Children of the Mind

Orson Scott Card

New York: Tor, 1996. ISBN: 0-812-52239-7. Pp. 370

The conclusion to the Ender Sage, the fourth installment picks up where Xenocide ended: with the Lusitania Fleet bearing down on the hapless planet even as the colonists, the Hive Queen, and the pequeninos are desperately trying to find a way to save themselves from certain doom. Congress is also shutting down the ansibles, gradually depriving Jane of capacity and threatening to end her existence unless she finds a human host willing to take her philote. Even as she ferries members of the three species to various planets, Miro and Val search for the home of the race that has created the descolada.

This novel feels much more like the excellent Speaker for the Dead rather than its somewhat dull sequel even though it is ostensibly just a part of the latter. Mr Card goes back to territory he is best at dealing with: human relationships. None of that "save humanity by obliterating another sentient species" ethical dilemmas here. Instead, we are back to entirely human pain even in a fantastic setting. The book is about Ender and his alter egos, Peter and Val, that he had unwittingly brought to life when Jane took the ship Outside. The main theme (and an intriguing one at that) is about the subconscious drive that gives direction and meaning to our lives, that we try to govern but to whose imperative we must eventually relinquish control.

Ender wants to stay with his wife Novinha even though she has rejected him, shutting herself in a convent, unwilling to suffer the loss of yet another man she loves. But he persists, going so far as to give up his life and join her in celibacy. But although he can order his body to follow her into monastic duty, he cannot manage his inward urge to explore, to continue to live. And the urge finds expression in Peter and Val who carry out their missions even as Ender slowly fades away on Lusitania.

Mr Card's world here is a sort of mechanized Platonism. Like the ancient philosopher, his metaphysics consists of this world and the Outside, the other side that we cannot see with our physical senses but that we can experience with our mind's eye. We have the ideal forms (philotes) and this world of shadows where the forms take their transient shapes, and (he is explicit about this), we cannot measure the reality of the philotes even though we can observe their effects and use them without even understanding how we do it. Even the Hive Queen who has been using the philotes forever does so on an instinctive level, without really knowing what she is doing. So it helps to think about the Outside in these Platonic terms. Note in particular that getting there requires mental activity, and one on a truly grand scale that only Jane can manage. But that does not mean that Mr Card is just borrowing the idea. He's improving on it.

Plato's theory had a huge problem because it never did adequately explain why the human soul whose natural habitat is the world of the forms would willingly dirty itself by taking on a human body. Mr Card's answer is that the philotes are hungry for physical existence, that they are not perfect but are rather incomplete without being called into the possession of a tangible form. Whereas Plato got himself in a bind trying to explain just how the body (which is just dirt) was supposed to help the soul get through all its reincarnations until it can regain its true position with the forms, this variant has the forms desperately trying to give meaning to their own existence by acquiring empirical content. In other words, without the material, the philotes are nothing, just like the material cannot exist without them.

It is a symbiotic relationship that still leaves a bunch of questions unanswered. As I understand it, there is an implicit hierarchy among the philotes: the more ambitious (for lack of better word) and the more able ones can possess higher organisms, like a Hive Queen, a human being, or a pequenino. The lower-order philotes are content with managing a cell or two. This suggests two things. First, most obviously, we are all fundamentally the same. In the grand scheme of things then it cannot really matter if one or another of the races vanishes: the philotes will continue like they have always done, except they will have to twine differently. Second, the philotes themselves are in competition with each other, a sort of power struggle whose winner grabs the spoils and the right to control other philotes. Although Mr Card patiently explains that the lower-order philotes are content with their lot in life, I have yet to meet a slave who loved his master.

But the most important question that I have has to do with human will: are humans more than the philotes that inhabit their bodies? The answer seems to be negative: witness Peter and Val's problems when Ender was not paying enough attention to them. But if this is the case, then we are back into the first conundrum: Humans are nothing more than a collection of philotes (and so are the buggers and the pequeninos), which now means that they are just another shape for the same fundamental being. But if that being can exist just as fine in other shapes, then losing a particular one is not a big deal. So why are humans so determined to live? Where does this lust for life come from? Why should they be convicted if they stop at nothing to secure their right to exist, even if that means obliterating other impermanent beings?

Back to the more mundane aspects of the novel, I sort of enjoyed the rather stereotypical portrayal of the Japanese (not because it is stereotypical but because I like reading about Japan), but I think the politics depicted here are naive. Some famous philosopher on a remote planet stirs up his former student who manages to put the resources of his powerful family to such efficient use that they manage to get Starways Congress to repeal its own act and order the fleet not to destroy Lusitania. All in a matter of days. I really would have preferred to read about Peter making his way into high politics and managing to become Hegemon again. The other annoyance I had was with the Caribbean planet and the fat natives. I just did not care much about the supposed mix of superstition and modernity. But these are minor quibbles even if I would love to have read more about Jane and Miro or Peter and Wang-mu. This is my second favorite Card novel thus far.

November 4, 2005