Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

in size and number. That would make a difference, wouldn't it?"
    "Yes," said Ela.
    "A lot more efficiently than anything that would happen through natural evolution," said Ender.
    "And then the wars stop," said Planter. "We always think there are great causes for these wars, that they're struggles between good and evil. And now all the time they are nothing but planetary regulation."
    "No," said Valentine. "The need to fight, the rage, that might come from the descolada, but it doesn't mean the causes you fought for are--"
    "The cause we fight for is planetary regulation," said Planter. "Everything fits. How do you think we help with warming the planet?"
    "I don't know," said Ela. "Even trees eventually die of old age."
    "You don't know because you've come during a warm time, not a cold one. But when the winters get bad, we build houses. The brothertrees give themselves to us to make houses. All of us, not just the ones who live in cold places. We all build houses, and the forests are reduced by half, by three-quarters. We thought this was a great sacrifice the brothertrees made for the sake of the tribe, but now I see that it's the descolada, wanting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to warm the planet."
    "It's still a great sacrifice," said Ender.
    "All our great epics," said Planter. "All our heroes. Just brothers acting out the will of the descolada."
    "So what ?" said Valentine.
    "How can you say that? I learn that our lives are nothing, that we're only tools used by a virus to regulate the global ecosystem, and you call it nothing?"
    "Yes, I call it nothing," said Valentine. "We human beings are no different. It may not be a virus, but we still spend most of our time acting out our genetic destiny. Take the differences between males and females. Males naturally tend toward a broadcast strategy of reproduction. Since males make an almost infinite supply of sperm and it costs them nothing to deploy it--"
    "Not nothing ," said Ender.
    "Nothing," said Valentine, "just to deploy it. Their most sensible reproductive strategy is to deposit it in every available female-- and to make special efforts to deposit it in the healthiest females, the ones most likely to bring their offspring to adulthood. A male does best, reproductively, if he wanders and copulates as widely as possible."
    "I've done the wandering," said Ender. "Somehow I missed out on the copulating."
    "I'm speaking of overall trends," said Valentine. "There are always strange individuals who don't follow the norms. The female strategy is just the opposite, Planter. Instead of millions and millions of sperm, they only have one egg a month, and each child represents an enormous investment of effort. So females need stability. They need to be sure there'll always be plenty of food. We also spend large amounts of time relatively helpless, unable to find or gather food. Far from being wanderers, we females need to establish and stay. If we can't get that, then our next best strategy is to mate with the strongest and healthiest possible males. But best of all is to get a strong healthy male who'll stay and provide, instead of wandering and copulating at will.
    "So there are two pressures on males. The one is to spread their seed, violently if necessary. The other is to be attractive to females by being stable providers-- by suppressing and containing the need to wander and the tendency to use force. Likewise, there are two pressures on females. The one is to get the seed of the strongest, most virile males so their infants will have good genes, which would make the violent, forceful males attractive to them. The other is to get the protection of the most stable males, nonviolent males, so their infants will be protected and provided for and as many as possible will reach adulthood.
    "Our whole history, all that I've ever found in all my wanderings as an itinerant historian before I finally unhooked myself from this reproductively unavailable brother of mine and had a family-- it can all be interpreted as people blindly acting out those genetic strategies. We get pulled in those two directions.
    "Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts-- those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.
    "And the tribes of wandering barbarians outside