Xenocide

Orson Scott Card

New York: Tor, 1991. ISBN: 0-812-50925-0. Pp. xi, 592.

The third in the Ender saga, Xenocide is by far the most ambitious. It is also the most interesting, the most infuriating, and in one particular way, the most disappointing. It continues almost exactly where Speaker for the Dead left off. The horribly disfigured Miro is in "stasis" (that is, on his inter-planetary round-trip that would bring him back to Lusitania thirty years from the time of his departure in barely weeks local time); Valentine and her family are about to rendezvous with him on their own voyage to the colony that is now home to at least three sentient species, the humans, the buggers, and the pequeninos. After the treaty that Ender signed with the pequeninos, things have gone more or less smoothly there, with most humans minding their own business unaware of the Hive Queen rapidly building starships on a remote continent of the planet. But not all is well...

This time, there is even less action than in the preceding novel. Instead the story is driven by its fascinating characters having to face ever more complex ethical choices within an ever collapsing time frame, and with ever more devastating consequences and risks. Lusitania is home to the descolada, a particularly vicious virus that has destroyed almost all native life, and has transformed the rest into a strange dualistic existence, utterly dependent on its presence. The humans are fighting a losing rear-guard action against its attempts to penetrate their medicinal defenses, but it adapts so adroitly and spreads the improvement so quickly that some have come to suspect it might be intelligent. Starways Congress, aware of the danger that the rebellious colony represents with its possibility of spreading the descolada throughout the galaxy, has ordered a fleet to destroy the planet. To commit another xenocide.

And here enter the ethical problems that the protagonists must deal with. Should they destroy the descolada if it would also kill all pequeninos? As the natives wise up to the possibility, they naturally evolve a counter-plan that not only would save them, but perhaps destroy the humans in the bargain. What's more, it is based on a somewhat fanciful interpretation of the Bible that elevates their third life (as fathertrees) as one willed by the Holy Ghost and denied to the unworthy humans. The descolada is the working of the Holy Ghost, and they intend to spread it and let God judge who must live and who must die. Suddenly, the tiny human colony must bear the responsibility for the potential obliteration of all mankind. Can that justify extermination of the pequeninos? The Church sends Quim to correct the heresy but he ends up killed, his quest unsuccessful and yet portentous for the colonists now vent their rage on the hapless pequeninos they have close by, the ones, in fact, that are closest to them. But that only strengthens the position of the war-makers among the natives, and makes it even more imperative to deal with them.

Jane, the sentient computer program, has risked her own existence by shutting off all communications between Congress and the fleet, in an attempt to prevent the order to destroy Lusitania from reaching its intended audience. But this triggers an investigation that ultimately leads to a precocious girl on the remote planet Path to uncovering the truth about Jane. When Jane tries to awake her to the truth about Path and how its people had been manipulated by Congress, she runs into a blank wall of utter superstition and uncomprehending dogma based on seemingly elaborate but ultimately misleading teachings. Gloriously Bright is a potent character in the book: she is very smart, very creative, very intelligent, and yet supremely arrogant in that quaint self-deprecating way, and so self-assured that she misses the most important truth she could have learned in her life. Ironically, the choice of name is redeemed at the end when she becomes a religious symbol, and as such can be seen as a bright light to many, even when her own blindness forever imprisoned her in her house, tracing wood patterns on the floor.

But what of the various dilemmas on Lusitania? Despite the humans' best efforts, the solutions evade them. At first, they cannot decode the descolada at all. But then the sacrifice of a pequenino determined to prove that his species does not owe its intelligence to the virus finally persuades one of the researchers to divulge her information that leads to a speedy analysis. And yet this is not enough, for now they cannot manufacture it, the descolada is just too quick in its responses. Time is getting short, Gloriously Bright has informed Congress, and they are preparing to shut down the ansibles, effectively killing Jane, and enabling the destruction of the planet. This speeds up the Hive Queen's preparations for departure along with enough pequeninos, now mostly of the heretic party.

How much is human life worth? There's only one Hive Queen and only one planet with pequeninos. And maybe the buggers are no longer a threat, but the piggies certainly could be one while armed with the descolada virus that is deadly to nearly everything. Should they act to save sentient species, possibly placing the rest of mankind at risk? Or should they commit another xenocide? Should they even attack the descolada itself if it is intelligent but incapable of communicating with them?

All interesting questions, all worth pondering, all fascinating. And while Card sets them up, while he repeats them again and again, the major strength of the book underpins its major failing too. For in the end Card chickens out. The "solution" is a veritable deus ex machina, complete with threads to lower it from above onto the scene amid confused and frightened actors in a tragedy. Card actually solves all problems by denying them: he manages to find a solution that effectively renders them null and void. That is, he not so much as proposes a solution as he avoids having to solve the problem. You see, they will design an anti-descolada virus that would preserve the pequeninos and although they cannot do it in this reality, they can go to an alternate universe where they can just wish it into existence, they can just imagine it. This is the alternate "other" space where our physical laws have no meaning, and it can enable all sorts of fancy and weird stuff, from faster-than-light travel to materializing your sister as a girl and resurrecting your long-dead brother, not to mention improving your body without going to Jenny Craig.

All that's fine, of course, for it is Card's universe, not mine. I do not object to the "science" or the attractive power of the mind that can simply imagine things into reality. What I object is that it gives a neat solution to a fascinating problem: no longer would the pequeninos need to be destroyed in order to save the humans (wouldn't it have been much more interesting if their intelligence was produced by the descolada?), they no longer represent a threat to humanity because without the virus, they are just a technologically-backward species (so they can be moved from Lusitania), Jane's existence is no longer in danger because even when they shut down the computers, her "essence," which turns out to have resided in Ender all along, would not die (I admit to being partial to this if only because Jane is my favorite character), and Jane would help transporting people off the planet to save them from the fleet, unless of course the new Peter does not get to Congress first and get it to reverse its orders, and the people of Path will be miraculously saved from the genetic bondage Congress had rather clumsily inflicted on them (and without disturbances either, even though the so-called "godspoken" had oppressed the rest), and so on.

And, by the way, was I the only one who wondered if Ender was justified in restoring the Hive Queen, especially now when she is busily building spaceships. Yes, I know we are told that she will never harm another species (to the point that she was willing to let the descolada infected pequeninos take off), but can we believe that? It never was explained very well why the buggers, who apparently never fight among themselves and are so alien-friendly, had all that military machinery with which they mounted two invasions. I'd worry. And I'd want Ender to worry too.

Come to think of it, maybe I prefer Speaker for the Dead after all, most of the ideas that are developed here come from that book, and the human relationships are much more fascinating. It was a bit odd to find this novel such a disappointment in that respect too. Novinha becomes utterly unreasonable again, rejects Ender, and converts to Christianity... and to the monastic celibate order too. I also found her children (now adults) behaving in inexplicably petulant, self-centered, and truly annoying ways. Maybe there are plenty of people like that, but then I can't believe that they would be nearly as smart as these ones were supposed to be. Their smarts and their immaturity simply did not sit well together, specially if we recall that Ender (who has this inhuman insight into everyone's psyche) has been part of their family for three decades.

Other than that, Xenocide is entertaining. If you ignore the cop-out with the fundamental ethical problems driving the narrative, and if you ignore the somewhat clumsy device used to effect it, it was a good novel.

October 24, 2005