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Master Han was not in his room when Wang-mu returned. He might be at the toilet and return in a moment. He might be performing some ritual of the godspoken, in which case he could be gone for hours. Wang-mu was too full of questions to wait for him. She brought up the project documents on the terminal, knowing that Jane would be watching, monitoring her. That Jane had no doubt monitored all that happened in Qing-jao's room.
Still, Jane waited for Wang-mu to phrase the questions she had got from Qing-jao before she started trying to answer. And then Jane answered first the question of veracity.
"The documents from Lusitania are genuine enough," said Jane. "Ela and Novinha and Ouanda and all the others who have studied with them are deeply specialized, yes, but within their specialty they're very good. If Qing-jao had read the Life of Human, she would see how these dozen species-pairs function."
"But what she says is still hard for me to understand," said Wang-mu. "I've been trying to think how it could all be true--that there are too few species for a real gaialogy to develop, and yet the planet Lusitania is still well-enough regulated to sustain life. Could it possibly be that there is no environmental stress on Lusitania?"
"No," said Jane. "I have access to all the astronomical data from the satellites there, and in the time humanity has been present in the Lusitania system, Lusitania and its sun have shown all the normal fluctuations. Right now there seems to be an overall trend of global cooling."
"Then how will the life forms on Lusitania respond?" asked Wang-mu. "The descolada virus won't let them evolve--it tries to destroy anything strange, which is why it's going to kill the humans and the hive queen, if it can."
Jane, whose small image sat in lotus position in the air over Master Han's terminal, held up a hand. "One moment," she said.
Then she lowered her hand. "I have been reporting your questions to my friends, and Ela is very excited."
A new face appeared in the display, just behind and above the image of Jane. She was a dark-skinned, Negroid-looking woman; or some mix, perhaps, since she was not that dark, and her nose was narrow. This is Elanora, thought Wang-mu. Jane is showing me a woman on a world many lightyears away; is she also showing my face to her? What does this Ela make of me? Do I seem hopelessly stupid to her?
But Ela clearly was thinking nothing about Wang-mu at all. She was speaking, instead, of Wang-mu's questions. "Why doesn't the descolada virus permit variety? That should be a trait with negative survival value, and yet the descolada survives. Wang-mu must think I'm such an idiot, not to have thought of this before. But I'm not a gaialogist, and I grew up on Lusitania, so I never questioned it, I just figured that whatever the Lusitanian gaialogy was, it worked--and then I kept studying the descolada. What does Wang-mu think?"
Wang-mu was appalled to hear these words from this stranger. What had Jane told Ela about her? How could Ela even imagine that Wang-mu would think Ela was an idiot, when she was a scientist and Wang-mu was only a servant girl?
"How can it matter what I think?" said Wang-mu.
"What do you think?" said Jane. "Even if you can't think why it might matter, Ela wants to know."
So Wang-mu told her speculations. "This is very stupid to think of, because it's only a microscopic virus, but the descolada must be doing it all. After all, it contains the genes of every species within it, doesn't it? So it must take care of evolution by itself. Instead of all that genetic drift, the descolada must do the drifting. It could, couldn't it? It could change the genes of a whole species, even while the species is still alive. It wouldn't have to wait for evolution."
There was a pause again, with Jane holding up her hand. Sh
e must be showing Wang-mu's face to Ela, letting her hear Wang-mu's words from her own lips.
"Nossa Senhora," whispered Ela. "On this world, the descolada is Gaia. Of course. That would explain everything, wouldn't it? So few species, because the descolada only permits the species that it has tamed. It turned a whole planetary gaialogy into something almost as simple as Daisyworld itself."
Wang-mu thought it was almost funny, to hear a highly-educated scientist like Ela refer back to Daisyworld, as if she were still a new student, a half-educated child like Wang-mu.
Another face appeared next to Ela's, this time an older Caucasian man, perhaps sixty years old, with whitening hair and a very quieting, peaceful look to his face. "But part of Wang-mu's question is still unanswered," said the man. "How could the descolada ever evolve? How could there have ever been proto-descolada viruses? Why would such a limited gaialogy have survival preference over the slow evolutionary model that every other world with life on it has had?"
"I never asked that question," said Wang-mu. "Qing-jao asked the first part of it, but the rest of it is his question."
"Hush," said Jane. "Qing-jao never asked the question. She used it as a reason not to study the Lusitanian documents. Only you really asked the question, and just because Andrew Wiggin understands your own question better than you do doesn't mean it isn't still yours."
So this was Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead. He didn't look ancient and wise at all, not the way Master Han did. Instead this Wiggin looked foolishly surprised, the way all round-eyes did, and his face changed with every momentary mood, as if it were out of control. Yet there was that look of peace about him. Perhaps he had some of the Buddha in him. Buddha, after all, had found his own way onto the Path. Maybe this Andrew Wiggin had found a way onto the Path, even though he wasn't Chinese at all.
Wiggin was still asking the questions that he thought were Wang-mu's. "The odds against the natural occurrence of such a virus are--unbelievable. Long before a virus evolved that could link species together and control a whole gaialogy, the proto-descoladas would have destroyed all life. There wasn't any time for evolution--the virus is just too destructive. It would have killed everything in its earliest form, and then died out itself when it ran out of organisms to pillage."
"Maybe the pillaging came later," said Ela. "Maybe it evolved in symbiosis with some other species that benefited from its ability to genetically transform all the individuals within it, all within a matter of days or weeks. It might only have extended to other species later."
"Maybe," said Andrew.
A thought occurred to Wang-mu. "The descolada is like one of the gods," she said. "It comes and changes everybody whether they like it or not."
"Except the gods have the decency to go away," said Wiggin.
He responded so quickly that Wang-mu realized that Jane must now be transmitting everything that was done or said instantaneously across the billions of kilometers of space between them. From what Wang-mu had learned about ansible costs, this sort of thing would be possible only for the military; a business that tried a realtime ansible linkup would pay enough money to provide housing for every poor person on an entire planet. And I'm getting this for free, because of Jane. I'm seeing their faces and they're seeing mine, even at the moment they speak.
"Do they?" asked Ela. "I thought the whole problem that Path was having is that the gods won't go away and leave them alone."
Wang-mu answered with bitterness. "The gods are like the descolada in every way. They destroy anything they don't like, and the people they do like they transform into something that they never were. Qing-jao was once a good and bright and funny girl, and now she's spiteful and angry and cruel, all because of the gods."
