Xenocide

“Where?”

“Inside Andrew Wiggin.”

It took a while for them to explain to her what Ender had learned about Jane from the hive queen. It was strange to think of this computer entity as being centered inside Ender's body, but it made a kind of sense that Jane had been created by the hive queens during Ender's campaign against them. To Valentine, though, there was another, immediate consequence. If the faster-than-light ship could only go where Jane took it, and Jane was inside Ender, there could be only one conclusion.

“Then Andrew has to go?”

“Claro. Of course,” said Grego.

“He's a little old to be a test pilot,” said Valentine.

“In this case he's only a test passenger,” said Grego. “He just happens to hold the pilot inside him.”

“It's not as if the voyage will have any physical stress,” said Olhado. “If Grego's theory works out exactly right, he'll just sit there and after a couple of minutes or actually a microsecond or two, he'll be in the other place. And if it doesn't work at all, he'll just stay right here, with all of us feeling foolish for thinking we could wish our way through space.”

“And if it turns out Jane can get him Outside but can't hold things together there, then he'll be stranded in a place that doesn't even have any placeness to it,” said Valentine.

“Well, yes,” said Grego. “If it works halfway, the passengers are effectively dead. But since we'll be in a place without time, it won't matter to us. It'll just be an eternal instant. Probably not enough time for our brains to notice that the experiment failed. Stasis.”

“Of course, if it works,” said Olhado, “then we'll carry our own spacetime with us, so there would be duration. Therefore, we'll never know if we fail. We'll only notice if we succeed.”

“But I'll know if he never comes back,” said Valentine.

“Right,” said Grego. “If he never comes back, then you'll have a few months of knowing it until the fleet gets here and blasts everything and everybody all to hell.”

“Or until the descolada turns everybody's genes inside out and kills us all,” added Olhado.

“I suppose you're right,” said Valentine. “Failure won't kill them any deader than they'll be if they stay.”

“But you see the deadline pressure that we're under,” said Grego. “We don't have much time left before Jane loses her ansible co

“So even if it works, the first flight might be the last.”

“No,” said Olhado. “The flights are instantaneous. If it works, she can shuttle everybody off this planet in no more time than it takes people to get in and out of the starship.”

“You mean it can take off from a planet surface?”

“That's still iffy,” said Grego. “She might only be able to calculate location within, say ten thousand kilometers. There's no explosion or displacement problem, since the philotes will reenter Inside space ready to obey natural laws again. But if the starship reappears in the middle of a planet it'll still be pretty hard to dig to the surface.”

“But if she can be really precise– within a couple of centimeters, for instance– then the flights can be surface-to-surface,” said Olhado.

“Of course we're dreaming,” said Grego. “Jane's going to come back and tell us that even if she could turn all the stellar mass in the galaxy into computer chips, she couldn't hold all the data she'd have to know in order to make a starship travel this way. But at the moment, it still sounds possible and I am feeling good!”

At that, Grego and Olhado started whooping and laughing so loud that Mayor Kovano came to the door to make sure Valentine was all right. To her embarrassment, he caught her laughing and whooping right along with them.

“Are we happy, then?” asked Kovano.

“I guess,” said Valentine, trying to recover her composure.

“Which of our many problems have we solved?”

“Probably none of them,” said Valentine. “It would be too idiotically convenient if the universe could be manipulated to work this way.”

“But you've thought of something.”

“The metaphysical geniuses here have a completely unlikely possibility,” said Valentine. “Unless you slipped them something really weird in their lunch.”

Kovano laughed and left them alone. But his visit had had the effect of sobering them again.

“Is it possible?” asked Valentine.

“I would never have thought so,” said Grego. “I mean, there's the problem of origin.”

“It actually answers the problem of origin,” said Olhado. “The Big Bang theory's been around since–”

“Since before I was born,” said Valentine.

“I guess,” said Olhado. “What nobody's been able to figure out is why a Big Bang would ever happen. This way it makes a weird kind of sense. If somebody who was capable of holding the pattern of the entire universe in his head stepped Outside, then all the philotes there would sort themselves out into the largest place in the pattern that they could control. Since there's no time there, they could take a billion years or a microsecond, all the time they needed, and then when it was sorted out, bam, there they are, the whole universe, popping out into a new Inside space. And since there's no distance or position– no whereness– then the entire thing would begin the size of a geometric point–”

“No size at all,” said Grego.

“I remember my geometry,” said Valentine.

“And immediately expand, creating space as it grew. As it grew, time would seem to slow down– or do I mean speed up?”

“It doesn't matter,” said Grego. “It all depends whether you're Inside the new space or Outside or in some other Inspace.”

“Anyway, the universe now seems to be constant in time while it's expanding in space. But if you wanted to, you could just as easily see it as constant in size but changing in time. The speed of light is slowing down so that it takes longer to get from one place to another, only we can't tell that it's slowing down because everything else slows down exactly relative to the speed of light. You see? All a matter of perspective. For that matter, as Grego said before, the universe we live in is still, in absolute terms, exactly the size of a geometric point– when you look at it from Outside. Any growth that seems to take place on the Inside is just a matter of relative location and time.”

“And what kills me,” said Grego, “is that this is the kind of thing that's been going on inside Olhado's head all these years. This picture of the universe as a dimensionless point in Outside space is the way he's been thinking all along. Not that he's the first to think of it. Just that he's the one who actually believed it and saw the co

“As long as we're playing metaphysical games,” said Valentine, “then where did this whole thing begin? If what we think of as reality is just a pattern that somebody brought Outside, and the universe just popped into being, then whoever it was is probably still wandering around giving off universes wherever she goes. So where did she come from? And what was there before she started doing it? And how did Outside come to exist, for that matter?”

“That's Inspace thinking,” said Olhado. “That's the way you conceive of things when you still believe in space and time as absolutes. You think of everything starting and stopping, of things having origins, because that's the way it is in the observable universe. The thing is, Outside there're no rules like that at all. Outside was always there and always will be there. The number of philotes there is infinite, and all of them always existed. No matter how many of them you pull out and put into organized universes, there'll be just as many left as there always were.”

“But somebody had to start making universes.”