Xenocide ew-4

by Orson Scott Card

  “Reincarnation,” said Jakt. “The philote is the soul.”

  “It happens with the piggies, anyway,” said Miro.

  “The hive queen as well,” said the Miro-image. “The reason we discovered philotic connections in the first place was because we saw how the buggers communicated with each other faster than light– that's what showed us it was possible. The individual buggers are all part of the hive queen; they're like her hands and feet, and she's their mind, one vast organism with thousands or millions of bodies. And the only connection between them is the twining of their philotic rays.”

  It was a picture of the universe that Valentine had never conceived of before. Of course, as a historian and biographer she usually conceived of things in terms of peoples and societies; while she wasn't ignorant of physics, neither was she deeply trained in it. Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.

  And she liked the idea well enough to wish it were true. Of the trillion lovers who had whispered to each other, We are one, could it be that some of them really were? Of the billions of families who had bonded together so closely they felt like a single soul, wouldn't it be lovely to think that at the most basic level of reality it was so?

  Jakt, however, was not so caught up in the idea. “I thought we weren't supposed to talk about the existence of the hive queen,” he said. “I thought that was Ender's secret.”

  “It's all right,” said Valentine. “Everyone in this room knows.”

  Jakt gave her his impatient look. “I thought we were coming to Lusitania to help in the struggle against Starways Congress. What does any of this have to do with the real world?”

  “Maybe nothing,” said Valentine. “Maybe everything.”

  Jakt buried his face in his hands for a moment, then looked back up at her with a smile that wasn't really a smile. “I haven't heard you say anything so transcendental since your brother left Trondheim.”

  That stung her, particularly because she knew it was meant to. After all these years, was Jakt still jealous of her connection with Ender? Did he still resent the fact that she could care about things that meant nothing to him? “When he went,” said Valentine, “I stayed.” She was really saying, I passed the only test that mattered. Why should you doubt me now?

  Jakt was abashed. It was one of the best things about him, that when he realized he was wrong he backed down at once. “And when you went,” said Jakt, “I came with you.” Which she took to mean, I'm with you, I'm really not jealous of Ender anymore, and I'm sorry for sniping at you. Later, when they were alone, they'd say these things again openly. It wouldn't do to reach Lusitania with suspicions and jealousy on either's part.

  Miro, of course, was oblivious to the fact that Jakt and Valentine had already declared a truce. He was only aware of the tension between them, and thought he was the cause of it. “I'm sorry,” said Miro. “I didn't mean to…”

  “It's all right,” said Jakt. “I was out of line.”

  “There is no line,” said Valentine, with a smile at her husband. Jakt smiled back.

  That was what Miro needed to see; he visibly relaxed.

  “Go on,” said Valentine.

  “Take all that as a given,” said the Miro-image.

  Valentine couldn't help it– she laughed out loud. Partly she laughed because this mystical Gangean philote-as-soul business was such an absurdly large premise to swallow. Partly she laughed to release the tension between her and Jakt. “I'm sorry,” she said. “That's an awfully big 'given.' If that's the preamble, I can't wait to hear the conclusion.”

  Miro, understanding her laughter now, smiled back. “I've had a lot of time to think,” he said. “That really was my speculation on what life is. That everything in the universe is behavior. But there's something else we want to tell you about. And ask you about, too, I guess.” He turned to Jakt. “And it has a lot to do with stopping the Lusitania Fleet.”

  Jakt smiled and nodded. “I appreciate being tossed a bone now and then.”

  Valentine smiled her most charming smile. “So– later you'll be glad when I break a few bones.”

  Jakt laughed again.

  “Go on, Miro,” said Valentine.

  It was the image-Miro that responded. “If all of reality is the behavior of philotes, then obviously most philotes are only smart enough or strong enough to act as a meson or hold together a neutron. A very few of them have the strength of will to be alive– to govern an organism. And a tiny, tiny fraction of them are powerful enough to control– no, to be– a sentient organism. But still, the most complex and intelligent being– the hive queen, for instance– is, at core, just a philote, like all the others. It gains its identity and life from the particular role it happens to fulfill, but what it is is a philote.”

  “My self– my will– is a subatomic particle?” asked Valentine.

  Jakt smiled, nodded. “A fun idea,” he said. “My shoe and I are brothers.”

  Miro smiled wanly. The Miro-image, however, answered. “If a star and a hydrogen atom are brothers, then yes, there is a kinship between you and the philotes that make up common objects like your shoe.”

  Valentine noticed that Miro had not subvocalized anything just before the Miro-image answered. How had the software producing the Miro-image come up with the analogy with stars and hydrogen atoms, if Miro didn't provide it on the spot? Valentine had never heard of a computer program capable of producing such involved yet appropriate conversation on its own.

  “And maybe there are other kinships in the universe that you know nothing of till now,” said the Miro-image. “Maybe there's a kind of life you haven't met.”

  Valentine, watching Miro, saw that he seemed worried. Agitated. As if he didn't like what the Miro-image was doing now.

  “What kind of life are you talking about?” asked Jakt.

  “There's a physical phenomenon in the universe, a very common one, that is completely unexplained, and yet everyone takes it for granted and no one has seriously investigated why and how it happens. This is it: None of the ansible connections has ever broken.”

  “Nonsense,” said Jakt. “One of the ansibles on Trondheim was out of service for six months last year– it doesn't happen often, but it happens.”

  Again Miro's lips and jaw were motionless; again the image answered immediately. Clearly he was not controlling it now. “I didn't say that the ansibles never break down. I said that the connections– the philotic twining between the parts of a split meson– have never broken. The machinery of the ansible can break down, the software can get corrupted, but never has a meson fragment within an ansible made the shift to allow its philotic ray to entwine with another local meson or even with the nearby planet.”

  “The magnetic field suspends the fragment, of course,” said Jakt.

  “Split mesons don't endure long enough in nature for us to know how they naturally act,” said Valentine.

  “I know all the standard answers,” said the image. “All nonsense. All the kind of answers parents give their children when they don't know the truth and don't want to bother finding out. People still treat the ansibles like magic. Everybody's glad enough that the ansibles keep on working; if they tried to figure out why, the magic might go out of it and then the ansibles would stop.”

  “Nobody feels that way,” said Valentine.

  “They all do,” said the image. “Even if it took hundreds of years, or a thousand years, or three thousand years, one of those connections should have broken by now. One of those meson fragments should have shifted its philotic ray– but they never have.”

  “Why?” asked Miro.

  Valentine assumed at first that Miro was asking a rhetorical question. But no– he was looking at the image just like the rest of them, asking it to tell him why.
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  “I thought this program was reporting your speculations,” said Valentine.

  “It was,” said Miro. “But not now.”

  “What if there's a being who lives among the philotic connections between ansibles?” asked the image.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Miro. Again he was speaking to the image on the screen.

  And the image on the screen changed, to the face of a young woman, one that Valentine had never seen before.

  “What if there's a being who dwells in the web of philotic rays connecting the ansibles on every world and every starship in the human universe? What if she is composed of those philotic connections? What if her thoughts take place in the spin and vibration of the split pairs? What if her memories are stored in the computers of every world and every ship?”

  “Who are you?” asked Valentine, speaking directly to the image.

  “Maybe I'm the one who keeps all those philotic connections alive, ansible to ansible. Maybe I'm a new kind of organism, one that doesn't twine rays together, but instead keeps them twined to each other so that they never break apart. And if that's true, then if those connections ever broke, if the ansibles ever stopped moving– if the ansibles ever fell silent, then I would die.”

  “Who are you?” asked Valentine again.

  “Valentine, I'd like you to meet Jane,” said Miro. “Ender's friend. And mine.”

  “Jane.”

  So Jane wasn't the code name of a subversive group within the Starways Congress bureaucracy. Jane was a computer program, a piece of software.

  No. If what she had just suggested was true, then Jane was more than a program. She was a being who dwelt in the web of philotic rays, who stored her memories in the computers of every world. If she was right, then the philotic web– the network of crisscrossing philotic rays that connected ansible to ansible on every world– was her body, her substance. And the philotic links continued working with never a breakdown because she willed it so.

  “So now I ask the great Demosthenes,” said Jane. “Am I raman or varelse? Am I alive at all? I need your answer, because I think I can stop the Lusitania Fleet. But before I do it, I have to know: Is it a cause worth dying for?”

  Jane's words cut Miro to the heart. She could stop the fleet– he could see that at once. Congress had sent the M.D. Device with several ships of the fleet, but they had not yet sent the order to use it. They couldn't send the order without Jane knowing it beforehand, and with her complete penetration of all the ansible communications, she could intercept the order before it was sent.

  The trouble was that she couldn't do it without Congress realizing that she existed– or at least that something was wrong. If the fleet didn't confirm the order, it would simply be sent again, and again, and again. The more she blocked the messages, the clearer it would be to Congress that someone had an impossible degree of control over the ansible computers.

  She might avoid this by sending a counterfeit confirmation, but then she would have to monitor all the communications between the ships of the fleet, and between the fleet and all planetside stations, in order to keep up the pretense that the fleet knew something about the kill order. Despite Jane's enormous abilities, this would soon be beyond her– she could pay some degree of attention to hundreds, even thousands of things at a time, but it didn't take Miro long to realize that there was no way she could handle all the monitoring and alterations this would take, even if she did nothing else.

  One way or another, the secret would be out. And as Jane explained her plan, Miro knew that she was right– her best option, the one with the least chance of revealing her existence, was simply to cut off all ansible communications between the fleet and the planetside stations, and between the ships of the fleet. Let each ship remain isolated, the crew wondering what had happened, and they would have no choice but to abort their mission or continue to obey their original orders. Either they would go away or they would arrive at Lusitania without the authority to use the Little Doctor.

  In the meantime, however, Congress would know that something had happened. It was possible that with Congress's normal bureaucratic inefficiency, no one would ever figure out what happened. But eventually somebody would realize that there was no natural or human explanation of what happened. Someone would realize that Jane– or something like her– must exist, and that cutting off ansible communications would destroy her. Once they knew this, she would surely die.

  “Maybe not,” Miro insisted. “Maybe you can keep them from acting. Interfere with interplanetary communications, so they can't give the order to shut down communications.”

  No one answered. He knew why: she couldn't interfere with ansible communications forever. Eventually the government on each planet would reach the conclusion on its own. She might live on in constant warfare for years, decades, generations. But the more power she used, the more humankind would hate and fear her. Eventually she would be killed.

  “A book, then,” said Miro. “Like the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. Like the Life of Human. The Speaker for the Dead could write it. To persuade them not to do it.”

  “Maybe,” said Valentine.

  “She can't die,” said Miro.

  “I know that we can't ask her to take that chance,” said Valentine. “But if it's the only way to save the hive queen and the pequeninos–”

  Miro was furious. “You can talk about her dying! What is Jane to you? A program, a piece of software. But she's not, she's real, she's as real as the hive queen, she's as real as any of the piggies–”

  “More real to you, I think,” said Valentine.

  “As real,” said Miro. “You forget– I know the piggies like my own brothers–”

  “But you're able to contemplate the possibility that destroying them may be morally necessary.”

  “Don't twist my words.”

  “I'm untwisting them,” said Valentine. “You can contemplate losing them, because they're already lost to you. Losing Jane, though–”

  “Because she's my friend, does that mean I can't plead for her? Can life-and-death decisions only be made by strangers?”

  Jakt's voice, quiet and deep, interrupted the argument. “Calm down, both of you. It isn't your decision. It's Jane's. She has the right to determine the value of her own life. I'm no philosopher, but I know that.”

  “Well said,” Valentine answered.

  Miro knew that Jakt was right, that it was Jane's choice. But he couldn't bear that, because he also knew what she would decide. Leaving the choice up to Jane was identical to asking her to do it. And yet, in the end, the choice would be up to her anyway. He didn't even have to ask her what she would decide. Time passed so quickly for her, especially since they were already traveling at near-lightspeed, that she had probably decided already. It was too much to bear. To lose Jane now would be unbearable; just thinking of it threatened Miro's composure. He didn't want to show such weakness in front of these people. Good people, they were good people, but he didn't want them to see him lose control of himself. So Miro leaned forward, found his balance, and precariously lifted himself from his seat. It was hard, since only a few of his muscles responded to his will, and it took all his concentration just to walk from the bridge to his compartment. No one followed him or even spoke to him. He was glad of that.

  Alone in his room, he lay down on his bunk and called to her. But not aloud. He subvocalized, because that was his custom when he talked to her. Even though the others on this ship now knew of her existence, he had no intention of losing the habits that had kept her concealed till now.

  “Jane,” he said silently.

  “Yes,” said the voice in his ear. He imagined, as always, that her soft voice came from a woman just out of sight, but close, very close. He shut his eyes, so he could imagine her better. Her breath on his cheek. Her hair dangling over his face as she spoke to him softly, as he answered in silence.

  “Talk to Ender before you decide,” he said.

  “I a
lready did. Just now, while you were thinking about this.”

  “What did he say?”

  “To do nothing. To decide nothing, until the order is actually sent.”

  “That's right. Maybe they won't do it.”

  “Maybe. Maybe a new group with different policies will come into power. Maybe this group will change its mind. Maybe Valentine's propaganda will succeed. Maybe there'll be a mutiny on the fleet.”

  This last was so unlikely that Miro realized Jane absolutely believed that the order would be sent.

  “How soon?” asked Miro.

  “The fleet should arrive in about fifteen years. A year or less after these two ships get there. That's how I timed your voyage. The order will be sent sometime before. Maybe six months before arrival– which would be aboul eight hours ship's time before the fleet drops out of lightspeed and staggerss down to normal speeds.”

  “Don't do it,” said Miro.

  “I haven't decided.”

  “Yes you have. You've decided to do it.”

  She said nothing.

  “Don't leave me,” he said.

  “I don't leave my friends if I don't have to,” she said. “Some people do, but I don't.”

  “Just don't,” he said again. He was crying. Could she see that, sense it somehow through the jewel in his ear?

  “I'll try.”

  “Find another way. Find another way to stop them. Find some way to put yourself outside the philotic net so they can't kill you.”

  “That's what Ender said.”

  “Then do it!”

  “I can search for such a way, but who knows if it exists?”

  “It has to.”