Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

starship the whole time? It's impossible. There'd be some record of the ansible transmissions, somewhere ."
    "It's always the ansible," said Wang-mu. "The Lusitania Fleet stops sending messages, and her starship must be sending them but it isn't. Who knows? Maybe Lusitania is sending secret messages, too." She thought of The Life of Human .
    "There can't be any secret messages," said Qing-jao. "The ansible's philotic connections are permanent, and if there's any transmission at any frequency, it would be detected and the computers would keep a record of it."
    "Well, there you are," said Wang-mu. "If the ansibles are all still connected, and the computers don't have a record of transmissions, and yet we know that there have been transmissions because Demosthenes has been writing all these things, then the records must be wrong."
    "There is no way for anyone to hide an ansible transmission," said Qingjao. "Not unless they were right in there at the very moment the transmission was received, switching it away from the normal logging programs and-- anyway, it can't be done. A conspirator would have to be sitting at every ansible all the time, working so fast that--"
    "Or they could have a program that did it automatically."
    "But then we'd know about the program-- it would be taking up memory, it would be using processor time."
    "If somebody could make a program to intercept the ansible messages, couldn't they also make it hide itself so it didn't show up in memory and left no record of the processor time it used?"
    Qing-jao looked at Wang-mu in anger. "Where did you learn so many questions about computers and you still don't know that things like that can't be done!"
    Wang-mu bowed her head and touched it to the floor. She knew that humiliating herself like this would make Qing-jao ashamed of her anger and they could talk again.
    "No," said Qing-jao, "I had no right to be angry, I'm sorry. Get up, Wang-mu. Keep asking questions. Those are good questions. It might be possible because you can think of it, and if you can think of it maybe somebody could do it. But here's why I think it's impossible: Because how could anybody install such a masterful program --on it would have to be on every computer that processes ansible communications anywhere. Thousands and thousands of them. And if one breaks down and another one comes online, it would have to download the program into the new computer almost instantly. And yet it could never put itself into permanent storage or it would be found there; it must keep moving itself all the time, dodging, staying out of the way of other programs, moving into and out of storage. A program that could do all that would have to be-- intelligent, it would have to be trying to hide and figuring out new ways to do it all the time or we would have noticed it by now and we never have. There's no program like that. How would anyone have ever programmed it? How could it have started? And look, Wang-mu-- this Valentine Wiggin who writes all of the Demosthenes things-- she's been hiding herself for thousands of years. If there's a program like that it must have been in existence the whole time. It wouldn't have been made up by the enemies of Starways Congress because there wasn't a Starways Congress when Valentine Wiggin started hiding who she was. See how old these records are that gave us her name? She hasn't been openly linked to Demosthenes since these earliest reports from-- from Earth . Before starships. Before ..."
    Qing-jao's voice trailed off, but Wang-mu already understood, had reached this conclusion before Qing-jao vocalized it. "So if there's a secret program in the ansible computers," said Wang-mu, "it must have been there all along. Right from the start."
    "Impossible," whispered Qing-jao. But since everything else was impossible, too, Wang-mu knew that Qing-jao loved this idea, that she wanted to believe it because even though it was impossible at least it was conceivable , it could be imagined and therefore it might just be real. And I conceived of it, thought Wang-mu. I may not be godspoken but I'm intelligent too. I understand things. Everybody treats me like a foolish child, even Qing-jao, even though Qing-jao knows how quickly I learn, even though she knows that I think of ideas that other people don't think of-- even she despises me. But I am as smart as anyone, Mistress! I am as smart as you, even though you never notice that, even though you will think you thought of this all