Xenocide (Ender's Saga 3)

That was true until the moment that Han Qing-jao began to use her computer to access all the reports dealing with the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet. Then Qing-jao's name moved many levels upward in Jane's attention. Jane began to keep a log of everything that Qing-jao did with her computer. And it quickly became clear to her that Han Qing-jao, though she was only sixteen, meant to make serious trouble for Jane. Because Han Qing-jao, unconnected as she was to any particular bureaucracy, having no ideological axe to grind or vested interest to protect, was taking a broader and therefore more dangerous look at all the information that had been collected by every human agency.

Why was it dangerous? Had Jane left clues behind that Qing-jao would find?

No, of course not. Jane left no clues. She had thought of leaving some, of trying to make the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet look like sabotage or mechanical failure or some natural disaster. She had to give up on that idea, because she couldn't work up any physical clues. All she could do was leave misleading data in computer memories. None of it would ever have any physical analogue in the real world, and therefore any halfway-intelligent researcher would quickly realize that the clues were all faked-up data. Then he would conclude that the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet had to have been caused by some agency that had unimaginably detailed access to the computer systems that had the false data. Surely that would lead people to discover her far more quickly than if she left no evidence at all.

Leaving no evidence was the best course, definitely; and until Han Qing-jao began her investigation, it had worked very well. Each investigating agency looked only in the places they usually looked. The police on many planets checked out all the known dissident groups (and, in some places, tortured various dissidents until they made useless confessions, at which point the interrogators filed final reports and pronounced the issue closed). The military looked for evidence of military opposition--especially alien starships, since the military had keen memories of the invasion of the buggers three thousand years before. Scientists looked for evidence of some unexpected invisible astronomical phenomenon that could account for either the destruction of the fleet or the selective breakdown of ansible communication. The politicians looked for somebody else to blame. Nobody imagined Jane, and therefore nobody found her.

But Han Qing-jao was putting everything together, carefully, systematically, running precise searches on the data. She would inevitably turn up the evidence that could eventually prove--and end--Jane's existence. That evidence was, simply put, the lack of evidence. Nobody else could see it, because nobody had ever brought an unbiased methodical mind to the investigation.

What Jane couldn't know was that Qing-jao's seemingly inhuman patience, her meticulous attention to detail, her constant rephrasing and re-programming of computer searches, that all of these were the result of endless hours kneeling hunched over on a wooden floor, carefully following a grain in the wood from one end of a board to the other, from one side of a room to the other. Jane couldn't begin to guess that it was the great lesson taught her by the gods that made Qing-jao her most formidable opponent. All Jane knew was that at some point, this searcher named Qing-jao would probably realize what no one else really understood: that every conceivable explanation for the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet had already been completely eliminated.

At that point only one conclusion would remain: that some force not yet encountered anywhere in the history of humankind had the power either to make a widely scattered fleet of starships disappear simultaneously, or--just as unlikely--to make that fleet's ansibles all stop functioning at once. And if that same methodical mind then started listing possible forces that might have such power, eventually it was bound to name the one that was true: an independent entity that dwelt among--no, that was composed of--the philotic rays connecting all ansibles together. Because this idea was true, no amount of logical scrutiny or research would eliminate it. Eventually this idea would be left standing alone. And at that point, somebody would surely act on Qing-jao's discovery and set out to destroy Jane.

So Jane watched Qing-jao's research with more and more fascination. This sixteen-year-old daughter of Han Fei-tzu, who weighed 39 kilograms and stood 160 centimeters tall and was in the uppermost social and intellectual class on the Taoist Chinese world of Path, was the first human being Jane had ever found who approached the thoroughness and precision of a computer and, therefore, of Jane herself. And though Jane could conduct in an hour the search that was taking Qing-jao weeks and months to complete, the dangerous truth was tha

t Qing-jao was performing almost exactly the search Jane herself would have conducted; and therefore there was no reason for Jane to suppose that Qing-jao would not reach the conclusion that Jane herself would reach.

Qing-jao was therefore Jane's most dangerous enemy, and Jane was helpless to stop her--at least physically. Trying to block Qing-jao's access to information would only mean leading her more quickly to the knowledge of Jane's existence. So instead of open opposition, Jane searched for another way to stop her eney. 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.

6

VARELSE

The new strain of potatoes was dying. Ender saw the telltale brown circles in the leaves, the plants broken off where the stems had turned so brittle that the slightest breeze bent them till they snapped. This morning they had all been healthy. The onset of this disease was so sudden, its effect so devastating, that it could only be the descolada virus.

Ela and Novinha would be disappointed--they had had such hopes for this strain of potato. Ela, Ender's stepdaughter, had been working on a gene that would cause every cell in an organism to produce three different chemicals that were known to inhibit or kill the descolada virus. Novinha, Ender's wife, had been working on a gene that would cause cell nuclei to be impermeable to any molecule larger than one-tenth the size of the descolada. With this strain of potato, they had spliced in both genes and, when early tests showed that both traits had taken hold, Ender had brought the seedlings to the experimental farm and planted them. He and his assistants had nurtured them for the past six weeks. All had seemed to be going well.

If the technique had worked, it could have been adapted to all the plants and animals that the humans of Lusitania depended on for food. But the descolada virus was too clever by half--it saw through all their stratagems, eventually. Still, six weeks was better than the normal two or three days. Maybe they were on the right track.

Or maybe things had already gone too far. Back when Ender first arrived on Lusitania, new strains of Earthborn plants and animals could last as long as twenty years in the field before the descolada decoded their genetic molecules and tore them apart. But in recent years the descolada virus had apparently made a breakthrough that allowed it to decode any genetic molecule from Earth in days or even hours.

These days the only thing that allowed the human colonists to grow their plants and raise their animals was a spray that was immediately fatal to the descolada virus. There were human colonists who wanted to spray the whole planet and wipe out the descolada virus once and for all.

Spraying a whole planet was impractical, but not impossible; there were other reasons for rejecting that option. Every form of native life absolutely depended on the descolada in order to reproduce. That included the piggies--the pequeninos, the intelligent natives of this world--whose reproductive cycle was inextricably bound up with the only native species of tree. If the descolada virus were ever destroyed, this generation of pequeninos would be the last. It would be xenocide.

So far, the idea of doing anything that would wipe out the piggies would be immediately rejected by most of the people of Milagre, the village of humans. So far. But Ender knew that many minds would change if a few more facts were widely known. For instance, only a handful of people knew that twice already the descolada had adapted itself to the chemical they were using to kill it. Ela and Novinha had already developed several new versions of the chemical, so that the next time the descolada adapted to one viricide they could switch immediately to another. Likewise, they had once had to change the descolada inhibitor that kept human beings from dying of the descolada viruses that dwelt in every human in the colony. The inhibitor was added to all the colony's food, so that every human being ingested it with every meal.

However, all the inhibitors and viricides worked on the same basic principles. Someday, just as the descolada virus had learned how to adapt to Earthborn genes in general, it would also learn how to handle each class of chemicals, and then it wouldn't matter how many new versions they had--the descolada would exhaust their resources in days.

Only a few people knew how precarious Milagre's survival really was. Only a few people understood how much was riding on the work that Ela and Novinha, as Lusitania's xenobiologists, were doing; how close their contest was with the descolada; how devastating the consequences would be if they ever fell behind.

Just as well. If the colonists did understand, there would be many who would say, If it's inevitable that someday the descolada will overwhelm us, then let's wipe it out now. If that kills all the piggies then we're sorry, but if it's us or them, we choose us.

It was fine for Ender to take the long view, the philosophical perspective, and say, Better for one small human colony to perish than to wipe out an entire sentient species. He knew this argument would carry no water with the humans of Lusitania. Their own lives were at stake here, and the lives of their children; it would be absurd to expect them to be willing to die for the sake of another species that they didn't understand and that few of them even liked. It would make no sense genetically--evolution encourages only creatures who are serious about protecting their own genes. Even if the Bishop himself declared it to be the will of God that the human beings of Lusitania lay down their lives for the piggies, there would be precious few who would obey.

I'm not sure I could make such a sacrifice myself, thought Ender. Even though I have no children of my own. Even though I have already lived through the destruction of a sentient species--even though I triggered that destruction myself, and I know what a terrible moral burden that is to bear--I'm not sure I could let my fellow human beings die, either by starvation because their food crops have been destroyed, or far more painfully by the return of the descolada as a disease with the power to consume the human body in days.

And yet . . . could I consent to the destruction of the pequeninos? Could I permit another xenocide?

He picked up one of the broken potato stems with its blotchy leaves. He would have to take this to Novinha, of course. Novinha would examine it, or Ela would, and they'd confirm what was already obvious. Another failure. He put the potato stem into a sterile pouch.

"Speaker."

It was Planter, Ender's assistant and his closest friend among the piggies. Planter was a son of the pequenino named Human, whom Ender had taken into the "third life," the tree stage of the pequenino life cycle. Ender held up the transparent plastic pouch for Planter to see the leaves inside.

"Very dead indeed, Speaker," said Planter, with no discernible emotion. That had been the most disconcerting thing about working with pequeninos at first--they didn't show emotions in ways that humans could easily, habitually interpret. It was one of the greatest barriers to their acceptance by most of the colonists. The piggies weren't cute or cuddly; they were merely strange.

"We'll try again," said Ender. "I think we're getting closer."