Ender's Saga 3 - Xenocide

VIP免费

2024-12-06 0 0 2.71MB 802 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

XENOCIDE

by Orson Scott Card

XENOCIDE ................................................................ 1

Chapter 1 -- A PARTING.............................................. 3

Chapter 2 -- A MEETING ............................................17

Chapter 3 -- CLEAN HANDS ........................................54

Chapter 4 -- JANE .....................................................72

Chapter 5 -- THE LUSITANIA FLEET ........................... 110

Chapter 6 -- VARELSE.............................................. 142

Chapter 7 -- SECRET MAID....................................... 175

Chapter 8 -- MIRACLES............................................ 212

Chapter 9 -- PINEHEAD............................................ 282

Chapter 10 -- MARTYR ............................................. 316

Chapter 11 -- THE JADE OF MASTER HO..................... 363

Chapter 12 -- GREGO'S WAR .................................... 421

Chapter 13 -- FREE WILL ......................................... 478

Chapter 14 -- VIRUS MAKERS ................................... 530

Chapter 15 -- LIFE AND DEATH ................................. 585

Chapter 16 -- VOYAGE ............................................. 709

Chapter 17 -- ENDER'S CHILDREN............................. 730

Chapter 18 -- THE GOD OF PATH............................... 777

Chapter 1 -- A PARTING

<Today one of the brothers asked me: Is it a terrible

prison, not to be able to move from the place where you're

standing?>

<I told him that I am now more free than he is. The

inability to move frees me from the obligation to act.>

Han Fei-tzu sat in lotus position on the bare wooden floor

beside his wife's sickbed. Until a moment ago he might

have been sleeping; he wasn't sure. But now he was aware

of the slight change in her breathing, a change as subtle as

the wind from a butterfly's passing.

Jiang-qing, for her part, must also have detected some

change in him, for she had not spoken before and now she

did speak. Her voice was very soft. But Han Fei-tzu could

hear her clearly, for the house was silent. He had asked his

friends and servants for stillness during the dusk of Jiang-

qing's life. Time enough for careless noise during the long

night that was to come, when there would be no hushed

words from her lips.

"Still not dead," she said. She had greeted him with these

words each time she woke during the past few days. At

first the words had seemed whimsical or ironic to him, but

now he knew that she spoke with disappointment. She

longed for death now, not because she hadn't loved life,

but because death was now unavoidable, and what cannot

be shunned must be embraced. That was the Path. Jiang-

qing had never taken a step away from the Path in her life.

"Then the gods are kind to me," said Han Fei-tzu.

"To you," she breathed. "What do we contemplate?"

It was her way of asking him to share his private

thoughts with her. When others asked his private

thoughts, he felt spied upon. But Jiang-qing asked only so

that she could also think the same thought; it was part of

their having become a single soul.

"We are contemplating the nature of desire," said Han

Fei-tzu.

"Whose desire?" she asked. "And for what?"

My desire for your bones to heal and become strong, so

that they don't snap at the slightest pressure. So that you

could stand again, or even raise an arm without your own

muscles tearing away chunks of bone or causing the bone

to break under the tension. So that I wouldn't have to

watch you wither away until now you weigh only eighteen

kilograms. I never knew how perfectly happy we were until

I learned that we could not stay together.

"My desire," he answered. "For you."

"'You only covet what you do not have.' Who said that?"

"You did," said Han Fei-tzu. "Some say, 'what you cannot

have.' Others say, 'what you should not have.' I say, 'You

can truly covet only what you will always hunger for.'"

"You have me forever."

"I will lose you tonight. Or tomorrow. Or next week."

"Let us contemplate the nature of desire," said Jiang-

qing. As before, she was using philosophy to pull him out

of his brooding melancholy.

He resisted her, but only playfully. "You are a harsh

ruler," said Han Feitzu. "Like your ancestor-of-the-heart,

you make no allowance for other people's frailty." Jiang-

qing was named for a revolutionary leader of the ancient

past, who had tried to lead the people onto a new Path but

was overthrown by weak-hearted cowards. It was not

right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him:

her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband.

Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women

were more complete inside themselves. They were also

better at living in their children. They were never as

solitary as a man alone.

Jiang-qing refused to let him return to brooding. "When a

man's wife is dead, what does he long for?"

Rebelliously, Han Fei-tzu gave her the most false answer

to her question. "To lie with her," he said.

"The desire of the body," said Jiang-qing.

Since she was determined to have this conversation, Han

Fei-tzu took up the catalogue for her. "The desire of the

body is to act. It includes all touches, casual and intimate,

and all customary movements. Thus he sees a movement

out of the corner of his eye, and thinks he has seen his

dead wife moving across the doorway, and he cannot be

content until he has walked to the door and seen that it

was not his wife. Thus he wakes up from a dream in which

he heard her voice, and finds himself speaking his answer

aloud as if she could hear him."

"What else?" asked Jiang-qing.

"I'm tired of philosophy," said Han Fei-tzu. "Maybe the

Greeks found comfort in it, but not me."

"The desire of the spirit," said Jiang-qing, insisting.

"Because the spirit is of the earth, it is that part which

makes new things out of old ones. The husband longs for

all the unfinished things that he and his wife were making

when she died, and all the unstarted dreams of what they

would have made if she had lived. Thus a man grows

angry at his children for being too much like him and not

enough like his dead wife. Thus a man hates the house

they lived in together, because either he does not change

it, so that it is as dead as his wife, or because he does

change it, so that it is no longer half of her making."

"You don't have to be angry at our little Qing-jao," said

Jiang-qing.

"Why?" asked Han Fei-tzu. "Will you stay, then, and help

me teach her to be a woman? All I can teach her is to be

what I am-- cold and hard, sharp and strong, like obsidian.

If she grows like that, while she looks so much like you,

how can I help but be angry?"

"Because you can teach her everything that I am, too,"

said Jiang-qing.

"If I had any part of you in me," said Han Fei-tzu, "I

would not have needed to marry you to become a

complete person." Now he teased her by using philosophy

to turn the conversation away from pain. "That is the

desire of the soul. Because the soul is made of light and

dwells in air, it is that part which conceives and keeps

ideas, especially the idea of the self. The husband longs for

his whole self, which was made of the husband and wife

together. Thus he never believes any of his own thoughts,

because there is always a question in his mind to which his

wife's thoughts were the only possible answer. Thus the

whole world seems dead to him because he cannot trust

anything to keep its meaning before the onslaught of this

unanswerable question."

"Very deep," said Jiang-qing.

"If I were Japanese I would commit seppuku, spilling my

bowel into the jar of your ashes."

"Very wet and messy," she said.

He smiled. "Then I should be an ancient Hindu, and burn

myself on your pyre."

But she was through with joking. "Qing-jao," she

whispered. She was reminding him he could do nothing so

flamboyant as to die with her. There was little Qing-jao to

care for.

So Han Fei-tzu answered her seriously. "How can I teach

her to be what you are?"

"All that is good in me," said Jiang-qing, "comes from the

Path. If you teach her to obey the gods, honor the

ancestors, love the people, and serve the rulers, I will be

in her as much as you are."

"I would teach her the Path as part of myself," said Han

Fei-tzu.

"Not so," said Jiang-qing. "The Path is not a natural part

of you, my husband. Even with the gods speaking to you

every day, you insist on believing in a world where

everything can be explained by natural causes."

"I obey the gods." He thought, bitterly, that he had no

choice; that even to delay obedience was torture.

"But you don't know them. You don't love their works."

"The Path is to love the people. The gods we only obey."

How can I love gods who humiliate me and torment me at

every opportunity?

"We love the people because they are creatures of the

gods."

"Don't preach to me."

She sighed.

Her sadness stung him like a spider. "I wish you would

preach to me forever," said Han Fei-tzu.

"You married me because you knew I loved the gods, and

that love for them was completely missing from yourself.

That was how I completed you."

How could he argue with her, when he knew that even

now he hated the gods for everything they had ever done

to him, everything they had ever made him do, everything

they had stolen from him in his life.

"Promise me," said Jiang-qing.

He knew what these words meant. She felt death upon

her; she was laying the burden of her life upon him. A

burden he would gladly bear. It was losing her company on

the Path that he had dreaded for so long.

"Promise that you will teach Qing-jao to love the gods

and walk always on the Path. Promise that you will make

her as much my daughter as yours."

"Even if she never hears the voice of the gods?"

"The Path is for everyone, not just the godspoken."

Perhaps, thought Han Fei-tzu, but it was much easier for

the godspoken to follow the Path, because to them the

price for straying from it was so terrible. The common

people were free; they could leave the Path and not feel

the pain of it for years. The godspoken couldn't leave the

Path for an hour.

"Promise me."

I will. I promise.

But he couldn't say the words out loud. He did not know

why, but his reluctance was deep.

In the silence, as she waited for his vow, they heard the

sound of running feet on the gravel outside the front door

of the house. It could only be Qing-jao, home from the

garden of Sun Cao-pi. Only Qing-jao was allowed to run

and make noise during this time of hush, They waited,

knowing that she would come straight to her mother's

room.

The door slid open almost noiselessly. Even Qing-jao had

caught enough of the hush to walk softly when she was

actually in the presence of her mother. Though she walked

on tiptoe, she could hardly keep from dancing, almost

galloping across the floor. But she did not fling her arms

around her mother's neck; she remembered that lesson

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

XENOCIDEbyOrsonScottCard(c)1991OrsonScottCardXENOCIDE................................................................1Chapter1--APARTING..............................................3Chapter2--AMEETING............................................17Chapter3--CLEANHANDS....................................

展开>> 收起<<

Ender's Saga 3 - Xenocide.pdf

共802页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Ender's Saga 3 - Xenocide

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: