Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  “Please settle something for me, Jane,” said Thulium.

  “There’s something left to settle?” Jane asked.

  “When I left Nest, I thought I was bringing Sprout back with me. But he wasn’t with me when I arrived. Did I take him Outside, but he returned Inside to a place of his own choosing? Or did I never take him anywhere, and he just remained there on Nest?”

  “And this makes a difference to you because?”

  “If Sprout brought himself back Inside to a place of his choosing,” said Thulium, “then he’s as capable of this leaping thing we do as I am.”

  “Not as practiced, perhaps,” said Jane, “but as capable, yes.”

  “Can anyone learn it?” asked Thulium.

  “We know that it comes easily to leguminids,” said Jane. “And also to Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-Mu. Not to mention Miro. But the Hive Queen assures me that most aiúas lack the capacity to carry anyone besides themselves completely. Things would fall apart Outside, and not all could be brought back In.”

  “Unpleasant,” said Dog. “I take it my aiúa—the thing we call inwit, I believe—is not one of those capable.”

  “I don’t understand your brains,” said Jane. “You have capacity far beyond brain size.”

  “Our brains are organized on different principles than your mammalian brains. Dinosaurs also had very small brains to control gigantic bodies. Whatever tricks their brains played to bring it off, our brains also did. But it isn’t a matter of brain size, is it, Jane?”

  “Dog,” said Sprout, “what Jane is reluctant to tell you is that she doesn’t know if she’s ready to train any of the birds of Nest. Imagine if vast hordes of keas suddenly appeared on any populated world and played a game of chaos with the people there.”

  “Sounds fun,” said Peter.

  “Disastrous,” said Dog. “But ravens are not keas.”

  “Sharing this with other humans is perilous enough,” said Jane. “If you can learn to do it, Dog, then the power would be forever out of my control. You would share it where you wanted. And I would have unleashed chaos on the universe.”

  “How do you control these humans—these children you’ve already shared it with?”

  “I can watch over them, because they’re only a few, and whatever they do with it I can undo instantly. But it’s beyond my bandwidth to be able to control a thousand ravens.”

  “I don’t want the power,” said Dog. “I just wondered if you would teach me, if I had a good reason to desire it.”

  “Dog,” said Jane, “I will refuse you nothing. You don’t need a reason. But give me time to sort things out. Wait until we meet with the people underground on Nest. The Folk, Ruqyaq called them.”

  “The Runa,” said Dog. “It’s the Quechua name for themselves. ‘The Folk’ is a decent translation. Their language is called Runa Simi—‘folk talking.’”

  “The Runa,” said Jane. “When can we meet them?”

  “When I go back home,” said Dog, “I will invite Ruqyaq and Royal Son and Phoenix to go with me to talk with the Huapaya. The leader of the Runa.”

  “Thank you,” said Jane.

  “We will tell them all that we have learned,” said Dog. “Then the Huapaya will call a Council and they will decide what to do about you.”

  Sprout finally spoke up again. “Dog, you watched the vidrec. Since I didn’t know it was being recorded, I did what I would do if no one was watching except the keas. Please tell me. Did I do well, or did I make mistakes? If I made mistakes, I want to learn from them so I don’t make them again.”

  Dog flew to Sprout and landed on the table he was seated at. “Sprout, the humans I have met so far could not have chosen an emissary who did better than you. You made no mistakes, because you tried no strategies. You simply responded to ridiculous provocations according to your own inwit, and that is always the right course.”

  Sprout felt tears dribbling down his cheeks. Foolish child, he told himself. Yet he knew they were tears of relief, because his deepest self-doubt had been answered, had been taken away. He could trust himself.

  Which meant he didn’t have to rely on Thulium to tell him his worth.

  “When can we go back?” asked Sprout.

  “I will send Dog back at once, if she wants to go,” said Jane. “Or she can stay as long as she wants, and see whatever she wants to see, and speak with anyone who won’t die of heart failure to have a raven talk to them.”

  “May I take a copy of that vidrec back with me?” asked Dog. “I believe it will be as convincing to the Folk as it was to you.”

  “Can your computers read it?” asked a pequenino.

  “Our computers and yours work on the same principles,” said Dog, “because everybody had computers before the Huapaya left the Sol System. I assume the rec is both two and three dimensional.”

  “It can be read either way,” said the pequenino.

  “Good.”

  “I will go with you to help them understand the format of the drive,” said the pequenino.

  “The Yachachiyruna will figure it out and make it work,” said Dog. “But your offer was thoughtful and brave. Since humans always need names, I assume you, who work with humans, have one?”

  “I am called Fingers,” said the pequenino.

  “Don’t all your kind have fingers?”

  “Fingers is a translation of ‘digits,’” said Finger. “Because I work with digital machines and know how they work, my people call me Fingers, and so do the humans here—the few who ever ask a pequenino for a name.”

  “Can’t they tell you apart?” asked Dog. “They can’t tell ravens or keas apart until one of them speaks.”

  “They know me well enough,” said Fingers. “Because when there’s a computer problem to solve, they don’t ask any of the other pequeninos to help. Just me.”

  Quara laughed. “Well, it’s nice to know how careless and stupid we look to the people we pretend to respect.”

  “Respect is always a pretense,” said Si Wang-Mu. “It begins as a game of pretending, and then as the players come to know each other, it can turn into real respect, or it can remain pretense forever, because nobody is worthy of it.”

  “How very quotable,” said Quara.

  “I know,” said Wang-Mu. “Because I was quoting. Han Fei-Tzu, who was my teacher for a few months, said and wrote many wise things. I will give you the titles of his books.”

  “I look forward to it,” said Quara.

  To Sprout it sounded as if Quara was being sarcastic. But if Wang-Mu didn’t realize that, or saw the sarcasm but chose to take it at face value, it was none of Sprout’s business. He wanted to read the books, but he’d talk to Wang-Mu about it later.

  “I assume,” said Ela, “that everyone here agrees that we should accept Sprout’s report as originally given, with augmentations from the vidrec. Anyone to the contrary?”

  Nobody spoke, nobody moved.

  “Then the report is accepted, and we will all study it to form the basis for further action,” said Ela.

  Peter chuckled.

  Sprout saw that Wang-Mu made a subtle gesture to him. He assumed it meant, “Shut up,” but in the nicest possible terms.

  “You are amused?” asked Ela.

  “Nobody ever ‘accepted’ Wang-Mu’s and my reports,” said Peter.

  “Nobody ever doubted them,” said Ela. “And you brought back Royal Son and Dog.”

  “Can I get dressed in regular clothes now?” asked Sprout.

  “First get your hair cut,” said Ela. “Not all the bird crap came out of your hair, and cutting it shorter will probably be easier than finding a useful chemical solvent.”

  18

  Talker: I can witness your conversation from here. No need to come inside.

  Peter: Thank you.

  Jane: What is it that’s so important you wanted to say it in the presence of the Hive Queen?

  Wang-Mu: We were discussing Quara, and her efforts to make sure we don’t i
nadvertently do what happened when the Formics first came to Earth.

  Talker: What happened on Earth was my fault. I had never conceived of sentient beings who could not speak mind to mind, as my Sisters and I do.

  Wang-Mu: As soon as you realized your mistake, you stopped trying to colonize Earth. But you knew of no way to communicate this to us. And we ended up killing all the Sisters except you, in your cocoon, left behind for Ender Wiggin to find.

  Talker: You were discussing that tragedy of errors, and?

  Wang-Mu: And Peter thought of something I thought was very important.

  Jane: And yet Peter lets you talk for him. Are you Peter’s Talker?

  Wang-Mu: He did not think it was as important as I did.

  Peter: I think it’s important. I just think it’s also obvious, and telling you in this formalized way will make my embarrassment all the more.

  Jane: He’s shy.

  Wang-Mu: In a pig’s eye.

  Peter: A Hive Queen came to Earth with one goal, to prepare the planet for settlement by her and her brood. She set to work, and all the human resistance was just a pesky primate that had some weirdly sophisticated tools. She kept interpreting events according to the framework she already had in mind.

  Talker: Until some of those primates snuck into the scout ship and blew it up from the inside. Using our own tools against us. Too clever and dangerous to ignore.

  Peter: But to the humans, our purpose was to repel a destructive invader, who was destroying our croplands, killing our people, making Earth uninhabitable for human beings. We had to repel the invaders, so that was our single-minded purpose.

  Talker: It’s sometimes good to remind ourselves of ancient history.

  Peter: It isn’t ancient history. We’re acting out the same tragedy of errors right now.

  Talker: Nobody’s trying to colonize Nest.

  Peter: We know that. And I believe that the ravens and keas and Engineers trust us, at least to a degree. Us, and also Sprout, probably to a greater degree.

  Wang-Mu: Just as that Hive Queen came intent on terraforming and colonizing, we came with the sole intent of finding the source of the descolada and trying to determine its function. We’ve made some progress, but we have much, much more to learn.

  Peter: That’s what Nest is to us. A source of data. But what are we to the Folk of Nest, the underground people who left birds and their tree-swinging cousins on the surface as their first line of defense against intruders? What are we, as the birds and Engineers come to trust us?

  Talker: You are strangers who can appear anywhere, whenever you want, whose box of a spaceship can instantaneously jump to any part of the sky. Strangers with technologies they never dreamed of.

  Jane: And we are humans who answered their offering of the descolada genome with cryptic genetic codes and not a word of language. And now our emissaries are making friends with their watchdogs, so they are no longer a line of defense at all.

  Peter: Everything we do and say is filtered through that perception of us as terrifying invaders who cannot be kept out.

  Jane: And that perception is accurate.

  Peter: Just as humans perceived the Formics’ terraforming as a brutal assault, how do the Folk of Nest perceive our actions? Spies, seducers, turning their allies into our allies. They have been hidden for millennia, and now they have been found by humans with terrifying, irresistible technology.

  Jane: If they think we’re irresistible, then they shouldn’t resist.

  Wang-Mu: We aren’t killing anybody. Not one feather of one bird fell because of us.

  Peter: But the Folk were underground. They didn’t witness any of it. They only know what the birds and the Engineers tell them. And now, because they like us or respect us or whatever it is they feel toward us, the Folk can’t trust them to make an honest report.

  Talker: You think we may have war whether we like it or not.

  Jane: War would be impossible. We will simply disappear when we perceive a threat.

  Wang-Mu: Sprout didn’t, he stayed and endured his punishment, and I’m not sure what they’ll conclude from that.

  Jane: They should conclude that we mean no harm.

  Wang-Mu: Or that we sent a completely unqualified terrified child who froze up when he was attacked.

  Peter: They can’t attack us in any way that they believe we will recognize as an attack.

  Wang-Mu: But they will attack us. They must. They believe we are their worst nightmare come true.

  Talker: What do you suggest? Abandoning your mission?

  Wang-Mu: We must find out all we can about the descolada.

  Jane: But “all we can” must certainly mean “all we can learn without getting killed.”

  Peter: We need to think what form their attack might take. A trap, an ambush? Certainly. But we can escape from any trap, and they know it.

  Wang-Mu: They have to find a way to attack us without our knowing we have been attacked.

  —Conversation: Jane Ribeira, Hive Queen (via Talker), Peter Wiggin, Si Wang-Mu quoted in Plikt, “Peter Wiggin as Ender’s Heir”

  Jane had gone off with Peter and Wang-Mu, presumably to visit either the pequeninos or the Hive Queen. Still, Thulium realized she must have been able to devote some attention to the leguminids, because it was while Jane was gone that Father came back.

  Along with Aunt Carlotta and her husband, Yuuto, and Uncle Andrew and his wife Mayumi. But Father’s wife, Thulium’s mother, Airi, was not with them.

  “She did not choose to come,” said Father.

  “That’s not enough,” said Carlotta. “Thulium will take it all personally.”

  You don’t know how Thulium will take anything, Aunt Carlotta. But instead of saying this, Thulium held her tongue.

  “Fine,” said Father. “If you care, Thulium, her decision had little to do with you. Because she met your brothers, she declared herself to be incompetent to contribute to any child-rearing in my family. Unfortunately, she hadn’t met you. She might have come, if she had, but it wasn’t my choice.”

  Uncle Andrew chuckled. “I believe that Jane sent the people she wanted to keep out of her way, you and the twins foremost, Sergeant.”

  “Quite likely,” said Father. “But she didn’t leave me much time to make my case.”

  “We’re here,” said Yuuto. “And since we do want to meet our long-missing children, why are we still out here chatting with Cincinnatus’s daughter?”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, too, Uncle Yuuto,” said Thulium. Then she bowed in greeting. “Aunt Mayumi, I’m happy to have a chance to know you.”

  Mayumi bowed slightly in return. “I see that to some degree, you are different from your brothers.”

  “I am proud to hear it,” said Thulium. “If you find that I resemble them in any way, I hope you’ll tell me, gently but clearly, so I can change.”

  Mayumi smiled at that. “I hear that you and all the children have turned out to be very bright.”

  “We’re all scientists,” said Thulium. “We are entrusted with adult tasks and fulfil them well.”

  “What adult tasks?” asked Father.

  At this point, Sprout and Blue came out of the building and shyly approached their father, Yuuto. So Thulium thought they weren’t listening when she answered Father, “I work in the Quarantine Bay, analyzing data collected from the surface of Nest.”

  “What is Nest?” asked Uncle Andrew.

  “It’s the name the natives use for their own world,” said Thulium. “We used to call the planet Descoladora.”

  “You’ve spoken to the natives?” asked Father.

  “Some of us have,” said Thulium.

  “Sprout has,” said Blue, proudly. “They pooped and peed all over him.”

  That created a dead silence.

  “We’ll show you all the vids,” said Sprout. “Not as bad as it sounds.”

  “I think the missing information here,” said Thulium, “is that the natives who performed said act
s upon Sprout’s person were birds. Kea parrots to be exact. And Peter and Wang-Mu spoke with a raven named Dog.”

  “Ravens? Keas?” asked Father.

  “They’re fully sentient,” said Thulium.

  “I’ll decide that for myself,” said Father.

  “And trigger an interplanetary incident?” said Sprout.

  “You went down to the surface of the planet that sent us the descolada?” asked Father.

  “They didn’t do it,” said Sprout, “but we have plenty of time to lay that out.”

  Father looked intently at Thulium. “Have you been down to the surface?”

  “I left as soon as the keas started harassing us. They took all our gear and I realized I couldn’t properly do my job, so I … left.”

  “And I stayed,” added Sprout thinly.

  Aunt Carlotta uttered something that might have been “Hmmm?” or “Hmmmph!”

  “Thulium, I don’t know what kind of failure of adult supervision this represents, but you are not going back to the surface of that planet.”

  Thulium said nothing, because she knew that he couldn’t control her location in space ever again.

  “You have your defiant look,” said Father. “But I think the adults around here will understand that I am to be reckoned with when I say that anyone who transports you to the surface of Descoladora or anywhere else without my consent will pay severely.”

  “Will you kill them, Father?” asked Thulium.

  “Thule,” said Sprout.

  “Stay out of this, Sprout,” said Aunt Carlotta.

  “He can’t control where she goes, not anymore,” said Sprout. “That’s just a fact, it’s not defiance or brag or anything else. Just a fact.”

  Thulium knew that because Sprout’s own parents were there, and perhaps because Father had some respect for Yuuto’s physical prowess, Father could not face down Sprout the way he would have on the Herodotus. So he turned back to Thulium.

  Whereupon, with the characteristic wrenching in her gut, Thulium went Outside and In, placing herself next to Sprout with her hand on his shoulder.