Xenocide (Ender's Saga #3)

by Orson Scott Card

She longed for death now, not because she hadn’t loved life, but because death was now unavoidable, and what cannot be shunned must be embraced.

Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That’s when parents know the least and care the most, so they’re more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they’re right.”

<So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in the god these humans brought with them.> <You don’t believe in God?> <The question never came up. We have always remembered how we began.> <You evolved. We were created.> <By a virus.> <By a virus that God created in order to create us.> <So you, too, are a believer.> <I understand belief.> <No—you desire belief.> <I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that’s what faith is.> <Or deliberate insanity.>

“This is why I wonder sometimes whether I’m alive or not. You living creatures, you think that because you want something very much, it has to happen. That wishing something with all your heart will make it so.”

At least Ender will realize at last that this is the natural order of things, that he might not be as responsible for the destruction of the buggers three thousand years ago as he had always thought. Xenocide must be built into the universe. No mercy, not even for the greatest players in the game.

A pure soul must never grow attached to any one thing. A pure soul must expose himself to new things every day.

The only way to retrieve a secret, once it is known, is to replace it with a lie; then the knowledge of the truth is once again your secret.”

We can’t do crimes in the service of Congress, because Congress makes the laws. But if Congress ever became evil, then in obeying them we might also be doing evil. That is a matter of conscience. However, if that happened, Congress would surely lose the mandate of heaven.

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.

<What happened to the bridge you made?> <We never thought about it. It’s probably still out there somewhere.>

I have too many secrets, thought Ender. For all these years I’ve been a speaker for the dead, uncovering secrets and helping people to live in the light of truth. Now I no longer tell anyone half of what I know, because if I told the whole truth there would be fear, hatred, brutality, murder, war.

“This is something I have tried to teach you all your life, but now you must learn it, Qing-jao. The gods are the cause of everything that happens, but they never act except in disguise. Do you hear me?”

She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.

She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there’d be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn’t understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were.

No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next.

She might be protective and possessive with her children, whom she thought of as needing her, but with the people she needed, she was the opposite. If she feared that they would be taken away from her, she withdrew from them; she stopped permitting herself to need them.

“Mother just said things to you that should have made you furious or hurt or—something, anyway—and you just sit there trying to think of ways to help her. 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.”

“Foolish man,” said Warmaker. “We are doing nothing to you but holding you still. What happens to you is whatever God desires. Didn’t Christ say, ‘I do nothing but what I’ve seen the Father do’? Didn’t Christ say, ‘I am the way. Come follow me’? Well, we are letting you do what Christ did. He went without bread for forty days in the wilderness. We give you a chance to be one-fourth as holy. If God wants us to believe in your doctrine, he’ll send angels to feed you. He’ll turn stones into bread.” “You’re making a mistake,” said Quim. “You made the mistake by coming here.” “I mean that you’re making a doctrinal mistake. You’ve got the lines down right—fasting in the wilderness, stones into bread, all of it. But didn’t you think it might be a little too self-revelatory for you to give yourself Satan’s part?”

“Any animal is willing to kill the Other,” said Ender. “But the higher beings include more and more living things within their self-story, until at last there is no Other. Until the needs of others are more important than any private desires. The highest beings of all are the ones who are willing to pay any personal cost for the good of those who need them.”

“You don’t understand how important faith is to the people of Lusitania,” said Peregrino. “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.”

No doubt it was all an elaborate pretense at normality, but in Valentine’s experience, normality was always a pretense, people acting out what they thought were their expected roles.

Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society’s norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves—either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself.

“But Qing-jao also had a mother and father who loved her. So did I. There are many different purposes in this world, many different causes of everything. Just because one cause you believed in turned out to be false doesn’t mean that there aren’t other causes that can still be trusted.”

“Let me tell you about gods,” said Wiggin. “No matter how smart or strong you are, there’s always somebody smarter or stronger, and when you run into somebody who’s stronger and smarter than anybody, you think, This is a god. This is perfection. But I can promise you that there’s somebody else somewhere else who’ll make your god look like a maggot by comparison. And somebody smarter or stronger or better in some way. So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people down. For Congress to genetically alter people to make them smarter and more creative, that could have been a godlike, generous gift. But they were scared, so they hobbled the people of Path. They wanted to stay in control. A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.”

“I think you don’t grow up until you stop worrying about other people’s purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.”

How can I tell the good people from the bad, if the bad people all have some way of convincing themselves that they’re trying to do good even though they’re doing something terrible? And the good people can believe that they’re actually very bad even though they’re doing something good? Maybe you can only do good if you think you’re bad, and if you think you’re good then you can only do bad.

“What nobody’s been able to figure out is why a Big Bang would ever happen. This way it makes a weird kind of sense. If somebody who was capable of holding the pattern of the entire universe in his head stepped Outside, then all the philotes there would sort themselves out into the largest place in the pattern that they could control. Since there’s no time there, they could take a billion years or a microsecond, all the time they needed, and then when it was sorted out, bam, there they are, the whole universe, popping out into a new Inside space.