Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3)

by Orson Scott Card

Out of a moral wasteland like Peter’s soul came harmony and unity and peace. While Ender’s legacy, as far as humanity remembered, was murder, slaughter, xenocide.

<The most unpleasant thing about human beings is that they don’t metamorphose. Your people and mine are born as grubs, but we transform ourselves into a higher form before we reproduce. Human beings remain grubs all their lives.> <Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.> <Such changes are superficial. The nature of the organism remains the same. Humans are very proud of their changes, but every imagined transformation turns out to be a new set of excuses for behaving exactly as the individual has always behaved.> <You are too different from humans ever to understand them.> <You are too similar to humans for you ever to be able to see them clearly.

The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.’

She did not understand all of human nature, but Ender had taught her this: to stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make the person stop wanting to do it.

It was one of the quirks of her alien mind that disturbed Ender most. Ender had grown up in a culture that judged people’s maturity and social fitness by their ability to anticipate the results of their choices. In some ways the Hive Queen seemed markedly deficient in this area; for all her great wisdom and experience, she seemed as boldly and unjustifiably confident as a small child. That was one of the things that frightened Ender about dealing with her. Could she keep a promise? If she failed to keep one, would she even realize what she had done?

The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.

Don’t you ever feel like lashing out at somebody? I mean, don’t you ever lose your temper?’ ‘Ela, after you’ve inadvertently killed a couple of people with your bare hands, either you learn to control your temper or you lose your humanity.’ ‘You’ve done that?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.

<So now the killing starts.> <Amusing that your people started it, not the humans.> <Your people started it, too, when you had your wars with the humans.> <We started it, but they ended it.> <How do they manage it, these humans – beginning each time so innocently, yet always ending up with the most blood on their hands?>

<It’s a wonder that human beings ever became intelligent enough to travel between worlds.> <Not really. I’ve been thinking about that lately. Starflight they learned from you. Ender says they didn’t grasp the physics of it until your first colony fleet reached their star system.> <Should we have stayed at home for fear of teaching starflight to soft-bodied four-limbed hairless slugs?>

<If they’re so stupid and we’re so intelligent, why do we have only one hive, which thrives here because a human being carried us? And why have you been so utterly dependent on them for every technical and scientific advance you make?> <Maybe intelligence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.> <Maybe we’re the fools, for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all.>

‘You don’t understand how important faith is to the people of Lusitania,’ said Peregrine ‘And you don’t understand how devastating fear and rage can be, and how quickly religion and civilization and human decency are forgotten when a mob forms.’

Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and become instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we’ll use the moment it comes close enough.

<I’m always content. I am what I am, no matter how I got that way.> <But still not free.> <Males and females both, we still have to lose our lives in order to pass on our genes.> <Poor fool. Do you think that I, the Hive Queen, am free? Do you think that human parents, once they bear young, are ever truly free again? If life to you means independence, a completely unfettered freedom to do as you like, then none of the sentient creatures is alive. None of us is ever fully free.> <Put down roots, my friend, and then tell me how unfree you were when you were yet unrooted.>