The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  “What did I do?” asked Peter.

  She turned around, looking puzzled. “You did just fine!” she said. “I didn’t slap you or put my knee in your kintamas, did I? But it’s breakfast—Malu is praying and they’ve got more food than they had two nights ago, when we thought we’d die from eating it!”

  And both of Peter’s separate tracks of attention noticed that he was hungry, both severally and all at once. Neither he nor Wang-mu had eaten anything last night. For that matter, he had no memory of leaving the beach and coming to lie down with her on these mats. Somebody must have carried them. Well, that was no surprise. There wasn’t a man or woman on that beach who didn’t look like he could pick Peter up and break him like a pencil. As for Wang-mu, as he watched her run lightly toward the mountain range of Samoans gathered at water’s edge, he thought she was like a bird flying toward a flock of cattle.

  I’m not a child and never was one, not in this body, thought Peter. So I don’t know if I’m even capable of childish longings and the grand romances of adolescence. And from Ender I have this sense of comfortableness in love; it isn’t grand sweeping passions that I even expect to feel. Will the kind of love I have for you be enough, Wang-mu? To reach out to you when I’m in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you, your energy as you look up at these towering mound-people, speaking to them as an equal even though every movement of your hands, every fluting syllable of your speech cries out that you’re a child—is it enough for you that I feel these loves for you? Because it’s enough for me. And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.

  Plikt sat alone in her room, writing and writing. She had been preparing all her life for this day—to be writing the oration for Andrew Wiggin’s funeral. She would speak his death—and she had the research to do it, she could speak for a solid week and still not exhaust a tenth of what she knew about him. But she would not speak for a week. She would speak for a single hour. Less than an hour. She understood him; she loved him; she would share with others who did not know him what he was, how he loved, how history was different because this man, brilliant, imperfect, but well-meaning and filled with a love that was strong enough to inflict suffering when it was needed—how history was different because he lived, and how also ten thousand, a hundred thousand, millions of individual lives were also different, strengthened, clarified, lifted up, brightened, or at least made more consonant and truthful because of what he had said and done and written in his life.

  And would she also tell this? Would she tell how bitterly one woman grieved alone in her room, weeping and weeping, not because of grief that Ender was gone, but because of shame at finally understanding herself. For though she had loved and admired him—no, worshiped this man—nevertheless when he died what she felt was not grief at all, but relief and excitement. Relief: The waiting is over! Excitement: My hour has come!

  Of course that’s what she felt. She wasn’t such a fool as to expect herself to be of more than human moral strength. And the reason she didn’t grieve as Novinha and Valentine grieved was because a great part of their lives had just been torn away from them. What was torn away from mine? Ender gave me a few dollops of his attention, but little more. We had only a few months when he was my teacher on Trondheim; then a generation later our lives touched again for these few months here; and both times he was preoccupied, he had more important things and people to attend to than me. I was not his wife. I was not his sister. I was only his student and disciple—a man who was done with students and never wanted disciples. So of course no great part of my life was taken from me because he had only been my dream, never my companion.

  I forgive myself and yet I cannot stop the shame and grief I feel, not because Andrew Wiggin died, but because in the hour of his death I showed myself to be what I really am: utterly selfish, concerned only with my own career. I chose to be the speaker of Ender’s death. Therefore the moment of his death can only be the fulfillment of my life. What kind of vulture does that make me? What kind of parasite, a leech upon his life . . .

  And yet her fingers continued to type, sentence after sentence, despite the tears flowing down her cheeks. Off in Jakt’s house, Valentine grieved with her husband and children. Over in Olhado’s house, Grego and Olhado and Novinha had gathered to comfort each other, at the loss of the man who had been husband and father to them. They had their relationship to him, and I have mine. They have their private memories; mine will be public. I will speak, and then I will publish what I said, and what I am writing now will give new shape and meaning to the life of Ender Wiggin in the minds of every person of a hundred worlds. Ender the Xenocide; Andrew the Speaker for the Dead; Andrew the private man of loneliness and compassion; Ender the brilliant analyst who could pierce to the heart of problems and of people without being deflected by fear or ambition or . . . or mercy. The man of justice and the man of mercy, coexisting in one body. The man whose compassion let him see and love the hive queens even before he ever touched one of them with his hands; the man whose fierce justice let him destroy them all because he believed they were his enemy.

  Would Ender judge me harshly for my ugly feelings on this day? Of course he would—he would not spare me, he would know the worst that is in my heart.

  But then, having judged me, he would also love me. He would say, So what? Get up and speak my death. If we waited for perfect people to be speakers for the dead, all funerals would be conducted in silence.

  And so she wrote, and wept; and when the weeping was done, the writing went on. When the hair that he had left behind was sealed in a small box and buried in the grass near Human’s root, she would stand and speak. Her voice would raise him from the dead, make him live again in memory. And she would also be merciful; and she would also be just. That much, at least, she had learned from him.

  12

  “AM I BETRAYING ENDER?”

  “Why do people act as if war and murder were unnatural?

  What’s unnatural is to go your whole life

  without ever raising your hand in violence.”

  from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

  “We’re going about this all wrong,” said Quara.

  Miro felt the old familiar anger surge inside him. Quara had a knack for making people angry, and it didn’t help that she seemed to know that she annoyed people and relished it. Anyone else in the ship could have said exactly the same sentence and Miro would have given them a fair hearing. But Quara managed to put an edge on the words that made it sound as if she thought everyone in the world but herself was stupid. Miro loved her as a sister, but he couldn’t help it that he hated having to spend hour upon hour in her company.

  Yet, because Quara was in fact the one among them most knowledgeable about the ur-language she had discovered months before in the descolada virus, Miro did not allow his inward sigh of exasperation to become audible. Instead he swiveled in his seat to listen.

  So did the others, though Ela made less effort to hide her annoyance. Actually, she made none. “Well, Quara, why weren’t we smart enough to notice our stupidity before.”

  Quara was oblivious to Ela’s sarcasm—or chose to appear oblivious, anyway. “How can we decipher a language out of the blue? We don’t have any referents. But we do have complete records of the versions of the descolada virus. We know what it looked like before it adapted to the human metabolism. We know how it changed after each of our attempts to kill it. Some of the changes were functional—it was adapting. But some of them were clerical—it was keeping a record of what it did.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Ela with perhaps too much pleasure in correcting Quara.

  “I kn
ow it,” said Quara. “Anyway, it gives us a known context, doesn’t it? We know what that language is about, even if we haven’t been able to decode it.”

  “Well, now that you’ve said all that,” said Ela, “I still have no idea how this new wisdom will help us decode the language. I mean, isn’t that precisely what you’ve been working on for months?”

  “Ah,” said Quara. “I have. But what I haven’t been able to do is speak the ‘words’ that the descolada virus recorded and see what answers we get back.”

  “Too dangerous,” said Jane at once. “Absurdly dangerous. These people are capable of making viruses that completely destroy biospheres, and they’re callous enough to use them. And you’re proposing that we give to them precisely the weapon they used to devastate the pequeninos’ planet? Which probably contains a complete record, not only of the pequeninos’ metabolism, but of ours as well? Why not just slit our own throats and send them the blood?”

  Miro noticed that when Jane spoke, the others looked almost stunned. Part of their response might have been to the difference between Val’s diffidence and the bold attitude that Jane displayed. Part of it, too, might have been because the Jane they knew was more computerlike, less assertive. Miro, however, recognized this authoritarian style from the way she had often spoken into his ear through the jewel. In a way it was a pleasure for him to hear her again; it was also disturbing to hear it coming from the lips of someone else. Val was gone; Jane was back; it was awful; it was wonderful.

  Because Miro was not so taken aback by Jane’s attitude, he was the one to speak into the silence. “Quara’s right, Jane. We don’t have years and years to work this out—we might have only a few weeks. Or less. We need to provoke a linguistic response. Get an answer from them, analyze the difference in language between their initial statements to us and the later ones.”

  “We’re giving away too much,” said Jane.

  “No risk, no gain,” said Miro.

  “Too much risk, all dead,” said Jane snidely. But in the snideness there was a familiar lilt, a kind of sauciness that said, I’m only playing. And that came, not from Jane—Jane had never sounded like that—but from Val. It hurt to hear it; it was good to hear it. Miro’s dual responses to everything coming from Jane kept him constantly on edge. I love you, I miss you, I grieve for you, shut up; whom he was talking to seemed to change with the minutes.

  “It’s only the future of three sentient species we’re gambling with,” added Ela.

  With that they all turned to Firequencher.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m just a tourist.”

  “Come on,” said Miro. “You’re here because your people are at risk the same as ours. This is a tough decision and you have to vote. You have the most at risk, actually, because even the earliest descolada codes we have might well reveal the whole biological history of your people since the virus first came among you.”

  “Then again,” said Firequencher, “it might mean that since they already know how to destroy us, we have nothing to lose.”

  “Look,” said Miro. “We have no evidence that these people have any kind of manned starflight. All they’ve sent out so far are probes.”

  “All that we know about,” said Jane.

  “And we’ve had no evidence of anybody coming around to check out how effective the descolada had been at transforming the biosphere of Lusitania to prepare it to receive colonists from this planet. So if they do have colony ships out there, either they’re already on the way so what different does it make if we share this information, or they haven’t sent any which means that they can’t.”

  “Miro’s right,” said Quara, pouncing. Miro winced. He hated being on Quara’s side, because now everybody’s annoyance with her would rub off on him. “Either the cows are already out of the barn, so why bother shutting the door, or they can’t get the door open anyway, so why put a lock on it?”

  “What do you know about cows?” asked Ela disdainfully.

  “After all these years of living and working with you,” said Quara nastily, “I’d say I’m an expert.”

  “Girls, girls,” said Jane. “Get a grip on yourselves.”

  Again, everyone but Miro turned to her in surprise. Val wouldn’t have spoken up during a family conflict like this; nor would the Jane they knew—though of course Miro was used to her speaking up all the time.

  “We all know the risks of giving them information about us,” said Miro. “We also know that we’re making no headway and maybe we’ll be able to learn something about the way this language works after having some give and take.”

  “It’s not give and take,” said Jane. “It’s give and give. We give them information they probably can’t get any other way, information that may well tell them everything they need to know in order to create new viruses that might well circumvent all our weapons against them. But since we have no idea how that information is coded, or even where each specific datum is located, how can we interpret the answer? Besides, what if the answer is a new virus to destroy us?”

  “They’re sending us the information necessary to construct the virus,” said Quara, her voice thick with contempt, as if she thought Jane were the stupidest person who ever lived, instead of arguably the most godlike in her brilliance. “But we’re not going to build it. As long as it’s just a graphic representation on a computer screen—”

  “That’s it,” said Ela.

  “What’s it?” said Quara. It was her turn to be annoyed now, for obviously Ela was a step ahead of her on something.

  “They aren’t taking these signals and putting them up on a computer screen. We do that because we have a language written with symbols that we see with the naked eye. But they must read these broadcast signals more directly. The code comes in, and they somehow interpret it by following the instruction to make the molecule that’s described in the broadcast. Then they ‘read’ it by—what, smelling it? Swallowing it? The point is, if genetic molecules are their language, then they must somehow take them into their body as appropriately as the way we get the images of our writing from the paper into our eyes.”

  “I see,” said Jane. “You’re hypothesizing that they’re expecting us to make a molecule out of what they send us, instead of just reading it on a screen and trying to abstract it and intellectualize it.”

  “For all we know,” said Ela, “this could be how they discipline people. Or attack them. Send them a message. If they ‘listen’ they have to do it by reading the molecule into their bodies and letting it have its effect on them. So if the effect is poison or a killing disease, just hearing the message subjects them to the discipline. It’s as if all our language had to be tapped out on the back of our neck. To listen, we’d have to lie down and expose ourself to whatever tool they chose to use to send the message. If it’s a finger or a feather, well and good—but if it’s a broadaxe or a machete or a sledgehammer, too bad for us.”

  “It doesn’t even have to be fatal,” said Quara, her rivalry with Ela forgotten as she developed the idea in her own mind. “The molecules could be behavior-altering devices. To hear is literally to obey.”

  “I don’t know if you’re right in the particulars,” said Jane. “But it gives the experiment much more potential for success. And it suggests that they might not have a delivery system that can attack us directly. That changes the probable risk.”

  “And people say you can’t think well without your computer,” said Miro.

  At once he was embarrassed. He had inadvertently spoken to her as flippantly as he used to when he subvocalized so she could overhear him through the jewel. But now it sounded strangely cold of him, to tease her about having lost her computer network. He could joke that way with Jane-in-the-jewel. But Jane-in-the-flesh was a different matter. She was now a human person. With feelings that had to be worried about.

  Jane had feelings all along, thought Miro. But I didn’t think much about them because . . . because I didn’t have to. Because I d
idn’t see her. Because she wasn’t, in a sense, real to me.

  “I just meant . . .” Miro said. “I just mean, good thinking.”

  “Thank you,” said Jane. There wasn’t a trace of irony in her voice, but Miro knew the irony was there all the same, because it was inherent in the situation. Miro, this uniprocessing human, was telling this brilliant being that she had thought well—as if he were fit to judge her.

  Suddenly he was angry, not at Jane, but at himself. Why should he have to watch every word he said, just because she had not acquired this body in the normal way? She may not have been human before, but she was certainly human now, and could be talked to like a human. If she was somehow different from other human beings, so what? All human beings were different from all others, and yet to be decent and polite, wasn’t he supposed to treat everyone basically alike? Wouldn’t he say, “Do you see what I mean?” to a blind person, expecting the metaphorical use of “see” to be taken without umbrage? Well, why not say, “Good thinking,” to Jane? Just because her thought processes were unfathomably deep to a human didn’t mean that a human couldn’t use a standard expression of agreement and approval when speaking to her.

  Looking at her now, Miro could see a kind of sadness in her eyes. No doubt it came from his obvious confusion—after joking with her as he always had, suddenly he was embarrassed, suddenly he backtracked. That was why her “Thank you” had been ironic. Because she wanted him to be natural with her, and he couldn’t.

  No, he hadn’t been natural, but he certainly could.

  And what did it matter, anyway? They were here to solve the problem of the descoladores, not to work out the kinks in their personal relationships after the wholesale body swap.

  “Do I take it we have agreement?” asked Ela. “To send messages encoded with the information contained on the descolada virus?”