The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)
Page 67
“We don’t have much choice,” said Bishop Peregrino.
“There are many choices,” said Ender, “and many reasons for choosing. You already made one choice—when you found your files being stripped, you decided to try to save them, and you decided to trust them with me, a stranger. Your trust was not misplaced—I’ll return your files to you whenever you ask, unread, unaltered.”
“Thank you,” said Dona Cristã. “But we did that before we knew the gravity of the charge.”
“They’re going to evacuate us,” said Dom Cristão.
“They control everything,” said Bishop Peregrino.
“I already told him that,” said Bosquinha.
“They don’t control everything,” said Ender. “They only control you through the ansible connection.”
“We can’t cut off the ansible,” said Bishop Peregrino. “That is our only connection with the Vatican.”
“I don’t suggest cutting off the ansible. I only tell you what I can do. And when I tell you this, I am trusting you the way you trusted me. Because if you repeat this to anyone, the cost to me—and to someone else, whom I love and depend on—would be immeasurable.”
He looked at each of them, and each in turn nodded acquiescence.
“I have a friend whose control over ansible communications among all the Hundred Worlds is complete—and completely unsuspected. I’m the only one who knows what she can do. And she has told me that when I ask her to, she can make it seem to all the framlings that we here on Lusitania have cut off our ansible connection. And yet we will have the ability to send guarded messages if we want to—to the Vatican, to the offices of your order. We can read distant records, intercept distant communications. In short, we will have eyes and they will be blind.”
“Cutting off the ansible, or even seeming to, would be an act of rebellion. Of war.” Bosquinha was saying it as harshly as possible, but Ender could see that the idea appealed to her, though she was resisting it with all her might. “I will say, though, that if we were insane enough to decide on war, what the Speaker is offering us is a clear advantage. We’d need any advantage we could get—if we were mad enough to rebel.”
“We have nothing to gain by rebellion,” said the Bishop, “and everything to lose. I grieve for the tragedy it would be to send Miro and Ouanda to stand trial on another world, especially because they are so young. But the court will no doubt take that into account and treat them with mercy. And by complying with the orders of the committee, we will save this community much suffering.”
“Don’t you think that having to evacuate this world will also cause them suffering?” asked Ender.
“Yes. Yes, it will. But a law was broken, and the penalty must be paid.”
“What if the law was based on a misunderstanding, and the penalty is far out of proportion to the sin?”
“We can’t be the judges of that,” said the Bishop.
“We are the judges of that. If we go along with Congressional orders, then we’re saying that the law is good and the punishment is just. And it may be that at the end of this meeting you’ll decide exactly that. But there are some things you must know before you can make your decision. Some of those things I can tell you, and some of those things only Ela and Novinha can tell you. You shouldn’t make your decision until you know all that we know.”
“I’m always glad to know as much as possible,” said the Bishop. “Of course, the final decision is Bosquinha’s, not mine—”
“The final decision belongs to all of you together, the civil and religious and intellectual leadership of Lusitania. If any one of you decides against rebellion, rebellion is impossible. Without the Church’s support, Bosquinha can’t lead. Without civil support, the Church has no power.”
“We have no power,” said Dom Cristão. “Only opinions.”
“Every adult in Lusitania looks to you for wisdom and fairmindedness.”
“You forget a fourth power,” said Bishop Peregrino. “Yourself.”
“I’m a framling here.”
“A most extraordinary framling,” said the Bishop. “In your four days here you have captured the soul of this people in a way I feared and foretold. Now you counsel rebellion that could cost us everything. You are as dangerous as Satan. And yet here you are, submitting to our authority as if you weren’t free to get on the shuttle and leave here when the starship returns to Trondheim with our two young criminals aboard.”
“I submit to your authority,” said Ender, “because I don’t want to be a framling here. I want to be your citizen, your student, your parishioner.”
“As a speaker for the dead?” asked the Bishop.
“As Andrew Wiggin. I have some other skills that might be useful. Particularly if you rebel. And I have other work to do that can’t be done if humans are taken from Lusitania.”
“We don’t doubt your sincerity,” said the Bishop. “But you must forgive us if we are doubtful about casting in with a citizen who is something of a latecomer.”
Ender nodded. The Bishop could not say more until he knew more. “Let me tell you first what I know. Today, this afternoon, I went out into the forest with Miro and Ouanda.”
“You! You also broke the law!” The Bishop half-rose from his chair.
Bosquinha reached forward, gestured to settle the Bishop’s ire. “The intrusion in our files began long before this afternoon. The Congressional Order couldn’t possibly be related to his infraction.”
“I broke the law,” said Ender, “because the piggies were asking for me. Demanding, in fact, to see me. They had seen the shuttle land. They knew that I was here. And, for good or ill, they had read the Hive Queen and the Hegemon.”
“They gave the piggies that book?” said the Bishop.
“They also gave them the New Testament,” said Ender. “But surely you won’t be surprised to learn that the piggies found much in common between themselves and the hive queen. Let me tell you what the piggies said. They begged me to convince all the Hundred Worlds to end the rules that keep them isolated here. You see, the piggies don’t think of the fence the way we do. We see it as a way of protecting their culture from human influence and corruption. They see it as a way of keeping them from learning all the wonderful secrets that we know. They imagine our ships going from star to star, colonizing them, filling them up. And five or ten thousand years from now, when they finally learn all that we refuse to teach them, they’ll emerge into space to find all the worlds filled up. No place for them at all. They think of our fence as a form of species murder. We will keep them on Lusitania like animals in a zoo, while we go out and take all the rest of the universe.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Dom Cristão. “That isn’t our intention at all.”
“Isn’t it?” Ender retorted. “Why are we so anxious to keep them from any influence from our culture? It isn’t just in the interest of science. It isn’t just good xenological procedure. Remember, please, that our discovery of the ansible, of starflight, of partial gravity control, even of the weapon we used to destroy the buggers—all of them came as a direct result of our contact with the buggers. We learned most of the technology from the machines they left behind from their first foray into Earth’s star system. We were using those machines long before we understood them. Some of them, like the philotic bond, we don’t even understand now. We are in space precisely because of the impact of a devastatingly superior culture. And yet in only a few generations, we took their machines, surpassed them, and destroyed them. That’s what our fence means—we’re afraid the piggies will do the same to us. And they know that’s what it means. They know it, and they hate it.”
“We aren’t afraid of them,” said the Bishop. “They’re—savages, for heaven’s sake—”
“That’s how we looked to the buggers, too,” said Ender. “But to Pipo and Libo and Ouanda and Miro, the piggies have never looked like savages. They’re different from us, yes, far more different than framlings. But they’re still peop
le. Ramen, not varelse. So when Libo saw that the piggies were in danger of starving, that they were preparing to go to war in order to cut down the population, he didn’t act like a scientist. He didn’t observe their war and take notes on the death and suffering. He acted like a Christian. He got experimental amaranth that Novinha had rejected for human use because it was too closely akin to Lusitanian biochemistry, and he taught the piggies how to plant it and harvest it and prepare it as food. I have no doubt that the rise in piggy population and the fields of amaranth are what the Starways Congress saw. Not a willful violation of the law, but an act of compassion and love.”
“How can you call such disobedience a Christian act?” said the Bishop.
“What man of you is there, when his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?”
“The devil can quote scripture to suit his own purpose,” said the Bishop.
“I’m not the devil,” said Ender, “and neither are the piggies. Their babies were dying of hunger, and Libo gave them food and saved their lives.”
“And look what they did to him!”
“Yes, let’s look what they did to him. They put him to death. Exactly the way they put to death their own most honored citizens. Shouldn’t that have told us something?”
“It told us that they’re dangerous and have no conscience,” said the Bishop.
“It told us that death means something completely different to them. If you really believed that someone was perfect in heart, Bishop, so righteous that to live another day could only cause them to be less perfect, then wouldn’t it be a good thing for them if they were killed and taken directly into heaven?”
“You mock us. You don’t believe in heaven.”
“But you do! What about the martyrs, Bishop Peregrino? Weren’t they caught up joyfully into heaven?”
“Of course they were. But the men who killed them were beasts. Murdering saints didn’t sanctify them, it damned their murderers’ souls to hell forever.”
“But what if the dead don’t go to heaven? What if the dead are transformed into new life, right before your eyes? What if when a piggy dies, if they lay out his body just so, it takes root and turns into something else? What if it turns into a tree that lives fifty or a hundred or five hundred years more?”
“What are you talking about?” demanded the Bishop.
“Are you telling us that the piggies somehow metamorphose from animal to plant?” asked Dom Cristão. “Basic biology suggests that this isn’t likely.”
“It’s practically impossible,” said Ender. “That’s why there are only a handful of species on Lusitania that survived the Descolada. Because only a few of them were able to make the transformation. When the piggies kill one of their people, he is transformed into a tree. And the tree retains at least some of its intelligence. Because today I saw the piggies sing to a tree, and without a single tool touching it, the tree severed its own roots, fell over, and split itself into exactly the shapes and forms of wood and bark that the piggies needed. It wasn’t a dream. Miro and Ouanda and I all saw it with our own eyes, and heard the song, and touched the wood, and prayed for the soul of the dead.”
“What does this have to do with our decision?” demanded Bosquinha. “So the forests are made up of dead piggies. That’s a matter for scientists.”
“I’m telling you that when the piggies killed Pipo and Libo they thought they were helping them transform into the next stage of their existence. They weren’t beasts, they were ramen, giving the highest honor to the men who had served them so well.”
“Another moral transformation, is that it?” asked the Bishop. “Just as you did today in your speaking, making us see Marcos Ribeira again and again, each time in a new light, now you want us to think the piggies are noble? Very well, they’re noble. But I won’t rebel against Congress, with all the suffering such a thing would cause, just so our scientists can teach the piggies how to make refrigerators.”
“Please,” said Novinha.
They looked at her expectantly.
“You say that they stripped our files? They read them all?”
“Yes,” said Bosquinha.
“Then they know everything that I have in my files. About the Descolada.”
“Yes,” said Bosquinha.
Novinha folded her hands in her lap. “There won’t be any evacuation.”
“I didn’t think so,” said Ender. “That’s why I asked Ela to bring you.”
“Why won’t there be an evacuation?” asked Bosquinha.
“Because of the Descolada.”
“Nonsense,” said the Bishop. “Your parents found a cure for that.”
“They didn’t cure it,” said Novinha. “They controlled it. They stopped it from becoming active.”
“That’s right,” said Bosquinha. “That’s why we put the additives in the water. The Colador.”
“Every human being on Lusitania, except perhaps the Speaker, who may not have caught it yet, is a carrier of the Descolada.”
“The additive isn’t expensive,” said the Bishop. “But perhaps they might isolate us. I can see that they might do that.”
“There’s nowhere isolated enough,” said Novinha. “The Descolada is infinitely variable. It attacks any kind of genetic material. The additive can be given to humans. But can they give additives to every blade of grass? To every bird? To every fish? To every bit of plankton in the sea?”
“They can all catch it?” asked Bosquinha. “I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t tell anybody,” said Novinha. “But I built the protection into every plant that I developed. The amaranth, the potatoes, everything—the challenge wasn’t making the protein usable, the challenge was to get the organisms to produce their own Descolada blockers.”
Bosquinha was appalled. “So anywhere we go—”
“We can trigger the complete destruction of the biosphere.”
“And you kept this a secret?” asked Dom Cristão.
“There was no need to tell it. No one had ever left Lusitania, and no one was planning to go.” Novinha looked at her hands in her lap. “Something in the information had caused the piggies to kill Pipo. I kept it secret so no one else would know. But now, what Ela has learned over the last few years, and what the Speaker has said tonight—now I know what it was that Pipo learned. The Descolada doesn’t just split the genetic molecules and prevent them from reforming or duplicating. It also encourages them to bond with completely foreign genetic molecules. Ela did the work on this against my will. All the native life on Lusitania thrives in plant-and-animal pairs. The cabra with the capim. The watersnakes with the grama. The suckflies with the reeds. The xingadora bird with the tropeço vines. And the piggies with the trees of the forest.”
“You’re saying that one becomes the other?” Dom Cristão was at once fascinated and repelled.
“The piggies may be unique in that, in transforming from the corpse of a piggy into a tree,” said Novinha. “But perhaps the cabras become fertilized from the pollen of the capim. Perhaps the flies are hatched from the tassels of the river reeds. It should be studied. I should have been studying it all these years.”
“And now they’ll know this?” asked Dom Cristão. “From your files?”
“Not right away. But sometime in the next ten or twenty years. Before any other framlings get here, they’ll know,” said Novinha.
“I’m not a scientist,” said the Bishop. “Everyone else seems to understand except me. What does this have to do with the evacuation?”
Bosquinha fidgeted with her hands. “They can’t take us off Lusitania,” she said. “Anywhere they took us, we’d carry the Descolada with us, and it would kill everything. There aren’t enough xenobiologists in the Hundred Worlds to save even a single planet from devastation. By the time they get here, they’ll know that we can’t leave.”
“Well, then,” said the Bishop. “That solves our problem. If we tell them now, they won’t even send a fleet to evacuate us.”
The Bishop scoffed. “What, do you think they’ll blow up the planet? Come now, Speaker, there are no more Enders among the human race. The worst they might do is quarantine us here—”
“In which case,” said Dom Cristão, “why should we submit to their control at all? We could send them a message telling them about the Descolada, informing them that we will not leave the planet and they should not come here, and that’s it.”
Bosquinha shook her head. “Do you think that none of them will say, ‘The Lusitanians, just by visiting another world, can destroy it. They have a starship, they have a known propensity for rebelliousness, they have the murderous piggies. Their existence is a threat.’ ”
“Who would say that?” said the Bishop.
“No one in the Vatican,” said Ender. “But Congress isn’t in the business of saving souls.”
“And maybe they’d be right,” said the Bishop. “You said yourself that the piggies want starflight. And yet wherever they might go, they’ll have this same effect. Even uninhabited worlds, isn’t that right? What will they do, endlessly duplicate this bleak landscape—forests of a single tree, prairies of a single grass, with only the cabra to graze it and only the xingadora to fly above it?”
“Maybe someday we could find a way to get the Descolada under control,” said Ela.
“We can’t stake our future on such a thin chance,” said the Bishop.
“That’s why we have to rebel,” said Ender. “Because Congress will think exactly that way. Just as they did three thousand years ago, in the Xenocide. Everybody condemns the Xenocide because it destroyed an alien species that turned out to be harmless in its intentions. But as long as it seemed that the buggers were determined to destroy humankind, the leaders of humanity had no choice but to fight back with all their strength. We are presenting them with the same dilemma again. They’re already afraid of the piggies. And once they understand the Descolada, all the pretense of trying to protect the piggies will be done with. For the sake of humanity’s survival, they’ll destroy us. Probably not the whole planet. As you said, there are no Enders today. But they’ll certainly obliterate Milagre and remove any trace of human contact. Including killing all the piggies who know us. Then they’ll set a watch over this planet to keep the piggies from ever emerging from their primitive state. If you knew what they know, wouldn’t you do the same?”