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

by Orson Scott Card

  "I hate you for this," she said. "I knew you'd do this."

  "Do what?"

  "Make me feel so terrible that I have to— give in!"

  "If you knew I'd do this, why did you come?"

  "I shouldn't have! I wish I hadn't!"

  "I'll tell you why you came. You came so that I would make you give in. So that when you did it, you'd be doing it for my sake, and not for your family."

  "So I'm your puppet?"

  "Just the opposite. You chose to come here. You are using me to make you do what you really want to do. At heart you are still human, Quara. You want your people to live. You would be a monster if you didn't."

  "Just because you're dying doesn't make you wise," she said.

  "Yes it does," said Planter.

  "What if I tell you that I'll never cooperate in the killing of the descolada?"

  "Then I'll believe you," said Planter.

  "And hate me."

  "Yes," said Planter.

  "You can't."

  "Yes I can. I'm not a very good Christian. I am not able to love the one who chooses to kill me and all my people."

  She said nothing.

  "Go away now," he said. "I've said all that I can say. Now I want to chant my stories and keep myself intelligent until death finally comes."

  She walked away from him, into the sterilisation chamber.

  Miro turned toward Ela. "Get everybody out of the lab," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Because there's a chance that she'll come out and tell you what she knows."

  "Then I should be the one to go, and everybody else stay," said Ela.

  "No," said Miro. "You're the only one that she'll ever tell."

  "If you think that, then you're a complete—"

  "Telling anyone else wouldn't hurt her enough to satisfy her," said Miro. "Everybody out."

  Ela thought for a moment. "All right," she said to the others. "Get back to the main lab and monitor your computers. I'll bring us up on the net if she tells me anything, and you can see what she enters as we put it in. If you can make sense of what you're seeing, start following it up. Even if she actually knows anything, we still won't have much time to design a truncated descolada so we can get it to Planter before he dies. Go."

  They went.

  When Quara emerged from the sterilisation chamber, she found only Ela and Miro waiting for her.

  "I still think it's wrong to kill the descolada before we've even tried to talk to it," she said.

  "It may well be," said Ela. "I only know that I intend to do it if I can."

  "Bring up your files," said Quara. "I'm going to tell you everything I know about descolada intelligence. If it works and Planter lives through this, I'm going to spit in his face."

  "Spit a thousand times," said Ela. "Just so he lives."

  Her files came up into the display. Quara began pointing to certain regions of the model of the descolada virus. Within a few minutes, it was Quara sitting before the terminal, typing, pointing, talking, as Ela asked questions.

  In his ear, Jane spoke up again. "The little bitch," she said. "She didn't have her files in another computer. She kept everything she knew inside her head."

  ***

  By late afternoon the next day, Planter was at the edge of death and Ela was at the edge of exhaustion. Her team had worked through the night; Quara had helped, constantly, indefatigably reading over everything Ela's people came up with, critiquing, pointing out errors. By mid-morning, they had a plan for a truncated virus that should work. All of the language capability was gone, which meant the new viruses wouldn't be able to communicate with each other. All the analytical ability was gone as well, as near as they could tell. But safely in place were all the parts of the virus that supported bodily functions in the native species of Lusitania. As near as they could possibly tell without having a working sample of the virus, the new design was exactly what was needed— a descolada that was completely functional in the life cycles of the Lusitanian species, including the pequeninos, yet completely incapable of global regulation and manipulation. They named the new virus recolada. The old one had been named for its function of tearing apart; the new one for its remaining function, holding together the species-pairs that made up the native life of Lusitania.

  Ender raised one objection— that since the descolada must have been putting the pequeninos into a belligerent, expansive mode, the new virus might lock them into that particular condition. But Ela and Quara answered together that they had deliberately used an older version of the descolada as their model, from a time when the pequeninos were more relaxed— more "themselves." The pequeninos working on the project had agreed to this; there was little time to consult anyone else except Human and Rooter, who also concurred.

  With the things that Quara had taught them about the workings of the descolada, Ela also had a team working on a killer bacterium that would spread quickly through the entire planet's gaialogy, finding the normal descolada in every place and every form, tearing it to bits and killing it. It would recognise the old descolada by the very elements that the new descolada would lack. Releasing the recolada and the killer bacterium at the same time should do the job.

  There was only one problem remaining— actually making the new virus. That was Ela's direct project from mid-morning on. Quara collapsed and slept. So did most of the pequeninos. But Ela struggled on, trying to use all the tools she had to break apart the virus and recombine it as she needed.

  But when Ender came late in the afternoon to tell her that it was now or never, if her virus was to save Planter, she could only break down and weep from exhaustion and frustration.

  "I can't," she said.

  "Then tell him that you've achieved it but you can't get it ready in time and —"

  "I mean it can't be done."

  "You've designed it."

  "We've planned it, we've modelled it, yes. But it can't be made. The descolada is a really vicious design. We can't build it from scratch because there are too many parts that can't hold together unless you have those very sections already working to keep rebuilding each other as they break down. And we can't do modifications of the present virus unless the descolada is at least marginally active, in which case it undoes what we're doing faster than we can do it. It was designed to police itself constantly so it can't be altered, and to be so unstable in all its parts that it's completely unmakable."

  "But they made it."

  "Yes, but I don't know how. Unlike Grego, I can't completely step outside my science on some metaphysical whim and make things up and wish them into existence. I'm stuck with the rules of nature as they are here and now, and there's no rule that will let me make it."

  "So we know where we need to go, but we can't get there from here."

  "Until last night I didn't know enough to guess whether we could design this new recolada or not, and therefore I had no way of guessing whether we could make it. I figured that if it was designable, it was makable. I was ready to make it, ready to act the moment Quara relented. All we've achieved is to know, finally, completely, that it can't be done. Quara was right. We definitely found out enough from her to enable us to kill every descolada virus on Lusitania. But we can't make the recolada that could replace it and keep Lusitanian life functioning."

  "So if we use the viricide bacterium —"

  "All the pequeninos in the world would be where Planter is now within a week or two. And all the grass and birds and vines and everything. Scorched earth. An atrocity. Quara was right." She wept again.

  "You're just tired." It was Quara, awake now and looking terrible, not refreshed at all by her sleep.

  Ela, for her part, couldn't answer her sister.

  Quara looked like she might be thinking of saying something cruel, along the lines of What did I tell you? But she thought better of it, and came and put her hand on Ela's shoulder. "You're tired, Ela. You need to sleep."

  "Yes," said Ela.

  "But first let'
s tell Planter."

  "Say good-bye, you mean."

  "Yes, that's what I mean."

  They made their way to the lab that contained Planter's clean room. The pequenino researchers who had slept were awake again; all had joined the vigil for Planter's last hours. Miro was inside with Planter again, and this time they didn't make him leave, though Ender knew that both Ela and Quara longed to be inside with him. Instead they both spoke to him over the speakers, explaining what they had found. The half-success that was worse, in its way, than complete failure, because it could easily lead to the destruction of all the pequeninos, if the humans of Lusitania became desperate enough.

  "You won't use it," whispered Planter. The microphones, sensitive as they were, could barely pick up his voice.

  "We won't," said Quara. "But we're not the only people here."

  "You won't use it," he said. "I'm the only one who'll ever die like this."

  The last of his words were voiceless; they read his lips later, from the holo recording, to be sure of what he said. And, having said it, having heard their good-byes, he died.

  The moment the monitoring machines confirmed his death, the pequeninos of the research group rushed into the clean room. No need for sterilisation now. They wanted the descolada with them. Brusquely moving Miro out of the way, they set to work, injecting the virus into every part of Planter's body, hundreds of injections in moments. They had been preparing for this, obviously. They would respect Planter's sacrifice in life— but once he was dead, his honour satisfied, they had no compunctions about trying to save him for the third life if they could.

  They took him out into the open space where Human and Rooter stood, and laid him on a spot already marked, forming an equilateral triangle with those two young father trees. There they flayed his body and staked it open. Within hours a tree was growing, and there was hope, briefly, that it might be a father tree. But it took only a few days more for the brothers, who were adept at recognising a young father tree, to declare that the effort had failed. There was a kind of life, containing his genes, yes; but the memories, the will, the person who was Planter was lost. The tree was mute; there would be no mind joining the perpetual conclave of the father trees. Planter had determined to free himself of the descolada, even if it meant losing the third life that was the descolada's gift to those it possessed. He succeeded, and, in losing, won.

  He had succeeded in something else, too. The pequeninos departed from their normal pattern of forgetting quickly the name of mere brother trees. Though no little mother would ever crawl its bark, the brother tree that had grown from his corpse would be known by the name of Planter and treated with respect, as if it were a father tree, as if it were a person. Moreover, his story was told and told again throughout Lusitania, wherever pequeninos lived. He had proved that pequeninos were intelligent even without the descolada; it was a noble sacrifice, and speaking the name of Planter was a reminder to all pequeninos of their fundamental freedom from the virus that had put them in bondage.

  But Planter's death did not give any pause to the preparations for pequenino colonisation of other worlds. Warmaker's people had a majority now, and as rumours spread that the humans had a bacterium capable of killing all the descolada, they had an even greater urgency. Hurry, they told the hive queen again and again. Hurry, so we can win free of this world before the humans decide to kill us all.

  ***

  "I can do it, I think," said Jane. "If the ship is small and simple, the cargo almost nothing, the crew as few as possible, then I can hold the pattern of it in my mind. If the voyage is brief, the stay in Outspace very short. As for holding the locations of the start and finish in my mind, that's easy, child's play, I can do it within a millimetre, less. If I slept, I could do it in my sleep. So there's no need for it to endure acceleration or provide extended life support. The starship can be simple. A sealed environment, places to sit, light, heat. If in fact we can get there and I can hold it all together and bring us back, then we won't be out in space long enough to use up the oxygen in a small room."

  They were all gathered in the Bishop's office to listen to her— the whole Ribeira family, Jakt's and Valentine's family, the pequenino researchers, several priests and Filhos, and perhaps a dozen other leaders of the human colony. The Bishop had insisted on having the meeting in his office. "Because it's large enough," he had said, "and because if you're going to go out like Nimrod and hunt before the Lord, if you're going to send a ship like Babel out to heaven to seek the face of God, then I want to be there to plead with God to be merciful to you."

  "How much of your capacity is left?" Ender asked Jane.

  "Not much," she said. "As it is, every computer in the Hundred Worlds will be sluggish while we do it, as I use their memory to hold the pattern."

  "I ask, because we want to try to perform an experiment while we're out there."

  "Don't waffle about it, Andrew," said Ela. "We want to perform a miracle while we're there. If we get Outside it means that Grego and Olhado are probably right about what it's like out there. And that means that the rules are different. Things can be created just by comprehending the pattern of them. So I want to go. There's a chance that while I'm there, holding the pattern of the recolada virus in my mind, I might be able to create it. I might be able to bring back a virus that can't be made in real space. Can you take me? Can you hold me there long enough to make the virus?"

  "How long is that?" asked Jane.

  "It should be instantaneous," said Grego. "The moment we arrive, whatever full patterns we hold in our minds should be created within a period of time too brief for humans to notice. The real time will be taken analysing to see if, in fact, she's got the virus she wanted. Maybe five minutes."

  "Yes," said Jane. "If I can do this at all, I can do it for five minutes."

  "The rest of the crew," said Ender.

  "The rest of the crew will be you and Miro," said Jane. "And no one else."

  Grego protested loudest, but he was not alone.

  "I'm a pilot," said Jakt.

  "I'm the only pilot of this ship," said Jane.

  "Olhado and I thought of it," said Grego.

  "Ender and Miro will come because it can't be done safely without them. I dwell within Ender— where he goes, he carries me with him. Miro, on the other hand, has become so close to me that I think he might be part of the pattern that is myself. I want him there because I may not be whole without him. No one else. I can't have anyone else in the pattern. Ela is the only one beyond these two."

  "Then that's the crew," said Ender.

  "With no argument," added Mayor Kovano.

  "Will the hive queen build the ship?" asked Jane.

  "She will," said Ender.

  "Then I have only one more favor to ask. Ela, if I can give you the five minutes, can you also hold the pattern of another virus in your mind?"

  "The virus for Path?" she asked.

  "We owe them that, if we can, for the help they gave to us."

  "I think so," she said, "or at least the differences between it and the normal descolada. That's all I can possibly hold of anything— the differences."

  "And how soon will all this happen?" asked the Mayor.

  "However fast the hive queen can build the ship," said Jane. "We have only forty-eight days until the Hundred Worlds shut down their ansibles. I will survive that day, we know that now, but it will cripple me. It will take me awhile to relearn all my lost memories, if I ever can. Until that's happened, I can't possibly sustain the pattern of a ship to go Outside."