"We're inside," said Wang-mu. "But where are we going?"
"Jane is matching the velocity of the Little Doctor."
"I thought she couldn't pick it up without the starship."
"She's getting the tracking data from the satellite. She'll predict exactly where it will be at a certain moment, and then push us Outside and bring us back In at exactly that point, going exactly that speed."
"The Little Doctor will be inside this ship? With us?" asked Wang-mu.
"Stand over here by the wall," he said. "And hold on to me. We're going to be weightless. So far you've managed to visit four planets without ever having that experience."
"Have you had that experience before?"
Peter laughed, then shook his head. "Not in this body. But I guess at some level I remembered how to handle it because--"
At that moment they became weightless and in the air in front of them, not touching the sides or walls of the starship, was the mammoth missile that carried the Little Doctor. If its rockets had still been firing, they would have been incinerated. Instead it was hurtling on at the speed it had already achieved; it seemed to hover in the air because the starship was going exactly the same speed.
Peter hooked his feet under a bench bolted to the wall, then reached out his hands and touched the missile. "We need to bring it into contact with the floor," he said.
Wang-mu tried to reach for it, too, but immediately she came loose from the wall and started drifting. Intense nausea began immediately, as her body desperately searched for some direction that would serve as down.
"Think of the device as downward," said Peter urgently. "The device is down. You're falling toward the device."
She felt herself reorient. It helped. And as she drifted closer she was able to take hold of it and cling. She could only watch, grateful simply not to be vomiting, as Peter slowly, gently pushed the mass of the missile toward the floor. When they touched, the whole ship shuddered, for the mass of the missile was probably greater than the mass of the ship that now surrounded it.
"Okay?" Peter asked.
"I'm fine," said Wang-mu. Then she realized he had been talking to Jane, and his "okay" was part of that conversation.
"Jane is tracing the thing right now," said Peter. "She does it with the starships, too, before she ever takes them anywhere. It used to be analytical, by computer. Now her aiua sort of tours the inner structure of the thing. She couldn't do it till it was in solid contact with something she knew: the starship. Us. When she gets a sense of the inner shape of the thing, she can hold it together Outside."
"We're just going to take it there and leave it?" asked Wang-mu.
"No," said Peter. "It would either hold together and detonate, or it would break apart, and either way, who knows what the damage would be out there? How many little copies of it would wink into existence?"
"None at all," said Wang-mu. "It takes an intelligence to make something new."
"What do you think this thing is made of? Just like every bit of your body, just like every rock and tree and cloud, it's all aiuas, and there'll be other unconnected aiuas out there desperate to belong, to imitate, to grow. No, this thing is evil, and we're not taking it out there."
"Where are we taking it?"
"Home to meet its sender," said Peter.
Admiral Lands stood glumly alone on the bridge of his flagship. He knew that Causo would have spread the word by now--the launch of the Little Doctor had been illegal, mutinous; the Old Man would be court-martialed or worse when they got back to civilization. No one spoke to him; no one dared look at him. And Lands knew that he would have to relieve himself of command and turn the ship over to Causo, as his X.O., and the fleet to his second-in-command, Admiral Fukuda. Causo's gesture in not arresting him immediately was kind, but it was also useless. Knowing the truth of his disobedience, it would be impossible for the men and officers to follow him and unfair to ask it of them.
Lands turned to give the order, only to find his X.O. already heading toward him. "Sir," said Causo.
"I know," said Lands. "I relieve myself of command."
"No sir," said Causo. "Come with me, sir."
"What do you plan to do?" asked Lands.
"The cargo officer has reported something in the main hold of the ship."
"What is it?" asked Lands.
Causo just looked at him. Lands nodded, and they walked together from the bridge.
Jane had taken the box of the starship, not into the weapons bay of the flagship, for that could hold only the Little Doctor, not the box around it, but rather into the main hold, which was much more copious and which also lacked any practical means of relaunching the weapon.
Peter and Wang-mu stepped out of the starship and into the hold.
Then Jane took away the starship, leaving Peter, Wang-mu, and the Little Doctor behind.
Back on Lusitania, the starship would reappear. But no one would get into it. No one needed to. The M.D. Device was no longer heading for Lusitania. Now it was in the hold of the flagship of the Lusitania Fleet, traveling at a relativistic speed toward oblivion. The proximity sensor on the Little Doctor would not be triggered, of course, since it was nowhere near an object of planetary mass. But the timer was still chugging away.
"I hope they notice us soon," said Wang-mu.
"Oh, don't worry. We have whole minutes left."
"Has anyone seen us yet?"
"There was a fellow in that office," said Peter, pointing toward an open door. "He saw the starship, then he saw us, then he saw the Little Doctor. Now he's gone. I don't think we'll be alone much longer."
A door high up the front wall of the hold opened. Three men stepped onto the balcony that overlooked the hold on three sides.
"Hi," said Peter.
"Who the hell are you?" asked the one with the most ribbons and trim on his uniform.
"I'm betting you're Admiral Bobby Lands," said Peter. "And you must be the executive officer, Causo. And you must be the cargo officer, Lung."
"I said who the hell are you!" demanded Admiral Lands.
"I don't think your priorities are straight," said Peter. "I think there'll be plenty of time for us to discuss my identity after you deactivate the timer on this weapon that you so carelessly tossed out into space perilously close to a settled planet."
"If you think you can--"
But the Admiral didn't finish his sentence, because the X.O. was diving over the rail and jumping down to the deck of the cargo hold, where he immediately began twisting the fingerbolts that held the casing over the timer. "Causo," said Lands, "that can't be the--"
"It's the Little Doctor, all right, sir," said Causo.
"We launched it!" shouted the Admiral.
"But that must have been a mistake," said Peter. "An oversight. Because Starways Congress revoked your authorization to launch it."
"Who are you and how did you get here?"
Causo stood up, sweat dripping off his brow. "Sir, I am pleased to report that with more than two minutes' leeway, I have managed to prevent our ship from being blown into its constituent atoms."
"I'm glad to see that you didn't have any nonsense about requiring two separate keys and a secret combination to get that thing switched off," said Peter.
"No, it was designed to make turning it off pretty easy," said Causo. "There are directions on how to do it all over this thing. Now, turning it on--that's hard."
"But somehow you managed to do it," said Peter.
"Where is your vehicle?" said the Admiral. He was climbing down a ladder to the deck. "How did you get here?"
"We came in a nice box, which we discarded when it was no longer needed," said Peter. "Haven't you gathered, yet, that we did not come to be interrogated by you?"
"Arrest these two," Lands ordered.
Causo looked at the admiral as if he were crazy. But the cargo officer, who had followed the admiral down the ladder, moved to obey, taking a couple of steps toward Peter and Wang-mu.
/> Instantly, they disappeared and reappeared up on the balcony where the three officers had come in. Of course it took a moment or two for the officers to find them. The cargo officer was merely baffled. "Sir," he said. "They were right here a second ago."
Causo, on the other hand, had already decided that something unusual was going on for which there was no appropriate military response. So he was responding according to another pattern. He crossed himself and began murmuring a prayer.
Lands, however, took a few steps backward, until he bumped into the Little Doctor. He clung to it, then suddenly pulled his hands away from it with loathing, perhaps even with pain, as if the surface of it had suddenly become scorching hot to his hands. "Oh God," he said. "I tried to do what Ender Wiggin would have done."
Wang-mu couldn't help it. She laughed aloud.
"That's odd," said Peter. "I was trying to do exactly the same thing."
"Oh God," said Lands again.
"Admiral Lands," said Peter, "I have a suggestion. Instead of spending a couple of months of realtime trying to turn this ship around and launch this thing illegally again, and instead of trying to establish a useless, demoralizing quarantine around Lusitania, why don't you just head on back to one of the Hundred Worlds--Trondheim is close--and in the meantime, make a report to Starways Congress. I even have some ideas about what the report might say, if you want to hear them."
In answer, Lands took out a laser pistol and pointed it at Peter.
Immediately, Peter and Wang-mu disappeared from where they were and reappeared behind Lands. Peter reached out and deftly disarmed the Admiral, unfortunately breaking two of his fingers in the process. "Sorry, I'm out of practice," said Peter. "I haven't had to use my martial arts skills in--oh, thousands of years."
Lands sank to his knees, nursing his injured hand.
"Peter," Wang-mu said, "can we stop having Jane move us around like that? It's really disorienting."
Peter winked at her. "Want to hear my ideas about your report?" Peter asked the admiral.
Lands nodded.
"Me too," said Causo, who clearly foresaw that he would be commanding this ship for some time.
"I think you need to use your ansible to report that due to a malfunction, it was reported that a launch of the Little Doctor took place. But in fact, the launch was aborted in time, and to prevent further mishap, you had the M.D. Device moved to the main hold where you disarmed and disabled it. You get the part about disabling it?" Peter asked Causo.
Causo nodded. "I'll do it at once, sir." He turned to the cargo officer. "Get me a tool kit."
While the cargo officer went to pull a kit out of the storage bin on the wall, Peter continued. "Then you can report that you entered into contact with a native of Lusitania--that's me--who was able to satisfy you that the descolada virus was completely under control and that it no longer poses a threat to anybody."
"And how do I know that?" said Lands.
"Because I carry what's left of the virus, and if it weren't utterly killed, you would catch the descolada and die of it in a couple of days. Now, in addition to certifying that Lusitania poses no threat, your report should also state that the rebellion of Lusitania was no more than a misunderstanding, and that far from there being any human interference in the pequenino culture, the pequeninos exercised their free rights as sentient beings on their own planet to acquire information and technology from friendly visiting aliens--namely, the human colony of Milagre. Since that time, many of the pequeninos have become very adept at much human science and technology, and at some reasonable time in the future they will send ambassadors to Starways Congress and hope that Congress will return the courtesy. Are you getting this?"
Lands nodded. Causo, working on taking apart the firing mechanism of the Little Doctor, grunted his assent.
"You may also report that the pequeninos have entered into alliance with yet another alien race, which contrary to various premature reports, was not completely extinguished in the notorious xenocide of Ender Wiggin. One cocooned hive queen survived, she being the source of all the information contained in the famous book The Hive Queen, whose accuracy is now proved to be unassailable. The Hive Queen of Lusitania, however, does not wish to exchange ambassadors with Starways Congress at the present time, and prefers instead that her interests be represented by the pequeninos."
"There are still buggers?" asked Lands.
"Ender Wiggin did not, technically speaking, commit xenocide after all. So if your launch of this missile, here, hadn't been aborted, you would have been the cause of the first xenocide, not the second one. And as it stands right now, however, there has never been a xenocide, though not for lack of trying both times, I must admit."
Tears coursed down Lands's face. "I didn't want to do it. I thought it was the right thing. I thought I had to do it to save--"
"Let's say you take that up with the ship's therapist at some later time," said Peter. "We still have one more point to address. We have a technology of starflight that I think the Hundred Worlds would like to have. You've already seen a demonstration of it. Usually, though, we prefer to do it inside our rather unstylish and boxy-looking starships. Still, it's a pretty good method and it lets us visit other worlds without losing even a second of our lives. I know that those who hold the keys to our method of starflight would be delighted, over the next few months, to instantaneously transport all relativistic starships currently in flight to their destinations."
"But there's a price for it," said Causo, nodding.
"Well, let's just say that there's a precondition," said Peter. "A key element of our instantaneous starflight includes a computer program that Starways Congress recently tried to kill. We found a substitute method, but it's not wholly adequate or satisfactory, and I think I can safely say that Starways Congress will never have the use of instantaneous starflight until all the ansibles in the Hundred Worlds are reconnected to all the computer networks on every world, without delays and without those pesky little snoop programs that keep yipping away like ineffectual little dogs."
"I don't have any authority to--"
"Admiral Lands, I didn't ask you to decide. I merely suggested the contents of the message you might want to send, by ansible, to Starways Congress. Immediately."
Lands looked away. "I don't feel well," he said. "I think I'm incapacitated. Executive Officer Causo, in front of Cargo Officer Lung, I hereby transfer command of this ship to you, and order you to notify Admiral Fukuda that he is now commander of this fleet."
"Won't work," said Peter. "The message I've described has to come from you. Fukuda isn't here and I don't intend to go repeat all of this to him. So you will make the report, and you will retain command of fleet and ship, and you will not weasel out of your responsibility. You made a hard choice a while back. You chose wrong, but at least you chose with courage and determination. Show the same courage now, Admiral. We haven't punished you here today, except for my unfortunate clumsiness with your fingers, for which I really am sorry. We're giving you a second chance. Take it, Admiral."
Lands looked at Peter and tears began to flow down his cheeks. "Why did you give me a second chance?"
"Because that's what Ender always wanted," said Peter. "And maybe by giving you a second chance, he'll get one, too."
Wang-mu took Peter's hand and squeezed it.
Then they disappeared from the cargo hold of the flagship and reappeared inside the control room of a shuttle orbiting the planet of the descoladores.
Wang-mu looked around at a room full of strangers. Unlike Admiral Lands's starship, this craft had no artificial gravity, but by holding onto Peter's hand Wang-mu kept from either fainting or throwing up. She had no idea who any of these people were, but she did know that Firequencher had to be a pequenino and the nameless worker at one of the computer terminals was a creature of the kind once hated and feared as the merciless buggers.
"Hi, Ela, Quara, Miro," said Peter. "This is Wang-mu."
Wang-mu wou
ld have been terrified, except that the others were so obviously terrified to see them.
Miro was the first to recover enough to speak. "Didn't you forget your spaceship?" he asked.
Wang-mu laughed.
"Hi, Royal Mother of the West," said Miro, using the name of Wang-mu's ancestor-of-the-heart, a god worshiped on the world of Path. "I've heard all about you from Jane," Miro added.
A woman drifted in through a corridor at one end of the control room.
"Val?" said Peter.
"No," answered the woman. "I'm Jane."
"Jane," whispered Wang-mu. "Malu's god."
"Malu's friend," said Jane. "As I am your friend, Wang-mu." She reached Peter and, taking him by both hands, looked him in the eye. "And your friend too, Peter. As I've always been your friend."
16
"HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY
AREN'T QUIVERING IN
TERROR?"
"O Gods! You are unjust!
My mother and father
deserved to have
a better child
than me!"
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
"You had the Little Doctor in your possession and you gave it back?" asked Quara, sounding incredulous.
Everyone, Miro included, assumed she meant that she didn't trust the fleet not to use it.
"It was dismantled in front of my eyes," said Peter.
"Well, can it be mantled again?" she asked.
Wang-mu tried to explain. "Admiral Lands isn't going to be able to go down that road now. We wouldn't have left things unsettled. Lusitania is safe."
"She's not talking about Lusitania," said Ela coldly. "She's talking about here. The descolada planet."
"Am I the only person who thought of it?" said Quara. "Tell the truth--it would solve all our worries about followup probes, about new outbreaks of even worse versions of the descolada--"
"You're thinking of blowing up a world populated by a sentient race?" asked Wang-mu.
"Not right now," said Quara, sounding as if Wang-mu were the stupidest person she had ever wasted time talking to. "If we determine that they're, you know, what Valentine called them. Varelse. Unable to be reasoned with. Impossible to coexist with."