Quara sighed--but, to her credit, it didn't sound petulant. To Miro's practiced ear, it sounded as though she were really emotionally torn. Not at all the defiant face she showed to her family. "I don't," she said.
"Maybe you didn't forge the chains, but you hold the key and refuse to use it."
"The descolada isn't a chain," she said. "A chain is a nothing. The descolada is alive."
"So am I. So are all my people. Why is their life more important than ours?"
"The descolada doesn't kill you. Your enemy is Ela and my mother. They're the ones who would kill all of you in order to keep the descolada from killing them."
"Of course," said Planter. "Of course they would. As I would kill all of them to protect my people."
"So your quarrel isn't with me."
"Yes it is. Without what you know, humans and pequeninos will end up killing each other, one way or another. They'll have no choice. As long as the descolada can't be tamed, it will eventually destroy humanity or humanity will have to destroy it--and us along with it."
"They'll never destroy it," said Quara.
"Because you won't let them."
"Any more than I'd let them destroy you. Sentient life is sentient life."
"No," said Planter. "With ramen you can live and let live. But with varelse, there can be no dialogue. Only war."
"No such thing," Quara said. Then she launched into the same arguments she had used when Miro talked to her.
When she was finished, there was silence for a while.
"Are they talking still?" Ela whispered to the people who were watching in the visual monitors. Miro didn't hear an answer--somebody probably shook his head no.
"Quara," whispered Planter.
"I'm still here," she answered. To her credit, the argumentative tone was gone from her voice again. She had taken no joy from her cruel moral correctness.
"That's not why you're refusing to help," he said.
"Yes it is."
"You'd help in a minute if it weren't your own family you had to surrender to."
"Not true!" she shouted.
So--Planter struck a nerve.
"You're only so sure you're right because they're so sure you're wrong."
"I am right!"
"When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?"
"I have doubts," whispered Quara.
"Listen to your doubts," said Planter. "Save my people. And yours."
"Who am I to decide between the descolada and our people?"
"Exactly," said Planter. "Who are you to make such a decision?"
"I'm not," she said. "I'm withholding a decision."
"You know what the descolada can do. You know what it will do. Withholding a decision is a decision."
"It's not a decision. It's not an action."
"Failing to try to stop a murder that you might easily stop--how is that not murder?"
"Is this why you wanted to see me? One more person telling me what to do?"
"I have the right."
"Because you took it upon yourself to become a martyr and die?"
"I haven't lost my mind yet," said Planter.
"Right. You've proved your point. Now let them get the descolada back in here and save you."
"No."
"Why not? Are you so sure you're right?"
"For my own life, I can decide. I'm not like you--I don't decide for others to die."
"If humanity dies, I die with them," said Quara.
"Do you know why I want to die?" said Planter.
"Why?"
"So I don't have to watch humans and pequeninos kill each other ever again."
Quara bowed her head.
"You and Grego--you're both the same."
Tears dropped onto the faceplate of the suit. "That's a lie."
"You both refuse to listen to anybody else. You know better about everything. And when you're both done, many many innocent people are dead."
She stood up as if to go. "Die, then," she said. "Since I'm such a murderer, why should I cry over you?" But she didn't take a step. She doesn't want to go, thought Miro.
"Tell them," said Planter.
She shook her head, so vigorously that tears flipped outward from her eyes, spattering the inside of the mask. If she kept that up, soon she wouldn't be able to see a thing.
"If you tell what you know, everybody is wiser. If you keep a secret, then everyone is a fool."
"If I tell, the descolada will die!"
"Then let it!" cried Planter.
The exertion was an extraordinary drain on him. The instruments in the lab went crazy for a few moments. Ela muttered under her breath as she checked with each of the technicians monitoring them.
"Is that how you'd like me to feel about you?" asked Quara.
"It is how you feel about me," whispered Planter. "Let him die."
"No," she said.
"The descolada came and enslaved my people. So what if it's sentient or not! It's a tyrant. It's a murderer. If a human being behaved the way the descolada acts, even you would agree he had to be stopped, even if killing him were the only way. Why should another species be treated more leniently than a member of your own?"
"Because the descolada doesn't know what it's doing," said Quara. "It doesn't understand that we're intelligent."
"It doesn't care," said Planter. "Whoever made the descolada sent it out not caring whether the species it captures or kills are sentient or not. Is that the creature you want all my people and all your people to die for? Are you so filled with hate for your family that you'll be on the side of a monster like the descolada?"
Quara had no answer. She sank onto the stool beside Planter's bed.
Planter reached out a hand and rested it on her shoulder. The suit was not so thick and impermeable that she couldn't feel the pressure of it, even though he was very weak.
"For myself, I don't mind dying," he said. "Maybe because of the third life, we pequeninos don't have the same fear of death that you short-lived humans do. But even though I won't have the third life, Quara, I will have the kind of immortality you humans have. My name will live in the stories. Even if I have no tree at all, my name will live. And what I did. You humans can say that I'm choosing to be a martyr for nothing, but my brothers understand. By staying clear and intelligent to the end, I prove that they are who they are. I help show that our slavemasters didn't make us who we are, and can't stop us from being who we are. The descolada may force us to do many things, but it doesn't own us to the very center. Inside us there is a place that is our true self. So I don't mind dying. I will live forever in every pequenino that is free."
"Why are you saying this when only I can hear?" said Quara.
"Because only you have the power to kill me completely. Only you have the power to make it so my death means nothing, so that all my people die after me and there's no one left to remember. Why shouldn't I leave my testament with you alone? Only you will decide whether or not it has any worth."
"I hate you for this," she said. "I knew you'd do this."
"Do what?"
"Make me feel so terrible that I have to--give in!"
"If you knew I'd do this, why did you come?"
"I shouldn't have! I wish I hadn't!"
"I'll tell you why you came. You came so that I would make you give in. So that when you did it, you'd be doing it for my sake, and not for your family."
"So I'm your puppet?"
"Just the opposite. You chose to come here. You are using me to make you do what you really want to do. At heart you are still human, Quara. You want your people to live. You would be a monster if you didn't."
"Just because you're dying doesn't make you wise," she said.
"Yes it does," said Planter.
"What if I tell you that I'll never cooperate in the killing of the descolada?"
"Then I'll believe you," said Planter.
"And hate me."
"Yes," said Plant
er.
"You can't."
"Yes I can. I'm not a very good Christian. I am not able to love the one who chooses to kill me and all my people."
She said nothing.
"Go away now," he said. "I've said all that I can say. Now I want to chant my stories and keep myself intelligent until death finally comes."
She walked away from him, into the sterilization chamber.
Miro turned toward Ela. "Get everybody out of the lab," he said.
"Why?"
"Because there's a chance that she'll come out and tell you what she knows."
"Then I should be the one to go, and everybody else stay," said Ela.
"No," said Miro. "You're the only one that she'll ever tell."
"If you think that, then you're a complete--"
"Telling anyone else wouldn't hurt her enough to satisfy her," said Miro. "Everybody out."
Ela thought for a moment. "All right," she said to the others. "Get back to the main lab and monitor your computers. I'll bring us up on the net if she tells me anything, and you can see what she enters as we put it in. If you can make sense of what you're seeing, start following it up. Even if she actually knows anything, we still won't have much time to design a truncated descolada so we can get it to Planter before he dies. Go."
They went.
When Quara emerged from the sterilization chamber, she found only Ela and Miro waiting for her.
"I still think it's wrong to kill the descolada before we've even tried to talk to it," she said.
"It may well be," said Ela. "I only know that I intend to do it if I can."
"Bring up your files," said Quara. "I'm going to tell you everything I know about descolada intelligence. If it works and Planter lives through this, I'm going to spit in his face."
"Spit a thousand times," said Ela. "Just so he lives."
Her files came up into the display. Quara began pointing to certain regions of the model of the descolada virus. Within a few minutes, it was Quara sitting before the terminal, typing, pointing, talking, as Ela asked questions.
In his ear, Jane spoke up again. "The little bitch," she said. "She didn't have her files in another computer. She kept everything she knew inside her head."
By late afternoon the next day, Planter was at the edge of death and Ela was at the edge of exhaustion. Her team had worked through the night; Quara had helped, constantly, indefatigably reading over everything Ela's people came up with, critiquing, pointing out errors. By midmorning, they had a plan for a truncated virus that should work. All of the language capability was gone, which meant the new viruses wouldn't be able to communicate with each other. All the analytical ability was gone as well, as near as they could tell. But safely in place were all the parts of the virus that supported bodily functions in the native species of Lusitania. As near as they could possibly tell without having a working sample of the virus, the new design was exactly what was needed--a descolada that was completely functional in the life cycles of the Lusitanian species, including the pequeninos, yet completely incapable of global regulation and manipulation. They named the new virus recolada. The old one had been named for its function of tearing apart; the new one for its remaining function, holding together the species-pairs that made up the native life of Lusitania.
Ender raised one objection--that since the descolada must have been putting the pequeninos into a belligerent, expansive mode, the new virus might lock them into that particular condition. But Ela and Quara answered together that they had deliberately used an older version of the descolada as their model, from a time when the pequeninos were more relaxed--more "themselves." The pequeninos working on the project had agreed to this; there was little time to consult anyone else except Human and Rooter, who also concurred.
With the things that Quara had taught them about the workings of the descolada, Ela also had a team working on a killer bacterium that would spread quickly through the entire planet's gaialogy, finding the normal descolada in every place and every form, tearing it to bits and killing it. It would recognize the old descolada by the very elements that the new descolada would lack. Releasing the recolada and the killer bacterium at the same time should do the job.
There was only one problem remaining--actually making the new virus. That was Ela's direct project from midmorning on. Quara collapsed and slept. So did most of the pequeninos. But Ela struggled on, trying to use all the tools she had to break apart the virus and recombine it as she needed.
But when Ender came late in the afternoon to tell her that it was now or never, if her virus was to save Planter, she could only break down and weep from exhaustion and frustration.
"I can't," she said.
"Then tell him that you've achieved it but you can't get it ready in time and--"
"I mean it can't be done."
"You've designed it."
"We've planned it, we've modeled it, yes. But it can't be made. The descolada is a really vicious design. We can't build it from scratch because there are too many parts that can't hold together unless you have those very sections already working to keep rebuilding each other as they break down. And we can't do modifications of the present virus unless the descolada is at least marginally active, in which case it undoes what we're doing faster than we can do it. It was designed to police itself constantly so it can't be altered, and to be so unstable in all its parts that it's completely unmakable."
"But they made it."
"Yes, but I don't know how. Unlike Grego, I can't completely step outside my science on some metaphysical whim and make things up and wish them into existence, I'm stuck with the rules of nature as they are here and now, and there's no rule that will let me make it."
"So we know where we need to go, but we can't get there from here."
"Until last night I didn't know enough to guess whether we could design this new recolada or not, and therefore I had no way of guessing whether we could make it. I figured that if it was designable, it was makable. I was ready to make it, ready to act the moment Quara relented. All we've achieved is to know, finally, completely, that it can't be done. Quara was right. We definitely found out enough from her to enable us to kill every descolada virus on Lusitania. But we can't make the recolada that could replace it and keep Lusitanian life functioning."
"So if we use the viricide bacterium--"
"All the pequeninos in the world would be where Planter is now within a week or two. And all the grass and birds and vines and everything. Scorched earth. An atrocity. Quara was right." She wept again.
"You're just tired. It was Quara, awake now and looking terrible, not refreshed at all by her sleep.
Ela, for her part, couldn't answer her sister.
Quara looked like she might be thinking of saying something cruel, along the lines of What did I tell you? But she thought better of it, and came and put her hand on Ela's shoulder. "You're tired, Ela. You need to sleep."
"Yes," said Ela.
"But first let's tell Planter."
"Say good-bye, you mean."
"Yes, that's what I mean."
They made their way to the lab that contained Planter's cleanroom. The pequenino researchers who had slept were awake again; all had joined the vigil for Planter's last hours. Miro was inside with Planter again, and this time they didn't make him leave, though Ender knew that both Ela and Quara longed to be inside with him. Instead they both spoke to him over the speakers, explaining what they had found. The half-success that was worse, in its way, than complete failure, because it could easily lead to the destruction of all the pequeninos, if the humans of Lusitania became desperate enough.
"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."