Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga 4)

Quara clicked her tongue in disdain. "You weren't here, Peter. You didn't see what they were throwing at us--a newly engineered and specially tailored virus to make us sit as still as idiots while they came and took over our ship."

"And they sent this how, in a nice envelope?" said Peter. "They sent an infected puppy, knowing you couldn't resist picking it up and hugging it?"

"They broadcast the code," said Quara. "But they expected us to interpret it by making the molecule and then it would have its effect."

"No," said Peter, "you speculated that that's how their language works, and then you started to act as if your speculation were true."

"And somehow you know that it's not?" said Quara.

"I don't know anything about it," said Peter. "That's my point. We just don't know. We can't know. Now, if we saw them launching probes, or if they started trying to blast this ship out of the sky, we'd have to start taking action. Like sending ships after the probes and carefully studying the viruses they were sending out. Or if they attacked this ship, we'd take evasive action and analyze their weapons and tactics."

"That's fine now," said Quara. "Now that Jane's safe and the mothertrees are intact so she can handle the starflight thing she does. Now we can catch up with probes and dance out of the way of missiles or whatever. But what about before, when we were helpless here? When we had only a few weeks to live, or so we thought?"

"Back then," said Peter, "you didn't have the Little Doctor, either, so you couldn't have blown up their planet. We didn't get our hands on the M. D. Device until after Jane's power of flight was restored. And with that power, it was no longer necessary to destroy the descolada planet until and unless it posed a danger too great to be resisted any other way."

Quara laughed. "What is this? I thought Peter was supposed to be the nasty side of Ender's personality. Turns out you're the sweetness and light."

Peter smiled. "There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally."

"We couldn't be engaging in a bit of self-justification, could we?" said Quara. "You're Ender's successor. Therefore you find it convenient to believe that those boys Ender killed were the exceptions to your niceness rule."

"I justify Ender by his ignorance and helplessness. We aren't helpless. Starways Congress and the Lusitania Fleet were not helpless. And they chose to act before alleviating their ignorance."

"Ender chose to use the Little Doctor while he was ignorant."

"No, Quara. The adults who commanded him used it. They could have intercepted and blocked his decision. There was plenty of time for them to use the overrides. Ender thought he was playing a game. He thought that by using the Little Doctor in the simulation he would prove himself unreliable, disobedient, or even too brutal to trust with command. He was trying to get himself kicked out of Command School. That's all. He was doing the necessary thing to get them to stop torturing him. The adults were the ones who decided simply to unleash their most powerful weapon: Ender Wiggin. No more effort to talk with the buggers, to communicate. Not even at the end when they knew that Ender was going to destroy the buggers' home planet. They had decided to go for the kill no matter what. Like Admiral Lands. Like you, Quara."

"I said I'd wait until we found out!"

"Good," said Peter. "Then we don't disagree."

"But we should have the Little Doctor here!"

"The Little Doctor shouldn't exist at all," said Peter. "It was never necessary. It was never appropriate. Because the cost of it is too high."

"Cost!" hooted Quara. "It's cheaper than the old nuclear weapons!"

"It's taken us three thousand years to get over the destruction of the hive queens' home planet. That's the cost. If we use the Little Doctor, then we're the sort of people who wipe out other species. Admiral Lands was just like the men who were using Ender Wiggin. Their minds were made up. This was the danger. This was the evil. This had to be destroyed. They thought they meant well. They were saving the human race. But they weren't. There were a lot of different motives involved, but along with deciding to use the weapon, they also decided not to attempt to communicate with the enemy. Where was the demonstration of the Little Doctor on a nearby moon? Where was Lands's attempt to verify that the situation on Lusitania had not changed? And you, Quara--what methodology, exactly, were you planning to use to determine whether the descoladores were too evil to be allowed to live? At what point do you know they are an unbearable danger to all other sentient species?"

"Turn it around, Peter," said Quara. "At what point do you know they're not?"

"We have better weapons than the Little Doctor. Ela once designed a molecule to block the descolada's efforts to cause harm, without destroying its ability to help the flora and fauna of Lusitania to pass through their transformations. Who's to say that we can't do the same thing for every nasty little plague they send at us until they give up? Who's to say that they aren't already trying desperately to communicate with us? How do you know that the molecule they sent wasn't an attempt to make us happy with them the only way they kne

w how, by sending us a molecule that would take away our anger? How do you know they aren't already quivering in terror down on that planet because we have a ship that can disappear and reappear anywhere else? Are we trying to talk to them?"

Peter looked around at all of them.

"Don't you understand, any of you? There's only one species that we know of that has deliberately, consciously, knowingly tried to destroy another sentient species without any serious attempt at communication or warning. We're the ones. The first xenocide failed because the victims of the attack managed to conceal exactly one pregnant female. The second time it failed for a better reason--because some members of the human species determined to stop it. Not just some, many. Congress. A big corporation. A philosopher on Divine Wind. A Samoan divine and his fellow believers on Pacifica. Wang-mu and I. Jane. And Admiral Lands's own officers and men, when they finally understood the situation. We're getting better, don't you see? But the fact remains--we humans are the sentient species that has shown the most tendency to deliberately refuse to communicate with other species and instead destroy them utterly. Maybe the descoladores are varelse and maybe they're not. But I'm a lot more frightened at the thought that we are varelse. That's the cost of using the Little Doctor when it isn't needed and never will be, given the other tools in our kit. If we choose to use the M. D. Device, then we are not ramen. We can never be trusted. We are the species that would deserve to die for the safety of all other sentient life."

Quara shook her head, but the smugness was gone. "Sounds to me like somebody is still trying to earn forgiveness for his own crimes."

"That was Ender," said Peter. "He spent his life trying to turn himself and everyone else into ramen. I look around me in this ship, I think of what I've seen, the people I've known in the past few months, and I think that the human race isn't doing too badly. We're moving in the right direction. A few throwbacks now and then. A bit of blustery talk. But by and large, we're coming closer to being worthy to associate with the hive queens and the pequeninos. And if the descoladores are perhaps a bit farther from being ramen than we are, that doesn't mean we have a right to destroy them. It means we have all the more reason to be patient with them and try to nurse them along. How many years has it taken us to get here from marking the sites of battles with piles of human skulls? Thousands of years. And all the time, we had teachers trying to get us to change, pointing the way. Bit by bit we learned. Let's teach them--if they don't already know more than we do."

"It could take years just to learn their language," said Ela.

"Transportation is cheap now," said Peter. "No offense intended, Jane. We can keep teams shuttling back and forth for a long time without undue hardship to anyone. We can keep a fleet watching this planet. With pequeninos and hive workers alongside the human researchers. For centuries. For millennia. There's no hurry."

"I think that's dangerous," said Quara.