Xenocide (Ender's Saga #3)

by Orson Scott Card

“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.”

“The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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?

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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 that actually happens is likely until it exists, and then it’s certain.

<You’ll soon learn that there are no strange stars, no alien skies.> <No?> <Only skies and stars, in all their varieties. Each one with its own flavor, and all flavors good.>

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. Food only looks good to a hungry man.

Philosophy was as far above her as the sky was above the earth. “But the sky only seems to be far away from you,” said Master Han, when she told him this. “Actually it is all around you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out, even when you labor with your hands in the mud. That is true philosophy.”

Calling them pig-men—is that how you convince yourself, my mistress, that helping Congress won’t lead to xenocide? If you call them by an animal name, does that mean that it’s all right to slaughter them?

You are less than nothing to me. You are a bug floating in my waterglass. You defile the whole glass, not just the place where you float. I wake up in pain, knowing you are in this house.” Then I’m hardly “nothing” to you, am I? said Wang-mu silently. It sounds to me as if I’m very important to you indeed. You may be very brilliant, Qing-jao, but you do not understand yourself any better than anybody else does.

your people had been artificially enhanced.” “And shackled, all at once,”

No one likes to find out that the story he always believed about his own identity is false.

Just because your former understanding of the purpose of your life is contradicted doesn’t mean that you have to decide there is no purpose.”

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.”

“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.

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.”

“We always think there are great causes for these wars, that they’re struggles between good and evil. And now all the time they are nothing but planetary regulation.”

“We human beings are no different. It may not be a virus, but we still spend most of our time acting out our genetic destiny. Take the differences between males and females. Males naturally tend toward a broadcast strategy of reproduction. Since males make an almost infinite supply of sperm and it costs them nothing to deploy it—” “Not nothing,” said Ender. “Nothing,” said Valentine, “just to deploy it. Their most sensible reproductive strategy is to deposit it in every available female—and to make special efforts to deposit it in the healthiest females, the ones most likely to bring their offspring to adulthood. A male does best, reproductively, if he wanders and copulates as widely as possible.” “I’ve done the wandering,” said Ender. “Somehow I missed out on the copulating.” “I’m speaking of overall trends,” said Valentine. “There are always strange individuals who don’t follow the norms. The female strategy is just the opposite, Planter. Instead of millions and millions of sperm, they only have one egg a month, and each child represents an enormous investment of effort. So females need stability. They need to be sure there’ll always be plenty of food. We also spend large amounts of time relatively helpless, unable to find or gather food. Far from being wanderers, we females need to establish and stay. If we can’t get that, then our next best strategy is to mate with the strongest and healthiest possible males. But best of all is to get a strong healthy male who’ll stay ...

“What you’ll be is dead,” said Ender. “But free first,” said Planter. “And the first of my people to be free.”

Maybe they all had good purposes in mind for the terrible things they did.

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.

It was as if she felt herself pressed against a wall, but it was a wall that she made herself, and if she could only find a way to move it aside—the way she could move her hands away from her face whenever she wanted—then she could easily push through to the truth.

He was describing good parents. He wasn’t telling her what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was. To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the good things that you have. And to spare them the bad things if you can. That was goodness. What were the gods, then? They would want everyone else to know and have and be all good things. They would teach and share and train, but never force.

what their stories mean. They transform things so that the same memory can mean a thousand different things. Even from their dreams, sometimes they make up out of that randomness something that illuminates everything.

Now we discover that there are so many ways of knowing the same things that we’ll never find them all.

“Sometimes I thought I was the only one who understood, even though half the time I didn’t know what it was that I was understanding. I withdrew and watched, and because I didn’t have any personal ego on the line in the family quarrels, I could see more clearly than any of them.

“I’m good at seeing things. We passive, unbelonging observers always see better.

From the moment he walked in the door, it was obvious that he saw and understood everything, just the way I saw it. It was exhilarating. Because of course I had never actually believed my own conclusions about my family. I never trusted my own judgments. Obviously no one saw things the way I did, so I must be wrong.

It’s how he treated us all differently, and yet remained himself.

You don’t protect the truth by keeping other people from knowing it.”

It had always bothered Ender, made him feel uneasy to know that there was only one queen. What if something happened to her? But then, it made the hive queen uncomfortable to think of human beings having only a bare handful of children—what if something happened to them? Both species practiced a combination of nurturance and redundancy to protect their genetic heritage. Humans had a redundancy of parents, and then nurtured the few offspring. The hive queen had a redundancy of offspring, who then nurtured the parent. Each species had found its own balance of strategy.

<We never thought about how. We only did it. Found a hot bright source. A network, but very strange, with shifting membership. And at the center of it, not something like us, but just another—common one. You. But with such intensity. Focused into the network, toward the other humans. Focused inward on your computer game. And focused outward, beyond all, on us. Searching for us.> “I wasn’t searching for you. I was studying you.” Watching every vid they had at the Battle School, trying to understand the way the bugger mind worked. “I was imagining you.” <So we say. Searching for us. Imagining us. That’s how we search for each other. So you were calling us.>

The queen never stops reaching. Calling.> “So then you find her?” <We know where she is. The queen-body. The worker-caller. The memory-holder. > “Then what are you searching for?” <The us-thing. The binder. The meaning-maker.>

“Where do you find it?” <It hears us calling and comes.> “But how do you call?” <As you called us. We imagine the thing which it must become. The pattern of the hive. The queen and the workers and the binding together. Then one comes who understands the pattern and can hold it. We give the queen-body to it.>

“We’re talking about a passage from another kind of space. A place where philotes already are.” <All in the same non-place. No place-ness in that place. No where-being. All hungry for whereness. All thirsty for pattern. All lonely for selfness.>

<We couldn’t find the pattern in you. We were trying to make a pattern between you and the other humans, only you kept shifting and changing, we couldn’t make sense of it. And you couldn’t make sense of us, either, so that reaching of yours couldn’t make a pattern, either. So we took the third pattern. You reaching into the machine. You yearning so much for it. Like the life-yearning of the new queen-body. You were binding yourself to the program in the computer. It showed you images. We could find the images in the computer and we could find them in your mind. We could match them while you watched. The computer was very complicated and you were even more complicated but it was a pattern that held still. You were moving together and while you were together you possessed each other, you had the same vision. And when you imagined something and did it, the computer made something out of your imagining and imagined something back. Very primitive imagining from the computer. It wasn’t a self. But you were making it a self by the life-yearning. The reaching-out you were doing.>

She must have been a very strong and powerful—philote, if your word is the right name—to be able to change her own pattern and still remember to be herself.

Is all our work in vain, after all? thought Valentine. I, the historian, the philosopher Demosthenes, trying to teach people that they need not fear all aliens, but can see them as raman. And Ender, with his empathic books the Hive Queen, the Hegemon, the Life of Human—what force did they really have in the world, compared with the instinctive terror at the sight of these dangerous oversized insects? Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming 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 think he’s on to something—he was shouting and dancing a minute ago. We had a sewing-machine experience.” “Ah,” said Valentine. “It’s an old science-class story,” said Olhado. “People who wanted to invent sewing machines kept failing because they always tried to imitate the motions of hand-sewing, pushing the needle through the fabric and drawing the thread along behind through the eye at the back end of the needle. It seemed obvious. Until somebody first thought of putting the eye in the nose of the needle and using two threads instead of just one. A completely unnatural, indirect approach that when it comes right down to it, I still don’t understand.”

An aiúa.” “Sanskrit for life,” Olhado explained to Valentine. “The word for the philote who controls a pattern that holds other philotes in order. The word for entities—like planets and atoms and animals and stars—that have an intrinsic, enduring form.”

<Does he know this?> <We doubt it.> <Will you tell him?> <Not until he asks.> <When do you think that will be?> <When he already knows the answer.>

He knew that she was strong enough to hold the moral contradictions of her own actions, and still remain sane. Her ambivalence toward her own actions would probably mellow her, make her less certain from moment to moment that her judgment was absolutely correct, and that all who disagreed with her were absolutely wrong. If anything, at the end of this she would emerge more whole and compassionate and, yes, decent than she had been before in her hotheaded youth.