Xenocide ew-4

by Orson Scott Card

  “What then? Why all this smoke?”

  “Ask her,” said Ender. “Maybe she'll be honest with you.”

  “Will we actually see her?” asked Miro.

  “Oh yes,” said Ender. “Or at least– we'll be in her presence. She may even touch us. But perhaps the less we see the better. It's usually dark where she lives, unless she's near to egg-laying. At that time she needs to see, and the workers open tunnels to bring in daylight.”

  “They don't have artificial light?” asked Miro.

  “They never used it,” said Ender, “even on the starships that came to Sol System back during the Bugger Wars. They see heat the way we see light. Any source of warmth is clearly visible to them. I think they even arrange their heat sources in patterns that could only be interpreted aesthetically. Thermal painting.”

  “So why do they use light for egg-laying?” asked Valentine.

  “I'd hesitate to call it a ritual– the hive queen has such scorn for human religion. Let's just say it's part of their genetic heritage. Without sunlight there's no egg-laying.”

  Then they were in the bugger city.

  Valentine wasn't surprised at what they found– after all, when they were young, she and Ender had been with the first colony on Rov, a former bugger world. But she knew that the experience would be surprising and alien to Miro and Plikt, and in fact some of the old disorientation came back to her, too. Not that there was anything obviously strange about the city. There were buildings, most of them low, but based on the same structural principles as any human buildings. The strangeness came in the careless way that they were arranged. There were no roads and streets, no attempt to line up the buildings to face the same way. Nor did buildings rise out of the ground to any common height. Some were nothing but a roof resting on the ground; others rose to a great height. Paint seemed to be used only as a preservative– there was no decoration. Ender had suggested that heat might be used aesthetically; it was a sure thing that nothing else was.

  “It makes no sense,” said Miro.

  “Not from the surface,” said Valentine, remembering Rov. “But if you could travel the tunnels, you'd realize that it all makes sense underground. They follow the natural seams and textures of the rock. There's a rhythm to geology, and the buggers are sensitive to it.”

  “What about the tall buildings?” asked Miro.

  “The water table is their downward limit. If they need greater height, they have to go up.”

  “What are they doing that requires a building so tall?” asked Miro.

  “I don't know,” said Valentine. They were skirting a building that was at least three hundred meters high; in the near distance they could see more than a dozen others.

  For the first time on this excursion, Plikt spoke up. “Rockets,” she said.

  Valentine caught a glimpse of Ender smiling a bit and nodding slightly. So Plikt had confirmed his own suspicions.

  “What for?” asked Miro.

  Valentine almost said, To get into space, of course! But that wasn't fair– Miro had never lived on a world that was struggling to get into space for the first time. To him, going offplanet meant taking the shuttle to the orbiting station. But the single shuttle used by the humans of Lusitania would hardly do for transporting material outward for any kind of major deepspace construction program. And even if it could do the job, the hive queen was unlikely to ask for human help.

  “What's she building, a space station?” asked Valentine.

  “I think so,” said Ender. “But so many rockets, and such large ones– I think she's planning to build it all at once. Probably cannibalizing the rockets themselves. What do you think the throw might be?”

  Valentine almost answered with exasperation– how should I know? Then she realized that he wasn't asking her. Because almost at once he supplied the answer himself. Which meant that he must have been asking the computer in his ear. No, not a “computer.” Jane. He was asking Jane. It was still hard for Valentine to get used to the idea that even though there were only four people in the car, there was a fifth person present, looking and listening through the jewels Ender and Miro both wore.

  “She could do it all at once,” said Ender. “In fact, given what's known about the chemical emissions here, the hive queen has smelted enough metal to construct not only a space station but also two small long-range starships of the sort that the first bugger expedition brought. Their version of a colony ship.”

  “Before the fleet arrives,” said Valentine. She understood at once. The hive queen was preparing to emigrate. She had no intention of letting her species be trapped on a single planet when the Little Doctor came again.

  “You see the problem,” said Ender. “She won't tell us what she's doing, and so we have to rely on what Jane observes and what we can guess. And what I'm guessing isn't a very pretty picture.”

  “What's wrong with the buggers getting offplanet?” asked Valentine.

  “Not just the buggers,” said Miro.

  Valentine made the second connection. That's why the pequeninos had given permission for the hive queen to pollute so badly. That's why there were two ships planned, right from the first. “A ship for the hive queen and a ship for the pequeninos.”

  “That's what they intend,” said Ender. “But the way I see it is– two ships for the descolada.”

  “Nossa Senhora,” whispered Miro.

  Valentine felt a chill go through her. It was one thing for the hive queen to seek the salvation of her species. But it was quite another thing for her to carry the deadly self-adapting virus to other worlds.

  “You see my quandary,” said Ender. “You see why she won't tell me directly what she's doing.”

  “But you couldn't stop her anyway, could you?” asked Valentine.

  “He could warn the Congress fleet,” said Miro.

  That's right. Dozens of heavily armed starships, converging on Lusitania from every direction– if they were warned about two starships leaving Lusitania, if they were given their original trajectories, they could intercept them. Destroy them.

  “You can't,” said Valentine.

  “I can't stop them and I can't let them go,” said Ender. “To stop them would be to risk destroying the buggers and the piggies alike. To let them go would be to risk destroying all of humanity.”

  “You have to talk to them. You have to reach some kind of agreement.”

  “What would an agreement with us be worth?” asked Ender. “We don't speak for humanity in general. And if we make threats, the hive queen will simply destroy all our satellites and probably our ansible as well. She may do that anyway, just to be safe.”

  “Then we'd really be cut off,” said Miro.

  “From everything,” said Ender.

  It took Valentine a moment to realize that they were thinking of Jane. Without an ansible, they couldn't speak to her anymore. And without the satellites that orbited Lusitania, Jane's eyes in space would be blinded.

  “Ender, I don't understand,” said Valentine. “Is the hive queen our enemy?”

  “That's the question, isn't it?” asked Ender. “That's the trouble with restoring her species. Now that she has her freedom again, now that she's not bundled up in a cocoon hidden in a bag under my bed, the hive queen will act in the best interest of her species– whatever she thinks that is.”

  “But Ender, it can't be that there has to be war between humans and buggers again.”

  “If there were no human fleet heading toward Lusitania, the question wouldn't come up.”

  “But Jane has disrupted their communications,” said Valentine. “They can't receive the order to use the Little Doctor.”

  “For now,” said Ender. “But Valentine, why do you think Jane risked her own life in order to cut off their communications?”

  “Because the order was sent.”

  “Starways Congress sent the order to destroy this planet. And now that Jane has revealed her power, they'll be all the more determined to destroy
us. Once they find a way to get Jane out of the way, they'll be even more certain to act against this world.”

  “Have you told the hive queen?”

  “Not yet. But then, I'm not sure how much she can learn from my mind without my wanting her to. It's not exactly a means of communication that I know how to control.”

  Valentine put her hand on Ender's shoulder. “Was this why you tried to persuade me not to come see the hive queen? Because you didn't want her to learn the real danger?”

  “I just don't want to face her again,” said Ender. “Because I love her and I fear her. Because I'm not sure whether I should help her or try to destroy her. And because once she gets those rockets into space, which could be any day now, she could take away our power to stop her. Take away our connection with the rest of humanity.”

  And, again, what he didn't say: She could cut Ender and Miro off from Jane.

  “I think we definitely need to have a talk with her,” said Valentine.

  “Either that or kill her,” said Miro.

  “Now you understand my problem,” said Ender.

  They rode on in silence.

  The entrance to the hive queen's burrow was a building that looked like any other. There was no special guard– indeed, in their whole excursion they hadn't seen a single bugger. Valentine remembered when she was young, on her first colony world, trying to imagine what the bugger cities had looked like when they were fully inhabited. Now she knew– they looked exactly the way they did when they were dead. No scurrying buggers; like ants swarming over the hills. Somewhere, she knew, there were fields and orchards being tended under the open sun, but none of that was visible from here.

  Why did this make her feel so relieved?

  She knew the answer to the question even as she asked it. She had spent her childhood on Earth during the Bugger Wars; the insectoid aliens had haunted her nightmares, as they had terrified every other child on Earth. Only a handful of human beings, however, had ever seen a bugger in person, and few of those were still alive when she was a child. Even in her first colony, where the ruins of bugger civilization surrounded her, they had found not even one desiccated corpse. All her visual images of the buggers were the horrifying images from the vids.

  Yet wasn't she the first person to have read Ender's book, the Hive Queen? Wasn't she the first, besides Ender, to come to think of the hive queen as a person of alien grace and beauty?

  She was the first, yes, but that meant little. Everyone else alive today had grown up in a moral universe shaped in part by the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. While she and Ender were the only two left alive who had grown up with the steady campaign of loathing toward the buggers. Of course she felt irrational relief at not having to see the buggers. To Miro and Plikt, the first sight of the hive queen and her workers wouldn't have the same emotional tension that it had for her.

  I am Demosthenes, she reminded herself. I'm the theorist who insisted that the buggers were ramen, aliens who could be understood and accepted. I must simply do my best to overcome the prejudices of my childhood. In due time all of humanity will know of the reemergence of the hive queen; it would be shameful if Demosthenes were the one person who could not receive the hive queen as raman.

  Ender took the car in a circle around a smallish building. “This is the right place,” he said. He pulled the car to a stop, then slowed the fan to settle it onto the capim near the building's single door. The door was very low– an adult would have to go through on hands and knees.

  “How do you know?” asked Miro.

  “Because she says so,” said Ender.

  “Jane?” asked Miro. He looked puzzled, because of course Jane had said nothing of the sort to him.

  “The hive queen,” said Valentine. “She speaks directly into Ender's mind.”

  “Nice trick,” said Miro. “Can I learn it?”

  “We'll see,” said Ender. “When you meet her.”

  As they clambered off the car and dropped into the tall grass, Valentine noticed how Miro and Ender both kept glancing at Plikt. Of course it bothered them that Plikt was so quiet. Or rather, seemed so quiet. Valentine thought of Plikt as a loquacious, eloquent woman. But she had also got used to the way Plikt played the mute at certain times. Ender and Miro, of course, were only discovering her perverse silence for the first time, and it bothered them. Which was one of the main reasons Plikt did it. She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.

  Valentine didn't think much of the technique as a way of dealing with strangers, but she had watched how, as a tutor, Plikt's silences forced her students– Valentine's children– to deal with their own ideas. When Valentine and Ender taught, they challenged their students with dialogue, questions, arguments. But Plikt forced her students to play both sides of an argument, proposing their own ideas, then attacking them in order to refute their own objections. The method probably wouldn't work for most people. Valentine had concluded that it worked so well for Plikt because her wordlessness was not complete noncommunication. Her steady, penetrating gaze was in itself an eloquent expression of skepticism. When a student was confronted with that unblinking regard, he soon succumbed to all his own insecurities. Every doubt that the student had managed to put aside and ignore now forced itself forward, where the student had to discover within himself the reasons for Plikt's apparent doubt.

  Valentine's oldest, Syfte, had called these one-sided confrontations “staring into the sun.” Now Ender and Miro were taking their own turn at blinding themselves in a contest with the all-seeing eye and the naught-saying mouth. Valentine wanted to laugh at their unease, to reassure them. She also wanted to give Plikt a gentle little slap and tell her not to be difficult.

  Instead of doing either, Valentine strode to the door of the building and pulled it open. There was no bolt, just a handle to grasp. The door opened easily. She held it open as Ender dropped to his knees and crawled through. Plikt followed immediately. Then Miro sighed and slowly sank to his knees. He was more awkward in crawling than he was in walking– each movement of an arm or leg was made individually, as if it took a second to think of how to make it go. At last he was through, and now Valentine ducked down and squat-walked through the door. She was the smallest, and she didn't have to crawl.

  Inside, the only light came from the door. The room was featureless, with a dirt floor. Only as Valentine's eyes became used to the darkness did she realize that the darkest shadow was a tunnel sloping down into the earth.

  “There aren't any lights down in the tunnels,” Ender said. “She'll direct me. You'll have to hold onto each other's hands. Valentine, you go last, all right?”

  “Can we go down standing up?” asked Miro. The question clearly mattered.

  “Yes,” said Ender. “That's why she chose this entrance.”

  They joined hands, Plikt holding Ender's hand, Miro between the two women. Ender led them a few steps down the slope into the tunnel. It was steep, and the utter blackness ahead was daunting. But Ender stopped before the darkness became absolute.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Valentine.

  “Our guide,” said Ender.

  At that moment, the guide arrived. In the darkness, Valentine could barely see the black-reed arm with a single finger and thumb as it nudged Ender's hand. Immediately Ender enclosed the finger within his left hand; the black thumb closed like a pincer over his hand. Looking up the arm, Valentine tried to see the bugger it belonged to. All she could actually make out, though, was a child-size shadow, and perhaps a slight gleam of reflection off a carapace.

  Her imagination supplied all that was missing, and against her will she shuddered.

  Miro muttered something in Portuguese. So he, too, was affected by the presence of the bugger. Plikt, however, remained silent, and Valentine couldn't tell whether she trembled or remained entirely unaffected. Then Miro took a shuffli
ng forward step, pulling on Valentine's hand, leading her forward into the darkness.

  Ender knew how hard this passage would be for the others. So far only he, Novinha, and Ela had ever visited the hive queen, and Novinha had come only the once. The darkness was too unnerving, to move endlessly downward without help of eyes, knowing from small sounds that there was life and movement, invisible but nearby.

  “Can we talk?” asked Valentine. Her voice sounded very small.

  “It's a good idea,” said Ender. “You won't bother them. They don't take much notice of sound.”

  Miro said something. Without being able to see his lips move, Ender found it harder to understand Miro's speech.

  “What?” asked Ender.

  “We both want to know how far it is,” Valentine said.

  “I don't know,” said Ender. “From here, anyway. And she might be almost anywhere down here. There are dozens of nurseries. But don't worry. I'm pretty sure I could find my way out.”

  “So could I,” said Valentine. “With a flashlight, anyway.”

  “No light,” said Ender. “The egg-laying requires sunlight, but after that light only retards the development of the eggs. And at one stage it can kill the larvae.”

  “But you could find your way out of this nightmare in the dark?” asked Valentine.

  “Probably,” said Ender. “There are patterns. Like spider webs– when you sense the overall structure, each section of tunnel makes more sense.”

  “These tunnels aren't random?” Valentine sounded skeptical.

  “It's like the tunneling on Eros,” said Ender. He really hadn't had that much chance to explore when he lived on Eros as a child-soldier. The asteroid had been honeycombed by the buggers when they made it their forward base in the Sol System; it became fleet headquarters for the human allies after it was captured during the first Bugger War. During his months there, Ender had devoted most of his time and attention to learning to control fleets of starships in space. Yet he must have noticed much more about the tunnels than he realized at the time, because the first time the hive queen brought him into her burrows on Lusitania, Ender found that the bends and turns never seemed to take him by surprise. They felt right– no, they felt inevitable.