Xenocide Read online

  XENOCIDE

  TOR BOOKS BY ORSON SCOTT CARD

  ENDER

  Ender's Game

  Speaker for the Dead

  Xenocide

  Children of the Mind

  Ender's Shadow

  Shadow of the Hegemon

  Shadow Puppets

  First Meetings

  Eye for Eye

  The Folk of the Fringe

  Future on Fire

  Future on Ice

  Hart's Hope

  Lovelock (with Kathryn Kidd) Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

  Maps in a Mirror:

  The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

  Saints

  Songmaster

  The Worthing Saga

  Wyrms

  THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER

  Seventh Son

  Red Prophet

  Prentice Alvin

  Alvin Journeyman

  Heartfire

  The Crystal City

  HOMECOMING

  The Memory of Earth

  The Call of Earth

  The Ships of Earth

  Earthfall

  Earthborn

  WOMEN OF GENISIS

  Sarah

  Rebekah

  SHORT FICTION

  Maps in a Mirror, Volume 1: The Changed Man (paperback) Maps in a Mirror, Volume 2: Flux (paperback) Maps in a Mirror, Volume 3: Cruel Miracles (paperback) Maps in a Mirror, Volume 4: Monkey Sonatas (paperback)

  XENOCIDE

  Orson Scott Card

  A TOM DOHERTY

  ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  XENOCIDE

  Copyright (c) 1991 by Orson Scott Card All rights reserved.

  Several chapters of this book appeared first in Analog magazine as the novella "Gloriously Bright."

  Quotations from Li Qing-jao are from James Cryer, trans., Plum Blossom: Poems of Li Ch'ing-Chao (Carolina Wren Press, 1984), by permission of the translator.

  Quotations from Han Fei-tzu are from Burton Watson, trans., Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings (Columbia University Press, 1964), by permission of the publisher.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor(r) is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Card, Orson Scott.

  Xenocide / Orson Scott Card.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Ender's game.

  "A Tom Doherty Associates book."

  ISBN 0-312-86187-7 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-312-86187-2

  I. Title.

  PS3553.A655X46 1991

  813'.54--dc20

  90-27108

  CIP

  To Clark and Kathy Kidd:

  for the freedom, for the haven,

  and for frolics all over America.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Pronunciation

  1. A Parting

  2. A Meeting

  3. Clean Hands

  4. Jane

  5. The Lusitania Fleet

  6. Varelse

  7. Secret Maid

  8. Miracles

  9. Pinehead

  10. Martyr

  11. The Jade of Master Ho

  12. Grego's War

  13. Free Will

  14. Virus Makers

  15. Life and Death

  16. Voyage

  17. Ender's Children

  18. The God of Path

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A chance meeting with James Cryer in the Second Foundation Bookstore in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, led directly to the story of Li Qing-jao and Han Fei-tzu at the heart of this book. Learning that he was a translator of Chinese poetry, I asked him on the spot if he could give me a few plausible names for some Chinese characters I was developing. My knowledge of Chinese culture was rudimentary at best, and my idea for these characters was for them to play a fairly minor, though meaningful, role in the story of Xenocide. But as James Cryer, one of the most vigorous, fascinating, and generous people I have known, told me more and more about Li Qing-jao and Han Fei-tzu--as he showed me their writings and told me more stories about other figures in Chinese history and literature--I began to realize that here was the real foundation of the tale I wanted this book to tell. I owe him much, and regret that I have passed up my best opportunities to repay.

  I also give my thanks to many others: To Judith Rapaport, for her book The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing, which was the source of the information about obsessive-compulsive disorder in this novel. To my agent Barbara Bova, who called this book into existence by selling it in England before I had ever thought of writing it. To my American publisher Tom Doherty, for extraordinary faith and generosity that I hope will all be justified in the end. To Jim Frenkel, the editor who wisely turned down the first outline of this book when I offered it to Dell back in 1978, telling me--correctly--that I wasn't ready yet to write such an ambitious novel. To my British publisher, Anthony Cheetham, who has believed in my work from the start of my career, and has patiently waited for this book far longer than either of us bargained for. To my editor Beth Meacham, for being a friend, adviser, and protector through the preparation of this and many other books. To the many readers who have written to me urging me to return to Ender's story; their encouragement helped a great deal as I struggled through the most difficult writing project of my career so far. To Fred Chappell's graduate writing workshop at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, for looking over and responding to the first draft of the Qing-jao storyline. To Stan Schmidt at Analog, for being willing to publish such an extraordinarily long portion of the novel as the story "Gloriously Bright." To my assistants, Laraine Moon, Erin Absher, and Willard and Peggy Card, who, serving well in such completely different ways, gave me the freedom and help that I needed in order to write at all. To friends like Jeff Alton and Philip Absher, for reading early drafts to help me ensure that this hodgepodge of characters and storylines actually did make sense. And to my children, Geoffrey, Emily, and Charlie, for being patient with me through the crabbiness and neglect that always seem to accompany my bursts of writing, and for letting me borrow from their lives and experiences as I create the characters I love the most.

  Above all, I give my thanks to my wife, Kristine, who has suffered through every arduous step in the creation of this book, raising questions, catching errors and contradictions, and--most important--responding so favorably to those aspects of the story that worked well that I found in her the confidence to go on. I have no idea who I would be, as a writer or as a person, without her; I intend never to have occasion to find out.

  PRONUNCIATION

  A few names may seem strange to English-speaking readers. From Chinese, Qing-jao is pronounced "tching jow"; Jiang-qing is "jee-eng tching." From Portuguese, Quim is pronounced "keeng"; Novinha is "no-VEEN-ya"; Olhado is "ol-YAH-doe." From Swedish, Jakt is "yahkt."

  Other names are either easier to pronounce as written, or repeated rarely enough that they shouldn't cause difficulty.

  XENOCIDE

  1

  A PARTING

 

 

 

 

  Han Fei-tzu sat in lotus position on the ba
re wooden floor beside his wife's sickbed. Until a moment ago he might have been sleeping; he wasn't sure. But now he was aware of the slight change in her breathing, a change as subtle as the wind from a butterfly's passing.

  Jiang-qing, for her part, must also have detected some change in him, for she had not spoken before and now she did speak. Her voice was very soft. But Han Fei-tzu could hear her clearly, for the house was silent. He had asked his friends and servants for stillness during the dusk of Jiang-qing's life. Time enough for careless noise during the long night that was to come, when there would be no hushed words from her lips.

  "Still not dead," she said. She had greeted him with these words each time she woke during the past few days. At first the words had seemed whimsical or ironic to him, but now he knew that she spoke with disappointment. She longed for death now, not because she hadn't loved life, but because death was now unavoidable, and what cannot be shunned must be embraced. That was the Path. Jiang-qing had never taken a step away from the Path in her life.

  "Then the gods are kind to me," said Han Fei-tzu.

  "To you," she breathed. "What do we contemplate?"

  It was her way of asking him to share his private thoughts with her. When others asked his private thoughts, he felt spied upon. But Jiang-qing asked only so that she could also think the same thought; it was part of their having become a single soul.

  "We are contemplating the nature of desire," said Han Fei-tzu.

  "Whose desire?" she asked. "And for what?"

  My desire for your bones to heal and become strong, so that they don't snap at the slightest pressure. So that you could stand again, or even raise an arm without your own muscles tearing away chunks of bone or causing the bone to break under the tension. So that I wouldn't have to watch you wither away until now you weigh only eighteen kilograms. I never knew how perfectly happy we were until I learned that we could not stay together.

  "My desire," he answered. "For you."

  " 'You only covet what you do not have.' Who said that?"

  "You did," said Han Fei-tzu. "Some say, 'what you cannot have.' Others say, 'what you should not have.' I say, 'You can truly covet only what you will always hunger for.'"

  "You have me forever."

  "I will lose you tonight. Or tomorrow. Or next week."

  "Let us contemplate the nature of desire," said Jiang-qing. As before, she was using philosophy to pull him out of his brooding melancholy.

  He resisted her, but only playfully. "You are a harsh ruler," said Han Fei-tzu. "Like your ancestor-of-the-heart, you make no allowance for other people's frailty." Jiang-qing was named for a revolutionary leader of the ancient past, who had tried to lead the people onto a new Path but was overthrown by weak-hearted cowards. It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.

  Jiang-qing refused to let him return to brooding. "When a man's wife is dead, what does he long for?"

  Rebelliously, Han Fei-tzu gave her the most false answer to her question. "To lie with her," he said.

  "The desire of the body," said Jiang-qing.

  Since she was determined to have this conversation, Han Fei-tzu took up the catalogue for her. "The desire of the body is to act. It includes all touches, casual and intimate, and all customary movements. Thus he sees a movement out of the corner of his eye, and thinks he has seen his dead wife moving across the doorway, and he cannot be content until he has walked to the door and seen that it was not his wife. Thus he wakes up from a dream in which he heard her voice, and finds himself speaking his answer aloud as if she could hear him."

  "What else?" asked Jiang-qing.

  "I'm tired of philosophy," said Han Fei-tzu. "Maybe the Greeks found comfort in it, but not me."

  "The desire of the spirit," said Jiang-qing, insisting.

  "Because the spirit is of the earth, it is that part which makes new things out of old ones. The husband longs for all the unfinished things that he and his wife were making when she died, and all the unstarted dreams of what they would have made if she had lived. Thus a man grows angry at his children for being too much like him and not enough like his dead wife. Thus a man hates the house they lived in together, because either he does not change it, so that it is as dead as his wife, or because he does change it, so that it is no longer half of her making."

  "You don't have to be angry at our little Qing-jao," said Jiang-qing.

  "Why?" asked Han Fei-tzu. "Will you stay, then, and help me teach her to be a woman? All I can teach her is to be what I am--cold and hard, sharp and strong, like obsidian. If she grows like that, while she looks so much like you, how can I help but be angry?"

  "Because you can teach her everything that I am, too," said Jiang-qing.

  "If I had any part of you in me," said Han Fei-tzu, "I would not have needed to marry you to become a complete person." Now he teased her by using philosophy to turn the conversation away from pain. "That is the desire of the soul. Because the soul is made of light and dwells in air, it is that part which conceives and keeps ideas, especially the idea of the self. The husband longs for his whole self, which was made of the husband and wife together. Thus he never believes any of his own thoughts, because there is always a question in his mind to which his wife's thoughts were the only possible answer. Thus the whole world seems dead to him because he cannot trust anything to keep its meaning before the onslaught of this unanswerable question."

  "Very deep," said Jiang-qing.

  "If I were Japanese I would commit seppuku, spilling my bowel into the jar of your ashes."

  "Very wet and messy," she said.

  He smiled. "Then I should be an ancient Hindu, and burn myself on your pyre."

  But she was through with joking. "Qing-jao," she whispered. She was reminding him he could do nothing so flamboyant as to die with her. There was little Qing-jao to care for.

  So Han Fei-tzu answered her seriously. "How can I teach her to be what you are?"

  "All that is good in me," said Jiang-qing, "comes from the Path. If you teach her to obey the gods, honor the ancestors, love the people, and serve the rulers, I will be in her as much as you are."

  "I would teach her the Path as part of myself," said Han Fei-tzu.

  "Not so," said Jiang-qing. "The Path is not a natural part of you, my husband. Even with the gods speaking to you every day, you insist on believing in a world where everything can be explained by natural causes."

  "I obey the gods." He thought, bitterly, that he had no choice; that even to delay obedience was torture.

  "But you don't know them. You don't love their works."

  "The Path is to love the people. The gods we only obey." How can I love gods who humiliate me and torment me at every opportunity?

  "We love the people because they are creatures of the gods."

  "Don't preach to me."

  She sighed.

  Her sadness stung him like a spider. "I wish you would preach to me forever," said Han Fei-tzu.

  "You married me because you knew I loved the gods, and that love for them was completely missing from yourself. That was how I completed you."

  How could he argue with her, when he knew that even now he hated the gods for everything they had ever done to him, everything they had ever made him do, everything they had stolen from him in his life.

  "Promise me," said Jiang-qing.

  He knew what these words meant. She felt death upon her; she was laying the burden of her life upon him. A burden he would gladly bear. It was losing her company on the Path that he had dreaded for so long.

  "Promise that you will teach Qing-jao to love the gods and walk always on the Path. Promise that you will make her as much my daughter as yours."

  "Even if she never hears the voice of the gods?"

  "Th
e Path is for everyone, not just the godspoken."

  Perhaps, thought Han Fei-tzu, but it was much easier for the godspoken to follow the Path, because to them the price for straying from it was so terrible. The common people were free; they could leave the Path and not feel the pain of it for years. The godspoken couldn't leave the Path for an hour.

  "Promise me."

  I will. I promise.

  But he couldn't say the words out loud. He did not know why, but his reluctance was deep.

  In the silence, as she waited for his vow, they heard the sound of running feet on the gravel outside the front door of the house. It could only be Qing-jao, home from the garden of Sun Cao-pi. Only Qing-jao was allowed to run and make noise during this time of hush. They waited, knowing that she would come straight to her mother's room.

  The door slid open almost noiselessly. Even Qing-jao had caught enough of the hush to walk softly when she was actually in the presence of her mother. Though she walked on tiptoe, she could hardly keep from dancing, almost galloping across the floor. But she did not fling her arms around her mother's neck; she remembered that lesson even though the terrible bruise had faded from Jiang-qing's face, where Qing-jao's eager embrace had broken her jaw three months ago.

  "I counted twenty-three white carp in the garden stream," said Qing-jao.

  "So many," said Jiang-qing.

  "I think they were showing themselves to me," said Qing-jao. "So I could count them. None of them wanted to be left out."

  "Love you," whispered Jiang-qing.

  Han Fei-tzu heard a new sound in her breathy voice--a popping sound, like bubbles bursting with her words.

  "Do you think that seeing so many carp means that I will be godspoken?" asked Qing-jao.

  "I will ask the gods to speak to you," said Jiang-qing.

  Suddenly Jiang-qing's breathing became quick and harsh. Han Fei-tzu immediately knelt and looked at his wife. Her eyes were wide and frightened. The moment had come.

  Her lips moved. Promise me, she said, though her breath could make no sound but gasping.

  "I promise," said Han Fei-tzu.

  Then her breathing stopped.

  "What do the gods say when they talk to you?" asked Qing-jao.

  "Your mother is very tired," said Han Fei-tzu. "You should go out now."

  "But she didn't answer me. What do the gods say?"