Page 814 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"But what she says is still hard for me to understand," said Wang-mu. "I've been trying to think how it could all be true-- that there are too few species for a real gaialogy to develop, and yet the planet Lusitania is still well-enough regulated to sustain life. Could it possibly be that there is no environmental stress on Lusitania?"
"No," said Jane. "I have access to all the astronomical data from the satellites there, and in the time humanity has been present in the Lusitania system, Lusitania and its sun have shown all the normal fluctuations. Right now there seems to be an overall trend of global cooling."
"Then how will the life forms on Lusitania respond?" asked Wang-mu. "The descolada virus won't let them evolve-- it tries to destroy anything strange, which is why it's going to kill the humans and the hive queen, if it can."
Jane, whose small image sat in lotus position in the air over Master Han's terminal, held up a hand. "One moment," she said.
Then she lowered her hand. "I have been reporting your questions to my friends, and Ela is very excited."
A new face appeared in the display, just behind and above the image of Jane. She was a dark- skinned, Negroid-looking woman; or some mix, perhaps, since she was not that dark, and her nose was narrow. This is Elanora, thought Wang-mu. Jane is showing me a woman on a world many lightyears away; is she also showing my face to her? What does this Ela make of me? Do I seem hopelessly stupid to her?
But Ela clearly was thinking nothing about Wang-mu at all. She was speaking, instead, of Wang- mu's questions. "Why doesn't the descolada virus permit variety? That should be a trait with negative survival value, and yet the descolada survives. Wang-mu must think I'm such an idiot, not to have thought of this before. But I'm not a gaialogist, and I grew up on Lusitania, so I never questioned it, I just figured that whatever the Lusitanian gaialogy was, it worked-- and then I kept studying the descolada. What does Wang-mu think?"
Wang-mu was appalled to hear these words from this stranger. What had Jane told Ela about her? How could Ela even imagine that Wang-mu would think Ela was an idiot, when she was a scientist and Wang-mu was only a servant girl?
"How can it matter what I think?" said Wang-mu.
"What do you think?" said Jane. "Even if you can't think why it might matter, Ela wants to know."
So Wang-mu told her speculations. "This is very stupid to think of, because it's only a microscopic virus, but the descolada must be doing it all. After all, it contains the genes of every species within it, doesn't it? So it must take care of evolution by itself. Instead of all that genetic drift, the descolada must do the drifting. It could, couldn't it? It could change the genes of a whole species, even while the species is still alive. It wouldn't have to wait for evolution."