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

by Orson Scott Card

  Maybe you can only do good if you think you're bad, and if you think you're good then you can only do bad.

  But that paradox was too much for her. There'd be no sense in the world if you had to judge people by the opposite of how they tried to seem. Wasn't it possible for a good person also to try to seem good? And just because somebody claimed to be scum didn't mean that he wasn't scum. Was there any way to judge people, if you can't judge even by their purpose?

  Was there any way for Wang-mu to judge even herself?

  Half the time I don't even know the purpose of what I do. I came to this house because I was ambitious and wanted to be a secret maid to a rich god spoken girl. It was pure selfishness on my part, and pure generosity that led Qing-jao to take me in. And now here I am helping Master Han commit treason— what is my purpose in that? I don't even know why I do what I do. How can I know what other people's true purposes are? There's no hope of ever knowing good from bad.

  She sat up in lotus position on her mat and pressed her face into her hands. It was as if she felt herself pressed against a wall, but it was a wall that she made herself, and if she could only find a way to move it aside— the way she could move her hands away from her face whenever she wanted— then she could easily push through to the truth.

  She moved her hands away. She opened her eyes. There was Master Han's terminal, across the room. There, today, she had seen the faces of Elanora Ribeira von Hesse and Andrew Wiggin. And Jane's face.

  She remembered Wiggin telling her what the gods would be like. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them. Why would he say such a thing? How could he know what a god would be?

  Somebody who wants to teach you how to know everything that they know and do everything that they do— what he was really describing was parents, not gods.

  Only there were plenty of parents who didn't do that. Plenty of parents who tried to keep their children down, to control them, to make slaves of them. Where she had grown up, Wang-mu had seen plenty of that.

  So what Wiggin was describing wasn't parents, really. He was describing good parents. He wasn't telling her what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was. To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the good things that you have. And to spare them the bad things if you can. That was goodness.

  What were the gods, then? They would want everyone else to know and have and be all good things. They would teach and share and train, but never force.

  Like my parents, thought Wang-mu. Clumsy and stupid sometimes, like all people, but they were good. They really did look out for me. Even sometimes when they made me do hard things because they knew it would be good for me. Even sometimes when they were wrong, they were good. I can judge them by their purpose after all. Everybody calls their purpose good, but my parents' purposes really were good, because they meant all their acts toward me to help me grow wiser and stronger and better. Even when they made me do hard things because they knew I had to learn from them. Even when they caused me pain.

  That was it. That's what the gods would be, if there were gods. They would want everyone else to have all that was good in life, just like good parents. But unlike parents or any other people, the gods would actually know what was good and have the power to cause good things to happen, even when nobody else understood that they were good. As Wiggin said, real gods would be smarter and stronger than anybody else. They would have all the intelligence and power that it was possible to have.

  But a being like that— who was someone like Wang-mu to judge a god? She couldn't understand their purposes even if they told her, so how could she ever know that they were good? Yet the other approach, to trust in them and believe in them absolutely— wasn't that what Qing-jao was doing?

  No. If there were gods, they would never act as Qing-jao thought they acted— enslaving people, tormenting and humiliating them.

  Unless torment and humiliation were good for them...

  No! She almost cried aloud, and once again pressed her face into her hands, this time to keep silence.

  I can only judge by what I understand. If as far as I can see, the gods that Qing-jao believes in are only evil, then yes, perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps I can't comprehend the great purpose they accomplish by making the godspoken into helpless slaves, or destroying whole species. But in my heart I have no choice but to reject such gods, because I can't see any good in what they're doing. Perhaps I'm so stupid and foolish that I will always be the enemy of the gods, working against their high and incomprehensible purposes. But I have to live my life according to what I understand, and what I understand is that there are no such gods as the ones the god spoken teach us about. If they exist at all, they take pleasure in oppression and deception, humiliation and ignorance. They act to make other people smaller and themselves larger. Those would not be gods, then, even if they existed. They would be enemies. Devils.

  The same with the beings, whoever they are, who made the descolada virus. Yes, they would have to be very powerful to make a tool like that. But they would also have to be heartless, selfish, arrogant beings, to think that all life in the universe was theirs to manipulate as they saw fit. To send the descolada out into the universe, not caring who it killed or what beautiful creatures it destroyed— those could not be gods, either.

  Jane, now— Jane might be a god. Jane knew vast amounts of information and had great wisdom as well, and she was acting for the good of others, even when it would take her life— even now, after her life was forfeit. And Andrew Wiggin, he might be a god, so wise and kind he seemed, and not acting for his own benefit but for the pequeninos. And Valentine, who called herself Demosthenes, she had worked to help other people find the truth and make wise decisions of their own. And Master Han, who was trying to do the right thing always, even when it cost him his daughter. Maybe even Ela, the scientist, even though she had not known all that she ought to have known— for she was not ashamed to learn truth from a servant girl.

  Of course they were not the sort of gods who lived off in the Infinite West, in the Palace of the Royal Mother. Nor were they gods in their own eyes— they would laugh at her for even thinking of it. But compared to her, they were gods indeed. They were so much wiser than Wang-mu, and so much more powerful, and as far as she could understand their purposes, they were trying to help other people become as wise and powerful as possible. Even wiser and more powerful than they were themselves. So even though Wang-mu might be wrong, even though she might truly understand nothing at all about anything, nevertheless she knew that her decision to work with these people was the right one for her to make.

  She could only do good as far as she understood what goodness was. And these people seemed to her to be doing good, while Congress seemed to be doing evil. So even though in the long run it might destroy her— for Master Han was now an enemy of Congress, and might be arrested and killed, and her along with him— still she would do it. She would never see real gods, but she could at least work to help those people who were as close to being gods as any real person could ever be.

  And if the gods don't like it, they can poison me in my sleep or catch me on fire as I'm walking in the garden tomorrow or just make my arms and legs and head drop off my body like crumbs off a cake. If they can't manage to stop a stupid little servant girl like me, they don't amount to much anyway.

  Chapter 15 — LIFE AND DEATH

  Ender's coming to see us.

  He comes and talks to me all the time.

  And we can talk directly into his mind. But he insists on coming. He doesn't feel like he's talking to us unless he sees us. He has a harder time distinguishing between his own thoughts and the ones we put in his mind when we converse from a distance. So he's coming.

  And you don't like this?

  He wants us to tell him answers and we don't know any answers.

  You know everything that the humans know. You got into space, didn't you? You don't even need their ansibles to talk from world to world.
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  They're so hungry for answers, these humans. They have so many questions.

  We have questions, too, you know.

  They want to know why, why, why. Or how. Everything all tied up into a nice neat bundle like a cocoon. The only time we do that is when we're metamorphosing a queen.

  They like to understand everything. But so do we, you know.

  Yes, you'd like to think you're just like the humans, wouldn't you? But you're not like Ender. Not like the humans. He has to know the cause of everything, he has to make a story about everything and we don't know any stories. We know memories. We know things that happen. But we don't know why they happen, not the way he wants us to.

  Of course you do.

  We don't even care why, the way these humans do. We find out as much as we need to know to accomplish something, but they always want to know more than they need to know. After they get something to work, they're still hungry to know why it works and why the cause of its working works.

  Aren't we like that?

  Maybe you will be, when the descolada stops interfering with you.

  Or maybe we'll be like your workers.

  If you are, you won't care. They're all very happy. It's intelligence that makes you unhappy. The workers ore either hungry or not hungry. In pain or not in pain. They're never curious or disappointed or anguished or ashamed. And when it comes to things like that, these humans make you and me look like workers.

  I think you just don't know us well enough to compare.

  We've been inside your head and we've been inside Ender's head and we've been inside our own heads for a thousand generations and these humans make us look like we're asleep. Even when they're asleep they're not asleep. Earth born animals do this thing, inside their brains— a sort of mad firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they're asleep. The part of their brain that records sight or sound, it's firing off every hour or two while they sleep, even when all the sights and sounds are complete random nonsense, their brains just keep on trying to assemble it into something sensible. They try to make stories out of it. It's complete random nonsense with no possible correlation to the real world, and yet they turn it into these crazy stories. And then they forget them. All that work, coming up with these stories, and when they wake up they forget almost all of them. But when they do remember, then they try to make stories about those crazy stories, trying to fit them into their real lives.

  We know about their dreaming.

  Maybe without the descolada, you'll dream, too.

  Why should we want to? As you say, it's meaningless. Random firings of the synapses of the neurons in their brains.

  They're practising. They're doing it all the time. Coming up with stories. Making connections. Making sense out of nonsense.

  What good is it, when it means nothing?

  That's just it. They have a hunger we know nothing about. The hunger for answers. The hunger for making sense. The hunger for stories.

  We have stories.

  You remember deeds. They make up deeds. They change what their stories mean. They transform things so that the same memory can mean a thousand different things. Even from their dreams, sometimes they make up out of that randomness something that illuminates everything. Not one human being has anything like the kind of mind you have. The kind we have. Nothing as powerful. And their lives are so short, they die so fast. But in their century or so they come up with ten thousand meanings for every one that we discover.

  Most of them wrong.

  Even if the vast majority of them are wrong, even if ninety-nine of every hundred is stupid and wrong, out of ten thousand ideas that still leaves them with a hundred good ones. That's how they make up for being so stupid and having such short lives and small memories.

  Dreams and madness.

  Magic and mystery and philosophy.

  You can't say that you never think of stories. What you've just been telling me is a story.

  I know.

  See? Humans do nothing you can't do.

  Don't you understand? I got even this story from Ender's mind. It's his. And he got the seed of it from somebody else, something he read, and combined it with things he thought of until it made sense to him. It's all there in his head. While we are like you. We have a clear view of the world. I have no trouble finding my way through your mind. Everything orderly and sensible and clear. You'd be as much at ease in mine. What's in your head is reality, more or less, as best you understand it. But in Ender's mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can't all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they're needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every new problem he faces. As if he conceives of a new universe to live in, every hour a new one, often hopelessly wrong and he ends up making mistakes and bad judgements, but sometimes so perfectly right that it opens things up like a miracle and I look through his eyes and see the world his new way and it changes everything. Madness, and then illumination. We knew everything there was to know before we met these humans, before we built our connection with Ender's mind. Now we discover that there are so many ways of knowing the same things that we'll never find them all.

  Unless the humans teach you.

  You see? We are scavengers also.

  You're a scavenger. We're supplicants.

  If only they were worthy of their own mental abilities.

  Aren't they?

  They are planning to blow you up, you remember. There's so much possibility in their minds, but they are still, after all, individually stupid and small-minded and half-blind and half-mad. There's still the ninety-nine percent of their stories that are hideously wrong and lead them into terrible errors. Sometimes we wish we could tame them, like the workers. We tried to, you know, with Ender. But we couldn't do it. Couldn't make a worker of him.

  Why not?

  Too stupid. Can't pay attention long enough. Human minds lack focus. They get bored and wander off. We had to build a bridge outside him, using the computer that he was most closely bonded with. Computers, now— those things can pay attention. And their memory is neat, orderly, everything organised and findable.

  But they don't dream.

  No madness. Too bad.

  Valentine showed up unbidden at Olhado's door. It was early morning. He wouldn't go to work till afternoon— he was a shift manager at the small brickworks. But he was already up and about, probably because his family was. The children were trooping out the door. I used to see this on television back in the ancient days, thought Valentine. The family going out the door in the morning, all at the same time, and Dad last of all with the briefcase. In their own way, my parents acted out that life. Never mind how deeply weird their children were. Never mind how after we paraded off to school in the morning, Peter and I went prowling through the nets, trying to take over the world through the use of pseudonyms. Never mind that Ender was torn away from the family as a little boy and never saw any of them again, even on his one visit to Earth— except me. I think my parents still imagined they were doing it right, because they went through a ritual they had seen on TV.

  And here it is again. The children bursting through the door. That boy must be Nimbo, the one who was with Grego at the confrontation with the mob. But here he is, just a clich‚ child— no one would guess that he had been part of that terrible night only a little while ago.

  Mother gave them each a kiss. She was still a beautiful young woman, even with so many children. So ordinary, so like the clich.. and yet a remarkable woman, for she had married their father, hadn't she? She had seen past the deformity.