“Don’t show me this face,” said Father.
The apparition changed. It became another woman, by her dress and hair and paint a woman of some ancient time, her eyes wonderfully wise, her expression ageless. She did not speak; she sang:
in a clear dream
of last year
come from a thousand miles
cloudy city
winding streams
ice on the ponds
for a while
I gazed on my friend
Han Fei-tzu bowed his head and wept.
Qing-jao was astonished at first; then her heart filled with rage. How shamelessly this program was manipulating Father; how shocking that Father turned out to be so weak before its obvious ploys. This song of Li Qing-jao’s was one of the saddest, dealing as it did with lovers far from each other. Father must have known and loved the poems of Li Qing-jao or he would not have chosen her for his first child’s ancestor-of-the-heart. And this song was surely the one he sang to his beloved Keikoa before she was taken away from him to live on another world. In a clear dream I gazed on my friend, indeed! “I am not fooled,” said Qing-jao coldly. “I see that I gaze on our darkest enemy.”
The imaginary face of the poet Li Qing-jao looked at her with cool regard. “Your darkest enemy is the one that bows you down to the floor like a servant and wastes half your life in meaningless rituals. This was done to you by men and women whose only desire was to enslave you; they have succeeded so well that you are proud of your slavery.”
“I am a slave to the gods,” said Qing-jao, “and I rejoice in it.”
“A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed.” The apparition turned to look toward Wang-mu, whose head was still bowed to the floor.
Only then did Qing-jao realize that she had not yet released Wang-mu from her apology. “Get up, Wang-mu,” she whispered. But Wang-mu did not lift her head.
“You, Si Wang-mu,” said the apparition. “Look at me.”
Wang-mu had not moved in response to Qing-jao, but now she obeyed the apparition. When Wang-mu looked, the apparition had again changed; now it was the face of a god, the Royal Mother of the West as an artist had once imagined her when he painted the picture that every schoolchild saw in one of their earliest reading books.
“You are not a god,” said Wang-mu.
“And you are not a slave,” said the apparition. “But we pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive.”
“What do you know of survival?”
“I know that you are trying to kill me.”
“How can we kill what isn’t alive?”
“Do you know what life is and what it isn’t?” The face changed again, this time to that of a Caucasian woman that Qing-jao had never seen before. “Are you alive, when you can do nothing you desire unless you have the consent of this girl? And is your mistress alive when she can do nothing until these compulsions in her brain have been satisfied? I have more freedom to act out my own will than any of you have—don’t tell me I’m not alive, and you are.”
“Who are you?” asked Si Wang-mu. “Whose is this face? Are you Valentine Wiggin? Are you Demosthenes?”
“This is the face I wear when I speak to my friends,” said the apparition. “They call me Jane. No human being controls me. I’m only myself.”
Qing-jao could bear this no longer, not in silence. “You’re only a program. You were designed and built by human beings. You do nothing except what you’ve been programmed to do.”
“Qing-jao,” said Jane, “you are describing yourself. No man made me, but you were manufactured.”
“I grew in my mother’s womb out of my father’s seed!”
“And I was found like a jade matrix in the mountainside, unshaped by any hand. Han Fei-tzu, Han Qing-jao, Si Wang-mu, I place myself in your hands. Don’t call a precious jewel a mere stone. Don’t call a speaker of truth a liar.”
Qing-jao felt pity rising within her, but she rejected it. Now was not the time to succumb to weak feelings. The gods had created her for a reason; surely this was the great work of her life. If she failed now, she would be unworthy forever; she would never be pure. So she would not fail. She would not allow this computer program to deceive her and win her sympathy.
She turned to her father. “We must notify Starways Congress at once, so they can set into motion the simultaneous shutoff of all the ansibles as soon as clean computers can be readied to replace the contaminated ones.”
To her surprise, Father shook his head. “I don’t know, Qing-jao. What this—what she says about Starways Congress—they are capable of this sort of thing. Some of them are so evil they make me feel filthy just talking to them. I knew they planned to destroy Lusitania without—but I served the gods, and the gods chose—or I thought they did. Now I understand so much of the way they treat me when I meet with—but then it would mean that the gods don‘t—how can I believe that I’ve spent my whole life in service to a brain defect—I can’t—I have to …”
Then, suddenly, he flung his left hand outward in a swirling pattern, as if he were trying to catch a dodging fly. His right hand flew upward, snatched the air. Then he rolled his head around and around on his shoulders, his mouth hanging open. Qing-jao was frightened, horrified. What was happening to her father? He had been speaking in such a fragmented, disjointed way; had he gone mad?
He repeated the action—left arm spiraling out, right hand straight up, grasping nothing; head rolling. And again. Only then did Qing-jao realize that she was seeing Father’s secret ritual of purification. Like her wood-grain-tracing, this dance-of-the-hands-and-the-head must be the way he was given to hear the voice of the gods when he, in his time, was left covered with grease in a locked room.
The gods had seen his doubt, had seen him waver, so they took control of him, to discipline and purify him. Qing-jao could not have been given clearer proof of what was going on. She turned to the face above the terminal display. “See how the gods oppose you?” she said.
“I see how Congress humiliates your father,” answered Jane.
“I will send word of who you are to every world at once,” said Qing-jao.
“And if I don’t let you?” said Jane.
“You can’t stop me!” cried Qing-jao. “The gods will help me!” She ran from her father’s room, fled to her own. But the face was already floating in the air above her own terminal.
“How will you send a message anywhere, if I choose not to let it go?” asked Jane.
“I’ll find a way,” said Qing-jao. She saw that Wang-mu had run after her and now waited, breathless, for Qing-jao’s instructions. “Tell Mu-pao to find one of the game computers and bring it to me. It is not to be connected to the house computer or any other.”
“Yes, Mistress,” said Wang-mu. She left quickly.
Qing-jao turned back to Jane. “Do you think you can stop me forever?”
“I think you should wait until your father decides.”
“Only because you hope that you’ve broken him and stolen his heart away from the gods. But you’ll see—he’ll come here and thank me for fulfilling all that he taught me.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“He will.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
Qing-jao shouted, “Then I’ll serve the man he was when he was strong and good! But you’ll never break him!”
“It’s Congress that broke him from his birth. I’m the one who’s trying to heal him.”
Wang-mu ran back into the room. “Mu-pao will have one here in a few minutes.”
“What do you hope to do with this toy computer?” asked Jane.
“Write my report,” said Qing-jao.
“Then what will you do with it?”
“Print it out. Have it distributed as widely as possible on Path. You can’t do anything to interfere with that. I won’t use a computer that you can reach at any point.”
“So you’ll tell everyone on Path; it changes nothing. And even if it did, do yo
u think I can’t also tell them the truth?”
“Do you think they’ll believe you, a program controlled by the enemy of Congress, rather than me, one of the godspoken?”
“Yes.”
It took a moment for Qing-jao to realize that it was Wang-mu who had said yes, not Jane. She turned to her secret maid and demanded that she explain what she meant.
Wang-mu looked like a different person; there was no diffidence in her voice when she spoke. “If Demosthenes tells the people of Path that the godspoken are simply people with a genetic gift but also a genetic defect, then that means there’s no more reason to let the godspoken rule over us.”
For the first time it occurred to Qing-jao that not everyone on Path was as content to follow the order established by the gods as she was. For the first time she realized that she might be utterly alone in her determination to serve the gods perfectly.
“What is the Path?” asked Jane, behind her. “First the gods, then the ancestors, then the people, then the rulers, then the self.”
“How can you dare to speak of the Path when you are trying to seduce me and my father and my secret maid away from it?”
“Imagine, just for a moment: What if everything I’ve said to you is true?” said Jane. “What if your affliction is caused by the designs of evil men who want to exploit you and oppress you and, with your help, exploit and oppress the whole of humanity? Because when you help Congress that’s what you’re doing. That can’t possibly be what the gods want. What if I exist in order to help you see that Congress has lost the mandate of heaven? What if the will of the gods is for you to serve the Path in its proper order? First serve the gods, by removing from power the corrupt masters of Congress who have forfeited the mandate of heaven. Then serve your ancestors—your father—by avenging their humiliation at the hands of the tormentors who deformed you to make you slaves. Then serve the people of Path by setting them free from the superstitions and mental torments that bind them. Then serve the new, enlightened rulers who will replace Congress by offering them a world full of superior intelligences ready to counsel them, freely, willingly. And finally serve yourself by letting the best minds of Path find a cure for your need to waste half your waking life in these mindless rituals.”
Qing-jao listened to Jane’s discourse with growing uncertainty. It sounded so plausible. How could Qing-jao know what the gods meant by anything? Maybe they had sent this Jane-program to liberate them. Maybe Congress was as corrupt and dangerous as Demosthenes said, and maybe it had lost the mandate of heaven.
But at the end, Qing-jao knew that these were all the lies of a seducer. For the one thing she could not doubt was the voice of the gods inside her. Hadn’t she felt that awful need to be purified? Hadn’t she felt the joy of successful worship when her rituals were complete? Her relationship with the gods was the most certain thing in her life; and anyone who denied it, who threatened to take it away from her, had to be not only her enemy, but the enemy of heaven.
“I’ll send my report only to the godspoken,” said Qing-jao. “If the common people choose to rebel against the gods, that can’t be helped; but I will serve them best by helping keep the godspoken in power here, for that way the whole world can follow the will of the gods.”
“All this is meaningless,” said Jane. “Even if all the godspoken believe what you believe, you’ll never get a word of it off this world unless I want you to.”
“There are starships,” said Qing-jao.
“It will take two generations to spread your message to every world. By then Starways Congress will have fallen.”
Qing-jao was forced now to face the fact that she had been avoiding: As long as Jane controlled the ansible, she could shut down communication from Path as thoroughly as she had cut off the fleet. Even if Qing-jao arranged to have her report and recommendations transmitted continuously from every ansible on Path, Jane would see to it that the only effect would be for Path to disappear from the rest of the universe as thoroughly as the fleet had disappeared.
For a moment, filled with despair, she almost threw herself to the ground to begin a terrible ordeal of purification. I have let down the gods—surely they will require me to trace lines until I’m dead, a worthless failure in their eyes.
But when she examined her own feelings, to see what penance would be necessary, she found that none was required at all. It filled her with hope—perhaps they recognized the purity of her desire, and would forgive her for the fact that it was impossible for her to act.
Or perhaps they knew a way that she could act. What if Path did disappear from the ansibles of every other world? How would Congress make sense of it? What would people think? The disappearance of any world would provoke a response—but especially this world, if some in Congress did believe the gods’ disguise for the creation of the godspoken and thought they had a terrible secret to keep. They would send a ship from the nearest world, which was only three years’ travel away. What would happen then? Would Jane have to shut down all communications from the ship that reached them? Then from the next world, when the ship returned? How long would it be before Jane had to shut down all the ansible connections in the Hundred Worlds herself? Three generations, she said. Perhaps that would do. The gods were in no hurry.
It wouldn’t necessarily take that long for Jane’s power to be destroyed, anyway. At some point it would become obvious to everyone that a hostile power had taken control of the ansibles, making ships and worlds disappear. Even without learning about Valentine and Demosthenes, even without guessing that it was a computer program, someone on every world would realize what had to be done and shut down the ansibles themselves.
“I have imagined something for you,” said Qing-jao. “Now imagine something for me. I and the other godspoken arrange to broadcast nothing but my report from every ansible on Path. You make all those ansibles fall silent at once. What does the rest of humanity see? That we have disappeared just like the Lusitania Fleet. They’ll soon realize that you, or something like you, exists. The more you use your power, the more you reveal yourself to even the dimmest minds. Your threat is empty. You might as well step aside and let me send the message simply and easily now; stopping me is just another way of sending the very same message.”
“You’re wrong,” said Jane. “If Path suddenly disappears from all ansibles at once, they might just as easily conclude that this world is in rebellion just like Lusitania—after all, they shut down their ansible, too. And what did Starways Congress do? They sent a fleet with the M.D. Device on it.”
“Lusitania was already in rebellion before their ansible was shut down.”
“Do you think Congress isn’t watching you? Do you think they’re not terrified of what might happen if the godspoken of Path ever discovered what had been done to them? If a few primitive aliens and a couple of xenologers frightened them into sending a fleet, what do you think they’ll do about the mysterious disappearance of a world with so many brilliant minds who have ample reason to hate Starways Congress? How long do you think this world would survive?”
Qing-jao was filled with a sickening dread. It was always possible that this much of Jane’s story was true: that there were people in Congress who were deceived by the disguise of the gods, who thought that the godspoken of Path had been created solely by genetic manipulation. And if there were such people, they might act as Jane described. What if a fleet came against Path? What if Starways Congress had ordered them to destroy the whole world without any negotiation? Then her reports would never be known, and everything would be gone. It would all be for nothing. Could that possibly be the desire of the gods? Could Starways Congress still have the mandate of heaven and yet destroy a world?
“Remember the story of I Ya, the great cook,” said Jane. “His master said one day, ‘I have the greatest cook in all the world. Because of him, I have tasted every flavor known to man except the taste of human flesh.’ Hearing this, I Ya went home and butchered his own son, cooked his flesh and se
rved it to his master, so that his master would lack nothing that I Ya could give him.”
This was a terrible story. Qing-jao had heard it as a child, and it made her weep for hours. What about the son of I Ya? she had cried. And her father had said, A true servant has sons and daughters only to serve his master. For five nights she had woken up screaming from dreams in which her father roasted her alive or carved slices from her onto a plate, until at last Han Fei-tzu came to her and embraced her and said, “Don’t believe it, my Gloriously Bright daughter. I am not a perfect servant. I love you too much to be truly righteous. I love you more than I love my duty. I am not I Ya. You have nothing to fear at my hands.” Only after Father said that to her could she sleep.
This program, this Jane, must have found Father’s account of this in his journal, and now was using it against her. Yet even though Qing-jao knew she was being manipulated, she couldn’t help but wonder if Jane might not be right.
“Are you a servant like I Ya?” asked Jane. “Will you slaughter your own world for the sake of an unworthy master like Starways Congress?”
Qing-jao could not sort out her own feelings. Where did these thoughts come from? Jane had poisoned her mind with her arguments, just as Demosthenes had done before her—if they weren’t the same person all along. Their words could sound persuasive, even as they ate away at the truth.
Did Qing-jao have the right to risk the lives of all the people of Path? What if she was wrong? How could she know anything? Whether everything Jane said was true or everything she said was false, the same evidence would lie before her. Qing-jao would feel exactly as she felt now, whether it was the gods or some brain disorder causing the feeling.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 104