evil to be allowed to live? At what point do you know they are an unbearable danger to all other sentient species?"
"Turn it around, Peter," said Quara. "At what point do you know they're not?"
"We have better weapons than the Little Doctor. Ela once designed a molecule to block the descolada's efforts to cause harm, without destroying its ability to help the flora and fauna of Lusitania to pass through their transformations. Who's to say that we can't do the same thing for every nasty little plague they send at us until they give up? Who's to say that they aren't already trying desperately to communicate with us? How do you know that the molecule they sent wasn't an attempt to make us happy with them the only way they knew how, by sending us a molecule that would take away our anger? How do you know they aren't already quivering in terror down on that planet because we have a ship that can disappear and reappear anywhere else? Are we trying to talk to them?"
Peter looked around at all of them.
"Don't you understand, any of you? There's only one species that we know of that has deliberately, consciously, knowingly tried to destroy another sentient species without any serious attempt at communication or warning. We're the ones. The first xenocide failed because the victims of the attack managed to conceal exactly one pregnant female. The second time it failed for a better reason -- because some members of the human species determined to stop it. Not just some, many. Congress. A big corporation. A philosopher on Divine Wind. A Samoan divine and his fellow believers on Pacifica. Wang-mu and I. Jane. And Admiral Lands's own officers and men, when they finally understood the situation. We're getting better, don't you see? But the fact remains -- we humans are the sentient species that has shown the most tendency to deliberately refuse to communicate with other species and instead destroy them utterly. Maybe the descoladores are varelse and maybe they're not. But I'm a lot more frightened at the thought that we are varelse. That's the cost of using the Little Doctor when it isn't needed and never will be, given the other tools in our kit. If we choose to use the M. D. Device, then we are not ramen. We can never be trusted. We are the species that would deserve to die for the safety of all other sentient life."
Quara shook her head, but the smugness was gone. "Sounds to me like somebody is still trying to earn forgiveness for his own crimes."
"That was Ender," said Peter. "He spent his life trying to turn himself and everyone else into ramen. I look around me in this ship, I think of what I've seen, the people I've known in the past few months, and I think that the human race isn't doing too badly. We're moving in the right direction. A few throwbacks now and then. A bit of blustery talk. But by and large, we're coming closer to being worthy to associate with the hive queens and the pequeninos. And if the descoladores are perhaps a bit farther from being ramen than we are, that doesn't mean we have a right to destroy them. It means we have all the more reason to be patient with them and try to nurse them along. How many years has it taken us to get here from marking the sites of battles with piles of human skulls? Thousands of years. And all the time, we had teachers trying to get us to change, pointing the way. Bit by bit we learned. Let's teach them -- if they don't already know more than we do."
"It could take years just to learn their language," said Ela.
"Transportation is cheap now," said Peter. "No offense intended, Jane. We can keep teams shuttling back and forth for a long time without undue hardship to anyone. We can keep a fleet watching this planet. With pequeninos and hive workers alongside the human researchers. For centuries. For millennia. There's no hurry."
"I think that's dangerous," said Quara.
"And I think you have the same instinctive desire that we all have, the one that gets us in so damn much trouble all the time," said Peter. "You know that you're going to die, and you want to see it all resolved before you do."
"I'm not old yet!" Quara said.
Miro spoke up. "He's right, Quara. Ever since Marcão died, you've had death looming