Sum
@Summmluv
She smiles. She says his name.
Ender Wiggin, my precious.
'...Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can’t punish him, because he can’t help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can’t honor him, because he was a puppet, too.'
Reklam
‘Our philotic connections say that we aren’t. Because we’re capable of connecting with each other by act of will, which no other form of life on Earth can do. There’s something we have, something we are, that wasn’t caused by anything else.’
‘What, our soul?’
‘Not even that,’ said Miro.
‘Because the priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he’s responsible for every choice we make. God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal – there’s no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.’
Isn’t it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality, who’s about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl genius with OCD on a planet I never heard of, and how will I live without Jane when she’s gone?
‘Stop pitying yourself and get back to work.’ It was Jane, speaking in his ear, and she had waited almost long enough before speaking, almost long enough that he was ready to have her tease him. Almost but not quite, and so he resented her intrusion. Resented knowing that she had been listening and watching all along.
‘Now you’re mad,’ she said.
You don’t know what I’m feeling, thought Ender. You can’t know. Because you’re not human.
‘You think I don’t know what you’re feeling,’ said Jane.
He felt a moment of vertigo, because for a moment it seemed to him that she had been listening to something far deeper than the conversation.
‘But I lost you once, too.’
Ender subvocalized: ‘I came back.’
‘Never completely,’ said Jane. ‘Never like it was before. So you just take a couple of those self-pitying little tears on your cheeks and count them as if they were mine. Just to even up the score.’
‘I don’t know why I bother trying to save your life,’ said Ender silently.
‘Me neither,’ said Jane. ‘I keep telling you it’s a waste of time.’
‘The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven. Maybe I could have been content. Maybe not.’
Reklam