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"Except the gods have the decency to go away," said Wiggin.
He responded so quickly that Wang-mu realized that Jane must now be transmitting everything that was done or said instantaneously across the billions of kilometers of space between them. From what Wang-mu had learned about ansible costs, this sort of thing would be possible only for the military; a business that tried a realtime ansible linkup would pay enough money to provide housing for every poor person on an entire planet. And I'm getting this for free, because of Jane. I'm seeing their faces and they're seeing mine, even at the moment they speak.
"Do they?" asked Ela. "I thought the whole problem that Path was having is that the gods won't go away and leave them alone."
Wang-mu answered with bitterness. "The gods are like the descolada in every way. They destroy anything they don't like, and the people they do like they transform into something that they never were. Qing-jao was once a good and bright and funny girl, and now she's spiteful and angry and cruel, all because of the gods."
"All because of genetic alteration by Congress," said Wiggin. "A deliberate change introduced by people who were forcing you to fit their own plan."
"Yes," said Ela. "Just like the descolada."
"What do you mean?" asked Wiggin.
"A deliberate change introduced here by people who were trying to force Lusitania to fit their own plan."
"What people?" asked Wang-mu. "Who would do such a terrible thing?"
"It's been at the back of my mind for years," said Ela. "It bothered me that there were so few life forms on Lusitania-- you remember, Andrew, that was part of the reason we discovered that the descolada was involved in the pairing of species. We knew that there was a catastrophic change here that wiped out all those species and restructured the few survivors. The descolada was more devastating to most life on Lusitania than a collision with an asteroid. But we always assumed because we found the descolada here that it evolved here. I knew it made no sense-- just what Qing-jao said-- but since it had obviously happened, then it didn't matter whether it made sense or not. But what if it didn't happen? What if the descolada came from the gods? Not god gods, of course, but some sentient species that developed this virus artificially?"
"That would be monstrous," said Wiggin. "To create a poison like that and send it out to other worlds, not knowing or caring what you kill."
"Not a poison," said Ela. "If it really does handle planetary systems regulation, couldn't the descolada be a device for terraforming other worlds? We've never tried terraforming anything-- we humans and the buggers before us only settled on worlds whose native life forms had brought them to a stasis that was similar to the stasis of Earth. An oxygen-rich atmosphere that sucked out carbon