"Orson Scott Card - Ender's Saga 03 - Xenocide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

from him or because of his insistence. And now, though she was using it in a
noble cause, she was nevertheless doing exactly the sort of political
manipulation that Peter had loved so much.
Peter had gone on to become Hegemon, ruler of all humanity for sixty years at
the beginning of the Great Expansion. He was the one who united all the
quarreling communities of man for the vast effort that flung starships out to
every world where the buggers had once dwelt, and then on to discover more
habitable worlds until, by the time he died, all the Hundred Worlds had either
been settled or had colony ships on the way. It was almost a thousand years
after that, of course, before Starways Congress once again united all of
humankind under one government-- but the memory of the first true Hegemon--
*the* Hegemon-- was at the heart of the story that made human unity possible.
Out of a moral wasteland like Peter's soul came harmony and unity and peace.
While Ender's legacy, as far as humanity remembered, was murder, slaughter,
xenocide.
Ender, Valentine's younger brother, the man she and her family were voyaging to
see-- he was the tender one, the brother she loved and, in the earliest years,
tried to protect. He was the good one. Oh, yes, he had a streak of ruthlessness
that rivaled Peter's, but he had the decency to be appalled by his own
brutality. She had loved him as fervently as she had loathed Peter; and when
Peter exiled his younger brother from the Earth that Peter was determined to
rule, Valentine went with Ender-- her final repudiation of Peter's personal
hegemony over her.
And here I am again, thought Valentine, back in the business of politics.
She spoke sharply, in the clipped voice that told her terminal that she was
giving it a command. "Transmit," she said.
The word transmitting appeared in the air above her essay. Ordinarily, back when
she was writing scholarly works, she would have had to specify a destination--
submit the essay to a publisher through some roundabout pathway so that it could
not readily be traced to Valentine Wiggin. Now, though, a subversive friend of
Ender's, working under the obvious code name of "Jane," was taking care of all
that for her-- managing the tricky business of translating an ansible message
from a ship going at near-light speed to a message readable by a planetbound
ansible for which time was passing more than five hundred times faster.
Since communicating with a starship ate up huge amounts of planetside ansible
time, it was usually done only to convey navigational information and
instructions. The only people permitted to send extended text messages were high
officials in the government or the military. Valentine could not begin to
understand how "Jane" managed to get so much ansible time for these text
transmissions-- and at the same time keep anyone from discovering where these
subversive documents were coming from. Furthermore, "Jane" used even more
ansible time transmitting back to her the published responses to her writings,
reporting to her on all the arguments and strategies the government was using to
counter Valentine's propaganda. Whoever "Jane" was-- and Valentine suspected
that "Jane" was simply the name for a clandestine organization that had
penetrated the highest reaches of government-- she was extraordinarily good. And
extraordinarily foolhardy. Still, if Jane was willing to expose herself--
themselves-- to such risks, Valentine owed it to her-- them-- to produce as many
tracts as she could, and as powerful and dangerous as she could make them.
If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.