Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

dividing line is always there."
    "What I love," said Grego, "is the idea that after we've started tootling around at instantaneous speeds in our reality, what's to stop us from finding others? Whole new universes?"
    "Or making others," said Olhado.
    "Right," said Grego. "As if you or I could actually hold a pattern for a whole universe in our minds."
    "But maybe Jane could," said Olhado. "Couldn't she?"
    "What you're saying," said Valentine, "is that maybe Jane is God."
    "She's probably listening right now," said Grego. "The computer's on, even if the display is blocked. I'll bet she's getting a kick out of this."
    "Maybe every universe lasts long enough to produce something like Jane," said Valentine. "And then she goes out and creates more and--"
    "It goes on and on," said Olhado. "Why not?"
    "But she's an accident ," said Valentine.
    "No," said Grego. "That's one of the things Andrew found out today. You've got to talk to him. Jane was no accident. For all we know there are no accidents. For all we know, everything was all part of the pattern from the start."
    "Everything except ourselves," said Valentine. "Our-- what's the word for the philote that controls us?"
    " Aiúa ," said Grego. He spelled it out for her.
    "Yes," she said. "Our will , anyway, which always existed, with whatever strengths and weaknesses it has. And that's why, as long as we're part of the pattern of reality, we're free."
    "Sounds like the ethicist is getting into the act," said Olhado.
    "This is probably complete bobagem ," said Grego. "Jane's going to come back laughing at us. But Nossa Senhora , it's fun , isn't it?"
    "Hey, for all we know, maybe that's why the universe exists in the first place," said Olhado. "Because going around through chaos popping out realities is a lark. Maybe God's been having the best time."
    "Or maybe he's just waiting for Jane to get out there and keep him company," said Valentine.
     
     
     
    It was Miro's turn with Planter. Late-- after midnight. Not that he could sit by him and hold his hand. Inside the cleanroom, Miro had to wear a suit, not to keep contamination out, but to keep the descolada virus he carried inside himself from getting to Planter.
    If I just cracked my suit a little bit, thought Miro, I could save his life.
    In the absence of the descolada, the breakdown of Planter's body was rapid and devastating. They all knew that the descolada had messed with the pequenino reproductive cycle, giving the pequeninos their third life as trees, but until now it hadn't been clear how much of their daily life depended on the descolada. Whoever designed this virus was a coldhearted monster of efficiency. Without the descolada's daily, hourly, minutely intervention, cells began to become sluggish, the production of vital energy-storing molecules stopped, and-- what they feared most-- the synapses of the brain fired less rapidly. Planter was rigged with tubes and electrodes, and he lay inside several scanning fields, so that from the outside Ela and her pequenino assistants could monitor every aspect of his dying. In addition, there were tissue samples every hour or so around the clock. His pain was so great that when he slept at all, the taking of tissue samples didn't wake him. And yet through all this-- the pain, the quasi-stroke that was afflicting his brain-- Planter remained doggedly lucid. As if he were determined by sheer force of will to prove that even without the descolada, a pequenino could be intelligent. Planter wasn't doing this for science, of course. He was doing it for dignity.
    The real researchers couldn't spare time to take a shift as the inside worker, wearing the suit and just sitting there, watching him, talking to him. Only people like Miro, and Jakt's and Valentine's children-- Syfte, Lars, Ro, Varsam-- and the strange quiet woman Plikt; people who had no other urgent duties to attend to, who were patient enough to endure the waiting and young enough to handle their duties with precision-- only such people were given shifts. They might have added a fellow pequenino to the shift, but all the brothers who knew enough about human technologies to do the job right were part of Ela's or Ouanda's teams, and had too much work to do. Of all those who spent time inside the cleanroom with him, taking tissue samples, feeding him, changing bottles, cleaning him up, only Miro had known pequeninos well enough to communicate with them. Miro could speak to him in Brothers' Language. That had to be of