Xenocide Read online

  "But you're able to contemplate the possibility that destroying them may be morally necessary."

  "Don't twist my words."

  "I'm untwisting them," said Valentine. "You can contemplate losing them, because they're already lost to you. Losing Jane, though--"

  "Because she's my friend, does that mean I can't plead for her? Can life-and-death decisions only be made by strangers?"

  Jakt's voice, quiet and deep, interrupted the argument. "Calm down, both of you. It isn't your decision. It's Jane's. She has the right to determine the value of her own life. I'm no philosopher, but I know that."

  "Well said," Valentine answered.

  Miro knew that Jakt was right, that it was Jane's choice. But he couldn't bear that, because he also knew what she would decide. Leaving the choice up to Jane was identical to asking her to do it. And yet, in the end, the choice would be up to her anyway. He didn't even have to ask her what she would decide. Time passed so quickly for her, especially since they were already traveling at near-lightspeed, that she had probably decided already.

  It was too much to bear. To lose Jane now would be unbearable; just thinking of it threatened Miro's composure. He didn't want to show such weakness in front of these people. Good people, they were good people, but he didn't want them to see him lose control of himself. So Miro leaned forward, found his balance, and precariously lifted himself from his seat. It was hard, since only a few of his muscles responded to his will, and it took all his concentration just to walk from the bridge to his compartment. No one followed him or even spoke to him. He was glad of that.

  Alone in his room, he lay down on his bunk and called to her. But not aloud. He subvocalized, because that was his custom when he talked to her. Even though the others on this ship now knew of her existence, he had no intention of losing the habits that had kept her concealed till now.

  "Jane," he said silently.

  "Yes," said the voice in his ear. He imagined, as always, that her soft voice came from a woman just out of sight, but close, very close. He shut his eyes, so he could imagine her better. Her breath on his cheek. Her hair dangling over his face as she spoke to him softly, as he answered in silence.

  "Talk to Ender before you decide," he said.

  "I already did. Just now, while you were thinking about this."

  "What did he say?"

  "To do nothing. To decide nothing, until the order is actually sent."

  "That's right. Maybe they won't do it."

  "Maybe. Maybe a new group with different policies will come into power. Maybe this group will change its mind. Maybe Valentine's propaganda will succeed. Maybe there'll be a mutiny on the fleet."

  This last was so unlikely that Miro realized Jane absolutely believed that the order would be sent.

  "How soon?" asked Miro.

  "The fleet should arrive in about fifteen years. A year or less after these two ships get there. That's how I timed your voyage. The order will be sent sometime before. Maybe six months before arrival--which would be about eight hours ship's time before the fleet drops out of lightspeed and staggers down to normal speeds."

  "Don't do it," said Miro.

  "I haven't decided."

  "Yes you have. You've decided to do it."

  She said nothing.

  "Don't leave me," he said.

  "I don't leave my friends if I don't have to," she said. "Some people do, but I don't."

  "Just don't," he said again. He was crying. Could she see that, sense it somehow through the jewel in his ear?

  "I'll try."

  "Find another way. Find another way to stop them. Find some way to put yourself outside the philotic net so they can't kill you."

  "That's what Ender said."

  "Then do it!"

  "I can search for such a way, but who knows if it exists?"

  "It has to."

  "This is why I wonder sometimes whether I'm alive or not. You living creatures, you think that because you want something very much, it has to happen. That wishing something with all your heart will make it so."

  "How can you search for something if you don't believe that it exists?"

  "Either I search or I don't," said Jane. "I don't get distracted or bored like humans do. I'll try to think of something else."

  "Think of this, too," said Miro. "Think of who you are. Of how your mind works. You can't possibly find a way of saving your life until you understand how you came to life in the first place. And once you understand yourself--"

  "Then maybe I can make a copy and store it somewhere."

  "Maybe."

  "Maybe," she echoed.

  But he knew she didn't believe it, and neither did he. She existed in the philotic network of the ansibles; she could store her memories in the network of computers on every world and every ship in space, but there was nowhere that she could put her self, not if it required a network of philotic links.

  Unless.

  "What about the fathertrees on Lusitania? They communicate philotically, don't they?"

  "It's not the same thing," said Jane. "It isn't digital. It isn't coded the way the ansibles are."

  "It may not be digital, but the information gets transferred somehow. It works philotically. And the hive queen, too--she communicates with the buggers that way."

  "No chance of that," said Jane. "The structure's too simple. Her communication with them isn't a network. They're all connected only to her."

  "How do you know it won't work, when you don't even know for sure how you function?"

  "All right. I'll think about it."

  "Think hard," he said.

  "I only know one way to think," said Jane.

  "I mean, pay attention to it."

  She could follow many trains of thought at once, but her thoughts were prioritized, with many different levels of attention. Miro didn't want her relegating her self-investigation to some low order of attention.

  "I'll pay attention," she said.

  "Then you'll think of something," he said. "You will."

  She didn't answer for a while. He thought this meant that the conversation was over. His thoughts began to wander. To try to imagine what life would be like, still in this body, only without Jane. It could happen before he even arrived on Lusitania. And if it did, this voyage would have been the most terrible mistake of his life. By traveling at lightspeed, he was skipping thirty years of realtime. Thirty years that might have been spent with Jane. He might be able to deal with losing her then. But losing her now, only a few weeks into knowing her--he knew that his tears arose from self-pity, but he shed them all the same.

  "Miro," she said.

  "What?" he asked.

  "How can I think of something that's never been thought of before?"

  For a moment he didn't understand.

  "Miro, how can I figure out something that isn't just the logical conclusion of things that human beings have already figured out and written somewhere?"

  "You think of things all the time," said Miro.

  "I'm trying to conceive of something inconceivable. I'm trying to find answers to questions that human beings have never even tried to ask."

  "Can't you do that?"

  "If I can't think original thoughts, does that mean that I'm nothing but a computer program that got out of hand?"

  "Hell, Jane, most people never have an original thought in their lives." He laughed softly. "Does that mean they're just ground-dwelling apes that got out of hand?"

  "You were crying," she said.

  "Yes."

  "You don't think I can think of a way out of this. You think I'm going to die."

  "I believe you can think of a way. I really do. But that doesn't stop me from being afraid."

  "Afraid that I'll die."

  "Afraid that I'll lose you."

  "Would that be so terrible? To lose me?"

  "Oh God," he whispered.

  "Would you miss me for an hour?" she insisted. "For a day? For a year?"

 
; What did she want from him? Assurance that when she was gone she'd be remembered? That someone would yearn for her? Why would she doubt that? Didn't she know him yet?

  Maybe she was human enough that she simply needed reassurance of things she already knew.

  "Forever," he said.

  It was her turn to laugh. Playfully. "You won't live that long," she said.

  "Now you tell me," he said.

  This time when she fell silent, she didn't come back, and Miro was left alone with his thoughts.

  Valentine, Jakt, and Plikt had remained together on the bridge, talking through the things they had learned, trying to decide what they might mean, what might happen. The only conclusion they reached was that while the future couldn't be known, it would probably be a good deal better than their worst fears and nowhere near as good as their best hopes. Wasn't that how the world always worked?

  "Yes," said Plikt. "Except for the exceptions."

  That was Plikt's way. Except when she was teaching, she said little, but when she did speak, it had a way of ending the conversation. Plikt got up to leave the bridge, headed for her miserably uncomfortable bed; as usual, Valentine tried to persuade her to go back to the other starship.

  "Varsam and Ro don't want me in their room," said Plikt.

  "They don't mind a bit."

  "Valentine," said Jakt, "Plikt doesn't want to go back to the other ship because she doesn't want to miss anything."

  "Oh," said Valentine.

  Plikt grinned. "Good night."

  Soon after, Jakt also left the bridge. His hand rested on Valentine's shoulder for a moment as he left. "I'll be there soon," she said. And she meant it at the moment, meant to follow him almost at once. Instead she remained on the bridge, thinking, brooding, trying to make sense of a universe that would put all the nonhuman species ever known to man at risk of extinction, all at once. The hive queen, the pequeninos, and now Jane, the only one of her kind, perhaps the only one that ever could exist. A veritable profusion of intelligent life, and yet known only to a few. And all of them in line to be snuffed out.

  At least Ender will realize at last that this is the natural order of things, that he might not be as responsible for the destruction of the buggers three thousand years ago as he had always thought. Xenocide must be built into the universe. No mercy, not even for the greatest players in the game.

  How could she have ever thought otherwise? Why should intelligent species be immune to the threat of extinction that looms over every species that ever came to be?

  It must have been an hour after Jakt left the bridge before Valentine finally turned off her terminal and stood up to go to bed. On a whim, though, she paused before leaving and spoke into the air. "Jane?" she said. "Jane?"

  No answer.

  There was no reason for her to expect one. It was Miro who wore the jewel in his ear. Miro and Ender both. How many people did she think Jane could monitor at one time? Maybe two was the most she could handle.

  Or maybe two thousand. Or two million. What did Valentine know of the limitations of a being who existed as a phantom in the philotic web? Even if Jane heard her, Valentine had no right to expect that she would answer her call.

  Valentine stopped in the corridor, directly between Miro's door and the door to the room she shared with Jakt. The doors were not soundproof. She could hear Jakt's soft snoring inside their compartment. She also heard another sound. Miro's breath. He wasn't sleeping. He might be crying. She hadn't raised three children without being able to recognize that ragged, heavy breathing.

  He's not my child. I shouldn't meddle.

  She pushed open the door; it was noiseless, but it cast a shaft of light across the bed. Miro's crying stopped immediately, but he looked at her through swollen eyes.

  "What do you want?" he said.

  She stepped into the room and sat on the floor beside his bunk, so their faces were only a few inches apart. "You've never cried for yourself, have you?" she said.

  "A few times."

  "But tonight you're crying for her."

  "Myself as much as her."

  Valentine leaned closer, put her arm around him, pulled his head onto her shoulder.

  "No," he said. But he didn't pull away. And after a few moments, his arm swung awkwardly around to embrace her. He didn't cry anymore, but he did let her hold him for a minute or two. Maybe it helped. Valentine had no way of knowing.

  Then he was done. He pulled away, rolled onto his back. "I'm sorry," he said.

  "You're welcome," she said. She believed in answering what people meant, not what they said.

  "Don't tell Jakt," he whispered.

  "Nothing to tell," she said. "We had a good talk."

  She got up and left, closing his door behind her. He was a good boy. She liked the fact that he could admit caring what Jakt thought about him. And what did it matter if his tears tonight had self-pity in them? She had shed a few like that herself. Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

  5

  THE LUSITANIA FLEET

 

 

 

 

  Qing-jao was no longer the little girl whose hands had bled in secret. Her life had been transformed from the moment she was proved to be godspoken, and in the ten years since that day she had come to accept the voice of the gods in her life and the role this gave her in society. She learned to accept the privileges and honors given to her as gifts actually meant for the gods; as her father taught her, she did not take on airs, but instead grew more humble as the gods and the people laid ever-heavier burdens on her.

  She took her duties seriously, and found joy in them. For the past ten years she had passed through a rigorous, exhilarating course of studies. Her body was shaped and trained in the company of other children--running, swimming, riding, combat-with-swords, combat-with-sticks, combat-with-bones. Along with other children, her memory was filled with languages--Stark, the common speech of the stars, which was typed into computers; Old Chinese, which was sung in the throat and drawn in beautiful ideograms on rice paper or in fine sand; and New Chinese, which was merely spoken at the mouth and jotted down with a common alphabet on ordinary paper or in dirt. No one was surprised except Qing-jao herself that she learned all these languages much more quickly and easily and thoroughly than any of the other children.

  Other teachers came to her alone. This was how she learned sciences and history, mathematics and music. And every week she would go to her father and spend half a day with him, showing him all that she had learned and listening to what he said in response. His praise made her dance all the way back to her room; his mildest rebuke made her spend hours tracing woodgrain lines in her schoolroom, until she felt worthy to return to studying.

  Another part of her schooling was utterly private. She had seen for herself how Father was so strong that he could postpone his obedience to the gods. She knew that when the gods demanded a ritual of purification, the hunger, the need to obey them was so exquisite it could not be denied. And yet Father somehow denied it--long enough, at least, that his rituals were always in private. Qing-jao longed for such strength herself, and so she began to discipline herself to delay. When the gods made her feel her oppressive unworthiness, and her eyes began to search for woodgrain lines or her hands began to feel unbearably filthy, she would wait, trying to concentrate on what was happening at the moment and put off obedience as long as she could.

  At first it was a triumph if she managed to postpone her purification for a full minute--and when her resistance broke, the gods punished her for it by making the ritual more onerous and difficult than usual. But she refused to give up. She was Han Fei-tzu's daughter, wasn't she? And in time, over the years, she learned what her father had learned: that one could live with the hunger, contain it, often for hours
, like a bright fire encased in a box of translucent jade, a dangerous, terrible fire from the gods, burning within her heart.

  Then, when she was alone, she could open that box and let the fire out, not in a single, terrible eruption, but slowly, gradually, filling her with light as she bowed her head and traced the lines on the floor, or bent over the sacred laver of her holy washings, quietly and methodically rubbing her hands with pumice, lye, and aloe.

  Thus she converted the raging voice of the gods into a private, disciplined worship. Only at rare moments of sudden distress did she lose control and fling herself to the floor in front of a teacher or visitor. She accepted these humiliations as the gods' way of reminding her that their power over her was absolute, that her usual self-control was only permitted for their amusement. She was content with this imperfect discipline. After all, it would be presumptuous of her to equal her father's perfect self-control. His extraordinary nobility came because the gods honored him, and so did not require his public humiliation; she had done nothing to earn such honor.

  Last of all, her schooling included one day each week helping with the righteous labor of the common people. Righteous labor, of course, was not the work the common people did every day in their offices and factories. Righteous labor meant the backbreaking work of the rice paddies. Every man and woman and child on Path had to perform this labor, bending and stooping in shin-deep water to plant and harvest the rice--or forfeit citizenship. "This is how we honor our ancestors," Father explained to her when she was little. "We show them that none of us will ever rise above doing their labor." The rice that was grown by righteous labor was considered holy; it was offered in the temples and eaten on holy days; it was placed in small bowls as offerings to the household gods.

  Once, when Qing-jao was twelve, the day was terribly hot and she was eager to finish her work on a research project. "Don't make me go to the rice paddies today," she said to her teacher. "What I'm doing here is so much more important."

  The teacher bowed and went away, but soon Father came into her room. He carried a heavy sword, and she screamed in terror when he raised it over his head. Did he mean to kill her for having spoken so sacrilegiously? But he did not hurt her--how could she have imagined that he might? Instead the sword came down on her computer terminal. The metal parts twisted; the plastic shattered and flew. The machine was destroyed.