Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)
destruction loomed over Lusitania, some of them set in motion by Ender himself, and yet not one of them could now be solved by any act or word or thought of Andrew Wiggin. Like all the other citizens of Lusitania, his future was in the hands of other people. The difference between him and them was that Ender knew all the danger, all the possible consequences of every failure or mistake. Who was more cursed, the one who died, unknowing until the very moment of his death, or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?
Ender left the fathertrees and walked on down the well-beaten path toward the human colony. Through the gate, through the door of the xenobiology lab. The pequenino who served as Ela's most trusted assistant-- named Deaf, though he was definitely not hard of hearing-- led him at once to Novinha's office, where Ela, Novinha, Quara, and Grego were already waiting. Ender held up the pouch containing the fragment of potato plant.
Ela shook her head; Novinha sighed. But they didn't seem half as disappointed as Ender had expected. Clearly there was something else on their minds.
"I guess we expected that," said Novinha.
"We still had to try," said Ela.
" Why did we have to try?" demanded Grego. Novinha's youngest son-- and therefore Ender's stepson-- was in his mid-thirties now, a brilliant scientist in his own right; but he did seem to relish his role as devil's advocate in all the family's discussions, whether they dealt with xenobiology or the color to paint the walls. "All we're doing by introducing these new strains is teaching the descolada how to get around every strategy we have for killing it. If we don't wipe it out soon, it'll wipe us out. And once the descolada is gone, we can grow regular old potatoes without any of this nonsense."
"We can't !" shouted Quara. Her vehemence surprised Ender. Quara was reluctant to speak out at the best of times; for her to speak so loudly now was out of character. "I tell you that the descolada is alive."
"And I tell you that a virus is a virus," said Grego.
It bothered Ender that Grego was calling for the extermination of the descolada-- it wasn't like him to so easily call for something that would destroy the pequeninos. Grego had practically grown up among the pequenino males-- he knew them better, spoke their language better, than anyone.
"Children, be quiet and let me explain this to Andrew," said Novinha. "We were discussing what to do if the potatoes failed, Ela and I, and she told me-- no, you explain it, Ela."
"It's an easy enough concept. Instead of trying to grow plants that inhibit the growth of the descolada virus, we need to go after the virus itself."
"Right," said Grego.
"Shut up ," said Quara.
"As a kindness to us all, Grego, please do as your sister has so kindly asked," said Novinha.
Ela sighed and went on. "We can't just kill it because that would kill all the other native life on Lusitania. So what I propose is trying to develop a new strain of descolada that continues to act as the present virus acts in the reproductive cycles of all the Lusitanian life forms, but without the ability to adapt to new species."
"You can eliminate that part of the virus?" asked Ender. "You can find it?"
"Not likely. But I think I can find all the parts of the virus that are active in the piggies and in all the other plant-animal pairs, keep those, and discard everything else. Then we'd add a rudimentary reproductive ability and set up some receptors so it'll respond properly to the appropriate changes in the host bodies, put the whole thing in a little organelle, and there we have it-- a substitute for the descolada so that the pequeninos and all the other native species are safe, while we can live without worry."
"Then you'll spray all the original descolada virus to wipe them out?" asked Ender. "What if there's already a resistant strain?"
"No, we don't spray them, because spraying wouldn't wipe out the viruses that are already incorporated into the bodies of every Lusitanian creature. This is the really tricky part--"
"As if the rest were easy ," said Novinha, "making a new organelle out of nothing--"
"We can't just inject these organelles into a few piggies or even into all of them, because we'd also have to inject them into every other native animal and tree and blade of grass."
"Can't be done," said Ender.
"So we have to develop a mechanism to deliver the organelles universally, and
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher