from
Xenocide
by
Orson Scott Card

<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.>

<Or deliberate insanity.>

The only conclusion they reached was that while the future couldn’t be known, it would probably be a good deal better than their worst fears and nowhere near as good as their best hopes. Wasn’t that how the world always worked?

“Yes,” said Plikt. “Except for the exceptions.”

Father did not raise his voice. It was in the faintest whisper that he said, “First the gods. Second the ancestors. Third the people. Fourth the rulers. Last the self.”

It was the clearest expression of the Path. It was the reason this world was settled in the first place. She had forgotten: If she was too busy to perform righteous labor, she was not on the Path.

She would never forget again. And, in time, she learned to love the sun beating down on her back, the water cool and murky around her legs and hands, the stalks of the rice plants like fingers reaching up from the mud to interwine with her fingers. Covered with muck in the rice paddies, she never felt unclean, because she knew that she was filthy in the service of the gods.

“So much power has no right or reason to exist in the universe.”

“Who taught you this?”

“Decency taught me this,” said Qing-jao. “The gods made the stars and all the planets—who is man to unmake them?”

“But the gods also made the laws of nature that make it possible to destroy them—who is man to refuse to receive what the gods have given?”

“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.”

Qing-jao thought for only a moment, then nodded her understanding. “So the Life of Human may be universally true, but specifically false.”

“Yes,” said Han Fei-tzu. “You can read the book and gain great wisdom from it, because it is true. But is that book an accurate representation of the pequeninos themselves?”

“Just as the gods speak only to a chosen few, so the secrets of the rulers must be known only to those who will use the knowledge properly. Demosthenes was giving powerful secrets to people who were not fit to use them wisely, and so for the good of the people those secrets had to be withdrawn. 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.”

“You’re telling me that Demosthenes is not a liar, and Congress is.”

“I’m telling you that Demosthenes is the enemy of the gods.”

“Shut up,” said Quara.

“As a kindness to us all, Grego, please do as your sister has so kindly asked,” said Novinha.

“Even if they’re sentient,” said Ender, “that doesn’t mean they’re sacrosanct. It all depends whether they’re raman or varelse. If they’re raman—if we can understand them and they can understand us well enough to work out a way of living together—then fine. We’ll be safe, they’ll be safe.”

“The great peacemaker plans to sign a treaty with a molecule?” asked Grego.

Ender ignored his mocking tone. “On the other hand, if they’re trying to destroy us, and we can’t find a way to communicate with them, then they’re varelse—sentient aliens, but impacably hostile and dangerous. Varelse are aliens we can’t live with. Varelse are aliens with whom we are naturally and permanently engaged in a war to the death, and at that time our only moral choice is to do all that’s necessary to win.”

“You believe that miracles are possible.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t think any of them actually happen.”

“Miro, I believe that they do happen. I just don’t know if people accurately perceive which events are miracles and which are not.”

“Will God answer your prayer?”

“Of course. God answers all prayers.”

It took only a moment for Miro to realize what Quim meant. “I mean, will he say yes.”

“Ah. That’s the part I’m never sure about. Tell me later if he did.”

<I’ve been talking to Ender and his sister, Valentine. She’s a historian.>

<Explain this.>

<She searches through the books to find out the stories of humans, and then writes stories about what she finds and gives them to all the other humans.>

<If the stories are already written down, why does she write them again?>

<Because they aren’t well understood. She helps people understand them.>

<If the people closer to that time didn’t understand them, how can she, coming later, understand them better?>

<I asked this myself, and Valentine said that she doesn’t always understand them better. But the old writers understood what the stories meant to the people of their time, and she understands what the stories mean to people of her time.>

<So the story changes.>

<Yes.>

<And yet each time they still think of the story as a true memory?>

<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.>

Then she thought of some famous lines from a song by her ancestor-of-the-heart:

I want to call back
the blackberry flowers
that have fallen
though pear blossoms remain

The poet Li Qing-jao knew the pain of regretting words that have already fallen from our lips and can never be called back. But she was wise enough to remember that even though those words are gone, there are still new words waiting to be said, like the pear blossoms.

“Hasn’t anyone caught on yet that the gods always say what people want to hear?”

“Not so,” said Ender. “The gods often ask us to do things we never desired, things that require us to sacrifice everything on their behalf. Don’t underestimate the gods.”

“Does your Catholic God speak to you?”

“Maybe he does. I never hear him, though. Or if I do, I never know that it’s his voice I’m hearing.”

“And when you die do the gods of every people really gather them up and take them off somewhere to live forever?”

“I don’t know. They never write.”

“We face some of the most terrible moral choices that humankind has ever faced. We run the risk of committing xenocide, or allowing it to be committed if we do nothing. Every known or suspected sentient species lives in the shadow of grave risk, and it’s here, with us and with us alone, that almost all the decisions lie. Last time anything remotely similar happened, our human predecessors chose to commit xenocide in order, as they supposed, to save themselves. I am asking all of you to help us pursue every avenue, however unlikely, that shows us a glimmer of hope, that might provide us with a tiny shred of light to guide our decisions. Will you help?”

“I want to live,” she said.

“Not as much as you want to be yourself,” said Ender.

“Any animal is willing to kill in order to save itself.”

“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.”

“Are you a believer?”

“Let’s say I’m a suspecter. I suspect there may be someone who cares what happens to us. That’s one step better than merely wishing. And one step below hoping.”

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.

“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.”

“So—as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn’t exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can’t ever trace them back. If you’ve got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to.”

“Bobagem,” said Miro.

“Well, I admit that it’s a philosophy with no practical value,” said Ender. “Valentine once explained it to me this way. 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.”

“As long as the whole species is together, interbreeding constantly,” said Qing-jao, “individuals never drift too far, genetically speaking; their genes are constantly being recombined with other genes in the same species, so the variations are spread evenly through the whole population with each new generation. Only when the environment puts them under such stress that one of those randomly drifting traits suddenly has survival value, only then will all those in that particular environment who lack that trait die out, until the new trait, instead of being an occasional sport, is now a universal definer of the new species. That’s the fundamental tenet of gaialogy—constant genetic drift is essential for the survival of life as a whole.”

“We’re on the verge of reconceptualizing the universe. We’ve discovered the illuminating principle that wishing makes it so and all living creatures pop out of nowhere whenever they’re needed.”

“If wishing makes it so,” said Valentine, “can we wish for faster-than-light flight?”

“Grego’s doing math in his head right now,” said Olhado, “so he’s functionally dead. But yes. I think he’s onto 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 unnnatural, indirect approach that when it comes right down to it, I still don’t understand.”

“So we’re going to sew our way through space?”

“In a way. The shortest distance between two points isn’t necessarily a line. It comes from something Andrew learned from the hive queen. How they call some kind of creature from an alternate spacetime when they create a new hive queen. Grego jumped on that as proof that there was a real non-real space. Don’t ask me what he means by that. I make bricks for a living.”

“Unreal realspace,“ said Grego. “You had it backward.”

“I was just thinking—I heard a prayer, not many weeks ago. A prayer to Os Venerados, Grandfather Gusto and Grandmother Cida. That if there wasn’t a way to solve the impossible problems facing us, they would petition God to open up the way.”

“Not a bad prayer,” said the Bishop. “And perhaps God has granted it.”

“I know,” said Quara. “That’s what I was thinking. What if all this stuff about Outspace and Inspace, what if it was never real before. What if it ony came to be true because of that prayer?”

“What of it?” asked the Bishop.

“Well, don’t you think that would be funny?”

Apparently no one did.

“I’ve made a promise.”

“You made one to me, too,” he said.

“Should I break a vow to God, so I can keep my vow with you?”

“God would understand.”

“How easily those who never hear his voice declare what he would and would not want.”

“Do you hear his voice these days?”

“I hear his song in my heart, the way the Psalmist did. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

“The twenty-third. While the only song I hear is the twenty-second.”

She smiled wanly. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” she quoted.

“He’s a good boy who thought that he was doing the something fine.”

“Yes,” he said. “But it got away from him.”

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” she said. “When you don’t understand the consequences of your acts, how can you be blamed for them?”

He knew that she was talking as much about him, Ender the Xenocide, as about Nimbo. “You don’t take the blame,” he answered. “But you stll take responsibility. For healing the wounds you caused.”

“Yes,” she said. “The wounds you caused. But not all the wounds in the world.”