Children of the Mind Read online

  "If we're there when you die, we'll never come home again."

  "Bad luck, eh?"

  "So we're a suicide mission."

  "Life is a suicide mission, Miro. Check it out--basic philosophy course. You spend your life running out of fuel and when you're finally out, you croak."

  "You sound like Mother now," said Miro.

  "Oh, no," said Jane. "I'm taking it with good humor. Your mother always thought her doom was tragic."

  Miro was readying some retort when Val's voice interrupted his colloquy with Jane.

  "I hate it when you do that!" she cried.

  "Do what?" said Miro, wondering what she had just been saying before this outburst.

  "Tune me out and talk to her."

  "To Jane? I always talk to Jane."

  "But you used to listen to me sometimes," said Val.

  "Well, Val, you used to listen to me, too, but that's all changed now, apparently."

  Val flung herself out of her chair and stormed over to loom above him. "Is that how it is? The woman you loved was the quiet one, the shy one, the one who always let you dominate every conversation. Now that I'm excited, now that I feel like I'm really myself, well, that's not the woman you wanted, is that it?"

  "It's not about preferring quiet women or--"

  "No, we couldn't admit to anything so recidivist as that, could we! No, we have to proclaim ourselves to be perfectly virtuous and--"

  Miro rose to his feet--not easy, with her so close to his chair--and shouted right back in her face. "It's about being able to finish a sentence now and then!"

  "And how many of my sentences did you--"

  "Right, turn it right back on--"

  "You wanted to have me dispossessed from my own life and put somebody else in--"

  "Oh, is that what this is about? Well, be relieved, Val, Jane says--"

  "Jane says, Jane says! You said you loved me, but no woman can compete with some bitch that's always there in your ear, hanging on every word you say and--"

  "Now you sound like my mother!" shouted Miro. "Nossa Senhora, I don't know why Ender followed her into the monastery, she was always griping about how he loved Jane more than he loved her--"

  "Well at least he tried to love a woman more than that overgrown appointment book!"

  They stood there, face-to-face--or almost so, Miro being somewhat taller, but with his knees bent because he hadn't quite been able to get all the way out of his chair because she was standing so close and now with her breath in his face, the warmth of her body just a few centimeters away, he thought, This is the moment when . . .

  And then he said it aloud before he had even finished forming the thought, "This is the moment in all the videos when the couple that were screaming at each other suddenly look into each other's eyes and embrace each other and laugh at their anger and then kiss each other."

  "Yeah, well, that's the videos," said Val. "If you lay a hand on me I'll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it'll take a heart surgeon to get them out."

  She whirled around and returned to her chair.

  Miro eased himself back into his own seat and said--out loud this time, but softly enough that Val would know he wasn't talking to her--"Now, Jane, where were we before the tornado struck."

  Jane's answer was drawled out slowly; Miro recognized it as a mannerism of Ender's when he was being ironically subtle. "You can see now why I might have problems getting the use of any part of her body."

  "Yeah, well, I'm having the same problem," said Miro silently, but he laughed aloud, a little chuckle that he knew would drive Val crazy. And from the way she stiffened but did not respond at all he knew that it was working.

  "I don't need you two fighting," said Jane mildly. "I need you working together. Because you may have to work this out without me."

  "As far as I can tell," said Miro, "you and Val have been working things out without me."

  "Val has been working things out because she's so full of . . . whatever she's full of right now."

  "Ender is what she's full of," said Miro.

  Val turned around in her chair and looked at him. "Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?"

  "Ender is dying," said Miro. "Or did you already know?"

  "Jane mentioned he seemed to be inattentive."

  "Dying," said Miro again.

  "I think it speaks very clearly about the nature of men," said Val, "that you and Ender both claim to love a flesh-and-blood woman, but in fact you can't give that woman even a serious fraction of your attention."

  "Yes, well, you have my whole attention, Val," said Miro. "And as for Ender, if he's not paying attention to Mother it's because he's paying attention to you."

  "To my work, you mean. To the task at hand. Not to me."

  "Well, that's all you've been paying attention to, except when you took a break to rip on me about how I'm talking to Jane and not listening to you."

  "That's right," said Val. "You think I don't see what's been going on with me this past day? How all of a sudden I can't shut up about things, I'm so intense I can't sleep, how I--Ender's supposedly been the real me all along, only he left me alone till now and that was fine because what he's doing now is terrifying. Don't you see that I'm frightened? It's too much. It's more than I can stand. I can't hold that much energy inside me."

  "So talk about it instead of screaming at me," said Miro.

  "But you weren't listening. I was trying to and you were just subvocalizing to Jane and shutting me out."

  "Because I was sick of hearing endless streams of data and analysis that I could just as easily catch in summary on the computer. How was I supposed to know that you'd take a break in your monologue and start talking about something human?"

  "Everything's bigger than life right now and I don't have any experience with this. In case you forgot, I haven't been alive very long. I don't know things. There are a lot of things I don't know. I don't know why I care so much about you, for instance. You're the one trying to get me replaced as landlord of this body. You're the one who tunes me out or takes me over but I don't want that, Miro. I really need a friend right now."

  "So do I," said Miro.

  "But I don't know how to do it," said Val.

  "I, on the other hand, know perfectly well how to do it," said Miro. "But the only other time it happened, I fell in love with her and then she turned out to be my half-sister because her father was secretly my mother's lover, and the man I had thought was my father turned out to be sterile because he was dying of some internally rotting disease. So you can see how I might be hesitant."

  "Valentine was your friend. She is still."

  "Yes," said Miro. "Yes, I was forgetting. I've had two friends."

  "And Ender," said Val.

  "Three," said Miro. "And my sister Ela makes four. And Human was my friend, so it's five."

  "See? I think that makes you qualified to show me how to have a friend."

  "To make a friend," said Miro, echoing his mother's intonations, "you have to be one."

  "Miro," said Val. "I'm scared."

  "Of what?"

  "Of this world we're looking for, what we'll find there. Of what's going to happen to me if Ender dies. Or if Jane takes over as my--what, my inner light, my puppeteer. Of what it will feel like if you don't like me anymore."

  "What if I promise to like you no matter what?"

  "You can't make a promise like that."

  "Okay, if I wake up to find you strangling me or smothering me, then I'll stop liking you."

  "What about drowning?"

  "No, I can't open my eyes under water, so I'd never know it was you."

  They both laughed.

  "This is the time in the videos," said Val, "when the hero and the
heroine laugh and then hold each other."

  Jane's voice interrupted from both their computer terminals. "Sorry to break up a tender moment, but we've got a new world here and there are electromagnetic messages being relayed between the planet surface and orbiting artificial objects."

  Immediately they both turned to their terminals and looked at the data Jane was throwing at them.

  "It doesn't take any close analysis," said Val. "This one is hopping with technology. If it isn't the descolada planet, I'm betting they know where it is."

  "What I'm worried about is, have they detected us and what are they going to do about it? If they've got the technology to put things in space, they might have the technology to shoot things out of space, too."

  "I'm watching for incoming objects," said Jane.

  "Let's see," said Val, "if any of these EM-waves are carrying anything that looks like language."

  "Datastreams," said Jane. "I'm analyzing it for binary patterns. But you know that decoding computerized language requires three or four levels of decoding instead of the normal two and it isn't easy."

  "I thought binary was simpler than spoken languages," said Miro.

  "It is, when it's programs and numerical data," said Jane. "But what if it's digitized visuals? How long is a line if it's a rasterized display? How much of a transmission is header material? How much is error-correction data? How much of it is a binary representation of a written representation of a spoken language? What if it's further encrypted beyond that, to avoid interception? I have no idea what machine is producing the code and no idea what machine is receiving it. So using most of my capacity to work on the problem I'm having a very hard time except that this one--"

  A diagram appeared on the front page of the display.

  "--I think this one is a representation of a genetic molecule."

  "A genetic molecule?"

  "Similar to the descolada," said Jane. "That is, similar in the way it's different from Earth and native Lusitanian genetic molecules. Do you think this is a plausible decoding of this?"

  A mass of binary digits flashed into the air above their terminals. In a moment it resolved itself into hexadecimal notation. Then into a rasterized image that resembled static interference more than any kind of coherent picture.

  "It doesn't scan well this way. But as a set of vector instructions, I find that it consistently gives me results like this."

  And now picture after picture of genetic molecules appeared on the screen.

  "Why would anyone be transmitting genetic information?" said Val.

  "Maybe it's a kind of language," said Miro.

  "Who could read a language like that?" asked Val.

  "Maybe the kind of people who could create the descolada," said Miro.

  "You mean they talk by manipulating genes?" said Val.

  "Maybe they smell genes," said Miro. "Only they do it with incredible articulation. Subtlety and shade of meaning. Then when they started sending people up into space, they had to talk to them so they sent pictures and then from the pictures they reconstruct the message and, um, smell it."

  "That's the most ass-backwards explanation I've ever heard," said Val.

  "Well," said Miro, "like you said, you haven't lived very long. There are a lot of ass-backwards explanations in the world, and I doubt I hit the jackpot with that one."

  "It's probably an experiment they're doing, sending data back and forth," said Val. "Not all the communications make up diagrams do they, Jane?"

  "Oh, no, I'm sorry if I gave that impression. This was just a small class of data streams that I was able to decode in a meaningful way. There's this stuff that seems to me to be analog rather than digital, and if I make it into sound it's like this."

  They heard the computers emit a series of staticky screeches and yips.

  "Or if I translate it into bursts of light, it looks like this."

  Whereupon their terminals danced with light, pulsing and shifting colors seemingly randomly.

  "Who knows what an alien language looks or sounds like?" said Jane.

  "I can see this is going to be difficult," said Miro.

  "They do have some pretty good math skills," said Jane. "The math stuff is easy to catch and I see some glimpses that imply they work at a high level."

  "Just an idle question, Jane. If you weren't with us, how long would it have taken us to analyze the data and get the results you've gotten so far? If we were using just the ship's computers?"

  "Well, if you had to program them for every--"

  "No, no, just assuming they had good software," said Miro.

  "Somewhere upwards of seven human generations," said Jane.

  "Seven generations?"

  "Of course, you'd never try to do it with just two untrained people and two computers without any useful programs," said Jane. "You'd put hundreds of people on the project and then it would only take you a few years."

  "And you expect us to carry on this work when they pull the plug on you?"

  "I'm hoping to finish the translation problem before I'm toast," said Jane. "So shut up and let me concentrate for a minute."

  Grace Drinker was too busy to see Wang-mu and Peter. Well, actually she did see them, as she shambled from one room to another of her house of sticks and mats. She even waved. But her son went right on explaining how she wasn't here right now but she would be back later if they wanted to wait, and as long as they were waiting, why not have dinner with the family? It was hard even to be annoyed when the lie was so obvious and the hospitality so generous.

  Dinner went a long way toward explaining why Samoans tended to be so large in every dimension. They had to evolve such great size because smaller Samoans must simply have exploded after lunch. They could never have handled dinners. The fruit, the fish, the taro, the sweet potatoes, the fish again, more fruit--Peter and Wang-mu had thought they were well fed in the resort, but now they realized that the hotel chef was a second-rater compared to what went on in Grace Drinker's house.

  She had a husband, a man of astonishing appetite and heartiness who laughed whenever he wasn't chewing or talking, and sometimes even then. He seemed to get a kick out of telling these papalagi visitors what different names meant. "My wife's name, now, it really means, 'Protector of Drunken People.' "

  "It does not," said his son. "It means 'One Who Puts Things in Proper Order.' "

  "For drinking!" cried the father.

  "The last name has nothing to do with the first name." The son was getting annoyed now. "Not everything has a deep meaning."

  "Children are so easily embarrassed," said the father. "Ashamed. Must put the best face on everything. The holy island, its name is really 'Ata Atua, which means, 'Laugh, God!'"

  "Then it would be pronounced 'Atatua instead of Atatua," the son corrected again. "Shadow of the God, that's what the name really means, if it means anything besides just the holy island."

  "My son is a literalist," said the father. "Everything so serious. Can't hear a joke when God shouts it in his ear."

  "It's you always shouting jokes in my ear, Father," said the son with a smile. "How could I possibly hear the jokes of the God?"

  This was the only time the father didn't laugh. "My son has a dead ear for humor. He thought that was a joke."

  Wang-mu looked at Peter, who was smiling as if he understood what was so funny with these people all the time. She wondered if he had even noticed that no one had introduced these males, except by their relationship to Grace Drinker. Had they no names?

  Never mind, the food is good, and even if you don't get Samoan humor, their laughter and good spirits were so contagious that it was impossible not to feel happy and at ease in their company.

  "Do you think we have enough?" asked the father, when his daughter brought in the last fish, a large pink-fleshed sea creature garnished with something that glistened--Wang-mu's first thought was a sugar glaze, but who would do that to a fish?

  At once his children answered him, as if
it were a ritual in the family: "Ua lava!"

  The name of a philosophy? Or just Samoan slang for "enough already"? Or both at once?

  Only when the last fish was half eaten did Grace Drinker herself come in, making no apology for not having spoken to them when she passed them more than two hours before. A breeze off the sea was cooling down the open-walled room, and, outside, light rain fell in fits and starts as the sun kept trying and failing to sink into the water to the west. Grace sat at the low table, directly between Peter and Wang-mu, who had thought they were sitting next to each other with no room for another person, especially not a person of such ample surface area as Grace. But somehow there was room, if not when she began to sit, then certainly by the time she finished the process, and once her greetings were done, she managed what the family had not--she polished off the last fish and ended up licking her fingers and laughing just as maniacally as her husband at all the jokes he told.

  And then, suddenly, Grace leaned over to Wang-mu and said, quite seriously, "All right, Chinese girl, what's your scam?"

  "Scam?" asked Wang-mu.

  "You mean I have to get the confession from the white boy? They train these boys to lie, you know. If you're white they don't let you grow up to adulthood if you haven't mastered the art of pretending to say one thing while actually intending to do another."

  Peter was appalled.

  Suddenly the whole family erupted in laughter. "Bad hospitality!" cried Grace's husband. "Did you see their faces? They thought she meant it!"

  "But I do mean it," said Grace. "You both intend to lie to me. Arrived on a starship yesterday? From Moskva?" Suddenly she burst into what sounded like pretty convincing Russian, perhaps of the dialect spoken on Moskva.

  Wang-mu had no idea how to respond. But she didn't have to. Peter was the one with Jane in his ear, and he immediately answered her, "I hope to learn Samoan while I'm assigned here on Pacifica. I won't accomplish that by babbling in Russian, however you might try to goad me with cruel references to my countrymen's amorous proclivities and lack of pulchritude."