Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 3 - Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card

  She also saw that her hands were still smeared with grease, and felt her unbearable dirtiness: the gods' judgement against her. She shouldn't have tried to kill herself after all. The gods wouldn't allow her to escape their judgement so easily.

  What can I do? she pleaded. How can I be clean before you, O Gods? Li Qing-jao, my ancestor-of-the-heart, show me how to make myself worthy to receive the kind judgement of the gods!

  What came at once to her mind was Li Qing-jao's love song "Separation." It was one of the first that Father had given her to memorise when she was only three years old, only a short time before he and Mother told her that Mother was going to die. It was exactly appropriate now, too, for wasn't she separated from the goodwill of the gods? Didn't she need to be reconciled with them so they could receive her as one of the truly god spoken ones?

  someone's sent a loving note in lines of returning geese and as the moon fills my western chamber as petals dance over the flowing stream again I think of you the two of us living a sadness apart a hurt that can't be removed yet when my gaze comes down my heart stays up

  The moon filling the western chamber told her that it was really a god, not an ordinary man-lover who was being pined for in this poem— references to the west always meant that the gods were involved. Li Qing-Jao had answered the prayer of little Han Qing-jao, and sent this poem to tell her how to cure the hurt that couldn't be removed— the filthiness of her flesh.

  What is the loving note? thought Qing-jao. Lines of returning geese— but there are no geese in this room. Petals dancing over a flowing stream— but there are no petals, there is no stream here.

  "Yet when my gaze comes down, my heart stays up." That was the clue, that was the answer, she knew it. Slowly, carefully Qing-jao rolled over onto her belly. Once when she tried to put weight on her left hand, her elbow buckled and an exquisite pain almost made her lose consciousness again. At last she knelt, her head bowed, leaning on her right hand. Gazing down. The poem promised that this would let her heart stay up.

  She felt no better— still filthy, still in pain. Looking down showed her nothing but the polished boards of the floor, the grain of the wood making rippling lines reaching from between her knees outward to the very edge of the room.

  Lines. Lines of wood grain, lines of geese. And couldn't the wood grain also be seen as a flowing stream? She must follow these lines like the geese; she must dance over these flowing streams like a petal. That was what the promise meant: When her gaze came down, her heart would stay up.

  She found one particular line in the wood grain, a line of darkness like a river rippling through the lighter wood around it, and knew at once that this was the stream she was supposed to follow. She dared not touch it with her finger— filthy, unworthy finger. It had to be followed lightly, the way a goose touched the air, the way a petal touched the stream. Only her eyes could follow the line.

  So she began to trace the line, follow it carefully to the wall. A couple of times she moved so quickly that she lost the line, forgot which one it was; but soon she found it again, or thought she did, and followed it to the wall. Was it good enough? Were the gods satisfied?

  Almost, but not quite— she couldn't be sure that when her gaze slipped from the line she had returned to the right one. Petals didn't skip from stream to stream. She had to follow the right one, along its entire length. This time she started at the wall and bowed very low, so her eyes wouldn't be distracted even by the movement of her own right hand. She inched her way along, never letting herself so much as blink, even when her eyes burned. She knew that if she lost the grain she was following she'd have to go back and start over. It had to be done perfectly or it would lose all its power to cleanse her.

  It took forever. She did blink, but not haphazardly, by accident. When her eyes burned too much, she would bow down until her left eye was directly over the grain. Then she would close the other eye for a moment. Her right eye relieved, she would open it, then put that eye directly over the line in the wood and close the left. This way she was able to make it halfway across the room until the board ended, butting up against another.

  She wasn't sure whether that was good enough, whether it was enough to finish the board or if she needed to find another wood grain line to follow. She made as if to get up, testing the gods, to see if they were satisfied. She half-rose, felt nothing; she stood, and still she was at ease.

  Ah! They were satisfied, they were pleased with her. Now the grease on her skin felt like nothing more than a little oil. There was no need for washing, not at this moment, for she had found another way to cleanse herself, another way for the gods to discipline her. Slowly she lay back on the floor, smiling, weeping softly in joy. Li Qing-jao, my ancestor-of-the-heart, thank you for showing me the way. Now I have been joined to the gods; the separation is over. Mother, I am again connected to you, clean and worthy. White Tiger of the West, I am now pure enough to touch your fur and leave no mark of filthiness.

  Then hands touched her— Father's hands, picking her up. Drops of water fell onto her face, the bare skin of her body— Father's tears. "You're alive," he said. "My god spoken one, my beloved, my daughter, my life, Gloriously Bright, you shine on."

  Later she would learn that Father had had to be tied and gagged during her test, that when she climbed the statue and made as if to press her throat against the sword, he flung himself forward with such force that his chair fell and his head struck the floor. This was regarded as a great mercy, since it meant he didn't see her terrible fall from the statue. He wept for her all the time she lay unconscious. And then, when she rose to her knees and began to trace the wood grains on the floor, he was the one who realised what it meant. "Look," he whispered. "The gods have given her a task. The gods are speaking to her."

  The others were slow to recognise it, because they had never seen anyone trace wood grain lines before. It wasn't in the Catalogue of Voices of the Gods: Door-Waiting, Counting-to-Multiples-of-Five, Object-Counting, Checking-for-Accidental-Murders, Fingernail-Tearing, Skin-Scraping, Pulling-Out-of-Hair, Gnawing-at-Stone, Bugging-Out-of-Eyes— all these were known to be penances that the gods demanded, rituals of obedience that cleansed the soul of the god spoken so that the gods could fill their minds with wisdom. No one had ever seen Wood grain-Tracing. Yet Father saw what she was doing, named the ritual, and added it to the Catalogue of Voices. It would forever bear her name, Han Qing-jao, as the first to be commanded by the gods to perform this rite. It made her very special.

  So did her unusual resourcefulness in trying to find ways to cleanse her hands and, later, kill herself. Many had tried scraping their hands on walls, of course, and most attempted to wipe on clothes. But rubbing her hands to build up the heat of friction, that was regarded as rare and clever. And while head-beating was common, climbing a statue and jumping off and landing on her head was very rare. And none who had done it before had been strong enough to keep their hands behind their back so long. The temple was all abuzz with it, and word soon spread to all the temples in Path.

  It was a great honour to Han Fei-tzu, of course, that his daughter was so powerfully possessed by the gods. And the story of his near-madness when she was trying to destroy herself spread just as quickly and touched many hearts. "He may be the greatest of the god spoken," they said of him, "but he loves his daughter more than life." This made them love him as much as they already revered him.

  It was then that people began whispering about the possible godhood of Han Fei-tzu. "He is great and strong enough that the gods will listen to him," said the people who favoured him. "Yet he is so affectionate that he will always love the people of the planet Path, and try to do good for us. Isn't this what the god of a world ought to be?" Of course it was impossible to decide now— a man could not be chosen to be god of a village, let alone of a whole world, until he died. How could you judge what sort of god he'd be, until his whole life, from beginning to end, was known?

  These whispers came to Qing-jao's ears many time
s as she grew older, and the knowledge that her father might well be chosen god of Path became one of the beacons of her life. But at the time, and forever in her memory, she remembered that his hands were the ones that carried her bruised and twisted body to the bed of healing, his eyes were the ones that dropped warm tears on to her cold skin, his voice was the one that whispered in the beautiful passionate tones of the old language, "My beloved, my Gloriously Bright, never take your light from my life. Whatever happens, never harm yourself or I will surely die."

  Chapter 4 — JANE

  So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in the god these humans brought with them.

  You don't believe in God?

  The question never come up. We have always remembered how we began.

  You evolved. We were created.

  By a virus.

  By a virus that God created in order to create us.

  So you, too, are a believer.

  I understand belief.

  No— you desire belief.

  I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that's what faith is.

  Or deliberate insanity

  It turned out not to be just Valentine and Jakt who came over to Miro's ship. Plikt also came, without invitation, and installed herself in a miserable little cubicle where there wasn't even room to stretch out completely. She was the anomaly on the voyage— not family, not crew, but a friend. Plikt had been a student of Ender's when he was on Trondheim as a speaker for the dead. She had figured out, quite independently, that Andrew Wiggin was the Speaker for the Dead and that he was also the Ender Wiggin.

  Why this brilliant young woman should have become so fixed on Ender Wiggin, Valentine could not really understand. At times she thought, Perhaps this is how some religions start. The founder doesn't ask for disciples; they come and force themselves upon him.

  In any event, Plikt had stayed with Valentine and her family for all the years since Ender left Trondheim, tutoring the children and helping in Valentine's research, always waiting for the day that the family journeyed to be with Ender— a day that only Plikt had known would come.

  So during the last half of the voyage to Lusitania, it was the four of them who travelled in Miro's ship: Valentine, Miro, Jakt, and Plikt. Or so Valentine thought at first. It was on the third day since the rendezvous that she learned of the fifth traveller who had been with them all along.

  That day, as always, the four of them were gathered on the bridge. There was nowhere else to go. This was a cargo ship— besides the bridge and the sleeping quarters, there was only a tiny galley and the toilet. All the other space was designed to hold cargo, not people— not in any kind of reasonable comfort.

  Valentine didn't mind the loss of privacy, though. She was slacking off now on her output of subversive essays; it was more important, she felt, to get to know Miro— and, through him, Lusitania. The people there, the pequeninos, and, most particularly, Miro's family— for Ender had married Novinha, Miro's mother. Valentine did glean much of that kind of information, of course— she couldn't have been a historian and biographer for all these years without learning how to extrapolate much from scant bits of evidence.

  The real prize for her had turned out to be Miro himself. He was bitter, angry, frustrated, and filled with loathing for his crippled body, but all that was understandable— his loss had happened only a few months before, and he was still trying to redefine himself. Valentine didn't worry about his future— she could see that he was very strong-willed, the kind of man who didn't easily fall apart. He would adapt and thrive.

  What interested her most was his thought. It was as if the confinement of his body had freed his mind. When he had first been injured his paralysis was almost total. He had had nothing to do but lie in one place and think. Of course, much of his time had been spent brooding about his losses, his mistakes, the future he couldn't have. But he had also spent many hours thinking about the issues that busy people almost never think about. And on that third day together, that's what Valentine was trying to draw out of him.

  "Most people don't think about it, not seriously, and you have," said Valentine.

  "Just because I think about it doesn't mean I know anything," said Miro. She really was used to his voice now, though sometimes his speech was maddeningly slow. It took a real effort of will at times to keep from showing any sign of inattention.

  "The nature of the universe," said Jakt.

  "The sources of life," said Valentine. "You said you had thought about what it means to be alive, and I want to know what you thought."

  "How the universe works and why we all are in it." Miro laughed. "It's pretty crazy stuff."

  "I've been trapped alone in an ice floe in a fishing boat for two weeks in a blizzard with no heat," said Jakt. "I doubt you've come up with anything that'll sound crazy to me."

  Valentine smiled. Jakt was no scholar, and his philosophy was generally confined to holding his crew together and catching a lot of fish. But he knew that Valentine wanted to draw Miro out, and so he helped put the young man at ease, helped him know that he'd be taken seriously.

  And it was important for Jakt to be the one who did that— because Valentine had seen, and so had Jakt, how Miro watched him. Jakt might be old, but his arms and legs and back were still those of a fisherman, and every movement revealed the suppleness of his body. Miro even commented on it once, obliquely, admiringly: "You've got the build of a twenty-year-old." Valentine heard the ironic corollary that must have been in Miro's mind: While I, who am young, have the body of an arthritic ninety-year-old. So Jakt meant something to Miro— he represented the future that Miro could never have. Admiration and resentment; it would have been hard for Miro to speak openly in front of Jakt, if Jakt had not taken care to make sure Miro heard nothing but respect and interest from him.

  Plikt, of course, sat in her place, silent, withdrawn, effectively invisible.

  "All right," said Miro. "Speculations on the nature of reality and the soul."

  "Theology or metaphysics?" asked Valentine.

  "Metaphysics, mostly," said Miro. "And physics. Neither one is my specialty. And this isn't the kind of story you said you needed me for."

  "I don't always know exactly what I'll need."

  "All right," said Miro. He took a couple of breaths, as if he were trying to decide where to begin. "You know about philotic twining."

  "I know what everybody knows," said Valentine. "And I know that it hasn't led anywhere in the last twenty-five hundred years because it can't really be experimented with." It was an old discovery, from the days when scientists were struggling to catch up with technology. Teenage physics students memorised a few wise sayings: "Philotes are the fundamental building blocks of all matter and energy. Philotes have neither mass nor inertia. Philotes have only location, duration, and connection." And everybody knew that it was philotic connections— the twining of philotic rays— that made ansibles work, allowing instantaneous communication between worlds and starships many light-years apart. But no one knew why it worked, and because philotes could not be "handled," it was almost impossible to experiment with them. They could only be observed, and then only through their connections.

  "Philotics," said Jakt. "Ansibles?"

  "A by-product," said Miro.

  "What does it have to do with the soul?" asked Valentine.

  Miro was about to answer, but he grew frustrated, apparently at the thought of trying to give a long speech through his sluggish, resisting mouth. His jaw was working, his lips moving slightly. Then he said aloud, "I can't do it."

  "We'll listen," said Valentine. She understood his reluctance to try extended discourse with the limitations of his speech, but she also knew he had to do it anyway.

  "No," said Miro.

  Valentine would have tried further persuasion, but she saw his lips were still moving, though little sound came out. Was he muttering? Cursing?

  No— she knew it wasn't that at all.