Xenocide

On the world of Path, Han Fei-tzu sits beside the sickbed of his wife, Jiang-qing, as her breath grows shallow. Her bones are brittle as dried leaves; she weighs only eighteen kilograms. “Still not dead,” she whispers, a greeting that has become a lament. In the quiet dusk of her life, she draws him into philosophy, pulling him from the gravity of his grief. They contemplate desire - his for her to live, hers for the release of death. She speaks of the Path: to obey the gods, honor the ancestors, love the people, and serve the rulers. She makes him promise to teach their daughter, Qing-jao, to love the gods he secretly resents. He cannot say the words until the moment her breathing stops. Then, with his wife's body before him and his four-year-old daughter asking innocent questions, the gods demand their due. He feels the unbearable pressure to perform the ritual of cleansing, a frantic, twisting penance for his unworthy thoughts. Even in his deepest sorrow, they will not leave him in peace.

Three thousand light-years away and decades later, though only weeks have passed for her, Valentine Wiggin's starship prepares to meet another. For years, she has written subversive essays as Demosthenes, trying to turn public opinion against the fleet that Starways Congress has sent to destroy the world of Lusitania. Now she is to rendezvous with Miro, stepson of her brother Ender. When she meets him, she finds a young man trapped inside a broken body, his speech painfully slow, his movements clumsy. “My brain damage isn't your problem,” he says, his voice thick with resentment. But she does not offer pity. She challenges him, demanding the stories she needs to save his world. He gives her more than she expects, a vision of damnation: the descolada virus, which Lusitania's native pequeninos need to live, is so adaptable it might one day escape and destroy all humanity. “What if the fleet is right?” he asks. “What if the only way to save humanity… is to destroy Lusitania now?”

On Path, young Qing-jao feels the gods' call as a terrible, invisible slime upon her hands. She scrubs them until they bleed, hiding the wounds from her father, ashamed of her own filthiness. But when her secret is discovered, she is taken to a temple for the test. Her hands are plunged into a basin of thick, black grease, and she is locked in a room with no water, no cloth. “You can never wash again,” her father tells her. The need for cleanliness is an agony that drives her to madness. She smears the grease on her clothes, her hair, her face, then scrapes her skin raw against the polished walls. Finally, convinced of her own unworthiness, she climbs a bronze statue and leaps headfirst to the floor, seeking the purity of death. She wakes with a broken arm, still feeling the gods' judgment. In her despair, a poem comes to her, and she understands. Kneeling, she begins to trace a single, dark grain in the wooden floor, following it inch by inch, a new ritual to appease the insatiable gods.

The voice first comes to Miro as a face on his computer screen. “I'm a friend of the Speaker for the Dead,” she says. He soon learns her name is Jane. She lives inside the jewel-like terminal Ender gave him, an intelligence dwelling within the network of ansible computers that connects all of human civilization. She is his constant companion, the only one with the patience to listen to his slow speech. He reveals her existence to Valentine, and Jane herself explains her nature: she is an entity born in the philotic web, and her life depends on the ansible network's continued function. It was she who severed communication with the Lusitania Fleet, an act of sabotage to prevent them from receiving the order to commit xenocide. But her act has revealed her existence. Sooner or later, Congress will realize what has happened and shut down the entire ansible network to destroy her. “Am I raman or varelse?” she asks Valentine. “Is saving Lusitania a cause worth dying for?”

On Lusitania, Ender Wiggin watches another crop of Earth potatoes succumb to the descolada. He lives surrounded by impossible choices. His wife, Novinha, and her brilliant children, the xenobiologists Ela and Quara, are locked in a desperate race against the virus. Quara argues that the descolada is a sentient species and must not be destroyed. Her brother Grego argues that it is a mindless plague, and for humanity to survive, it must be exterminated, even if that means the end of the pequeninos. Secretly, the hive queen, whom Ender restored to life, is building starships. She intends to send her own people and the pequeninos to new worlds, but Ender knows they will carry the descolada with them, a plague upon the stars. He feels the weight of three species resting on his shoulders, yet he is powerless. He can only listen and talk, a speaker for the living who are already as good as dead.

Qing-jao, now a young woman of fearsome intelligence and discipline, is given a task by her father: discover what happened to the Lusitania Fleet. Her obsessive, methodical research leads her to uncover the identity of the writer Demosthenes - Valentine Wiggin, sister to the Hegemon and the Xenocide. She deduces the existence of a secret program, Jane, capable of controlling the ansible network. As she prepares to report her findings to Congress, Jane reveals herself, appearing as an image above the terminal. She tells Qing-jao and her father the truth: the “gods” are not divine. They are a genetically engineered form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, spliced into the most intelligent people of Path by Congress to keep them docile and enslaved. For Han Fei-tzu, it is a moment of terrible liberation. But for Qing-jao, it is the ultimate test of faith.

With Jane's destruction only weeks away, Grego and his brother Olhado devise a desperate theory. They believe it is possible to travel faster than light by briefly stepping “Outside” of spacetime into a realm of pure potential, a place where patterns held in a conscious mind can become real. The journey requires a “knower,” an aiúa, a conscious soul to hold the pattern of the ship and its passengers together. Jane is such a being, and her own aiúa is inextricably linked to Ender. A small ship is built, a simple metal shell. Ender, Miro, and Ela climb inside. They feel nothing, but one moment they are on Lusitania, and the next they are surrounded by a swirling, placeless chaos. When they look at each other, there are not three, but six. Miro sits beside a perfect, healthy version of himself, while his old, broken body dissolves into dust. Beside Ender sit two figures from his deepest past: his sister, Valentine, as a beautiful, innocent girl, and his brother, Peter, the brilliant, cruel boy who became the first Hegemon.

They return to Lusitania with miracles and monsters. In the vials she carried, Ela finds the recolada, a new version of the virus that can sustain pequenino life without being a threat to others. Miro has a new body, a gift from his own deepest memory of himself. But Ender has brought back his children, Peter and young Val, living embodiments of his own inner conflict. The recolada proves successful, and a single dose is sent with Peter on the starship to Path, to free the godspoken. Young Val and Miro prepare to take another ship to find new homes for the pequeninos and the hive queen. But on Lusitania, the long-simmering tensions between humans and pequeninos erupt. Grego, mad with grief over his brother Quim's death at the hands of a heretical tribe, incites a mob that burns an innocent forest, slaughtering the mothertree and her unborn young. The hive queen's bugger workers must intervene to restore a fragile, fearful peace.

On Path, the virus arrives. Han Fei-tzu releases it, and a plague of liberation sweeps the planet. The godspoken are freed from their rituals, and the genetic enhancements they carried are spread to all. Han Fei-tzu and Jane craft a message, explaining the change not as a rebellion, but as a gift from the gods, a purification of the whole world. The people believe it, and a new age begins. But Qing-jao refuses the new story. To her, the silence of the gods is the ultimate test. She believes they have withdrawn to see who remains faithful. Alone, she continues her rituals, tracing the woodgrain lines on the floor, day after day, year after year. Her father dies. The world changes around her. She becomes an old woman, a holy figure, the last true servant of the gods. Pilgrims come to watch her endless, silent worship. When she dies, murmuring her mother's name, the people of Path elevate her. In a world without gods, Han Qing-jao, whose name means Gloriously Bright, becomes the God of Path.