Ben Bova - Children Of The Mind.pdf

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file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Ben%20Bova%20-%20Children%20Of%20The%20Mind.txt
CHILDREN OF THE MIND
To Barbara Bova,
whose toughness, wisdom, and empathy
make her a great agent
and an even better friend
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. “I’m Not Myself”
2. “You Don’t Believe in God”
3. “There Are Too Many of Us”
4. “I Am a Man of Perfect Simplicity”
5. “Nobody Is Rational”
6. “Life Is a Suicide Mission”
7. “I Offer Her This Poor Old Vessel”
8. “What Matters Is Which Fiction You Believe”
9. “It Smells Like Life to Me”
10. “This Has Always Been Your Body”
11. “You Called Me Back from Darkness”
12. “Am I Betraying Ender?”
13. “Till Death Ends All Surprises”
14. “How They Communicate with Animals”
15. “We’re Giving You a Second Chance”
16. “How Do You Know They Aren’t Quivering in Terror”
17. “The Road Goes On without Him Now”
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My heartfelt thanks to:
Glenn Makitka, for the title, which seems so obvious now, but which never
crossed my mind until he suggested it in a discussion in Hatrack River on
America Online;
Van Gessel, for introducing me to Hikari and Kenzaburo Oe, and for his masterful
translation of Shusaku Endo's Deep River;
Helpful readers in Hatrack River, like Stephen Boulet and Sandi Golden, who
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caught typographical errors and inconsistencies in the manuscript;
Tom Doherty and Beth Meacham at Tor, who allowed me to split Xenocide in half in
order to have a chance to develop and write the second half of the story
properly;
My friend and fellow weeder in the vineyards of literature, Kathryn H. Kidd, for
her chapter-by-chapter encouragement;
Kathleen Bellamy and Scott J. Alien for Sisyphean service;
Kristine and Geoff for careful reading that helped me resolve contradictions and
unclarities; and
My wife, Kristine, and my children, Geoffrey, Emily, Charlie Ben, and Zina, for
patience with my strange schedule and self-absorption during the writing
process, and for teaching me all that is worth telling stories about.
This novel was begun at home in Greensboro, North Carolina, and finished on the
road at Xanadu II in Myrtle Beach, in the Hotel Panama in San Rafael, and in Los
Angeles in the home of my dear cousins Mark and Margaret Park, whom I thank for
their friendship and their hospitality. Chapters were uploaded in manuscript
form into the Hatrack River Town Meeting on America Online, where several dozen
fellow citizens of that virtual community downloaded it, read it, and commented
on it to the book's and my great benefit.
CHAPTER 1
“I'M NOT MYSELF”
"Mother. Father. Did I do it right?"
The last words of Han Qing-jao, from
The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
Si Wang-mu stepped forward. The young man named Peter took her hand and led her
into the starship. The door closed behind them.
Wang-mu sat down on one of the swiveling chairs inside the small metal-walled
room. She looked around, expecting to see something strange and new. Except for
the metal walls, it could have been any office on the world of Path. Clean, but
not fastidiously so. Furnished, in a utilitarian way. She had seen holos of
ships in flight: the smoothly streamlined fighters and shuttles that dipped into
and out of the atmosphere; the vast rounded structures of the starships that
accelerated as near to the speed of light as matter could get. On the one hand,
the sharp power of a needle; on the other, the massive power of a sledgehammer.
But here in this room, no power at all. Just a room.
Where was the pilot? There must be a pilot, for the young man who sat across the
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room from her, murmuring to his computer, could hardly be controlling a starship
capable of the feat of traveling faster than light.
And yet that must have been precisely what he was doing, for there were no other
doors that might lead to other rooms. The starship had looked small from the
outside; this room obviously used all the space that it contained. There in the
corner were the batteries that stored energy from the solar collectors on the
top of the ship. In that chest, which seemed to be insulated like a
refrigerator, there might be food and drink. So much for life support. Where was
the romance in starflight now, if this was all it took? A mere room.
With nothing else to watch, she watched the young man at the computer terminal.
Peter Wiggin, he said his name was. The name of the ancient Hegemon, the one who
first united all the human race under his control, back when people lived on
only one world, all the nations and races and religions and philosophies crushed
together elbow to elbow, with nowhere to go but into each other's lands, for the
sky was a ceiling then, and space was a vast chasm that could not be bridged.
Peter Wiggin, the man who ruled the human race. This was not him, of course, and
he had admitted as much. Andrew Wiggin sent him; Wang-mu remembered, from things
that Master Han had told her, that Andrew Wiggin had somehow made him. Did this
make the great Speaker of the Dead Peter's father? Or was he somehow Ender's
brother, not just named for but actually embodying the Hegemon who had died
three thousand years before?
Peter stopped murmuring, leaned back in his chair, and sighed. He rubbed his
eyes, then stretched and groaned. It was a very indelicate thing to do in
company. The sort of thing one might expect from a coarse fieldworker.
He seemed to sense her disapproval. Or perhaps he had forgotten her and now
suddenly remembered that he had company. Without straightening himself in his
chair, he turned his head and looked at her.
"Sorry," he said. "I forgot I was not alone."
Wang-mu longed to speak boldly to him, despite a lifetime retreating from bold
speech. After all, he had spoken to her with offensive boldness, when his
starship appeared like a fresh-sprouted mushroom on the lawn by the river and he
emerged with a single vial of a disease that would cure her home world, Path, of
its genetic illness. He had looked her in the eye not fifteen minutes ago and
said, "Come with me and you'll be part of changing history. Making history." And
despite her fear, she had said yes.
Had said yes, and now sat in a swivel chair watching him behave crudely,
stretching like a tiger in front of her. Was that his beast-of-the-heart, the
tiger? Wang-mu had read the Hegemon. She could believe that there was a tiger in
that great and terrible man. But this one? This boy? Older than Wang-mu, but she
was not too young to know immaturity when she saw it. He was going to change the
course of history! Clean out the corruption in the Congress. Stop the Lusitania
Fleet. Make all colony planets equal members of the Hundred Worlds. This boy who
stretched like a jungle cat.
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"I don't have your approval," he said. He sounded annoyed and amused, both at
once. But then she might not be good at understanding the inflections of one
such as this. Certainly it was hard to read the grimaces of such a round-eyed
man. Both his face and his voice contained hidden languages that she could not
understand.
"You must understand," he said. "I'm not myself."
Wang-mu spoke the common language well enough at least to understand the idiom.
"You are unwell today?" But she knew even as she said it that he had not meant
the expression idiomatically at all.
"I'm not myself," he said again. "I'm not really Peter Wiggin."
"I hope not," said Wang-mu. "I read about his funeral in school."
"I do look like him, though, don't I?" He brought up a hologram into the air
over his computer terminal. The hologram rotated to look at Wang-mu; Peter sat
up and assumed the same pose, facing her.
"There is a resemblance," she said.
"Of course, I'm younger," said Peter. "Because Ender didn't see me again after
he left Earth when he was -- what, five years old? A little runt, anyway. I was
still a boy. That's what he remembered, when he conjured me out of thin air."
"Not air at all," she said. "Out of nothing."
"Not nothing, either," he said. "Conjured me, all the same." He smiled wickedly.
"I can call spirits from the vasty deep."
These words meant something to him, but not to her. In the world of Path she had
been expected to be a servant and so was educated very little. Later, in the
house of Han Fei-tzu, her abilities had been recognized, first by her former
mistress, Han Qing-jao, and later by the master himself. From both she had
acquired some bits of education, in a haphazard way. What teaching there had
been was mostly technical, and the literature she learned was of the Middle
Kingdom, or of Path itself. She could have quoted endlessly from the great poet
Li Qing-jao, for whom her one-time mistress had been named. But of the poet he
was quoting, she knew nothing.
"I can call spirits from the vasty deep," he said again. And then, changing his
voice and manner a little, he answered himself. "Why so can I, or so can any
man. But will they come when you do call for them?"
"Shakespeare?" she guessed.
He grinned at her. She thought of the way a cat smiles at the creature it is
toying with. "That's always the best guess when a European is doing the
quoting," he said.
"The quotation is funny," she said. "A man brags that he can summon the dead.
But the other man says that the trick is not calling, but rather getting them to
come."
He laughed. "What a way you have with humor."
"This quotation means something to you, because Ender called you forth from the
dead."
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He looked startled. "How did you know?"
She felt a thrill of fear. Was it possible? "I did not know, I was making a
joke."
"Well, it's not true. Not literally. He didn't raise the dead. Though he no
doubt thinks he could, if the need arose." Peter sighed. "I'm being nasty. The
words just come to my mind. I don't mean them. They just come."
"It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking
them aloud."
He rolled his eyes. "I wasn't trained for servility, the way you were."
So this was the attitude of one who came from a world of free people -- to sneer
at one who had been a servant through no fault of her own. "I was trained to
keep unpleasant words to myself as a matter of courtesy," she said. "But perhaps
to you, that is just another form of servility."
"As I said, Royal Mother of the West, nastiness comes unbidden to my mouth."
"I am not the Royal Mother," said Wang-mu. "The name was a cruel joke --"
"And only a very nasty person would mock you for it." Peter grinned. "But I'm
named for the Hegemon. I thought perhaps bearing ludicrously overwrought names
was something we might have in common."
She sat silently, entertaining the possibility that he might have been trying to
make friends.
"I came into existence," he said, "only a short while ago. A matter of weeks. I
thought you should know that about me."
She didn't understand.
"You know how this starship works?" he said.
Now he was leaping from subject to subject. Testing her. Well, she had had
enough of being tested. "Apparently one sits within it and is examined by rude
strangers," she said.
He smiled and nodded. "Give as good as you get. Ender told me you were nobody's
servant."
"I was the true and faithful servant of Qing-jao. I hope Ender did not lie to
you about that."
He brushed away her literalism. "A mind of your own." Again his eyes sized her
up; again she felt utterly comprehended by his lingering glance, as she had felt
when he first looked at her beside the river. "Wang-mu, I am not speaking
metaphorically when I tell you I was only just made. Made, you understand, not
born. And the way I was made has much to do with how this starship works. I
don't want to bore you by explaining things you already understand, but you must
know what -- not who -- I am in order to understand why I need you with me. So I
ask again -- do you know how this starship works?"
She nodded. "I think so. Jane, the being who dwells in computers, she holds in
her mind as perfect a picture as she can of the starship and all who are within
it. The people also hold their own picture of themselves and who they are and so
on. Then she moves everything from the real world to a place of nothingness,
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