Xenocide (Ender's Saga #3)

by Orson Scott Card

<I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act.> <You who speak languages, you are such liars.>

Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremacy. They have conflict between mates, not because their communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all.

“If the old soldier can still stand up and salute, I say let him march in the parade.”

How very Scandinavian.

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.”

Jakt was abashed. It was one of the best things about him, that when he realized he was wrong he backed down at once.

The only way it is through.

Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner’s loss.

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

One can hardly believe that—a mammaloid species that turns into a tree when it dies? Beautiful as poetry. Ludicrous as science.”

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.”

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.

Three full minutes with burning eyes and wheezing lungs, while waving his arms and squatting and standing: our ritual of obeisance to the almighty descolada. Thus we humiliate ourselves before the undisputed master of life on this planet.

“It’s not ironic,” said Ender, “it’s the way the world works. Someone once told me that the only teacher who’s worth anything to you is your enemy.”

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.

Maybe we’re the varelse. Maybe xenocide is built into the human psyche as into no other species. Maybe the best thing that could happen for the moral good of the universe is for the descolada to get loose, to spread throughout the human universe and break us down to nothing. Maybe the descolada is God’s answer to our unworthiness.

“I mean,” said Quim mildly, “that while you certainly want your body back, it may be that God, in his great wisdom, knows that for you to become the best man you can be, you need to spend a certain amount of time as a cripple.” “How much time?” Miro demanded. “Certainly no longer than the rest of your life.”

Valentine explained something about some stories being true and others being truthful. I didn’t understand any of it.> <Why don’t they just remember their stories accurately in the first place? Then they wouldn’t have to keep lying to each other.

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.

“Child of my name,” said the face in the computer, “let me tell you the story of the Jade of Master Ho.” “I know the story,” said Father. “If you understood it, I wouldn’t have to tell it to you.”

“If you loved him you wouldn’t have tried to stop him from going,” said Miro. His voice wasn’t loud, and his speech was thick and hard to understand. They listened, all of them, in silence. Even Mother, in anguished silence, for his words were terrible. “But you don’t love him. 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. But you’re the cheat, Mother. You’re the one who uses our love for you to try to control us.”

From all wise men, O Lord, protect us.

All I asked you to do was take responsibility for my family.

Because you refused to.

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.”

“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.”

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

“You do what I do,” said Miro. “What’s that?” “You take a breath. You let it out. Then you take another.”

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.

“Hush,” said Jane. “Qing-jao never asked the question. She used it as a reason not to study the Lusitanian documents. Only you really asked the question, and just because Andrew Wiggin understands your own question better than you do doesn’t mean it isn’t still yours.”

“I don’t care what her customs are,” said Wiggin. “The only reason for such bowing is to humiliate one person before another, and I won’t have her bow that way to me. She’s done nothing to be ashamed of. She’s opened up a way of looking at the descolada that might just lead to the salvation of a couple of species.”

“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.”

Are you going to be resentful because nobody did anything to you?”

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.”

It’s intelligence that makes you unhappy.

<Even if the vast majority of them are wrong, even if ninety-nine of every hundred is stupid and wrong, out of ten thousand ideas that still leaves them with a hundred good ones. That’s how they make up for being so stupid and having such short lives and small memories.> <Dreams and madness.> <Magic and mystery and philosophy.>

“Andrew would have threatened that, you know. Everybody thinks he’s such a saint, but he always bullies people who don’t go along with him.” “He doesn’t threaten.” “I’ve seen him do it.” “He warns.” “Oh. Excuse me. Is there a difference?” “Yes,” said Miro.

“Because I’m only just making the connection. We never meant what you’ve described, but the thing we did mean, that might be the thing you described.” <Very unclear.> “Join the club.” <Very welcome laughing happy.>

“Anyway, the universe now seems to be constant in time while it’s expanding in space. But if you wanted to, you could just as easily see it as constant in size but changing in time. The speed of light is slowing down so that it takes longer to get from one place to another, only we can’t tell that it’s slowing down because everything else slows down exactly relative to the speed of light. You see? All a matter of perspective. For that matter, as Grego said before, the universe we live in is still, in absolute terms, exactly the size of a geometric point—when you look at it from Outside. Any growth that seems to take place on the Inside is just a matter of relative location and time.”

“I know what you mean,” said Peter. “It’s a lot more fun to destroy an opponent when he’s able to understand how thoroughly you defeated him.”