Children of the Mind

From Orson Scott Card Wiki

Publisher: Tor Science Fiction and Fantasy
Published: 1996-08-01

[edit] Story Summary

Orson Scott Card returns at last to the story of Ender Wiggin, the child hero of the Hugo and Nebula award winner Ender's Game, who as a man found a way to redeem the Xenocide of his youth and restore the Hive Queen to life. Now his adopted world, Lusitania, is threatened by the same planet-destroying weapon that he himself used so many thousands of years before.

Lusitania is home to three sentient species: The Pequeninos, a strange race native to Lusitania; a large colony of humans; and the Hive Queen, brought there by Ender. But the Starways Congress fears Lusitania and a strange virus that it harbors, and they have gathered a fleet to destroy the planet.

Ender's oldest friend, Jane, the computer intelligence that has evolved with him over three thousand years, allowed the Starways Congress to discover her existence when she tried to stop the fleet. Now they are trying to kill her as well, by shutting down the network of computers and ansibles in which she lives. They are afraid of her and of her control over all human communications.

Jane can save the three sentient races of Lusitania. She has learned how to move ships outside the universe, and then instantly back to a different world, abolishing the light-speed limit. But it takes all the processing power available to her, and the Starways Congress is shutting down the Net world by world. Soon she will not be able to move the ships.

But there is hope: during the first trip outside, Ender's mind briefly took control and created two new beings - replicas of his brother Peter, who was the Hegemon, and his sister Valentine. These two children of Ender's mind, together with his adopted children from Lusitania, are racing against time to discover new worlds, to influence the Starways Congress to recall the fleet, and to save Jane by finding a home for her disembodied intelligence once the Human Network is closed off to her.

[edit] Praise:

"...a worthy ending to what might be styled a saga of the ethical evolution of humanity, a concept seldom attempted before and never realized with the success Card achieves here." - Booklist

The finale of the author's Hugo Award-winning Ender Wiggin trilogy is the kind of Asimovoid sci-fi/fantasy saga prized by aficionados." - AudioFile

[edit] Story Details

Warning: Plot or ending details follow

At the start of Children of the Mind, Jane is using her newly discovered abilities to take the formics, humans and pequeninos to distant habitable planets to colonize them, but she is losing her memories and concentration as the vast computer network connected to the ansible is being shut down. If she is to live, she must find a way to transfer her aiúa to a human body.

Ender's wife has joined a religious order, the Children of the Mind of Christ (Filhos de Mente de Christo), and Ender insists on joining with her. His own aiúa now controls his own body as well as young Valentine's and Peter's, but his own body suffers as most of his attention is devoted to the efforts of Peter and Valentine, diverting much of the aiúa of his own body into his other two. Peter (joined by Wang-mu, an intelligent servant girl from Path, introduced in the third book) goes off to distant worlds attempting to manipulate the political arena to ultimately sway enough members of Starways Congress to vote against the destruction of Lusitania. Meanwhile, Miro and young Valentine are spending all available time looking for additional habitable planets (or so they think). Eventually it is revealed that they are in fact searching for the home planet of the aliens who created the devastating descolada virus. This planet is discovered and Miro dubs the inhabitants descoladores. However, the Lusitania Fleet is expected to arrive and destroy Lusitania within a few weeks. Jane is constantly shuttling shiploads of colonists off Lusitania and to the new colony planets in an effort to get as many humans off the planet as possible before it is destroyed.

Peter and Wang-Mu travel to the worlds of Divine Wind and Pacifica to convince the Japanese-led swing group of the Starways Congress to revoke their order to destroy Lusitania. They succeed, but the admiral at the head of the Lusitania fleet disobeys their order and does what he believes Ender Wiggin, the first Xenocide, would have done: he fires the M.D. Device to protect all human life from the (now harmless, though he doesn't realize it) descolada, regardless of the political implications.

However, not all is as awful as it may seem. Jane is granted possession of Young Val's body, so she is not destroyed by the ansible shutdown. She is then able to continue transporting starships instantaneously by putting part of her aiúa in the infinitely large pequenino mothertrees. She is then able to get Peter and Wang-Mu close enough to the M.D. Device so that she can transport the Molecular Disruption Device itself back to Lusitania fleet, where it is then disarmed and disabled.

So, in the end, Ender's aiúa leaves his broken, old body and previous life behind to live in Peter, Jane falls in love with Miro, and Peter with Si Wang-mu (Both couples get married under one of the mothertrees of the pequeninos, the same day as Ender's funeral), Peter's efforts finally come to fruition, and the destruction of Lusitania is averted. The story ends with the two new couples "winking" away from Lusitania to an unknown destination.