fandomhigh | Library, Thursday [3/24]

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Library, Thursday [3/24]

Cassidy was relieved to find that the library was in a state of peace today. There didn't seem to be any squabbles of any kind going on in the stacks. She was convinced that it was because the different armies had taken her threats of shielding them and putting them in the children's section for a few hours quite seriously.

After she took care of any of the shelving and straightening that needed to be done, she withdrew to the desk with a few books on Akido -- and a travel book about Baltimore.

This could only end well. Really.

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"Mine, or humanity's in general?" Ender wondered. "I was born at a time when religion and faith were frowned upon in public. My parents were religious, but they hid it, and so I didn't learn anything from them; my thoughts about the world came from what happened to me, and the people I talked to. But I haven't yet stumbled on one that I wouldn't change if I got a good argument against it."

A pause.

"Or maybe that's untrue; maybe I just believe people all have a little good and a little bad in them, but that's nothing anyone taught me."

There were a few questions that she really wanted to ask, but she didn't want to be rude. She liked Ender and therefore didn't want to insult him by asking too many personal questions. So she thought carefully about what else she could ask.

"I'm not sure I understand why faith and belief would be frowned upon in public, but I've always been one to believe that there is good in everybody."

"Because a lot of faiths where I come from encourage people to have as many babies as they can," Ender explained, "And we spent a lot of time all clumped up together in one place, with no more room for new people. It was illegal to have more than two children for a very long time."

Cassidy's mind stumbled over that one for a long moment as she tried to gather her voice. "Mother Night and may the Darkness be merciful."

"Overcrowding," Ender said, simply. "It was that, or run out of resources."

While the logical part of Cassidy understood what he was saying, the emotional part of her was still grappling with the idea of a certain number of children being illegal.

"Witches don't have many children," she said. "So Kaeleer hasn't ever had the resource problem from what I have studied." She chewed on her lip. "Do the resources come up short because there are no Queens to care for the land?"

It was an honest, albeit naive, question.

"No," Ender said, though the smile he gave her - tiny and rueful - showed that he understood. "Because any patch of land can only support so many people, Queens or not. And if there are more and more people every day, with nowhere for them to go, eventually there'll be too many."

"Oh." Cassidy said and then she nodded. "Even the most fertile land can only support so much life on it, so to try and prevent the resources running out... there was a law made like that?" She was trying to imagine a world that had so many people like Ender had described.

"We had been under attack for a long time at that point," Ender said, with a quick nod. "Everyone was afraid, so they clumped together, knowing they couldn't leave. And obeyed the law, for the most part, except for those who believed in their faith so much they couldn't quite stomach it."

Like Ender's parents, but he wasn't about to go into the whole 'why yes, I'm my parents' third child' thing here.

Okay, that part, Cassidy didn't like. The idea of Ender's people being under attack brought up all of her protective instincts. They weren't the instincts of a Queen, but the instincts of Cassidy herself to defend people she cared about.

"Attacked? There was someone making war on your people?"

"Another species," Ender supplied. "The Formics. They attacked us twice, and we barely got out with our lives. Eventually we attacked them ourselves, and killed them all. There's no more population laws now."

He kept his tone mild, matter-of-fact. Being guilty of xenocide was also not anything he was eager to share.

Her eyes had widened only slightly during his explanation. "I'm glad that you and your people are free of that, then," she said. "It couldn't have been easy for you to know your people were at war."

"It was what it was," Ender said, vaguely. "When you grow up with war and fear, it winds up being just the way things are. You adapt. People are pretty resilient that way."

"You're a stronger person than I am, then," Cassidy said honestly. "I would get myself into a great deal of trouble trying to adapt. My brother says that I am too nosy and curious for my own good sometimes. I would want to know the whys of the enemy so I could find the best way to help overcome them while pretending to adapt. Problem is, I don't lie well."

Or really, at all.

"There were already people in charge taking care of that," he said, "Our command structure is very different from the Blood - I'm sure you've noticed some of that already. Besides, how you grow up also determines a lot about which way you point your curiosity - and which way you help."

After a brief pause, he added, "And how much you accept the idea that the enemy is the enemy and that's that."

"If they're hurting and killing my people, it would be difficult for me to not accept that the enemy is just the enemy," she said slowly. "If there was a reason that they were doing it that wasn't just they're evil and that's that, then it would probably be a little harder to accept that reasoning."

"Do you think it's likely any creature with a conscience would just do something because they're evil?" Ender asked. "I mean, without definition 'evil' can be anything you want it to be. Do you think there's something like a person who is only evil, and hence only does evil things?"

"I don't think that a person or creature starts out as evil or only evil," she said after thinking about this. "I think that most are shaped by their perceptions or the way the world is around them -- or the way that it treats them. All beings start out with the ability to be either good or evil -- or I guess even neutral."

"But is it either-or to you?" Ender asked, "Or can an evil person still have some good in them? Do a good thing for the wrong reasons, for example? Or is it possible for someone to be neither good nor evil, but to do evil out of ignorance, and what does that make them?"

He didn't actually really have any answers to those questions, but they were ones that plagued him, and different perspectives could often help.

Though he had his hunch about what her answer would be.

Cassidy ran a hand through her hair. "Before Agio, I would have said that it's not either-or. I used to believe that everyone had good in them and the ability to do good, and maybe in some ways I still do think that. The Jhinka scared me because I had never felt something so focused on another's destruction like that. Were they evil or just tainted? I don't know. Were they trying to kill everything in that village out of an evil bred by ignorance? I don't know that, either." She sighed. "Do I think that someone could be neither good or evil, but do things that we would label as evil because of the way that we are all taught -- and they were taught differently than we might have been? I do think that it's possible."

He nodded thoughtfully as she answered. "And what if I tell you that the people who attacked us were very different from us?" Ender asked. "That among their species, the only people capable of individual thought, of reproduction, were their Queens, and every other being under their command had no thoughts of their own, were like hands and feet? That the two times they attacked my world and killed my people, they did so thinking that they weren't killing any people, just poking us in the arm or the leg?"

He placed a hand down on the books he'd brought in.

Cassidy's face drained of color. "They had Queens that made them attack your world? Their own people were so broken by them that they couldn't understand that they were harming people?"

She swallowed hard, and then swallowed again. "If they were truly incapable of making the distinction between the harm they thought they were doing and what they were really doing, then I don't believe that makes them evil."

"No," he corrected, gently, "They were just a different species. A little like ants, except their Queens had grown sentient, and very clever. But it was biologically impossible for anyone out of that species, except for the Queens, to develop minds, souls, whatever you would call it. Their Queens corrupted nothing, but their people were just their bodies, born empty; that's just the way they had always been. The problem was that their Queens thought that we worked the same way on the inside, when we didn't-- they didn't realise that for us, every human can think just as well as our Queens do."

He took a breath. "When the Queens did figure that out, they stopped attacking us," he said, "Because for them it was unthinkable to kill anything that could think freely like they did."

Edited 2011-03-25 14:55 (UTC)

"Mother Night," Cassidy whispered. "Mother Night." She shook her head slightly, processing everything that Ender was telling her. Bodies born empty was something she was having a hard time imagining, but she was trying to.

"I don't understand why they would be attacking in the first place, even if they thought every other being worked like them." She bit her lip again. "If they didn't know better and were just acting as they thought every one did, but then stopped when they realized what they were doing... I don't think I would call them evil." She looked up at Ender. "But it wasn't my people that they were attacking. What did you think?"

"I think it was a tragic failure to communicate, nothing more, nothing less," he said, with a brief, none-too-happy quirk of his mouth. "They had just been looking for a new place to colonise, and thought they were just letting us know about their intent by killing a handful of people. Then things escalated."

Ender bit down on his own lip. "Of course, the other side of the question is this," he said, "We didn't know that after the second time they didn't want to come back. So we came for them the third time and wiped them out. Does that make us evil?"

He wasn't actually sure he wanted her to answer that - it was framed as an impersonal question, but it was quite personal to him, and he wasn't sure he actually wanted to debate the matter of guilt here that distantly when it wasn't.

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