Philotic Web

Having given some thought to how SotG could link into CotM in SiF, I have come up with what I believe to be an elegant solution.

At the end of CotM, Peter promises the crew of the battleship that Jane will, as a sign of good intent, instantly transport all in-transit ships to their destinations once she is re-connected to the ansible network.

Given Bean/his children are in such a ship, and have an operational ansible, Jane will surely find them and will discover why they are there and learn of Bean's condition.

This will prompt Jane to bring the ship to Lusitania, as Ela will undoubtably be able to manufacture a 'cure' using Outside.

Just a thought, but I struggle to think of any other way of doing it.

I don't think that would work exactly. Even with Bean in flight, Ender has been in flight a lot longer. Though I don't know the math exactly...

However, EiE gave us a new treat that many of us have overlooked. Stasis chambers... It was said Bean was giving the most advanced ship, so why wouldn't he get a ship with stasis if Ender who left before the war between Achillies started got a ship with stasis?

Ofcourse OSC didn't mention the idea of stasis chambers until after EiE which came after SotG and CotM. It would be extremely stupid of Graff not to have put Bean in a ship with Stasis chambers in SotG.

Ta-da, Beans alive.

Bean was almost definitely given a ship with stasis chambers, but would he use it? Knowing Bean as we do, it's possible that he would choose not to use them, unless he thought his kids would need him sometime in the future, or his much vaunted survival instinct kicked in. It could go either way. Besides, stasis doesn't make you stop aging, it just makes you age a lot more slowly than usual. Depending on how much time has passed in his ship, he could die in stasis. Or he could realize that possibility, and decide to do what he can with the remainder of his life instead of risking sleeping through it. And what about the ship itself? It could need repairs or something, forcing them to land someplace, and the strain of decelerating from relativistic speeds on his heart could have killed him.

I'm just typing as the ideas come to mind, and I want Bean to be alive, but there's just so many circumstances in which he could have died that I doubt he's still alive. I'm sure his kids are, though. Sure of that. Though they're probably getting pretty old in Bean years.

I'm forced to agree that it's a fantastic way for OSC to continue the series, I mean with 5 main characters, whom are all very loveable... Peter (with Ender's aiua of course), Wang-Mu, Jane, Miro AND Bean, the book has alot of potential. With all of Bean's kids too, and the plot of overthrowing Congress or fighting the Descoladares, alot of potential indeed.

I have read all of the books and am a huge fan of not only the ender and shadow series's but also worthing saga. And after i finished children of the mind i was ubsessed with trying to figure out what the descoladores were. Then when i finished shadows in flight an idea sprung on me.
What if the Descaladores are Bean's descendants?
Bean's original mission was to find new planets... and there were boys and girls on bored. Petra even joked about it in shadow puppets. The descaladores are obviously geniusus in order to invent the descolada. Wouldn't Beans Genes inbreeding cause such a species to exist?
I have no proof, but i like the idea.

You've already posted that and found the answer, fishbird42.

Anyway, I don't think Bean would abandon his kids by going into statis would he? They're the only thing he has left that has Petra in them. I would think he couldn't bear to not see them.

when i finished shadows in flight

Fishbird say what??? Shadows in Flight is out already?? Am I sure you said that?

It's not out! We don't even know when it's coming out!

sry about that i meant shadow of the giant

Okay, good. You almost gave me a shock attack!

Shock attack?

I like the idea of Bean's descendants being the Descoladores (even if that is a bad thing), but as for Bean being in Staisis.... well how the heck could Jane find Bean? was his ship equipped with an ansible, and if so, how is Jane supposed to figure out that Bean is in there? Ender never knew about Bean. Everybody who did has died. Did they record Bean's Departure in a computer somewhere along with who Bean is? And even granting all of this, why would Jane even care?


too many questions

well to invent the descolada you'd need a reason... like fixing bean... an old cast of human experiment gone wrong? sounds firefly-ish... There's got to be a connection between tearing gene's apart and healing bean. I think Jane would have to know Bean exists somewhere but in a low low low level of attention. Doesn't someone have to make her look at these things for her to know about it at a higher attention level?

Or she hears a story about Bean and it triggers something.

or Bean's kids ended up hating humanity for banishing them...

MOD EDIT: You are an odd spammer, but a spammer nonetheless. You are the Weakest Link, Goodbye.

I like the idea of Bean's descendants being the Descoladores (even if that is a bad thing), but as for Bean being in Staisis.... well how the heck could Jane find Bean? was his ship equipped with an ansible, and if so, how is Jane supposed to figure out that Bean is in there? Ender never knew about Bean. Everybody who did has died. Did they record Bean's Departure in a computer somewhere along with who Bean is? And even granting all of this, why would Jane even care?


too many questions

I always thought that the Descoladores were the decendent of the mad scientist, Dr. Volescu's virus. The virus that he supposedly created to infect the human population on earth with Bean's condition, but failed.

Perhaps he did not failed after all. The virus has many of the same characteristics as those of the Descolada Virus. Maybe Voluscu some how escaped Earth and continued in his plan to create the virus.

I can see how the virus could have evolved over three thousand years into the Descolada.

It's been a while since I read Speaker, or Xenocide, or which ever book it was discussed in, but I thought that evidence suggested that the Descolada had been influencing life on Lusitania for more than 3000 years. That pretty much rules out human involvement.

this is almost completely impossible, but if some how IFCOM had created Jane, and she secretly already knew about the inside/outside travel (faster then light travel) then she could have paired with IFCOM to transport Bean and his children directly to the planet of descoladorres (obviouslly not named at the time) and he could have found some special virus, found out that it counters Anton's Key, Make it intelligent(into the Descolada) and then inject it into his blood stream. when Anton's Key is turned, perhaps a side effect is that the Descolada will not kill him or others with the key turned, only counter it so they are 'normal' humans once again. Maybe after Bean thought of this, he wanted to see what the effect would be on normal life/fauna/flora/etc and send the Descolada thru the outside to Lusitania and then transported himself thru the outside every now and then to check up on his expirement, and eventually, I don't know, maybe Bean's children had to have kids with each other to carry on the blood line(its kind of sick, but who knows) or maybe when Bean was in the outside, he discovered but Ender did, Where he can make others with his mind. This is more likely. He probably made an ideal husband/wife for each of his children and then, say, a dozen more random humans (keep in mind, they would all have to have Anton's Key turned to live with the Descolada) and then They all lived on the planet of Descoladores together and continued their life for generations, etc, until Ela and the others discovered the planet. By that point, the descoladores, like any other empire/nation, they developed their own language, and they were such an advanced nation, they probably assumed Ela and the others could understand them, since I'm sure the descoladores could understand stark. Anyways, these are my ideas. i could say tons more but I've already typed so much.
(sorry for any typos)

I think I saw in another topic that you aren't done reading through the series, so I won't spoil the details, but IFCOM didn't create Jane.

I know that I've read all the books that's why I said it's impossible. but after the hive queen "created/found" her, isn't there a possibility IFCOM teamed up with her? is the rest of my comment Atleast interesting?

who the hell knows whats gonna happen or how it happened. guess we all might get shadows in fligth and see ourselves!

i just found one thing i wanted to mention.

the ansible was mentioned mostly in the speaker series, and is very rarely mentioned in the shadow series. so OSC makes a big deal out of how bean has an ansible, and even makes bean send a message to graff.

why did he do it, if not to somehow get jane in there when he wrote SiF?

i think a lot of fans (me included) were immeasurably unsatisfied by the SotG ending. peter's dead and the FPE is falling apart, petra is old and dying, bean is probably still 16 and off in a starship somewhere with his children, awaiting death away from his beloved.

really, what a cheerful ending.

i would have loved to have ender meet bean one last time before he died... but that's pretty much impossible, and of course not going to happen.

1. The Descoladores can't have anything to do with Bean or his children. In Children, Jane, Miro, and Valentine find the planet of the Descaladores by analyzing the biota of various planets and noting the remnants of Descolada-like effects. Not only are the Descaladores utterly alien (anyone remember their mode of communication?), they've been operating for a long, long time.

2. The Bean/stasis issue is simply a continuity error. One of the above posters stated the Bean wouldn't have gone into stasis because he wouldn't have abandoned his children - well, that wouldn't have been the case if they'd simply all stayed on Earth in stasis. And for those that would argue that even in stasis he couldn't have survived on Earth much longer (an assertion with which I disagree), the solution could have simply been to place them in stasis in Earth orbit - no gravity and essentially no biological processes moving forward. If Ender was disallowed from traveling on from Ganges in stasis because he couldn't heal in that state, I find it hard to believe that Bean's condition would've worsened substantially under the same conditions.

The bottom line is that Card simply screwed up. Considering his volume of (excellent) work, I certainly don't blame him.

i just found one thing i wanted to mention.

the ansible was mentioned mostly in the speaker series, and is very rarely mentioned in the shadow series. so OSC makes a big deal out of how bean has an ansible, and even makes bean send a message to graff.

why did he do it, if not to somehow get jane in there when he wrote SiF?

I think the explanation is far simpler. In the Speaker series, events take place over a number of different planets, thus requiring the ansible for communication (until Jane's insta-travel-by-means-of-mothertree-network trick anyway). In the Shadow series, everything takes place on Earth. Ergo, no ansible needed.