It startled Ender to realize that Planter had just confessed that the pequeninos still took some pains to try to impress human beings. “What behaviors of yours have anything to do with planetary regulation?”
“Trees,” said Planter. “How many forests are there, all over the world? Transpiring constantly. Turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When there's more of it in the atmosphere, the world gets warmer. So what would we do to make the world get cooler?”
“Plant more forests,” said Ela. “To use up more CO2 so that more heat could escape into space.”
“Yes,” said Planter. “But think about how we plant our trees.”
The trees grow from the bodies of the dead, thought Ender. “War,” he said.
“There are quarrels between tribes, and sometimes they make small wars,” said Planter. “Those would be nothing on a planetary scale. But the great wars that sweep across the whole world– millions and millions of brothers die in these wars, and all of them become trees. Within months the forests of the world could double in size and number. That would make a difference, wouldn't it?”
“Yes,” said Ela.
“A lot more efficiently than anything that would happen through natural evolution,” said Ender.
“And then the wars stop,” said Planter. “We always think there are great causes for these wars, that they're struggles between good and evil. And now all the time they are nothing but planetary regulation.”
“No,” said Valentine. “The need to fight, the rage, that might come from the descolada, but it doesn't mean the causes you fought for are–”
“The cause we fight for is planetary regulation,” said Planter. “Everything fits. How do you think we help with warming the planet?”
“I don't know,” said Ela. “Even trees eventually die of old age.”
“You don't know because you've come during a warm time, not a cold one. But when the winters get bad, we build houses. The brothertrees give themselves to us to make houses. All of us, not just the ones who live in cold places. We all build houses, and the forests are reduced by half, by three-quarters. We thought this was a great sacrifice the brothertrees made for the sake of the tribe, but now I see that it's the descolada, wanting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to warm the planet.”
“It's still a great sacrifice,” said Ender.
“All our great epics,” said Planter. “All our heroes. Just brothers acting out the will of the descolada.”
“So what?” said Valentine.
“How can you say that? I learn that our lives are nothing, that we're only tools used by a virus to regulate the global ecosystem, and you call it nothing?”
“Yes, I call it nothing,” said Valentine. “We human beings are no different. It may not be a virus, but we still spend most of our time acting out our genetic destiny. Take the differences between males and females. Males naturally tend toward a broadcast strategy of reproduction. Since males make an almost infinite supply of sperm and it costs them nothing to deploy it–”
“Not nothing,” said Ender.
“Nothing,” said Valentine, “just to deploy it. Their most sensible reproductive strategy is to deposit it in every available female– and to make special efforts to deposit it in the healthiest females, the ones most likely to bring their offspring to adulthood. A male does best, reproductively, if he wanders and copulates as widely as possible.”
“I've done the wandering,” said Ender. “Somehow I missed out on the copulating.”
"I'm speaking of overall trends," said Valentine. "There are always strange individuals who don't follow the norms. The female strategy is just the opposite, Planter. Instead of millions and millions of sperm, they only have one egg a month, and each child represents an enormous investment of effort. So females need stability. They need to be sure there'll always be plenty of food. We also spend large amounts of time relatively helpless, unable to find or gather food. Far from being wanderers, we females need to establish and stay. If we can't get that, then our next best strategy is to mate with the strongest and healthiest possible males. But best of all is to get a strong healthy male who'll stay and provide, instead of wandering and copulating at will.
"So there are two pressures on males. The one is to spread their seed, violently if necessary. The other is to be attractive to females by being stable providers– by suppressing and containing the need to wander and the tendency to use force. Likewise, there are two pressures on females. The one is to get the seed of the strongest, most virile males so their infants will have good genes, which would make the violent, forceful males attractive to them. The other is to get the protection of the most stable males, nonviolent males, so their infants will be protected and provided for and as many as possible will reach adulthood.
"Our whole history, all that I've ever found in all my wanderings as an itinerant historian before I finally unhooked myself from this reproductively unavailable brother of mine and had a family– it can all be interpreted as people blindly acting out those genetic strategies. We get pulled in those two directions.
"Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts– those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.
“And the tribes of wandering barbarians outside the reach of civilization, those follow the mainly male strategy. Spread the seed. Within the tribe, the strongest, most dominant males take possession of the best females, either through formal polygamy or spur-of-the-moment copulations that the other males are powerless to resist. But those low-status males are kept in line because the leaders take them to war and let them rape and pillage their brains out when they win a victory. They act out sexual desirability by proving themselves in combat, and then kill all the rival males and copulate with their widowed females when they win. Hideous, monstrous behavior– but also a viable acting-out of the genetic strategy.”
Ender found himself very uncomfortable, hearing Valentine talk this way. He knew all this was true as far as it went, and he had heard it all before, but it still, in a small way, made him as uncomfortable as Planter was to learn similar things about his own people. Ender wanted to deny it all, to say, Some of us males are naturally civilized. But in his own life, hadn't he performed the acts of dominance and war? Hadn't he wandered? In that context, his decision to stay on Lusitania was really a decision to abandon the male-dominant social model that had been engrained in him as a young soldier in battle school, and become a civilized man in a stable family.
Yet even then, he had married a woman who turned out to have little interest in having more children. A woman with whom marriage had turned out to be anything but civilized, in the end. If I follow the male model, then I'm a failure. No child anywhere who carries on my genes. No woman who accepts my rule. I'm definitely atypical.
But since I haven't reproduced, my atypical genes will die with me, and thus the male and female social models are safe from such an in-between person as myself.
Even as Ender made his own private evaluations of Valentine's interpretation of human history, Planter showed his own response by lying back in his chair, a gesture that spoke of scorn. “I'm supposed to feel better because humans are also tools of some genetic molecule?”
“No,” said Ender. “You're supposed to realize that just because a lot of behavior can be explained as responses to the needs of some genetic molecule, it doesn't mean that all pequenino behavior is meaningless.”