Earth Unaware
Page 41
“Remember, I’m not stupid,” said Imala. “I will keep an open mind. You’re simply going to have to trust me.”
He didn’t want to trust her. He wanted to trust the person five or six steps up the org chart, but what choice did he have.
He showed her everything: the charts, the trajectory, wreckage from the Italians, video of him and Father and Toron attacking the pod, the hormigas fiercely fighting back, Toron’s death, interviews with the surviving Italians recounting the pod attacking their ships. There was even footage of Victor modifying the quickship and launching it toward Luna. It took nearly two hours to go over it all, and Imala sat in silence the whole time. When Victor finished, Imala remained quiet for a few moments.
“Play back the part where we see the aliens,” she said.
Victor found the spot and played it.
“Stop right there,” said Imala.
Victor freeze-framed on the hormiga’s face.
Imala stared at it for a full two minutes. Finally she looked at Victor. “Is this a hoax?”
“Yes, it’s big elaborate hoax, Imala. I went out and invented a near-lightspeed ship just so I could prank you.”
“I’m asking, Victor, because it looks completely real to me. Not just the alien, but everything. All the data. The math. The sky scans. It looks authentic, and I believe it.”
“You do?”
“Completely. But if this is a hoax then you need to tell me now because I am prepared to help you as much as I can. And if I help you, and this turns out not to be real, I will lose my job, and you and I will go to prison for a very long time.”
“It’s real. If you can get access to a scope powerful enough to see out to that far, you can see it for yourself.”
She shook her head. “That will take too long. The only scopes that powerful on Luna belong to Ukko Jukes. And believe me, he won’t help us.”
“So you’ll take this to your boss?”
“Of course I’ll take it to my boss. I have to. That’s my job. But not the original data cube. I want that to stay with you. I’ll take a copy. Today. Right after I leave here. But that can’t be all we do, Victor. I’m not putting the fate of the world into the hands of a few bureaucrats in Lunar Customs. I don’t know those people, and even if I did I wouldn’t trust them with something like this. Sad recent experiences have taught me never to trust the people above me. So we’ll follow the proper channels, yes. We’ll start the ball rolling that way. But we also do our own thing. We get the word out our way. Now. Immediately.”
“How? We go to the press?”
“No. Not fast enough. The world isn’t watching the Lunar news. I mean right now, Victor. We upload this video of the alien onto the nets. Right now. We get people all over the world watching this video within the hour.”
“How do we do that?”
She took her holopad from her pouch, set it on the table, and copied the video from Victor’s data cube to her own holospace. Using her stylus, she selected a section of video featuring the alien attacking Victor and his Father and Toron on the pod and set it aside. Then she selected other bits of video to follow. The interior of the Formic pod. The wreckage of the Italian ships. Select, frightening accounts from the Italian survivors. She then created several frames with additional information, including coordinates, trajectory, and other data from Edimar. When she finished, she played it back. It was just over five minutes long.
“We can’t make it too long,” she said. “Or people won’t watch it.”
“It’s good,” said Victor. “It’s just the right length.”
She was moving her stylus in the holospace, bringing up several different windows. “There are about twenty major sites we can upload this to. They all get a lot of traffic. Other sites will see it and pick it up. It’ll go viral.”
“How quickly?”
“No telling. My guess is very fast. Once it gets momentum, it will explode. You want to tell the whole world aliens are coming? Here’s your chance.” She handed him the stylus. The windows in the holospace were all selected. Twenty vid sites on the nets. A large green button in the center of the holo was marked “send.” All he had to do was touch it.
He thought of Father and Mother and Concepción and Mono and everyone back on El Cavador praying for him to reach this moment. This is what he had come for and nearly died for. This is what Toron had died for. He thought of Janda. He thought of her hand atop his, holding the stylus, too. He thought of the twelve billion people on Earth who were in for the wake-up call of their lives.
“This better work,” said Victor. Then he reached out and pushed the button.
AFTERWORD
The story in this novel didn’t begin as a novel. It began as backstory to Ender’s Game, which was first published as a novelette in August 1977, and then later as a full-length novel in 1985. Backstory, by its definition, is everything that happened in the world of the story before the story begins. It’s easy to ignore backstory. It’s in the past, after all. Yet in the case of Ender’s Game, I’d argue that without the richly imaginative history that Scott Card gave his universe, the premise of Ender’s Game would have failed.
Consider how the novel begins. Here you have this six-year-old kid with a medical device on the back of his neck—likely connected to his brain stem—that monitors his every action, thought, and conversation, all to determine if he has what it takes to be the next great military commander. It begs the question: What happened to the human race that led us to allow such an invasion of personal privacy or, for that matter, the use of innocent children for war? The answer, of course, is the Formics. Scott Card created a history for the world filled with alien invasions and do-or-die heroics in which the human race was nearly wiped out. In other words, he created a history on which the circumstances of Ender’s story could exist. And yet he only gave us as much of that history as we needed to know. We knew that the two conflicts were called the First and Second Formic Wars, and we heard whispers of pivotal events, such as the Battle of the Belt or “the scouring of China,” but the specifics of those wars and events were largely unexplained. Instead, Scott kept our eyes and hearts laser-focused on the story he was telling, the story of Ender Wiggin.
Flash ahead to 2009. Marvel Comics has just published a ten-issue adaptation of Ender’s Game and a ten-issue adaptation of Ender’s Shadow. The response from critics and fans was overwhelmingly positive, and the praise was well deserved. The comics were beautifully drawn and extremely well written. Credit goes to Marvel, who showed their respect for and love of the original material by staying faithful to Scott’s original stories and by hiring some of the most talented creators in comics today to bring the stories to life. (Christopher Yost, Pasqual Ferry, Mike Carey, Sebastian Fiumara, Frank D’Armata, Giulia Brusco, Jim Cheung, Jake Black, and others.)
Marvel wanted to do more and assembled a team to adapt Speaker for the Dead and Ender in Exile—both as limited-issue series. In addition, Marvel produced a few one-shot comics in the Ender universe as well. (One shots are stand-alone issues not part of an ongoing or limited series.) One such comic adapted Scott’s short story Mazer in Prison. Another told how Peter and Valentine initiated and then stopped the League War. Another told a completely original Valentine story. In short, the world of Ender Wiggin was thriving in comics.
But Marvel wasn’t finished. They wanted to do more. And it was here that Scott Card made the proposition that would eventually result in the book you’re holding now. Scott essentially asked, “What if, instead of another adaptation, Marvel does an original series in the Ender universe? What if we told the story of the first two Formic wars? Why not bring all the backstory from Ender’s Game to life, with a completely new cast of characters?”
Marvel said yes, and Scott and I agreed to write the series. I had been working with Marvel adapting Speaker for the Dead and Ender in Exile and writing a few one-shots. Scott had comic experience as well, having written Ultimate Iron Man for Marvel some years befor
e. It wasn’t the first time Scott and I had worked as a team, either. We had collaborated on the novel Invasive Procedures and on a limited-issue comic series for EA Comics based on the award-winning video game Dragon Age.
While Marvel began assembling an art team, Scott and I began to develop the story. Ender’s Game had been on Scott’s mind for over thirty years, so many of those early story sessions consisted of Scott sharing what had been stewing in his brain all those years and me furiously taking notes. The early conversations were primarily focused on world-building. Scott had given a lot of thought to the concept of asteroid mining and how the whole industry would work. What was the science of it all? How do the miners get the metals back to Earth? What economic infrastructure must exist to make survival in the Deep possible? Would miners work exclusively in the Asteroid Belt, or would some miners venture farther out? Were there only corporations doing the work or was there room in the economy for independent mining families and clans? And if so, what is the relationship between free miners and corporate? And how do miner families marry and prosper? How do they mix up their gene pool and exist in such an empty and isolated environment?
And what about the military? Scott and I knew that Mazer Rackham had to play a pivotal role in this story. Where was he trained? And more importantly, who trained him? Who showed Mazer how to command?
Once Scott and I had a basic framework of the world, we began populating it with characters. We knew from the get-go that we weren’t writing Ender’s Game. This wouldn’t be the story of a single hero; it would be the story of many.
The challenge was, we were writing a comic book. And comic books, in case you’ve never counted, are generally twenty-two pages long. You can only squeeze so many panels of art onto a page, and the more dialogue you write, the more art you cover up. So it’s best to be extremely economical with words. Some of the ideas and characters that Scott and I were developing simply wouldn’t fit in the comics.
Around this time Marvel introduced Scott and me to the art of Giancarlo Caracuzzo, who blew us away with his environments and characters and style. The immensely talented Jim Charalampidis joined as colorist, and in no time, beautifully vibrant pages of the comic began popping up in our inboxes.
Creating comics is much like filmmaking in that’s it a highly collaborative process. Ideas can come from anywhere, and the contributions of each individual shape the outcome for everyone. The character of Victor Delgado, for example, will always exist in my head exactly as Giancarlo drew him. And the muted earth tones that Jim gave El Cavador are the colors I see whenever I think of the ship.
There were other people involved in the comics, of course, but the person who deserves the most credit and a lifelong standing ovation is Jordan D. White, our editor at Marvel, who had a hand in every aspect of the comics and who may be the nicest person working in the industry today. (You should follow him on Twitter at @cracksh0t. That’s a zero, not the letter O.)
Additional thanks go to Jake Black, Billy Tan, Guru-eFX, Cory Petit, Jenny Frison, Salvador Larroca, Aron Lusen, Bryan Hitch, Paul Mounts, Arune Singh, John Paretti, Joe Quesada, and everyone else at Marvel.
As Scott and I continued to develop the stories for each issue, we continued to create story elements that simply wouldn’t fit in the comics. To give you a sense of what I mean, this novel only includes the story contained in the first three issues of the comics. And not even the complete story of those issues; there are bits of issues two and three that won’t exist in novel form until a subsequent book.
So Scott and I had to make some concessions and exclude people and events from the comics that we knew would only exist in the novels. If you’ve read the comics as well as this book, you’ve likely noticed some of the changes. Scott and I think of it this way: The comics are an adaptation of the novels even though the comics existed before the novels. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say: The comics are an expansion of the backstory of Ender’s Game and an adaptation of the novels that followed them. Hmm. Think about that too much and you might get dizzy. Of course, this practice of evolving a story is nothing new to the Ender universe. Remember, Ender’s Game began as a novelette.
As for this novel, thanks goes to everyone at Tor, especially our editor, Beth Meacham, whose wise counsel was critical in bringing the novel to life. Additional thanks go to Kathleen Bellamy, Kristine Card, and my wife, Lauren Johnston, for their careful reading of the manuscript and constant encouragement. Thanks also to the children still living in the Card and Johnston homes, for their patience as Scott and I closed ourselves in our respective offices to make this novel happen. Thank you, Zina, Luke, Jake, Layne, and little Meg. We couldn’t have done it without you.
By Orson Scott Card from Tom Doherty Associates
Empire
The Folk of the Fringe
Future on Fire (editor)
Future on Ice (editor)
Invasive Procedures (with Aaron Johnston)
Keeper of Dreams
Lovelock (with Kathryn Kidd)
Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
Saints
Songmaster
Treason
A War of Gifts
The Worthing Saga
Wyrms
THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER
Seventh Son
Red Prophet
Prentice Alvin
Alvin Journeyman
Heartfire
The Crystal City
ENDER
Ender’s Game
Ender’s Shadow
Shadows in Flight
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
First Meetings
Ender in Exile
HOMECOMING
The Memory of Earth
The Call of Earth
The Ships of Earth
Earthfall
Earthborn
WOMEN OF GENESIS
Sarah
Rebekah
Rachel & Leah
From Other Publishers
Enchantment
Homebody
Lost Boys
Magic Street
Stone Father
Stone Tables
Treasure Box
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
Characters and Viewpoint
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
EARTH UNAWARE
Copyright © 2012 by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-2904-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781429946568 (e-book)
First Edition: July 2012