Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  It took Sprout only a moment to make the leap to understanding. The source of the virus would have sent a virus, not a blueprint for making one. As an attack, the digital transmission would only have worked if the starship receiving it had a crew so phenomenally stupid that they would actually assemble the virus and turn it loose on themselves.

  “Do we even know what species lives on that planet?” asked Thulium.

  “We do not,” said Valentine.

  “What about architecture and transportation, features that might be visible from orbit?”

  “We have people studying the pictures that were taken,” said Valentine.

  “But their findings are not part of this briefing?” asked Thulium.

  “We couldn’t include everything,” said Valentine, “but today I’ll be sure that we have that information tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” said Thulium.

  Dys and Lanth made slight disparaging remarks about Thulium, including Lanth saying something about children being seen and not heard, but since Thulium was only a year younger than the twins, it only made Lanth seem both mean and intellectually ill-equipped. But the twins modeled their surly and cantankerous attitude on Uncle Sergeant’s, and in his absence, perhaps they were hoping to maintain a certain level of skepticism, hostility, and bullying in his honor.

  There were more presentations and discussions on viruses and possible delivery systems. What triggered interest in Sprout’s mind was a possible experiment. “Valentine,” he said, not raising his hand because her back was to them.

  Valentine turned around.

  “It seemed that short shrift was given to the possibility of the descolada virus having infiltrated the atmosphere of Lusitania without any delivery system outside itself.”

  “It’s a very complex molecule,” said Valentine, “and most of our researchers—both on Lusitania and in cooperating research institutions on other planets—are convinced that cosmic radiation would have killed or deformed the virus in transit, if it traveled unprotected through space.”

  Sprout nodded. “So that is an area in which we have decided not to explore or question the preexisting assumptions?”

  Valentine regarded him steadily, and Sprout could imagine her trying to decide if he was being a troublemaker like the twins, or if he was trying to open up and reprioritize their scientific inquiries, the way Thule had.

  “I’m not suggesting anybody be taken from any other project to research that,” said Sprout.

  “Then why did you bring it up?” asked Valentine.

  “Because, now that I know everybody else is ignoring it, that’s the question I’d like to explore,” said Sprout.

  Valentine paused again, for one heartbeat, then two. “I was hoping to get all of the Delphiki family working on one aspect of the problem together, but—”

  “You don’t know us yet,” said Sprout. “We don’t work well with others.”

  “Everyone pursues a separate line of research?” asked Valentine.

  “We all do whatever we please,” said Little Mum, the oldest of the Giant’s grandchildren. “Which in some cases comes very near to doing nothing at all.”

  “She thinks everything I do is a waste of time,” said Boss, her little brother.

  “Because it is,” said Little Mum. “But you are unfailingly supportive of the research projects of others, so you have your own kind of contribution to make.”

  That got some laughter from the twins and Blue, but Thulium didn’t laugh, and neither did Sprout.

  “Everything everybody does is a waste of time, until it isn’t,” said Sprout. “I want to ‘waste my time’ seeing how a version of the descolada virus adapts to the conditions in cold interstellar space.”

  “I don’t know if we have the equipment here on Lusitania to allow any such experiment,” said Valentine.

  “That’s why I don’t intend to perform those experiments on Lusitania,” said Sprout.

  “Where, then?” asked Little Mum.

  “There are spare starships—or star boxes, whatever you call them—left over from the migration to other habitable worlds. I imagine it’ll be within Jane’s capacity to put me up in orbit and also in interstellar space as often as need be.”

  “If and when that project seems to be an urgent priority,” said Valentine.

  Sprout recognized that Valentine was trying to keep him from realizing that she was blowing off his request. “When I go to sample blood, I’ll need a copy of the descolada virus in order to identify its presence or absence.”

  “You have no understanding of how dangerous the descolada virus is,” said Miro.

  “I look like a nine-year-old,” said Sprout, “because I have lived for the relativistic equivalent of nine Earth years. But I’m not a child in need of protection. I’m a human in need of respect for my sense and my capacity. If I get infected by the virus, quarantine me and give me one of your several cures or controls. We need to learn if the virus could have simply arrived in the outer atmosphere of Lusitania and drifted down to the surface. With no packaging, there would be no heat from reentry. So if the virus could drift in space without losing virulency, it could have reached the surface unscathed. And if that is what happened, we have no way of guessing whether it was released into the galaxy as a deliberate attack or merely an accident.”

  Dys scoffed. “Molecules don’t achieve escape velocity by accident,” he said.

  “I’ve already thought of several ways it could happen,” said Sprout, “which I intend to test. Your biased judgments are scientifically irrelevant, and you know it.”

  “Enough bickering,” said Valentine.

  “There’s never enough bickering in the face of stupidity,” said Lanth.

  “Sprout,” said Valentine, “let’s discuss this with the scientists of the descolada project and see what can be done.”

  There were more discussions and a few more presentations, especially dealing with the lack of biodiversity on Lusitania and what the long-term effects of that were likely to be. But Sprout had presented what he cared about.

  He also noticed that Valentine directed a disproportionate amount of her presentation to Thulium. Maybe that was sympathy because her older brothers taunted her, but Sprout suspected it was something else. It seemed that Valentine knew something about Ultima Thule, something that made Valentine particularly interested in her, and Sprout intended to find out what it was.

  But when he asked her, Thulium wasn’t very helpful. “Sprout, I think I see what you mean, but I can’t explain it.”

  Sprout thought this answer was evasive. “Can’t explain” could mean that she had no explanation, or it could just as easily mean that she knew perfectly well why Valentine treated her differently, but was restrained by something from telling him.

  “When will you be able to tell me the secret?” asked Sprout.

  “When my guesses collide with at least a little evidence,” said Thulium.

  “If two of us are watching for evidence…”

  “Then two of us will probably be looking for nothing at all,” said Thulium. “Really, Sprout, if I tell anybody what I’m thinking, it’ll be you.”

  Sprout had to be content with that, unless he wanted a quarrel with Uncle Sergeant’s daughter. She was not belligerent, like her father and brothers, but Sprout knew she could hold a grudge and carry a quarrel too far, just like the rest of her family.

  Sprout had looked up some of the researchers among the Lusitanians. What drew his eye was the work that Miro’s younger sister, Quara, had done with Lusitanian biology. Quara seemed to try to question and cast doubt on every hypothesis brought up by others. Which struck Sprout as being closer to the scientific attitude than anyone else. “I want to meet her,” Sprout told Miro.

  “No you don’t,” said Miro. “She makes Sergeant Delphiki look cooperative and gentle.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to marry her,” said Sprout.

  “She may be my youngest sibling,” sa
id Miro, “but I took a relativistic voyage and when I came back, she was twenty years older and I wasn’t.”

  “Why would I care about that? Everyone is older than I am.”

  “She published meticulously,” said Miro. “She made no errors in her data.”

  “There is no data,” said Sprout.

  “There is, but it’s all classified top secret, need to know.”

  “I need to know,” said Sprout.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think we’ve missed key aspects of the descolada virus,” said Sprout. “I need to know Quara’s data on life-forms that went extinct after the coming of the descolada.”

  “That’s easy,” said Miro. “Zero.”

  “No bones of other life-forms?” asked Sprout.

  “None found so far,” said Miro.

  “Nobody’s looking?”

  “None found so far,” said Miro.

  “What about the life cycle of the pequeninos and the trees prior to the coming of the descolada.”

  “Easy enough,” said Miro. “They have the organs for copulation, internal and external. Trees were their habitat, not part of their life sequence. The trees can blossom still, and if there were any pollinating insects, they might even produce fruit or seeds, though I’ve never seen any evidence of it.”

  “Nobody tried hand-pollinating them?” asked Sprout.

  “There are no unattended trees,” said Miro. “Imagine the human response if alien researchers wanted to try the experiment of impregnating some their most beloved relatives.”

  Sprout raised his eyebrows. “You mean they don’t even want to know?”

  “I mean nobody has been stupid enough to bring up the idea.”

  “Well, then,” said Sprout. “I believe I have a purpose here after all.”

  “No,” said Miro.

  “You’ve cut me off from everything interesting. I have to either work on topics you assign, which are all essentially scutwork, or you bar me from access.”

  “I don’t bar you from anything,” said Miro. “Go talk to the pequeninos. See how they respond. Remember that they are prone to vivisecting their human contacts in hopes that trees will arise from the corpses.”

  “But only the humans that they like,” said Sprout.

  “Come on, Brussels,” said Miro. “If you can’t try to fertilize blossoms, what do you think you have to talk to the pequeninos about?”

  “Their institutional memory,” said Sprout. “Their most ancient stories. What their oldest citizens know about the pre-descolada past.”

  “I’ve talked to them. Ender talked to them. My real father, Libo, talked to them, as did his father, Pipo. They remember nothing.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear from my talking to them about it,” said Sprout.

  “Three of the four I just mentioned are dead. And I nearly died.”

  “The pequeninos only killed two of them. Ender Wiggin died of boredom, as I understand it. And your injury came from passing through the disruptor field.”

  “So you have a fifty-fifty chance,” said Miro.

  “Let me through the gate and let me see what I can learn.”

  “What’s the point?” asked Miro.

  “If we can reconstruct anything about the biome that was broken by the descolada, we might have a better idea of what the virus was actually meant to do,” said Sprout. “And I personally believe no one has made any kind of effort at gathering data about paleobiology on Lusitania.”

  “So you’ll converse with pequeninos, and then you’ll dig holes looking for what, prehistoric pollen?”

  “Prehistoric pollen might contain at least a few partial genomes,” said Sprout.

  “If you ever find any,” said Miro.

  “So because you think I’ll probably fail, you won’t allow me to try.”

  “Because I think your attempts will cause trouble and seriously endanger you, I’m not opening the gate for you,” said Miro.

  “I think your scientific curiosity is seriously lacking,” said Sprout.

  “There are ways over the fence without going through the gate,” said Miro.

  “Have you turned off the disruptor field at the fence?” asked Sprout.

  “No.”

  “Is it milder?”

  “It is no different in any way from when I went through it,” said Miro.

  “So you’re suggesting I get brain-damaged in pursuit of things you should be encouraging me to research.”

  “Nothing about our conversation consists of me suggesting anything to you,” said Miro. “Why don’t you go back, think again, and come up with some useful line of research?”

  Since Sprout had no intention of doing any such thing, he walked away from Miro.

  He also spent the day avoiding everybody else. Walking on the lawns of the Delphiki Concentration Camp, as the twins were starting to call it. Napping on the far side of a low rise, so he was invisible from the building, though he assumed the Lusitanians had some kind of tracking device—they must have, because they never went searching for him.

  He missed two whole cycles of meals that way, and was feeling more than slightly peckish when Thulium came out to find him. She had a basket with food inside. And two bottles of water. “Hunger strikes go better when you have a little food and water,” she said.

  “I’m not on a hunger strike.”

  “Sulking goes better with food and drink as well.”

  “Now you’re just trying to provoke me,” said Sprout.

  “I’m worried about you. Miro says you wanted to go talk to the pequeninos.”

  “Yes, and he refused to open the gate. He suggested that I could go over the fence.”

  “No,” said Thulium. “He said that people had been known to go over the fence.”

  Sprout rolled his eyes.

  “I’ve done it,” said Thulium.

  Sprout knew Thulium well enough to take this ridiculous assertion seriously. “Through the disruptor field?”

  “It caused hallucinations and disorientation but I never lost touch with reality. No pain, not even a headache, and no brain damage that I’ve been able to detect.”

  “Why did it affect you so mildly?” asked Sprout.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does Miro say?”

  “I haven’t discussed it with him, beyond the fact that I did it,” said Thulium.

  “What’s your speculative explanation?”

  “One possibility that I’m eager to test is whether the genetic alteration our parents made in themselves, which has been passed down to us, made our brains somehow different. Less susceptible to the disruptor field.”

  “And how would you test that?” asked Sprout.

  “I’d take you into the disruptor field and see what happened.”

  Sprout thought of that. “You went in alone, didn’t you,” he said.

  “I figured that if it started feeling bad, I’d get out of it.”

  “It didn’t occur to you that it might affect you so sharply that once inside it, you couldn’t get out?”

  “Absolutely,” said Thulium.

  “But you tried it anyway,” said Sprout.

  “I’m so very brave.”

  “And foolish,” said Sprout.

  “I believe ‘brave’ and ‘foolish’ are very near to being synonyms,” said Thulium.

  “If I go into the disruptor field with you,” said Sprout, “you’ll pull me out if it affects me worse than it affected you?”

  “Of course,” said Thulium. “Or if I can’t, I’ll go get help from someone who can.”

  “And if I suffer the same stroke-like symptoms that Miro suffered all those years ago?”

  “I’ll read to you every day, from research reports, histories, and ridiculously romantic novels, until you recover completely.”

  “Miro had to kill himself to recover,” said Sprout.

  “But he didn’t do it until he had already created a replacement body,” said Th
ulium.

  Sprout took a sandwich out of the basket. “This looks good. Please tell me you didn’t make it yourself.”

  “I didn’t make it myself,” said Thulium.

  “It looks like it was made by a child,” said Sprout.

  “When you tell me to lie to you…”

  Sprout bit down into the sandwich, chewed. “It’s very good.”

  “I know,” said Thulium. “I’m learning skills here on the surface. There are skills that would have been meaningless on the Herodotus even if we had tried to acquire them.”

  “I want to make a contribution to solving the problem of the descolada,” said Sprout.

  “Me, too,” said Thulium. “Let’s finish lunch and go see if we can get you over the fence.”

  6

  The life of the original Peter Wiggin—no, let’s be honest, the real Peter Wiggin—was already chronicled in the short biography The Hegemon, penned by the Speaker for the Dead, whose identity, known to few, was the late Andrew “Ender” Wiggin. But there is no reason to believe that anyone will ever chronicle the life of the new Peter Wiggin, created from the mind of Andrew Wiggin on the first voyage Outside. His physical appearance is, or so I’m told, identical to the original—the only two possible witnesses, his brother Andrew and his sister Valentine, both affirmed this. Since the duplicate of Valentine, now known as Jane, is genetically identical to the original, we can only assume a similar twinning between the two iterations of Peter.

  But Peter Wiggin is not the same person or even a true twin. His aiúa—his inmost soul, his will, the part of him that chooses—is not his own. It is not a new model summoned out of darkness by whatever force summons aiúas to control and give the spark of will to new life. Instead it is a well-used aiúa, the one belonging to Andrew Wiggin. When I talk to the current Peter, it is a complex conversation, because I know that buried deep within his unconscious mind, it is Ender Wiggin himself, his deepest self, that answers me. But in his own mind, he thinks of himself as Peter Wiggin, who came into being in the first faster-than-light starship.

  Because his aiúa recognizes his face in the mirror as being the same as the face of the brother who terrorized and dominated Ender during the first years of his life, he feels that he has some sort of obligation to live up to that version of Peter Wiggin, which sometimes makes him answer harshly. But his heart is not in it, when he acts that way. He knows that this is not what he wants to be; it is not how he wants to treat me. From all accounts, Ender spent the latter part of his life as a tender husband to Novinha Ribeira and a loving stepfather to her very difficult brood of children, who grew up to be almost as smart as they think they are. So Ender’s aiúa naturally rejects Peter’s cruelty, and at times when he forgets that it’s his duty to act out the Peter script, he is as tender and caring to me, his wife, as I could ever hope for.