Xenocide

“No,” said Jane. “I have access to all the astronomical data from the satellites there, and in the time humanity has been present in the Lusitania system, Lusitania and its sun have shown all the normal fluctuations. Right now there seems to be an overall trend of global cooling.”

“Then how will the life forms on Lusitania respond?” asked Wang-mu. “The descolada virus won't let them evolve– it tries to destroy anything strange, which is why it's going to kill the humans and the hive queen, if it can.”

Jane, whose small image sat in lotus position in the air over Master Han's terminal, held up a hand. “One moment,” she said.

Then she lowered her hand. “I have been reporting your questions to my friends, and Ela is very excited.”

A new face appeared in the display, just behind and above the image of Jane. She was a dark-ski

But Ela clearly was thinking nothing about Wang-mu at all. She was speaking, instead, of Wang-mu's questions. “Why doesn't the descolada virus permit variety? That should be a trait with negative survival value, and yet the descolada survives. Wang-mu must think I'm such an idiot, not to have thought of this before. But I'm not a gaialogist, and I grew up on Lusitania, so I never questioned it, I just figured that whatever the Lusitanian gaialogy was, it worked– and then I kept studying the descolada. What does Wang-mu think?”

Wang-mu was appalled to hear these words from this stranger. What had Jane told Ela about her? How could Ela even imagine that Wang-mu would think Ela was an idiot, when she was a scientist and Wang-mu was only a servant girl?

“How can it matter what I think?” said Wang-mu.

“What do you think?” said Jane. “Even if you can't think why it might matter, Ela wants to know.”

So Wang-mu told her speculations. “This is very stupid to think of, because it's only a microscopic virus, but the descolada must be doing it all. After all, it contains the genes of every species within it, doesn't it? So it must take care of evolution by itself. Instead of all that genetic drift, the descolada must do the drifting. It could, couldn't it? It could change the genes of a whole species, even while the species is still alive. It wouldn't have to wait for evolution.”

There was a pause again, with Jane holding up her hand. She must be showing Wang-mu's face to Ela, letting her hear Wang-mu's words from her own lips.

“Nossa Senhora,” whispered Ela. “On this world, the descolada is Gaia. Of course. That would explain everything, wouldn't it? So few species, because the descolada only permits the species that it has tamed. It turned a whole planetary gaialogy into something almost as simple as Daisyworld itself.”

Wang-mu thought it was almost fu

Another face appeared next to Ela's, this time an older Caucasian man, perhaps sixty years old, with whitening hair and a very quieting, peaceful look to his face. “But part of Wang-mu's question is still unanswered,” said the man. “How could the descolada ever evolve? How could there have ever been proto-descolada viruses? Why would such a limited gaialogy have survival preference over the slow evolutionary model that every other world with life on it has had?”

“I never asked that question,” said Wang-mu. “Qing-jao asked the first part of it, but the rest of it is his question.”

“Hush,” said Jane. “Qing-jao never asked the question. She used it as a reason not to study the Lusitanian documents. Only you really asked the question, and just because Andrew Wiggin understands your own question better than you do doesn't mean it isn't still yours.”

So this was Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead. He didn't look ancient and wise at all, not the way Master Han did. Instead this Wiggin looked foolishly surprised, the way all round-eyes did, and his face changed with every momentary mood, as if it were out of control. Yet there was that look of peace about him. Perhaps he had some of the Buddha in him. Buddha, after all, had found his own way onto the Path. Maybe this Andrew Wiggin had found a way onto the Path, even though he wasn't Chinese at all.

Wiggin was still asking the questions that he thought were Wang-mu's. “The odds against the natural occurrence of such a virus are– unbelievable. Long before a virus evolved that could link species together and control a whole gaialogy, the proto-descoladas would have destroyed all life. There wasn't any time for evolution– the virus is just too destructive. It would have killed everything in its earliest form, and then died out itself when it ran out of organisms to pillage.”

“Maybe the pillaging came later,” said Ela. “Maybe it evolved in symbiosis with some other species that benefited from its ability to genetically transform all the individuals within it, all within a matter of days or weeks. It might only have extended to other species later.”

“Maybe,” said Andrew.

A thought occurred to Wang-mu. “The descolada is like one of the gods,” she said. “It comes and changes everybody whether they like it or not.”

“Except the gods have the decency to go away,” said Wiggin.

He responded so quickly that Wang-mu realized that Jane must now be transmitting everything that was done or said instantaneously across the billions of kilometers of space between them. From what Wang-mu had learned about ansible costs, this sort of thing would be possible only for the military; a business that tried a realtime ansible linkup would pay enough money to provide housing for every poor person on an entire planet. And I'm getting this for free, because of Jane. I'm seeing their faces and they're seeing mine, even at the moment they speak.

“Do they?” asked Ela. “I thought the whole problem that Path was having is that the gods won't go away and leave them alone.”

Wang-mu answered with bitterness. “The gods are like the descolada in every way. They destroy anything they don't like, and the people they do like they transform into something that they never were. Qing-jao was once a good and bright and fu

“All because of genetic alteration by Congress,” said Wiggin. “A deliberate change introduced by people who were forcing you to fit their own plan.”

“Yes,” said Ela. “Just like the descolada.”

“What do you mean?” asked Wiggin.

“A deliberate change introduced here by people who were trying to force Lusitania to fit their own plan.”

“What people?” asked Wang-mu. “Who would do such a terrible thing?”

“It's been at the back of my mind for years,” said Ela. “It bothered me that there were so few life forms on Lusitania– you remember, Andrew, that was part of the reason we discovered that the descolada was involved in the pairing of species. We knew that there was a catastrophic change here that wiped out all those species and restructured the few survivors. The descolada was more devastating to most life on Lusitania than a collision with an asteroid. But we always assumed because we found the descolada here that it evolved here. I knew it made no sense– just what Qing-jao said– but since it had obviously happened, then it didn't matter whether it made sense or not. But what if it didn't happen? What if the descolada came from the gods? Not god gods, of course, but some sentient species that developed this virus artificially?”

“That would be monstrous,” said Wiggin. “To create a poison like that and send it out to other worlds, not knowing or caring what you kill.”