60 pages • 2 hours read
Orson Scott CardXenocide
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Voyage”
The hive queen and Human agree that hope lies in Ender’s mission to travel to Outspace. If the mission succeeds, the hive queen will send out daughter queens but will stay on Lusitania herself.
Han Fei-tzu asks Qing-jao if they should use the virus that will reverse the OCD mutation, and although she says that she is not afraid of the virus, she begs him not to use it because it will provoke the gods to punish him. He plans to release the virus nonetheless and hopes that Qing-jao will listen once the OCD is reversed.
Ender, Miro, and Ela are loaded into a small spacecraft. While spectators see the spaceship disappear, those on the ship feel nothing, but they know they are in Outspace when three other people suddenly appear. Miro appears as his former self, before his brain damage, and his current body dissolves. A young version of Valentine appears, along with a version of Peter at the age when he became Hegemon. Ender unwittingly created them both from patterns he holds in his mind. He argues with Peter, and Ela yells for them to stop so that Ender can help her test the recolada. The recolada virus is viable, so Jane returns the ship to Lusitania along with Peter and young Valentine.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Ender’s Children”
The hive queen can feel that Ender continues to hold the patterns for young Valentine and Peter and that they are both part of him. As she states, “Whatever they do, whatever they say, it is Ender’s aiúa [Ender’s will], acting and speaking” (359).
The recolada is successfully tested on a Pequenino named Glass, and the test is successful. Knowing that Peter is dangerously predisposed toward harmful psychological patterns, Ender considers killing him. However, he is morally conflicted because he cannot harm young Val, so by extension, he cannot kill Peter either. He thinks of Peter and young Val as his children, and he is uncomfortable because they both have intimate knowledge of him, meaning he has no more secrets. Bishop Peregrino, who baptizes Miro’s new body, rejects Peter and young Val as abominations and rejects Ender for creating them. Ender feels responsible for Peter and young Val but also feels he has no control over Peter. He refuses to travel to Outspace again, fearing that he would only create two more, but he agrees that Peter and young Val, as parts of him, could go in his stead given their ability to contain Jane within themselves. Jane is worried that it might not work and asserts that having several versions of Peter is better than letting everyone on Lusitania die, but Ender thinks that Peter is too dangerous to risk replicating again.
The Pequeninos kill Glass so he can enter his third life as a fathertree, thereby completing the experiment. Valentine argues that young Val is not Ender’s daughter. She takes young Val home but is uncomfortable in her presence, so Plikt takes in young Val. Experiments show that young Val and Valentine have identical genetics, and she wonders if she was ever as beautiful and pure as young Val. Valentine feels lonely because Jakt is in space retrieving samples of plants and animals that will now be able to survive on Lusitania. Peter and Jane make another successful trip to Outspace to confirm that Peter and young Val can carry Jane’s consciousness. Peter will be sent to Path, and young Val will go in search of habitable planets for the Pequeninos and the hive queen.
The recolada is released. Peter plans on taking control of Starways Congress and becoming the Hegemon after delivering the virus to Path. Ender visits Novinha, and she is peaceful and no longer blames him for Quim’s death. She refuses to leave the convent but wants Ender to join her there. Ender will not join the convent but will be allowed to visit Novinha once a month. Ender feels that his work is done and his influence on the world will be represented in the actions of his children—Peter, young Val, and Novinha’s children whom he helped to raise. Ender finds young Val at Olhado’s. Young Val tells Ender that he is not responsible for healing the world. He leaves and speaks with Jane about their love and the ansible shutdown they are still facing.
Chapter 18 Summary: “The God of Path”
The descolada had been assimilating to the hive queen, and Human suggests that she could have merged with the humans—an idea that disgusts her. Human still feels trapped by the descolada virus and resents the fact that Pequeninos must die and become trees before they can reproduce. The hive queen does not feel free, nor do human parents, but Human, who has roots and cannot move, does not agree with the comparison.
Arriving on Path, Peter delivers the virus and a bacterium that will reverse the side effects, and he asks Wang-mu to join him. She is hesitant, but when she learns that he is Peter Wiggin, she agrees to help him. After they leave, Han Fei-tzu drinks the serums and then passes them to Qing-jao and the others in his house. They fall ill from the side effects, and Qing-jao, who recovers first, tends to her father and the servants. She does not have the urge to purify, and she assumes it is because she has pleased the gods.
A document created by Jane and Han Fei-tzu is released, claiming that everyone on Path has been purified, which is why they can no longer hear the gods. Qing-jao accuses Han Fei-tzu of deception, and when Jane declares that they are all gods, that none of them had been made, and that they will exist as long as gods, Qing-jao screams. She internally begs the gods to speak to her, but they do not. She thinks it is a test and concludes that she must trace woodgrains without being told to do it. Despite Qing-jao’s resistance to Path’s new reality, the transformation on Path is mostly peaceful, and schools are opened to all children. Researchers confirm that Starways Congress altered their genes, but Qing-jao does not pay attention to the results of their research. She gains fame as the last of the godspoken, and people visit her and leave food for her. She whispers while purifying, and disciples record her words in a book, including her last words asking her now-deceased parents if she lived correctly. When she dies, Path agrees that Qing-jao has become the God of Path.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
The climax occurs in Chapter 16, when Jane successfully transports Ender, Miro, and Ela to Outspace and back. The success of the trip provides solutions for their most significant problems. They have discovered faster-than-light travel, so they can move the hive queen, Pequeninos, and humans to safety before the Lusitania fleet arrives. Ela creates recolada and the virus to reverse OCD on Path, so the people of Path can find liberation and so it is safe for the Pequeninos to move to other places within the universe. They also confirm that Jane is contained, in part, within Ender, so she will survive the ansible shut down. Although the solutions are provided, only two of the problems—the destruction of the descolada and the implementation of the virus on Path—are resolved in the novel. The story ends on a cliffhanger, with the Lusitania fleet still on its way and the ansible shutdown yet to take place. By leaving the plot unfinished, the author intends to inspire readers to read the subsequent books in the series.
Ender’s creation of Peter and young Val is unintentional, and it demonstrates his highly conflicted opinion of himself. Valentine was too gentle to defeat the hive queen in the original Formic Wars, and Peter was too volatile, so the government requested Ender be born, and his temperament turned out to reflect the ideal combination of gentle empathy and pragmatic harshness. After his unwitting xenocide of the Formics as a young boy, Ender spends the majority of his adulthood trying to find ways to make up for the atrocities he was manipulated into committing in his youth, and the child-versions of his siblings remain vivid in his memory. By accidentally creating Peter and young Val while in Outspace, Ender reveals that his own sense of identity is as precarious as it was when he was a boy, for even now, he still sees himself as being an amalgam of his siblings rather than an independent person. The hive queen notes that in order for young Val and Peter to continue to exist, Ender is constantly “creating” them, which supports the idea that Ender does not have self-awareness. Instead, he focuses his energy outward, attempting to understand others without seeking to understand himself. Even his ceremonial occupation as Speaker for the Dead supports this pattern, for in this role, his very function is to see to the heart of the deceased person and speak for them after their deaths, providing others with an honest sense of who they really were. Paradoxically, this heightened perception about the true nature of others also speaks to a lack of self-awareness about himself, and as Xenocide draws to its open-ended conclusion, it is clear that Ender still has a lot of work to do to understand his inner self.
The final sections also complete the thematic arcs that run throughout the novel. The theme of Ethics and Morality in Science continues through Miro’s creation of his new body and in the conflicts of how to handle Peter and young Val. Similarly, Han Fei-tzu’s actions are also morally ambiguous; he was dishonest and secretive when he concealed the truth of the genetically engineered OCD from the people of Path, but his deception was well-intentioned, for he did not wish to destroy his people’s religion in the process of curing their shared affliction. This theme continues in a different form, along with the issue of Defining Intelligent Life, when Quara asserts that the descolada virus is sentient and denounces the replacement of the descolada with the recolada. Even after the deed is done and another xenocide is perpetrated (this time against the deadly descolada), the hive queen’s revelation that the descolada was merging with her and her drones implies that the decision to kill the virus was premature at best. If it were in fact attempting to adapt and coexist with the sentient species it initially killed, this development inspires the questions of whether the descolada actually posed a long-term threat and whether Quara was correct in her attempts to preserve it.
The theme of Cross-Species Understanding and Coexistence is also developed through the positive transition toward inter-species trust. The uncertainty leading up to the climax and falling action results in mistrust between the humans, hive queen, and Pequeninos, but the creation of the recolada and the success of faster-than-light travel increases the levels of trust between the species by ensuring survival and safety for all of them. Once each species feels safe, the cross-species relationships stabilize. The Power of Religion also remains a prominent theme through the reactions on Path. The people believe that Han Fei-tzu and Jane’s message that the gods purified Path, and this information makes the cultural transition smooth. This demonstrates the power of religion to unite people even more powerfully than the presentation of empirical evidence.
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