"All right," she said. "That was a low blow. But so is sending you to try to crack open my files. Trying to play on my sympathies."
"Sympathies?" asked Miro.
"Because you're a--because you're--"
"Damaged," said Miro. He hadn't thought of the fact that pity complicated everything. But how could he help it? Whatever he did, it was a cripple doing it.
"Well, yes."
"Ela didn't send me," said Miro.
"Mother, then."
"Not Mother."
"Oh, you're a freelance meddler? Or are you going to tell me that all of humanity has sent you? Or are you a delegate of an abstract value? 'Decency sent me.'"
"If it did, it sent me to the wrong place."
She reeled back as if she had been slapped.
"Oh, am I the indecent one?"
"Andrew sent me," said Miro.
"Another manipulator."
"He would have come himself."
"But he was so busy, doing his own meddling. Nossa Senhora, he's a minister, mixing himself up in scientific matters that are so far above his head that--"
"Shut up," said Miro.
He spoke forcefully enough that she actually did fall silent--though she wasn't happy about it.
"You know what Andrew is," Miro said. "He wrote the Hive Queen and--"
"the Hive Queen and the Hegemon and the Life of Human."
"Don't tell me he doesn't know anything."
"No. I know that isn't true," said Quara. "I just get so angry. I feel like everybody's against me."
"Against what you're doing, yes," said Miro.
"Why doesn't anybody see things my way?"
"I see things your way," said Miro.
"Then how can you--"
"I also see things their way."
"Yes. Mr. Impartial. Make me feel like you understand me. The sympathetic approach."
"Planter is dying to try to learn information you probably already know."
"Not true. I don't know whether pequenino intelligence comes from the virus or not."
"A truncated virus could be tested without killing him."
"Truncated--is that the word of choice? It'll do. Better than castrated. Cutting off all the limbs. And the head, too. Nothing but the trunk left. Powerless. Mindless. A beating heart, to no purpose."
"Planter is--"
"Planter's in love with the idea of being a martyr. He wants to die."
"Planter is asking you to come and talk to him."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Come on, Miro. They send a cripple to me. They want me to come talk to a dying pequenino. As if I'd betray a whole species because a dying friend--a volunteer, too--asks me with his dying breath."
"Quara."
"Yes, I'm listening."
"Are you?"
"Disse que sim!" she snapped. I said I am.
"You might be right about all this."
"How kind of you."
"But so might they."
"Aren't you the impartial one."
"You say they were wrong to make a decision that might kill the pequeninos without consulting them. Aren't you--"
"Doing the same thing? What should I do, do you think? Publish my viewpoint and take a vote? A few thousand humans, millions of pequeninos on your side--but there are trillions of descolada viruses. Majority rule. Case closed."
"The descolada is not sentient," said Miro.
"For your information," said Quara, "I know all about this latest ploy. Ela sent me the transcripts. Some Chinese girl on a backwater colony planet who doesn't know anything about xenogenetics comes up with a wild hypothesis, and you all act as if it were already proved."
"So--prove it false."
"I can't. I've been shut out of the lab. You prove it true."
"Occam's razor proves it true. Simplest explanation that fits the facts."
"Occam was a medieval old fart. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is always, God did it. Or maybe--that old woman down the road is a witch. She did it. That's all this hypothesis is--only you don't even know where the witch is."
"The descolada is too sudden."
"It didn't evolve, I know. Had to come from somewhere else. Fine. Even if it's artificial, that doesn't mean it isn't sentient now."
"It's trying to kill us. It's varelse, not raman."
"Oh, yes, Valentine's hierarchy. Well, how do I know that the descolada is the varelse, and we're the ramen? As far as I can tell, intelligence is intelligence. Varelse is just the term Valentine invented to mean Intelligence-that-we've-decided-to-kill, and raman means Intelligence-that-we-haven't-decided-to-kill-yet."
"It's an unreasoning, uncompassionate enemy."
"Is there another kind?"
"The descolada doesn't have respect for any other life. It wants to kill us. It already rules the pequeninos. All so it can regulate this planet and spread to other worlds."
For once, she had let him finish a long statement. Did it mean she was actually listening to him?
"I'll grant you part of Wang-mu's hypothesis," said Quara. "It does make sense that the descolada is regulating the gaialogy of Lusitania. In fact, now that I think about it, it's obvious. It explains most of the conversations I've observed--the information-passing from one virus to another. I figure it should take only a few months for a message to get to every virus on the planet--it would work. But just because the descolada is running the gaialogy doesn't mean that you've proved it's not sentient. In fact, it could go the other way--the descolada, by taking responsibility for regulating the gaialogy of a whole world, is showing altruism. And protectiveness, too--if we saw a mother lion lashing out at an intruder in order to protect her young, we'd admire her. That's all the descolada is doing--lashing out against humans in order to protect her precious responsibility. A living planet."
"A mother lion protecting her cubs."
"I think so."
"Or a rabid dog, devouring our babies."
Quara paused. Thought for a moment. "Or both. Why can't it be both? The descolada's trying to regulate a planet here. But humans are getting more and more dangerous. To her, we're the rabid dog. We root out the plants that are part of her control system, and we plant our own, unresponsive plants. We make some of the pequeninos behave strangely and disobey her. We burn a forest at a time when she's trying to build more. Of course she wants to get rid of us!"
"So she's out to destroy us."
"It's her privilege to try! When will you see that the descolada has rights?"
"Don't we? Don't the pequeninos?"
Again she paused. No immediate counterargument. It gave him hope that she might actually be listening.
"You know something, Miro?"
"What."
"They were right to send you."
"Were they?"
"Because you're not one of them."
That's true enough, thought Miro. I'll never be "one of" anything again.
"Maybe we can't talk to the descolada. And maybe it really is just an artifact. A biological robot acting out its programming. But maybe it isn't. And they're keeping me from finding out."
"What if they open the lab to you?"
"They won't," said Quara. "If you think they will, you don't know Ela and Mother. They've decided that I'm not to be trusted, and so that's that. Well, I've decided they're not to be trusted, either."
"Thus whole species die for family pride."
"Is that all you think this is, Miro? Pride? I'm holding out because of nothing nobler than a petty quarrel?"
"Our family has a lot of pride."
"Well, no matter what you think, I'm doing this out of conscience, no matter whether you want to call it pride or stubbornness or anything else."
"I believe you," said Miro.
"But do I believe you when you say that you believe me? We're in such a tangle." She turned back to her terminal. "Go away now, Miro. I told you I'd think about it, and I will."
"Go see Pla
nter."
"I'll think about that, too." Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "He is my friend, you know. I'm not inhuman. I'll go see him, you can be sure of that."
"Good."
He started for the door.
"Miro," she said.
He turned, waited.
"Thanks for not threatening to have that computer program of yours crack my files open if I didn't open them myself."
"Of course not," he said.
"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.
"The only difference between a warning and a threat is whether you're the person giving it or the person receiving it," said Quara.
"No," said Miro. "The difference is how the person means it."
"Go away," she said. "I've got work to do, even while I'm thinking. So go away."
He opened the door.
"But thanks," she said.
He closed the door behind him.
As he walked away from Quara's place, Jane immediately piped up in his ear. "I see you decided against telling her that I broke into her files before you even came."
"Yes, well," said Miro. "I feel like a hypocrite, for her to thank me for not threatening to do what I'd already done."
"I did it."
"We did it. You and me and Ender. A sneaky group."
"Will she really think about it?"
"Maybe," said Miro. "Or maybe she's already thought about it and decided to cooperate and was just looking for an excuse. Or maybe she's already decided against ever cooperating, and she just said this nice thing at the end because she's sorry for me."
"What do you think she'll do?"
"I don't know what she'll do," said Miro. "I know what I'll do. I'll feel ashamed of myself every time I think about how I let her think that I respected her privacy, when we'd already pillaged her files. Sometimes I don't think I'm a very good person."
"You notice she didn't tell you that she's keeping her real findings outside the computer system, so the only files I can reach are worthless junk. She hasn't exactly been frank with you, either."
"Yes, but she's a fanatic with no sense of balance or proportion."
"That explains everything."
"Some traits just run in the family," said Miro.
The hive queen was alone this time. Perhaps exhausted from something--mating? Producing eggs? She spent all her time doing this, it seemed. She had no choice. Now that workers had to be used to patrol the perimeter of the human colony, she had to produce even more than she had planned. Her offspring didn't have to be educated--they entered adulthood quickly, having all the knowledge that any other adult had. But the process of conception, egg-laying, emergence, and cocooning still took time. Weeks for each adult. She produced a prodigious number of young, compared to a single human. But compared to the town of Milagre, with more than a thousand women of childbearing age, the bugger colony had only one producing female.
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.
"Because we're at a dead end. Because everybody else is trying, and you have as much at stake as we do."
"The descolada threatens you as much as it threatens us. Someday you probably aren't going to be able to control it, and then you're gone."
"No." It was the problem of faster-than-light flight. Grego had been wracking his brains. In jail there was nothing else for him to think about. The last time Ender had spoken with him, he wept--as much from exhaustion as frustration. He had covered reams of papers with equations, spreading them all over the secure room that was used as a cell. "Don't you care about faster-than-light flight?"
The mildness of her response almost hurt, it so deeply disappointed him. This is what despair is like, he thought. Quara a brick wall on the nature of descolada intelligence. Planter dying of descolada deprivation. Han Fei-tzu and Wang-mu struggling to duplicate years of higher study in several fields, all at once. Grego worn out. And nothing to show for it.
She must have heard his anguish as clearly as if he had howled it.
"You've done it," he said. "It must be possible."
"You projected an action across lightyears. You found me."
"Not so," he said. "I never even knew we had made mental contact until I found the message you had left for me." It had been the moment of greatest strangeness in his life, to stand on an alien world and see a model, a replication of the landscape that had existed in only one other place--the computer on which he had played his personalized version of the Fantasy Game. It was like having a total stranger come up to you and tell you your dream from the night before. They had been inside his head. It made him afraid, but it also excited him. For the first time in his life, he felt known. Not known of--he was famous throughout humanity, and in those days his fame was all positive, the greatest hero of all time. Other people knew of him. But with this bugger artifact, he discovered for the first time that he was known.
"How did you find me, then?"
"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."
"And that was all?"
He was having trouble making sense of what they were saying. What kind of network was he connected to?
"I wasn't connected. They were my soldiers, that's all."
"But humans are individuals, not like your workers."
Not helpful at all. Nothing to do with faster-than-light flight. If all sounded like mumbo-jumbo, not like science at all. Nothing that Grego could expre
ss mathematically.
Ender didn't understand how establishing an ansible link with his brain could be like hatching out a new queen. "Explain it to me."
"But what are you doing when you do it?"
"And what do you always do?"
"Then remember what you do, and show it to me."
It was true. She had tried only a couple of times, when he was very young and had first discovered her cocoon. He simply couldn't cope with it, couldn't make sense of it. Flashes, a few glimpses were clear, but it was so disorienting that he panicked, and probably fainted, though he was alone and couldn't be sure what had happened, clinically speaking.
"If you can't tell me, we have to do something."
"No. I'll tell you to stop. It didn't kill me before."
"Try, yes."
She gave him no time to reflect or prepare. At once he felt himself seeing out of compound eyes, not many lenses with the same vision, but each lens with its own picture. It gave him the same vertiginous feeling as so many years before. But this time he understood a little better--in part because she was making it less intense than before, and in part because he knew something about the hive queen now, about what she was doing to him.
The many different visions were what each of the workers was seeing, as if each were a single eye connected to the same brain. There was no hope of Ender making sense of so many images at once.
Most of the visions dropped out immediately. Then, one by one, the others were sorted out. He imagined that she must have some organizing principle for the workers. She could disregard all those who weren't part of the queen-making process. Then, for Ender's sake, she had to sort through even the ones who were part of it, and that was harder, because usually she could sort the visions by task rather than by the individual workers. At last, though, she was able to show him a primary image and he could focus on it, ignoring the flickers and flashes of peripheral visions.