The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “Yes,” whispered Wang-mu. “I’m listening too.”

  “There is a possibility—a remote one, as you will see, but a possibility nonetheless—that if we are able to decode the descolada virus and tame it, we can also make an adaptation that could be useful on Path.”

  “How so?” asked Han Fei-tzu. “Why should we want this monstrous artificial virus here?”

  “The whole business of the descolada is entering a host organism’s cells, reading the genetic code, and reorganizing it according to the descolada’s own plan. When we alter it, if we can, we’ll remove its own plan from it. We’ll also remove almost all of its self-defense mechanisms, if we can find them. At that point, it may be possible to use it as a super-splicer. Something that can effect a change, not just on the reproductive cells, but on all the cells of a living creature.”

  “Forgive me,” said Han Fei-tzu, “but I have been reading in this field lately, and the concept of a super-splicer has been rejected, because the body starts to reject its own cells as soon as they’re genetically altered.”

  “Yes,” said Ela. “That’s how the descolada kills. The body rejects itself to death. But that only happened because the descolada had no plan for dealing with humans. It was studying the human body as it went, making random changes and seeing what happened. It had no single plan for us, and so each victim ended up with many different genetic codes in his or her cells. What if we made a super-splicer that worked according to a single plan, transforming every cell in the body to conform with a single new pattern? In that case, our studies of the descolada assure us that the change could be effected in each individual person within six hours, usually—half a day at the most.”

  “Fast enough that before the body can reject itself—”

  “It will be so perfectly unified that it will recognize the new pattern as itself.”

  Wang-mu’s crying had stopped. She seemed as excited now as Fei-tzu felt, and despite all her self-discipline, she could not contain it. “You can change all the godspoken? Free even the ones who are already alive?”

  “If we are able to decode the descolada, then not only would we be able to remove the OCD from the godspoken, we would also be able to install all the enhancements in the common people. It would have the most effect in the children, of course—older people have already passed the growth stages where the new genes would have the most effect. But from that time on, every child born on Path would have the enhancements.”

  “What then? Would the descolada disappear?”

  “I’m not sure. I think we would have to build into the new gene a way for it to destroy itself when its work is done. But we would use Wang-mu’s genes as a model. Not to stretch the point, Wang-mu, you would become a sort of genetic co-parent of the entire population of your world.”

  She laughed. “What a wonderful joke to play on them! So proud to be chosen, and yet their cure will come from one such as me!” At once, though, her face fell and she covered her face with her hands. “How could I say such a thing. I have become as haughty and arrogant as the worst of them.”

  Fei-tzu laid his hand on her shoulder. “Say nothing so harsh. Such feelings are natural. They come and go quickly. Only those who make them a way of life are to be condemned for them.” He turned back to Ela. “There are ethical problems here.”

  “I know. And I think those problems should be addressed now, even though it may never be possible even to do this. We’re talking about the genetic alteration of an entire population. It was an atrocity when Congress secretly did it to Path without the consent or knowledge of the population. Can we undo an atrocity by following the same path?”

  “More than that,” said Han Fei-tzu. “Our entire social system here is based on the godspoken. Most people will interpret such a transformation as a plague from the gods, punishing us. If it became known that we were the source, we would be killed. It’s possible, though, that when it becomes known that the godspoken have lost the voice of the gods—the OCD—the people will turn on them and kill them. How will freeing them from the OCD have helped them then, if they’re dead?”

  “We’ve discussed this,” said Ela. “And we have no idea what’s the right thing to do. For now the question is moot because we haven’t decoded the descolada and may never be able to. But if we develop the capability, we believe that the choice of whether to use it should be yours.”

  “The people of Path?”

  “No,” said Ela. “The first choices are yours, Han Fei-tzu, Si Wang-mu, and Han Qing-jao. Only you know of what has been done to you, and even though your daughter doesn’t believe it, she does fairly represent the viewpoint of the believers and the godspoken of Path. If we get the capability, put the question to her. Put the question to yourselves. Is there some plan, some way to bring this transformation to Path, that would not be destructive? And if it can be done, should it be done? No—say nothing now, decide nothing now. Think about it yourselves. We are not part of this. We will only inform you when or whether we learn how to do it. From there it will be up to you.”

  Ela’s face disappeared.

  Jane lingered a moment longer. “Worth waking up for?” she asked.

  “Yes!” cried Wang-mu.

  “Kind of nice to discover that you’re a lot more than you ever thought you were, isn’t it?” said Jane.

  “Oh, yes,” said Wang-mu.

  “Now go back to sleep, Wang-mu. And you, Master Han—your fatigue is showing very clearly. You’re useless to us if you lose your health. As Andrew has told me, over and over—we must do all we can do without destroying our ability to keep doing it.”

  Then she was gone, too.

  Wang-mu immediately began to weep again. Han Fei-tzu slid over and sat beside her on the floor, cradled her head against his shoulder, and rocked gently back and forth. “Hush, my daughter, my sweet one, in your heart you already knew who you were, and so did I, so did I. Truly your name was wisely given. If they perform their miracles on Lusitania, you will be the Royal Mother of all the world.”

  “Master Han,” she whispered. “I’m crying also for Qing-jao. I have been given more than I ever hoped for. But who will she be, if the voice of the gods is taken from her?”

  “I hope,” said Fei-tzu, “that she will be my true daughter again. That she will be as free as you, the daughter who has come to me like a petal on the winter river, borne to me from the land of perpetual spring.”

  He held her for many long minutes more, until she began to doze on his shoulder. Then he laid her back on her mat, and he retired to his own corner to sleep, with hope in his heart for the first time in many days.

  When Valentine came to see Grego in prison, Mayor Kovano told her that Olhado was with him. “Aren’t these Olhado’s working hours?”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Kovano. “He’s a good manager of brick-makers, but I think saving the world might be worth an afternoon of somebody else covering for him on management.”

  “Don’t get your expectations too high,” said Valentine. “I wanted him involved. I hoped he might help. But he isn’t a physicist.”

  Kovano shrugged. “I’m not a jailer, either, but one does what the situation requires. I have no idea whether it has to do with Olhado being in there or Ender’s visit a little while ago, but I’ve heard more excitement and noise in there than—well, than I’ve ever heard when the inmates were sober. Of course, public drunkenness is what people are usually jailed for in this town.”

  “Ender came?”

  “From the hive queen. He wants to talk to you. I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Yes. Well, I’ll go see him when I leave here.” Where she had been was with her husband. Jakt was getting ready to go back into space on the shuttle, to prepare his own ship for quick departure, if need be, and to see whether the original Lusitanian colony ship could possibly be restored for another flight after so many decades without maintenance of the stardrive. The only thing it had been used for was storage of seeds
and genes and embryos of Earthborn species, in case they were someday needed. Jakt would be gone for at least a week, possibly longer, and Valentine couldn’t very well let him go without spending some time with him. He would have understood, of course—he knew the terrible pressure that everyone was under. But Valentine also knew that she wasn’t one of the key figures in these events. She would only be useful later, writing the history of it.

  When she left Jakt, however, she had not come straight to the mayor’s office to see Grego. She had taken a walk through the center of town. Hard to believe that only a short time ago—how many days? Weeks?—the mob had formed here, drunken and angry, working themselves up to a murderous rage. Now it was so quiet. The grass had even recovered from the trampling, except for one mudhole where it refused to grow back.

  But it wasn’t peaceful here. On the contrary. When the town had been at peace, when Valentine first arrived, there had been bustle and business here in the heart of the colony, all through the day. Now a few people were out and about, yes, but they were glum, almost furtive. Their eyes stayed down, looking at the ground before their feet, as if everyone were afraid that if they didn’t watch every step they’d fall flat.

  Part of the glumness was probably shame, thought Valentine. There was a hole in every building in town now, where blocks or bricks had been torn out to use in the building of the chapel. Many of the gaps were visible from the praça where Valentine walked.

  She suspected, however, that fear more than shame had killed the vibrancy in this place. No one spoke of it openly, but she caught enough comments, enough covert glances toward the hills north of town that she knew. What loomed over this colony wasn’t the fear of the coming fleet. It wasn’t shame over the slaughter of the pequenino forest. It was the buggers. The dark shapes only occasionally visible on the hills or out in the grass surrounding the town. It was the nightmares of the children who had seen them. The sick dread in the hearts of the adults. Historical that took place set in the Bugger War period were continously checked out from the library as people became obsessed with watching humans achieve victory over buggers. And as they watched, they fed their worst fears. The theoretical notion of the hive culture as a beautiful and worthy one, as Ender had depicted it in his first book, the Hive Queen, disappeared completely for many of the people here, perhaps most of them, as they dwelt in the unspoken punishment and imprisonment enforced by the hive queen’s workers.

  Is all our work in vain, after all? thought Valentine. I, the historian, the philosopher Demosthenes, trying to teach people that they need not fear all aliens, but can see them as raman. And Ender, with his empathic books the Hive Queen, the Hegemon, the Life of Human—what force did they really have in the world, compared with the instinctive terror at the sight of these dangerous oversized insects? Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we’ll use the moment it comes close enough.

  Now she was back in a clean, safe place, not so disquieting even if it did serve as a prison as well as the center of city government. A place where the buggers were seen as allies—or at least as an indispensable peacekeeping force, holding antagonists apart for their mutual protection. There are people, Valentine reminded herself, who are able to transcend their animal origins.

  When she opened the cell door, Olhado and Grego were both sprawled on bunks, papers strewn on the floor and table between them, some flat, some wadded up. Papers even covered the computer terminal, so that if the computer was on, the display couldn’t possibly function. It looked like a typical teenager’s bedroom, complete with Grego’s legs stretching up the walls, his bare feet dancing a weird rhythm, twisting back and forth, back and forth in the air. What was his inner music?

  “Boa tarde, Tia Valentina,” said Olhado.

  Grego didn’t even look up.

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “Just in time,” said Olhado. “We’re on the verge of reconceptualizing the universe. We’ve discovered the illuminating principle that wishing makes it so and all living creatures pop out of nowhere whenever they’re needed.”

  “If wishing makes it so,” said Valentine, “can we wish for faster-than-light flight?”

  “Grego’s doing math in his head right now,” said Olhado, “so he’s functionally dead. But yes. I think he’s on to something—he was shouting and dancing a minute ago. We had a sewing-machine experience.”

  “Ah,” said Valentine.

  “It’s an old science-class story,” said Olhado. “People who wanted to invent sewing machines kept failing because they always tried to imitate the motions of hand-sewing, pushing the needle through the fabric and drawing the thread along behind through the eye at the back end of the needle. It seemed obvious. Until somebody first thought of putting the eye in the nose of the needle and using two threads instead of just one. A completely unnatural, indirect approach that when it comes right down to it, I still don’t understand.”

  “So we’re going to sew our way through space?”

  “In a way. The shortest distance between two points isn’t necessarily a line. It comes from something Andrew learned from the hive queen. How they call some kind of creature from an alternate spacetime when they create a new hive queen. Grego jumped on that as proof that there was a real non-real space. Don’t ask me what he means by that. I make bricks for a living.”

  “Unreal realspace,” said Grego. “You had it backward.”

  “The dead awake,” said Olhado.

  “Have a seat, Valentine,” said Grego. “My cell isn’t much, but it’s home. The math on this is still crazy but it seems to fit. I’m going to have to spend some time with Jane on it, to do the really tight calculations and run some simulations, but if the hive queen’s right, and there’s a space so universally adjacent to our space that philotes can pass into our space from the other space at any point, and if we postulate that the passage can go the other way, and if the hive queen is also right that the other space contains philotes just as ours does, only in the other space—call it Outside—the philotes aren’t organized according to natural law, but are instead just possibilities, then here’s what might work—”

  “Those are awfully big ifs,” said Valentine.

  “You forget,” said Olhado. “We start from the premise that wishing makes it so.”

  “Right, I forgot to mention that,” said Grego. “We also assume that the hive queen is right that the unorganized philotes respond to patterns in someone’s mind, immediately assuming whatever role is available in the pattern. So that things that are comprehended Outside will immediately come to exist there.”

  “All this is perfectly clear,” said Valentine. “I’m surprised you didn’t think of it before.”

  “Right,” said Grego. “So here’s how we do it. Instead of trying to physically move all the particles that compose the starship and its passengers and cargo from Star A to Star B, we simply conceive of them all—the entire pattern, including all the human contents—as existing, not Inside, but Outside. At that moment, all the philotes that compose the starship and the people in it disorganize themselves, pop through into the Outside, and reassemble themselves there according to the familiar pattern. Then we do the same thing again, and pop back Inside—only now we’re at Star B. Preferably a safe orbiting distance away.”

  “If every point in our space corresponds to a point Outside,” said Valentine, “don’t we just have to do our traveling there instead of here?”

  “The rules are different there,” said Grego. “There’s no whereness there. Let’s assume that in our space, whereness—relative location—is simply an artifact of the order that philotes follow. It’s a convention. So is distance, for that matter. We measure distance according to the time it takes to travel it—but it only takes that amount of time because the phil
otes of which matter and energy are comprised follow the conventions of natural law. Like the speed of light.”

  “They’re just obeying the speed limit.”

  “Yes. Except for the speed limit, the size of our universe is arbitrary. If you looked at our universe as a sphere, then if you stood outside the sphere, it could as easily be an inch across or a trillion lightyears or a micron.”

  “And when we go Outside—”

  “Then the Inside universe is exactly the same size as any of the disorganized philotes there—no size at all. Furthermore, since there is no whereness there, all philotes in that space are equally close or nonclose to the location of our universe. So we can reenter Inside space at any point.”

  “That makes it sound almost easy,” said Valentine.

  “Yes, well,” said Grego.

  “It’s the wishing that’s hard,” said Olhado.

  “To hold the pattern, you really have to understand it,” said Grego. “Each philote that rules a pattern comprehends only its own part of reality. It depends on the philotes within its pattern to do their job and hold their own pattern, and it also depends the philote that controls the pattern that it’s a part of to keep it in its proper place. The atom philote has to trust the neutron and proton and electron philotes to hold their own internal structures together, and the molecule philote to hold the atom in its proper place, while the atom philote concentrates on his own job, which is keeping the parts of the atom in place. That’s how reality seems to work—in this model, anyway.”

  “So you transplant the whole thing to Outside and back Inside again,” said Valentine. “I understood that.”

  “Yes, but who? Because the mechanism for sending requires that the whole pattern for the ship and all its contents be established as a pattern of its own, not just an arbitrary conglomeration. I mean, when you load a cargo on a ship and the passengers embark, you haven’t created a living pattern, a philotic organism. It’s not like giving birth to a baby—that’s an organism that can hold itself together. The ship and its contents are just a collection. They can break apart at any point. So when you move all the philotes out into disorganized space, lacking whereness or thisness or any organizing principle, how do they reassemble? And even if they reassemble themselves into the structures they know, what do you have? A lot of atoms. Maybe even living cells and organisms—but without spacesuits or a starship, because those aren’t alive. All the atoms and maybe even the molecules are floating around, probably replicating themselves like crazy as the unorganized philotes out there start copying the pattern, but you’ve got no ship.”