Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

against her. Yet even though Qing-jao knew she was being manipulated, she couldn't help but wonder if Jane might not be right.
    "Are you a servant like I Ya?" asked Jane. "Will you slaughter your own world for the sake of an unworthy master like Starways Congress?"
    Qing-jao could not sort out her own feelings. Where did these thoughts come from? Jane had poisoned her mind with her arguments, just as Demosthenes had done before her-- if they weren't the same person all along. Their words could sound persuasive, even as they ate away at the truth.
    Did Qing-jao have the right to risk the lives of all the people of Path? What if she was wrong? How could she know anything? Whether everything Jane said was true or everything she said was false, the same evidence would lie before her. Qing-jao would feel exactly as she felt now, whether it was the gods or some brain disorder causing the feeling.
    Why, in all this uncertainty, didn't the gods speak to her? Why, when she needed the clarity of their voice, didn't she feel dirty and impure when she thought one way, clean and holy when she thought the other? Why were the gods leaving her unguided at this cusp of her life?
    In the silence of Qing-jao's inward debate, Wang-mu's voice came as cold and harsh as the sound of metal striking metal. "It will never happen," said Wang-mu.
    Qing-jao only listened, unable even to bid Wang-mu to be still.
    "What will never happen?" asked Jane.
    "What you said-- Starways Congress blowing up this world."
    "If you think they wouldn't do it you're even more of a fool than Qingjao thinks," said Jane.
    "Oh, I know they'd do it. Han Fei-tzu knows they'd do it-- he said they were evil enough men to commit any terrible crime if it suited their purpose."
    "Then why won't it happen?"
    "Because you won't let it happen," said Wang-mu. "Since blocking off every ansible message from Path might well lead to the destruction of this world, you won't block those messages. They'll get through. Congress will be warned. You will not cause Path to be destroyed."
    "Why won't I?"
    "Because you are Demosthenes," said Wang-mu. "Because you are full of truth and compassion."
    "I am not Demosthenes," said Jane.
    The face in the terminal display wavered, then changed into the face of one of the aliens. A pequenino, its porcine snout so disturbing in its strangeness. A moment later, another face appeared, even more alien: it was a bugger, one of the nightmare creatures that had once terrified all of humanity. Even having read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon , so that she understood who the buggers were and how beautiful their civilization had been, when Qing-jao saw one face to face like this it frightened her, though she knew it was only a computer display.
    "I am not human," said Jane, "even when I choose to wear a human face. How do you know, Wang-mu, what I will and will not do? Buggers and piggies both have killed human beings without a second thought."
    "Because they didn't understand what death meant to us. You understand. You said it yourself-- you don't want to die."
    "Do you think you know me, Si Wang-mu?"
    "I think I know you," said Wang-mu, "because you wouldn't have any of these troubles if you had been content to let the fleet destroy Lusitania."
    The bugger in the display was joined by the piggy, and then by the face that represented Jane herself. In silence they looked at Wang-mu, at Qing-jao, and said nothing.
     
     
     
    "Ender," said the voice in his ear.
    Ender had been listening in silence, riding on the car that Varsam was driving. For the last hour Jane had been letting him listen in on her conversation with these people of Path, translating for him whenever they spoke in Chinese instead of Stark. Many kilometers of prairie had passed by as he listened, but he had not seen it; before his mind's eye were these people as he imagined them. Han Fei-tzu-- Ender well knew that name, tied as it was to the treaty that ended his hope that a rebellion of the colony worlds would put an end to Congress, or at least turn its fleet away from Lusitania. But now Jane's existence, and perhaps the survival of Lusitania and all its peoples, hinged on what was thought and said and decided by two young girls in a bedroom on an obscure colony world.
    Qing-jao, I know you well, thought Ender. You are such a bright one, but the light you see by comes entirely from the stories of your gods. You are like the pequenino brothers who sat and watched my stepson die, able at