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Master Han nodded, to concede the possibility.
"The second problem I'm working on is even knottier," said Jane. "Whether we achieve faster- than-light travel or not, some pequeninos will have starships and can leave the planet Lusitania. The problem is that they carry inside them the most insidious and terrible virus ever known, one that destroys every form of life it touches except those few that it can twist into a deformed kind of symbiotic life utterly dependent on the presence of that virus."
"The descolada," said Master Han. "One of the justifications sometimes used for carrying the Little Doctor with the fleet in the first place."
"And it may actually be a justification. From the hive queen's point of view, it's impossible to choose between one life form and another, but as Andrew has often pointed out to me, human beings don't have that problem. If it's a choice between the survival of humanity and the survival of the pequeninos, he'd choose humanity, and for his sake so would I."
"And I," said Master Han.
"You can be sure the pequeninos feel the same way in reverse," said Jane. "If not on Lusitania then somewhere, somehow, it will almost certainly come down to a terrible war in which humans use the Molecular Disruption Device and the pequeninos use the descolada as the ultimate biological weapon. There's a good chance of both species utterly destroying each other. So I feel some urgency about the need to find a replacement virus for the descolada, one that will perform all the functions needed in the pequeninos' life cycle without any of its predatory, self-adapting capabilities. A selectively inert form of the virus."
"I thought there were ways to neutralize the descolada. Don't they take drugs in their drinking water on Lusitania?"
"The descolada keeps figuring out their drugs and adapting to them. It's a series of footraces. Eventually the descolada will win one, and then there won't be any more humans to race against."
"Do you mean that the virus is intelligent?" asked Wang-mu.
"One of the scientists on Lusitania thinks so," said Jane. "A woman named Quara. Others disagree. But the virus certainly acts as if it were intelligent, at least when it comes to adapting itself to changes in its environment and changing other species to fit its needs. I think Quara is right, personally. I think the descolada is an intelligent species that has its own kind of language that it uses to spread information very quickly from one side of the world to the other."
"I'm not a virologist," said Master Han.
"And yet if you could look at the studies being performed by Elanora Ribeira von Hesse--" "Of course I'll look. I only wish I had your hope that I can help."