Children of the Mind

by Orson Scott Card

  And then she realized that where the lace thinned out it was not because there was nothing there, but because the twines simply grew more delicate. There were as many of them, more perhaps, but they became a web of gossamer, so delicate that Jane's rough touch might break them; but she touched them and they did not break, and she followed the threads into a place that teemed with life, with hundreds of small lives, all of them hovering on the brink of consciousness but not quite ready for the leap into awareness. And underneath them all, warm and loving, an aiua that was in its own way strong, but not as Jane was. No, the aiua of the mothertree was strong without ambition. It was part of every life that dwelt upon her skin, inside the dark of the heart of the tree or on the outside, crawling into the light and reaching out to become awake and alive and break free and become themselves. And it was easy to break free, for the mothertree aiua expected nothing from her children, loved their independence as much as she had loved their need.

  She was copious, her sap-filled veins, her skeleton of wood, her tingling leaves that bathed in light, her roots that tapped into seas of water salted with the stuff of life. She stood still in the center of her delicate and gentle web, strong and provident, and when Jane came to her verge she looked upon her as she looked upon any lost child. She backed away and made room for her, let Jane taste of her life, let Jane share the mastery of chlorophyll and cellulose. There was room here for more than one.

  And Jane, for her part, having been invited in, did not abuse the privilege. She did not stay long in any mothertree, but visited and drank of life and shared the work of the mothertree and then moved on, tree to tree, dancing her dance along the gossamer web; and now the fathertrees did not recoil from her, for she was the messenger of the mothers, she was their voice, she shared their life and yet she was unlike them enough that she could speak, could be their consciousness, a thousand mothertrees around the world, and the growing mothertrees on distant planets, all of them found voice in Jane, and all of them rejoiced in the new, more vivid life that came to them because she was there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  A man called Olhado because of his mechanical eyes stood out in the forest with his children. They had been picnicking with pequeninos who were his children's particular friends; but then the drumming had begun, the throbbing voice of the fathertrees, and the pequeninos rose all at once in fear.

  Olhado's first thought was: Fire. For it was not that long ago that the great ancient trees that had stood here were all burned by humans, filled with rage and fear. The fire the humans brought had killed the fathertrees, except for Human and Rooter, who stood at some distance from the rest; it had killed the ancient mothertree. But now new growth had risen from the corpses of the dead, as murdered pequeninos passed into their Third Life. And somewhere in the middle of all this newgrowth forest, Olhado knew, there grew a new mothertree, no doubt still slender, but thick-trunked enough from its passionate desperate first growth that hundreds of grublike babies crawled the dark hollow of its woody womb. The forest had been murdered, but it was alive again. And among the torchbearers had been Olhado's own boy, Nimbo, too young to understand what he was doing, blindly following the demagogic rantings of his uncle Grego until it nearly killed him and when Olhado learned what he had done he was ashamed, for he knew that he had not sufficiently taught his children. That was when their visits to the forest began. It was not too late. His children would grow up knowing pequeninos so well that to harm them would be unthinkable.

  Yet there was fear in this forest again, and Olhado felt himself suddenly sick with dread. What could it be? What is the warning from the fathertrees? What invader has attacked them?

  But the fear only lasted for a few moments. Then the pequeninos turned, hearing something from the fathertrees that made them start to walk toward the heart of the forest. Olhado's children would have followed, but with a gesture he held them back. He knew that the mothertree was in the center, where the pequeninos were going, and it wasn't proper for humans to go there.

  "Look, Father," said his youngest girl. "Plower is beckoning."

  So he was. Olhado nodded then, and they followed Plower into the young forest until they came to the very place where once Nimbo had taken part in the burning of an ancient mothertree. Her charred corpse still rose into the sky, but beside it stood the new mother, slender by comparison, but still thicker than the newgrowth brothertrees. It was not her thickness that Olhado marveled at, though, nor was it the great height that she had reached in such a short time, nor the thick canopy of leaves that already spread out in shady layers over the clearing. No, it was the strange dancing light that played up and down the trunk, wherever the bark was thin, a light so white and dazzling that he could hardly look at it. Sometimes he thought that there was only one small light which raced so fast that it left the whole tree glowing before it returned to trace the path again; sometimes it seemed that it was the whole tree that was alight, throbbing with it as if it contained a volcano of life ready to erupt. The glowing reached out along the branches of the tree into the thinnest twigs; the leaves twinkled with it; and the furred shadows of the baby pequeninos crawled more rapidly along the trunk of the tree than Olhado had thought possible. It was as if a small star had come down to take residence inside the tree.

  After the dazzle of the light had lost its novelty, though, Olhado noticed something else--noticed, in fact, what the pequeninos themselves most marveled at. There were blossoms on the tree. And some of the blossoms had already blown, and behind them fruit was already growing, growing visibly.

  "I thought," said Olhado softly, "that the trees could bear no fruit."

  "They couldn't," answered Plower. "The descolada robbed them of that."

  "But what is this?" said Olhado. "Why is there light inside the tree? Why is the fruit growing?"

  "The fathertree Human says that Ender has brought his friend to us. The one called Jane. She's visiting within the mothertrees in every forest. But even he did not tell us of this fruit."

  "It smells so strong," said Olhado. "How can it ripen so fast? It smells so strong and sweet and tangy, I can almost taste it just from breathing the air of the blossoms, the scent of the ripening fruit."

  "I remember this smell," said Plower. "I have never smelled it before in my life because no tree has ever blossomed and no fruit has ever grown, but I know this smell. It smells like life to me. It smells like joy."

  "Then eat it," said Olhado. "Look--one of them is ripe already, here, within reach." Olhado lifted his hand, but then hesitated. "May I?" he asked. "May I pluck a fruit from the mothertree? Not for me to eat--for you."

  Plower seemed to nod with his whole body. "Please," he whispered.

  Olhado took hold of the glowing fruit. Did it t
remble under his hand? Or was that his own trembling?

  Olhado gripped the fruit, firm but softening, and plucked it gently from the tree. It came away so easily. He bent and gave it to Plower. Plower bowed and took it reverently, lifted it to his lips, licked it, then opened his mouth.

  Opened his mouth and bit into it. The juice of it shone on his lips; he licked them clean; he chewed; he swallowed.

  The other pequeninos watched him. He held out the fruit to them. One at a time they came to him, brothers and wives, came to him and tasted.

  And when that fruit was gone, they began to climb the bright and glowing tree, to take the fruit and share it and eat it until they could eat no more. And then they sang. Olhado and his children stayed the night to hear them sing. The people of Milagre heard the sound of it, and many of them came into the faint light of dusk, following the shining of the tree to find the place where the pequeninos, filled with the fruit that tasted like joy, sang the song of their rejoicing. And the tree in the center of them was part of the song. The aiua whose force and fire made the tree so much more alive than it had ever been before danced into the tree, along every path of the tree, a thousand times in every second.

  A thousand times in every second she danced this tree, and every other tree on every world where pequenino forests grew, and every mothertree that she visited burst with blossoms and with fruit, and pequeninos ate of it and breathed deep the scent of fruit and blossoms, and they sang. It was an old song whose meaning they had long forgotten but now they knew the meaning of it and they could sing no other. It was a song of the season of bloom and feast. They had gone so long without a harvest that they forgot what harvest was. But now they knew what the descolada had stolen from them long before. What had been lost was found again. And those who had been hungry without knowing the name of their hunger, they were fed.

  10

  "THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN

  YOUR BODY"

  "Oh, Father! Why did you turn away?

  In the hour when I triumphed over evil,

  why did you recoil from me?"

  from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

  Malu sat with Peter, Wang-mu, and Grace beside a bonfire near the beach. The canopy was gone, and so was much of the ceremony. There was kava, but, despite the ritual surrounding it, in Wang-mu's opinion they drank it now as much for the pleasure of it as for its holiness or symbolism.

  At one point Malu laughed long and loud, and Grace laughed too, so it took her a while to interpret. "He says that he cannot decide if the fact that the god was in you, Peter, makes you holy, or the fact that she left proves you to be unholy."

  Peter chuckled--for courtesy, Wang-mu knew--while Wang-mu herself did not laugh at all.

  "Oh, too bad," said Grace. "I had hoped you two might have a sense of humor."

  "We do," said Peter. "We just don't have a Samoan sense of humor."

  "Malu says the god can't stay forever where she is. She's found a new home, but it belongs to others, and their generosity won't last forever. You felt how strong Jane is, Peter--"

  "Yes," said Peter softly.

  "Well, the hosts that have taken her in--Malu calls it the forest net, like a fishing net for catching trees, but what is that?--anyway he says that they are so weak compared to Jane that whether she wills it or not, in time their bodies will all belong to her unless she finds somewhere else to be her permanent home."

  Peter nodded. "I know what he's saying. And I would have agreed, until the moment that she actually invaded me, that I would gladly give up this body and this life, which I thought I hated. But I found out, with her chasing me around, that Malu was right, I don't hate my life, I want very much to live. Of course it's not me doing the wanting, ultimately, it's Ender, but since ultimately he is me, I guess that's a quibble."

  "Ender has three bodies," said Wang-mu. "Does this mean he's giving up one of the others?"

  "I don't think he's giving up anything," said Peter. "Or I should say, I don't think I'm giving up anything. It's not a conscious choice. Ender's hold on life is angry and strong. Supposedly he was on his deathbed for a day at least before Jane was shut down."

  "Killed," said Grace.

  "Demoted maybe," said Peter stubbornly. "A dryad now instead of a god. A sylph." He winked at Wang-mu, who had no idea what he was talking about. "Even when he gives up on his own old life he just won't let go."

  "He has two more bodies than he needs," said Wang-mu, "and Jane has one fewer than she must have. It seems that the laws of commerce should apply. Two times more supply than is needed--the price should be cheap."

  When all of this was interpreted to Malu, he laughed again. "He laughs at 'cheap,' " said Grace. "He says that the only way that Ender will give up any of his bodies is to die."

  Peter nodded. "I know," he said.

  "But Ender isn't Jane," said Wang-mu. "He hasn't been living as a--a naked aiua running along the ansible web. He's a person. When people's aiuas leave their bodies, they don't go chasing around to something else."

  "And yet his--my--aiua was inside me," said Peter. "He knows the way. Ender might die and yet let me live."

  "Or all three of you might die."

  "This much I know," Malu told them, through Grace. "If the god is to be given life of her own, if she is ever to be restored to her power, Ender Wiggin has to die and give a body to the god. There's no other way."

  "Restored to her power?" asked Wang-mu. "Is that possible? I thought the whole point of the computer shutdown was to lock her out of the computer nets forever."

  Malu laughed again, and slapped his naked chest and thighs as he poured out a stream of Samoan.

  Grace translated. "How many hundreds of computers do we have here in Samoa? For months, ever since she made herself known to me, we have been copying, copying, copying. Whatever memory she wanted us to save, we have it, ready to restore it all. Maybe it's only one small part of what she used to be, but it's the most important part. If she can get back into the ansible net, she'll have what she needs to get back into the computer nets as well."

  "But they're not linking the computer nets to the ansibles," said Wang-mu.

  "That's the order sent by Congress," said Grace. "But not all orders are obeyed."

  "Then why did Jane bring us here?" Peter asked plaintively. "If Malu and you deny that you have any influence over Aimaina, and if Jane has already been in contact with you and you're already effectively in revolt against Congress--"

  "No, no, it's not like that," Grace reassured him. "We were doing what Malu asked us, but he never spoke of a computer entity, he spoke of a god, and we obeyed because we trust his wisdom and we know he sees things that we don't see. Your coming told us who Jane is."

  When Malu learned in turn what had been said, he pointed at Peter. "You! You came here to bring the god!" Then he pointed at Wang-mu. "And you came here to bring the man."

  "Whatever that means," said Peter.

  But Wang-mu thought she understood. They had survived one crisis, but this peaceful hour was only a lull. The battle would be joined again, and this time the outcome would be different. If Jane was to live, if there was to be any hope of restoring instantaneous starflight, Ender had to give at least one of his bodies to her. If Malu was right, then Ender had to die. There was a slight chance that Ender's aiua might still keep one of the three bodies, and go on living. I am here, Wang-mu said silently, to make sure that it is Peter who survives, not as the god, but as the man.

  It all depends, she realized, on whether Ender-as-Peter loves me more than Ender-as-Valentine loves Miro or Ender-as-Ender loves Novinha.

  With that thought she almost despaired. Who was she? Miro had been Ender's friend for years. Novinha was his wife. But Wang-mu--Ender had only learned of her existence mere days or at most weeks ago. What was she to him?

  But then she had another, more comforting and yet disturbing thought. Is it as important who the loved one is as it is which aspect of Ender desires him or her? Valentine
is the perfect altruist--she might love Miro most of all, yet give him up for the sake of giving starflight back to us all. And Ender--he was already losing interest in his old life. He's the weary one, he's the worn-out one. While Peter--he's the one with the ambition, the lust for growth and creation. It's not that he loves me, it's that he loves me, or rather that he wants to live, and part of life to him is me, this woman who loves him despite his supposed wickedness. Ender-as-Peter is the part of him that most needs to be loved because he least deserves it--so it is my love, because it is for Peter, that will be most precious to him.

  If anyone wins at all, I will win, Peter will win, not because of the glorious purity of our love, but because of the desperate hunger of the lovers.

  Well, the story of our lives won't be as noble or pretty, but then, we'll have a life, and that's enough.

  She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.

  Over the ansible, Olhado told his brother and sisters on the starship what had happened with Jane and the mothertrees.

  "The Hive Queen says it can't last long this way," said Olhado. "The mothertrees aren't all that strong. They'll slip, they'll lose control, and pretty soon Jane will be a forest, period. Not a talking one, either. Just some very lovely, very bright, very nurturing trees. It was beautiful to see, I promise you, but the way the Hive Queen tells it, it still sounds like death."

  "Thanks, Olhado," Miro said. "It doesn't make much difference to us either way. We're stranded here, and so we're going to get to work, now that Val isn't bouncing off the walls. The descoladores haven't found us yet--Jane got us in a higher orbit this time--but as soon as we have a workable translation of their language we'll wave at them and let them know we're here."