Orson Card - Children of the Mind

"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."

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, which takes no time at all, and then brings it back into reality in whatever place she chooses. Which also takes no time. So instead of starships taking years to get from world to world, it happens in an instant."

Peter nodded. "Very good. Except what you have to understand is that during the time that the starship is Outside, it isn't surrounded by nothingness. Instead it's surrounded by uncountable numbers of aiúas."

She turned away her face from him.

"You don't understand aiúas?"

"To say that all people have always existed. That we are older than the oldest gods ..."

"Well, sort of," said Peter. "Only aiúas on the Outside, they can't be said to exist, or at least not any kind of meaningful existence. They're just ... there. Not even that, because there's no sense of location, no there where they might be. They just are. Until some intelligence calls them, names them, puts them into some kind of order, gives them shape and form."

"The clay can become a bear," she said, "but not as long as it rests cold and wet in the riverbank."

"Exactly. So there was Ender Wiggin and several other people who, with luck, you'll never need to meet, taking the first voyage Outside. They weren't going anywhere, really. The point of that first voyage was to get Outside long enough that one of them, a rather talented genetic scientist, could create a new molecule, an extremely complex one, by the image she held of it in her mind. Or rather her image of the modifications she needed to make in an existing... well, you don't have the biology for it. Anyway, she did what she was supposed to do, she created the new molecule, calloo callay, only the thing is, she wasn't the only person doing any creating that day."

"Ender's mind created you?" asked Wang-mu.

"Inadvertently. I was, shall we say, a tragic accident. An unhappy side effect. Let's just say that everybody there, every thing there, was creating like crazy. The aiúas Outside are frantic to be made into something, you see. There were shadow starships being created all around us. All kinds of weak, faint, fragmented, fragile, ephemeral structures rising and falling in each instant. Only four had any solidity. One was that genetic molecule that Elanora Ribeira had come to create."

"One was you?"

"The least interesting one, I fear. The least loved and valued. One of the people on the ship was a fellow named Miro, who through a tragic accident some years ago had been left somewhat crippled. Neurologically damaged. Thick of speech, clumsy with his hands, lame when he walked. He held within his mind the powerful, treasured image of himself as he used to be. So -- with that perfect self-image, a vast number of aiúa assembled themselves into an exact copy, not of how he was, but of how he once was and longed to be again. Complete with all his memories -- a perfect replication of him. So perfect that it had the same utter loathing for his crippled body that he himself had. So ... the new, improved Miro -- or rather the copy of the old, undamaged Miro -- whatever -- he stood there as the ultimate rebuke of the crippled one. And before their very eyes, that old rejected body crumbled away into nothing."

Wang-mu gasped, imagining it. "He died!"

"No, that's the point, don't you see? He lived. It was Miro. His own aiúa -- not the trillions of aiúas making up the atoms and molecules of his body, but the one that controlled them all, the one that was himself, his will -- his aiúa simply moved to the new and perfect body. That was his true self. And the old one ..."

"Had no use."

"Had nothing to give it shape. You see, I think our bodies are held together by love. The love of the master aiúa for the glorious powerful body that obeys it, that gives the self all its experience of the world. Even Miro, even with all his self-loathing when he was crippled, even he must have loved whatever pathetic remnant of his body was left to him. Until the moment that he had a new one."

"And then he moved."

"Without even knowing that he had done so," said Peter. "He followed his love."

Wang-mu heard this fanciful tale and knew that it must be true, for she had overheard many a mention of aiúas in the conversations between Han Fei-tzu and Jane, and now with Peter Wiggin's story, it made sense. It had to be true, if only because this starship really had appeared as if from nowhere on the bank of the river behind Han Fei-tzu's house.