Xenocide ew-4

by Orson Scott Card

  “You saw all this as a child?”

  “I'm good at seeing things. We passive, unbelonging observers always see better. Don't you think?”

  Valentine laughed. “Yes, we do. The same role, then, you think? You and I, both historians?”

  “Till your brother came. From the moment he walked in the door, it was obvious that he saw and understood everything, just the way I saw it. It was exhilarating. Because of course I had never actually believed my own conclusions about my family. I never trusted my own judgments. Obviously no one saw things the way I did, so I must be wrong. I even thought that I saw things so peculiarly because of my eyes. That if I had real eyes I would have seen things Miro's way. Or Mother's.”

  “So Andrew confirmed your judgments.”

  “More than that. He acted on them. He did something about them.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was here as a speaker for the dead. But from the moment he walked in the door, he took– he took–”

  “Over?”

  “Took responsibility. For change. He saw all the sicknesses I saw, but he started healing them as best he could. I saw how he was with Grego, firm but kind. With Quara, responding to what she really wanted instead of what she claimed to want. With Quim, respecting the distance he wanted to keep. With Miro, with Ela, with Mother, with everybody.”

  “With you?”

  “Making me part of his life. Connecting with me. Watching me jack into my eye and still talking to me like a person. Do you know what that meant to me?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Not the part about me. I was a hungry little kid, I'll admit; the first kind person could have conned me, I'm sure. It's what he did about us all. It's how he treated us all differently, and yet remained himself. You've got to think about the men in my life. Marcao, who we thought was our father– I had no idea who he was. All I ever saw was the liquor in him when he was drunk, and the thirst when he was sober. Thirst for alcohol but also a thirst for respect that he could never get. And then he dropped over dead. Things got better at once. Still not good, but better. I thought, the best father is the one who isn't there. Only that wasn't true, either, was it? Because my real father, Libo, the great scientist, the martyr, the hero of research, the love of my mother's life– he had sired all these delightful children on my mother, he could see the family in torment, and yet he did nothing.”

  “Your mother didn't let him, Andrew said.”

  “That's right– and one must always do things Mother's way, mustn't one?”

  “Novinha is a very imposing woman.”

  “She thinks she's the only one in the world ever to suffer,” said Olhado. “I say that without rancor. I have simply observed that she is so full of pain, she's incapable of taking anyone else's pain seriously.”

  “Try saying something rancorous next time. It might be more kind.”

  Olhado looked surprised. “Oh, you're judging me? Is this motherhood solidarity or something? Children who speak ill of their mothers must be slapped down? But I assure you, Valentine, I meant it. No rancor. No grudges. I know my mother, that's all. You said you wanted me to tell you what I saw– that's what I see. That's what Andrew saw, too. All that pain. He's drawn to it. Pain sucks him like a magnet. And Mother had so much she almost sucked him dry. Except that maybe you can't suck Andrew dry. Maybe the well of compassion inside him is bottomless.”

  His passionate speech about Andrew surprised her. And pleased her, too. “You say Quim turned to God for the perfect invisible father. Who did you turn to? Not someone invisible, I think.”

  “No, not someone invisible.”

  Valentine studied his face in silence.

  “I see everything in bas-relief,” said Olhado. “My depth perception is very poor. If we'd put a lens in each eye instead of both in one, the binocularity would be much improved. But I wanted to have the jack. For the computer link. I wanted to be able to record the pictures, to be able to share them. So I see in bas-relief. As if everybody were a slightly rounded cardboard cutout, sliding across a flat painted background. In a way it makes everybody seem so much closer together. Sliding over each other like sheets of paper, rubbing on each other as they pass.”

  She listened, but said nothing for a while longer.

  "Not someone invisible," he said, echoing, remembering. "That's right. I saw what Andrew did in our family. I saw that he came in and listened and watched and understood who we were, each individual one of us. He tried to discover our need and then supply it. He took responsibility for other people and it didn't seem to matter to him how much it cost him. And in the end, while he could never make the Ribeira family normal, he gave us peace and pride and identity. Stability. He married Mother and was kind to her. He loved us all. He was always there when we wanted him, and seemed unhurt by it when we didn't. He was firm with us about expecting civilized behavior, but never indulged his whims at our expense. And I thought: This is so much more important than science. Or politics, either. Or any particular profession or accomplishment or thing you can make. I thought: If I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to other children, their whole lives, what Andrew was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.

  “So you're a career father,” said Valentine.

  “Who works at a brick factory to feed and clothe the family. Not a brickmaker who also has kids. Lini also feels the same way.”

  “Lini?”

  “Jaqueline. My wife. She followed her own road to the same place. We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.”

  “You'd be surprised,” said Valentine.

  “It's a boring life, to read about,” said Olhado. “Not to live, though.”

  “So the secret that you protect from your tormented siblings is– happiness.”

  “Peace. Beauty. Love. All the great abstractions. I may see them in bas-relief, but I see them up close.”

  “And you learned it from Andrew. Does he know?”

  “I think so,” said Olhado. “Do you want to know my most closely guarded secret? When we're alone together, just him and me, or me and Lini and him– when we're alone, I call him Papa, and he calls me Son.”

  Valentine made no effort to stop her tears from flowing, as if they flowed half for him and half for her. “So Ender does have children, after all,” she said.

  “I learned how to be a father from him, and I'm a damned good one.”

  Valentine leaned forward. It was time to get down to business. “That means that you, more than any of the others, stand to lose something truly beautiful and fine if we don't succeed in our endeavors.”

  “I know,” said Olhado. “My choice was a selfish one in the long run. I'm happy, but I can't do anything to help save Lusitania.”

  “Wrong,” said Valentine. “You just don't know yet.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Let's talk a while longer, and see if we can find out. And if it's all right with you, Lauro, your Jaqueline should stop eavesdropping from the kitchen now, and come on in and join us.”

  Bashfully, Jaqueline came in and sat beside her husband. Valentine liked the way they held hands. After so many children– it reminded herself of holding hands with Jakt, and how glad it made her feel.

  “Lauro,” she said, “Andrew tells me that when you were younger, you were the brightest of all the Ribeira children. That you spoke to him of wild philosophical speculations. Right now, Lauro, my adoptive nephew, it is wild philosophy we need. Has your brain been on hold since you were a child? Or do you still think thoughts of great profundity?”

  “I have my thoughts,” said Olhado. “But I don't even believe them myself.”

  “We're working on faster-than-light flight, Lauro. We're working on discovering the soul of a comput
er entity. We're trying to rebuild an artificial virus that has self-defense capabilities built into it. We're working on magic and miracles. So I'd be glad of any insights you can give me on the nature of life and reality.”

  “I don't even know what ideas Andrew was talking about,” said Olhado. “I quit studying physics, I–”

  “If I want studies, I'll read books. So let me tell you what we told a very bright Chinese servant girl on the world of Path: Let me know your thoughts, and I'll decide for myself what's useful and what isn't.”

  “How? You're not a physicist either.”

  Valentine walked to the computer waiting quietly in the corner. “May I turn this on?”

  “Pois nao,” he said. Of course.

  “Once it's on, Jane will be with us.”

  “Ender's personal program.”

  “The computer entity whose soul we're trying to locate.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Maybe you should be telling me things.”

  “I already know what I know. So start talking. About those ideas you had as a child, and what has become of them since.”

  * * *

  Quara had a chip on her shoulder from the moment Miro entered the room. “Don't bother,” she said.

  “Don't bother what?”

  “Don't bother telling me my duty to humanity or to the family– two separate, non-overlapping groups, by the way.”

  “Is that what I came for?” asked Miro.

  “Ela sent you to persuade me to tell her how to castrate the descolada.”

  Miro tried a little humor. “I'm no biologist. Is that possible?”

  “Don't be cute,” said Quara. “If you cut out their ability to pass information from one virus to another, it's like cutting out their tongues and their memory and everything that makes them intelligent. If she wants to know this stuff, she can study what I studied. It only took me five years of work to get there.”

  “There's a fleet coming.”

  “So you are an emissary.”

  “And the descolada may figure out how to–”

  She interrupted him, finished his sentence. “Circumvent all our strategies to control it, I know.”

  Miro was annoyed, but he was used to people getting impatient with his slowness of speech and cutting him off. And at least she had guessed what he was driving at. “Any day,” he said. “Ela feels time pressure.”

  “Then she should help me learn to talk to the virus. Persuade it to leave us alone. Make a treaty, like Andrew did with the pequeninos. Instead, she's cut me off from the lab. Well, two can play that game. She cuts me off, I cut her off.”

  “You were telling secrets to the pequeninos.”

  “Oh, yes, Mother and Ela, the guardians of truth! They get to decide who knows what. Well, Miro, let me tell you a secret. You don't protect the truth by keeping other people from knowing it.”

  “I know that,” said Miro.

  “Mother completely screwed up our family because of her damned secrets. She wouldn't even marry Libo because she was determined to keep a stupid secret, which if he'd known might have saved his life.”

  “I know,” said Miro.

  This time he spoke with such vehemence that Quara was taken aback. “Oh, well, I guess that was a secret that bothered you more than it did me. But then you should be on my side in this, Miro. Your life would have been a lot better, all our lives would have been, if Mother had only married Libo and told him all her secrets. He'd still be alive, probably.”

  Very neat solutions. Tidy little might-have-beens. And false as hell. If Libo had married Novinha, he wouldn't have married Bruxinha, Ouanda's mother, and thus Miro wouldn't have fallen unsuspectingly in love with his own half-sister because she would never had existed at all. That was far too much to say, however, with his halting speech. So he confined himself to saying “Ouanda wouldn't have been born,” and hoped she would make the connections.

  She considered for a moment, and the connection was made. “You have a point,” she said. “And I'm sorry. I was only a child then.”

  “It's all past,” said Miro.

  “Nothing is past,” said Quara. “We're still acting it out, over and over again. The same mistakes, again and again. Mother still thinks that you keep people safe by keeping secrets from them.”

  “And so do you,” said Miro.

  Quara thought about that for a moment. “Ela was trying to keep the pequeninos from knowing that she was working on destroying the descolada. That's a secret that could have destroyed the whole pequenino society, and they weren't even being consulted. They were preventing the pequeninos from protecting themselves. But what I'm keeping secret is– maybe– a way to intellectually castrate the descolada– to make it half-alive.”

  “To save humanity without destroying the pequeninos.”

  “Humans and pequeninos, getting together to compromise on how to wipe out a helpless third species!”

  “Not exactly helpless.”

  She ignored him. “Just the way Spain and Portugal got the Pope to divide up the world between their Catholic Majesties back in the old days right after Columbus. A line on a map, and poof– there's Brazil, speaking Portuguese instead of Spanish. Never mind that nine out of ten Indians had to die, and the rest lose all their rights and power for centuries, even their very languages–”

  It was Miro's turn to become impatient. “The descolada isn't the Indians.”

  “It's a sentient species.”

  “It isn't,” said Miro.

  “Oh?” asked Quara. “And how are you so sure? Where's your certificate in microbiology and xenogenetics? I thought your studies were all in xenology. And thirty years out of date.”

  Miro didn't answer. He knew that she was perfectly aware of how hard he had worked to bring himself up to speed since he got back here. It was an ad hominem attack and a stupid appeal to authority. It wasn't worth answering. So he sat there and studied her face. Waiting for her to get back into the realm of reasonable discussion.

  “All right,” she said. “That was a low blow. But so is sending you to try to crack open my files. Trying to play on my sympathies.”

  “Sympathies?” asked Miro.

  “Because you're a– because you're–”

  “Damaged,” said Miro. He hadn't thought of the fact that pity complicated everything. But how could he help it? Whatever he did, it was a cripple doing it.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Ela didn't send me,” said Miro.

  “Mother, then.”

  “Not Mother.”

  “Oh, you're a freelance meddler? Or are you going to tell me that all of humanity has sent you? Or are you a delegate of an abstract value? 'Decency sent me.'”

  “If it did, it sent me to the wrong place.”

  She reeled back as if she had been slapped.

  “Oh, am I the indecent one?”

  “Andrew sent me,” said Miro.

  “Another manipulator.”

  “He would have come himself.”

  “But he was so busy, doing his own meddling. Nossa Senhora, he's a minister, mixing himself up in scientific matters that are so far above his head that–”

  “Shut up,” said Miro.

  He spoke forcefully enough that she actually did fall silent– though she wasn't happy about it.

  “You know what Andrew is,” Miro said. “He wrote the Hive Queen and–”

  “–the Hive Queen and the Hegemon and the Life of Human.”

  “Don't tell me he doesn't know anything.”

  “No. I know that isn't true,” said Quara. “I just get so angry. I feel like everybody's against me.”

  “Against what you're doing, yes,” said Miro.

  “Why doesn't anybody see things my way?”

  “I see things your way,” said Miro.

  “Then how can you–”

  “I also see things their way.”

  “Yes. Mr. Impartial. Make me feel like you understand me. The sympathetic approach.”


  “Planter is dying to try to learn information you probably already know.”

  “Not true. I don't know whether pequenino intelligence comes from the virus or not.”

  “A truncated virus could be tested without killing him.”

  “Truncated– is that the word of choice? It'll do. Better than castrated. Cutting off all the limbs. And the head, too. Nothing but the trunk left. Powerless. Mindless. A beating heart, to no purpose.”

  “Planter is–”

  “Planter's in love with the idea of being a martyr. He wants to die.”

  “Planter is asking you to come and talk to him.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Come on, Miro. They send a cripple to me. They want me to come talk to a dying pequenino. As if I'd betray a whole species because a dying friend– a volunteer, too– asks me with his dying breath.”

  “Quara.”

  “Yes, I'm listening.”

  “Are you?”

  “Disse que sim!” she snapped. I said I am.

  “You might be right about all this.”

  “How kind of you.”

  “But so might they.”

  “Aren't you the impartial one.”

  “You say they were wrong to make a decision that might kill the pequeninos without consulting them. Aren't you–”

  “Doing the same thing? What should I do, do you think? Publish my viewpoint and take a vote? A few thousand humans, millions of pequeninos on your side– but there are trillions of descolada viruses. Majority rule. Case closed.”