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

by Orson Scott Card

  Wherever it was when it felt us calling.

  "But where is that?"

  Not here.

  "Fine, I believe you. But where does it come from?"

  Can't think of the place.

  "You forget?"

  We mean that the place where it is can't be thought of. If we could think of the place then they would already have thought of themselves and none of them would need to take the pattern we show.

  "What kind of thing is this binder-together?"

  Can't see it. Can't know it until it finds the pattern and then when it's there it's like us.

  Ender couldn't help shuddering. All this time he had thought that he was speaking to the hive queen herself. Now he realised that the thing that talked to him in his mind was only using that body the way it used the buggers. Symbiosis. A controlling parasite, possessing the whole hive queen system, using it.

  No. This is ugly, the terrible thing you're thinking. We aren't another thing. We're this thing. We are the hive queen, just the way you're the body. You say, My body, and yet you are your body, but you're also possessor of the body. The hive queen is ourself, this body is me, not something else inside. I. I wasn't anything until I found the imagining.

  "I don't understand. What was it like?"

  How can I remember? I never had memory until I followed the imagining and came to this place and became the hive queen.

  "Then how did you know that you aren't just the hive queen?"

  Because after I came, they gave me the memories. I saw the queen-body before I came, and then I saw the queen-body after I was in it. I was strong enough to hold the pattern in my mind, and so I could possess it. Become it. It took many days but then we were whole and they could give us the memories because I had the whole memory.

  The vision the hive queen had been giving him faded. It wasn't helping anyway, or at least not in any way he could grasp. Nevertheless, a mental image was coming clear for Ender now, one that came from his own mind to explain all the things she was saying. The other hive queens— not physically present, most of them, but linked philotically to the one queen who had to be there— they held the pattern of the relationship between hive queen and workers in their minds, until one of these mysterious memoryless creatures was able to contain the pattern in its mind and therefore take possession of it.

  Yes.

  "But where do these things come from? Where do you have to go to get them?"

  We don't go anywhere. We call, and there they are.

  "So they're everywhere?"

  They aren't here at all. Nowhere here. Another place.

  "But you said you don't have to go anywhere to get them."

  Doorways. We don't know where they are, but everywhere there's a door.

  "What are the doorways like?"

  Your brain made the word you say. Doorway. Doorway.

  Now he realised that doorway was the word his brain called forth to label the concept they were putting in his mind. And suddenly he was able to grasp an explanation that made sense.

  "They're not in the same space-time continuum as ours. But they can enter ours at any point."

  To them all points are the same point. All wheres are the same where. They only find one where-ness in the pattern.

  "But this is incredible. You're calling forth some being from another place, and—"

  The calling forth is nothing. All things do it. All new makings. You do it. Every human baby has this thing. The pequeninos are these things also. Grass and sunlight. All making calls them, and they come to the pattern. if there are already some who understand the pattern, then they come and possess it. Small patterns are very easy. Our pattern is very hard. Only a very wise one can possess it.

  "Philotes," said Ender. "The things out of which all other things are made."

  The word you say doesn't make a meaning like what we mean.

  "Because I'm only just making the connection. We never meant what you've described, but the thing we did mean, that might be the thing you described."

  Very unclear.

  "Join the club."

  Very welcome laughing happy.

  "So when you make a hive queen, you already have the biological body, and this new thing— this philote that you call out of the non-place where philotes are— it has to be one that's able to comprehend the complex pattern that you have in your minds of what a hive queen is, and when one comes that can do it, it takes on that identity and possesses the body and becomes the self of that body—"

  Of all the bodies.

  "But there are no workers yet, when the hive queen is first made."

  It becomes the self of the workers-to-come.

  "We're talking about a passage from another kind of space. A place where philotes already are."

  All in the same non-place. No place-ness in that place. No where-being. All hungry for whereness. All thirsty for pattern. All lonely for selfness.

  "And you say that we're made of the same things?"

  How could we have found you if you weren't?

  "But you said that finding me was like making a hive queen."

  We couldn't find the pattern in you. We were trying to make a pattern between you and the other humans, only you kept shifting and changing, we couldn't make sense of it. And you couldn't make sense of us, either, so that reaching of yours couldn't make a pattern, either. So we took the third pattern. You reaching into the machine. You yearning so much for it. Like the life-yearning of the new queen-body. You were binding yourself to the program in the computer. It showed you images. We could find the images in the computer and we could find them in your mind. We could match them while you watched. The computer was very complicated and you were even more complicated but it was a pattern that held still. You were moving together and while you were together you possessed each other, you had the same vision. And when you imagined something and did it, the computer made something out of your imagining and imagined something back. Very primitive imagining from the computer. It wasn't a self. But you were making it a self by the life-yearning. The reaching-out you were doing.

  "The Fantasy Game," said Ender. "You made a pattern out of the Fantasy Game."

  We imagined the same thing you were imagining. All of us together. Calling. It was very complicated and strange, but much simpler than anything else we found in you. Since then we know — very few humans are capable of concentrating the way you concentrated on that game. And we've seen no other computer program that responded to a human the way that game responded to you. It was yearning, too. Cycling over and over, trying to find something to make for you.

  "And when you called ..."

  It came. The bridge we needed. The together-binder for you and the computer program. It held the pattern so that it was alive even when you weren't paying attention to it. It was linked to you, you were part of it, and yet we could also understand it. It was the bridge.

  "But when a philote takes possession of a new hive queen, it controls it, queen-body and worker-bodies. Why didn't this bridge you made take control of me?"

  Do you think we didn't try?

  "Why didn't it work?"

  You weren't capable of letting a pattern like that control you. You could willingly become part of a pattern that was real and alive, but you couldn't be controlled by it. You couldn't even be destroyed by it. And there was so much of you in the pattern that we couldn't even control it ourselves. Too strange for us.

  "But you could still use it to read my mind."

  We could use it to stay connected with you in spite of all the strangeness. We studied you, especially when you played the game. And as we understood you, we began to grasp the idea of your whole species. That each individual of you was alive, with no hive queen at all.

  "More complicated than you expected?"

  And less. Your individual minds were simpler in the ways that we expected to be complicated, and complicated in ways that we expected them to be simple. We realised that you were truly alive and
beautiful in your perverse and tragic lonely way and we decided not to send another colony ship to your worlds.

  "But we didn't know that. How could we know?"

  We also realised that you were dangerous and terrible. You in particular, dangerous because you found all our patterns and we couldn't think of anything complicated enough to confuse you. So you destroyed all but me. Now I understand you better. I've had all these years to study you. You are not as terrifyingly brilliant as we thought.

  "Too bad. Terrifying brilliance would be useful right now."

  We prefer a comforting glow of intelligence.

  "We humans get slower as we age. Give me a few more years and I'll be downright cosy."

  We know that you'll die someday. Even though you put it off for so long.

  Ender didn't want this to become another conversation about mortality or any of the other aspects of human life that so fascinated the hive queen. There was still one question that had occurred to him during the hive queen's story. An intriguing possibility.

  "The bridge you made. Where was it? In the computer?"

  Inside you. The way I'm inside the body of the hive queen.

  "But not part of me."

  Part of you but also not-you. Other. Outside but inside. Bound to you but free. It couldn't control you, and you couldn't control it.

  "Could it control the computer?"

  We didn't think about that. We didn't care. Maybe.

  "How long did you use this bridge? How long was it there?"

  We stopped thinking about it. We were thinking about you.

  "But it was still there the whole time you were studying me."

  Where would it go?

  "How long would it last?"

  We never made one like that before. How would we know? The hive queen dies when the queen-body dies.

  "But what body was the bridge in?"

  Yours. At the centre of the pattern.

  "This thing was inside me?"

  Of course. But it was still not-you. It disappointed us that way, when it couldn't let us control you, and we stopped thinking about it. But we see now that this was very important. We should have searched for it. We should have remembered it.

  "No. To you it was like— a bodily function. Like balling up your fist to hit somebody. You did it, and then when you didn't need it you didn't notice whether your fist was still there or not."

  We don't understand the connection but it seems to make sense inside you.

  "It's still alive, isn't it?"

  It could be. We're trying to feel it. Find it. Where can we look? The old pattern isn't there. You don't play the Fantasy Game anymore.

  "But it would still be linked to the computer, wouldn't it? A connection between me and the computer. Only the pattern could have grown, couldn't it? It could include other people, too. Think of it being linked to Miro— the young man I brought with me—"

  The broken one ...

  "And instead of being linked to that one computer, linked to thousands and thousands of them, through the ansible links between worlds."

  This could be. It was alive. It could grow. The way we grow when we make more workers. All this time. Now that you mention it, we're sure it must still be there because we're still linked to you, and it was only through that pattern that we connected with you. The connection is very strong now— that's part of what it is, the link between us and you. We thought the connection grew stronger because we knew you better. But maybe it also grew stronger because the bridge was growing.

  "And I always thought— Jane and I always thought that she was— that she had somehow come to exist in the ansible connections between worlds. That's probably where she feels herself, the place that feels like the centre of her— body, I was going to say."

  We're trying to feel whether the bridge between us is still there. Hard to feel it.

  "Like trying to find a particular muscle that you've been using all your life but never by itself."

  Interesting comparison. We don't see the connection but no, now we see it.

  "The comparison?"

  The bridge. Very big. The pattern of it is too big. We can't grasp it any more. Very big. Memory — very confusing. Much harder than finding you the first time — very confusing. Getting lost. We can't hold it in our mind any more.

  "Jane," whispered Ender. "You're a big girl now."

  Jane's voice came in answer: "You're cheating, Ender. I can't hear what she's saying to you. I can only feel your heart pounding and your rapid breathing."

  Jane. We've seen this name in your mind many times. But the bridge wasn't a person with a face —

  "Neither is Jane."

  We see a face in your mind when you think of this name. We still see it. Always we thought it was a person. But now —

  "She's the bridge. You made her."

  Called her. You made the pattern. She possessed it. What she is, this Jane, this bridge, she began with the pattern we discovered in you and the Fantasy Game, yes, but she has imagined herself to be much larger. She must have been a very strong and powerful — philote, if your word is the right name — to be able to change her own pattern and still remember to be herself.

  "You reached out across the light-years and found me because I was looking for you. And then you found a pattern and called a creature from another space who grasped the pattern and possessed it and became Jane. All of this instantaneously. Faster than light."

  But this isn't faster-than-light travel. It's faster-than-light imagining and calling. It still doesn't pick you up here and put you there.

  "I know. I know. This may not help us answer the question I came here with. But I had another question, just as important to me, that I never thought would have anything to do with you, and here you had the answer to it all along. Jane's real, alive the whole time, and her self isn't out there in space, it's inside me. Connected to me. They can't kill her by switching her off. That's something."

  If they kill the pattern, she can die.

  "But they can't kill the whole pattern, don't you see? It doesn't depend on the ansibles after all. It depends on me and on the link between me and the computers. They can't cut the link between me and the computers here and in the satellites orbiting Lusitania. And maybe she doesn't need the ansibles, either. After all, you don't need them to reach me through her."

  Many strange things are possible. We can't imagine them. They feel very stupid and strange, the things going through your mind. You're making us very tired, with all your thinking of stupid imaginary impossible things.

  "I'll leave you, then. But this will help. This has to help. If Jane can find a way to survive because of this, then that's a real victory. The first victory, when I was beginning to think there wasn't any victory to be had in this."

  The moment he left the presence of the hive queen, he began talking to Jane, telling her everything he could remember of what the hive queen could explain. Who Jane was, how she was created.

  And as he talked, she analysed herself in light of what he said. Began to discover things about herself that she had never guessed. By the time Ender got back to the human colony, she had verified as much of his story as she could. "I never found this because I always started with the wrong assumptions," she said. "I imagined my centre to be out in space somewhere. I should have guessed I was inside you from the fact that even when I was furious with you, I had to come back to you to be at peace."