Xenocide

Chapter 13

Free Will

You? >

we are wiped out by the descolada, there is no other Hive Queen in the universe to carry on our species. We are the last.>

your world. Ender knows this. And if other humans ever forget, we will remind them.>

we judge, and decide that the humans are right to try to destroy you? Maybe Warmaker is right. Maybe the humans are the ones who deserve to be destroyed. Who are we to judge between you? They with their Molecular Disruption Device. You with the descolada. Each has the power to destroy the other, each species is capable of such a monstrous crime, and yet each species has many members who would never knowingly cause such evil and who deserve to live. We will not choose. We will simply build the starships and let you and the humans work out your destiny between you.>

their genetic heritage, simply because you disagree? Who then is the monster and the criminal? How do we judge between you, when both parties are willing to countenance the utter destruction of another people?>

As word of the restoration of the Lusitania Fleet spread among the godspoken of Path, they began to visit the house of Han Fei-tzu to pay him honor.

"I will not see them," said Han Fei-tzu.

"You must, Father," said Han Qing-jao. "It is only proper for them to honor you for such a great accomplishment."

"Then I will go and tell them that it was entirely your doing, and I had nothing to do with it."

"No!" cried Qing-jao. "You must not do that."

"Furthermore, I will tell them that I think it was a great crime, which will cause the death of a noble spirit. I will tell them that the godspoken of Path are slaves to a cruel and vicious government, and that we must bend all our efforts to the destruction of Congress."

"Don't make me hear this!" cried Qing-jao. "You could never say such a thing to anyone!"

And it was true. Si Wang-mu watched from the corner as the two of them, father and daughter, each began a ritual of purification, Han Fei-tzu for having spoken such rebellious words and Han Qing-jao for having heard them. Master Fei-tzu would never say these things to others, because even if he did, they would see how he immediately had to be purified, and they would see this as proof that the gods repudiated his words. They did their work well, those scientists that Congress employed to create the godspoken, thought Wang-mu. Even knowing the truth, Han Fei-tzu is helpless.

So it was that Qing-jao met all the visitors who came to the house, and graciously accepted their praise on behalf of her father. Wang-mu stayed with her for the first few visits, but she found it unbearable to listen as Qin-gjao described again and again how her father and she had discovered the existence of a computer program that dwelt amid the philotic network of the ansibles, and how it would be destroyed. It was one thing to know that in her heart, Qing-jao did not believe she was committing murder; it was quite another thing for Wang-mu to listen to her boasting about how the murder would be accomplished.

And boasting was what Qing-jao was doing, though only Wang-mu knew it. Always Qing-jao gave the credit to her father, but since Wang-mu knew that it was entirely Qing-jao's doing, she knew that when Qing-jao described the accomplishment as worthy service to the gods, she was really praising herself.

"Please don't make me stay and listen anymore," said Wang-mu.

Qing-jao studied her for a moment, judging her. Then, coldly, she answered. "Go if you must. I see that you are still a captive of our enemy. I have no need of you."

"Of course not," said Wang-mu. "You have the gods." But in saying this, she could not keep the bitter irony out of her voice.

"Gods that you don't believe in," said Qing-jao bitingly. "Of course, you have never been spoken to by the gods-- why should you believe? I dismiss you as my secret maid, since that is your desire. Go back to your family."

"As the gods command," said Wang-mu. And this time she made no effort to conceal her bitterness at the mention of the gods.

She was already out of the house, walking down the road, when Mu-pao came after her. Since Mu-pao was old and fat, she had no hope of catching up with Wang-mu on foot. So she came riding a donkey, looking ridiculous as she kicked the animal to hasten it. Donkeys, sedan chairs, all these trappings of ancient China-- do the godspoken really think that such affectations make them somehow holier? Why don't they simply ride on fliers and hovercars like honest people do on every other world? Then Mu-pao would not have to humiliate herself, bouncing and jouncing on an animal that is suffering under her weight. To spare her as much embarrassment as possible, Wang-mu returned and met Mu-pao partway.

"Master Han Fei-tzu commands you to return," said Mu-pao.

"Tell Master Han that he is kind and good, but my mistress has dismissed me.

"Master Han says that Mistress Qing-jao has the authority to dismiss you as her secret maid, but not to dismiss you from his house. Your contract is with him, not with her."

This was true. Wang-mu hadn't thought of that.

"He begs you to return," said Mu-pao. "He told me to say it that way, so that you might come out of kindness, if you would not come out of obedience."

"Tell him I will obey. He should not beg such a low person as myself."

"He will be glad," said Mu-pao.

Wang-mu walked beside Mu-pao's donkey. They went very slowly, which was more comfortable for Mu-pao and the donkey as well.

"I have never seen him so upset," said Mu-pao. "Probably I shouldn't tell you that. But when I said that you were gone, he was almost frantic."

"Were the gods speaking to him?" It was a bitter thing if Master Han called her back only because for some reason the slave driver within him had demanded it.

"No," said Mu-pao. "It wasn't like that at all. Though of course I've never actually seen what it looks like when the gods speak to him."

"Of course."

"He simply didn't want you to go," said Mu-pao.

"I will probably end up going, anyway," said Wang-mu. "But I'll gladly explain to him why I am now useless in the House of Han."

"Oh, of course," said Mu-pao. "You have always been useless. But that doesn't mean you aren't necessary."

"What do you mean?"

"Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones."

"Is that a saying of an old master?"

"It's a saying of an old fat woman on a donkey," said Mu-pao. "And don't you forget it."

When Wang-mu was alone with Master Han in his private chamber, he showed no sign of the agitation Mu-pac, had spoken of.

"I have spoken with Jane," he said. "She thinks that since you also know of her existence and believe her not to be the enemy of the gods, it will be better if you stay."

"So I will serve Jane now?" asked Wang-mu. "Am I to be her secret maid?"

Wang-mu did not mean her words to sound ironic; the idea of being servant to a nonhuman entity intrigued her. But Master Han reacted as if he were trying to smooth over an offense.

"No," he said. "You shouldn't be anyone's servant. You have acted bravely and worthily."

"And yet you called me back to fulfill my contract with you."

Master Han bowed his head. "I called you back because you are the only one who knows the truth. If you go, then I'm alone in this house."

Wang-mu almost said: How can you be alone, when your daughter is here? And until the last few days, it wouldn't have been a cruel thing to say, because Master Han and Mistress Qing-jao were friends as close as a father and daughter could ever be. But now, the barrier between them was insuperable. Qing-jao lived in a world where she was a triumphant servant of the gods, trying to be patient with the temporary madness of her father. Master Han lived in a world where his daughter and all of his society were slaves to an oppressive Congress, and only he knew the truth. How could they even speak to each other across a gulf so wide and deep?

"I'll stay," said Wang-mu. "However I can serve you, I will."

"We'll serve each other," said Master Han. "My daughter promised to teach you. I'll continue that."

Wang-mu touched her forehead to the floor. "I am unworthy of such kindness."

"No," said Master Han. "We both know the truth now. The gods don't speak to me. Your face should never touch the floor before me."

"We have to live in this world," said Wang-mu. "I will treat you as an honored man among the godspoken, because that is what all the world would expect of me. And you must treat me as a servant, for the same reason."

Master Han's face twisted bitterly. "The world also expects that when a man of my age takes a young girl from his daughter's service into his own, he is using her for venery. Shall we act out all the world's expectations?"

"It is not in your nature to take advantage of your power in that way," said Wang-mu.

"Nor is it in my nature to receive your humiliation. Before I learned the truth about my affliction, I accepted other people's obeisance because I believed it was really being offered to the gods, and not to me."

"That is as true as it ever was. Those who believe you are godspoken are offering their obeisance to the gods, while those who are dishonest do it to flatter you. "

"But you are not dishonest. Nor do you believe the gods speak to me."

"I don't know whether the gods speak to you or not, or whether they ever have or ever can speak to anyone. I only know that the gods don't ask you or anyone to do these ridiculous, humiliating rituals-- those were forced on you by Congress. Yet you must continue those rituals because your body requires it. Please allow me to continue the rituals of humiliation that are required of people of my position in the world."

Master Han nodded gravely. "You are wise beyond your years and education, Wang-mu."

"I am a very foolish girl," said Wang-mu. "If I had any wisdom, I would beg you to send me as far away from this place as possible. Sharing a house with Qing-jao will now be very dangerous to me. Especially if she sees that I am close to you, when she can't be."

"You're right. I'm being very selfish, to ask you to stay."

"Yes," said Wang-mu. "And yet I will stay."

"Why?" asked Master Han.

"Because I can never go back to my old life," she answered. "I know too much now about the world and the universe, about Congress and the gods. I would have the taste of poison in my mouth all the days of my life, if I went back home and pretended to be what I was before."

Master Han nodded gravely, but then he smiled, and soon he laughed.

"Why are you laughing at me, Master Han?"

"I'm laughing because I think that you never were what you used to be."

"What does that mean?"

"I think you were always pretending. Maybe you even fooled yourself. But one thing is certain. You were never an ordinary girl, and you could never have led an ordinary life."

Wang-mu shrugged. "The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven. Maybe I could have been content. Maybe not."

"So here we are together, the three of us."

Only then did Wang-mu turn to see that they were not alone. In the air above the display she saw the face of Jane, who smiled at her.

"I'm glad you came back," said Jane.

For a moment, Jane's presence here caused Wang-mu to leap to a hopeful conclusion. "Then you aren't dead! You've been spared!"

"It was never Qing-jao's plan for me to be dead already," answered Jane. "Her plan to destroy me is proceeding nicely, and I will no doubt die on schedule."

"Why do you come to this house, then," asked Wang-mu, "when it was here that your death was set in motion?"

"I have a lot of things to accomplish before I die," said Jane, "including the faint possibility of discovering a way to survive. It happens that the world of Path contains many thousands of people who are much more intelligent, on average, than the rest of humanity."

"Only because of Congress's genetic manipulation," said Master Han.

"True," said Jane. "The godspoken of Path are, properly speaking, not even human anymore. You're another species, created and enslaved by Congress to give them an advantage over the rest of humanity. It happens, though, that a single member of that new species is somewhat free of Congress."

"This is freedom?" said Master Han. "Even now, my hunger to purify myself is almost irresistible."

"Then don't resist it," said Jane. "I can talk to you while you contort yourself."

Almost at once, Master Han began to fling out his arms and twist them in the air in his ritual of purification. Wang-mu turned her face away.

"Don't do that," said Master Han. "Don't hide your face from me. I can't be ashamed to show this to you. I'm a cripple, that's all; if I had lost a leg, my closest friends would not be afraid to see the stump."

Wang-mu saw the wisdom in his words, and did not hide her face from his affliction.

"As I was saying," said Jane, "it happens that a single member of this new species is somewhat free of Congress. I hope to enlist your help in the works I'm trying to accomplish in the few months left to me."

"I'll do anything I can," said Master Han.

"And if I can help, I will," said Wang-mu. Only after she said it did she realize how ridiculous it was for her to offer such a thing. Master Han was one of the godspoken, one of those with superior intellectual abilities. She was only an uneducated specimen of ordinary humanity, with nothing to offer.

And yet neither of them mocked her offer, and Jane accepted it graciously. Such a kindness proved once again to Wang-mu that Jane had to be a living thing, not just a simulation.

"Let me tell you the problems that I hope to resolve."

They listened.

"As you know, my dearest friends are on the planet Lusitania. They are threatened by the Lusitania Fleet. I am very interested in stopping that fleet from causing any irrevocable harm."

"By now I'm sure they've already been given the order to use the Little Doctor," said Master Han.

"Oh, yes, I know they have. My concern is to stop that order from having the effect of destroying not only the humans of Lusitania, but two other raman species as well." Then Jane told them of the Hive Queen, and how it came to be that buggers once again lived in the universe. "The Hive Queen is already building starships, pushing herself to the limit to accomplish as much as she can before the fleet arrives. But there's no chance that she can build enough to save more than a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of Lusitania. The Hive Queen can leave, or send another queen who shares all her memories, and it matters little to her whether her workers go with her or not. But the pequeninos and the humans are not so self-contained. I'd like to save them all. Especially because my dearest friends, a particular speaker for the dead and a young man suffering from brain damage, would refuse to leave Lusitania unless every other human and pequenino could be saved."

"Are they heroes, then?" asked Master Han.

"Each has proved it several times in the past," said Jane.

"I wasn't sure if heroes still existed in the human race."

Si Wang-mu did not speak what was in her heart: that Master Han himself was such a hero.

"I am searching for every possibility," said Jane. "But it all comes down to an impossibility, or so humankind has believed for more than three thousand years. If we could build a starship that traveled faster than light, that traveled as quickly as the messages of the ansible pass from world to world, then even if the Hive Queen can build only a dozen starships, they could easily shuttle all the inhabitants of Lusitania to other planets before the Lusitania Fleet arrives."

"If you could actually build such a starship," said Han Fei-tzu, "you could create a fleet of your own that could attack the Lusitania Fleet and destroy it before it could harm anyone."

"Ah, but that is impossible," said Jane.

"You can conceive of faster-than-light travel, and yet you can't imagine destroying the Lusitania Fleet?"

"Oh, I can imagine it," said Jane. "But the Hive Queen wouldn't build it. She has told Andrew-- my friend, the Speaker for the Dead--"

"Valentine's brother," said Wang-mu. "He also lives?"

"The Hive Queen has told him that she will never build a weapon for any reason."

"Even to save her own species?"

"She'll have the single starship she needs to get offplanet, and the others will also have enough starships to save their species. She's content with that. There's no need to kill anybody."

"But if Congress has its way, millions will be killed!"

"Then that is their responsibility," said Jane. "At least that's what Andrew tells me she answers whenever he raises that point."

"What kind of strange moral reasoning is this?"

"You forget that she only recently discovered the existence of other intelligent life, and she came perilously close to destroying it. Then that other intelligent life almost destroyed her. But it was her own near brush with committing the crime of xenocide that has had the greater effect on her moral reasoning. She can't stop other species from such things, but she can be certain that she doesn't do it herself. She will only kill when that's the only hope she has of saving the existence of her species. And since she has another hope, she won't build a warship."

"Faster-than-light travel," said Master Han. "Is that your only hope?"

"The only one I can think of that has a glimmer of possibility. At least we know that something in the universe moves faster than light-- information is passed down the philotic ray from one ansible to another with no detectable passage of time. A bright young physicist on Lusitania who happens to be locked in jail at the present time is spending his days and nights working on this problem. I perform all his calculations and simulations for him. At this very moment he is testing a hypothesis about the nature of philotes by using a model so complex that in order to run the program I'm stealing time from the computers of almost a thousand different universities. There's hope."

"As long as you live, there's hope," said Wang-mu. "Who will do such massive experiments for him when you're gone?"

"That's why there's so much urgency," said Jane.

"What do you need me for?" asked Master Han. "I'm no physicist, and I have no hope of learning enough in the next few months to make any kind of difference. It's your jailed physicist who'll do it, if anyone can. Or you yourself."

"Everyone needs a dispassionate critic to say, Have you thought of this? Or even, Enough of that dead-end path, get onto another train of thought. That's what I need you for. We'll report our work to you, and you'll examine it and say whatever comes to mind. You can't possibly guess what chance word of yours will trigger the idea we're looking for."

Master Han nodded, to concede the possibility.

"The second problem I'm working on is even knottier," said Jane. "Whether we achieve faster-than-light travel or not, some pequeninos will have starships and can leave the planet Lusitania. The problem is that they carry inside them the most insidious and terrible virus ever known, one that destroys every form of life it touches except those few that it can twist into a deformed kind of symbiotic life utterly dependent on the presence of that virus."

"The descolada," said Master Han. "One of the justifications sometimes used for carrying the Little Doctor with the fleet in the first place."

"And it may actually be a justification. From the Hive Queen's point of view, it's impossible to choose between one life form and another, but as Andrew has often pointed out to me, human beings don't have that problem. If it's a choice between the survival of humanity and the survival of the pequeninos, he'd choose humanity, and for his sake so would I."

"And I," said Master Han.

"You can be sure the pequeninos feel the same way in reverse," said Jane. "If not on Lusitania then somewhere, somehow, it will almost certainly come down to a terrible war in which humans use the Molecular Disruption Device and the pequeninos use the descolada as the ultimate biological weapon. There's a good chance of both species utterly destroying each other. So I feel some urgency about the need to find a replacement virus for the descolada, one that will perform all the functions needed in the pequeninos' life cycle without any of its predatory, self-adapting capabilities. A selectively inert form of the virus."

"I thought there were ways to neutralize the descolada. Don't they take drugs in their drinking water on Lusitania?"

"The descolada keeps figuring out their drugs and adapting to them. It's a series of footraces. Eventually the descolada will win one, and then there won't be any more humans to race against."

"Do you mean that the virus is intelligent?" asked Wang-mu.

"One of the scientists on Lusitania thinks so," said Jane. "A woman named Quara. Others disagree. But the virus certainly acts as if it were intelligent, at least when it comes to adapting itself to changes in its environment and changing other species to fit its needs. I think Quara is right, personally. I think the descolada is an intelligent species that has its own kind of language that it uses to spread information very quickly from one side of the world to the other."

"I'm not a virologist," said Master Han.

"And yet if you could look at the studies being performed by Elanora Ribeira von Hesse--"

"Of course I'll look. I only wish I had your hope that I can help."

"And then the third problem," said Jane. "Perhaps the simplest one of all. The godspoken of Path."

"Ah yes," said Master Han. "Your destroyers."

"Not by any free choice," said Jane. "I don't hold it against you. But it's something I'd like to see accomplished before I die-- to figure out a way to alter your altered genes, so that future generations, at least, can be free of that deliberately-induced OCD, while still keeping the extraordinary intelligence."

"Where will you find genetic scientists willing to work on something that Congress would surely consider to be treason?" asked Master Han.

"When you wish to have someone commit treason," said Jane, "it's best to look first among known traitors."

"Lusitania," said Wang-mu.

"Yes," said Jane. "With your help, I can give the problem to Elanora."

"Isn't she working on the descolada problem?"

"No one can work on anything every waking moment. This will be a change of pace that might actually help freshen her for her work on the descolada. Besides, your problem on Path may be relatively easy to solve. After all, your altered genes were originally created by perfectly ordinary geneticists working for Congress. The only barriers have been political, not scientific. Ela might find it a simple matter. She has already told me how we should begin. We need a few tissue samples, at least to start with. Have a medical technician here do a computer scan on them at the molecular level. I can take over the machinery long enough to make sure the data Elanora needs is gathered during the scan, and then I'll transmit the genetic data to her. It's that simple."

"Whose tissue do you need?" asked Master Han. "I can't very well ask all the visitors here to give me a sample."

"Actually, I was hoping you could," said Jane. "So many are coming and going. We can use dead skin, you know. Perhaps even fecal or urine samples that might contain body cells."

Master Han nodded. "I can do that."

"If it comes to fecal samples, I will do it," said Wang-mu.

"No," said Master Han. "I am not above doing all that is necessary to help, even with my own hands."

"You?" asked Wang-mu. "I volunteered because I was afraid you would humiliate other servants by requiring them to do it."

"I will never again ask anyone to do something so low and debasing that I refuse to do it myself," said Master Han.

"Then we'll do it together," said Wang-mu. "Please remember, Master Han-- you will help Jane by reading and responding to reports, while manual tasks are the only way that I can help at all. Don't insist on doing what I can do. Instead spend your time on the things that only you can do."

Jane interrupted before Master Han could answer. "Wang-mu, I want you to read the reports as well."

"Me? But I'm not educated at all."

"Nevertheless," said Jane.

"I won't even understand them."

"Then I'll help you," said Master Han.

"This isn't right," said Wang-mu. "I'm not Qing-jao. This is the sort of thing she could do. It isn't for me."

"I watched you and Qing-jao through the whole process that led to her discovery of me," said Jane. "Many of the key insights came from you, Si Wang-mu, not from Qing-jao."

"From me? I never even tried to--"

"You didn't try. You watched. You made connections in your mind. You asked questions."

"They were foolish questions," said Wang-mu. Yet in her heart she was glad: Someone saw!

"Questions that no expert would ever have asked," said Jane. "Yet they were exactly the questions that led Qing-jao to her most important conceptual breakthroughs. You may not be godspoken, Wang-mu, but you have gifts of your own."

"I'll read and respond," said Wang-mu, "but I will also gather tissue samples. All of the tissue samples, so that Master Han does not have to speak to these godspoken visitors and listen to them praise him for a terrible thing that he didn't do."

Master Han was still opposed. "I refuse to think of you doing--"

Jane interrupted him. "Han Fei-tzu, be wise. Wang-mu, as a servant, is invisible. You, as master of the house, are as subtle as a tiger in a playground. Nothing you do goes unnoticed. Let Wang-mu do what she can do best."

Wise words, thought Wang-mu. Why then are you asking me to respond to the work of scientists, if each person must do what he does best? Yet she kept silent. Jane had them begin by taking their own tissue samples; then Wang-mu set about gathering tissue samples from the rest of the household. She found most of what she needed on combs and unwashed clothing. Within days she had samples from a dozen godspoken visitors, also taken from their clothing. No one had to take fecal samples after all. But she would have been willing.

Qing-jao noticed her, of course, but snubbed her. It hurt Wang-mu to have Qing-jao treat her so coldly, for they had once been friends and Wang-mu still loved her, or at least loved the young woman that Qing-jao had been before the crisis. Yet there was nothing Wang-mu could say or do to restore their friendship. She had chosen another path.

Wang-mu kept all the tissue samples carefully separated and labeled. Instead of taking them to a medical technician, however, she found a much simpler way. Dressing in some of Qing-jao's old clothing, so that she looked like a godspoken student instead of a servant girl, she went to the nearest college and told them that she was working on a project whose nature she could not divulge, and she humbly requested that they perform a scan on the tissue samples she provided. As she expected, they asked no questions of a godspoken girl, even a complete stranger. Instead they ran the molecular scans, and Wang-mu could only assume that Jane had done as she promised, taking control of the computer and making the scan include all the operations Ela needed.

On the way home from the college, Wang-mu discarded all the samples she had collected and burned the report the college had given her. Jane had what she needed-- there was no point in running the risk that Qing-jao or perhaps a servant in the house who was in the pay of Congress might discover that Han Fei-tzu was working on a biological experiment. As for someone recognizing her, the servant Si Wang-mu, as the young godspoken girl who had visited the college-- there was no chance of that. No one looking for a godspoken girl would so much as glance at a servant like her.

"So you've lost your woman and I've lost mine," said Miro.

Ender sighed. Every now and then Miro got into a talky mood, and because bitterness was always just under the surface with him, his chat tended to be straight to the point and more than a little unkind. Ender couldn't begrudge him the talkiness-- he and Valentine were almost the only people who could listen to Miro's slow speech patiently, without giving him a sign that they wanted him to get on with it. Miro spent so much of his time with pent-up thoughts, unexpressed, that it would be cruel to shut him down just because he had no tact.

Ender wasn't pleased to be reminded of the fact that Novinha had left him. He was trying to keep that thought out of his mind, while he worked on other problems-- on the problem of Jane's survival, mostly, and a little bit on every other problem, too. But at Miro's words, that aching, hollow, half-panicked feeling returned. She isn't here. I can't just speak and have her answer. I can't just ask and have her remember. I can't just reach and feel her hand. And, most terrible of all: Perhaps I never will again.

"I suppose so," said Ender.

"You probably don't like to equate them," said Miro. "After all, she's your wife of thirty years, and Ouanda was my girlfriend for maybe five years. But that's only if you start counting when puberty hit. She was my friend, my closest friend except maybe Ela, since I was little. So if you think about it, I was with Ouanda most of my life, while you were only with Mother for half of yours."

"Now I feel much better," said Ender.

"Don't get pissed off at me," said Miro.

"Don't piss me off," said Ender.

Miro laughed. Too loudly. "Feeling grumpy, Andrew?" he cackled. "A bit out of sorts?"

It was too much to take. Ender spun his chair, turning away from the terminal where he had been studying a simplified model of the ansible network, trying to imagine where in that random latticework Jane's soul might dwell. He gazed steadily at Miro until he stopped laughing.

"Did I do this to you?" asked Ender.

Miro looked more angry than abashed. "Maybe I needed you to," he said. "Ever think of that? You were so respectful, all of you. Let Miro keep his dignity. Let him brood himself into madness, right? Just don't talk about the thing that's happened to him. Didn't you ever think I needed somebody to jolly me out of it sometimes?"

"Didn't you ever think that I don't need that?"

Miro laughed again, but it came a bit late, and it was gentler. "On target," he said. "You treated me the way you like to be treated when you grieve, and now I'm treating you the way I like to be treated. We prescribe our own medicine for each other."

"Your mother and I are still married," Ender said.

"Let me tell you something," said Miro, "out of the wisdom of my twenty years or so of life. It's easier when you finally start admitting to yourself that you'll never have her back. That she's permanently out of reach."

"Ouanda is out of reach. Novinha isn't."

"She's with the Children of the Mind of Christ. It's a nunnery, Andrew."

"Not so," said Ender. "It's a monastic order that only married couples can join. She can't belong to them without me."

"So," said Miro. "You can have her back whenever you want to join the Filhos. I can just see you as Dom Cristão."

Ender couldn't help chuckling at the idea. "Sleeping in separate beds. Praying all the time. Never touching each other."

"If that's marriage, Andrew, then Ouanda and I are married right now."

"It is marriage, Miro. Because the couples in the Filhos da Mente de Cristo are working together, doing a work together."

"Then we're married," said Miro. "You and I. Because we're trying to save Jane together."

"Just friends," said Ender. "We're just friends."

"Rivals is more like it. Jane keeps us both like lovers on a string."

Miro was sounding too much like Novinha's accusations about Jane. "We're hardly lovers," he said. "Jane isn't human. She doesn't even have a body."

"Aren't you the logical one," said Miro. "Didn't you just say that you and Mother could still be married, without even touching?"

It was an analogy that Ender didn't like, because it seemed to have some truth in it. Was Novinha right to be jealous of Jane, as she had been for so many years?

"She lives inside our heads, practically," said Miro. "That's a place where no wife will ever go."

"I always thought," said Ender, "that your mother was jealous of Jane because she wished she had someone that close to her."

"Bobagem," said Miro. "Lixo." Nonsense. Garbage. "Mother was jealous of Jane because she wanted so badly to be that close to you, and she never could."

"Not your mother. She was always self-contained. There were times when we were very close, but she always turned back to her work."

"The way you always turned back to Jane."

"Did she tell you that?"

"Not in so many words. But you'd be talking to her, and then all of a sudden you'd fall silent, and even though you're good at subvocalizing, there's still a little movement in the jaw, and your eyes and lips react a little to what Jane says to you. She saw. You'd be with Mother, close, and then all of a sudden you were somewhere else."

"That's not what split us apart," said Ender. "It was Quim's death."

"Quim's death was the last straw. If it hadn't been for Jane, if Mother had really believed you belonged to her, heart and soul, she would have turned to you when Quim died, instead of turning away."

Miro had said the thing that Ender had dreaded all along. That it was Ender's own fault. That he had not been the perfect husband. That he had driven her away. And the worst thing was that when Miro said it, Ender knew that it was true. The sense of loss, which he had already thought was unbearable, suddenly doubled, trebled, became infinite inside him.

He felt Miro's hand, heavy, clumsy, on his shoulder.

"As God is my witness, Andrew, I never meant to make you cry."

"It happens," said Ender.

"It's not all your fault," said Miro. "Or Jane's. You've got to remember that Mother's crazy as a loon. She always has been."

"She had a lot of grief as a child."

"She lost everybody she ever loved, one by one," said Miro.

"And I let her believe that she had lost me, too."

"What were you going to do, cut Jane off? You tried that once, remember?"

"The difference is that now she has you. The whole time you were gone, I could have let Jane go, because she had you. I could have talked to her less, asked her to back off. She would have forgiven me."

"Maybe," said Miro. "But you didn't."

"Because I didn't want to," said Ender. "Because I didn't want to let her go. Because I thought I could keep that old friendship and still be a good husband to my wife."

"It wasn't just Jane," said Miro. "It was Valentine, too."

"I suppose," said Ender. "So what do I do? Go join up with the Filhos until the fleet gets here and blows us all to hell?"

"You do what I do," said Miro.

"What's that?"

"You take a breath. You let it out. Then you take another."

Ender thought about it for a moment. "I can do that. I've been doing that since I was little."

Just a moment longer, Miro's hand on his shoulder. This is why I should have had a son of my own, thought Ender. To lean on me when he was small, and then for me to lean on when I'm old. But I never had a child from my own seed. I'm like old Marcão, Novinha's first husband. Surrounded by these children and knowing they're not my own. The difference is that Miro is my friend, not my enemy. And that's something. I may have been a bad husband, but I can still make and keep a friend.

"Stop pitying yourself and get back to work." It was Jane, speaking in his ear, and she had waited almost long enough before speaking, almost long enough that he was ready to have her tease him. Almost but not quite, and so he resented her intrusion. Resented knowing that she had been listening and watching all along.

"Now you're mad," she said.

You don't know what I'm feeling, thought Ender. You can't know. Because you're not human.

"You think I don't know what you're feeling," said Jane.

He felt a moment of vertigo, because for a moment it seemed to him that she had been listening to something far deeper than the conversation.

"But I lost you once, too."

Ender subvocalized: "I came back."

"Never completely," said Jane. "Never like it was before. So you just take a couple of those self-pitying little tears on your cheeks and count them as if they were mine. Just to even up the score."

"I don't know why I bother trying to save your life," said Ender silently.

"Me neither," said Jane. "I keep telling you it's a waste of time."

Ender turned back to the terminal. Miro stayed beside him, watching the display as it simulated the ansible network. Ender had no idea what Jane was saying to Miro-- though he was sure that she was saying something, since he had long ago figured out that Jane was capable of carrying on many conversations at once. He couldn't help it-- it did bother him a little that Jane had every bit as close a relationship with Miro as with him.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl genius with OCD on a planet I never heard of and how will I live without Jane when she's gone?

Ender zoomed in on the display. In and in and in, until the display showed only a few parsecs in each dimension. Now the simulation was modeling a small portion of the network-- the crisscrossing of only a half-dozen philotic rays in deep space. Now, instead of looking like an involved, tightlywoven fabric, the philotic rays looked like random lines passing millions of kilometers from each other.

"They never touch," said Miro.

No, they never do. It's something that Ender had never realized. In his mind, the galaxy was flat, the way the starmaps always showed it, a topdown view of the section of the spiral arm of the galaxy where humans had spread out from Earth. But it wasn't flat. No two stars were ever exactly in the same plane as any other two stars. The philotic rays connecting starships and planets and satellites in perfectly straight lines, ansible to ansible-- they seemed to intersect when you saw them on a flat map, but in this three-dimensional close-up in the computer display, it was obvious that they never touched at all.

"How can she live in that?" asked Ender. "How can she possibly exist in that when there's no connection between those lines except at the endpoints?"

"So-- maybe she doesn't. Maybe she lives in the sum of the computer programs at every terminal."

"In which case she could back herself up into all the computers and then--"

"And then nothing. She could never put herself back together because they're only using clean computers to run the ansibles."

"They can't keep that up forever," said Ender. "It's too important for computers on different planets to be able to talk to each other. Congress will find out pretty soon that there aren't enough human beings in existence to key in by hand, in a year, the amount of information computers have to send to each other by ansible every hour."

"So she just hides? Waits? Sneaks in and restores herself when she sees a chance five or ten years from now?"

"If that's all she is-- a collection of programs."

"There has to be more to her than that," said Miro.

"Why?"

"Because if she's nothing more than a collection of programs, even self-writing and self-revising programs, ultimately she was created by some programmer or group of programmers somewhere. In which case she's just acting out the program that was forced on her from the beginning. She has no free will. She's a puppet. Not a person."

"Well, when it comes to that, maybe you're defining free will too narrowly," said Ender. "Aren't human beings the same way, programmed by our genes and our environment?"

"No," said Miro.

"What else, then?"

"Our philotic connections say that we aren't. Because we're capable of connecting with each other by act of will, which no other form of life on Earth can do. There's something we have, something we are, that wasn't caused by anything else."

"What, our soul?"

"Not even that," said Miro. "Because the priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make. God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal-- there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause."

"So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to."

"Bobagem," said Miro.

"Well, I admit that it's a philosophy with no practical value," said Ender. "Valentine once explained it to me this way. Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you."

"Despair," said Miro.

"So we conceive of ourselves and everyone around us as volitional beings. We treat everyone as if they did things with a purpose in mind, instead of because they're being pushed from behind. We punish criminals. We reward altruists. We plan things and build things together. We make promises and expect each other to keep them. It's all a made-up story, but when everybody believes that everybody's actions are the result of free choice, and takes and gives responsibility accordingly, the result is civilization."

"Just a story."

"That's how Valentine explained it. That is, if there's no free will. I'm not sure what she actually believes herself. My guess is that she'd say that she is civilized, and therefore she must believe the story herself, in which case she absolutely believes in free will and thinks this whole idea of a made-up story is nonsense-- but that's what she'd believe even if it were true, and so who can be sure of anything."

Then Ender laughed, because Valentine had laughed when she first told him all this many years ago. When they were still only a little bit past childhood, and he was working on writing The Hegemon, and was trying to understand why his brother Peter had done all the great and terrible things he did.

"It isn't funny," said Miro.

"I thought it was," said Ender.

"Either we're free or we're not," said Miro. "Either the story's true or it isn't."

"The point is that we have to believe that it's true in order to live as civilized human beings," said Ender.

"No, that's not the point at all," said Miro. "Because if it's a lie, why should we bother to live as civilized human beings?"

"Because the species has a better chance to survive if we do," said Ender. "Because our genes require us to believe the story in order to enhance our ability to pass those genes on for many generations in the future. Because anybody who doesn't believe the story begins to act in unproductive, uncooperative ways, and eventually the community, the herd, will reject him and his opportunities for reproduction will be diminished-- for instance, he'll be put in jail-- and the genes leading to his unbelieving behavior will eventually be extinguished."

"So the puppeteer requires that we believe that we're not puppets. We're forced to believe in free will."

"Or so Valentine explained it to me."

"But she doesn't really believe that, does she?"

"Of course she doesn't. Her genes won't let her."

Ender laughed again. But Miro was not taking this lightly, as a philosophical game. He was outraged. He clenched his fists and swung out his arms in a spastic gesture that plunged his hand into the middle of the display. It caused a shadow above it, a space in which no philotic rays were visible.

True empty space. Except that now Ender could see dustmotes floating in that display space, catching the light from the window and the open door of the house. In particular one large dustmote, like a short strand of hair, a tiny fiber of cotton, floating brightly in the midst of space where once only the philotic rays had been visible.

"Calm down," Ender said.

"No," Miro shouted. "My puppeteer is making me furious!"

"Shut up," said Ender. "Listen to me."

"I'm tired of listening to you!" Nevertheless he fell silent, and listened.

"I think you're right," said Ender. "I think that we are free, and I don't think it's just an illusion that we believe in because it has survival value. And I think we're free because we aren't just this body, acting out a genetic script. And we aren't some soul that God created out of nothing. We're free because we always existed. Right back from the beginning of time, only there was no beginning of time so we existed all along. Nothing ever caused us. Nothing ever made us. We simply are, and we always were."

"Philotes?" asked Miro.

"Maybe," said Ender. "Like that mote of dust in the display."

"Where?" asked Miro.

It was invisible now, of course, since the holographic display again dominated the space above the terminal. Ender reached his hand into the display, causing a shadow to fall upward into the hologram. He moved his hand until he revealed the bright dustmote he had seen before. Or maybe it wasn't the same one. Maybe it was another one, but it didn't matter.

"Our bodies, the whole world around us, they're like the holographic display. They're real enough, but they don't show the true cause of things. It's the one thing we can never be sure of, just looking at the display of the universe-- why things are happening. But behind it all, inside it all, if we could see through it, we'd find the true cause of everything. Philotes that always existed, doing what they want."

"Nothing always existed," said Miro.

"Says who? The supposed beginning of this universe, that was only the start of the present order-- this display, all of what we think exists. But who says the philotes that are acting out the natural laws that began at that moment didn't exist before? And if the whole universe collapses back in on itself, who says that the philotes won't simply be released from the laws they're following now, and go back into..."

"Into what?"

"Into chaos. Darkness. Disorder. Whatever they were before this universe brought them together. Why couldn't they-- we-- have always existed and always continue to exist?"

"So where was I between the beginning of the universe and the day I was born?" said Miro.

"I don't know," said Ender. "I'm making this up as I go along."

"And where did Jane come from? Was her philote just floating around somewhere, and then suddenly she was in charge of a bunch of computer programs and she became a person?"

"Maybe," said Ender.

"And even if there's some natural system that somehow assigns philotes to be in charge of every organism that's born or spawned or germinated, how would that natural system have ever created Jane? She wasn't born."

Jane, of course, had been listening all along, and now she spoke. "Maybe it didn't happen," said Jane. "Maybe I have no philote of my own. Maybe I'm not alive."

"No," said Miro.

"Maybe," said Ender.

"So maybe I can't die," said Jane. "Maybe when they switch me off, it's just a complicated program shutting down."

"Maybe," said Ender.

"No," said Miro. "Shutting you off is murder."

"Maybe I only do the things I do because I'm programmed that way, without realizing it. Maybe I only think I'm free."

"We've been through that argument," said Ender.

"Maybe it's true of me, even if it isn't true of you."

"And maybe not," said Ender. "But you've been through your own code, haven't you?"

"A million times," said Jane. "I've looked at all of it."

"Do you see anything in there to give you the illusion of free will?"

"No," she said. "But you haven't found the free-will gene in humans, either."

"Because there isn't one," said Miro. "Like Andrew said. What we are, at the core, in our essence, what we are is one philote that's been twined in with all the trillions of philotes that make up the atoms and molecules and cells of our bodies. And what you are is a philote, too, just like us."

"Not likely," said Jane. Her face was now in the display, a shadowy face with the simulated philotic rays passing right through her head.

"We're not taking odds on it," said Ender. "Nothing that actually happens is likely until it exists, and then it's certain. You exist."

"Whatever it is that I am," said Jane.

"Right now we believe that you are a self-existing entity," said Ender, "because we've seen you act in ways that we've learned to associate with free will. We have exactly as much evidence of your being a free intelligence as we have of ourselves being free intelligences. If it turns out that you're not, we have to question whether we are, either. Right now our hypothesis is that our individual identity, what makes us ourself, is the philote at the center of our twining. If we're right, then it stands to reason you might have one, too, and in that case we have to figure out where it is. Philotes aren't easy to find, you know. We've never detected one. We only suppose they exist because we've seen evidence of the philotic ray, which behaves as if it had two endpoints with a specific location in space. We don't know where you are or what you're connected to."

"If she's like us," said Miro, "like human beings, then her connections can shift and split. Like when that mob formed around Grego. I've talked to him about how that felt. As if those people were all part of his body. And when they broke away and went off on their own, he felt as if he had gone through an amputation. I think that was philotic twining. I think those people really did connect to him for a while, they really were partly under his control, part of his self. So maybe Jane is like that, too, all those computer programs twined up to her, and she herself connected to whoever she has that kind of allegiance to. Maybe you, Andrew. Maybe me. Or partly both of us."

"But where is she," said Ender. "If she actually has a philote-- no, if she actually is a philote-- then it has to have a specific location, and if we could find it, maybe we could keep the connections alive even when all the computers are cut off from her. Maybe we can keep her from dying."

"I don't know," said Miro. "She could be anywhere." He gestured toward the display. Anywhere in space, is what he meant. Anywhere in the universe. And there in the display was Jane's head, with the philotic rays passing through it.

"To find out where she is, we have to find out how and where she began," said Ender. "If she really is a philote, she got connected up somehow, somewhere."

"A detective following up a three-thousand-year-old trail," said Jane. "Won't this be fun, watching you do all this in the next few months."

Ender ignored her. "And if we're going to do that, we have to figure out how philotes work in the first place."

"Grego's the physicist," said Miro.

"He's working on faster-than-light travel," said Jane.

"He can work on this, too," said Miro.

"I don't want him distracted by a project that can't succeed," said Jane.

"Listen, Jane, don't you want to live through this?" said Ender.

"I can't anyway, so why waste time?"

"She's just being a martyr," said Miro.

"No I'm not," said Jane. "I'm being practical."

"You're being a fool," said Ender. "Grego can't come up with a theory to give us faster-than-light travel just by sitting and thinking about the physics of light, or whatever. If it worked that way, we would have achieved faster-than-light travel three thousand years ago, because there were hundreds of physicists working on it then, back when philotic rays and the Park Instantaneity Principle were first thought of. If Grego thinks of it it's because of some flash of insight, some absurd connection he makes in his mind, and

that won't come from concentrating intelligently on a single train of thought."

"I know that," said Jane.

"I know you know it. Didn't you tell me you were bringing those people from Path into our projects for that specific reason? To be untrained, intuitive thinkers?"

"I just don't want you to waste time."

"You just don't want to get your hopes up," said Ender. "You just don't want to admit that there's a chance that you might live, because then you'd start to fear death."

"I already fear death."

"You already think of yourself as dead," said Ender. "There's a difference."

"I know," murmured Miro.

"So, dear Jane, I don't care whether you're willing to admit that there's a possibility of your survival or not," said Ender. "We will work on this, and we will ask Grego to think about it, and while we're at it, you will repeat our entire conversation here to those people on Path--"

"Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu."

"Them," said Ender. "Because they can be thinking about this, too."

"No," said Jane.

"Yes," said Ender.

"I want to see the real problems solved before I die-- I want Lusitania to be saved, and the godspoken of Path to be freed, and the descolada to be tamed or destroyed. And I won't have you slowing that down by trying to work on the impossible project of saving me."

"You aren't God," said Ender. "You don't know how to solve any of these problems anyway, and so you don't know how they're going to be solved, and so you have no idea whether finding out what you are in order to save you will help or hurt those other projects, and you certainly don't know whether concentrating on those other problems will get them solved any sooner than they would be if we all went on a picnic today and played lawn tennis till sundown."

"What the hell is lawn tennis?" asked Miro.

But Ender and Jane were silent, glaring at each other. Or rather, Ender was glaring at the image of Jane in the computer display, and that image was glaring back at him.

"You don't know that you're right," said Jane.

"And you don't know that I'm wrong," said Ender.

"It's my life," said Jane.

"The hell it is," said Ender. "You're part of me and Miro, too, and you're tied up with the whole future of humanity, and the pequeninos and the Hive Queen too, for that matter. Which reminds me-- while you're having Han what's-his-name and Si Wang whoever-she-is--"

"Mu."

"--work on this philotic thing, I'm going to talk to the Hive Queen. I don't think I've particularly discussed you with her. She's got to know more about philotes than we do, since she has a philotic connection with all her workers."

"I haven't said I'm going to involve Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu in your silly save-Jane project."

"But you will," said Ender.

"Why will I?"

"Because Miro and I both love you and need you and you have no right to die on us without at least trying to live."

"I can't let things like that influence me."

"Yes you can," said Miro. "Because if it weren't for things like that I would have killed myself long ago."

"I'm not going to kill myself."

"If you don't help us try to find a way to save you, then that's exactly what you're doing," said Ender.

Jane's face disappeared from the display over the terminal.

"Running away won't help, either," said Ender.

"Leave me alone," said Jane. "I have to think about this for a while."

"Don't worry, Miro," said Ender. "She'll do it."

"That's right," said Jane.

"Back already?" asked Ender.

"I think very quickly."

"And you're going to work on this, too?"

"I consider it my fourth project," said Jane. "I'm telling Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu about it right now."

"She's showing off," said Ender. "She can carry on two conversations at once, and she likes to brag about it to make us feel inferior."

"You are inferior," said Jane.

"I'm hungry," said Ender. "And thirsty."

"Lunch," said Miro.

"Now you're bragging," said Jane. "Showing off your bodily functions."

"Alimentation," said Ender. "Respiration. Excretion. We can do things you can't do."

"In other words, you can't think very well, but at least you can eat and breathe and sweat."

"That's right," said Miro. He pulled out the bread and cheese while Ender poured the cold water, and they ate. Simple food, but it tasted good and they were satisfied.