The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “Fatal.”

  “No, probably not,” said Grego. “Who can guess? The rules are all different out there. The point is that you can’t possibly bring them back into our space in that condition, because that definitely would be fatal.”

  “So we can’t.”

  “I don’t know. Reality holds together in Inside space because all the philotes that it’s comprised of agree on the rules. They all know each other’s patterns and follow the same patterns themselves. Maybe it can all hold together in Outside space as long as the spaceship and its cargo and passengers are fully known. As long as there’s a knower who can hold the entire structure in her head.”

  “Her?”

  “As I said, I have to have Jane do the calculations. She has to see if she has access to enough memory to contain the pattern of relationships within a spaceship. She has to then see if she can take that pattern and imagine its new location.”

  “That’s the wishing part,” said Olhado. “I’m very proud of it, because I’m the one who thought of needing a knower to move the ship.”

  “This whole thing is really Olhado’s,” said Grego, “but I intend to put my name first on the paper because he doesn’t care about career advancement and I have to look good enough for people to overlook this felony conviction if I’m going to get a job at a university on another world somewhere.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Valentine.

  “I’m talking about getting off this two-bit colony planet. Don’t you understand? If this is all true, if it works, then I can fly to Rheims or Baía or—or Earth and come back here for weekends. The energy cost is zero because we’re stepping outside natural laws entirely. The wear and tear on the vehicles is nothing.”

  “Not nothing,” said Olhado. “We’ve still got to taxi close to the planet of destination.”

  “As I said, it all depends on what Jane can conceive of. She has to be able to comprehend the whole ship and its contents. She has to be able to imagine us Outside and Inside again. She has to be able to conceive of the exact relative positions of the startpoint and endpoint of the journey.”

  “So faster-than-light travel depends completely on Jane,” said Valentine.

  “If she didn’t exist, it would be impossible. Even if they linked all the computers together, even if someone could write the program to accomplish it, it wouldn’t help. Because a program is just a collection, not an entity. It’s just parts. Not a—what was the word Jane found for it? An aiúa.”

  “Sanskrit for life,” Olhado explained to Valentine. “The word for the philote who controls a pattern that holds other philotes in order. The word for entities—like planets and atoms and animals and stars—that have an intrinsic, enduring form.”

  “Jane is an aiúa, not just a program. So she can be a knower. She can incorporate the starship as a pattern within her own pattern. She can digest it and contain it and it will still be real. She makes it part of herself and knows it as perfectly and unconsciously as your aiúa knows your own body and holds it together. Then she can carry it with her Outside and back Inside again.”

  “So Jane has to go?” asked Valentine.

  “If this can be done at all, it’ll be done because Jane travels with the ship, yes,” said Grego.

  “How?” asked Valentine. “We can’t exactly go pick her up and carry her with us in a bucket.”

  “This is something Andrew learned from the hive queen,” said Grego. “She actually exists in a particular place—that is, her aiúa has a specific location in our space.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside Andrew Wiggin.”

  It took a while for them to explain to her what Ender had learned about Jane from the hive queen. It was strange to think of this computer entity as being centered inside Ender’s body, but it made a kind of sense that Jane had been created by the hive queens during Ender’s campaign against them. To Valentine, though, there was another, immediate consequence. If the faster-than-light ship could only go where Jane took it, and Jane was inside Ender, there could be only one conclusion.

  “Then Andrew has to go?”

  “Claro. Of course,” said Grego.

  “He’s a little old to be a test pilot,” said Valentine.

  “In this case he’s only a test passenger,” said Grego. “He just happens to hold the pilot inside him.”

  “It’s not as if the voyage will have any physical stress,” said Olhado. “If Grego’s theory works out exactly right, he’ll just sit there and after a couple of minutes or actually a microsecond or two, he’ll be in the other place. And if it doesn’t work at all, he’ll just stay right here, with all of us feeling foolish for thinking we could wish our way through space.”

  “And if it turns out Jane can get him Outside but can’t hold things together there, then he’ll be stranded in a place that doesn’t even have any placeness to it,” said Valentine.

  “Well, yes,” said Grego. “If it works halfway, the passengers are effectively dead. But since we’ll be in a place without time, it won’t matter to us. It’ll just be an eternal instant. Probably not enough time for our brains to notice that the experiment failed. Stasis.”

  “Of course, if it works,” said Olhado, “then we’ll carry our own spacetime with us, so there would be duration. Therefore, we’ll never know if we fail. We’ll only notice if we succeed.”

  “But I’ll know if he never comes back,” said Valentine.

  “Right,” said Grego. “If he never comes back, then you’ll have a few months of knowing it until the fleet gets here and blasts everything and everybody all to hell.”

  “Or until the descolada turns everybody’s genes inside out and kills us all,” added Olhado.

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Valentine. “Failure won’t kill them any deader than they’ll be if they stay.”

  “But you see the deadline pressure that we’re under,” said Grego. “We don’t have much time left before Jane loses her ansible connections. Andrew says that she might well survive it after all—but she’ll be crippled. Brain-damaged.”

  “So even if it works, the first flight might be the last.”

  “No,” said Olhado. “The flights are instantaneous. If it works, she can shuttle everybody off this planet in no more time than it takes people to get in and out of the starship.”

  “You mean it can take off from a planet surface?”

  “That’s still iffy,” said Grego. “She might only be able to calculate location within, say ten thousand kilometers. There’s no explosion or displacement problem, since the philotes will reenter Inside space ready to obey natural laws again. But if the starship reappears in the middle of a planet it’ll still be pretty hard to dig to the surface.”

  “But if she can be really precise—within a couple of centimeters, for instance—then the flights can be surface-to-surface,” said Olhado.

  “Of course we’re dreaming,” said Grego. “Jane’s going to come back and tell us that even if she could turn all the stellar mass in the galaxy into computer chips, she couldn’t hold all the data she’d have to know in order to make a starship travel this way. But at the moment, it still sounds possible and I am feeling good!”

  At that, Grego and Olhado started whooping and laughing so loud that Mayor Kovano came to the door to make sure Valentine was all right. To her embarrassment, he caught her laughing and whooping right along with them.

  “Are we happy, then?” asked Kovano.

  “I guess,” said Valentine, trying to recover her composure.

  “Which of our many problems have we solved?”

  “Probably none of them,” said Valentine. “It would be too idiotically convenient if the universe could be manipulated to work this way.”

  “But you’ve thought of something.”

  “The metaphysical geniuses here have a completely unlikely possibility,” said Valentine. “Unless you slipped them something really weird in their lunch.”

  Kovano laughe
d and left them alone. But his visit had had the effect of sobering them again.

  “Is it possible?” asked Valentine.

  “I would never have thought so,” said Grego. “I mean, there’s the problem of origin.”

  “It actually answers the problem of origin,” said Olhado. “The Big Bang theory’s been around since—”

  “Since before I was born,” said Valentine.

  “I guess,” said Olhado. “What nobody’s been able to figure out is why a Big Bang would ever happen. This way it makes a weird kind of sense. If somebody who was capable of holding the pattern of the entire universe in his head stepped Outside, then all the philotes there would sort themselves out into the largest place in the pattern that they could control. Since there’s no time there, they could take a billion years or a microsecond, all the time they needed, and then when it was sorted out, bam, there they are, the whole universe, popping out into a new Inside space. And since there’s no distance or position—no whereness—then the entire thing would begin the size of a geometric point—”

  “No size at all,” said Grego.

  “I remember my geometry,” said Valentine.

  “And immediately expand, creating space as it grew. As it grew, time would seem to slow down—or do I mean speed up?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Grego. “It all depends whether you’re Inside the new space or Outside or in some other Inspace.”

  “Anyway, the universe now seems to be constant in time while it’s expanding in space. But if you wanted to, you could just as easily see it as constant in size but changing in time. The speed of light is slowing down so that it takes longer to get from one place to another, only we can’t tell that it’s slowing down because everything else slows down exactly relative to the speed of light. You see? All a matter of perspective. For that matter, as Grego said before, the universe we live in is still, in absolute terms, exactly the size of a geometric point—when you look at it from Outside. Any growth that seems to take place on the Inside is just a matter of relative location and time.”

  “And what kills me,” said Grego, “is that this is the kind of thing that’s been going on inside Olhado’s head all these years. This picture of the universe as a dimensionless point in Outside space is the way he’s been thinking all along. Not that he’s the first to think of it. Just that he’s the one who actually believed it and saw the connection between that and the non-place where Andrew says the hive queen goes to find aiúas.”

  “As long as we’re playing metaphysical games,” said Valentine, “then where did this whole thing begin? If what we think of as reality is just a pattern that somebody brought Outside, and the universe just popped into being, then whoever it was is probably still wandering around giving off universes wherever she goes. So where did she come from? And what was there before she started doing it? And how did Outside come to exist, for that matter?”

  “That’s Inspace thinking,” said Olhado. “That’s the way you conceive of things when you still believe in space and time as absolutes. You think of everything starting and stopping, of things having origins, because that’s the way it is in the observable universe. The thing is, Outside there’re no rules like that at all. Outside was always there and always will be there. The number of philotes there is infinite, and all of them always existed. No matter how many of them you pull out and put into organized universes, there’ll be just as many left as there always were.”

  “But somebody had to start making universes.”

  “Why?” asked Olhado.

  “Because—because I—”

  “Nobody ever started. It’s always been going on. I mean, if it weren’t already going on, it couldn’t start. Outside where there aren’t any patterns, it would be impossible to conceive of a pattern. They can’t act, by definition, because they literally can’t even find themselves.”

  “But how could it always have been going on?”

  “Think of it as if this moment in time, the reality we live in at this moment, this condition of the entire universe—of all the universes—”

  “You mean now.”

  “Right. Think of it as if now were the surface of a sphere. Time is moving forward through the chaos of Outside like the surface of an expanding sphere, a balloon inflating. On the outside, chaos. On the inside, reality. Always growing—like you said, Valentine. Popping up new universes all the time.”

  “But where did this balloon come from?”

  “OK, you’ve got the balloon. The expanding sphere. Only now think of it as a sphere with an infinite radius.”

  Valentine tried to think what that would mean. “The surface would be completely flat.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you could never go all the way around it.”

  “That’s right, too. Infinitely large. Impossible even to count all the universes that exist on the reality side. And now, starting from the edge, you get on a starship and start heading inward toward the center. The farther in you go, the older everything is. All the old universes, back and back. When do you get to the first one?”

  “.You don’t,” said Valentine. “Not if you’re traveling at a finite rate.”

  “You don’t reach the center of a sphere of infinite radius, if you’re starting at the surface, because no matter how far you go, no matter how quickly, the center, the beginning, is always infinitely far away.”

  “And that’s where the universe began.”

  “I believe it,” said Olhado. “I think it’s true.”

  “So the universe works this way because it’s always worked this way,” said Valentine.

  “Reality works this way because that’s what reality is. Anything that doesn’t work this way pops back into chaos. Anything that does, comes across into reality. The dividing line is always there.”

  “What I love,” said Grego, “is the idea that after we’ve started tootling around at instantaneous speeds in our reality, what’s to stop us from finding others? Whole new universes?”

  “Or making others,” said Olhado.

  “Right,” said Grego. “As if you or I could actually hold a pattern for a whole universe in our minds.”

  “But maybe Jane could,” said Olhado. “Couldn’t she?”

  “What you’re saying,” said Valentine, “is that maybe Jane is God.”

  “She’s probably listening right now,” said Grego. “The computer’s on, even if the display is blocked. I’ll bet she’s getting a kick out of this.”

  “Maybe every universe lasts long enough to produce something like Jane,” said Valentine. “And then she goes out and creates more and—”

  “It goes on and on,” said Olhado. “Why not?”

  “But she’s an accident,” said Valentine.

  “No,” said Grego. “That’s one of the things Andrew found out today. You’ve got to talk to him. Jane was no accident. For all we know there are no accidents. For all we know, everything was all part of the pattern from the start.”

  “Everything except ourselves,” said Valentine. “Our—what’s the word for the philote that controls us?”

  “Aiúa,” said Grego. He spelled it out for her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Our will, anyway, which always existed, with whatever strengths and weaknesses it has. And that’s why, as long as we’re part of the pattern of reality, we’re free.”

  “Sounds like the ethicist is getting into the act,” said Olhado.

  “This is probably complete bobagem,” said Grego. “Jane’s going to come back laughing at us. But Nossa Senhora, it’s fun, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, for all we know, maybe that’s why the universe exists in the first place,” said Olhado. “Because going around through chaos popping out realities is a lark. Maybe God’s been having the best time.”

  “Or maybe he’s just waiting for Jane to get out there and keep him company,” said Valentine.

  It was Miro’s turn with Planter. Late—after midnight. Not that he
could sit by him and hold his hand. Inside the cleanroom, Miro had to wear a suit, not to keep contamination out, but to keep the descolada virus he carried inside himself from getting to Planter.

  If I just cracked my suit a little bit, thought Miro, I could save his life.

  In the absence of the descolada, the breakdown of Planter’s body was rapid and devastating. They all knew that the descolada had messed with the pequenino reproductive cycle, giving the pequeninos their third life as trees, but until now it hadn’t been clear how much of their daily life depended on the descolada. Whoever designed this virus was a coldhearted monster of efficiency. Without the descolada’s daily, hourly, minutely intervention, cells began to become sluggish, the production of vital energy-storing molecules stopped, and—what they feared most—the synapses of the brain fired less rapidly. Planter was rigged with tubes and electrodes, and he lay inside several scanning fields, so that from the outside Ela and her pequenino assistants could monitor every aspect of his dying. In addition, there were tissue samples every hour or so around the clock. His pain was so great that when he slept at all, the taking of tissue samples didn’t wake him. And yet through all this—the pain, the quasi-stroke that was afflicting his brain—Planter remained doggedly lucid. As if he were determined by sheer force of will to prove that even without the descolada, a pequenino could be intelligent. Planter wasn’t doing this for science, of course. He was doing it for dignity.

  The real researchers couldn’t spare time to take a shift as the inside worker, wearing the suit and just sitting there, watching him, talking to him. Only people like Miro, and Jakt’s and Valentine’s children—Syfte, Lars, Ro, Varsam—and the strange quiet woman Plikt; people who had no other urgent duties to attend to, who were patient enough to endure the waiting and young enough to handle their duties with precision—only such people were given shifts. They might have added a fellow pequenino to the shift, but all the brothers who knew enough about human technologies to do the job right were part of Ela’s or Ouanda’s teams, and had too much work to do. Of all those who spent time inside the cleanroom with him, taking tissue samples, feeding him, changing bottles, cleaning him up, only Miro had known pequeninos well enough to communicate with them. Miro could speak to him in Brothers’ Language. That had to be of some comfort to him, even if they were virtual strangers, Planter having been born after Miro left Lusitania on his thirty-year voyage.