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CHILDREN OF THE MIND

by Orson Scott Card

(c) 1996 Orson Scott Card

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Chapter 1 — “I’M NOT MYSELF”

“Mother. Father. Did I do it right?”

— The last words of Han Qing-jao, from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Si Wang-mu stepped forward. The young man named Peter took her hand and led her into the starship. The door closed behind them.

Wang-mu sat down on one of the swiveling chairs inside the small metal-walled room. She looked around, expecting to see something strange and new. Except for the metal walls, it could have been any office on the world of Path. Clean, but not fastidiously so. Furnished, in a utilitarian way. She had seen holos of ships in flight: the smoothly streamlined fighters and shuttles that dipped into and out of the atmosphere; the vast rounded structures of the starships that accelerated as near to the speed of light as matter could get. On the one hand, the sharp power of a needle; on the other, the massive power of a sledgehammer. But here in this room, no power at all. Just a room.

Where was the pilot? There must be a pilot, for the young man who sat across the room from her, murmuring to his computer, could hardly be controlling a starship capable of the feat of traveling faster than light.

And yet that must have been precisely what he was doing, for there were no other doors that might lead to other rooms. The starship had looked small from the outside; this room obviously used all the space that it contained. There in the corner were the batteries that stored energy from the solar collectors on the top of the ship. In that chest, which seemed to be insulated like a refrigerator, there might be food and drink. So much for life support. Where was the romance in starflight now, if this was all it took? A mere room.

With nothing else to watch, she watched the young man at the computer terminal. Peter Wiggin, he said his name was. The name of the ancient Hegemon, the one who first united all the human race under his control, back when people lived on only one world, all the nations and races and religions and philosophies crushed together elbow to elbow, with nowhere to go but into each other’s lands, for the sky was a ceiling then, and space was a vast chasm that could not be bridged. Peter Wiggin, the man who ruled the human race. This was not him, of course, and he had admitted as much. Andrew Wiggin sent him; Wang-mu remembered, from things that Master Han had told her, that Andrew Wiggin had somehow made him. Did this make the great Speaker of the Dead Peter’s father? Or was he somehow Ender’s brother, not just named for but actually embodying the Hegemon who had died three thousand years before?

Peter stopped murmuring, leaned back in his chair, and sighed. He rubbed his eyes, then stretched and groaned. It was a very indelicate thing to do in company. The sort of thing one might expect from a coarse fieldworker.

He seemed to sense her disapproval. Or perhaps he had forgotten her and now suddenly remembered that he had company. Without straightening himself in his chair, he turned his head and looked at her.

“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot I was not alone.”

Wang-mu longed to speak boldly to him, despite a lifetime retreating from bold speech. After all, he had spoken to her with offensive boldness, when his starship appeared like a fresh-sprouted mushroom on the lawn by the river and he emerged with a single vial of a disease that would cure her home world, Path, of its genetic illness. He had looked her in the eye not fifteen minutes ago and said, “Come with me and you’ll be part of changing history. Making history.” And despite her fear, she had said yes.

Had said yes, and now sat in a swivel chair watching him behave crudely, stretching like a tiger in front of her. Was that his beast-of-the-heart, the tiger? Wang-mu had read the Hegemon. She could believe that there was a tiger in that great and terrible man. But this one? This boy? Older than Wang-mu, but she was not too young to know immaturity when she saw it. He was going to change the course of history! Clean out the corruption in the Congress. Stop the Lusitania Fleet. Make all colony planets equal members of the Hundred Worlds. This boy who stretched like a jungle cat.

“I don’t have your approval,” he said. He sounded annoyed and amused, both at once. But then she might not be good at understanding the inflections of one such as this. Certainly it was hard to read the grimaces of such a round-eyed man. Both his face and his voice contained hidden languages that she could not understand.

“You must understand,” he said. “I’m not myself.”

Wang-mu spoke the common language well enough at least to understand the idiom. “You are unwell today?” But she knew even as she said it that he had not meant the expression idiomatically at all.

“I’m not myself,” he said again. “I’m not really Peter Wiggin.”

“I hope not,” said Wang-mu. “I read about his funeral in school.”

“I do look like him, though, don’t I?” He brought up a hologram into the air over his computer terminal. The hologram rotated to look at Wang-mu; Peter sat up and assumed the same pose, facing her.

“There is a resemblance,” she said.

“Of course, I’m younger,” said Peter. “Because Ender didn’t see me again after he left Earth when he was— what, five years old? A little runt, anyway. I was still a boy. That’s what he remembered, when he conjured me out of thin air.”

“Not air at all,” she said. “Out of nothing.”

“Not nothing, either,” he said. “Conjured me, all the same.” He smiled wickedly. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

These words meant something to him, but not to her. In the world of Path she had been expected to be a servant and so was educated very little. Later, in the house of Han Fei-tzu, her abilities had been recognized, first by her former mistress, Han Qing-jao, and later by the master himself. From both she had acquired some bits of education, in a haphazard way. What teaching there had been was mostly technical, and the literature she learned was of the Middle Kingdom, or of Path itself. She could have quoted endlessly from the great poet Li Qing-jao, for whom her one-time mistress had been named. But of the poet he was quoting, she knew nothing.

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” he said again. And then, changing his voice and manner a little, he answered himself. “Why so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?”

“Shakespeare?” she guessed.

He grinned at her. She thought of the way a cat smiles at the creature it is toying with. “That’s always the best guess when a European is doing the quoting,” he said.

“The quotation is funny,” she said. “A man brags that he can summon the dead. But the other man says that the trick is not calling, but rather getting them to come.”

He laughed. “What a way you have with humor.”

“This quotation means something to you, because Ender called you forth from the dead.”

He looked startled. “How did you know?”

She felt a thrill of fear. Was it possible? “I did not know, I was making a joke.”

“Well, it’s not true. Not literally. He didn’t raise the dead. Though he no doubt thinks he could, if the need arose.” Peter sighed. “I’m being nasty. The words just come to my mind. I don’t mean them. They just come.”

“It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from speaking them aloud.”

He rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t trained for servility, the way you were.”

So this was the attitude of one who came from a world of free people— to sneer at one who had been a servant through no fault of her own. “I was trained to keep unpleasant words to myself as a matter of courtesy,” she said. “But perhaps to you, that is just another form of servility.”

“As I said, Royal Mother of the West, nastiness comes unbidden to my mouth.”

“I am not the Royal Mother,” said Wang-mu. “The name was a cruel joke—”

“And only a very nasty person would mock you for it.” Peter grinned. “But I’m named for the Hegemon. I thought perhaps bearing ludicrously overwrought names was something we might have in common.”

She sat silently, entertaining the possibility that he might have been trying to make friends.

“I came into existence,” he said, “only a short while ago. A matter of weeks. I thought you should know that about me.”

She didn’t understand.

“You know how this starship works?” he said.

Now he was leaping from subject to subject. Testing her. Well, she had had enough of being tested. “Appareptly one sits within it and is examined by rude strangers,” she said.

He smiled and nodded. “Give as good as you get. Ender told me you were nobody’s servant.”

“I was the true and faithful servant of Qing-jao. I hope Ender did not lie to you about that.”

He brushed away her literalism. “A mind of your own.” Again his eyes sized her up; again she felt utterly comprehended by his lingering glance, as she had felt when he first looked at her beside the river. “Wang-mu, I am not speaking metaphorically when I tell you I was only just made. Made, you understand, not born. And the way I was made has much to do with how this starship works. I don’t want to bore you by explaining things you already understand, but you must know what— not who— I am in order to understand why I need you with me. So I ask again— do you know how this starship works?”

She nodded. “I think so. Jane, the being who dwells in computers, she holds in her mind as perfect a picture as she can of the starship and all who are within it. The people also hold their own picture of themselves and who they are and so on. Then she moves everything from the real world to a place of nothingness, which takes no time at all, and then brings it back into reality in whatever place she chooses. Which also takes no time. So instead of starships taking years to get from world to world, it happens in an instant.”

Peter nodded. “Very good. Except what you have to understand is that during the time that the starship is Outside, it isn’t surrounded by nothingness. Instead it’s surrounded by uncountable numbers of aiuas.”

She turned away her face from him.

“You don’t understand aiuas?”

“To say that all people have always existed. That we are older than the oldest gods …”

“Well, sort of,” said Peter. “Only aiuas on the Outside, they can’t be said to exist, or at least not any kind of meaningful existence. They’re just … there. Not even that, because there’s no sense of location, no there where they might be. They just are. Until some intelligence calls them, names them, puts them into some kind of order, gives them shape and form.”

“The clay can become a bear,” she said, “but not as long as it rests cold and wet in the riverbank.”

“Exactly. So there was Ender Wiggin and several other people who, with luck, you’ll never need to meet, taking the first voyage Outside. They weren’t going anywhere, really. The point of that first voyage was to get Outside long enough that one of them, a rather talented genetic scientist, could create a new molecule, an extremely complex one, by the image she held of it in her mind. Or rather her image of the modifications she needed to make in an existing… well, you don’t have the biology for it. Anyway, she did what she was supposed to do, she created the new molecule, calloo callay, only the thing is, she wasn’t the only person doing any creating that day.”

“Ender’s mind created you?” asked Wang-mu.

“Inadvertently. I was, shall we say, a tragic accident. An unhappy side effect. Let’s just say that everybody there, everything there, was creating like crazy. The aiuas Outside are frantic to be made into something, you see. There were shadow starships being created all around us. All kinds of weak, faint, fragmented, fragile, ephemeral structures rising and falling in each instant. Only four had any solidity. One was that genetic molecule that Elanora Ribeira had come to create.”

“One was you?”

“The least interesting one, I fear. The least loved and valued. One of the people on the ship was a fellow named Miro, who through a tragic accident some years ago had been left somewhat crippled. Neurologically damaged. Thick of speech, clumsy with his hands, lame when he walked. He held within his mind the powerful, treasured image of himself as he used to be. So— with that perfect self-image, a vast number of aiuas assembled themselves into an exact copy, not of how he was, but of how he once was and longed to be again. Complete with all his memories— a perfect replication of him. So perfect that it had the same utter loathing for his crippled body that he himself had. So … the new, improved Miro— or rather the copy of the old, undamaged Miro— whatever— he stood there as the ultimate rebuke of the crippled one. And before their very eyes, that old rejected body crumbled away into nothing.”

Wang-mu gasped, imagining it. “He died!”

“No, that’s the point, don’t you see? He lived. It was Miro. His own aiua— not the trillions of aiuas making up the atoms and molecules of his body, but the one that controlled them all, the one that was himself, his will— his aiua simply moved to the new and perfect body. That was his true self. And the old one …”

“Had no use.”

“Had nothing to give it shape. You see, I think our bodies are held together by love. The love of the master aiua for the glorious powerful body that obeys it, that gives the self all its experience of the world. Even Miro, even with all his self-loathing when he was crippled, even he must have loved whatever pathetic remnant of his body was left to him. Until the moment that he had a new one.”

“And then he moved.”

“Without even knowing that he had done so,” said Peter. “He followed his love.”

Wang-mu heard this fanciful tale and knew that it must be true, for she had overheard many a mention of aiuas in the conversations between Han Fei-tzu and Jane, and now with Peter Wiggin’s story, it made sense. It had to be true, if only because this starship really had appeared as if from nowhere on the bank of the river behind Han Fei-tzu’s house.

“But now you must wonder,” said Peter, “how I, unloved and unlovable as I know I am, came into existence.”

“You already said. Ender’s mind.”

“Miro’s most intensely held image was of his own younger, healthier, stronger self. But Ender, the images that mattered most in his mind were of his older sister Valentine and his older brother Peter. Not as they became, though, for his real older brother Peter was long dead, and Valentine— she has accompanied or followed Ender on all his hops through space, so she is still alive, but aged as he has aged. Mature. A real person. Yet on that starship, during that time Outside, he conjured up a copy of her youthful self. Young Valentine. Poor Old Valentine! She didn’t know she was so old until she saw this younger self, this perfect being, this angel that had dwelt in Ender’s twisted little mind from childhood on. I must say, she’s the most put-upon victim in all this little drama. To know that your brother carries around such an image of you, instead of loving you as you really are— well, one can see that Old Valentine— she hates it, but that’s how everyone thinks of her now, including, poor thing, herself— one can see that Old Valentine is really having her patience tried.”

“But if the original Valentine is still alive,” said Wang-mu, puzzled, “then who is the young Valentine? Who is she really? You can be Peter because he’s dead and no one is using his name, but …”

“Quite puzzling, isn’t it?” said Peter. “But my point is that whether he’s dead or not, I’m not Peter Wiggin. As I said before, I’m not myself.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. The hologram above the terminal turned to look at him. He had not touched the controls.

“Jane is with us,” said Wang-mu.

“Jane is always with us,” said Peter. “Ender’s spy.”

The hologram spoke. “Ender doesn’t need a spy. He needs friends, if he can get them. Allies at least.”

Peter reached idly for the terminal and turned it off. The hologram disappeared.

This disturbed Wang-mu very much. Almost as if he had slapped a child. Or beaten a servant. “Jane is a very noble creature, to treat her with such disrespect.”

“Jane is a computer program with a bug in the id routines.”

He was in a dark mood, this boy who had come to take her into his starship and spirit her away from the world of Path. But dark as his mood might be, she understood now, with the hologram gone from the terminal, what she had seen. “It isn’t just because you’re so young and the holograms of Peter Wiggin the Hegemon are of a mature man,” said Wang-mu.

“What,” he said impatiently. “What isn’t what?”

“The physical difference between you and the Hegemon.”

“What is it, then?”

“He looks— satisfied.”

“He conquered the world,” said Peter.

“So when you have done the same, you will get that look of satisfaction?”

“I suppose so,” said Peter. “It’s what passes for a purpose in my life. It’s the mission Ender has sent me on.”

“Don’t lie to me,” said Wang-mu. “On the riverbank you spoke of the terrible things I did for the sake of my ambition. I admit it— I was ambitious, desperate to rise out of my terrible lowborn state. I know the taste of it, and the smell of it, and I smell it coming from you, like the smell of tar on a hot day, you stink of it.”

“Ambition? Has a stench?”

“I’m drunk with it myself.”

He grinned. Then he touched the jewel in his ear. “Remember, Jane is listening, and she tells Ender everything.”

Wang-mu fell silent, but not because she was embarrassed. She simply had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing.

“So I’m ambitious. Because that’s how Ender imagined me. Ambitious and nasty-minded and cruel.”

“But I thought you were not yourself,” she said.

His eyes blazed with defiance. “That’s right, I’m not.” He looked away. “Sorry, Gepetto, but I can’t be a real boy. I have no soul.”

She didn’t understand the name he said, but she understood the word soul. “All my childhood I was thought to be a servant by nature. To have no soul. Then one day they discovered that I have one. So far it has brought me no great happiness.”

“I’m not speaking of some religious idea. I’m speaking of the aiua. I haven’t got one. Remember what happened to Miro’s broken-down body when his aiua abandoned it.”

“But you don’t crumble, so you must have an aiua after all.”

“I don’t have it, it has me. I continue to exist because the aiua whose irresistible will called me into existence continues to imagine me. Continues to need me, to control me, to be my will.”

“Ender Wiggin?” she asked.

“My brother, my creator, my tormentor, my god, my very self.”

“And young Valentine? Her too?”

“Ah, but he loves her. He’s proud of her. He’s glad he made her. Me he loathes. Loathes, and yet it’s his will that I do and say every nasty thing. When I’m at my most despicable, remember that I do only what my brother makes me do.”

“Oh, to blame him for—”

“I’m not blaming, Wang-mu. I’m stating simple reality. His will is controlling three bodies now. Mine, my impossibly angelic sister’s, and of course his own very tired middle-aged body. Every aiua in my body receives its order and place from his. I am, in all ways that matter, Ender Wiggin. Except that he has created me to be the vessel of every impulse in himself that he hates and fears. His ambition, yes, you smell his ambition when you smell mine. His aggression. His rage. His nastiness. His cruelty. His, not mine, because I am dead, and anyway I was never like this, never the way he saw me. This person before you is a travesty, a mockery! I’m a twisted memory. A despicable dream. A nightmare. I’m the creature hiding under the bed. He brought me out of chaos to be the terror of his childhood.”

“So don’t do it,” said Wang-mu. “If you don’t want to be those things, don’t do them.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. “If you’re so bright, why haven’t you understood a word I’ve said?”

She did understand, though. “What is your will, anyway? Nobody can see it. You don’t hear it thinking. You only know what your will is afterward, when you look back in your life and see what you’ve done.”

“That’s the most terrible trick he’s played on me,” said Peter softly, his eyes still closed. “I look back on my life and I see only the memories he has imagined for me. He was taken from our family when he was only five. What does he know of me or my life?”

“He wrote The Hegemon.”

“That book. Yes, based on Valentine’s memories, as she told them to him. And the public documents of my dazzling career. And of course the few ansible communications between Ender and my own late self before I— he— died. I’m only a few weeks old, yet I know a quotation from Henry X, Part I, Owen Glendower boasting to Hotspur. Henry Percy. How could I know that? When did I go to school? How long did I lie awake at night, reading old plays until I committed a thousand favorite lines to memory? Did Ender somehow conjure up the whole of his dead brother’s education? All his private thoughts? Ender only knew the real Peter Wiggin for five years. It’s not a real person’s memories I draw on. It’s the memories Ender thinks that I should have.”

“He thinks you should know Shakespeare, and so you do?” she asked doubtfully.

“If only Shakespeare were all he had given me. The great writers, the great philosophers. If only those were the only memories I had.”

She waited for him to list the troublesome memories. But he only shuddered and fell silent.

“So if you are really controlled by Ender, then … you are him. Then that is yourself. You are Andrew Wiggin. You have an aiua.”

“I’m Andrew Wiggin’s nightmare,” said Peter. “I’m Andrew Wiggin’s self-loathing. I’m everything he hates and fears about himself. That’s the script I’ve been given. That’s what I have to do.”

He flexed his hand into a fist, then extended it partway, the fingers still bent. A claw. The tiger again. And for a moment, Wang-mu was afraid of him. Only a moment, though. He relaxed his hands. The moment passed. “What part does your script have in it for me?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “You’re very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have such incredible vanity that I can’t really believe that anyone is actually smarter than I am. Which means that I’m all the more in need of good advice, since I can’t actually conceive of needing any.”

“You talk in circles.”

“That’s just part of my cruelty. To torment you with conversation. But maybe it’s supposed to go farther than that. Maybe I’m supposed to torture you and kill you the way I so clearly remember doing with squirrels. Maybe I’m supposed to stake your living body out in the woods, nailing your extremities to tree roots, and then open you up layer by layer to see at what point the flies begin to come and lay eggs in your exposed flesh.”

She recoiled at the image. “I have read the book. I know the Hegemon was not a monster!”

“It wasn’t the Speaker for the Dead who created me Outside. It was the frightened boy Ender. I’m not the Peter Wiggin he so wisely understood in that book. I’m the Peter Wiggin he had nightmares about. The one who flayed squirrels.”

“He saw you do that?” she asked.

“Not me,” he said testily. “And no, he never even saw him do it. Valentine told him later. She found the squirrel’s body in the woods near their childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina, on the continent of North America back on Earth. But that image fit so tidily into his nightmares that he borrowed it and shared it with me. That’s the memory I live with. Intellectually, I can imagine that the real Peter Wiggin was probably not cruel at all. He was learning and studying. He didn’t have compassion for the squirrel because he didn’t sentimentalize it. It was simply an animal. No more important than a head of lettuce. To cut it up was probably as immoral an act as making a salad. But that’s not how Ender imagined it, and so that’s not how I remember it.”

“How do you remember it?”

“The way I remember all my supposed memories. From the outside. Watching myself in horrified fascination as I take a fiendish delight in cruelty. All my memories prior to the moment I came to life on Ender’s little voyage Outside, in all of them I see myself through someone else’s eyes. A very odd feeling, I assure you.”

“But now?”

“Now I don’t see myself at all,” he said. “Because I have no self. I am not myself.”

“But you remember. You have memories. Of this conversation, already you remember it. Looking at me. You must, surely.”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember you. And I remember being here and seeing you. But there isn’t any self behind my eyes. I feel tired and stupid even when I’m being my most clever and brilliant.”

He smiled a charming smile and now Wang-mu could see again the true difference between Peter and the hologram of the Hegemon. It was as he said: Even at his most self-deprecating, this Peter Wiggin had eyes that flashed with inner rage. He was dangerous. You could see it looking at him. When he looked into your eyes, you could imagine him planning how and when you would die.

“I am not myself,” said Peter.

“You are saying this to control yourself,” said Wang-mu, guessing but also sure she was right. “This is your incantation, to stop yourself from doing what you desire.”

Peter sighed and leaned over, laying his head down on the terminal, his ear pressed against the cold plastic surface.

“What is it you desire?” she said, fearful of the answer.

“Go away,” he said.

“Where can I go? This great starship of yours has only one room.”

“Open the door and go outside,” he said.

“You mean to kill me? To eject me into space where I’ll freeze before I have time to suffocate?”

He sat up and looked at her in puzzlement. “Space?”

His confusion confused her. Where else would they be but in space? That’s where starships went, through space.

Except this one, of course.

As he saw understanding come to her, he laughed aloud. “Oh, yes, you’re the brilliant one, they’ve remade the entire world of Path to have your genius!”

She refused to be goaded.

“I thought there would be some sensation of movement. Or something. Have we traveled, then? Are we already there?”

“In the twinkling of an eye. We were Outside and then back Inside at another place, all so fast that only a computer could experience our voyage as having any duration at all. Jane did it before I finished talking to her. Before I said a word to you.”

“Then where are we? What’s outside the door?”

“We’re sitting in the woods somewhere on the planet Divine Wind. The air is breathable. You won’t freeze. It’s summer outside the door.”

She walked to the door and pulled down the handle, releasing the airtight seal. The door eased open. Sunlight streamed into the room.

“Divine Wind,” she said. “I read about it— it was founded as a Shinto world the way Path was supposed to be Taoist. The purity of ancient Japanese culture. But I think it’s not so very pure these days.”

“More to the point, it’s the world where Andrew and Jane and I felt— if one can speak of my having feelings apart from Ender’s own— the world where we might find the center of power in the worlds ruled by Congress. The true decision makers. The power behind the throne.”

“So you can subvert them and take over the human race?”

“So I can stop the Lusitania Fleet. Taking over the human race is a bit later on the agenda. The Lusitania Fleet is something of an emergency. We have only a few weeks to stop it before the fleet gets there and uses the Little Doctor, the M.D. Device, to blow Lusitania into its constituent elements. In the meantime, because Ender and everyone else expects me to fail, they’re building these little tin can starships as fast as possible and transporting as many Lusitanians as they can— humans, piggies, and buggers— to other habitable but as yet uninhabited planets. My dear sister Valentine— the young one— is off with Miro— in his fresh new body, the dear lad— searching out new worlds as fast as their little starship can carry them. Quite a project. All of them betting on my— on our— failure. Let’s disappoint them, shall we?”

“Disappoint them?”

“By succeeding. Let’s succeed. Let’s find the center of power among humankind, and let’s persuade them to stop the fleet before it needlessly destroys a world.”

Wang-mu looked at him doubtfully. Persuade them to stop the fleet? This nasty-minded, cruel-hearted boy? How could he persuade anyone of anything?

As if he could hear her thoughts, he answered her silent doubt. “You see why I invited you to come along with me. When Ender was inventing me, he forgot the fact that he never knew me during the time in my life when I was persuading people and gathering them together in shifting alliances and all that nonsense. So the Peter Wiggin he created is far too nasty, openly ambitious, and nakedly cruel to persuade a man with rectal itch to scratch his own butt.”

She looked away from him again.

“You see?” he said. “I offend you again and again. Look at me. Do you see my dilemma? The real Peter, the original one, he could have done the work I’ve been sent to do. He could have done it in his sleep. He’d already have a plan. He’d be able to win people over, soothe them, insinuate himself into their councils. That Peter Wiggin! He can charm the stings out of bees. But can I? I doubt it. For, you see, I’m not myself.”

He got up from his chair, roughly pushed his way past her, and stepped outside onto the meadow that surrounded the little metal cabin that had carried them from world to world. Wang-mu stood in the doorway, watching him as he wandered away from the ship; away, but not too far.

I know something of how he feels, she thought. I know something of having to submerge your will in someone else’s. To live for them, as if they were the star of the story of your life, and you merely a supporting player. I have been a slave. But at least in all that time I knew my own heart. I knew what I truly thought even as I did what they wanted, whatever it took to get what I wanted from them. Peter Wiggin, though, has no idea of what he really wants, because even his resentment of his lack of freedom isn’t his own, even that comes from Andrew Wiggin. Even his self-loathing is Andrew’s self-loathing, and …

And back and back, in circles, like the random path he was tracing through the meadow.

Wang-mu thought of her mistress— no, her former mistress— Qing-jao. She also traced strange patterns. It was what the gods forced her to do. No, that’s the old way of thinking. It’s what her obsessive-compulsive disorder caused her to do. To kneel on the floor and trace the grain of the wood in each board, trace a single line of it as far as it went across the floor, line after line. It never meant anything, and yet she had to do it because only by such meaningless mind-numbing obedience could she win a scrap of freedom from the impulses controlling her. It is Qing-jao who was always the slave, and never me. For the master that ruled her controlled her from inside her own mind. While I could always see my master outside me, so my inmost self was never touched.

Peter Wiggin knows that he is ruled by the unconscious fears and passions of a complicated man many lightyears away. But then, Qing-jao thought her obsessions came from the gods. What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you comes from outside, if in fact you only experience it inside your own heart? Where can you run from it? How can you hide? Qing-jao must be free by now, freed by the carrier virus that Peter brought with him to Path and put into the hands of Han Fei-tzu. But Peter— what freedom can there be for him?

And yet he must still live as if he were free. He must still struggle for freedom even if the struggle itself is just one more symptom of his slavery. There is a part of him that yearns to be himself. No, not himself. A self.

So what is my part in all of this? Am I supposed to work a miracle, and give him an aiua? That isn’t in my power.

And yet I do have power, she thought.

She must have power, or why else had he spoken to her so openly? A total stranger, and he had opened his heart to her at once. Why? Because she was in on the secrets, yes, but something else as well.

Ah, of course. He could speak freely to her because she had never known Andrew Wiggin. Maybe Peter was nothing but an aspect of Ender’s nature, all that Ender feared and loathed about himself. But she could never compare the two of them. Whatever Peter was, whoever controlled him, she was his confidante.

Which made her, once again, someone’s servant. She had been Qing-jao’s confidante, too.

She shuddered, as if to shake from her the sad comparison. No, she told herself. It is not the same thing. Because that young man wandering so aimlessly among the wildflowers has no power over me, except to tell me of his pain and hope for my understanding. Whatever I give to him I will give freely.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the frame of the door. I will give it freely, yes, she thought. But what am I planning to give him? Why, exactly what he wants— my loyalty, my devotion, my help in all his tasks. To submerge myself in him. And why am I already planning to do all this? Because however he might doubt himself, he has the power to win people to his cause.

She opened her eyes again and strode out into the hip-high grass toward him. He saw her and waited wordlessly as she approached. Bees buzzed around her; butterflies staggered drunkenly through the air, avoiding her somehow in their seemingly random flight. At the last moment she reached out and gathered a bee from a blossom into her hand, into her fist, but then quickly, before it could sting her, she lobbed it into Peter’s face.

Flustered, surprised, he batted away the infuriated bee, ducked under it, dodged, and finally ran a few steps before it lost track of him and buzzed its way out among the flowers again. Only then could he turn furiously to face her.

“What was that for!”

She giggled at him— she couldn’t help it. He had looked so funny.

“Oh, good, laugh. I can see you’re going to be fine company.”

“Be angry, I don’t care,” said Wang-mu. “I’ll just tell you this. Do you think that away off on Lusitania, Ender’s aiua suddenly thought, ‘Ho, a bee!’ and made you brush at it and dodge it like a clown?”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, aren’t you clever. Well gosh, Miss Royal Mother of the West, you sure solved all my problems! I can see I must always have been a real boy! And these ruby shoes, why, they’ve had the power to take me back to Kansas all along!”

“What’s Kansas?” she asked, looking down at his shoes, which were not red.

“Just another memory of Ender’s that he kindly shared with me,” said Peter Wiggin.

He stood there, his hands in his pockets, regarding her.

She stood just as silently, her hands clasped in front of her, regarding him right back.

“So are you with me?” he finally asked.

“You must try not to be nasty with me,” she said.

“Take that up with Ender.”

“I don’t care whose aiua controls you,” she said. “You still have your own thoughts, which are different from his— you feared the bee, and he didn’t even think of a bee right then, and you know it. So whatever part of you is in control or whoever the real ‘you’ happens to be, right there on the front of your head is the mouth that’s going to be speaking to me, and I’m telling you that if I’m going to work with you, you better be nice to me.”

“Does this mean no more bee fights?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s just as well. With my luck Ender no doubt gave me a body that goes into shock when I’m stung by a bee.”

“It can also be pretty hard on the bee,” she said.

He grinned at her. “I find myself liking you,” he said. “I really hate that.”

He strode off toward the starship. “Come on!” he called out to her. “Let’s see what information Jane can give us about this world we’re supposed to take by storm.”

Chapter 2 — “YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD!”

“When I follow the path of the gods through the wood, My eyes take every twisting turn of the grain, But my body moves straight along the planking, So those who watch me see that the path of the gods is straight, While I dwell in a world with no straightness in it.”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Novinha would not come to him. The gentle old teacher looked genuinely distressed as she told Ender. “She wasn’t angry,” the old teacher explained. “She told me that …”

Ender nodded, understanding how the teacher was torn between compassion and honesty. “You can tell me her words,” he said. “She is my wife, so I can bear it.”

The old teacher rolled her eyes. “I’m married too, you know.”

Of course he knew. All the members of the Order of the Children of the Mind of Christ— Os Filhos da Mente de Cristo— were married. It was their rule.

“I’m married, so I know perfectly well that your spouse is the one person who knows all the words you can’t bear to hear.”

“Then let me correct myself,” said Ender mildly. “She is my wife, so I am determined to hear it, whether I can bear it or not.”

“She says that she has to finish the weeding, so she has no time for lesser battles.”

Yes, that sounded like Novinha. She might tell herself that she had taken the mantle of Christ upon her, but if so it was the Christ who denounced the Pharisees, the Christ who said all those cruel and sarcastic things to his enemies and his friends alike, not the gentle one with infinite patience.

Still, Ender was not one to go away merely because his feelings were hurt. “Then what are we waiting for?” asked Ender. “Show me where I can find a hoe.”

The old teacher stared at him for a long moment, then smiled and led him out into the gardens. Soon, wearing work gloves and carrying a hoe in one hand, he stood at the end of the row where Novinha worked, bent over in the sunlight, her eyes on the ground before her as she cut under the root of weed after weed, turning each one up to bum to death in the hot dry sun. She was coming toward him.

Ender stepped to the unweeded row beside the one Novinha worked on, and began to hoe toward her. They would not meet, but they would pass close to each other. She would notice him or not. She would speak to him or not. She still loved and needed him. Or not. But no matter what, at the end of this day he would have weeded in the same field as his wife, and her work would have been more easily done because he was there, and so he would still be her husband, however little she might now want him in that role.

The first time they passed each other, she did not so much as look up. But then she would not have to. She would know without looking that the one who joined her in weeding so soon after she refused to meet with her husband would have to be her husband. He knew that she would know this, and he also knew she was too proud to look at him and show that she wanted to see him again. She would study the weeds until she went half blind, because Novinha was not one to bend to anyone else’s will.

Except, of course, the will of Jesus. That was the message she had sent him, the message that had brought him here, determined to talk to her. A brief note couched in the language of the Church. She was separating herself from him to serve Christ among the Filhos. She felt herself called to this work. He was to regard himself as having no further responsibility toward her, and to expect nothing more from her than she would gladly give to any of the children of God. It was a cold message, for all the gentleness of its phrasing.

Ender was not one to bend easily to another’s will, either. Instead of obeying the message, he came here, determined to do the opposite of what she asked. And why not? Novinha had a terrible record as a decision maker. Whenever she decided to do something for someone else’s good, she ended up inadvertently destroying them. Like Libo, her childhood friend and secret lover, the father of all her children during her marriage to the violent but sterile man who had been her husband until he died. Fearing that he would die at the hands of the pequeninos, the way his father had died, Novinha withheld from him her vital discoveries about the biology of the planet Lusitania, fearing that the knowledge of it would kill him. Instead, it was the ignorance of that very information that led him to his death. What she did for his own good, without his knowledge, killed him.

You’d think she’d learn something from that, thought Ender. But she still does the same thing. Making decisions that deform other people’s lives, without consulting them, without ever conceiving that perhaps they don’t want her to save them from whatever supposed misery she’s saving them from.

Then again, if she had simply married Libo in the first place and told him everything she knew, he would probably still be alive and Ender would never have married his widow and helped her raise her younger children. It was the only family Ender had ever had or was ever likely to have. So bad as Novinha’s decisions tended to be, the happiest time of his life had come about only because of one of the most deadly of her mistakes.

On their second pass, Ender saw that she still, stubbornly, was not going to speak to him, and so, as always, he bent first and broke the silence between them.

“The Filhos are married, you know. It’s a married order. You can’t become a full member without me.”

She paused in her work. The blade of the hoe rested on unbroken soil, the handle light in her gloved fingers. “I can weed the beets without you,” she finally said.

His heart leapt with relief that he had penetrated her veil of silence. “No you can’t,” he said. “Because here I am.”

“These are the potatoes,” she said. “I can’t stop you from helping with the potatoes.”

In spite of themselves they both laughed, and with a groan she unbent her back, stood straight, let the hoe handle fall to the ground, and took Ender’s hands in hers, a touch that thrilled him despite two layers of thick workglove cloth between their palms and fingers.

“If I do profane with my touch,” Ender began.

“No Shakespeare,” she said. “No ‘lips two blushing pilgrims ready stand.’”

“I miss you,” he said.

“Get over it,” she said.

“I don’t have to. If you’re joining the Filhos, so am I.”

She laughed.

Ender didn’t appreciate her scorn. “If a xenobiologist can retreat from the world of meaningless suffering, why can’t an old retired speaker for the dead?”

“Andrew,” she said, “I’m not here because I’ve given up on life. I’m here because I really have turned my heart over to the Redeemer. You could never do that. You don’t belong here.”

“I belong here if you belong here. We made a vow. A sacred one, that the Holy Church won’t let us set aside. In case you forgot.”

She sighed and looked out at the sky over the wall of the monastery. Beyond the wall, through meadows, over a fence, up a hill, into the woods … that’s where the great love of her life, Libo, had gone, and where he died. Where Pipo, his father, who was like a father to her as well, where he had gone before, and also died. It was into another wood that her son Estevao had gone, and also died, but Ender knew, watching her, that when she saw the world outside these walls, it was all those deaths she saw. Two of them had taken place before Ender got to Lusitania. But the death of Estevao— she had begged Ender to stop him from going to the dangerous place where pequeninos were talking of war, of killing humans. She knew as well as Ender did that to stop Estevao would have been the same as to destroy him, for he had not become a priest to be safe, but rather to try to carry the message of Christ to these tree people. Whatever joy came to the early Christian martyrs had surely come to Estevao as he slowly died in the embrace of a murderous tree. Whatever comfort God sent to them in their hour of supreme sacrifice. But no such joy had come to Novinha. God apparently did not extend the benefits of his service to the next of kin. And in her grief and rage she blamed Ender. Why had she married him, if not to make herself safe from these disasters?

He had never said to her the most obvious thing, that if there was anyone to blame, it was God, not him. After all, it was God who had made saints— well, almost saints— out of her parents, who died as they discovered the antidote to the descolada virus when she was only a child. Certainly it was God who led Estevao out to preach to the most dangerous of the pequeninos. Yet in her sorrow it was God she turned to, and turned away from Ender, who had meant to do nothing but good for her.

He never said this because he knew that she would not listen. And he also refrained from saying it because he knew she saw things another way. If God took Father and Mother, Pipo, Libo, and finally Estevao away from her, it was because God was just and punished her for her sins. But when Ender failed to stop Estevao from his suicidal mission to the pequeninos, it was because he was blind, self-willed, stubborn, and rebellious, and because he did not love her enough.

But he did love her. With all his heart he loved her.

All his heart?

All of it he knew about. And yet when his deepest secrets were revealed in that first voyage Outside, it was not Novinha that his heart conjured there. So apparently there was someone who mattered even more to him.

Well, he couldn’t help what went on in his unconscious mind, any more than Novinha could. All he could control was what he actually did, and what he was doing now was showing Novinha that regardless of how she tried to drive him away, he would not be driven. That no matter how much she imagined that he loved Jane and his involvement in the great affairs of the human race more than he loved her, it was not true, she was more important to him than any of it. He would give it all up for her. He would disappear behind monastery walls for her. He would weed rows of unidentified plant life in the hot sun. For her.

But even that was not enough. She insisted that he do it, not for her, but for Christ. Well, too bad. He wasn’t married to Christ, and neither was she. Still, it couldn’t be displeasing to God when a husband and wife gave all to each other. Surely that was part of what God expected of human beings.

“You know I don’t blame you for the death of Quim,” she said, using the old family nickname for Estevao.

“I didn’t know that,” he said, “but I’m glad to find it out.”

“I did at first, but I knew all along that it was irrational,” she said. “He went because he wanted to, and he was much too old for some interfering parent to stop him. If I couldn’t, how could you?”

“I didn’t even want to,” said Ender. “I wanted him to go. It was the fulfillment of his life’s ambition.”

“I even know that now. It’s right. It was right for him to go, and it was even right for him to die, because his death meant something. Didn’t it?”

“It saved Lusitania from a holocaust.”

“And brought many to Christ.” She laughed, the old laugh, the rich ironic laugh that he had come to treasure if only because it was so rare. “Trees for Jesus,” she said. “Who could have guessed?”

“They’re already calling him St. Stephen of the Trees.”

“That’s quite premature. It takes time. He must first be beatified. Miracles of healing must take place at his tomb. Believe me, I know the process.”

“Martyrs are thin on the ground these days,” said Ender. “He will be beatified. He will be canonized. People will pray for him to intercede with Jesus for them, and it will work, because if anyone has earned the right to have Christ hear him, it’s your son Estevao.”

Tears slipped down her cheeks, even as she laughed again. “My parents were martyrs and will be saints; my son, also. Piety skipped a generation.”

“Oh, yes. Yours was the generation of selfish hedonism.”

She finally turned to face him, tear-streaked dirty cheeks, smiling face, twinkling eyes that saw through into his heart. The woman he loved.

“I don’t regret my adultery,” she said. “How can Christ forgive me when I don’t even repent? If I hadn’t slept with Libo, my children would not have existed. Surely God does not disapprove of that?”

“I believe what Jesus said was, ‘I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive. But of you it is required that you forgive all men.’”

“More or less,” she said. “I’m not a scriptorian.” She reached out and touched his cheek. “You’re so strong, Ender. But you seem tired. How can you be tired? The universe of human beings still depends on you. Or if not the whole of humankind, then certainly you belong to this world. To save this world. But you’re tired.”

“Deep inside my bones I am,” he said. “And you have taken my last lifeblood away from me.”

“How odd,” she said. “I thought what I removed from you was the cancer in your life.”

“You aren’t very good at determining what other people want and need from you, Novinha. No one is. We’re all as likely to hurt as help.”

“That’s why I came here, Ender. I’m through deciding things. I put my trust in my own judgment. Then I put trust in you. I put trust in Libo, in Pipo, in Father and Mother, in Quim, and everyone disappointed me or went away or … no, I know you didn’t go away, and I know it wasn’t you that— hear me out, Andrew, hear me. The problem wasn’t in the people I trusted, the problem was that I trusted in them when no human being can possibly deliver what I needed. I needed deliverance, you see. I needed, I need, redemption. And it isn’t in your hands to give me— your open hands, which give me more than you even have to give, Andrew, but still you haven’t got the thing I need. Only my Deliverer, only the Anointed One, only he has it to give. Do you see? The only way I can make my life worth living is to give it to him. So here I am.”

“Weeding.”

“Separating the good fruit from the tares, I believe,” she said. “People will have more and better potatoes because I took out the weeds. I don’t have to be prominent or even noticed to feel good about my life now. But you, you come here and remind me that even in becoming happy, I’m hurting someone.”

“But you’re not,” said Ender. “Because I’m coming with you. I’m joining the Filhos with you. They’re a married order, and we’re a married couple. Without me you can’t join, and you need to join. With me you can. What could be simpler?”

“Simpler?” She shook her head. “You don’t believe in God, how’s that for starters?”

“I certainly do too believe in God,” said Ender, annoyed.

“Oh, you’re willing to concede God’s existence, but that’s not what I meant. I mean believe in him the way a mother means it when she says to her son, I believe in you. She’s not saying she believes that he exists— what is that worth? —she’s saying she believes in his future, she trusts that he’ll do all the good that is in him to do. She puts the future in his hands, that’s how she believes in him. You don’t believe in Christ that way, Andrew. You still believe in yourself. In other people. You’ve sent out your little surrogates, those children you conjured up during your visit in hell— you may be here with me in these walls right now, but your heart is out there scouting planets and trying to stop the fleet. You aren’t leaving anything up to God. You don’t believe in him.”

“Excuse me, but if God wanted to do everything himself, what did he make us for in the first place?”

“Yes, well, I seem to recall that one of your parents was a heretic, which is no doubt where your strangest ideas come from.” It was an old joke between them, but this time neither of them laughed.

“I believe in you,” Ender said.

“But you consult with Jane.”

He reached into his pocket, then held out his hand to show her what he had found there. It was a jewel, with several very fine wires leading from it. Like a glowing organism ripped from its delicate place amid the fronds of life in a shallow sea. She looked at it for a moment uncomprehending, then realized what it was and looked at the ear where, for all the years she had known him, he had worn the jewel that linked him to Jane, the computer-program-come-to-life who was his oldest, dearest, most reliable friend.

“Andrew, no, not for me, surely.”

“I can’t honestly say these walls contain me, as long as Jane was there to whisper in my ear,” he said. “I talked it out with her. I explained it. She understands. We’re still friends. But not companions anymore.”

“Oh, Andrew,” said Novinha. She wept openly now, and held him, clung to him. “If only you had done it years ago, even months ago.”

“Maybe I don’t believe in Christ the way that you do,” said Ender. “But isn’t it enough that I believe in you, and you believe in him?”

“You don’t belong here, Andrew.”

“I belong here more than anywhere else, if this is where you are. I’m not so much world-weary, Novinha, as I am will-weary. I’m tired of deciding things. I’m tired of trying to solve things.”

“We try to solve things here,” she said, pulling away from him.

“But here we can be, not the mind, but the children of the mind. We can be the hands and feet, the lips and tongue. We can carry out and not decide.” He squatted, knelt, then sat in the dirt, the young plants brushing and tickling him on either side. He put his dirty hands to his face and wiped his brow with them, knowing that he was only smearing dirt into mud.

“Oh, I almost believe this, Andrew, you’re so good at it,” said Novinha. “What, you’ve decided to stop being the hero of your own saga? Or is this just a ploy? Be the servant of all, so you can be the greatest among us?”

“You know I’ve never tried for greatness, or achieved it, either.”

“Oh, Andrew, you’re such a storyteller that you believe your own fables.”

Ender looked up at her. “Please, Novinha, let me live with you here. You’re my wife. There’s no meaning to my life if I’ve lost you.”

“We live as man and wife here, but we don’t … you know that we don’t …”

“I know that the Filhos forswear sexual intercourse,” said Ender. “I’m your husband. As long as I’m not having sex with anyone, it might as well be you that I’m not having sex with.” He smiled wryly.

Her answering smile was only sad and pitying.

“Novinha,” he said. “I’m not interested in my own life anymore. Do you understand? The only life I care about in this world is yours. If I lose you, what is there to hold me here?”

He wasn’t sure what he meant by this himself. The words had come unbidden to his lips. But he knew as he said them that it was not self-pity, but rather a frank admission of the truth. Not that he was thinking of suicide or exile or any other such low drama. Rather he felt himself fading. Losing his hold. Lusitania seemed less and less real to him. Valentine was still there, his dear sister and friend, and she was like a rock, her life was so real, but it was not real to him because she didn’t need him. Plikt, his unasked-for disciple, she might need Ender, but not the reality of him, only the idea of him. And who else was there? The children of Novinha and Libo, the children that he had raised as his own, and loved as his own, he loved them no less now, but they were adults, they didn’t need him. Jane, who once had been virtually destroyed by an hour of his inattention, she no longer needed him either, for she was there in the jewel in Miro’s ear, and in another jewel in Peter’s ear …

Peter. Young Valentine. Where had they come from? They had stolen his soul and taken it with them when they left. They were doing the living acts that once he would have done himself. While he waited here in Lusitania and … faded. That’s what he meant. If he lost Novinha, what would tie him to this body that he had carried around the universe for all these thousands of years?

“It’s not my decision,” Novinha said.

“It’s your decision,” said Ender, “whether you want me with you, as one of the Filhos da Mente de Cristo. If you do, then I believe I can make my way through all the other obstacles.”

She laughed nastily. “Obstacles? Men like you don’t have obstacles. Just steppingstones.”

“Men like me?”

“Yes, men like you,” said Novinha. “Just because I’ve never met any others. Just because no matter how much I loved Libo he was never for one day as alive as you are in every minute. Just because I found myself loving as an adult for the first time when I loved you. Just because I have missed you more than I miss even my children, even my parents, even the lost loves of my life. Just because I can’t dream of anyone but you, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t somebody else just like you somewhere else. The universe is a big place. You can’t be all that special, really. Can you?”

He reached through the potato plants and leaned a hand gently on her thigh. “You do still love me, then?” he asked.

“Oh, is that what you came for? To find out if I love you?”

He nodded. “Partly.”

“I do,” she said.

“Then I can stay?”

She burst into tears. Loud weeping. She sank to the ground; he reached through the plants to embrace her, to hold her, caring nothing for the leaves he crushed between them. After he held her for a long while, she broke off her crying and turned to him and held him at least as tightly as he had been holding her.

“Oh, Andrew,” she whispered, her voice cracking and breaking from having wept so much. “Does God love me enough to give you to me now, again, when I need you so much?”

“Until I die,” said Ender.

“I know that part,” she said. “But I pray that God will let me die first this time.”

Chapter 3 — “THERE ARE TOO MANY OF US”

“Let me tell you the most beautiful story I know.

A man was given a dog, which he loved very much.

The dog went with him everywhere,

but the man could not teach it to do anything useful.

The dog would not fetch or point,

it would not race or protect or stand watch.

Instead the dog sat near him and regarded him,

always with the same inscrutable expression.

‘That’s not a dog, it’s a wolf,’ said the man’s wife.

‘He alone is faithful to me,’ said the man,

and his wife never discussed it with him again.

One day the man took his dog with him into his private airplane

and as they flew over high winter mountains,

the engines failed

and the airplane was torn to shreds among the trees.

The man lay bleeding,

his belly torn open by blades of sheared metal,

steam rising from his organs in the cold air,

but all he could think of was his faithful dog.

Was he alive? Was he hurt?

Imagine his relief when the dog came padding up

and regarded him with that same steady gaze.

After an hour the dog nosed the man’s gaping abdomen,

then began pulling out intestines and spleen and liver

and gnawing on them, all the while studying the man’s face.

‘Thank God,’ said the man.

‘At least one of us will not starve.’

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-lao

Of all the faster-than-light starships that were flitting Outside and back In under Jane’s command, only Miro’s looked like an ordinary spacecraft, for the good reason that it was nothing more than the shuttle that had once taken passengers and cargo to and from the great starships that came to orbit around Lusitania. Now that the new starships could go immediately from one planet’s surface to another’s, there was no need for life support or even fuel, and since Jane had to hold the entire structure of each craft in her memory, the simpler they were the better. Indeed, they could hardly be called vehicles anymore. They were simple cabins now, windowless, almost unfurnished, bare as a primitive schoolroom. The people of Lusitania referred to space travel now as encaixarse, which was Portuguese for “going into the box,” or, more literally, “to box oneself up.”

Miro, however, was exploring, searching for new planets capable of sustaining the lives of the three sentient species, humans, pequeninos, and hive queens. For this he needed a more traditional spacecraft, for though he still went from planet to planet by way of Jane’s instant detour through the Outside, he could not usually count on arriving at a world where he could breathe the air. Indeed, Jane always started him out in orbit high above each new planet, so he could observe, measure, analyze, and only land on the most promising ones to make the final determination of whether the world was usable.

He did not travel alone. It would have been too much for one person to accomplish, and he needed everything he did to be doublechecked. Yet of all the work being done by anyone on Lusitania, this was the most dangerous, for he never knew when he cracked open the door of his spaceship whether there would be some unforeseeable menace on the new world. Miro, had long regarded his own life as expendable. For several long years trapped in a brain-damaged body he had wished for death; then, when his first trip Outside enabled him to recreate his body in the perfection of youth, he regarded any moment, any hour, any day of his life as an undeserved gift. He would not waste it, but he would not shrink from putting it at risk for the good of others. But who else could share his easy self-disregard?

Young Valentine was made to order, in every sense, it seemed. Miro had seen her come into existence at the same time as his own new body. She had no past, no kin, no links to any world except through Ender, whose mind had created her, and Peter, her fellow makeling. Oh, and perhaps one might consider her to be linked to the original Valentine, “the real Valentine,” as Young Val called her; but it was no secret that Old Valentine had no desire to spend even a moment in the company of this young beauty who mocked her by her very existence. Besides, Young Val was created as Ender’s image of perfect virtue. Not only was she unconnected, but also she was genuinely altruistic and quite willing to sacrifice herself for the good of others. So whenever Miro stepped into the shuttle, there was Young Val as his companion, his reliable assistant, his constant backup.

But not his friend. For Miro knew perfectly well who Val really was: Ender in disguise. Not a woman. And her love and loyalty to him were Ender’s love and loyalty, often tested, well-trusted, but Ender’s, not her own. There was nothing of her own in her. So while Miro had become used to her company, and laughed and joked with her more easily than with anyone in his life till now, he did not confide in her, did not allow himself to feel affection any deeper than camaraderie for her. If she noticed the lack of connection between them she said nothing; if it hurt her, the pain never showed.

What showed was her delight in their successes and her insistence that they push themselves ever harder. “We don’t have a whole day to spend on any world,” she said right from the start, and proved it by holding them to a schedule that let them make three voyages in a day. They came home after each three voyages to a Lusitania already quiet with sleep; they slept on the ship and spoke to others only to warn them of particular problems the colonists were likely to face on whatever new worlds had been found that day. And the three-a-day schedule was only on days when they dealt with likely planets. When Jane took them to worlds that were obvious losers— waterbound, for instance, or unbiotized— they moved on quickly, checking the next candidate world, and the next, sometimes five and six on those discouraging days when nothing seemed to work. Young Val pushed them both on to the edge of their endurance, day after day, and Miro accepted her leadership in this aspect of their voyaging because he knew that it was necessary.

His friend, however, had no human shape. For him she dwelt in the jewel in his ear. Jane, the whisper in his mind when he first woke up, the friend who heard everything he subvocalized, who knew his needs before he noticed them himself Jane, who shared all his thoughts and dreams, who had stayed with him through the worst of his cripplehood, who had led him Outside to where he could be renewed. Jane, his truest friend, who would soon die.

That was their real deadline. Jane would die, and then this instant starflight would be at an end, for there was no other being that had the sheer mental power to take anything more complicated than a rubber ball Outside and back In again. And Jane’s death would come, not by any natural cause, but because the Starways Congress, having discovered the existence of a subversive program that could control or at least access any and all of their computers, was systematically closing down, disconnecting, and sweeping out all their networks. Already she was feeling the injury of those systems that had been taken offline to where she could not access them. Someday soon the codes would be transmitted that would undo her utterly and all at once. And when she was gone, anyone who had not been taken from the surface of Lusitania and transplanted to another world would be trapped, waiting helplessly for the arrival of the Lusitania Fleet, which was coming ever closer, determined to destroy them all.

A grim business, this, in which despite all of Miro’s efforts, his dearest friend would die. Which, he knew full well, was part of why he did not let himself become a true friend to Young Val— because it would be disloyal to Jane to learn affection for anyone else during the last weeks or days of her life.

So Miro’s life was an endless routine of work, of concentrated mental effort, studying the findings of the shuttle’s instruments, analyzing aerial photographs, piloting the shuttle to unsafe, unscouted landing zones, and finally— not often enough— opening the door and breathing alien air. And at the end of each voyage, no time either to mourn or rejoice, no time even to rest: he closed the door, spoke the word, and Jane took them home again to Lusitania, to start it all over again.

On this homecoming, however, something was different. Miro opened the door of the shuttle to find, not his adoptive father Ender, not the pequeninos who prepared food for him and Young Val, not the normal colony leaders wanting a briefing, but rather his brothers Olhado and Grego, and his sister Elanora, and Ender’s sister Valentine. Old Valentine, come herself to the one place where she was sure to meet her unwelcome young twin? Miro saw at once how Young Val and Old Valentine glanced at each other, eyes not really meeting, and then looked away, not wanting to see each other. Or was that it? Young Val was more likely looking away from Old Valentine because she virtuously wanted to avoid giving offense to the older woman. No doubt if she could do it Young Val would willingly disappear rather than cause Old Valentine a moment’s pain. And, since that was not possible, she would do the next best thing, which was to remain as unobtrusive as possible when Old Valentine was present.

“What’s the meeting?” asked Miro. “Is Mother ill?”

“No, no, everybody’s in good health,” said Olhado.

“Except mentally,” said Grego. “Mother’s as mad as a hatter, and now Ender’s crazy too.”

Miro nodded, grimaced. “Let me guess. He joined her among the Filhos.”

Immediately Grego and Olhado looked at the jewel in Miro’s ear.

“No, Jane didn’t tell me,” said Miro. “I just know Ender. He takes his marriage very seriously.”

“Yes, well, it’s left something of a leadership vacuum here,” said Olhado. “Not that everybody isn’t doing their job just fine. I mean, the system works and all that. But Ender was the one we all looked to to tell us what to do when the system stops working. If you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” said Miro. “And you can speak of it in front of Jane. She knows she’s going to be shut down as soon as Starways Congress gets their plans in place.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Grego. “Most people don’t know about the danger to Jane— for that matter, most don’t even know she exists. But they can do the arithmetic to figure out that even going full tilt, there’s no way to get all the humans off Lusitania before the fleet gets here. Let alone the pequeninos. So they know that unless the fleet is stopped, somebody is going to be left here to die. There are already those who say that we’ve wasted enough starship space on trees and bugs.”

“Trees” referred, of course, to the pequeninos, who were not, in fact, transporting fathertrees and mothertrees; and “bugs” referred to the Hive Queen, who was also not wasting space sending a lot of workers. But every world they were settling did have a large contingent of pequeninos and at least one hive queen and a handful of workers to help her get started. Never mind that it was the hive queen on every world that quickly produced workers who were doing the bulk of the labor getting agriculture started; never mind that because they were not taking trees with them, at least one male and female in every group of pequeninos had to be “planted” —had to die slowly and painfully so that a fathertree and mothertree could take root and maintain the cycle of pequenino life. They all knew— Grego more than any other, since he’d recently been in the thick of itthat under the polite surface was an undercurrent of competition between species.

And it was not just among the humans, either. While on Lusitania the pequeninos still outnumbered humans by vast numbers, on the new colonies the humans predominated. “It’s your fleet coming to destroy Lusitania,” said Human, the leader of the fathertrees these days. “And even if every human on Lusitania died, the human race would continue. While for the Hive Queen and for us, it is nothing less than the survival of our species that is at stake. And yet we understand that we must let humans dominate for a time on these new worlds, because of your knowledge of skills and technologies we have not yet mastered, because of your practice at subduing new worlds, and because you still have the power to set fires to burn our forests.” What Human said so reasonably, his resentment couched in polite language, many other pequeninos and fathertrees said more passionately: “Why should we let these human invaders, who brought all this evil upon us, save almost all their population, while most of us will die?”

“Resentment between the species is nothing new,” said Miro.

“But until now we had Ender to contain it,” said Grego. “Pequeninos, the Hive Queen, and most of the human population saw Ender as a fair broker, someone they could trust. They knew that as long as he was in charge of things, as long as his voice was heard, their interests would be protected.”

“Ender isn’t the only good person leading this exodus,” said Miro.

“It’s a matter of trust, not of virtue,” said Valentine. “The nonhumans know that Ender is the Speaker for the Dead. No other human has ever spoken for another species that way. And yet the humans know that Ender is the Xenocide— that when the human race was threatened by an enemy countless generations ago, he was the one who acted to stop them and save humanity from, as they feared, annihilation. There isn’t exactly a candidate with equivalent qualifications ready to step into Ender’s role.”

“What’s that to me?” asked Miro bluntly. “Nobody listens to me here. I have no connections. I certainly can’t take Ender’s place either, and right now I’m tired and I need to sleep. Look at Young Val, she’s half-dead with weariness, too.”

It was true; she was barely able to stand. Miro at once reached out to support her; she gratefully leaned against his shoulder.

“We don’t want you to take Ender’s place,” said Olhado. “We don’t want anybody to take his place. We want him to take his place.”

Miro laughed. “You think I can persuade him? You’ve got his sister right there! Send her!”

Old Valentine grimaced. “Miro, he won’t see me.”

“Then what makes you think he’ll see me?”

“Not you, Miro. Jane. The jewel in your ear.”

Miro looked at them in bafflement. “You mean Ender has removed his jewel?”

In his ear, he heard Jane say, “I’ve been busy. I didn’t think it was important to mention it to you.”

But Miro knew how it had devastated Jane before, when Ender cut her off. Now she had other friends, yes, but that didn’t mean it would be painless.

Old Valentine continued. “If you can go to him and get him to talk to Jane …”

Miro shook his head. “Taking out the jewel— don’t you see that that was final? He’s committed himself to following Mother into exile. Ender doesn’t back away from his commitments.”

They all knew it was true. Knew, in fact, that they had really come to Miro, not with the real hope that he would accomplish what they needed, but as a last feeble act of desperation. “So we let things wind down,” said Grego. “We let things slide into chaos. And then, beset by interspecies war, we will die in shame when the fleet comes. Jane’s lucky, I think; she’ll already be dead when it gets here.”

“Tell him thanks,” Jane said to Miro.

“Jane says thanks,” said Miro. “You’re just too soft-hearted, Grego. “

Grego blushed, but he didn’t take back what he said.

“Ender isn’t God,” said Miro. “We’ll just do our best without him. But right now the best thing I can do is—”

“Sleep, we know,” said Old Valentine. “Not on the ship this time, though. Please. It makes us sick at heart to see how weary you both are. Jakt has brought the taxi. Come home and sleep in a bed.”

Miro glanced at Young Val, who still leaned sleepily on his shoulder.

“Both of you, of course,” said Old Valentine. “I’m not as distressed by her existence as you all seem to think.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Young Val. She reached out a weary arm, and the two women who bore the same name took each other’s hand. Miro watched as Young Val slipped from his side to take Old Valentine’s arm, and lean on her instead of him. His own feelings surprised him. Instead of relief that there was less tension between the two of them than he had thought, he found himself being rather angry. Jealous anger, that’s what it was. She was leaning on me, he wanted to say. What kind of childish response was that?

And then, as he watched them walk away, he saw what he should not have seen— Valentine’s shudder. Was it a sudden chill? The night was cool. But no, Miro was sure it was the touch of her young twin, and not the night air that made Old Valentine tremble.

“Come on, Miro,” said Olhado. “We’ll get you to the hovercar and into bed at Valentine’s house.”

“Is there a food stop along the way?”

“It’s Jakt’s house, too,” said Elanora. “There’s always food.”

As the hovercar carried them toward Milagre, the human town, they passed near some of the dozens of starships currently in service. The work of migration didn’t take the night off. Stevedores— many of them pequeninos— were loading supplies and equipment for transport. Families were shuffling in lines to fill up whatever spaces were left in the cabins. Jane would be getting no rest tonight as she took box after box Outside and back In. On other worlds, new homes were rising, new fields being plowed. Was it day or night in those other places? It didn’t matter. In a way they had already succeeded— new worlds were being colonized, and, like it or not, every world had its hive, its new pequenino forest, and its human village.

If Jane died today, thought Miro, if the fleet came tomorrow and blew us all to bits, in the grand scheme of things, what would it matter? The seeds have been scattered to the wind; some, at least, will take root. And if faster-than-light travel dies with Jane, even that might be for the best, for it will force each of these worlds to fend for itself. Some colonies will fail and die, no doubt. On some of them, war will come, and perhaps one species or another will be wiped out there. But it will not be the same species that dies on every world, or the same one that lives; and on some worlds, at least, we’ll surely find a way to live in peace. All that’s left for us now is details. Whether this or that individual lives or dies. It matters, of course. But not the way that the survival of species matters.

He must have been subvocalizing some of his thoughts, because Jane answered them. “Hath not an overblown computer program eyes and ears? Have I no heart or brain? When you tickle me do I not laugh?”

“Frankly, no,” said Miro silently, working his lips and tongue and teeth to shape words that only she could hear.

“But when I die, every being of my kind will also die,” she said. “Forgive me if I think of this as having cosmic significance. I’m not as self-abnegating as you are, Miro. I don’t regard myself as living on borrowed time. It was my firm intention to live forever, so anything less is a disappointment.”

“Tell me what I can do and I’ll do it,” he said. “I’d die to save you, if that’s what it took.”

“Fortunately, you’ll die eventually no matter what,” said Jane. “That’s my one consolation, that by dying I’ll do no more than face the same doom that every other living creature has to face. Even those long-living trees. Even those hive queens, passing their memories along from generation to generation. But I, alas, will have no children. How could I? I’m a creature of mind alone. There’s no provision for mental mating.”

“Too bad, too,” said Miro, “because I bet you’d be great in the virtual sack.”

“The best,” Jane said.

And then silence for a little while.

Only when they approached Jakt’s house, a new building on the outskirts of Milagre, did Jane speak again. “Keep in mind, Miro, that whatever Ender does with his own self, when Young Valentine speaks it’s still Ender’s aiua talking.”

“The same with Peter,” said Miro. “Now there’s a charmer. Let’s just say that Young Val, sweet as she is, doesn’t exactly represent a balanced view of anything. Ender may control her, but she’s not Ender.”

“There are just too many of him, aren’t there,” said Jane. “And, apparently, too many of me, at least in the opinion of Starways Congress.”

“There are too many of us all,” said Miro. “But never enough.”

They arrived. Miro and Young Val were led inside. They ate feebly; they slept the moment they reached their beds. Miro was aware that voices went on far into the night, for he did not sleep well, but rather kept waking a little, uncomfortable on such a soft mattress, and perhaps uncomfortable at being away from his duty, like a soldier who feels guilty at having abandoned his post.

Despite his weariness, Miro did not sleep late. Indeed, the sky outside was still dim with the predawn seepage of sunlight over the horizon when he awoke and, as was his habit, rose immediately from his bed, standing shakily as the last of sleep fled from his body. He covered himself and went out into the hall to find the bathroom and discharge his bladder. When he emerged, he heard voices from the kitchen. Either last night’s conversation was still going on, or some other neurotic early risers had rejected morning solitude and were chatting away as if dawn were not the dark hour of despair.

He stood before his own open door, ready to go inside and shut out those earnest voices, when Miro realized that one of them belonged to Young Val. Then he realized that the other one was Old Valentine. At once he turned and made his way to the kitchen, and again hesitated in a doorway.

Sure enough, the two Valentines were sitting across the table from each other, but not looking at each other. Instead they stared out the window as they sipped one of Old Valentine’s fruit-and-vegetable decoctions.

“Would you like one, Miro?” asked Old Valentine without looking up.

“Not even on my deathbed,” said Miro. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Good,” said Old Valentine.

Young Val continued to say nothing.

Miro came inside the kitchen, went to the sink, and drew himself a glass of water, which he drank in one long draught.

“I told you it was Miro in the bathroom,” said Old Valentine. “No one processes so much water every day as this dear lad.”

Miro chuckled, but he did not hear Young Val laugh.

“I am interfering with the conversation,” he said. “I’ll go.”

“Stay,” said Old Valentine.

“Please,” said Young Val.

“Please which?” asked Miro. He turned toward her and grinned.

She shoved a chair toward him with her foot. “Sit,” she said. “The lady and I were having it out about our twinship.”

“We decided,” said Old Valentine, “that it’s my responsibility to die first.”

“On the contrary,” said Young Val, “we decided that Gepetto did not create Pinocchio because he wanted a real boy. It was a puppet he wanted all along. That real-boy business was simply Gepetto’s laziness. He still wanted the puppet to dance— he just didn’t want to go to all the trouble of working the strings.”

“You being Pinocchio,” said Miro. “And Ender …”

“My brother didn’t try to make you,” said Old Valentine. “And he doesn’t want to control you, either.”

“I know,” whispered Young Val. And suddenly there were tears in her eyes.

Miro reached out a hand to lay atop hers on the table, but at once she snatched hers away. No, she wasn’t avoiding his touch, she was simply bringing her hand up to wipe the annoying tears out of her eyes.

“He’d cut the strings if he could, I know,” said Young Val. “The way Miro cut the strings on his old broken body.”

Miro remembered it very clearly. One moment he was sitting in the starship, looking at this perfect image of himself, strong and young and healthy; the next moment he was that image, had always been that image, and what he looked at was the crippled, broken, brain-damaged version of himself. And as he watched, that unloved, unwanted body crumbled into dust and disappeared.

“I don’t think he hates you,” said Miro, “the way I hated my old self.”

“He doesn’t have to hate me. It wasn’t hate anyway that killed your old body.” Young Val didn’t meet his eyes. In all their hours together exploring worlds, they had never talked about anything so personal. She had never dared to discuss with him that moment when both of them had been created. “You hated your old body while you were in it, but as soon as you were back in your right body, you simply stopped paying any attention to the old one. It wasn’t part of you anymore. Your aiua had no more responsibility for it. And with nothing to hold it together— pop goes the weasel.”

“Wooden doll,” said Miro. “Now weasel. What else am I?”

Old Valentine ignored his bid for a laugh. “So you’re saying Ender finds you uninteresting.”

“He admires me,” said Young Val. “But he finds me dull.”

“Yes, well, me too,” said Old Valentine.

“That’s absurd,” said Miro.

“Is it?” asked Old Valentine. “He never followed me anywhere; I was always the one who followed him. He was searching for a mission in life, I think. Some great deed to do, to match the terrible act that ended his childhood. He thought writing The Hive Queen would do it. And then, with my help in preparing it, he wrote The Hegemon and he thought that might be enough, but it wasn’t. He kept searching for something that would engage his full attention and he kept almost finding it, or finding it for a week or a month, but one thing was certain, the thing that engaged his attention was never me, because there I was in all the billion miles he traveled, there I was across three thousand years. Those histories I wrote— it was no great love for history, it was because it helped in his work. The way my writing used to help in Peter’s work. And when I was finished, then, for a few hours of reading and discussion, I had his attention. Only each time it was less satisfying because it wasn’t I who had his attention, it was the story I had written. Until finally I found a man who gave me his whole heart, and I stayed with him. While my adolescent brother went on without me, and found a family that took his whole heart, and there we were, planets apart, but finally happier without each other than we’d ever been together.”

“So why did you come to him again?” asked Miro.

“I didn’t come for him. I came for you.” Old Valentine smiled. “I came for a world in danger of destruction. But I was glad to see Ender, even though I knew he would never belong to me.”

“This may be an accurate description of how it felt to you,” said Young Val. “But you must have had his attention, at some level. I exist because you’re always in his heart.”

“A fantasy of his childhood, perhaps. Not me.”

“Look at me,” said Young Val. “Is this the body you wore when he was five and was taken away from his home and sent up to the Battle School? Is this even the teenage girl that he knew that summer by the lake in North Carolina? You must have had his attention even when you grew up, because his image of you changed to become me.”

“You are what I was when we worked on The Hegemon together,” said Old Valentine sadly.

“Were you this tired?” asked Young Val.

“I am,” said Miro.

“No you’re not,” said Old Valentine. “You are the picture of vigor. You’re still celebrating your beautiful new body. My twin here is heartweary.”

“Ender’s attention has always been divided,” said Young Val. “I’m filled with his memories, you see— or rather, with the memories that he unconsciously thought I should have, but of course they consist almost entirely of things that he remembers about my friend here, which means that all I remember is my life with Ender. And he always had Jane in his ear, and the people whose deaths he was speaking, and his students, and the Hive Queen in her cocoon, and so on. But they were all adolescent connections. Like every itinerant hero of epic, he wandered place to place, transforming others but remaining himself unchanged. Until he came here and finally gave himself wholly to somebody else. You and your family, Miro. Novinha. For the first time he gave other people the power to tear at him emotionally, and it was exhilarating and painful both at once, but even that he could handle just fine, he’s a strong man, and strong men have borne more. Now, though, it’s something else entirely. Peter and I, we have no life apart from him. To say that he is one with Novinha is metaphorical; with Peter and me it’s literal. He is us. And his aiua isn’t great enough, it isn’t strong or copious enough, it hasn’t enough attention in it to give equal shares to the three lives that depend on it. I realized this almost as soon as I was … what shall we call it, created? Manufactured?”

“Born,” said Old Valentine.

“You were a dream come true,” said Miro, with only a hint of irony.

“He can’t sustain all three of us. Ender, Peter, me. One of us is going to fade. One of us at least is going to die. And it’s me. I knew that from the start. I’m the one who’s going to die.”

Miro wanted to reassure her. But how do you reassure someone, except by recalling to them similar situations that turned out for the best? There were no similar situations to call upon.

“The trouble is that whatever part of Ender’s aiua I still have in me is absolutely determined to live. I don’t want to die. That’s how I know I still have some shred of his attention: I don’t want to die.”

“So go to him,” said Old Valentine. “Talk to him.”

Young Val gave one bitter hoot of laughter and looked away. “Please, Papa, let me live,” she said in a mockery of a child’s voice. “Since it’s not something he consciously controls, what could he possibly do about it, except suffer from guilt? And why should he feel guilty? If I cease to exist, it’s because my own self didn’t value me. He is myself. Do the dead tips of fingernails feel bad when you pare them away?”

“But you are bidding for his attention,” said Miro.

“I hoped that the search for habitable worlds would intrigue him. I poured myself into it, trying to be excited about it. But the truth is it’s utterly routine. Important, but routine, Miro.”

Miro nodded. “True enough. Jane finds the worlds. We just process them.”

“And there are enough worlds now. Enough colonies. Two dozen— pequeninos and hive queens are not going to die out now, even if Lusitania is destroyed. The bottleneck isn’t the number of worlds, it’s the number of starships. So all our labor— it isn’t engaging Ender’s attention anymore. And my body knows it. My body knows it isn’t needed.”

She reached up and took a large hank of her hair into her fist, and pulled— not hard, but lightly— and it came away easily in her hand. A great gout of hair, with not a sign of any pain at its going. She let the hair drop onto the table. It lay there like a dismembered limb, grotesque, impossible. “I think,” she whispered, “that if I’m not careful, I could do the same with my fingers. It’s slower, but gradually I will turn into dust just as your old body did, Miro. Because he isn’t interested in me. Peter is solving mysteries and fighting political wars off on some world somewhere. Ender is struggling to hold on to the woman he loves. But I …”

In that moment, as the hair torn from her head revealed the depth of her misery, her loneliness, her self-rejections, Miro realized what he had not let himself think of until now: that in all the weeks they had traveled world to world together, he had come to love her, and her unhappiness hurt him as if it were his own. And perhaps it was his own, his memory of his own self-loathing. But whatever the reason, it still felt like something deeper than mere compassion to him. It was a kind of desire. Yes, it was a kind of love. If this beautiful young woman, this wise and intelligent and clever young woman was rejected by her own inmost heart, then Miro’s heart had room enough to take her in. If Ender will not be yourself, let me! he cried silently, knowing as he formed the thought for the first time that he had felt this way for days, for weeks, without realizing it; yet also knowing that he could not be to her what Ender was.

Still, couldn’t love do for Young Val what it was doing for Ender himself? Couldn’t that engage enough of his attention to keep her alive? To strengthen her?

Miro reached out and gathered up her disembodied hair, twined it around his fingers, and then slid the looping locks into the pocket of his robe. “I don’t want you to fade away,” he said. Bold words for him.

Young Val looked at him oddly. “I thought the great love of your life was Ouanda.”

“She’s a middle-aged woman now,” said Miro. “Married and happy, with a family. It would be sad if the great love of my life were a woman who doesn’t exist anymore, and even if she did she wouldn’t want me.”

“It’s sweet of you to offer,” said Young Val. “But I don’t think we can fool Ender into caring about my life by pretending to fall in love.”

Her words stabbed Miro to the heart, because she had so easily seen how much of his self-declaration came from pity. Yet not all of it came from there; most of it was already seething just under the level of consciousness, just waiting its chance to come out. “I wasn’t thinking of fooling anyone,” said Miro. Except myself, he thought. Because Young Val could not possibly love me. She is, after all, not really a woman. She’s Ender.

But that was absurd. Her body was a woman’s body. And where did the choice of loves come from, if not the body? Was there something male or female in the aiua? Before it became master of flesh and bone, was it manly or womanly? And if so, would that mean that the aiuas composing atoms and molecules, rocks and stars and light and wind, that all of those were neatly sorted into boys and girls? Nonsense. Ender’s aiua could be a woman, could love like a woman as easily as it now loved, in a man’s body and in a man’s ways, Miro’s own mother. It wasn’t any lack in Young Val that made her look at him with such pity. It was a lack in him. Even with his body healed, he was not a man that a woman— or at least this woman, at the moment the most desirable of all women— could love, or wish to love, or hope to win.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he murmured. He pushed away from the table and left the room in two strides. Strode up the hall and once again stood in his open doorway. He heard their voices.

“No, don’t go to him,” said Old Valentine. Then something softer. Then, “He may have a new body, but his self-hatred has never been healed.”

A murmur from Young Val.

“Miro was speaking from his heart,” Old Valentine assured her. “It was a very brave and naked thing for him to do.”

Again Young Val spoke too softly for Miro to hear her.

“How could you know?” Old Valentine said. “What you have to realize is, we took a long voyage together, not that long ago, and I think he fell in love with me a little on that flight.”

It was probably true. It was definitely true. Miro had to admit it: some of his feelings for Young Val were really his feelings for Old Valentine, transferred from the woman who was permanently out of reach to this young woman who might be, he had hoped at least, accessible to him.

Now both their voices fell to levels where Miro could not even pick out words. But still he waited, his hands pressed against the

doo~amb, listening to the lilting of those two voices, so much alike, but both so well-known to him. It was a music that he could gladly hear forever.

“If there’s anyone like Ender in all this universe,” said Old Valentine with sudden loudness, “it’s Miro. He broke himself trying to save innocents from destruction. He hasn’t yet been healed.”

She meant me to hear that, Miro realized. She spoke loudly, knowing I was standing here, knowing I was listening. The old witch was listening for my door to close and she never heard it so she knows that I can hear them and she’s trying to give me a way to see myself. But I’m no Ender, I’m barely Miro, and if she says things like that about me it’s just proof that she doesn’t know who I am.

A voice spoke up in his ear. “Oh, shut up if you’re just going to lie to yourself.”

Of course Jane had heard everything. Even his thoughts, because, as was his habit, his conscious thoughts were echoed by his lips and tongue and teeth. He couldn’t even think without moving his lips. With Jane attached to his ear he spent his waking hours in a confessional that never closed.

“So you love the girl,” said Jane. “Why not? So your motives are complicated by your feelings toward Ender and Valentine and Ouanda and yourself. So what? What love was ever pure, what lover was ever uncomplicated? Think of her as a succubus. You’ll love her, and she’ll crumble in your arms.”

Jane’s taunting was infuriating and amusing at once. He went inside his room and gently closed the door. When it was closed, he whispered to her, “You’re just a jealous old bitch, Jane. You only want me for yourself.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Jane. “If Ender had ever really loved me, he would have created my human body when he was being so fertile Outside. Then I could make a play for you myself.”

“You already have my whole heart,” said Miro. “Such as it is.”

“You are such a liar,” said Jane. “I’m just a talking appointment book and calculator, and you know it.”

“But you’re very very rich,” said Miro. “I’ll marry you for your money.”

“By the way,” said Jane, “she’s wrong about one thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Miro, wondering which “she” Jane was referring to.

“You aren’t done with exploring worlds. Whether Ender is still interested in it or not— and I think he is, because she hasn’t turned to dust yet— the work doesn’t end just because there are enough habitable planets to save the piggies and buggers.”

Jane frequently used the old diminutive and pejorative terms for them. Miro often wondered, but never dared to ask, if she had any pejoratives for humans. But he thought he knew what her answer would be anyway: “The word ‘human’ is a pejorative,” she’d say.

“So what are we still looking for?” asked Miro.

“Every world that we can find before I die,” said Jane.

He thought about that as he lay back down on his bed. Thought about it as he tossed and turned a couple of times, then got up, got dressed for real, and set out under the lightening sky, walking among the other early risers, people about their business, few of whom knew him or even knew of him. Being a scion of the strange Ribeira family, he hadn’t had many childhood friends in ginasio; being both brilliant and shy, he’d had even fewer of the more rambunctious adolescent friendships in colegio. His only girlfriend had been Ouanda, until his penetration of the sealed perimeter of the human colony left him brain-damaged and he refused to see even her anymore. Then his voyage out to meet Valentine had severed the few fragile ties that remained between him and his birthworld. For him it was only a few months in a starship, but when he came back, years had passed, and he was now his mother’s youngest child, the only one whose life was unbegun. The children he had once watched over were adults who treated him like a tender memory from their youth. Only Ender was unchanged. No matter how many years. No matter what happened. Ender was the same.

Could it still be true? Could he be the same man even now, locking himself away at a time of crisis, hiding out in a monastery just because Mother had finally given up on life? Miro knew the bare outline of Ender’s life. Taken from his family at the tender age of five. Brought to the orbiting Battle School, where he emerged as the last best hope of humankind in its war with the ruthless invaders called buggers. Taken next to the fleet command on Eros, where he was told he was in advanced training, but where, without realizing it, he was commanding the real fleets, lightyears away, his commands transmitted by ansible. He won that war through brilliance and, in the end, the utterly unconscionable act of destroying the home world of the buggers. Except that he had thought it was a game.

Thought it was a game, but at the same time knowing that the game was a simulation of reality. In the game he had chosen to do the unspeakable; it meant, to Ender at least, that he was not free of guilt when the game turned out to be real. Even though the last Hive Queen forgave him and put herself, cocooned as she was, into his care, he could not shake himself free of that. He was only a child, doing what adults led him to do; but somewhere in his heart he knew that even a child is a real person, that a child’s acts are real acts, that even a child’s play is not without moral context.

Thus before the sun was up, Miro found himself facing Ender as they both straddled a stone bench in a spot in the garden that would soon be bathed in sunlight but now was clammy with the morning chill; and what Miro found himself saying to this unchangeable, unchanging man was this: “What is this monastery business, Andrew Wiggin, except for a backhanded, cowardly way of crucifying yourself?”

“I’ve missed you too, Miro,” said Ender. “You look tired, though. You need more sleep.”

Miro sighed and shook his head. “That wasn’t what I meant to say. I’m trying to understand you, I really am. Valentine says that I’m like you.”

“You mean the real Valentine?” asked Ender.

“They’re both real,” said Miro.

“Well, if I’m like you, then study yourself and tell me what you find.”

Miro wondered, looking at him, if Ender really meant this.

Ender patted Miro’s knee. “I’m really not needed out there now,” he said.

“You don’t believe that for a second,” said Miro.

“But I believe that I believe it,” said Ender, “and for me that’s pretty good. Please don’t disillusion me. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“No, you’re exploiting the convenience of having split yourself into three. This part of you, the aging middle-aged man, can afford the luxury of devoting himself entirely to his wife— but only because he has two young puppets to go out and do the work that really interests him.”

“But it doesn’t interest me,” said Ender. “I don’t care.”

“You as Ender don’t care because you as Peter and you as Valentine are taking care of everything else for you. Only Valentine isn’t well. You’re not caring enough about what she’s doing. What happened to my old crippled body is happening to her. More slowly, but it’s the same thing. She thinks so, Valentine thinks it’s possible. So do I. So does Jane.”

“Give Jane my love. I do miss her.”

“I give Jane my love, Ender.”

Ender grinned at his resistance. “If they were about to shoot you, Miro, you’d insist on drinking a lot of water just so they’d have to handle a corpse covered with urine when you were dead.”

“Valentine isn’t a dream or an illusion, Ender,” said Miro, refusing to be sidetracked into a discussion of his own obstreperousness. “She’s real, and you’re killing her.”

“Awfully dramatic way of putting it.”

“If you’d seen her pull out tufts of her own hair this morning …”

“So she’s rather theatrical, I take it? Well, you’ve always been one for the theatrical gesture, too. I’m not surprised you get along.”

“Andrew, I’m telling you you’ve got to—”

Suddenly Ender grew stern and his voice overtopped Miro’s even though he was not speaking loudly. “Use your head, Miro. Was your decision to jump from your old body to this newer model a conscious one? Did you think about it and say, ‘Well, I think I’ll let this old corpse crumble into its constituent molecules because this new body is a nicer place to dwell’?”

Miro got his point at once. Ender couldn’t consciously control where his attention went. His aiua, even though it was his deepest self, was not to be ordered about.

“I find out what I really want by seeing what I do,” said Ender. “That’s what we all do, if we’re honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously. I can’t help it if the part of me that’s controlling this girl whose company you’re sharing isn’t as important to my underlying will as you’d like. As she needs. I can’t do a thing.”

Miro bowed his head.

The sun came up over the trees. Suddenly the bench turned bright, and Miro looked up to see the sunlight making a halo out of Ender’s wildly slept-in hair. “Is grooming against the monastic rule?” asked Miro.

“You’re attracted to her, aren’t you,” said Ender, not really making a question out of it. “And it makes you a little uneasy that she is really me.”

Miro shrugged. “It’s a root in the path. But I think I can step over it.”

“But what if I’m not attracted to you?” asked Ender cheerfully.

Miro spread his arms and turned to show his profile. “Unthinkable,” he said.

“You are cute as a bunny,” said Ender. “I’m sure young Valentine dreams about you. I wouldn’t know. The only dreams I have are of planets blowing up and everyone I love being obliterated.”

“I know you haven’t forgotten the world in here, Andrew.” He meant that as the beginning of an apology, but Ender waved him off.

“I can’t forget it, but I can ignore it. I’m ignoring the world, Miro. I’m ignoring you, I’m ignoring those two walking psychoses of mine. At this moment, I’m trying to ignore everything but your mother.”

“And God,” said Miro. “You mustn’t forget God.”

“Not for a single moment,” said Ender. “As a matter of fact, I can’t forget anything or anybody. But yes, I am ignoring God, except insofar as Novinha needs me to notice him. I’m shaping myself into the husband that she needs.”

“Why, Andrew? You know Mother’s as crazy as a loon.”

“No such thing,” said Ender reprovingly. “But even if it were true, then … all the more reason.”

“What God has joined, let no man put asunder. I do approve, philosophically, but you don’t know how it …” Miro’s weariness swept over him then. He couldn’t think of the words to say what he wanted to say, and he knew that it was because he was trying to tell Ender how it felt, at this moment, to be Miro Ribeira, and Miro had no practice in even identifying his own feelings, let alone expressing them. “Desculpa,” he murmured, changing to Portuguese because it was his childhood language, the language of his emotions. He found himself wiping tears off his cheeks. “Se nao posso mudar nem voce, nao ha nada que possa, nada.” If I can’t get even you to move, to change, then there’s nothing I can do.

“Nem eu?” Ender echoed. “In all the universe, Miro, there’s nobody harder to change than me.”

“Mother did it. She changed you.”

“No she didn’t,” said Ender. “She only allowed me to be what I needed and wanted to be. Like now, Miro. I can’t make everybody happy. I can’t make me happy, I’m not doing much for you, and as for the big problems, I’m worthless there too. But maybe I can make your mother happy, or at least somewhat happier, at least for a while, or at least I can try.” He took Miro’s hands in his, pressed them to his own face, and they did not come away dry.

Miro watched as Ender got up from the bench and walked away toward the sun, into the shining orchard. Surely this is how Adam would have looked, thought Miro, if he had never eaten the fruit. If he had stayed and stayed and stayed and stayed in the garden. Three thousand years Ender has skimmed the surface of life. It was my mother he finally snagged on. I spent my whole childhood trying to be free of her, and he comes along and chooses to attach himself and …

And what am I snagged on, except him? Him in women’s flesh. Him with a handful of hair on a kitchen table.

Miro was getting up from the bench when Ender suddenly turned to face him and waved to attract his attention. Miro started to walk toward him, but Ender didn’t wait; he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.

“Tell Jane!” he called. “If she can figure out! How to do it! She can have that body!”

It took Miro a moment to realize that he was speaking of Young Val.

She’s not just a body, you self-centered old planet-smasher. She’s not just an old suit to be given away because it doesn’t fit or the style has changed.

But then his anger fled, for he realized that he himself had done precisely that with his old body. Tossed it away without a backward glance.

And the idea intrigued him. Jane. Was it even possible? If her aiua could somehow be made to take up residence in Young Val, could a human body hold enough of Jane’s mind to enable her to survive when Starways Congress tried to shut her down?

“You boys are so slow,” Jane murmured in his ear. “I’ve been talking to the Hive Queen and Human and trying to figure out how the thing is done— assigning an aiua to a body. The hive queens did it once, in creating me. But they didn’t exactly pick a particular aiua. They took what came. What showed up. I’m a little fussier.”

Miro said nothing as he walked to the monastery gate.

“Oh, yes, and then there’s the little matter of your feelings toward Young Val. You hate the fact that in loving her, it’s really, in a way, Ender that you love. But if I took over, if I were the will inside Young Val’s life, would she still be the woman you love? Would anything of her survive? Would it be murder?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Miro aloud.

The monastery gatekeeper looked up at him in surprise.

“Not you,” said Miro. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea.”

Miro was aware of her eyes on his back until he was out and on the path winding down the hill toward Milagre. Time to get back to the ship. Val will be waiting for me. Whoever she is.

What Ender is to Mother, so loyal, so patient— is that how I feel toward Val? Or no, it isn’t feeling, is it? It’s an act of will. It’s a decision that can never be revoked. Could I do that for any woman, any person? Could I give myself forever?

He remembered Ouanda then, and walked with the memory of bitter loss all the way back to the starship.

Chapter 4 — “I AM A MAN OF PERFECT SIMPLICITY!”

“When I was a child, I thought a god was disappointed whenever some distraction interrupted my tracing of the lines revealed in the grain of the wood. Now I know the gods expect such interruptions, for they know our frailty. It is completion that surprises them.”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Peter and Wang-mu ventured out into the world of Divine Wind on their second day. They did not have to worry about learning a language. Divine Wind was an older world, one of the first wave settled in the initial emigration from Earth. It was originally as recidivist as Path, clinging to the ancient ways. But the ancient ways of Divine Wind were Japanese ways, and so it included the possibility of radical change. Scarcely three hundred years into its history, the world transformed itself from being the isolated fiefdom of a ritualized shogunate to being a cosmopolitan center of trade and industry and philosophy. The Japanese of Divine Wind prided themselves on being hosts to visitors from all worlds, and there were still many places where children grew up speaking only Japanese until they were old enough to enter school. But by adulthood, all the people of Divine Wind spoke Stark with fluency, and the best of them with elegance, with grace, with astonishing economy; it was said by Mil Fiorelli, in his most famous book, Observations of Distant Worlds with the Naked Eye, that Stark was a language that had no native speakers until it was whispered by a Divine Wind.

So it was that when Peter and Wang-mu hiked through the woods of the great natural preserve where their starship had landed and emerged in a village of foresters, laughing about how long they had been “lost” in the woods, no one thought twice about Wang-mu’s obviously Chinese features and accent, or even about Peter’s white skin and lack of an epicanthic fold. They had lost their documents, they claimed, but a computer search showed them to be licensed automobile drivers in the city of Nagoya, and while Peter seemed to have had a couple of youthful traffic offenses there, otherwise they were not known to have committed any illegal acts. Peter’s profession was given as “independent teacher of physics” and Wang-mu’s as “itinerant philosopher,” both quite respectable positions, given their youth and lack of family attachment. When they were asked casual questions (“I have a cousin who teaches progenerative grammars in the Komatsu University in Nagoya”) Jane gave Peter appropriate comments to say:

“I never seem to get over to the Oe Building. The language people don’t talk to physicists anyway. They think we speak only mathematics. Wang-mu tells me that the only language we physicists know is the grammar of dreams.”

Wang-mu had no such friendly prompter in her ear, but then an itinerant philosopher was supposed to be gnomic in her speech and mantic in her thought. Thus she could answer Peter’s comment by saying, “I say that is the only grammar you speak. There is no grammar that you understand.”

This prompted Peter to tickle her, which made Wang-mu simultaneously laugh and wrench at his wrist until he stopped, thereby proving to the foresters that they were exactly what their documents said they were: brilliant young people who were nevertheless silly with love— or with youth, as if it made a difference.

They were given a ride in a government floater back to civilized country, where— thanks to Jane’s manipulation of the computer networks— they found an apartment that until yesterday had been empty and unfurnished, but which now was filled with an eclectic mix of furniture and art that reflected a charming mixture of poverty, quirkiness, and exquisite taste.

“Very nice,” said Peter.

Wang-mu, familiar only with the taste of one world, and really only of one man in that one world, could hardly evaluate Jane’s choices. There were places to sit— both Western chairs, which folded people into alternating right angles and never seemed comfortable to Wang-mu, and Eastern mats, which encouraged people to twine themselves into circles of harmony with the earth. The bedroom, with its Western mattress raised high off the ground even though there were neither rats nor roaches, was obviously Peter’s; Wang-mu knew that the same mat that invited her to sit in the main room of the apartment would also be her sleeping mat at night.

She deferentially offered Peter the first bath; he, however, seemed to feel no urgency to wash himself, even though he smelled of sweat from the hike and the hours cooped up in the floater. So Wang-mu ended up luxuriating in a tub, closing her eyes and meditating until she felt restored to herself. When she opened her eyes she no longer felt like a stranger. Rather she was herself, and the surrounding objects and spaces were free to attach themselves to her without damaging her sense of self. This was a power she had learned early in life, when she had no power even over her own body, and had to obey in all things. It was what preserved her. Her life had many unpleasant things attached to it, like remoras to a shark, but none of them changed who she was under the skin, in the cool darkness of her solitude with eyes closed and mind at peace.

When she emerged from the bathroom, she found Peter eating absently from a plate of grapes as he watched a holoplay in which masked Japanese actors bellowed at each other and took great, awkward, thundering steps, as if the actors were playing characters twice the size of their own bodies.

“Have you learned Japanese?” she asked.

“Jane’s translating for me. Very strange people.”

“It’s an ancient form of drama,” said Wang-mu.

“But very boring. Was there ever anyone whose heart was stirred by all this shouting?”

“If you are inside the story,” said Wang-mu, “then they are shouting the words of your own heart.”

“Somebody’s heart says, ‘I am the wind from the cold snow of the mountain, and you are the tiger whose roar will freeze in your own ears before you tremble and die in the iron knife of my winter eyes’?”

“It sounds like you,” said Wang-mu. “Bluster and brag.”

“I am the round-eyed sweating man who stinks like the corpse of a leaking skunk, and you are the flower who will wilt unless I take an immediate shower with lye and ammonia.”

“Keep your eyes closed when you do,” said Wang-mu. “That stuff burns.”

There was no computer in the apartment. Maybe the holoview could be used as a computer, but if so Wang-mu didn’t know how. Its controls looked like nothing she had seen in Han Fei-tzu’s house, but that was hardly a surprise. The people of Path didn’t take their design of anything from other worlds, if they could help it. Wang-mu didn’t even know how to turn off the sound. It didn’t matter. She sat on her mat and tried to remember everything she knew about the Japanese people from her study of Earth history with Han Qing-jao and her father, Han Fei-tzu. She knew that her education was spotty at best, because as a low-class girl no one had bothered to teach her much until she wangled her way into Qing-jao’s household. So Han Fei-tzu had told her not to bother with formal studies, but merely to explore information wherever her interests took her. “Your mind is unspoiled by a traditional education. Therefore you must let yourself discover your own way into each subject.” Despite this seeming liberty, Fei-tzu soon showed her that he was a stern taskmaster even when the subjects were freely chosen. Whatever she learned about history or biography, he would challenge her, question her; demand that she generalize, then refute her generalizations; and if she changed her mind, he would then demand just as sharply that she defend her new position, even though a moment before it had been his own. The result was that even with limited information, she was prepared to reexamine it, cast away old conclusions and hypothesize new ones. Thus she could close her eyes and continue her education without any jewel to whisper in her ear, for she could still hear Han Fei-tzu’s caustic questioning even though he was lightyears away.

The actors stopped ranting before Peter had finished his shower. Wang-mu did not notice. She did notice, however, when a voice from the holoview said, “Would you like another recorded selection, or would you prefer to connect with a current broadcast?”

For a moment Wang-mu thought that the voice must be Jane; then she realized that it was simply the rote menu of a machine. “Do you have news?” she asked.

“Local, regional, planetary or interplanetary?” asked the machine.

“Begin with local,” said Wang-mu. She was a stranger here. She might as well get acquainted.

When Peter emerged, clean and dressed in one of the stylish local costumes that Jane had had delivered for him, Wang-mu was engrossed in an account of a trial of some people accused of overfishing a lush coldwater region a few hundred kilometers from the city they were in. What was the name of this town? Oh, yes. Nagoya. Since Jane had declared this to be their hometown on all their false records, of course this was where the floater had brought them. “All worlds are the same,” said Wang-mu. “People want to eat fish from the sea, and some people want to take more of the fish than the ocean can replenish.”

“What harm does it do if I fish one extra day or take one extra ton?” Peter asked.

“Because if everyone does, then—” She stopped herself. “I see. You were ironically speaking the rationalization of the wrongdoers.”

“Am I clean and pretty now?” asked Peter, turning around to show off his loose-fitting yet somehow form-revealing clothing.

“The colors are garish,” said Wang-mu. “It looks as if you’re screaming.”

“No, no,” said Peter. “The idea is for the people who see me to scream.”

“Aaaah,” Wang-mu screamed softly.

“Jane says that this is actually a conservative costume— for a man

of my age and supposed profession. Men in Nagoya are known for being peacocks.”

“And the women?”

“Bare-breasted all the time,” said Peter. “Quite a stunning sight.”

“That is a lie. I didn’t see one bare-breasted woman on our way in and—” Again she stopped and frowned at him. “Do you really want me to assume that everything you say is a lie?”

“I thought it was worth a try.”

“Don’t be silly. I have no breasts.”

“You have small ones,” said Peter. “Surely you’re aware of the distinction.”

“I don’t want to discuss my body with a man dressed in a badly planned, overgrown flower garden.”

“Women are all dowds here,” said Peter. “Tragic but true. Dignity and all that. So are the old men. Only the boys and young men on the prowl are allowed such plumage as this. I think the bright colors are to warn women off. Nothing serious from this lad! Stay to play, or go away. Some such thing. I think Jane chose this city for us solely so she could make me wear these things.”

“I’m hungry. I’m tired.”

“Which is more urgent?” asked Peter.

“Hungry.”

“There are grapes,” he offered.

“Which you didn’t wash. I suppose that’s a part of your death wish.”

“On Divine Wind, insects know their place and stay there. No pesticides. Jane assured me.”

“There were no pesticides on Path, either,” said Wang-mu. “But we washed to clear away bacteria and other one-celled creatures. Amebic dysentery will slow us down.”

“Oh, but the bathroom is so nice, it would be a shame not to use it,” said Peter. Despite his flippancy, Wang-mu saw that her comment about dysentery from unwashed fruit bothered him.

“Let’s eat out,” said Wang-mu. “Jane has money for us, doesn’t she?”

Peter listened for a moment to something coming from the jewel in his ear.

“Yes, and all we have to do is tell the master of the restaurant that we lost our IDs and he’ll let us thumb our way into our accounts. Jane says we’re both very rich if we need to be, but we should try to act as if we were of limited means having an occasional splurge to celebrate something. What shall we celebrate?”

“Your bath.”

“You celebrate that. I’ll celebrate our safe return from being lost in the woods.”

Soon they found themselves on the street, a busy place with few cars, hundreds of bicycles, and thousands of people both on and off the glideways. Wang-mu was put off by these strange machines and insisted they walk on solid ground, which meant choosing a restaurant close by. The buildings in this neighborhood were old but not yet tatty-looking; an established neighborhood, but one with pride. The style was radically open, with arches and courtyards, pillars and roofs, but few walls and no glass at all. “The weather must be perfect here,” said Wang-mu.

“Tropical, but on the coast with a cold current offshore. It rains every afternoon for an hour or so, most of the year anyway, but it never gets very hot and never gets chilly at all.”

“It feels as though everything is outdoors all the time.”

“It’s all fakery,” said Peter. “Our apartment had glass windows and climate control, you notice. But it faces back, into the garden, and besides, the windows are recessed, so from below you don’t see the glass. Very artful. Artificially natural looking. Hypocrisy and deception— the human universal.”

“It’s a beautiful way to live,” said Wang-mu. “I like Nagoya.”

“Too bad we won’t be here long.”

Before she could ask to know where they were going and why, Peter pulled her into the courtyard of a busy restaurant. “This one cooks the fish,” said Peter. “I hope you don’t mind that.”

“What, the others serve it raw?” asked Wang-mu, laughing. Then she realized that Peter was serious. Raw fish!

“The Japanese are famous for it,” said Peter, “and in Nagoya it’s almost a religion. Notice— not a Japanese face in the restaurant. They wouldn’t deign to eat fish that was destroyed by heat. It’s just one of those things that they cling to. There’s so little that’s distinctively Japanese about their culture now, so they’re devoted to the few uniquely Japanese traits that survive.”

Wang-mu nodded, understanding perfectly how a culture could cling to long-dead customs just for the sake of national identity, and also grateful to be in a place where such customs were all superficial and didn’t distort and destroy the lives of the people the way they had on Path.

Their food came quickly— it takes almost no time to cook fish— and as they ate, Peter shifted his position several times on the mat. “Too bad this place isn’t nontraditional enough to have chairs.”

“Why do Europeans hate the earth so much that you must always lift yourself above it?” asked Wang-mu.

“You’ve already answered your question,” said Peter coldly. “You start from the assumption that we hate the earth. It makes you sound like some magic-using primitive.”

Wang-mu blushed and fell silent.

“Oh, spare me the passive oriental woman routine,” said Peter. “Or the passive I - was - trained - to - be - a - servant - and - you - sound - like - a - cruel - heartless - master manipulation through guilt. I know I’m a shit and I’m not going to change just because you look so downcast.”

“Then you could change because you wish not to be a shit any longer.”

“It’s in my character. Ender created me hateful so he could hate me. The added benefit is that you can hate me, too.”

“Oh, be quiet and eat your fish,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re supposed to analyze human beings and you can’t understand the person closest to you in all the world.”

“I don’t want to understand you,” said Peter. “I want to accomplish my task by exploiting this brilliant intelligence you’re supposed to have— even if you believe that people who squat are somehow ‘closer to the earth’ than people who remain upright.”

“I wasn’t talking about me,” she said. “I was talking about the person closest to you. Ender.”

“He is blessedly far from us right now.”

“He didn’t create you so that he could hate you. He long since got over hating you.”

“Yeah, yeah, he wrote The Hegemon, et cetera, et cetera.”

“That’s right,” said Wang-mu. “He created you because he desperately needed someone to hate him.”

Peter rolled his eyes and took a drink of milky pineapple juice. “Just the right amount of coconut. I think I’ll retire here, if Ender doesn’t die and make me disappear first.”

“I say something true, and you answer with coconut in the pineapple juice?”

“Novinha hates him,” said Peter. “He doesn’t need me.”

“Novinha is angry at him, but she’s wrong to be angry and he knows it. What he needs from you is a … righteous anger. To hate him for the evil that is really in him, which no one but him sees or even believes is there.”

“I’m just a nightmare from his childhood,” said Peter. “You’re reading too much into this.”

“He didn’t conjure you up because the real Peter was so important in his childhood. He conjured you up because you are the judge, the condemner. That’s what Peter drummed into him as a child. You told me yourself, talking about your memories. Peter taunting him, telling him of his unworthiness, his uselessness, his stupidity, his cowardice. You do it now. You look at his life and call him a xenocide, a failure. For some reason he needs this, needs to have someone damn him.”

“Well, how nice that I’m around, then, to despise him,” said Peter.

“But he also is desperate for someone to forgive him, to have mercy on him, to interpret all his actions as well meant. Valentine is not there because he loves her— he has the real Valentine for that. He has his wife. He needs your sister to exist so she can forgive him.”

“So if I stop hating Ender, he won’t need me anymore and I’ll disappear?”

“If Ender stops hating himself, then he won’t need you to be so mean and you’ll be easier to get along with.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not that easy getting along with somebody who’s constantly analyzing a person she’s never met and preaching at the person she has met.”

“I hope I make you miserable,” said Wang-mu. “It’s only fair, considering.”

“I think Jane brought us here because the local costumes reflect who we are. Puppet though I am, I take some perverse pleasure in life. While you— you can turn anything drab just by talking about it.”

Wang-mu bit back her tears and returned to her food.

“What is it with you?” Peter said.

She ignored him, chewed slowly, finding the untouched core of herself, which was busily enjoying the food.

“Don’t you feel anything?”

She swallowed, looked up at him. “I already miss Han Fei-tzu, and I’ve been gone scarcely two days.” She smiled slightly. “I have known a man of grace and wisdom. He found me interesting. I’m quite comfortable with boring you.”

Peter immediately made a show of splashing water on his ears. “I’m burning, that stung, oh, how can I stand it. Vicious! You have the breath of a dragon! Men die at your words!”

“Only puppets strutting around hanging from strings,” said Wang-mu.

“Better to dangle from strings than to be bound tight by them,” said Peter.

“Oh, the gods must love me, to have put me in the company of a man so clever with words.”

“Whereas the gods have put me in the company of a woman with no breasts.”

She forced herself to pretend to take this as a joke. “Small ones, I thought you said.”

But suddenly the smile left his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve hurt you.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll tell you later, after a good night’s sleep.”

“I thought we were bantering,” said Peter. “Bandying insults.”

“We were,” said Wang-mu. “But I believe them all.”

Peter winced. “Then I’m hurt, too.”

“You don’t know how to hurt,” said Wang-mu. “You’re just mocking me.”

Peter pushed aside his plate and stood up. “I’ll see you back at the apartment. Think you can find the way?”

“Do I think you actually care?”

“It’s a good thing I have no soul,” said Peter. “That’s the only thing that stops you from devouring it.”

“If I ever had your soul in my mouth,” said Wang-mu, “I would spit it out.”

“Get some rest,” said Peter. “For the work I have ahead, I need a mind, not a quarrel.” He walked out of the restaurant. The clothing fit him badly. People looked. He was a man of too much dignity and strength to dress so foppishly. Wang-mu saw at once that it shamed him. She saw also that he knew it, that he moved swiftly because he knew this clothing was wrong for him. He would undoubtedly have Jane order him something older looking, more mature, more in keeping with his need for honor.

Whereas I need something that will make me disappear. Or better yet, clothing that will let me fly away from here, all in a single night, fly Outside and back In to the house of Han Fei-tzu, where I can look into eyes that show neither pity nor scorn.

Nor pain. For there is pain in Peter’s eyes, and it was wrong of me to say he felt none. It was wrong of me to value my own pain so highly that I thought it gave me the right to inflict more on him.

If I apologize to him, he’ll mock me for it.

But then, I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong. Is that a principle Han Fei-tzu taught me? No. I was born with that one. Like my mother said, too much pride, too much pride.

When she returned to the apartment, however, Peter was asleep; exhausted, she postponed her apology and also slept. Each of them woke during the night, but never at the same time; and in the morning, the edge of last night’s quarrel had worn off. There was business at hand, and it was more important for her to understand what they were going to attempt to do today than for her to heal a breach between them that seemed, in the light of morning, to be scarcely more than a meaningless spat between tired friends.

“The man Jane has chosen for us to visit is a philosopher.”

“Like me?” Wang-mu said, keenly aware of her false new role.

“That’s what I wanted to discuss with you. There are two kinds of philosophers here on Divine Wind. Aimaina Hikari, the man we will meet, is an analytical philosopher. You don’t have the education to hold your own with him. So you are the other kind. Gnomic and mantic. Given to pithy phrases that startle others with their seeming irrelevancy.”

“Is it necessary that my supposedly wise phrases only seem irrelevant?”

“You don’t even have to worry about that. The gnomic philosophers depend on others to connect their irrelevancies with the real world. That’s why any fool can do it.”

Wang-mu felt anger rise in her like mercury in a thermometer. “How kind of you to choose that profession for me.”

“Don’t be offended,” said Peter. “Jane and I had to come up with some role you could play on this particular planet that wouldn’t reveal you to be an uneducated native of Path. You have to understand that no child on Divine Wind is allowed to grow up as hopelessly ignorant as the servant class on Path.”

Wang-mu did not argue further. What would be the point? If one has to say, in an argument, “I am intelligent! I do know things!” then one might as well stop arguing. Indeed, this idea struck her as being exactly one of those gnomic phrases that Peter was talking about. She said so.

“No, no, I don’t mean epigrams,” said Peter. “Those are too analytical. I mean genuinely strange things. For instance, you might have said, ‘The woodpecker attacks the tree to get at the bug,’ and then I would have had to figure out just how that might fit our situation here. Am I the woodpecker? The tree? The bug? That’s the beauty of it.”

“It seems to me that you have just proved yourself to be the more gnomic of the two of us.”

Peter rolled his eyes and headed for the door.

“Peter,” she said, not moving from her place.

He turned to face her.

“Wouldn’t I be more helpful to you if I had some idea of why we’re meeting this man, and who he is?”

Peter shrugged. “I suppose. Though we know that Aimaina Hikari is not the person or even one of the people we’re looking for.”

“Tell me whom we are looking for, then.”

“We’re looking for the center of power in the Hundred Worlds,” he said.

“Then why are we here, instead of Starways Congress?”

“Starways Congress is a play. The delegates are actors. The scripts are written elsewhere.”

“Here.”

“The faction of Congress that is getting its way about the Lusitania Fleet is not the one that loves war. That group is cheerful about the whole thing, of course, since they always believe in brutally putting down insurrection and so on, but they would never have been able to get the votes to send the fleet without a swing group that is very heavily influenced by a school of philosophers from Divine Wind.”

“Of which Aimaina Hikari is the leader?”

“It’s more subtle than that. He is actually a solitary philosopher, belonging to no particular school. But he represents a sort of purity of Japanese thought which makes him something of a conscience to the philosophers who influence the swing group in Congress.”

“How many dominoes do you think you can line up and have them still knock each other over?”

“No, that wasn’t gnomic enough. Still too analytical.”

“I’m not playing my part yet, Peter. What are the ideas that this swing group gets from this philosophical school?”

Peter sighed and sat down— bending himself into a chair, of course. Wang-mu sat on the floor and thought: This is how a man of Europe likes to see himself, with his head higher than all others, teaching the woman of Asia. But from my perspective, he has disconnected himself from the earth. I will hear his words, but I will know that it is up to me to bring them into a living place.

“The swing group would never use such massive force against what really amounts to a minor dispute with a tiny colony. The original issue, as you know, was that two xenologers, Miro Ribeira and Ouanda Mucumbi, were caught introducing agriculture among the pequeninos of Lusitania. This constituted cultural interference, and they were ordered offplanet for trial. Of course, with the old relativistic lightspeed ships, taking someone off planet meant that when and if they ever went back, everyone they knew would be old or dead. So it was brutally harsh treatment and amounted to prejudgment. Congress might have expected protests from the government of Lusitania, but what it got instead was complete defiance and a cutoff of ansible communications. The tough guys in Congress immediately started lobbying for a single troopship to go and seize control of Lusitania. But they didn’t have the votes, until—”

“Until they raised the specter of the descolada virus.”

“Exactly. The group that was adamantly opposed to the use of force brought up the descolada, as a reason why troops shouldn’t be sent— because at that time anyone who was infected with the virus had to stay on Lusitania and keep taking an inhibitor that kept the descolada from destroying your body from the inside out. This was the first time that the danger of the descolada became widely known, and the swing group emerged, consisting of those who were appalled that Lusitania had not been quarantined long before. What could be more dangerous than to have a fast-spreading, semi-intelligent virus in the hands of rebels? This group consisted almost entirely of delegates who were strongly influenced by the Necessarian school from Divine Wind.”

Wang-mu nodded. “And what do the Necessarians teach?”

“That one lives in peace and harmony with one’s environment, disturbing nothing, patiently bearing mild or even serious afflictions. However, when a genuine threat to survival emerges, one must act with brutal efficiency. The maxim is, Act only when necessary, and then act with maximum force and speed. Thus, where the militarists wanted a troopship, the Necessarian-influenced delegates insisted on sending a fleet armed with the Molecular Disruption Device, which would destroy the threat of the descolada virus once and for all. There’s a sort of ironic neatness about it all, don’t you think?”

“I don’t see it.”

“Oh, it fits together so perfectly. Ender Wiggin was the one who used the Little Doctor to wipe out the bugger home world. Now it’s going to be used for only the second time— against the very world where he happens to live! It gets even thicker. The first Necessarian philosopher, Ooka, used Ender himself as the prime example of his ideas. As long as the buggers were seen to be a dangerous threat to the survival of humankind, the only appropriate response was utter eradication of the enemy. No half-measures would do. Of course the buggers turned out not to have been a threat after all, as Ender himself wrote in his book The Hive Queen, but Ooka defended the mistake because the truth was unknowable at the time Ender’s superiors turned him loose against the enemy. What Ooka said was, ‘Never trade blows with the enemy.’ His idea was that you try never to strike anyone, but when you must, you strike only one blow, but such a harsh one that your enemy can never, never strike back.”

“So using Ender as an example—”

“That’s right. Ender’s own actions are being used to justify repeating them against another harmless species.”

“The descolada wasn’t harmless.”

“No,” said Peter. “But Ender and Ela found another way, didn’t they? They struck a blow against the descolada itself. But there’s no way now to convince Congress to withdraw the fleet. Because Jane already interfered with Congress’s ansible communications with the fleet, they believe they face a formidable widespread secret conspiracy. Any argument we make will be seen as disinformation. Besides, who would believe the farfetched tale of that first trip Outside, where Ela created the anti-descolada, Miro recreated himself, and Ender made my dear sister and me?”

“So the Necessarians in Congress—”

“They don’t call themselves that. But the influence is very strong. It is Jane’s and my opinion that if we can get some prominent Necessarians to declare against the Lusitania Fleet— with convincing reasoning, of course— the solidarity of the pro-fleet majority in Congress will be broken up. It’s a thin majority— there are plenty of people horrified by such devastating use of force against a colony world, and others who are even more horrified at the idea that Congress would destroy the pequeninos, the first sentient species found since the destruction of the buggers. They would love to stop the fleet, or at worst use it to impose a permanent quarantine.”

“Why aren’t we meeting with a Necessarian, then?”

“Because why would they listen to us? If we identify ourselves as supporters of the Lusitanian cause, we’ll be jailed and questioned. And if we don’t, who will take our ideas seriously?”

“This Aimaina Hikari, then. What is he?”

“Some people call him the Yamato philosopher. All the Necessarians of Divine Wind are, naturally, Japanese, and the philosophy has become most influential among the Japanese, both on their home worlds and wherever they have a substantial population. So even though Hikari isn’t a Necessarian, he is honored as the keeper of the Japanese soul.”

“If he tells them that it’s un-Japanese to destroy Lusitania—”

“But he won’t. Not easily, anyway. His seminal work, which won him his reputation as the Yamato philosopher, included the idea that the Japanese people were born as rebellious puppets. First it was Chinese culture that pulled the strings. But Hikari says, Japan learned all the wrong lessons from the attempted Chinese invasion of Japan— which, by the way, was defeated by a great storm, called kamikaze, which means ‘Divine Wind.’ So you can be sure everyone on this world, at least, remembers that ancient story. Anyway, Japan locked itself away on an island, and at first refused to deal with Europeans when they came. But then an American fleet forcibly opened Japan to foreign trade, and then the Japanese made up for lost time. The Meiji Restoration led to Japan trying to industrialize and Westernize itself— and once again a new set of strings made the puppet dance, says Hikari. Only once again, the wrong lessons were learned. Since the Europeans at the time were imperialists, dividing up Africa and Asia among them, Japan decided it wanted a piece of the imperial pie. There was China, the old puppetmaster. So there was an invasion—”

“We were taught of this invasion on Path,” said Wang-mu.

“I’m surprised they taught any history more recent than the Mongol invasion,” said Peter.

“The Japanese were finally stopped when the Americans dropped the first nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities.”

“The equivalent, in those days, of the Little Doctor. The irresistible, total weapon. The Japanese soon came to regard these nuclear weapons as a kind of badge of pride: We were the first people ever to have been attacked by nuclear weapons. It had become a kind of permanent grievance, which wasn’t a bad thing, really, because that was part of their impetus to found and populate many colonies, so that they would never be a helpless island nation again. But then along comes Aimaina Hikari, and he says— by the way, his name is self-chosen, it’s the name he used to sign his first book. It means ‘Ambiguous Light.’”

“How gnomic,” said Wang-mu.

Peter grinned. “Oh, tell him that, he’ll be so proud. Anyway, in his first book, he says, The Japanese learned the wrong lesson. Those nuclear bombs cut the strings. Japan was utterly prostrate. The proud old government was destroyed, the emperor became a figurehead, democracy came to Japan, and then wealth and great power.”

“The bombs were a blessing, then?” asked Wang-mu doubtfully.

“No, no, not at all. He thinks the wealth of Japan destroyed the people’s soul. They adopted the destroyer as their father. They became America’s bastard child, blasted into existence by American bombs. Puppets again.”

“Then what does he have to do with the Necessarians?”

“Japan was bombed, he says, precisely because they were already too European. They treated China as the Europeans treated America, selfishly and brutally. But the Japanese ancestors could not bear to see their children become such beasts. So just as the gods of Japan sent a Divine Wind to stop the Chinese fleet, so the gods sent the American bombs to stop Japan from becoming an imperialist state like the Europeans. The Japanese response should have been to bear the American occupation and then, when it was over, to become purely Japanese again, chastened and whole. The title of his book was, Not Too Late.”

“And I’ll bet the Necessarians use the American bombing of Japan as another example of striking with maximum force and speed.”

“No Japanese would have dared to praise the American bombing until Hikari made it possible to see the bombing, not as Japan’s victimization, but as the gods’ attempt at redemption of the people.”

“So you’re saying that the Necessarians respect him enough that if he changed his mind, they would change theirs— but he won’t change his mind, because he believes the bombing of Japan was a divine gift?”

“We’re hoping he will change his mind,” said Peter, “or our trip will be a failure. The thing is, there’s no chance he’ll be open to direct persuasion from us, and Jane can’t tell from his writings what or who it is who might influence him. We have to talk to him to find out where to go next— so maybe we can change their mind.”

“This is really complicated, isn’t it?” said Wang-mu.

“Which is why I didn’t think it was worth explaining it to you. What exactly are you going to do with this information? Enter into a discussion of the subtleties of history with an analytical philosopher of the first rank, like Hikari?”

“I’m going to listen,” said Wang-mu.

“That’s what you were going to do before,” said Peter.

“But now I will know who it is I’m listening to.”

“Jane thinks it was a mistake for me to tell you, because now you’ll be interpreting everything he says in light of what Jane and I already think we know.”

“Tell Jane that the only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.”

Peter laughed. “Epigrams again,” he said. “You’re supposed to say—”

“Don’t tell me how to be gnomic again,” said Wang-mu. She got up from the floor. Now her head was higher than Peter’s. “You’re the gnome. And as for me being mantic— remember that the mantic eats its mate.”

“I’m not your mate,” said Peter, “and ‘mantic’ means a philosophy that comes from vision or inspiration or intuition rather than from scholarship and reason.”

“If you’re not my mate,” said Wang-mu, “stop treating me like a wife.”

Peter looked puzzled, then looked away. “Was I doing that?”

“On Path, a husband assumes his wife is a fool and teaches her even the things she already knows. On Path, a wife has to pretend, when she is teaching her husband, that she is only reminding him of things he taught her long before.”

“Well, I’m just an insensitive oaf, aren’t I.”

“Please remember,” said Wang-mu, “that when we meet with Aimaina Hikari, he and I have one fund of knowledge that you can never have.”

“And what’s that?”

“A life.”

She saw the pain on his face and at once regretted causing it. But it was a reflexive regret— she had been trained from childhood up to be sorry when she gave offense, no matter how richly it was deserved.

“Ouch,” said Peter, as if his pain were a joke.

Wang-mu showed no mercy— she was not a servant now. “You’re so proud of knowing more than me, but everything you know is either what Ender put in your head or what Jane whispers in your ear. I have no Jane, I had no Ender. Everything I know, I learned the hard way. I lived through it. So please don’t treat me with contempt again. If I have any value on this expedition, it will come from my knowing everything you know— because everything you know, I can be taught, but what I know, you can never learn.”

The joking was over. Peter’s face reddened with anger. “How … who …”

“How dare I,” said Wang-mu, echoing the phrases she assumed he had begun. “Who do I think I am.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Peter softly, turning away.

“I’m not staying in my place, am I?” she asked. “Han Fei-tzu taught me about Peter Wiggin. The original, not the copy. How he made his sister Valentine take part in his conspiracy to seize the hegemony of Earth. How he made her write all of the Demosthenes material— rabble-rousing demagoguery— while he wrote all the Locke material, the lofty, analytical ideas. But the low demagoguery came from him.”

“So did the lofty ideas,” said Peter.

“Exactly,” said Wang-mu. “What never came from him, what came only from Valentine, was something he never saw or valued. A human soul.”

“Han Fei-tzu said that?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s an ass,” said Peter. “Because Peter had as much of a human soul as Valentine had.” He stepped toward her, looming. “I’m the one without a soul, Wang-mu.”

For a moment she was afraid of him. How did she know what violence had been created in him? What dark rage in Ender’s aiua might find expression through this surrogate he had created?

But Peter did not strike a blow. Perhaps it was not necessary.

***

Aimaina Hikari came out himself to the front gate of his garden to let them in. He was dressed simply, and around his neck was the locket that all the traditional Japanese of Divine Wind wore: a tiny casket containing the ashes of all his worthy ancestors. Peter had already explained to her that when a man like Hikari died, a pinch of the ashes from his locket would be added to a bit of his own ashes and given to his children or his grandchildren to wear. Thus all of his ancient family hung above his breastbone, waking and sleeping, and formed the most precious gift he could give his posterity. It was a custom that Wang-mu, who had no ancestors worth remembering, found both thrilling and disturbing.

Hikari greeted Wang-mu with a bow, but held out his hand for Peter to shake. Peter took it with some small show of surprise.

“Oh, they call me the keeper of the Yamato spirit,” said Hikari with a smile, “but that doesn’t mean I must be rude and force Europeans to behave like Japanese. Watching a European bow is as painful as watching a pig do ballet.”

As Hikari led them through the garden into his traditional paperwalled house, Peter and Wang-mu looked at each other and grinned broadly. It was a wordless truce between them, for they both knew at once that Hikari was going to be a formidable opponent, and they needed to be allies if they were to learn anything from him.

“A philosopher and a physicist,” said Hikari. “I looked you up when you sent your note asking for an appointment. I have been visited by philosophers before, and physicists, and also by Europeans and Chinese, but what truly puzzles me is why the two of you should be together.”

“She found me sexually irresistible,” said Peter, “and I can’t get rid of her.” Then he grinned his most charming grin.

To Wang-mu’s pleasure, Peter’s Western-style irony left Hikari impassive and unamused, and she could see a blush rising up Peter’s neck.

It was her turn— to play the gnome for real this time. “The pig wallows in mud, but he warms himself on the sunny stone.”

Hikari turned his gaze to her— remaining just as impassive as before. “I will write these words in my heart,” he said.

Wang-mu wondered if Peter understood that she had just been the victim of Hikari’s oriental-style irony.

“We have come to learn from you,” said Peter.

“Then I must give you food and send you on your way disappointed,” said Hikari. “I have nothing to teach a physicist or a philosopher. If I did not have children, I would have no one to teach, for only they know less than I.”

“No, no,” said Peter. “You’re a wise man. The keeper of the Yamato spirit.”

“I said that they call me that. But the Yamato spirit is much too great to be kept in so small a container as my soul. And yet the Yamato spirit is much too small to be worthy of the notice of the powerful souls of the Chinese and the European. You are the teachers, as China and Europe have always been the teachers of Japan.”

Wang-mu did not know Peter well, but she knew him well enough to see that he was flustered now, at a loss for how to proceed. In Ender’s life and wanderings, he had lived in several oriental cultures and even, according to Han Fei-tzu, spoke Korean, which meant that Ender would probably be able to deal with the ritualized humility of a man like Hikari— especially since he was obviously using that humility in a mocking way. But what Ender knew and what he had given to his Peter-identity were obviously two different things. This conversation would be up to her, and she sensed that the best way to play with Hikari was to refuse to let him control the game.

“Very well,” she said. “We will teach you. For when we show you our ignorance, then you will see where we most need your wisdom.”

Hikari looked at Peter for a moment. Then he clapped his hands. A serving woman appeared in a doorway. “Tea,” said Hikari.

At once Wang-mu leapt to her feet. Only when she was already standing did she realize what she was going to do. That peremptory command to bring tea was one that she had heeded many times in her life, but it was not a blind reflex that brought her to her feet. Rather it was her intuition that the only way to beat Hikari at his own game was to call his bluff: She would be humbler than he knew how to be.

“I have been a servant all my life,” said Wang-mu honestly, “but I was always a clumsy one,” which was not so honest. “May I go with your servant and learn from her? I may not be wise enough to learn the ideas of a great philosopher, but perhaps I can learn what I am fit to learn from the servant who is worthy to bring tea to Aimaina Hikari.”

She could see from his hesitation that Hikari knew he had been trumped. But the man was deft. He immediately rose to his feet. “You have already taught me a great lesson,” he said. “Now we will all go and watch Kenji prepare the tea. If she will be your teacher, Si Wang-mu, she must also be mine. For how could I bear to know that someone in my house knew a thing that I had not yet learned?”

Wang-mu had to admire his resourcefulness. He had once again placed himself beneath her.

Poor Kenji, the servant! She was a deft and well-trained woman, Wang-mu saw, but it made her nervous having these three, especially her master, watch her prepare the tea. So Wang-mu immediately reached in and “helped” —deliberately making a mistake as she did. At once Kenji was in her element, and confident again. “You have forgotten,” said Kenji kindly, “because my kitchen is so inefficiently arranged.” Then she showed Wang-mu how the tea was prepared. “At least in Nagoya,” she said modestly. “At least in this house.”

Wang-mu watched carefully, concentrating only on Kenji and what she was doing, for she quickly saw that the Japanese way of preparing tea— or perhaps it was the way of Divine Wind, or merely the way of Nagoya, or of humble philosophers who kept the Yamato spirit— was different from the pattern she had followed so carefully in the house of Han Fei-tzu. By the time the tea was ready, Wangmu had learned from her. For, having made the claim to be a servant, and having a computer record that asserted that she had lived her whole life in a Chinese community on Divine Wind, Wang-mu might have to be able to serve tea properly in exactly this fashion.