“In harmony,” said Spunky.

  “When does Santa Claus come in?” asked Elyon.

  2019

  Messenger

  An Ender’s Game Story

  Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game won the 1985 Nebula and 1986 Hugo Awards as Best Novel, and launched one of the most influential military science fiction/space opera series of all times. International bestsellers, the story and characters have reappeared in numerous sequels, including two spin-off novel series, and dozens of short stories. Card wrote a new Fleet School story featuring Ender and Valentine Wiggin for the first Infinite Stars. In his latest original, which takes place many years after Ender’s Game and the parallel Bean series of novels, the character Graff, commander of the famous battle school that trained both Ender and Bean, finds himself a 3,000-plus-year-old man aboard a mysterious spaceship, his only companion an artificial intelligence that speaks in the voice of an old friend. He soon finds himself reunited with Bean’s children and seeking their help on a new mission of great importance.

  Graff was born more than three thousand years ago, so it shouldn’t have surprised him that he was starting to feel old. But since he’d spent most of those years in stasis, he didn’t feel as if he had really lived that long. Two weeks awake, then ten or fifteen or twenty years in stasis. And since he spent most of that waking time working on keeping his networks alive, replacing the people who had dropped out or retired or emigrated or died, he hadn’t done half the physical activity his doctors had warned him that he required.

  So this time he would spend some quality time on the treadmill before he met with anybody. Not even Scipio, who was probably getting rather old himself.

  And if three miles an hour was the best he could do—barely a brisk walking pace—that was simply a demonstration of how much he needed to keep up an exercise regimen.

  He got out of his coffin—nobody but Graff thought that this vampire reference was amusing, but he didn’t expect anyone alive now to get any of his jokes—and looked for something to wear while he took his walk-in-place.

  There was no chifforobe where he expected one.

  Only then did he really look around. This was not his normal stasis chamber. The space was too small. The walls showed no natural woods or fabrics. This was not a mere remodeling.

  There was a faint vibration in the floor.

  There was a treadmill, but it folded down from the wall and had a mirror behind it, so that when he walked on it, he’d have to look at himself. He had specifically forbidden Scipio to install a mirror anywhere but the bathroom.

  There were only two doors in the room, on opposite sides. If one was a bathroom and one was a closet, he was going to regard this as an architectural flaw.

  “Am I in a vehicle of some kind?” Graff asked aloud.

  “Welcome back to the universe of functioning biota,” said a strange voice. Well, not strange. He recognized it, but he didn’t know why. It was certainly not the computer voice he had known back in his old quarters.

  “Thus leaving the question unanswered,” said Graff.

  “You’re in a spaceship,” said the voice.

  “A shuttle? A yacht? An interstellar ship?”

  “Interstellar,” said the voice.

  “Destination?” asked Graff.

  The voice said nothing.

  “Do you know the destination?” asked Graff.

  “I do,” said the voice.

  “Then will you be kind enough to inform me what it is?”

  “I will, after a long and complicated explanation.”

  “I’m sure it’s long and I’m sure one of the complications is that you expect me to be either shocked or angry. But I’m neither surprised nor enraged, because I knew this day would come.”

  “And what day would that be?” asked the voice.

  “The day when my subordinates decided they didn’t actually benefit personally from all the work it takes to keep me alive and in office. I’m surprised they didn’t just switch off the stasis without bothering to move me anywhere.”

  “They didn’t move you,” said the voice.

  “If my subordinates didn’t put me in this ship, who did?”

  “I did.”

  Graff registered this. “Why do I know your voice?”

  “I have recently acquired a human body which is now, for lack of a better term, my ‘self.’ I like it, and so I decided to use my flesh-and-blood voice wherever I’m installed.”

  “So you’re a delusional artificial intelligence?”

  “I’m as alive as you, sir,” said the voice.

  “But not here. Not physically here in this ship.”

  “I’m merely installed here to look after you. I’ve actually been looking after you for more than a thousand years.”

  “A guardian angel,” said Graff.

  “Think of me as a gift to you from an old friend.”

  “I have no friends,” said Graff.

  “You have at least one, besides me,” she said.

  “Everybody I ever cared about is dead.”

  Silence.

  “All right, so perhaps I’ve lost track. Who is this mythical friend you believe I have?”

  “My voice is identical to hers, so I’m surprised you didn’t immediately recognize me.”

  “Stasis doesn’t enhance my memories, it merely keeps me from losing memories when I’m under,” said Graff.

  “She and her brother have been using relativistic space travel to stay quite youthful. But the brother passed away, after a fashion. So now she’s your last remaining friend.”

  Graff processed this. A brother and sister he regarded as friends, who traveled together to stay young through relativity.

  “Ender Wiggin is dead?”

  “After a fashion,” said the voice.

  “Do I call you Valentine, then?”

  “Oh, please don’t,” said the voice. “I’m Jane. That’s what Andrew called me ever since we met.”

  “Andrew gave a copy of you to me,” said Graff.

  “Your deductive powers are undiminished, Hyrum Graff.”

  “But Andrew is now dead.”

  “Andrew got too busy to keep track of three living human bodies, so he abandoned the one he had been using since birth, moved into the one most interesting to him, and gave the left over body to me.”

  “Yes, I believe that this is definitely a long and complicated tale.”

  “Valentine is still alive, but I look and sound exactly like her, so call me Jane to eliminate confusion.”

  “Somehow you moved me, or caused me to be moved, from my residence to a starship.”

  “I ordered the removal and shipment of a box. One that needed life maintenance in transit. Fortunately, they didn’t open the box to check the contents.”

  “And you did this to me because . . .?”

  “Because within twenty-four hours, your house was going to blow up in a massive explosion that wouldn’t have left any parts of you large enough to get a DNA sample.”

  “Ah. Scipio was determined to remove me from office.”

  “No. Scipio was going to be summoned to your residence to greet you upon waking. The explosion would have killed him, too.”

  “So by removing me—”

  “I caused him to be notified of your removal. The officers he sent to investigate discovered and disarmed the explosives, tracked them to their source, and found and arrested the perpetrators.”

  “You didn’t inform Scipio that I’m very much alive?”

  “So you think that the way you live is in some way ‘life’?”

  “I don’t know of any definition of ‘life’ that would not include this organism.”

  “True, even if you are as purposeless as an amoeba.” “I did more than eat and split myself now and then. Splitting oneself seems to be your talent, not mine.”

  “You’ve kept your position at the head of the Ministry of Colonization long past the time when it had become a completely reflexive bureaucracy that did not actually need or want a leader.”

  “No bureaucracy does, but I led them anyway. I’ve made some bold moves during my times awake.”

  “I know of no definition of ‘bold’ that would include your moves in the past thousand years.”

  Graff almost launched into a defense, which would probably have ended up sounding like his own obituary. So he held his tongue and conceded the point. “It’s been a while since I really felt necessary, that’s true.”

  “So your absence from the Ministry of Colonization now leaves Scipio in charge. He’s a capable, honorable man who will lead the ministry much better than you did.”

  Graff didn’t like hearing that. But before he could come back with a retort, Jane overspoke him. “He’ll be better by virtue of being present and conscious more often than you have been.”

  Graff could not argue with that. “So why didn’t you just let them blow me up?”

  “Just because you weren’t doing anything useful didn’t mean you couldn’t.”

  “You have a more important job for me?”

  “I have more interesting things for you to do.”

  “Interesting to whom?”

  “To you.”

  And there was the crux of it. Graff was bored.

  “How long have I been on this voyage?”

  “The literal or the metaphorical one?”

  “Both.”

  “I pulled you out of the soon to be exploded building about eighty years ago.”

  “When did Ender die?”

  “Not that long ago. Three real years.”

  “So I’ve been out of office for eighty years, and the universe hasn’t imploded yet?”

  “You were in stasis for two hundred and eighty years before that,” said Jane. “Sans implosion.”

  Graff was stunned. “What year is it?”

  A number appeared in large characters on a section of wall that was apparently a high-resolution screen when Jane felt like making it so.

  “And how old am I?”

  “An impossible calculation.”

  “Because stasis doesn’t have an exact equivalent to realtime aging?”

  “You age more than zero but far less than realtime. I would only be guessing.”

  “Any guess about my life expectancy?”

  “If you actually exercised regularly, it would be higher. But your general health is good for a man of your probable age and recent stress levels.”

  “What do you mean by ‘recent’?”

  “The past thousand years. You don’t get as emotionally involved in problems as you used to. You don’t take failure personally because you haven’t been involved for decades since your last decisions. It’s the ideal executive life. You get to throw your weight around but you have little at stake, personally.”

  “You make me sound powerless,” said Graff.

  “Then we’re communicating accurately.”

  “If I have little effect on events and events have little effect on me, why did you bother to waken me?”

  “Because Ender is sort of dead, Valentine refuses to make decisions that affect large numbers of people, and you have memories like nobody else. And management skills. You see to the heart of problems and judge where the fixes need to be applied.”

  “Well, I’m positively beaming with pride.”

  “No, you’re clearly feeling some emotional stress right now.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Because you don’t like my having taken you into space.”

  “That depends on what you tell me when you finally divulge my destination.”

  “Our destination.”

  “Your personal body is somewhere else. In this ship, you’re just software, right?”

  “And yet software that is present, destructible, and memory-independent of my personal self until we can reconnect.”

  Graff wasn’t buying it. “This ship has an ansible, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you use the ansible to communicate frequently with your personal self.”

  “I do not.”

  “Not frequently but continuously?”

  “Ansibles are so primitive and clunky,” said Jane.

  Graff thought about this for a few moments. “You have an ansible-like connection with your personal self without need for any machine.”

  “Since the moment of my receiving that lovely, fresh, and healthy body.”

  “So there’s no waiting for an update. It knows everything you know, remembers everything you’ve done, so the destruction of this ship would cause you no loss at all.”

  “I feel separate and I don’t want this remote self to die. And this remote self is heading for the same destination as you.”

  “Which is exactly where?”

  “Impossible to say.”

  “I doubt that,” said Graff coldly. “How many times do you think you can lie to me and retain even a shred of trust?”

  “I’m your only source of information,” Jane reminded him.

  “Not a fact that will increase my trust in you,” said Graff.

  “Our destination, as a point in space, is in constant flux, because it involves a three-body problem. And quite possibly two more moving bodies as well, though they are more loosely connected.”

  “A three-body rendezvous? Three ships?” asked Graff.

  “Mental function is at normal.”

  “Try not to sound so surprised.”

  “Don’t project your feelings onto me,” said Jane. “This starship and two others are meeting at a point in space remote from any planet, yet deliberately not too remote from two known planetary orbits. The rendezvous point keeps fluctuating.”

  “Why?” asked Graff. He knew he didn’t have to explain his question. Two-ship rendezvous were a trivial problem for even broken-down old computers. Three-ship rendezvous were harder, but as a rule of thumb you solved them by solving two of the ships and then bringing the third ship to that calculated rendezvous point, bending the other two ships’ trajectories until they reached equilibrium. The rendezvous point thus calculated should never change at all.

  “Because one of the ships doesn’t know we’re going to rendezvous and might be uncooperative.”

  “Ah, so this is a battle maneuver,” said Graff.

  “I hope not,” said Jane.

  “And the third ship?”

  “It’ll come wherever I say, whenever I say.”

  “I believe the ‘wherever,’ but the ‘whenever’ would require a miracle.”

  “It does, every single time,” said Jane. “But it’s a different kind of space travel.”

  “You’re implying faster than light.”

  “I’m implying instantaneous, by passing through a space outside the universe of organized matter and energy.”

  Graff nodded. “It actually works?”

  “It has some anomalies.”

  “Like?”

  “If a conscious creative mind is present,” said Jane, “then whatever that mind is clearly imagining will be generated—even living organisms.”

  “Like living people?”

  “Like my personal body,” said Jane. “Ender passed through this creative space the first time I conducted such a voyage, and his mental image of his sister Valentine and his brother Peter were physically generated. Living, breathing, talking, eating, pooping organisms.”

  “And you took over the extra Valentine?”

  “Not really extra. Different. The way Ender remembered her when they first reunited after the war.”

  “And you took her over.”

  “Not while Ender was alive,” said Jane. “His own aiúa was so strong he controlled three bodies at once. His own, the new Valentine, and the new Peter.”

  Graff couldn’t help but laugh. “I can imagine even Valentine couldn’t remain calm, coming face to face with a younger version of herself.”

  “She got a little snippy sometimes, but now that it isn’t Ender controlling the new copy of her and making her act like the angel that Ender thought she was when he was little, Val is OK with having me around. And we can share clothing.”

  “She didn’t like seeing an idealized version of herself,” said Graff.

  “Who does?” replied Jane.

  “Many people think they already are that idealized version,” said Graff.

  Jane did not reply to this observation. After a few moments, she changed the subject: “Our destination. It’s a kind of reunion. I think we’ll bring together, including you, the oldest human beings alive.”

  “A conference of time-skipping travelers?” asked Graff. “Too late for Ender. Is Valentine coming?”

  “She has work to do. You’re at leisure.”

  “Who else, then?”

  “I’m not bringing together the oldest simply to have a sort of Methuselah party. It happens that three of this gathering are superb genetic scientists. Creative ones. Genetic designers.”

  “I prefer the human race as it is,” said Graff.

  “No species ever gets to rest on its laurels. It’s adapt or die.”

  “But species usually depend on natural processes to adapt.”

  “Natural processes, at present, are far too slow,” said Jane. “Our enemy is a relentless artificial gene, constantly reshaping itself in order to master and control every higher life form it meets. It’s too quick for us to rely on natural processes.”

  “Who is this trio of gene-snippers?” asked Graff.

  “You once knew a genetically modified child.”

  Graff immediately thought back to the only time in his life when he had been responsible for, and had relationships with, children. As their teacher, their goad, as he shaped them to save the human race. Battle School.

  Genetic modification.

  “Anton’s Key,” said Jane helpfully.

  “I already remembered,” said Graff. “Bean. The tiny child who was doomed to die of giantism.”

  “The extraordinary genius child who was even cleverer than Andrew Wiggin,” said Jane.

  “Cleverer, but nobody would have followed him to the toilet even if they needed to pee.”

  “That changed,” said Jane. “And you know it did.”

  “When I knew him, that was true.”