Xenocide

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

Thousands of years in the future, Ender is a member of a human colony on a planet, Lusitania, where another species, the Pequeninos, carry a virus fatal to all living things. Humans can survive in its presence due to a medical advance that renders it dormant; nonetheless, the threat presented by the incredibly virulent and adaptable virus is apparently great enough to dispatch a fleet of ships armed with the "Dr. Device", the Molecular Disrupter Device (M.D. Device) that can shatter planets, to destroy Lusitania.

In contact with an artificial sentience created by the ansible network by which spaceships and planets communicate in realtime across galactic distances, Ender and the Lusitanians are aware of the threat. The sentience, named Jane, will not permit the destruction of Lusitania until the inhabitants have found an interstellar means of escape; to delay its destructions, she shuts down the ansible connection to the fleet, even though this may lead to her discovery and termination.

On another world, named Path, a culture has arisen centered around the godspoken, those who hear the voices of the gods in the acts they carry out compulsively. Han Fei-Tzu is forced to dance; his daughter Qing-jao must periodically trace lines on the floor with her eye, sometimes for hours at a time. The godspoken enforce a religious government on the people with four dictates: obey the gods, honor the ancestors, love the people, and serve the rulers. The culture has Asian stylings, but is thoroughly centered on theocracy present in the godspoken elite, who both rule the world of Path and provide counsel to the Starways Congress, the interstellar governing body.

Qinq-jao is given the task of discovering why the Lusitania fleet has fallen silent as a test for her coming-of-age. The inhabitants of Path have been genetically altered for superior intelligence; Jane senses that Qinq-jao is the one who will eventually discover her and reveal her presence to the Starways Congress. Since the Congress will not abide a sentience in control of the ansible network that binds their galaxy, they will shut down the network, killing Jane. Jane does her best to subtly frustrate Qinq-jao, but she knows that it's merely a matter of time.

In her research to discover a way to evade Qinq-jao, Jane discovers that the inhabitants of Path have been genetically altered not just for intelligence, but for obsessive compulsive disorder as well. Thus, the Starways Congress has its hyper-intelligent counselors, without the threat that the godspoken of Path could ever displace them, since the theocratic order of Path could never be imposed on the galaxy at large.

Meanwhile, Qinq-jao stumbles across the hypothetical existence of Jane by tracing the identity of Demosthenes, the pen name of an essayist who has been arguing against the destruction of Lusitania. Discovering that Demosthenes must be Valentine Wiggin, Ender's brother, Qinq-jao discovers that Valentine has been on a starship for the last thirty years (relative to Path's time; on the ship, only a few weeks have passed). Because Jane has been publishing the essays on the Nets without transmissions from the ship, Qinq-jao reasons that a sentient computer program is responsible for hiding Demosthenes.

About to be discovered, Jane reveals herself to Han Fei-tzu and Qinq-jao, telling them about their real history and begging forbearance on their report to the Starways Congress. Han Fei-tzu, having discovered the same himself about their condition, accepts it, but Qing-jao doesn't.

to be continued...