to be beaten down by anything they threw at him in Battle School or Command School. The boy who wouldn't let bullies destroy him--no matter what it took to stop them. Naked with no weapons except the soap on his body, that's how Ender fought Bonzo Madrid in the bathroom at Battle School."

  "You've been doing your research."

  "Peter," said Wang-mu, "I don't expect you to be Ender, his personality, his memories, his training. But you are the one who can't be beaten down. You are the one who finds a way to destroy the enemy."

  Peter shook his head. "I'm not him, I'm truly not."

  "You told me back when we first met that you weren't yourself. Well, now you are. The whole of you, one man, intact in this body. Nothing is missing from you now. Nothing has been stolen from you, nothing is lost. Do you understand? Ender lived his life under the shadow of having caused xenocide. Now is the chance to be the opposite. To live the opposite life. To be the one who prevents it."

  Peter closed his eyes for a moment. "Jane," he said. "Can you take us without a starship?" He listened for a moment. "She says the real question is, can we hold ourselves together. It's the ship she controls and moves around, plus our aiuas--our own bodies are held together by us, not by her."

  "Well, we do that all the time anyway, so it's fine," said Wang-mu.

  "It's not fine," said Peter. "Jane says that inside the starship, we have visual clues, we have a sense of safety. Without those walls, without the light, in the deep emptiness, we can lose our place. We can forget where we are relative to our own body. We really have to hold on."

  "Does it help if we're so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?" asked Wang-mu.

  "I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes," said Peter.

  "Then let's do it. That's us in spades."

  Finding Peter's aiua was easy for Jane. She had been inside his body, she had followed his aiua--or chased it--until she knew it without searching. Wang-mu was a different case. Jane didn't know her all that well. The voyages she had taken her on before had been inside a starship whose location Jane already knew. But once she located Peter's--Ender's--aiua, it turned out to be easier than she thoug
ht. For the two of them, Peter and Wang-mu, were philotically twined. There was a tiny web in the making between them. Even without the box around them, Jane could hold onto them, both at once, as if they were one entity.

  And as she pushed them Outside she could feel how they clung all the more tightly to each other--not just the bodies, but also the invisible links of the deepest self. Outside they went together, and together they came back In. Jane felt a stab of jealousy--just as she had been jealous of Novinha, though without feeling the physical sensation of grief and rage that her body now brought to the emotion. But she knew it was absurd. It was Miro that Jane loved, as a woman loves a man. Ender was her father and her friend, and now he was barely Ender anymore. He was Peter, a man who remembered only the past few months of association with her. They were friends, but she had no claim on his heart.

  The familiar aiua of Ender Wiggin and the aiua of Si Wang-mu were even more tightly bound together than ever when Jane set them down on the surface of Lusitania.

  They stood in the midst of the starport. The last few hundred humans trying to escape were frantically trying to understand why the starships had stopped flying just when the M.D. Device was launched.

  "The starships here are all full," Peter said.

  "But we don't need a starship," said Wang-mu.

  "Yes we do," said Peter. "Jane can't pick up the Little Doctor without one."

  "Pick it up?" said Wang-mu. "Then you do have a plan."

  "Didn't you say I did?" said Peter. "I can't make a liar out of you." He spoke then to Jane through the jewel. "Are you here again? Can you talk to me through the satellites here on--all right. Good. Jane, I need you to empty one of these starships for me." He paused a moment. "Take the people to a colony world, wait for them to get out, and then bring it back over here by us, away from the crowd."

  Instantly, one of the starships disappeared from the starport. A cheer arose from the crowds as everyone rushed to get into one of the remaining ships. Peter and Wang-mu waited, waited, knowing that with every minute that it took to unload that starship on the colony world, the Little Doctor came closer to detonation.

  Then the wait was over. A boxy starship appeared beside them. Peter had the door open and both of them were inside before any of the other people at the starport even realized what was happening. A cry went up then, but Peter closed and sealed the door.