The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  She had a husband, a man of astonishing appetite and heartiness who laughed whenever he wasn’t chewing or talking, and sometimes even then. He seemed to get a kick out of telling these papalagi visitors what different names meant. “My wife’s name, now, it really means, ‘Protector of Drunken People.’ ”

  “It does not,” said his son. “It means ‘One Who Puts Things in Proper Order.’ ”

  “For drinking!” cried the father.

  “The last name has nothing to do with the first name.” The son was getting annoyed now. “Not everything has a deep meaning.”

  “Children are so easily embarrassed,” said the father. “Ashamed. Must put the best face on everything. The holy island, its name is really ‘Ata Atua, which means, ‘Laugh, God!’”

  “Then it would be pronounced ‘Atatua instead of Atatua,” the son corrected again. “Shadow of the God, that’s what the name really means, if it means anything besides just the holy island.”

  “My son is a literalist,” said the father. “Everything so serious. Can’t hear a joke when God shouts it in his ear.”

  “It’s you always shouting jokes in my ear, Father,” said the son with a smile. “How could I possibly hear the jokes of the God?”

  This was the only time the father didn’t laugh. “My son has a dead ear for humor. He thought that was a joke.”

  Wang-mu looked at Peter, who was smiling as if he understood what was so funny with these people all the time. She wondered if he had even noticed that no one had introduced these males, except by their relationship to Grace Drinker. Had they no names?

  Never mind, the food is good, and even if you don’t get Samoan humor, their laughter and good spirits were so contagious that it was impossible not to feel happy and at ease in their company.

  “Do you think we have enough?” asked the father, when his daughter brought in the last fish, a large pink-fleshed sea creature garnished with something that glistened—Wang-mu’s first thought was a sugar glaze, but who would do that to a fish?

  At once his children answered him, as if it were a ritual in the family: “Ua lava!”

  The name of a philosophy? Or just Samoan slang for “enough already”? Or both at once?

  Only when the last fish was half eaten did Grace Drinker herself come in, making no apology for not having spoken to them when she passed them more than two hours before. A breeze off the sea was cooling down the open-walled room, and, outside, light rain fell in fits and starts as the sun kept trying and failing to sink into the water to the west. Grace sat at the low table, directly between Peter and Wang-mu, who had thought they were sitting next to each other with no room for another person, especially not a person of such ample surface area as Grace. But somehow there was room, if not when she began to sit, then certainly by the time she finished the process, and once her greetings were done, she managed what the family had not—she polished off the last fish and ended up licking her fingers and laughing just as maniacally as her husband at all the jokes he told.

  And then, suddenly, Grace leaned over to Wang-mu and said, quite seriously, “All right, Chinese girl, what’s your scam?”

  “Scam?” asked Wang-mu.

  “You mean I have to get the confession from the white boy? They train these boys to lie, you know. If you’re white they don’t let you grow up to adulthood if you haven’t mastered the art of pretending to say one thing while actually intending to do another.”

  Peter was appalled.

  Suddenly the whole family erupted in laughter. “Bad hospitality!” cried Grace’s husband. “Did you see their faces? They thought she meant it!”

  “But I do mean it,” said Grace. “You both intend to lie to me. Arrived on a starship yesterday? From Moskva?” Suddenly she burst into what sounded like pretty convincing Russian, perhaps of the dialect spoken on Moskva.

  Wang-mu had no idea how to respond. But she didn’t have to. Peter was the one with Jane in his ear, and he immediately answered her, “I hope to learn Samoan while I’m assigned here on Pacifica. I won’t accomplish that by babbling in Russian, however you might try to goad me with cruel references to my countrymen’s amorous proclivities and lack of pulchritude.”

  Grace laughed. “You see, Chinese girl?” she said. “Lie lie lie. And so lofty-sounding as he does it. Of course he has that jewel in his ear to help him. Tell the truth, neither one of you speaks a lick of Russian.”

  Peter looked grim and vaguely sick. Wang-mu put him out of his misery—though at the risk of infuriating him. “Of course it’s a lie,” said Wang-mu. “The truth is simply too unbelievable.”

  “But the truth is the only thing worth believing, isn’t it?” asked Grace’s son.

  “If you can know it,” said Wang-mu. “But if you won’t believe the truth, someone has to help you come up with plausible lies, don’t they?”

  “I can make up my own,” said Grace. “Day before yesterday a white boy and a Chinese girl visited my friend Aimaina Hikari on a world at least twenty years’ voyage away. They told him things that disturbed his entire equilibrium so he could hardly function. Today a white boy and a Chinese girl, telling different lies from the ones told by his pair, of course, but nevertheless lying their lips off, these two come to me wanting to get my help or permission or advice about seeing Malu—”

  “Malu means ‘being calm,’ ” added Grace’s husband cheerfully.

  “Are you still awake?” asked Grace. “Weren’t you hungry? Didn’t you eat?”

  “I’m full but fascinated,” answered her husband. “Go on, expose them!”

  “I want to know who you are and how you got here,” said Grace.

  “That would be very hard to explain,” said Peter.

  “We’ve got minutes and minutes,” said Grace. “Millions of them, really. You’re the ones who seem to have only a few. So much hurry that you jump the gulf from star to star overnight. It strains credulity, of course, since lightspeed is supposed to be an insuperable barrier, but then, not believing you’re the same people my friend saw on the planet Divine Wind also strains credulity, so there we are. Supposing that you really can travel faster than light, what does that tell us about where you’re from? Aimaina takes it for granted that you were sent to him by the gods, more specifically by his ancestors, and he may be right, it’s in the nature of gods to be unpredictable and suddenly do things they’ve never done before. Myself, though, I find that rational explanations always work out better, especially in papers I hope to get published. So the rational explanation is that you come from a real world, not from some heavenly never-never land. And since you can hop from world to world in a moment or a day, you could come from anywhere. But my family and I think you come from Lusitania.”

  “Well, I don’t,” said Wang-mu.

  “And I’m originally from Earth,” said Peter. “If I’m from anywhere.”

  “Aimaina thinks you come from Outside,” said Grace, and for a moment Wang-mu thought the woman must have figured out how Peter came into existence. But then she realized that Grace’s words had a theological meaning, not a literal one. “The land of the gods. But Malu said he’s never seen you there, or if he did he didn’t know it was you. So that leaves me right back where I started. You’re lying about everything, so what good does it do to ask you questions?”

  “I told you the truth,” said Wang-mu. “I come from Path. And Peter’s origins, so far as they can be traced to any planet, are on Earth. But the vehicle we came in—that originated on Lusitania.”

  Peter’s face went white. She knew he was thinking, Why not just noose ourselves up and hand them the loose ends of the rope? But Wang-mu had to use her own judgment, and in her judgment they were in no danger from Grace Drinker or her family. Indeed, if she meant to turn them in to the authorities, wouldn’t she already have done so?

  Grace looked Wang-mu in the eyes and said nothing for a long while. Then: “Good fish, isn’t it?”

  “I wondered what the glaze was. Is there
sugar in it?”

  “Honey and a couple of herbs and actually some pig fat. I hope you aren’t some rare combination of Chinese and Jew or Muslim, because if you are you’re now ritually unclean and I would feel really bad about that, it’s so much trouble getting purified again, or so I’m told, it certainly is in our culture.”

  Peter, heartened now by Grace’s lack of concern with their miraculous spaceship, tried to get them back on the subject. “So you’ll let us see Malu?”

  “Malu decides who sees Malu, and he says you’re the ones who’ll decide, but that’s just him being enigmatic.”

  “Gnomic,” said Wang-mu. Peter winced.

  “Not really, not in the sense of being obscure. Malu means to be perfectly clear and for him spiritual things aren’t mystical at all, they’re just a part of life. I myself have never actually walked with the dead or heard the heroes sing their own songs or had a vision of the creation, but I have no doubt that Malu has.”

  “I thought you were a scholar,” said Peter.

  “If you want to talk to the scholar Grace Drinker,” she said, “read my papers and take a class. I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

  “We do,” said Wang-mu quickly. “Peter’s in a hurry. We have several deadlines.”

  “The Lusitania Fleet, now, I imagine that’s one of them. But not quite so urgent as another. The computer shut-down that’s been ordered.”

  Peter stiffened. “The order has been given?”

  “Oh, it was given weeks ago,” said Grace, looking puzzled. Then: “Oh, you poor dear, I don’t mean the actual go-ahead. I mean the order telling us how to prepare. You surely knew about that one.”

  Peter nodded and relaxed, glum again.

  “I think you want to talk to Malu before the ansible connections are shut down. Though why would that matter?” she said, thinking aloud. “After all, if you can travel faster than light, you could simply go and deliver your message yourself. Unless—”

  Her son offered a suggestion: “They have to deliver their message to a lot of different worlds.”

  “Or a lot of different gods!” cried his father, who then laughed uproariously at what certainly seemed to Wang-mu to be a feeble joke.

  “Or,” said the daughter, who was now lying down beside the table, occasionally belching as she let the enormous dinner digest. “Or, they need the ansible connections in order to do their fast travel trick.”

  “Or,” said Grace, looking at Peter, who had instinctively moved his hand to touch the jewel in his ear, “you’re connected to the very virus that we’re shutting down all the computers in order to eliminate, and that has something to do with your faster-than-light travel.”

  “It’s not a virus,” said Wang-mu. “It’s a person. A living entity. And you’re going to help Congress kill her, even though she’s the only one of her kind and she’s never harmed anybody.”

  “It makes them nervous when something—or, if you prefer, somebody—makes their fleet disappear.”

  “It’s still there,” said Wang-mu.

  “Let’s not fight,” said Grace. “Let’s just say that now that I’ve found you willing to tell the truth, perhaps it will be worthwhile for Malu to take the time to let you hear it.”

  “He has the truth?” asked Peter.

  “No,” said, Grace, “but he knows where it’s kept and he can get a glimpse now and then and tell us what he saw. I think that’s still pretty good.”

  “And we can see him?”

  “You’d have to spend a week purifying yourselves before you can set foot on Atatua—”

  “Impure feet tickling the Gods!” cried her husband, laughing uproariously. “That’s why they call it the Island of the Laughing God!”

  Peter shifted uncomfortably.

  “Don’t you like my husband’s jokes?” asked Grace.

  “No, I think—I mean, they’re simply not—I don’t get them, that’s all.”

  “Well, that’s because they’re not very funny,” said Grace. “But my husband is cheerfully determined to keep laughing through all this so he doesn’t get angry at you and kill you with his bare hands.”

  Wang-mu gasped, for she knew at once that this was true; without realizing it, she had been aware all along of the rage seething under the huge man’s laughter, and when she looked at his calloused, massive hands, she realized that he could surely tear her apart without even breaking into a sweat.

  “Why would you threaten us with death?” asked Peter, acting more belligerent than Wang-mu wished.

  “The opposite!” said Grace. “I tell you that my husband is determined not to let rage at your audacity and blasphemy control his behavior. To try to visit Atatua without even taking the trouble to learn that letting you set foot there, uncleansed and uninvited, would shame us and filthy us as a people for a hundred generations—I think he’s doing rather well not to have taken a blood oath against you.”

  “We didn’t know,” said Wang-mu.

  “He knew,” said Grace. “Because he’s got the all-hearing ear.”

  Peter blushed. “I hear what she says to me,” he said, “but I can’t hear what she chooses not to say.”

  “So . . . you were being led. And Aimaina is right, you do serve a higher being. Voluntarily? Or are you being coerced?”

  “That’s a stupid question, Mama,” said her daughter, belching again. “If they are coerced, how could they possibly tell you?”

  “People can say as much by what they don’t say,” answered Grace, “which you’d know if you’d sit up and look at their eloquent faces, these lying visitors from other planets.”

  “She’s not a higher being,” said Wang-mu. “Not like you mean it. Not a god. Though she does have a lot of control and she knows a lot of things. But she’s not omnipotent or anything, and she doesn’t know everything, and sometimes she’s even wrong, and I’m not sure she’s always good, either, so we can’t really call her a god because she’s not perfect.”

  Grace shook her head. “I wasn’t talking about some Platonic god, some ethereal perfection that can never be understood, only apprehended. Not some Nicene paradoxical being whose existence is perpetually contradicted by his nonexistence. Your higher being, this jewel-friend your partner wears like a parasite—except who is sucking life from whom, eh?—she could well be a god in the sense that we Samoans use the word. You might be her hero servants. You might be her incarnation, for all I know.”

  “But you’re a scholar,” said Wang-mu. “Like my teacher Han Fei-tzu, who discovered that what we used to call gods were really just genetically induced obsessions that we interpreted in such a way as to maintain our obedience to—”

  “Just because your gods don’t exist doesn’t mean mine don’t,” said Grace.

  “She must have tromped through acres of dead gods just to get here!” cried Grace’s husband, laughing uproariously. Only now that Wang-mu knew what his laughter really meant, his laugh filled her with fear.

  Grace reached out and laid a huge, heavy arm across her slight shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “My husband is a civilized man and he’s never killed anybody.”

  “Not for lack of trying!” he bellowed. “No, that was a joke!” He almost wept with laughter.

  “You can’t go see Malu,” said Grace, “because we would have to purify you and I don’t think you’re ready to make the promises you’d have to make—and I especially don’t believe you’re ready to make them and actually mean what you say. And those are promises that must be kept. So Malu is coming here. He’s being rowed to this island right now—no motors for him, so I want you to know exactly how many people are sweating for hours and hours just so you can have your chat with him. I just want to tell you this—you are being given an extraordinary honor, and I urge you not to look down your noses at him and listen to him with some sort of academic or scientific superciliousness. I’ve met a lot of famous people, some of them even rather smart, but this is the wisest man you’ll ever know, and if y
ou find yourself getting bored just keep this in mind: Malu isn’t stupid enough to think you can isolate facts from their context and have them still be true. So he always puts the things he says in their full context, and if that means you’ll have to listen to a whole history of the human race from beginning to now before he says anything you think is pertinent, well, I suggest you just shut up and listen, because most of the time the best stuff he says is accidental and irrelevant and you’re damn lucky if you have brains enough to notice what it is. Have I made myself clear?”

  Wang-mu wished with all her heart that she had eaten less. She felt quite nauseated with dread right now, and if she did throw up, she was sure it would take half an hour just to get it all back out of her.

  Peter, though, simply nodded calmly. “We didn’t understand, Grace, even though my partner read some of your writings. We thought we had come to speak to a philosopher, like Aimaina, or a scholar, like you. But now I see that we’ve come to listen to a man of wisdom whose experience reaches into realms that we have never seen or even dreamed of seeing, and we will listen silently until he asks us to ask him questions, and we’ll trust him to know better than we know ourselves what it is we need to hear.”

  Wang-mu recognized complete surrender when she saw it, and she was grateful to see that everyone at the table was nodding happily and no one felt obliged to tell a joke.

  “We’re also grateful that the honorable one has sacrificed so much, as have so many others, to come personally to us and bless us with wisdom that we do not deserve to receive.”

  To Wang-mu’s horror, Grace laughed out loud at her, instead of nodding respectfully.

  “Overkill,” Peter murmured.

  “Oh, don’t criticize her,” said Grace. “She’s Chinese. From Path, right? And I’ll bet you used to be a servant. How could you possibly have learned the difference between respect and obsequiousness? Masters never are content with mere respect from their servants.”