Frank Herbert - Children of the Mind

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2024-12-01 0 0 514.05KB 248 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
To Barbara Bova,
whose toughness, wisdom, and empathy
make her a great agent
and an even better friend
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. “I’m Not Myself”
2. “You Don’t Believe in God”
3. “There Are Too Many of Us”
4. “I Am a Man of Perfect Simplicity”
5. “Nobody Is Rational”
6. “Life Is a Suicide Mission”
7. “I Offer Her This Poor Old Vessel”
8. “What Matters Is Which Fiction You Believe”
9. “It Smells Like Life to Me”
10. “This Has Always Been Your Body”
11. “You Called Me Back from Darkness”
12. “Am I Betraying Ender?”
13. “Till Death Ends All Surprises”
14. “How They Communicate with Animals”
15. “We’re Giving You a Second Chance”
16. “How Do You Know They Aren’t Quivering in Terror”
17. “The Road Goes On without Him Now”
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
[Image]
My heartfelt thanks to:
Glenn Makitka, for the title, which seems so obvious now, but which never
crossed my mind until he suggested it in a discussion in Hatrack River on
America Online;
Van Gessel, for introducing me to Hikari and Kenzaburo Oe, and for his
masterful translation of Shusaku Endo's Deep River;
Helpful readers in Hatrack River, like Stephen Boulet and Sandi Golden, who
caught typographical errors and inconsistencies in the manuscript;
Tom Doherty and Beth Meacham at Tor, who allowed me to split Xenocide in
half in order to have a chance to develop and write the second half of the
story properly;
My friend and fellow weeder in the vineyards of literature, Kathryn H.
Kidd, for her chapter-by-chapter encouragement;
Kathleen Bellamy and Scott J. Alien for Sisyphean service;
Kristine and Geoff for careful reading that helped me resolve
contradictions and unclarities; and
My wife, Kristine, and my children, Geoffrey, Emily, Charlie Ben, and Zina,
for patience with my strange schedule and self-absorption during the
writing process, and for teaching me all that is worth telling stories
about.
This novel was begun at home in Greensboro, North Carolina, and finished on
the road at Xanadu II in Myrtle Beach, in the Hotel Panama in San Rafael,
and in Los Angeles in the home of my dear cousins Mark and Margaret Park,
whom I thank for their friendship and their hospitality. Chapters were
uploaded in manuscript form into the Hatrack River Town Meeting on America
Online, where several dozen fellow citizens of that virtual community
downloaded it, read it, and commented on it to the book's and my great
benefit.
CHAPTER 1
“I'M NOT MYSELF”
[Image]
"Mother. Father. Did I do it right?"
The last words of Han Qing-jao, from
The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
Si Wang-mu stepped forward. The young man named Peter took her hand and led
her into the starship. The door closed behind them.
Wang-mu sat down on one of the swiveling chairs inside the small
metal-walled room. She looked around, expecting to see something strange
and new. Except for the metal walls, it could have been any office on the
world of Path. Clean, but not fastidiously so. Furnished, in a utilitarian
way. She had seen holos of ships in flight: the smoothly streamlined
fighters and shuttles that dipped into and out of the atmosphere; the vast
rounded structures of the starships that accelerated as near to the speed
of light as matter could get. On the one hand, the sharp power of a needle;
on the other, the massive power of a sledgehammer. But here in this room,
no power at all. Just a room.
Where was the pilot? There must be a pilot, for the young man who sat
across the room from her, murmuring to his computer, could hardly be
controlling a starship capable of the feat of traveling faster than light.
And yet that must have been precisely what he was doing, for there were no
other doors that might lead to other rooms. The starship had looked small
from the outside; this room obviously used all the space that it contained.
There in the corner were the batteries that stored energy from the solar
collectors on the top of the ship. In that chest, which seemed to be
insulated like a refrigerator, there might be food and drink. So much for
life support. Where was the romance in starflight now, if this was all it
took? A mere room.
With nothing else to watch, she watched the young man at the computer
terminal. Peter Wiggin, he said his name was. The name of the ancient
Hegemon, the one who first united all the human race under his control,
back when people lived on only one world, all the nations and races and
religions and philosophies crushed together elbow to elbow, with nowhere to
go but into each other's lands, for the sky was a ceiling then, and space
was a vast chasm that could not be bridged. Peter Wiggin, the man who ruled
the human race. This was not him, of course, and he had admitted as much.
Andrew Wiggin sent him; Wang-mu remembered, from things that Master Han had
told her, that Andrew Wiggin had somehow made him. Did this make the great
Speaker of the Dead Peter's father? Or was he somehow Ender's brother, not
just named for but actually embodying the Hegemon who had died three
thousand years before?
Peter stopped murmuring, leaned back in his chair, and sighed. He rubbed
his eyes, then stretched and groaned. It was a very indelicate thing to do
in company. The sort of thing one might expect from a coarse fieldworker.
He seemed to sense her disapproval. Or perhaps he had forgotten her and now
suddenly remembered that he had company. Without straightening himself in
his chair, he turned his head and looked at her.
"Sorry," he said. "I forgot I was not alone."
Wang-mu longed to speak boldly to him, despite a lifetime retreating from
bold speech. After all, he had spoken to her with offensive boldness, when
his starship appeared like a fresh-sprouted mushroom on the lawn by the
river and he emerged with a single vial of a disease that would cure her
home world, Path, of its genetic illness. He had looked her in the eye not
fifteen minutes ago and said, "Come with me and you'll be part of changing
history. Making history." And despite her fear, she had said yes.
Had said yes, and now sat in a swivel chair watching him behave crudely,
stretching like a tiger in front of her. Was that his beast-of-the-heart,
the tiger? Wang-mu had read the Hegemon. She could believe that there was a
tiger in that great and terrible man. But this one? This boy? Older than
Wang-mu, but she was not too young to know immaturity when she saw it. He
was going to change the course of history! Clean out the corruption in the
Congress. Stop the Lusitania Fleet. Make all colony planets equal members
of the Hundred Worlds. This boy who stretched like a jungle cat.
"I don't have your approval," he said. He sounded annoyed and amused, both
at once. But then she might not be good at understanding the inflections of
one such as this. Certainly it was hard to read the grimaces of such a
round-eyed man. Both his face and his voice contained hidden languages that
she could not understand.
"You must understand," he said. "I'm not myself."
Wang-mu spoke the common language well enough at least to understand the
idiom. "You are unwell today?" But she knew even as she said it that he had
not meant the expression idiomatically at all.
"I'm not myself," he said again. "I'm not really Peter Wiggin."
"I hope not," said Wang-mu. "I read about his funeral in school."
"I do look like him, though, don't I?" He brought up a hologram into the
air over his computer terminal. The hologram rotated to look at Wang-mu;
Peter sat up and assumed the same pose, facing her.
"There is a resemblance," she said.
"Of course, I'm younger," said Peter. "Because Ender didn't see me again
after he left Earth when he was -- what, five years old? A little runt,
anyway. I was still a boy. That's what he remembered, when he conjured me
out of thin air."
"Not air at all," she said. "Out of nothing."
"Not nothing, either," he said. "Conjured me, all the same." He smiled
wickedly. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep."
These words meant something to him, but not to her. In the world of Path
she had been expected to be a servant and so was educated very little.
Later, in the house of Han Fei-tzu, her abilities had been recognized,
first by her former mistress, Han Qing-jao, and later by the master
himself. From both she had acquired some bits of education, in a haphazard
way. What teaching there had been was mostly technical, and the literature
she learned was of the Middle Kingdom, or of Path itself. She could have
quoted endlessly from the great poet Li Qing-jao, for whom her one-time
mistress had been named. But of the poet he was quoting, she knew nothing.
"I can call spirits from the vasty deep," he said again. And then, changing
his voice and manner a little, he answered himself. "Why so can I, or so
can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?"
"Shakespeare?" she guessed.
He grinned at her. She thought of the way a cat smiles at the creature it
is toying with. "That's always the best guess when a European is doing the
quoting," he said.
"The quotation is funny," she said. "A man brags that he can summon the
dead. But the other man says that the trick is not calling, but rather
getting them to come."
He laughed. "What a way you have with humor."
"This quotation means something to you, because Ender called you forth from
the dead."
He looked startled. "How did you know?"
She felt a thrill of fear. Was it possible? "I did not know, I was making a
joke."
"Well, it's not true. Not literally. He didn't raise the dead. Though he no
doubt thinks he could, if the need arose." Peter sighed. "I'm being nasty.
The words just come to my mind. I don't mean them. They just come."
"It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from
speaking them aloud."
He rolled his eyes. "I wasn't trained for servility, the way you were."
So this was the attitude of one who came from a world of free people -- to
sneer at one who had been a servant through no fault of her own. "I was
trained to keep unpleasant words to myself as a matter of courtesy," she
said. "But perhaps to you, that is just another form of servility."
"As I said, Royal Mother of the West, nastiness comes unbidden to my
摘要：

ToBarbaraBova,whosetoughness,wisdom,andempathymakeheragreatagentandanevenbetterfriendCONTENTSAcknowledgments1.“I’mNotMyself”2.“YouDon’tBelieveinGod”3.“ThereAreTooManyofUs”4.“IAmaManofPerfectSimplicity”5.“NobodyIsRational”6.“LifeIsaSuicideMission”7.“IOfferHerThisPoorOldVessel”8.“WhatMattersIsWhichFic...

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