“You won't use it,” whispered Planter. The microphones, sensitive as they were, could barely pick up his voice.
“We won't,” said Quara. “But we're not the only people here.”
“You won't use it,” he said. “I'm the only one who'll ever die like this.”
The last of his words were voiceless; they read his lips later, from the holo recording, to be sure of what he said. And, having said it, having heard their good-byes, he died.
The moment the monitoring machines confirmed his death, the pequeninos of the research group rushed into the cleanroom. No need for sterilization now. They wanted the descolada with them. Brusquely moving Miro out of the way, they set to work, injecting the virus into every part of Planter's body, hundreds of injections in moments. They had been preparing for this, obviously. They would respect Planter's sacrifice in life– but once he was dead, his honor satisfied, they had no compunctions about trying to save him for the third life if they could.
They took him out into the open space where Human and Rooter stood, and laid him on a spot already marked, forming an equilateral triangle with those two young fathertrees. There they flayed his body and staked it open. Within hours a tree was growing, and there was hope, briefly, that it might be a fathertree. But it took only a few days more for the brothers, who were adept at recognizing a young fathertree, to declare that the effort had failed. There was a kind of life, containing his genes, yes; but the memories, the will, the person who was Planter was lost. The tree was mute; there would be no mind joining the perpetual conclave of the fathertrees. Planter had determined to free himself of the descolada, even if it meant losing the third life that was the descolada's gift to those it possessed. He succeeded, and, in losing, won.
He had succeeded in something else, too. The pequeninos departed from their normal pattern of forgetting quickly the name of mere brothertrees. Though no little mother would ever crawl its bark, the brothertree that had grown from his corpse would be known by the name of Planter and treated with respect, as if it were a fathertree, as if it were a person. Moreover, his story was told and told again throughout Lusitania, wherever pequeninos lived. He had proved that pequeninos were intelligent even without the descolada; it was a noble sacrifice, and speaking the name of Planter was a reminder to all pequeninos of their fundamental freedom from the virus that had put them in bondage.
But Planter's death did not give any pause to the preparations for pequenino colonization of other worlds. Warmaker's people had a majority now, and as rumors spread that the humans had a bacterium capable of killing all the descolada, they had an even greater urgency. Hurry, they told the hive queen again and again. Hurry, so we can win free of this world before the humans decide to kill us all.
“I can do it, I think,” said Jane. “If the ship is small and simple, the cargo almost nothing, the crew as few as possible, then I can hold the pattern of it in my mind. If the voyage is brief, the stay in Outspace very short. As for holding the locations of the start and finish in my mind, that's easy, child's play, I can do it within a millimeter, less. If I slept, I could do it in my sleep. So there's no need for it to endure acceleration or provide extended life support. The starship can be simple. A sealed environment, places to sit, light, heat. If in fact we can get there and I can hold it all together and bring us back, then we won't be out in space long enough to use up the oxygen in a small room.”
They were all gathered in the Bishop's office to listen to her– the whole Ribeira family, Jakt's and Valentine's family, the pequenino researchers, several priests and Filhos, and perhaps a dozen other leaders of the human colony. The Bishop had insisted on having the meeting in his office. “Because it's large enough,” he had said, “and because if you're going to go out like Nimrod and hunt before the Lord, if you're going to send a ship like Babel out to heaven to seek the face of God, then I want to be there to plead with God to be merciful to you.”
“How much of your capacity is left?” Ender asked Jane.
“Not much,” she said. “As it is, every computer in the Hundred Worlds will be sluggish while we do it, as I use their memory to hold the pattern.”
“I ask, because we want to try to perform an experiment while we're out there.”
“Don't waffle about it, Andrew,” said Ela. “We want to perform a miracle while we're there. If we get Outside it means that Grego and Olhado are probably right about what it's like out there. And that means that the rules are different. Things can be created just by comprehending the pattern of them. So I want to go. There's a chance that while I'm there, holding the pattern of the recolada virus in my mind, I might be able to create it. I might be able to bring back a virus that can't be made in realspace. Can you take me? Can you hold me there long enough to make the virus?”
“How long is that?” asked Jane.
“It should be instantaneous,” said Grego. “The moment we arrive, whatever full patterns we hold in our minds should be created within a period of time too brief for humans to notice. The real time will be taken analyzing to see if, in fact, she's got the virus she wanted. Maybe five minutes.”
“Yes,” said Jane. “If I can do this at all, I can do it for five minutes.”
“The rest of the crew,” said Ender.
“The rest of the crew will be you and Miro,” said Jane. “And no one else.”
Grego protested loudest, but he was not alone.
“I'm a pilot,” said Jakt.
“I'm the only pilot of this ship,” said Jane.
“Olhado and I thought of it,” said Grego.
“Ender and Miro will come because it can't be done safely without them. I dwell within Ender– where he goes, he carries me with him. Miro, on the other hand, has become so close to me that I think he might be part of the pattern that is myself. I want him there because I may not be whole without him. No one else. I can't have anyone else in the pattern. Ela is the only one beyond these two.”
“Then that's the crew,” said Ender.
“With no argument,” added Mayor Kovano.
“Will the hive queen build the ship?” asked Jane.
“She will,” said Ender.
“Then I have only one more favor to ask. Ela, if I can give you the five minutes, can you also hold the pattern of another virus in your mind?”
“The virus for Path?” she asked.
“We owe them that, if we can, for the help they gave to us.”
“I think so,” she said, “or at least the differences between it and the normal descolada. That's all I can possibly hold of anything– the differences.”
“And how soon will all this happen?” asked the Mayor.
“However fast the hive queen can build the ship,” said Jane. “We have only forty-eight days until the Hundred Worlds shut down their ansibles. I will survive that day, we know that now, but it will cripple me. It will take me awhile to relearn all my lost memories, if I ever can. Until that's happened, I can't possibly sustain the pattern of a ship to go Outside.”
“The hive queen can have a ship as simple as this one built long before then,” said Ender. “In a ship so small there's no chance of shuttling all the people and pequeninos off Lusitania before the fleet arrives, let alone before the ansible cut-off keeps Jane from being able to fly the ship. But there'll be time to take new, descolada-free pequenino communities– a brother, a wife, and many pregnant little mothers– to a dozen planets and establish them there. Time to take new hive queens in their cocoons, already fertilized to lay their first few hundred eggs, to a dozen worlds as well. If this works at all, if we don't just sit there like idiots in a cardboard box wishing we could fly, then we'll come back with peace for this world, freedom from the danger of the descolada, and safe dispersal for the genetic heritage of the other species of ramen here. A week ago, it looked impossible. Now there's hope.”