Xenocide

“So you're a career father,” said Valentine.

“Who works at a brick factory to feed and clothe the family. Not a brickmaker who also has kids. Lini also feels the same way.”

“Lini?”

“Jaqueline. My wife. She followed her own road to the same place. We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.”

“You'd be surprised,” said Valentine.

“It's a boring life, to read about,” said Olhado. “Not to live, though.”

“So the secret that you protect from your tormented siblings is– happiness.”

“Peace. Beauty. Love. All the great abstractions. I may see them in bas-relief, but I see them up close.”

“And you learned it from Andrew. Does he know?”

“I think so,” said Olhado. “Do you want to know my most closely guarded secret? When we're alone together, just him and me, or me and Lini and him– when we're alone, I call him Papa, and he calls me Son.”

Valentine made no effort to stop her tears from flowing, as if they flowed half for him and half for her. “So Ender does have children, after all,” she said.

“I learned how to be a father from him, and I'm a damned good one.”

Valentine leaned forward. It was time to get down to business. “That means that you, more than any of the others, stand to lose something truly beautiful and fine if we don't succeed in our endeavors.”

“I know,” said Olhado. “My choice was a selfish one in the long run. I'm happy, but I can't do anything to help save Lusitania.”

“Wrong,” said Valentine. “You just don't know yet.”

“What can I do?”

“Let's talk a while longer, and see if we can find out. And if it's all right with you, Lauro, your Jaqueline should stop eavesdropping from the kitchen now, and come on in and join us.”

Bashfully, Jaqueline came in and sat beside her husband. Valentine liked the way they held hands. After so many children– it reminded herself of holding hands with Jakt, and how glad it made her feel.

“Lauro,” she said, “Andrew tells me that when you were younger, you were the brightest of all the Ribeira children. That you spoke to him of wild philosophical speculations. Right now, Lauro, my adoptive nephew, it is wild philosophy we need. Has your brain been on hold since you were a child? Or do you still think thoughts of great profundity?”

“I have my thoughts,” said Olhado. “But I don't even believe them myself.”

“We're working on faster-than-light flight, Lauro. We're working on discovering the soul of a computer entity. We're trying to rebuild an artificial virus that has self-defense capabilities built into it. We're working on magic and miracles. So I'd be glad of any insights you can give me on the nature of life and reality.”

“I don't even know what ideas Andrew was talking about,” said Olhado. “I quit studying physics, I–”

“If I want studies, I'll read books. So let me tell you what we told a very bright Chinese servant girl on the world of Path: Let me know your thoughts, and I'll decide for myself what's useful and what isn't.”

“How? You're not a physicist either.”

Valentine walked to the computer waiting quietly in the corner. “May I turn this on?”

“Pois nao,” he said. Of course.

“Once it's on, Jane will be with us.”

“Ender's personal program.”

“The computer entity whose soul we're trying to locate.”

“Ah,” he said. “Maybe you should be telling me things.”

“I already know what I know. So start talking. About those ideas you had as a child, and what has become of them since.”

Quara had a chip on her shoulder from the moment Miro entered the room. “Don't bother,” she said.

“Don't bother what?”

“Don't bother telling me my duty to humanity or to the family– two separate, non-overlapping groups, by the way.”

“Is that what I came for?” asked Miro.

“Ela sent you to persuade me to tell her how to castrate the descolada.”

Miro tried a little humor. “I'm no biologist. Is that possible?”

“Don't be cute,” said Quara. “If you cut out their ability to pass information from one virus to another, it's like cutting out their tongues and their memory and everything that makes them intelligent. If she wants to know this stuff, she can study what I studied. It only took me five years of work to get there.”

“There's a fleet coming.”

“So you are an emissary.”

“And the descolada may figure out how to–”

She interrupted him, finished his sentence. “Circumvent all our strategies to control it, I know.”

Miro was a

“Then she should help me learn to talk to the virus. Persuade it to leave us alone. Make a treaty, like Andrew did with the pequeninos. Instead, she's cut me off from the lab. Well, two can play that game. She cuts me off, I cut her off.”

“You were telling secrets to the pequeninos.”

“Oh, yes, Mother and Ela, the guardians of truth! They get to decide who knows what. Well, Miro, let me tell you a secret. You don't protect the truth by keeping other people from knowing it.”

“I know that,” said Miro.

“Mother completely screwed up our family because of her damned secrets. She wouldn't even marry Libo because she was determined to keep a stupid secret, which if he'd known might have saved his life.”

“I know,” said Miro.

This time he spoke with such vehemence that Quara was taken aback. “Oh, well, I guess that was a secret that bothered you more than it did me. But then you should be on my side in this, Miro. Your life would have been a lot better, all our lives would have been, if Mother had only married Libo and told him all her secrets. He'd still be alive, probably.”

Very neat solutions. Tidy little might-have-beens. And false as hell. If Libo had married Novinha, he wouldn't have married Bruxinha, Ouanda's mother, and thus Miro wouldn't have fallen unsuspectingly in love with his own half-sister because she would never had existed at all. That was far too much to say, however, with his halting speech. So he confined himself to saying “Ouanda wouldn't have been born,” and hoped she would make the co

She considered for a moment, and the co

“It's all past,” said Miro.

“Nothing is past,” said Quara. “We're still acting it out, over and over again. The same mistakes, again and again. Mother still thinks that you keep people safe by keeping secrets from them.”

“And so do you,” said Miro.

Quara thought about that for a moment. “Ela was trying to keep the pequeninos from knowing that she was working on destroying the descolada. That's a secret that could have destroyed the whole pequenino society, and they weren't even being consulted. They were preventing the pequeninos from protecting themselves. But what I'm keeping secret is– maybe– a way to intellectually castrate the descolada– to make it half-alive.”

“To save humanity without destroying the pequeninos.”

“Humans and pequeninos, getting together to compromise on how to wipe out a helpless third species!”

“Not exactly helpless.”

She ignored him. “Just the way Spain and Portugal got the Pope to divide up the world between their Catholic Majesties back in the old days right after Columbus. A line on a map, and poof– there's Brazil, speaking Portuguese instead of Spanish. Never mind that nine out of ten Indians had to die, and the rest lose all their rights and power for centuries, even their very languages–”

It was Miro's turn to become impatient. “The descolada isn't the Indians.”