Sum
@Summmluv
She smiles. She says his name.
Ender Wiggin, my precious.
Mother turned to Andrew, a bitter half-smile on her face. ‘You think the pequeninos caused the Descolada?’
‘No,’ said Andrew. ‘But what if the pequeninos are the Descolada?’
Quara gasped. Grego laughed. ‘You are full of clever ideas, aren’t you, Wiggin?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Quim.
‘I just wondered,’ said Andrew. ‘Quara says that the Descolada is complex enough that it might contain intelligence. What if Descolada viruses are using the bodies of the pequeninos to express their character? What if pequenino intelligence comes entirely from the viruses inside their bodies?’
Kovano acımadı
‘So we conclude—’
‘We conclude nothing,’ said Mother.
‘We conclude,’ continued Kovano, ‘that our xenobiologists are in sharp disagreement about the feasibility of taming the Descolada virus itself. That brings us to the other approach – persuading the pequeninos to send their colonies only to uninhabited worlds, where they can establish their own peculiarly poisonous ecology without killing human beings.’
'Persuading them,’ said Grego. ‘As if we could trust them to keep their promises.’
‘They’ve kept more promises so far than you have,’ said Kovano. ‘So I wouldn’t take a morally superior tone if I were you.’
An ansible without any philo
‘And the other problem?’ asked Kovano.
‘It’s one thing to design the replacement virus. It’s something else again to produce it.’
‘These are mere details,’ said Mother.
‘You’re wrong, Mother, and you know it,’ said Ela. ‘I can diagram what we want the new virus to be. But even working under ten degrees absolute, we can’t cut up and recombine the Descolada virus with enough precision. Either it dies, because we’ve left out too much, or it immediately repairs itself as soon as it returns to normal temperatures, because we didn’t take out enough.’
‘Technical problems.’
‘Technical problems,’ said Ela sharply. ‘Like building an ansible without a philotic link.’
‘Do you mean it’s a long way off, or you don’t have the faintest idea how to do it?’
Kovano was no fool – he obviously had dealt with scientists before. ‘Somewhere between those two,’ said Ela.
Mother shifted on her seat, visibly drawing away from Ela. My poor sister Ela, thought Quim. You may not be spoken to for the next several years.
PAUAHAUSHDU
Of course Grego took up her gauntlet. ‘When these viruses can write a poem or reason from a theorem, I’ll buy all this sentimental horseshit about how we ought to keep them alive.’
‘Just because we can’t read them doesn’t mean they don’t have their epic poems!’
‘Fechai as bocas!’ cried Kovano. Immediately they fell silent.
‘Nossa Senhora,’ he said. ‘Maybe God wants to destroy Lusitania because it’s the only way he can think of to shut you two up.’
Bishop Peregrino cleared his throat.