Children of the Mind
Page 14
The Hive Queen had already made the connection that Human intended.
said Human.
Plikt stood beside Ender's bed because she could not bear to sit, could not bear to move. He was going to die without uttering another word. She had followed him, had given up home and family to be near him, and what had he said to her? Yes, he let her be his shadow sometimes; yes, she was a silent observer of many of his conversations over the past few weeks and months. But when she tried to speak to him of things more personal, of deep memories, of what he meant by the things that he had done, he only shook his head and said--kindly, because he was kind, but firmly also because he did not wish her to misunderstand--said to her, "Plikt, I'm not a teacher anymore."
Yes you are, she wanted to say to him. Your books go on teaching even where you have never been. The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and already The Life of Human seems likely to take its place beside them. How can you say you're through with teaching, when there are other books to write, other deaths to speak? You have spoken the deaths of killers and saints, aliens, and once the death of a whole city swallowed up in a cataclysmic volcano. But in telling these stories of others, where was your story, Andrew Wiggin? How can I speak your death if you never explained it to me?
Or is this your last secret--that you never knew any more about the people whose deaths you spoke than I know about you today. You force me to invent, to guess, to wonder, to imagine--is this what you also did? Discover the most widely believed story, then find an alternate explanation that made sense to others and had meaning and the power to transform, and then tell that tale--even though it was also a fiction, and no truer than the story everyone believed? Is that what I must say as I speak the death of the Speaker for the Dead? His gift was not to discover truth, it was to invent it; he did not unfold, unknot, untwist the lives of the dead, he created them. And so I create his. His sister says he died because he tried to follow his wife with perfect loyalty, into the life of peace and seclusion that she hungered for; but the very peace of that life killed him, for his aiua was drawn into the lives of the strange children that sprang fullgrown from his mind, and his old body, despite all the years most likely left in it, was discarded because he hadn't the time to pay enough attention to keep the thing alive.
He wouldn't leave his wife or let her leave him; so he was bored to death and hurt her worse by staying with her than he ever would have done by letting her go without him.
There, is that brutal enough, Ender? He wiped out the hive queens of dozens of worlds, leaving only one survivor of that great and ancient people. He also brought her back to life. Does saving the last of your victims atone for having slain the others? He did not mean to do it, that is his defense; but dead is dead, and when the life is cut off in its prime, does the aiua say, Ah, but the child who killed me, he thought that he was playing a game, so my death counts less, it weighs less? No, Ender himself would have said, no, the death weighs the same, and I carry that weight on my shoulders. No one has more blood on their hands than I have; so I will speak with brutal truth of the lives of those who died without innocence, and show you that even these can be understood. But he was wrong, they can't be understood, none of them are understood, speaking for the dead is only effective because the dead are silent and can't correct our mistakes. Ender is dead and he can't correct my mistakes, so some of you will think that I haven't made any, you will think that I tell the truth about him but the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they tell us is true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.
Plikt stood and practiced speaking desperately, hopelessly beside Ender's coffin, though he was not yet in a coffin, he was still lying on a bed and air was pumping through a clear mask into his mo
uth and glucose solution into his veins and he was not yet dead. Just silent.
"A word," she whispered. "A word from you."
Ender's lips moved.
Plikt should have called the others at once. Novinha, who was exhausted with weeping--she was only just outside the room. And Valentine, his sister; Ela, Olhado, Grego, Quara, four of his adopted children; and many others, in and out of the receiving room, wanting a glimpse of him, a word, to touch his hand. If they could send word to other worlds, how they would mourn, the people who remembered his speakings over the three thousand years of his journeys world to world. If they could proclaim his true identity--Speaker for the Dead, author of the two--no, the three--great books of Speaking; and Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide, both selves in the same frail flesh--oh, what shock waves would spread throughout the human universe.
Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.
His lips moved.
"Peter," he whispered.
He was silent again.
What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter, for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message? What should Plikt say about this word?
She moved from beside his bed. Walked to the door, opened it. "I'm sorry," she said quietly, facing a room full of people who had only rarely heard her speak, and some of whom had never heard a word from her. "He spoke before I could call anyone else to hear. But he might speak again."
"What did he say?" said Novinha, rising to her feet.
"A name is all," said Plikt. "He said 'Peter.' "
"He calls for the abomination he brought back from space, and not for me!" said Novinha. But it was the drugs the doctors had given her, that was what spoke, that was what wept.
"I think he calls for our dead brother," said Old Valentine. "Novinha, do you want to come inside?"
"Why?" Novinha said. "He hasn't called for me, he called for him."
"He's not conscious," said Plikt.
"You see, Mother?" said Ela. "He isn't calling for anyone, he's just speaking out of some dream. But it's something, he said something, and isn't that a good sign?"
Still Novinha refused to go into the room. So it turned out to be Valentine and Plikt and four of his adopted children who stood around his bed when his eyes opened.
"Novinha," he said.
"She's grieving outside," said Valentine. "Drugged to the gills, I'm afraid."
"That's all right," said Ender. "What happened? I take it I'm sick."
"More or less," said Ela. " 'Inattentive' is the more exact description of the cause of your condition, as best we can tell."
"You mean I had some kind of accident?"
"I mean you're apparently paying too much attention to what's going on on a couple of other planets, and so your body here is on the edge of self-destruction. What I see under the microscopes are cells sluggishly trying to reconstruct breaks in their walls. You're dying by bits, all over your body."
"Sorry to be so much trouble," said Ender.
For a moment they thought this was the beginning of a conversation, the start of the process of healing. But having said this little bit, Ender closed his eyes and he was asleep again, the instruments unchanged from what they had said before he said a word.
Oh wonderful, thought Plikt. I beg him for a word, he gives it to me, and I know less now than I did before. We spent his few waking moments telling him what was going on instead of asking him the questions that we may never have the chance to ask again. Why do we all get stupider when we crowd around the brink of death?
But still she stood there, watching, waiting, as the others, in ones or twos, gave up and left the room again. Valentine came to her last of all and touched her arm. "Plikt, you can't stay here forever."
"I can stay as long as he can," she said.
Valentine looked into her eyes and must have seen something there that made her give up trying to persuade her. She left, and again Plikt was alone with the collapsing body of the man whose life was the center of her own.
Miro hardly knew whether to be glad or frightened by the change in Young Valentine since they had learned the true purpose of their search for new worlds. Where she had once been softspoken, even diffident, now she could hardly keep from interrupting Miro every time he spoke. The moment she thought she understood what he was going to say, she'd start answering--and when he pointed out that he was really saying something else, she'd answer that almost before he could finish his explanation. Miro knew that he was probably being oversensitive--he had spent a long time with speech so impaired that almost everyone interrupted him, and so he prickled at the slightest affront along those lines. And it wasn't that he thought there was any malice in it. Val was simply . . . on. Every moment she was awake--and she hardly seemed to sleep, at least Miro almost never saw her sleeping. Nor was she willing to go home between planets. "There's a deadline," she said. "They could give the signal to shut down the ansible networks any day now. We don't have time for needless rest."
Miro wanted to answer: Define "needless." He certainly needed more than he was getting, but when he said so, she merely waved him off and said, "Sleep if you want, I'll cover." And so he'd grab a nap and wake up to find that she and Jane had already eliminated three more planets--two of which, however, bore the earmarks of descolada-like trauma within the past thousand years. "Getting closer," Val would say, and then launch into interesting facts about the data until she'd interrupt herself--she was democratic about this, interrupting herself as easily as she interrupted him--to deal with the data from a new planet.
Now, after only a day of this, Miro had virtually given up speaking. Val was so focused on their work that she spoke of nothing else; and on that subject, there was little Miro needed to say, except periodically to relay some information from Jane that came through his earpiece instead of over the open computers of the ship. His near silence, though, gave him time to think. This is what I asked Ender for, he realized. But Ender couldn't do it consciously. His aiua does what it does because of Ender's deepest needs and desires, not because of his conscious decisions. So he couldn't give his attention to Val; but Val's work could become so exciting that Ender couldn't bear to concentrate on anything else.
Miro wondered: How much of this did Jane understand in advance?
And because he couldn't very well discuss it with Val, he subvocalized his questions so Jane could hear. "Did you reveal our mission to us now so that Ender would give his attention to Val? Or did you withhold it up until now so that Ender wouldn't?"
"I don't make that kind of plan," said Jane into his ear. "I have other things on my mind."
"But it's good for you, isn't it. Val's body isn't in any danger of withering away now."
"Don't be an ass, Miro. Nobody likes you when you're an ass."
"Nobody likes me anyway," he said, silently but cheerfully. "You couldn't have hidden out in her body if it was a pile of dust."
"I can't slip into it if Ender's there, utterly engrossed in what she's doing, either, can I," said Jane.
"Is he utterly engrossed?"
"Apparently so," said Jane. "His own body is falling apart. And more rapidly than Val's was."
It took Miro a moment to understand this. "You mean he's dying?"
"I mean Val is very much alive," said Jane.
"Don't you love Ender anymore?" asked Miro. "Don't you care?"
"If Ender doesn't care about his own life," said Jane, "why should I? We're both doing our best to set a ve
ry messy situation to rights. It's killing me, it's killing him. It very nearly killed you, and if we fail a whole lot of other people will be killed, too."
"You're a cold one," said Miro.
"Just a bunch of blips between the stars, that's what I am," said Jane.
"Merda de bode," said Miro. "What's this mood you're in?"
"I don't have feelings," said Jane. "I'm a computer program."
"We all know you have an aiua of your own. As much of a soul, if that's what you want to call it, as anyone else."
"People with souls can't be switched off by unplugging a few machines."
"Come on, they're going to have to shut down billions of computers and thousands of ansibles all at once in order to do you in. I'd say that's pretty impressive. One bullet would do for me. An overgrown electric fence almost polished me off."
"I suppose I just wanted to die with some kind of splashing sound or cooking smell or something," said Jane. "If I only had a heart. You probably don't know that song."
"We grew up on classic videos," said Miro. "It drowned out a lot of other unpleasantness at home. You've got the brain and the nerve. I think you've got the heart."
"What I don't have is the ruby slippers. I know there's no place like home, but I can't get there," said Jane.
"Because Ender's using her body so intensely?" asked Miro.
"I'm not as set on using Val's body as you were to have me do it," said Jane. "Peter's will do as well. Even Ender's, as long as he's not using it. I'm not actually female. That was merely my choice of identity to get close to Ender. He had problems bonding readily with men. The dilemma I have is that even if Ender would let go of one of these bodies for me to use it, I don't know how to get there. I don't know where my aiua is any more than you do. Can you put your aiua where you want it? Where is it now?"
"But the Hive Queen is trying to find you. She can do that--her people made you."
"Yes, she and her daughters and the fathertrees, they're building some kind of web, but it's never been done before--catching something already alive and leading it into a body that is already owned by someone else's aiua. It's not going to work, I'm going to die, but I'm dammed if I'm going to let those bastards who made the descolada come along after I'm dead and wipe out all the other sentient species I've known. Humans will pull the plug on me, yes, thinking I'm just a computer program run amok, but that doesn't mean I want someone else to pull the plug on humanity. Nor on the hive queens. Nor on the pequeninos. If we're going to stop them, we have to do it before I'm dead. Or at least I have to get you and Val there so you can do something without me."