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“Still not dead,” she said. She had greeted him with these words each time she woke during the past few days. At first the words had seemed whimsical or ironic to him, but now he knew that she spoke with disappointment. 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. That was the Path.
“The desire of the body is to act. It includes all touches, casual and intimate, and all customary movements. Thus he sees a movement out of the corner of his eye, and thinks he has seen his dead wife moving across the doorway, and he cannot be content until he has walked to the door and seen that it was not his wife. Thus he wakes up from a dream in which he heard her voice, and finds himself speaking his answer aloud as if she could hear him.
“Because the spirit is of the earth, it is that part which makes new things out of old ones. The husband longs for all the unfinished things that he and his wife were making when she died, and all the unstarted dreams of what they would have made if she had lived. Thus a man grows angry at his children for being too much like him and not enough like his dead wife. Thus a man hates the house they lived in together, because either he does not change it, so that it is as dead as his wife, or because he does change it, so that it is no longer half of her making.”
“That is the desire of the soul. Because the soul is made of light and dwells in air, it is that part which conceives and keeps ideas, especially the idea of the self. The husband longs for his whole self, which was made of the husband and wife together. Thus he never believes any of his own thoughts, because there is always a question in his mind to which his wife’s thoughts were the only possible answer. Thus the whole world seems dead to him because he cannot trust anything to keep its meaning before the onslaught of this unanswerable question.
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.”
She could listen, and so he could speak.
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.
<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.>
The philotic twining of living organisms simply is. Every philote is connected to something, and through that to something else, and through that to something else—living cells and organisms are simply two of the leels where those connections can be made” “Yes,” said Miro. “That which lives, twines.”
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner’s loss.
When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be clumsily told and you will still love the tale, if you love truth. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you cannot deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.”
We are using two different meanings of the words truth and belief. You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story’s factuality—to whether it literally depicts a real event in the real world. Your inner sense of truth responds to a story’s causality—to whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions, the way the gods work their will among human beings.”
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.”
But that is all gratuitous information, background noise to her; she knows it’s there, but it means nothing. To ask her about Han Qing-jao would be something like asking her a question about a certain molecule of water vapor in a distant cloud. The molecule is certainly there, but there’s nothing special to differentiate it from the million others in its immediate vicinity.
Nobody imagined Jane, and therefore nobody found her.
to stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make the person stop wanting to do it.
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.
Who was more cursed, the one who died, unknowing until the very moment of his death, or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?
Someone once told me that the only teacher who’s worth anything to you is your enemy.” “Then Quara and Grego must be giving each other advanced degrees,” said Ela. “Their argument is healthy,” said Ender. “It forces us to weigh every aspect of what we’re doing.”
To be free of the voice of the gods! Never to have to bow to the floor and trace the grain of the wood, never to wash her hands except when they got dirty … Yet Qing-jao couldn’t explain this to the girl. How could she understand? To Wang-mu, the godspoken were the privileged elite, infinitely wise and unapproachable. It would sound like a lie if Qing-jao explained that the burdens of the godspoken were far greater than the rewards.
Wang-mu would live her whole life and never be set a single task that would not need to be done again the next day; all of Wang-mu’s life would be spent doing work that would only be noticed or spoken of if she did it badly.
“Every day all people judge all other people. The question is whether we judge wisely.”
“Si Wang-mu, is it too hard for you to be with me?” asked Qing-jao. Wang-mu shook her head. “If it’s ever too hard, I’ll understand. You can leave me then. I was alone before. I’m not afraid to be alone again.”
If a woman must sell the doorway to her womb, as so many women had been forced to do through all of human history, surely the gods must let her receive something of value in return.
Why does he want so badly to travel faster than light?> <It’s a silly idea, isn’t it—to arrive somewhere before your image does. Like stepping through a mirror in order to try to meet yourself on the other side.>
Rooter says that physical reality is a message—and the message is a question that the philotes are continually asking God.> <What is the question?> <One word: Why?> <And how does God answer them?> <With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.
He could sense their impatience. Within minutes he could see how some, at least, were maneuvering to get away. So much to do this afternoon. See you at dinner. This whole thing was making them so uncomfortable they had to escape, take time to assimilate this version of Miro who had just returned to them, or perhaps plot how to avoid him as much as possible in the future. Grego and Quara were the worst, the most eager to get away, which stung him—once they had worshiped him. Of course he understood that this was why it was so hard for them to deal with the broken Miro that stood before them.
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And I don’t really know him at all. I don’t know anybody, and nobody knows me. We spend our lives guessing at what’s going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we “understand.” Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then.
Ender had faced worries and tensions before, many times in his years as a speaker for the dead. He had plunged into the problems of nations and families, communities and individuals, struggling to understand and then to purge and heal the diseases of the heart.
Yet she knew that it was wrong for him to seem so preoccupied. No, that wasn’t really it. He wasn’t preoccupied, he was unoccupied. He had detached himself from the world. And her job was to reconnect him. To bring him back and show him his place in the web of humanity.
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.
“What’s Eros?” asked Miro. “An asteroid near Earth,” said Valentine. “The place where Ender lost his mind.”
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. Maybe language was better.
“So you don’t even care?” “I care, of course,” said Quim. “But let’s say that there’s a longer view, in which life and death are less important matters than choosing what kind of life and what kind of death we have.”
“Remember, Wang-mu, that the world called Path is not the Path itself, but only was named so to remind us to live the true Path every day.
“People believed in the old gods on all of them. Gods are alive on every world, even here in the smallest human colony of all. They still have miracles of healing at the shrine of Os Venerados. Rooter has been telling us of a new heresy out in the hinterland somewhere. Some pequeninos who commune constantly with the Holy Ghost.”
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.
Wherever strangers meet is the fulcrum.> <Then let’s not be strangers anymore.
Novinha wasn’t speaking to Ender, and he was afraid. This wasn’t petulance—he had never seen Novinha be petulant. To Ender it seemed that her silence was not to punish him, but rather to keep from punishing him; that she was silent because if she spoke, her words would be too cruel ever to be forgiven.
She had lost too many of the people that she loved; when she felt one more of them slipping away, her response was visceral, not intellectual. Ender had come into her life as a healer, a protector. It was his job to keep her from being afraid, and now she was afraid, and she was angry at him for having failed her.
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.
“As long as one being gets others to bow to him because he has the power to destroy them and all they have and all they love, then all of us must be afraid together.”
A woman all along. No wonder I heard such sympathy in Demosthenes; she is a woman, and knows what it is to be ruled by others every waking moment. She is a woman, and so she dreams of freedom, of an hour in which there is no duty waiting to be done. No wonder there is revolution burning in her words, and yet they remain always words and never violence.
Qing-jao laughed aloud. “Now, Wang-mu, that was one of our first lessons about computers. It’s all right for the common people to imagine that computers actually decide things, but you and I know that computers are only servants, they only do what they’re told, they never actually want anything themselves.” Wang-mu almost lost control of herself, almost flew into a rage. Do you think that never wanting anything is a way that computers are similar to servants? Do you really think that we servants do only what we’re told and never want anything ourselves? Do you think that just because the gods
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they weren’t guilty of murder. Rather they were guilty of too much belief in a story they were told. Most people are able to hold most stories they’re told in abeyance, to keep a little distance between the story and their inmost heart. But for these brothers—and for you, Qingjao—the terrible lie has become the self-story, the tale that you must believe if you are to remain yourself.
“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 know how to love people. You only know how to own them. And because people will never act just like you want them to, Mother, you’ll always feel betrayed. And because eventually everybody dies, you’ll always feel cheated.
From all wise men, O Lord, protect us.
These are the people who hold a community together, who lead. Unlike the sheep and the wolves, they perform a better role than the script given them by their inner fears and desires. They act out the script of decency, of self-sacrifice, of public honor—of civilization. And in the pretense, it becomes reality. There really is civilization in human history, thought Valentine, but only because of people like these. The shepherds.
If you act as the enemy of life, then life will become your enemy.
