Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card

  "Ow," said Valentine.

  "Watch where you're going," said a man.

  Valentine isn't on this ship, thought Ender. And I know the man's voice, too.

  He turned to face them, the man and woman who had appeared in the empty seats beside him.

  Valentine. Impossibly young. The way she had looked when, as a young teenager, she had swum beside him in a lake on a private estate on Earth. The way she had looked when he loved her and needed her most, when she was the only reason he could think of to go on with his military training; when she was the only reason he could think of why the world might be worth the trouble of saving it.

  "You can't be real," he said.

  "Of course I am," she said. "You stepped on my foot, didn't you?"

  "Poor Ender," said the young man. "Clumsy and stupid. Not a really good combination."

  Now Ender knew him. "Peter," he said. His brother, his childhood enemy, at the age when he became Hegemon. The picture that had been playing on all the vids when Peter managed to arrange things so that Ender could never come home to Earth after his great victory.

  "I thought I'd never see you face to face again," said Ender. "You died so long ago."

  "Never believe a rumor of my death," said Peter. "I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition."

  "Where did you come from?"

  Miro offered the answer. "They must have come from patterns in your mind, Ender, since you know them."

  "They do," said Ender. "But why? It's our self-conception we're supposed to carry with us out here. The pattern by which we know ourselves."

  "Is that so, Ender?" said Peter. "Then you must be really special. A personality so complicated it takes two people to contain it."

  "There's no part of me in you," said Ender.

  "And you'd better keep it that way," said Peter, leering. "It's girls I like, not dirty old men."

  "I don't want you," said Ender.

  "Nobody ever did," said Peter. "They wanted you. But they got me, didn't they? They got me up to here. Do you think I don't know my whole story? You and that book of lies, the Hegemon. So wise and understanding. How Peter Wiggin mellowed. How he turned out to be a wise and fair-minded ruler. What a joke. Speaker for the Dead indeed. All the time you wrote it, you knew the truth. You posthumously washed the blood from my hands, Ender, but you knew and I knew that as long as I was alive, I wanted blood there."

  "Leave him alone," said Valentine. "He told the truth in the Hegemon."

  "Still protecting him, little angel?"

  "No!" cried Ender. "I've done with you, Peter. You're out of my life, gone for three thousand years."

  "You can run but you can't hide!"

  "Ender! Ender, stop it! Ender!"

  He turned. It was Ela crying out to him.

  "I don't know what's going on here, but stop it! We only have a few minutes left. Help me with the tests."

  She was right. Whatever was going on with Miro's new body, with Peter's and Valentine's reappearance here, the important thing was the descolada. Had Ela succeeded in transforming it? Creating the recolada? And the virus that would transform the people of Path? If Miro could remake his body, and Ender could somehow conjure up the ghosts of his past and make them flesh again, it was possible, really possible, that Ela's vials now contained the viruses whose patterns she had held in her mind.

  "Help me," whispered Ela again.

  Ender and Miro--the new Miro, his hand strong and sure--reached out, took the vials she offered them, and began the test. It was a negative test--if the bacteria, algae, and tiny worms they added to the tubes remained for several minutes, unaffected, then there was no descolada in the vials. Since the vials had been teeming with the living virus when they boarded the ship, that would be proof that something, at least, had happened to neutralize them. Whether it was truly the recolada or simply a dead or ineffective descolada remained to be discovered when they returned.

  The worms and algae and bacteria underwent no transformations. In tests beforehand, on Lusitania, the solution containing the bacteria turned from blue to yellow in the presence of the descolada; now it stayed blue. On Lusitania the tiny worms had quickly died and, graying husks, floated to the surface; now they wriggled on and on, staying the purplish-brown color that in them, at least, meant life. And the algae, instead of breaking apart and dissolving completely away, remained in the thin strands and tendrils of life.

  "Done, then," said Ender.

  "At least we can hope," said Ela.

  "Sit down," said Miro. "If we're done, she'll take us back."

  Ender sat. He looked at the seat where Miro had been sitting. His old crippled body was no longer identifiably human. It continued crumbling, the pieces breaking up into dust or flowing away as liquid. Even the clothing was dissolving into nothing.

  "It's not part of my pattern anymore," said Miro. "There's nothing to hold it together anymore."

  "What about these?" demanded Ender. "Why aren't they dissolving?"

  "Or you?" asked Peter. "Why don't you dissolve? Nobody needs you now. You're a tired old fart who can't even hold onto his woman. And you never even fathered a child, you pathetic old eunuch. Make way for a real man. No one ever needed you--everything you've ever done I could have done better, and everything I did you never could have matched."

  Ender buried his face in his hands. This was not an outcome he could have imagined in his worst nightmares. Yes, he knew they were going out into a place where things might be created out of his mind. But it had never occurred to him that Peter was still lingering there. He thought he had expunged that old hatred long ago.

  And Valentine--why would he create another Valentine? This one so young and perfect, sweet and beautiful? There was a real Valentine waiting for him back on Lusitania--what would she think, seeing what he created out of his own mind? Perhaps it would be flattering to know how closely she was held in his heart; but she would also know that what he treasured was what she used to be, not what she was now.

  The darkest and the brightest secrets of his heart would both stand exposed as soon as the door opened and he had to step back out onto the surface of Lusitania again.

  "Dissolve," he said to them. "Crumble away."

  "You do it first, old man," said Peter. "Your life is over, and mine is just beginning. All I had to try for the first time was Earth, one tired old planet--it was as easy as it would be for me to reach out and kill you with my bare hands, right now, if I wanted to. Snap your little neck like a dry noodle."

  "Try it," whispered Ender. "I'm not the frightened little boy anymore."

  "Nor are you a match for me," said Peter. "You never were, you never will be. You have too much heart. You're like Valentine. You flinch away from doing what has to be done. It makes you soft and weak. It makes you easy to destroy."

  A sudden flash of light. What was it, death in Outspace after all? Had Jane lost the pattern in her mind? Were they blowing up, or falling into a sun?

  No. It was the door opening. It was the light of the Lusitanian morning breaking into the relative darkness of the inside of the ship.

  "Are you coming out?" cried Grego. He stuck his head into the ship. "Are you--"

  Then he saw them. Ender could see him silently counting.

  "Nossa Senhora," whispered Grego. "Where the hell did they come from?"

  "Out of Ender's totally screwed-up head," said Peter.

  "From old and tender memory," said the new Valentine.

  "Help me with the viruses," said Ela.

  Ender reached out for them, but it was Miro she gave them to. She didn't explain, just looked away from him, but he understood. What had happened to him Outside was too strange for her to accept. Whatever Peter and this young new Valentine might be, they shouldn't exist. Miro's creation of a new body for himself made sense, even if it was terrible to watch the old corpse break into forgotten nothingness. Ela's focus had been so pure that she crea
ted nothing outside the vials she had brought for that purpose. But Ender had dredged up two whole people, both obnoxious in their own way--the new Valentine because she was a mockery of the real one, who surely waited just outside the door. And Peter managed to be obnoxious even as he put a spin on all his taunting that was at once dangerous and suggestive.

  "Jane," whispered Ender. "Jane, are you with me?"

  "Yes," she answered.

  "Did you see all this?"

  "Yes," she answered.

  "Do you understand?"

  "I'm very tired. I've never been tired before. I've never done something so very hard. It used up--all my attention at once. And two more bodies, Ender. Making me pull them into the pattern like that--I don't know how I did it."

  "I didn't mean to." But she didn't answer.

  "Are you coming or what?" asked Peter. "The others are all out the door. With all those little urine-sample jars."

  "Ender, I'm afraid," said young Valentine. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do now."

  "Neither do I," said Ender. "God forgive me if this somehow hurts you. I never would have brought you back to hurt you."

  "I know," she said.

  "No," said Peter. "Sweet old Ender conjures up a nubile young woman out of his own brain, who looks just like his sister in her teens. Mmm, mmm, Ender, old man, is there no limit to your depravity?"

  "Only a shamefully sick mind would even think of such a thing," Ender murmured.

  Peter laughed and laughed.

  Ender took young Val by the hand and led her to the door. He could feel her hand sweating and trembling in his. She felt so real. She was real. And yet there, as soon as he stood in the doorway, he could see the real Valentine, middle-aged and heading toward old, yet still the gracious, beautiful woman he had known and loved for all these years. That's the true sister, the one I love as my second self. What was this young girl doing in my mind?

  It was clear that Grego and Ela had said enough that people knew something strange had happened. And when Miro had strode from the ship, hale and vigorous, clear of speech and so exuberant he looked ready to burst into song--that had brought on a buzz of excitement. A miracle. There were miracles out there, wherever the starship went.

  Ender's appearance, though, brought a hush. Few would have known, at a glance, that the young girl with him was Valentine in her youth--no one there but Valentine herself had known her then. And no one but Valentine was likely to recognize Peter Wiggin in his vigorous young manhood; the pictures in the history texts were usually of the holos taken late in his life, when cheap, permanent holography was first coming into its own.

  But Valentine knew. Ender stood before the door, young Val beside him, Peter emerging just behind, and Valentine knew them both. She stepped forward, away from Jakt, until she stood before Ender face to face.

  "Ender," she said. "Dear sweet tormented boy, is this what you create, when you go to a place where you can make anything you want?" She reached out her hand and touched the young copy of herself upon the cheek. "So beautiful," she said. "I was never this beautiful, Ender. She's perfect. She's all I wanted to be but never was."

  "Aren't you glad to see me, Val, my dearest sweetheart Demosthenes?" Peter pushed his way between Ender and young Val. "Don't you have tender memories of me, as well? Am I not more beautiful than you remembered? I'm certainly glad to see you. You've done so well with the persona I created for you. Demosthenes. I made you, and you don't even thank me for it."

  "Thank you, Peter," whispered Valentine. She looked again at young Val. "What will you do with them?"

  "Do with us?" said Peter. "We're not his to do anything with. He may have brought me back, but I'm my own man now, as I always was."

  Valentine turned back to the crowd, still awestruck at the strangeness of events. After all, they had seen three people board the ship, had seen it disappear, then reappear on the exact spot no more than seven minutes later--and instead of three people emerging, there were five, two of them strangers. Of course they had stayed to gawk.

  But there'd be no answers for anyone today. Except on the most important question of all. "Has Ela taken the vials to the lab?" she asked. "Let's break it up here, and go see what Ela's made for us in outspace."

  17

  ENDER'S CHILDREN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  It was the last day of the test of the recolada. Word of its success--so far--had already spread through the human colony--and, Ender assumed, among all the pequeninos as well. Ela's assistant named Glass had volunteered to be the experimental subject. He had lived now for three days in the same isolation chamber where Planter had sacrificed himself. This time, though, the descolada had been killed within him by the viricide bacterium he had helped Ela devise. And this time, performing the functions that the descolada had once fulfilled, was Ela's new recolada virus. It had worked perfectly. He was not even slightly ill. Only one last step remained before the recolada could be pronounced a full success.

  An hour before that final test, Ender, with his absurd entourage of Peter and young Val, was meeting with Quara and Grego in Grego's cell.

  "The pequeninos have accepted it," Ender explained to Quara. "They're willing to take the risk of killing the descolada and replacing it with the recolada, after testing it with Glass alone."

  "I'm not surprised," said Quara.

  "I am," said Peter. "The piggies obviously have a deathwish as a species."

  Ender sighed. Though he was no longer a frightened little boy, and Peter was no longer older and larger and stronger than he, there was still no love in Ender's heart for this simulacrum of his brother that he had somehow created Outside. He was everything Ender had feared and hated in his childhood, and it was infuriating and frightening to have him back again.

  "What do you mean?" said Grego. "If the pequeninos didn't consent to it, then the descolada would make them too dangerous for humankind to allow them to survive."

  "Of course," said Peter, smiling. "The physicist is an expert on strategy."

  "What Peter is saying," said Ender, "is that if he were in charge of the pequeninos--which he no doubt would like to be--he would never willingly give up the descolada until he had won something from humanity in exchange for it."

  "To the surprise of all, the aging boy wonder still has a tiny spark of wit," said Peter. "Why should they kill off their only weapon that humanity has any reason to fear? The Lusitania Fleet is still coming, and it still has the M.D. Device aboard. Why don't they make Andrew here get on that magic flying football of his and go meet the fleet and lay down the law?"

  "Because they'd shoot me down like a dog," said Ender. "The pequeninos are doing this because it's right and fair and decent. Words that I'll define for you later."

  "I know the words," said Peter. "I also know what they mean."

  "You do?" asked
young Val. Her voice, as always, was a surprise--soft, mild, and yet able to pierce the conversation. Ender remembered that Valentine's voice had always been that way. Impossible not to listen to, though she so rarely raised her voice.

  "Right. Fair. Decent," said Peter. The words sounded filthy in his mouth. "Either the person saying them believes in those concepts or not. If not, then those words mean that he's got somebody standing behind me with a knife in his hand. And if he does believe them, then those words mean that I'm going to win."

  "I'll tell you what they mean," said Quara. "They mean that we're going to congratulate the pequeninos--and ourselves--for wiping out a sentient species that may exist nowhere else in the universe."

  "Don't kid yourself," said Peter.

  "Everybody's so sure that the descolada is a designed virus," said Quara, "but nobody's considered the alternative--that a much more primitive, vulnerable version of the descolada evolved naturally, and then changed itself to its present form. It might be a designed virus, yes, but who did the designing? And now we're killing it without attempting conversation."

  Peter grinned at her, then at Ender. "I'm surprised that this weaselly little conscience is not your blood offspring," he said. "She's as obsessed with finding reasons to feel guilty as you and Val."

  Ender ignored him and attempted to answer Quara. "We are killing it. Because we can't wait any longer. The descolada is trying to destroy us, and there's no time to dither. If we could, we would."

  "I understand all that," said Quara. "I cooperated, didn't I? It just makes me sick to hear you talking as if the pequeninos were somehow brave about collaborating in an act of xenocide in order to save their own skin."

  "Us or them, kid," said Peter. "Us or them."

  "You can't possibly understand," said Ender, "how ashamed I am to hear my own arguments on his lips."

  Peter laughed. "Andrew pretends not to like me," he said. "But the kid's a fraud. He admires me. He worships me. He always has. Just like his pretty little angel here."

  Peter poked at young Val. She didn't shy away. She acted instead as if she hadn't even felt his finger in the flesh of her upper arm.

  "He worships us both. In his twisted little mind, she's the moral perfection that he can never achieve. And I am the power and genius that was always just out of poor little Andrew's reach. It was really quite modest of him, don't you think? For all these years, he's carried his betters with him inside his mind."