Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

make sure you tell her to come to him as soon as she's done."
    "I'll tell her now. She has told me that nothing should stop her from answering the call of her father," said Wang-mu.
    Mu-pao looked aghast at the thought. "But it's forbidden to interrupt when the gods are--"
    "Qing-jao will do a greater penance later. She will want to know her father is calling her." It gave Wang-mu great satisfaction to put Mu-pao in her place. You may be ruler of the house servants, Mu-pao, but I am the one who has the power to interrupt even the conversation between my godspoken mistress and the gods themselves.
    As Wang-mu expected, Qing-jao's first reaction to being interrupted was bitter frustration, fury, weeping. But when Wang-mu bowed herself abjectly to the floor, Qing-jao immediately calmed. This is why I love her and why I can bear serving her, thought Wang-mu, because she does not love the power she has over me and because she has more compassion than any of the other godspoken I have heard of. Qing-jao listened to Wang-mu's explanation of why she had interrupted, and then embraced her. "Ah, my friend Wang-mu, you are very wise. If my father has cried out in anguish and then called to me, the gods know that I must put off my purification and go to him."
    Wang-mu followed her down the hallway, down the stairs, until they knelt together on the mat before Han Fei-tzu's chair.
     
     
     
    Qing-jao waited for Father to speak, but he said nothing. Yet his hands trembled. She had never seen him so anxious.
    "Father," said Qing-jao, "why did you call me?"
    He shook his head. "Something so terrible-- and so wonderful-- I don't know whether to shout for joy or kill myself." Father's voice was husky and out of control. Not since Mother died-- no, not since Father had held her after the test that proved she was godspoken-- not since then had she heard him speak so emotionally.
    "Tell me, Father, and then I'll tell you my news-- I've found Demosthenes, and I may have found the key to the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet."
    Father's eyes opened wider. "On this day of all days, you've solved the problem?"
    "If it is what I think it is, then the enemy of Congress can be destroyed. But it will be very hard. Tell me what you've discovered!"
    "No, you tell me first. This is strange-- both happening on the same day. Tell me!"
    "It was Wang-mu who made me think of it. She was asking questions about-- oh, about how computers work-- and suddenly I realized that if there were in every ansible computer a hidden program, one so wise and powerful that it could move itself from place to place to stay hidden, then that secret program could be intercepting all the ansible communications. The fleet might still be there, might even be sending messages, but we're not receiving them and don't even know that they exist because of these programs."
    "In every ansible computer? Working flawlessly all the time?" Father sounded skeptical, of course, because in her eagerness Qing-jao had told the story backward.
    "Yes, but let me tell you how such an impossible thing might be possible. You see, I found Demosthenes."
    Father listened as Qing-jao told him all about Valentine Wiggin, and how she had been writing secretly as Demosthenes all these years. " She is clearly able to send secret ansible messages, or her writings couldn't be distributed from a ship in flight to all the different worlds. Only the military is supposed to be able to communicate with ships that are traveling near the speed of light-- she must have either penetrated the military's computers or duplicated their power. And if she can do all that, if the program exists to allow her to do it, then that same program would clearly have the power to intercept the ansible messages from the fleet."
    "If A, then B, yes-- but how could this woman have planted a program in every ansible computer in the first place?"
    "Because she did it at the first! That's how old she is. In fact, if Hegemon Locke was her brother, perhaps-- no, of course -- he did it! When the first colonization fleets went out, with their philotic double-triads aboard to be the heart of each colony's first ansible, he could have sent that program with them."
    Father understood at once; of course he did. "As Hegemon he had the power, and the reason as well-- a secret program under his control, so that if there were a rebellion or a coup, he would still hold in his hands the threads that bind the worlds together."
    "And when he died,