As Sprout lay in bed that night, wishing he could sleep but knowing it would be a while before he managed it, he wondered if the right thing for him to do would be to stop using the power to detour, and merely live within the limitations of normal life.
And he also wondered if he should take Ruqyaq aside and try to teach him how to detour, so that the power would be given to him to take his people somewhere else, if the need arose.
I will take neither course, he decided. I will use this power in benign ways that meet my needs and don’t harm anybody else. But I’ll obey Jane and teach it to no one, not even my own children if I ever marry and have babies. I won’t teach it to Blue, even though I know he would use the power wisely and well. Because power is worthless without boundaries and the self-control to respect them.
Then he thought of all the amazing things that were bound to happen in the future, and he felt a stab of regret that even if he lived to be old, he would only see a tiny portion of the future, and would die before anything ended.
Because it would never end.
Acknowledgments
Readers of the Ender novels, the Shadow books, and any others in that same future universe have long been aware that none of the main story threads have been resolved in more than twenty years.
Not that each book lacked an ending; on the contrary, knowing that I was not going to resolve the crucial question of who designed the descolada virus, I made sure that each book had its own ending.
Why did I wait for so long? Oh, I can come up with all kinds of reasons, but from the very start—from the time that I thought up the descolada virus as the reason for the hypersimple ecology of Lusitania—I had no idea who created it or why, what world or star system or galaxy they lived in, and how the virus was propagated across space.
I thought of all kinds of possibilities and played out many stories in my mind. They all ran aground on the reef of motive: What possible motive could any civilization capable of creating such a tailor-made virus possibly have for afflicting other worlds randomly with such savage destruction?
Along the way I received suggestions from many readers who, in the absence of any decisions by the author, had made up their own speculative stories. The most common one was that the creators of the descolada were the descendants of Bean. Until I wrote Shadows in Flight, that remained a possibility, though an unlikely one—I would have needed more time than I could afford in order to have Bean’s descendants make the virus, propagate it, and have it work its damage upon the world of Lusitania.
But Shadows in Flight laid that issue to rest. Once I came to know Bean’s children, strange as they are, I knew that nothing as arrogant, destructive, and selfish as the descolada could possibly have come from them.
That left me with one choice that I kept coming back to: The descolada planet had once evolved higher life forms, but in waging biological warfare on each other, they reached a point where all that was left was the artificial viruses. I had toyed with that idea in an early short story, but the fundamental problem was, I didn’t want to write a novel that depended upon creating an alien species with no physical existence higher than the microbial.
Creating the alien culture in The Abyss was hard enough; why set myself a project that, if I did it extremely well, would still be incomprehensible and uninteresting to the vast majority of readers?
The goal of writing fiction is to put a story into your readers’ memory. How can you accomplish that if you are unclear and uninteresting? Maybe it would have been an entertaining experiment, but my readers have not waited twenty years for me to give them an arty, meaningless ending. I don’t want to leave my readers in uncomprehending awe, I want them to receive stories they can believe in and care about.
My breakthrough came with Jennifer Ackerman’s lovely books The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. I was so delighted by the things I learned—and by Ackerman’s obvious empathy with and admiration of the smartest birds on our planet—that I thought: What if some space-faring community on a generation ship made it their project to breed these birds for intelligence, rather the way dogs and horses have been bred for attributes that humans considered useful? What if, when they arrived at their new colony planet, the birds were ready to compete with humans for dominance?
While the ravens were my primary species to play with—despite Poe’s gloomy view of them and Diane Setterfield’s depiction of ravens in Bellman & Black as vengeful, just, and with long memories—what I really fell in love with were the kea parrots of New Zealand, which are too smart and playful for our own good. I didn’t have to make them all that much smarter than they already are in order to have them function as I needed them to.
Meanwhile, I played games with the construction of the virus that entered Lusitania so destructively hundreds of years before. Finding its origin was beyond the scope of the characters of The Last Shadow, but what they could do was speculate about its transmission between star systems, and how it might have been mutated by cosmic radiation along the way.
In a way, it turned out to follow the creative recipe that I discovered quite by accident at the very beginning of my career. Take one idea that you’ve been struggling with, combine it with a completely unrelated idea that you’ve also been working on, and see what comes out of the effort to reconcile both ideas into one coherent story.
You don’t necessarily end up with a strong story about both ideas; but the interplay of the unrelated ideas in your brain brings out the best of your storytelling. Book after book has arisen that way—only rarely by design—just as it took the imposition of two sentient bird species into my story about the struggle to understand and control the descolada virus to bring The Last Shadow to life.
Since the book ends without ever actually finding a world of origin for the descolada, perhaps some readers will be disappointed. But novels must resemble reality as well as fulfil our dreams and wishes, and in reality some historical and scientific questions remain mysteries because discovering the answers would require acquisition of data that we do not have, that we cannot reach.
When the characters in The Last Shadow have analyzed all the data and speculations that are available to them, and reach a conclusion which, to them, is sufficient, then I think I have done all a novelist can do, without breaking the contract between reader and novelist. When you can’t pull magic out of a hat to solve a problem, readers and writers are bound by something like the limitations of the real universe.
At the time of The Last Shadow, there is a means of traveling instantaneously to anywhere. But with so many star systems and planets, even a thousand ships would not be enough to make a serious dent in the number of Goldilocks planets that might have given rise to life, and which therefore cry out to be discovered and studied.
So the characters, being wise, close the book on the question, having found all the answers available. If their decision turns out to be even partly wrong, it is a later generation that will need to resolve it. But I am not the novelist who will recount that adventure.
There are many people who have been of great help in the years leading up to and including the writing of this book. First, Aaron Johnston’s powerful storytelling in the Formic Wars novels, which laid the groundwork for the entire Ender series, helped clarify my thinking about many things; his fiction also helped keep the Ender universe alive in the minds of many readers. Aaron and I developed the worlds and cultures and characters and outlines together—but all the flesh and blood, all the words and paragraphs of the finished novels came from Aaron. I’m proud to have partnered with him.
Then there are the two men I dedicated this book to. Ben Bova picked up the novelette Ender’s Game from the slushpile at Analog magazine back in 1974, asked for revisions, and then bought and published the story that resulted.
Years later, I realized that Speaker for the Dead would only work if a grown-up Ender Wiggin were the main character, and that this version of th
e story could only be told if I published a novel version of Ender’s Game with serious revisions in the denouement to set up Speaker. I met with Tom Doherty, who already had Speaker under contract, and told him I needed to write a novel version of Ender’s Game first. “Same terms as Speaker?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, hardly believing that he was giving me my answer on the spot. A handshake, and I went home, set aside Speaker for a while, and madly wrote the first (and basically last) draft of Ender’s Game.
So the book you’re holding in your hands—the book that I assume you’ve already read before coming to this acknowledgments section—really had its roots with Ben and Tom.
I made demands on my editor for decades, Beth Meacham, that I have never made of any editor before or since. She saw every chapter almost as soon as I wrote it, and either made suggestions that invariably helped in the writing process, or gave me the go-ahead that lent me confidence to proceed. She has been a stalwart and valuable friend and counselor throughout almost my entire career.
For decades now, I’ve regarded the audiobook production as the best first edition of my fiction. I write in an oral style; my books are meant to be read aloud. And for almost my entire career, my books have received superb audiobook productions under the direction and guidance of Stefan Rudnicki and his family of narrators. If you have listened to this book instead of reading with your eyes, you know why I am grateful to him for the high quality of his work.
My wife, Kristine Allen Card, as always read every chapter as it spewed out of my printer or arrived as a PDF when I was traveling. She never writes a word of my books, yet her imprimatur is on every aspect of my storytelling that actually works. Our friend, Erin Absher, also read, responded, and advised.
Cyndie Swindlehurst brought a lawyer’s attention to detail when she gave The Last Shadow its first copy edit, so we could turn in to Tor a clear and coherent story that did not contradict itself or the books that came before. After the superb job she did, she undertook to give the manuscript a final pass in order to make sure it was the best it could be. I’m glad I can trust a good lawyer to never miss any of the fine print.
Meanwhile, my children and, now, my grandchildren show me over and over again that when I write about the intelligence of children, I have not far exceeded what is possible for real highly verbal children. I have seen them struggle; I have seen them overcome their struggles. My adult children have found work that they love and have been quite successful at it; my grandchildren are all completely different from each other, demonstrating the amazing variety and vitality of human life.
To any of them who physically resemble me, I apologize. To those who are incessant talkers, I attest that you can, in fact, make a career of that. And because they are all kind and generous human beings, I can affirm that I am prouder of them than of any book or play or poem I’ve ever written.
By Orson Scott Card From Tom Doherty Associates
ENDER UNIVERSE
Ender Saga
Ender’s Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Ender in Exile
The Last Shadow
ENDER’S SHADOW SERIES
Ender’s Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant
Shadows in Flight
Children of the Fleet
The First Formic War (with Aaron Johnston)
Earth Unaware
Earth Afire
Earth Awakens
The Second Formic War
(With Aaron Johnston)
The Swarm
The Hive
Ender Novellas
A War of Gifts
First Meetings
THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER
Seventh Son
Red Prophet
Prentice Alvin
Alvin Journeyman
Heartfire
The Crystal City
THE MITHERMAGES
The Lost Gate
The Gate Thief
Gatefather
HOMECOMING
The Memory of Earth
The Call of Earth
The Ships of Earth
Earthfall
Earthborn
WOMEN OF GENESIS
Sarah
Rebekah
Rachel & Leah
THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD
Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card
Keeper of Dreams
STAND-ALONE FICTION
Invasive Procedures (with Aaron Johnston)
Empire
Hidden Empire
The Folk of the Fringe
Hart’s Hope
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
Saints
Songmaster
Treason
The Worthing Saga
Wyrms
Zanna’s Gift
About the Author
Orson Scott Card is best known for his science fiction novel Ender’s Game and its many sequels that expand the Ender Universe into the far future and the near past. Card’s first published science fiction appeared in 1977—the novelette version of Ender’s Game in the August issue of Analog. The novel-length version of Ender’s Game was published in 1985 and has been continuously in print since, including translations in many languages. Card was born in Washington State and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. He is a professor of writing and literature at Southern Virginia University.
Card is the author of many sci-fi and fantasy novels, including the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with Seventh Son). Additionally, he has written stand-alone science fiction and fantasy novels like Pastwatch and Hart’s Hope. He has also written contemporary thrillers like Empire, historical novels like the monumental Saints, and the biblical novels Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel and Leah. Card’s recent work includes the Mither Mages books (The Lost Gate, The Gate Thief, and Gatefather), and the Pathfinder trilogy. His contemporary young adult novels in the Micropowers series (Lost and Found, Duplex) are finding a new generation of readers. Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card. He and Kristine are the parents of five children and the grandparents of several grandchildren. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
By Orson Scott Card From Tom Doherty Associates
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE LAST SHADOW
Copyright © 2021 by Orson Scott Card
Al
l rights reserved.
Cover art by John Harris
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-0495-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-25213-5 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250252135
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: 2021
Last Shadow (9781250252135) Page 37