The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “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 cons
ulting 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.”

  “The descolada is not sentient,” said Miro.

  “For your information,” said Quara, “I know all about this latest ploy. Ela sent me the transcripts. Some Chinese girl on a backwater colony planet who doesn’t know anything about xenogenetics comes up with a wild hypothesis, and you all act as if it were already proved.”

  “So—prove it false.”

  “I can’t. I’ve been shut out of the lab. You prove it true.”

  “Occam’s razor proves it true. Simplest explanation that fits the facts.”

  “Occam was a medieval old fart. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is always, God did it. Or maybe—that old woman down the road is a witch. She did it. That’s all this hypothesis is—only you don’t even know where the witch is.”

  “The descolada is too sudden.”

  “It didn’t evolve, I know. Had to come from somewhere else. Fine. Even if it’s artificial, that doesn’t mean it isn’t sentient now.”

  “It’s trying to kill us. It’s varelse, not raman.”

  “Oh, yes, Valentine’s hierarchy. Well, how do I know that the descolada is the varelse, and we’re the ramen? As far as I can tell, intelligence is intelligence. Varelse is just the term Valentine invented to mean Intelligence-that-we’ve-decided-to-kill, and raman means Intelligence-that-we-haven’t-decided-to-kill-yet.”

  “It’s an unreasoning, uncompassionate enemy.”

  “Is there another kind?”

  “The descolada doesn’t have respect for any other life. It wants to kill us. It already rules the pequeninos. All so it can regulate this planet and spread to other worlds.”

  For once, she had let him finish a long statement. Did it mean she was actually listening to him?

  “I’ll grant you part of Wang-mu’s hypothesis,” said Quara. “It does make sense that the descolada is regulating the gaialogy of Lusitania. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s obvious. It explains most of the conversations I’ve observed—the information-passing from one virus to another. I figure it should take only a few months for a message to get to every virus on the planet—it would work. But just because the descolada is running the gaialogy doesn’t mean that you’ve proved it’s not sentient. In fact, it could go the other way—the descolada, by taking responsibility for regulating the gaialogy of a whole world, is showing altruism. And protectiveness, too—if we saw a mother lion lashing out at an intruder in order to protect her young, we’d admire her. That’s all the descolada is doing—lashing out against humans in order to protect her precious responsibility. A living planet.”

  “A mother lion protecting her cubs.”

  “I think so.”

  “Or a rabid dog, devouring our babies.”

  Quara paused. Thought for a moment. “Or both. Why can’t it be both? The descolada’s trying to regulate a planet here. But humans are getting more and more dangerous. To her, we’re the rabid dog. We root out the plants that are part of her control system, and we plant our own, unresponsive plants. We make some of the pequeninos behave strangely and disobey her. We burn a forest at a time when she’s trying to build more. Of course she wants to get rid of us!”

  “So she’s out to destroy us.”

  “It’s her privilege to try! When will you see that the descolada has rights?”

  “Don’t we? Don’t the pequeninos?”

  Again she paused. No immediate counterargument. It gave him hope that she might actually be listening.

  “You know something, Miro?”

  “What.”

  “They were right to send you.”

  “Were they?”

  “Because you’re not one of them.”

  That’s true enough, thought Miro. I’ll never be “one of” anything again.

  “Maybe we can’t talk to the descolada. And maybe it really is just an artifact. A biological robot acting out its programming. But maybe it isn’t. And they’re keeping me from finding out.”

  “What if they open the lab to you?”

  “They won’t,” said Quara. “If you think they will, you don’t know Ela and Mother. They’ve decided that I’m not to be trusted, and so that’s that. Well, I’ve decided they’re not to be trusted, either.”

  “Thus whole species die for family pride.”

  “Is that all you think this is, Miro? Pride? I’m holding out because of nothing nobler than a petty quarrel?”

  “Our family has a lot of pride.”

  “Well, no matter what you think, I’m doing this out of conscience, no matter whether you want to call it pride or stubbornness or anything else.”

  “I believe you,” said Miro.

  “But do I believe you when you say that you believe me? We’re in such a tangle.” She turned back to her terminal. “Go away now, Miro. I told you I’d think about it, and I will.”

  “Go see Planter.”

  “I’ll think about that, too.” Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. “He is my friend, you know. I’m not inhuman. I’ll go see him, you can be sure of that.”

  “Good.”

  He started for the door.

  “Miro,” she said.

  He turned, waited.

  “Thanks for not threatening to have that computer program of yours crack my files open if I didn’t open them myself.”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Andrew would have threatened that, you know. Everybody thinks he’s such a saint, but he always bullies people who don’t go along with him.”

  “He doesn’t threaten.”

  “I’ve seen him do it.”

  “He warns.”

  “Oh. Excuse me. Is there a difference?”

  “Yes,” said Miro.

  “The only difference between a warning and a threat is whether you’re the person giving it or the person receiving it,” said Quara.

  “No,” said Miro. “The difference is how the person means it.”

  “Go away,” she said. “I’ve got work to do, even while I’m thinking. So go away.”

  He opened the door.

  “But thanks,” she said.

  He closed the door behind him.

  As he walked away from Quara’s place, Jane immediately piped up in his ear. “I see you decided against telling her that I broke into her files before you even came.”

  “Yes, well,” said Miro. “I feel like a hypocrite, for her to thank me for not threatening to do what I’d already done.”

  “I did it.”

  “We did it. You and me and Ender. A sneaky group.”

  “Will she really think about it?”

  “Maybe,” said Miro. “Or maybe she’s already thought about it and decided to cooperate and was just looking for an excuse. Or maybe she’s already decided against ever cooperating, and she just said this nice thing at the end because she’s sorry for me.”

  “What do you think she’ll do?”

  “I don’t know what she’ll do,” said Miro. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll feel ashamed of myself every time I think about how I let her think that I respected her privacy, when we’d already pillaged her files. Sometimes I don’t think I’m a very good person.”

  “You notice she didn’t tell you that she’s keeping her real findings outside the computer system, so the only files I can reach are worthless junk. She hasn’t exactly been frank with you, either.”

  “Yes, but she’s a fanatic with no sense of balance or proportion.”

  “That explains everything.”

  “Some traits just run in the family,” said Miro.

  The hive queen was alone this time. Perhaps exhausted from something—mating? Producing eggs? She spent all her time doing this, it seemed. She had no choice. Now that workers had to be used to patro
l the perimeter of the human colony, she had to produce even more than she had planned. Her offspring didn’t have to be educated—they entered adulthood quickly, having all the knowledge that any other adult had. But the process of conception, egg-laying, emergence, and cocooning still took time. Weeks for each adult. She produced a prodigious number of young, compared to a single human. But compared to the town of Milagre, with more than a thousand women of childbearing age, the bugger colony had only one producing female.

  It had always bothered Ender, made him feel uneasy to know that there was only one queen. What if something happened to her? But then, it made the hive queen uncomfortable to think of human beings having only a bare handful of children—what if something happened to them? Both species practiced a combination of nurturance and redundancy to protect their genetic heritage. Humans had a redundancy of parents, and then nurtured the few offspring. The hive queen had a redundancy of offspring, who then nurtured the parent. Each species had found its own balance of strategy.

 

  “Because we’re at a dead end. Because everybody else is trying, and you have as much at stake as we do.”

 

  “The descolada threatens you as much as it threatens us. Someday you probably aren’t going to be able to control it, and then you’re gone.”

 

  “No.” It was the problem of faster-than-light flight. Grego had been wracking his brains. In jail there was nothing else for him to think about. The last time Ender had spoken with him, he wept—as much from exhaustion as frustration. He had covered reams of papers with equations, spreading them all over the secure room that was used as a cell. “Don’t you care about faster-than-light flight?”

 

  The mildness of her response almost hurt, it so deeply disappointed him. This is what despair is like, he thought. Quara a brick wall on the nature of descolada intelligence. Planter dying of descolada deprivation. Han Fei-tzu and Wang-mu struggling to duplicate years of higher study in several fields, all at once. Grego worn out. And nothing to show for it.

  She must have heard his anguish as clearly as if he had howled it.