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"As I was saying," said Jane, "it happens that a single member of this new species is somewhat free of Congress. I hope to enlist your help in the works I'm trying to accomplish in the few months left to me."
"I'll do anything I can," said Master Han.
"And if I can help, I will," said Wang-mu. Only after she said it did she realize how ridiculous it was for her to offer such a thing. Master Han was one of the godspoken, one of those with superior intellectual abilities. She was only an uneducated specimen of ordinary humanity, with nothing to offer.
And yet neither of them mocked her offer, and Jane accepted it graciously. Such a kindness proved once again to Wang-mu that Jane had to be a living thing, not just a simulation.
"Let me tell you the problems that I hope to resolve."
They listened.
"As you know, my dearest friends are on the planet Lusitania. They are threatened by the Lusitania Fleet. I am very interested in stopping that fleet from causing any irrevocable harm."
"By now I'm sure they've already been given the order to use the Little Doctor," said Master Han.
"Oh, yes, I know they have. My concern is to stop that order from having the effect of destroying not only the humans of Lusitania, but two other raman species as well." Then Jane told them of the hive queen, and how it came to be that buggers once again lived in the universe. "The hive queen is already building starships, pushing herself to the limit to accomplish as much as she can before the fleet arrives. But there's no chance that she can build enough to save more than a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of Lusitania. The hive queen can leave, or send another queen who shares all her memories, and it matters little to her whether her workers go with her or not. But the pequeninos and the humans are not so self-contained. I'd like to save them all. Especially because my dearest friends, a particular speaker for the dead and a young man suffering from brain damage, would refuse to leave Lusitania unless every other human and pequenino could be saved."
"Are they heroes, then?" asked Master Han.
"Each has proved it several times in the past," said Jane.
"I wasn't sure if heroes still existed in the human race."
Si Wang-mu did not speak what was in her heart: that Master Han himself was such a hero.
"I am searching for every possibility," said Jane. "But it all comes down to an impossibility, or so humankind has believed for more than three thousand years. If we could build a starship that traveled faster than light, that traveled as quickly as the messages of the ansible pass from world to world, then even if the hive queen can build only a dozen starships, they could easily shuttle all the inhabitants of Lusitania to other planets before the Lusitania Fleet arrives."
"If you could actually build such a starship," said Han Fei-tzu, "you could create a fleet of your own that could attack the Lusitania Fleet and destroy it before it could harm anyone."
"Ah, but that is impossible," said Jane.
"You can conceive of faster-than-light travel, and yet you can't imagine destroying the Lusitania Fleet?"
"Oh, I can imagine it," said Jane. "But the hive queen wouldn't build it. She has told Andrew--my friend, the Speaker for the Dead--"
"Valentine's brother," said Wang-mu. "He also lives?"
"The hive queen has told him that she will never build a weapon for any reason."
"Even to save her own species?"
"She'll have the single starship she needs to get offplanet, and the others will also have enough starships to save their species. She's content with that. There's no need to kill anybody."
"But if Congress has its way, millions will be killed!"
"Then that is their responsibility," said Jane. "At least that's what Andrew tells me she answers whenever he raises that point."
"What kind of strange moral reasoning is this?"
"You forget that she only recently discovered the existence of other intelligent life, and she came perilously close to destroying it. Then that other intelligent life almost destroyed her. But it was her own near brush with committing the crime of xenocide that has had the greater effect on her moral reasoning. She can't stop other species from such things, but she can be certain that she doesn't do it herself. She will only kill when that's the only hope she has of saving the existence of her species. And since she has another hope, she won't build a warship."
"Faster-than-light travel," said Master Han. "Is that your only hope?"
"The only one I can think of that has a glimmer of possibility. At least we know that something in the universe moves faster than light--information is passed down the philotic ray from one ansible to another with no detectable passage of time. A bright young physicist on Lusitania who happens to be locked in jail at the present time is spending his days and nights working on this problem. I perform all his calculations and simulations for him. At this very moment he is testing a hypothesis about the nature of philotes by using a model so complex that in order to run the program I'm stealing time from the computers of almost a thousand different universities. There's hope."
"As long as you live, there's hope," said Wang-mu. "Who will do such massive experiments for him when you're gone?"
"That's why there's so much urgency," said Jane.
