“You are inferior,” said Jane.
“I'm hungry,” said Ender. “And thirsty.”
“Lunch,” said Miro.
“Now you're bragging,” said Jane. “Showing off your bodily functions.”
“Alimentation,” said Ender. “Respiration. Excretion. We can do things you can't do.”
“In other words, you can't think very well, but at least you can eat and breathe and sweat.”
“That's right,” said Miro. He pulled out the bread and cheese while Ender poured the cold water, and they ate. Simple food, but it tasted good and they were satisfied.
Chapter 14 – VIRUS MAKERS
<I've been thinking about what travel between the stars might mean for us.>
<Besides species survival?>
<When you send out your workers, even light-years away, you see through their eyes, don't you?>
<And taste through their antennae, and feel the rhythm of every vibration. When they eat, I feel the crushing of the food within their jaws. That's why I almost always refer to myself as we, when I form my thoughts into a form that Andrew or you can understand, because I live my life in the constant presence of all that they see and taste and feel.>
<It's not quite that way between the fathertrees. We have to try in order to experience each other's life. But we can do it. Here at least, on Lusitania.>
<I can't see why the philotic connection would fail you.>
<Then I, too, will feel all that they feel, and taste the light of another sun on my leaves, and hear the stories of another world. It will be like the wonderment that come when the humans first arrived here. We had never thought that anything could be different from the world we saw till then. But they brought strange creatures with them, and they were strange themselves, and they had machines that performed miracles. The other forests could hardly believe what our fathertrees of that time told them. I remember in fact that our fathertrees had a hard time believing what the brothers of the tribe told them about the humans. Rooter bore the brunt of that, persuading them to believe that it wasn't a lie or madness or a joke.>
<A joke?>
<There are stories of trickster brothers who lie to the fathertrees, but they're always caught and punished terribly.>
<Andrew tells me that such stories are told in order to encourage civilized behavior.>
<It's always tempting to lie to the fathertrees. I did it sometimes myself. Not lying. Just exaggerating. They do it to me now, sometimes.>
<And do you punish them?>
<I remember which ones have lied.>
<If we have a worker who doesn't obey, we make him be alone and he dies.>
<A brother who lies too much has no chance of being a fathertree. They know this. They only lie to play with us. They always end up telling us the truth.>
<What if a whole tribe lies to their fathertrees? How would you ever know?>
<You might better speak of a tribe cutting down its own fathertrees, or burning them.>
<Has it ever happened?>
<Have the workers ever turned against the hive queen and killed her?>
<How could they? Then they would die.>
<You see. There are some things too terrible to think about. Instead I'll think of how it will feel when a fathertree first puts in his roots on another planet, and pushes out his branches into an alien sky, and drinks in sunlight from a strange star.>
<You'll soon learn that there are no strange stars, no alien skies.>
<No?>
<Only skies and stars, in all their varieties. Each one with its own flavor, and all flavors good.>
<Now you think like a tree. Flavors! Of skies!>
<I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet.>
“You're asking me to help you in your rebellion against the gods?”
Wang-mu remained bowed before her mistress– her former mistress– saying nothing. In her heart she had words she might have uttered. No, my mistress, I am asking you to help us in our struggle against the terrible bondage forced on the godspoken by Congress. No, my mistress, I'm asking you to remember your proper duty to your father, which even the godspoken may not ignore if they would be righteous. No, my mistress, I'm asking you to help us discover a way to save a decent and helpless people, the pequeninos, from xenocide.
But Wang-mu said nothing, because this was one of the first lessons she learned from Master Han. When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man. Qing-jao was not hungry for wisdom from Wang-mu, and never would be. So silence was all that Wang-mu could offer. She could only hope that Qing-jao would find her own road to proper obedience, compassionate decency, or the struggle for freedom.
Any motive would do, as long as Qing-jao's brilliant mind could be enlisted on their side. Wang-mu had never felt so useless in her life as now, watching Master Han labor over the questions that Jane had given him. In order to think about faster-than-light travel he was studying physics; how could Wang-mu help him, when she was only learning about geometry? To think about the descolada virus he was studying microbiology; Wang-mu was barely learning the concepts of gaialogy and evolution. And how could she be of any help when he contemplated the nature of Jane? She was a child of manual workers, and her hands, not her mind, held her future. Philosophy was as far above her as the sky was above the earth. “But the sky only seems to be far away from you,” said Master Han, when she told him this. “Actually it is all around you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out, even when you labor with your hands in the mud. That is true philosophy.” But she understood from this only that Master Han was kind, and wanted to make her feel better about her uselessness.
Qing-jao, though, would not be useless. So Wang-mu had handed her a paper with the project names and passwords on them.
“Does Father know you're giving these to me?”
Wang-mu said nothing. Actually, Master Han had suggested it, but Wangmu thought it might be better if Qing-jao didn't know at this point that Wang-mu came as an emissary from her father.
Qing-jao interpreted Wang-mu's silence as Wang-mu assumed she would– that Wang-mu was coming secretly, on her own, to ask for Qingjao's help.
“If Father himself had asked me, I would have said yes, for that is my duty as a daughter,” said Qing-jao.
But Wang-mu knew that Qing-jao wasn't listening to her father these days. She might say that she would be obedient, but in fact her father filled her with such distress that, far from saying yes, Qing-jao would have crumpled to the floor and traced lines all day because of the terrible conflict in her heart, knowing that her father wanted her to disobey the gods.
“I owe nothing to you,” said Qing-jao. “You were a false and disloyal servant to me. Never was there a more unworthy and useless secret maid than you. To me your presence in this house is like the presence of dung beetles at the supper table.”
Again, Wang-mu held her tongue. However, she also refrained from deepening her bow. She had assumed the humble posture of a servant at the beginning of this conversation, but she would not now humiliate herself in the desperate kowtow of a penitent. Even the humblest of us have our pride, and I know, Mistress Qing-jao, that I have caused you no harm, that I am more faithful to you now than you are to yourself.
Qing-jao turned back to her terminal and typed in the first project name, which was “UNGLUING,” a literal translation of the word descolada. “This is all nonsense anyway,” she said as she scanned the documents and charts that had been sent from Lusitania. “It is hard to believe that anyone would commit the treason of communicating with Lusitania only to receive nonsense like this. It is all impossible as science. No world could have developed only one virus that was so complex that it could include within it the genetic code for every other species on the planet. It would be a waste of time for me even to consider this.”