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They returned to the front room of Hikari’s house, Kenji and Wang-mu each bearing a small tea table. Kenji offered her table to Hikari, but he waved her over to Peter, and then bowed to him. It was Wang-mu who served Hikari. And when Kenji backed away from Peter, Wang-mu also backed away from Hikari.

For the first time, Hikari looked— angry? His eyes flashed, anyway. For by placing herself on exactly the same level as Kenji, she had just maneuvered him into a position where he either had to shame himself by being prouder than Wang-mu and dismissing his servant, or disrupt the good order of his own house by inviting Kenji to sit down with the three of them as equals.

“Kenji,” said Hikari. “Let me pour tea for you.”

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Check, thought Wang-mu. And mate.

It was a delicious bonus when Peter, who had finally caught on to the game, also poured tea for her, and then managed to spill it on her, which prompted Hikari to spill a little on himself in order to put his guest at ease. The pain of the hot tea and then the discomfort as it cooled and dried were well worth the pleasure of knowing that while Wang-mu had proved herself a match for Hikari in outrageous courtesy, Peter had merely proved himself to be an oaf.

Or was Wang-mu truly a match for Hikari? He must have seen and understood her effort to place herself ostentatiously beneath him. It was possible, then, that he was— humbly— allowing her to win pride of place as the more humble of the two. As soon as she realized that he might have done this, then she knew that he certainly had done it, and the victory was his.

I’m not as clever as I thought.

She looked at Peter, hoping that he would now take over and do whatever clever thing he had in mind. But he seemed perfectly content to let her lead out. Certainly he didn’t jump into the breach. Did he, too, realize that she had just been bested at her own game, because she failed to take it deep enough? Was he giving her the rope to hang herself?

Well, let’s get the noose good and tight.

“Aimaina Hikari, you are called by some the keeper of the Yamato spirit. Peter and I grew up on a Japanese world, and yet the Japanese humbly allow Stark to be the language of the public school, so that we speak no Japanese. In my Chinese neighborhood, in Peter’s American city, we spent our childhoods on the edge of Japanese culture, looking in. So if there is any particular part of our vast ignorance that will be most obvious to you, it is in our knowledge of Yamato itself.”

“Oh, Wang-mu, you make a mystery out of the obvious. No one understands Yamato better than those who see it from the outside, just as the parent understands the child better than the child understands herself.”

“Then I will enlighten you,” said Wang-mu, discarding the game of humility. “For I see Japan as an Edge nation, and I cannot yet see whether your ideas will make Japan a new Center nation, or begin the decay that all edge nations experience when they take power.”

“I grasp a hundred possible meanings, most of them surely true of my people, for your term ‘Edge nation,’” said Hikari. “But what is a Center nation, and how can a people become one?”

“I am not well-versed in Earth history,” said Wang-mu, “but as I studied what little I know, it seemed to me that there were a handful of Center nations, which had a culture so strong that they swallowed up all conquerors. Egypt was one, and China. Each one became unified and then expanded no more than necessary to protect their borders and pacify their hinterland. Each one took in its conquerors and swallowed them up for thousands of years. Egyptian writing and Chinese writing persisted with only stylistic modifications, so that the past remained present for those who could read.”

Wang-mu could see from Peter’s stiffness that he was very worried. After all, she was saying things that were definitely not gnomic.

But since he was completely out of his depth with an Asian, he was still making no effort to intrude.

“Both of these nations were born in barbarian times,” said Hikari. “Are you saying that no nation can become a Center nation now?”

“I don’t know,” said Wang-mu. “I don’t even know if my distinction between Edge nations and Center nations has any truth or value. I do know that a Center nation can keep its cultural power long after it has lost political control. Mesopotamia was continually conquered by its neighbors, and yet each conqueror in turn was more changed by Mesopotamia than Mesopotamia was changed. The kings of Assyria and Chaldea and Persia were almost indistinguishable after they had once tasted the culture of the land between the rivers. But a Center nation can also fall so completely that it disappears. Egypt staggered under the cultural blow of Hellenism, fell to its knees under the ideology of Christianity, and finally was erased by Islam. Only the stone buildings reminded the children of what and who their ancient parents had been. History has no laws, and all patterns that we find there are useful illusions.”

“I see you are a philosopher,” said Hikari.

“You are generous to call my childish speculations by that lofty name,” said Wang-mu. “But let me tell you now what I think about Edge nations. They are born in the shadow— or perhaps one could say, in the reflected light— of other nations. As Japan became civilized under the influence of China. As Rome discovered itself in the shadow of the Greeks.”

“The Etruscans first,” said Peter helpfully.

Hikari looked at him blandly, then turned back to Wang-mu without comment. Wang-mu could almost feel Peter wither at having been thus deemed irrelevant. She felt a little sorry for him. Not a lot, just a little.

“Center nations are so confident of themselves that they generally don’t need to embark on wars of conquest. They are already sure they are the superior people and that all other nations wish to be like them and obey them. But Edge nations, when they first feel their strength, must prove themselves, they think, and almost always they do so with the sword. Thus the Arabs broke the back of the Roman Empire and swallowed up Persia. Thus the Macedonians, on the edge of Greece, conquered Greece; and then, having been so culturally swallowed up that they now thought themselves Greek, they conquered the empire on whose edge the Greeks had become civilizedPersia. The Vikings had to harrow Europe before peeling off kingdoms in Naples, Sicily, Normandy, Ireland, and finally England. And Japan—”

“We tried to stay on our islands,” said Hikari softly.

“Japan, when it erupted, rampaged through the Pacific, trying to conquer the great Center nation of China, and was finally stopped by the bombs of the new Center nation of America.”

“I would have thought,” said Hikari, “that America was the ultimate Edge nation.”

“America was settled by Edge peoples, but the idea of America became the new envigorating principle that made it a Center nation. They were so arrogant that, except for subduing their own hinterland, they had no will to empire. They simply assumed that all nations wanted to be like them. They swallowed up all other cultures. Even on Divine Wind, what is the language of the schools? It was not England that imposed this language, Stark, Starways Common Speech, on us all.”

“It was only by accident that America was technologically ascendant at the moment the Hive Queen came and forced us out among the stars.”

“The idea of America became the Center idea, I think,” said Wang-mu. “Every nation from then on had to have the forms of democracy. We are governed by the Starways Congress even now. We all live within the American culture whether we like it or not. So what I wonder is this: Now that Japan has taken control of this Center nation, will Japan be swallowed up, as the Mongols were swallowed up by China? Or will the Japanese culture retain its identity, but eventually decay and lose control, as the Edge-nation Turks lost control of Islam and the Edge-nation Manchu lost control of China?”

Hikari was upset. Angry? Puzzled? Wang-mu had no way of guessing.

“The philosopher Si Wang-mu says a thing that is impossible for me to accept,” said Hikari. “How can you say that the Japanese are now in control of Starways Congress and the Hundred Worlds? When was this revolution that no one noticed?”

“But I thought you could see what your teaching of the Yamato way had accomplished,” said Wang-mu. “The existence of the Lusitania Fleet is proof of Japanese control. This is the great discovery that my friend the physicist taught me, and it was the reason we came to you.”

Peter’s look of horror was genuine. She could guess what he was thinking. Was she insane, to have tipped their hand so completely? But she also knew that she had done it in a context that revealed nothing about their motive in coming.

And, never having lost his composure, Peter took his cue and proceeded to explain Jane’s analysis of Starways Congress, the Necessarians, and the Lusitania Fleet, though of course he presented the ideas as if they were his own. Hikari listened, nodding now and then, shaking his head at other times; the impassivity was gone now, the attitude of amused distance discarded.

“So you tell me,” Hikari said, when Peter was done, “that because of my small book about the American bombs, the Necessarians have taken control of government and launched the Lusitania Fleet? You lay this at my door?”

“Not as a matter either for blame or credit,” said Peter. “You did not plan it or design it. For all I know you don’t even approve of it.”

“I don’t even think about the politics of Starways Congress. I am of Yamato.”

“But that’s what we came here to learn,” said Wang-mu. “I see that you are a man of the Edge, not a man of the Center. Therefore you will not let Yamato be swallowed up by the Center nation. Instead the Japanese will remain aloof from their own hegemony, and in the end it will slip from their hands into someone else’s hands.”

Hikari shook his head. “I will not have you blame Japan for this Lusitania Fleet. We are the people who are chastened by the gods, we do not send fleets to destroy others.”

“The Necessarians do,” said Peter.

“The Necessarians talk,” said Hikari. “No one listens.”

“You don’t listen to them,” said Peter. “But Congress does.”

“And the Necessarians listen to you,” said Wang-mu.

“I am a man of perfect simplicity!” cried Hikari, rising to his feet. “You have come to torture me with accusations that cannot be true!”

“We make no accusation,” said Wang-mu softly, refusing to rise. “We offer an observation. If we are wrong, we beg you to teach us our mistake.”

Hikari was trembling, and his left hand now clutched the locket of his ancestors’ ashes that hung on a silk ribbon around his neck. “No,” he said. “I will not let you pretend to be humble seekers after truth. You are assassins. Assassins of the heart, come to destroy me, come to tell me that in seeking to find the Yamato way I have somehow caused my people to rule the human worlds and use that power to destroy a helplessly weak sentient species! It is a terrible lie to tell me, that my life’s work has been so useless. I would rather you had put poison in my tea, Si Wang-mu. I would rather you had put a gun to my head and blown it off, Peter Wiggin. They named you well, your parents— proud and terrible names you both bear. The Royal Mother of the West? A goddess? And Peter Wiggin, the first hegemon! Who gives their child such a name as that?”

Peter was standing also, and he reached down to lift Wang-mu to her feet.

“We have given offense where we meant none,” said Peter. “I am ashamed. We must go at once.”

Wang-mu was surprised to hear Peter sound so oriental. The American way was to make excuses, to stay and argue.

She let him lead her to the door. Hikari did not follow them; it was left to poor Kenji, who was terrified to see her placid master so exercised, to show them out. But Wang-mu was determined not to let this visit end entirely in disaster. So at the last moment she rushed back and flung herself to the floor, prostrate before Hikari in precisely the pose of humiliation that she had vowed only a little while ago that she would never adopt again. But she knew that as long as she was in that posture, a man like Hikari would have to listen to her.

“Oh, Aimaina Hikari,” she said, “you have spoken of our names, but have you forgotten your own? How could the man called ‘Ambiguous Light’ ever think that his teachings could have only the effects that he intended?”

Upon hearing those words, Hikari turned his back and stalked from the room. Had she made the situation better or worse? Wang-mu had no way of knowing. She got to her feet and walked dolefully to the door. Peter would be furious with her. With her boldness she might well have ruined everything for them— and not just for them, but for all those who so desperately hoped for them to stop the Lusitania Fleet.

To her surprise, however, Peter was perfectly cheerful once they got outside Hikari’s garden gate. “Well done, however weird your technique was,” said Peter.

“What do you mean? It was a disaster,” she said; but she was eager to believe that somehow he was right and she had done well after all.

“Oh, he’s angry and he’ll never speak to us again, but who cares? We weren’t trying to change his mind ourselves. We were just trying to find out who it is who does have influence over him. And we did.”

“We did?”

“Jane picked up on it at once. When he said he was a man of ‘perfect simplicity.’”

“Does that mean something more than the plain sense of it?”

“Mr. Hikari, my dear, has revealed himself to be a secret disciple of Ua Lava.”

Wang-mu was baffled.

“It’s a religious movement. Or a joke. It’s hard to know which. It’s a Samoan term, with the literal meaning ‘Now enough,’ but which is translated more accurately as, ‘enough already!’”

“I’m sure you’re an expert on Samoan.” Wang-mu, for her part, had never heard of the language.

“Jane is,” said Peter testily. “I have her jewel in my ear and you don’t. Don’t you want me to pass along what she tells me?”

“Yes, please,” said Wang-mu.

“It’s a sort of philosophy— cheerful stoicism, one might call it, because when things get bad or when things are good, you say the same thing. But as taught by a particular Samoan writer named Leiloa Lavea, it became more than a mere attitude. She taught—”

“She? Hikari is a disciple of a woman?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Peter. “If you listen, I’ll tell you what Jane is telling me.”

He waited. She listened.

“All right, then, what Leiloa Lavea taught was a sort of volunteer communism. It’s not enough just to laugh at good fortune and say, ‘Enough already.’ You have to really mean it— that you have enough. And because you mean it, you take the surplus and you give it away. Similarly, when bad fortune comes, you bear it until it becomes unbearable— your family is hungry, or you can no longer function in your work. And then again you say, ‘Enough already,’ and you change something. You move; you change careers; you let your spouse make all the decisions. Something. You don’t endure the unendurable.”

“What does that have to do with ‘perfect simplicity’?”

“Leiloa Lavea taught that when you have achieved balance in your life— surplus good fortune is being fully shared, and all bad fortune has been done away with— what is left is a life of perfect simplicity. That’s what Aimaina Hikari was saying to us. Until we came, his life had been going on in perfect simplicity. But now we have thrown him out of balance. That’s good, because it means he’s going to be struggling to discover how to restore simplicity to its perfection. He’ll be open to influence. Not ours, of course.”

“Leiloa Lavea’s?”

“Hardly. She’s been dead for two thousand years. Ender met her once, by the way. He came to speak a death on her home world ofwell, Starways Congress calls it Pacifica, but the Samoan enclave there calls it Lumana’i. ‘The Future.’”

“Not her death, though.”

“A Fijian murderer, actually. A fellow who killed more than a hundred children, all of them Tongan. He didn’t like Tongans, apparently. They held off on his funeral for thirty years so Ender could come and speak his death. They hoped that the Speaker for the Dead would be able to make sense of what he had done.”

“And did he?”

Peter sneered. “Oh, of course, he was splendid. Ender can do no wrong. Yadda yadda yadda.”

She ignored his hostility toward Ender. “He met Leiloa Lavea?”

“Her name means ‘to be lost, to be hurt.’”

“Let me guess. She chose it herself.”

“Exactly. You know how writers are. Like Hikari, they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.”

“How gnomic,” said Wang-mu.

“Oh, shut up about that,” said Peter. “Did you actually believe all that stuff about Edge nations and Center nations?”

“I thought of it,” said Wang-mu. “When I first learned Earth history from Han Fei-tzu. He didn’t laugh when I told him my thoughts.”

“Oh, I’m not laughing, either. It’s naive bullshit, of course, but it’s not exactly funny.”

Wang-mu ignored his mockery. “If Leiloa Lavea is dead, where will we go?”

“To Pacifica. To Lumana’i. Hikari learned of Ua Lava in his teenage years at university. From a Samoan student— the granddaughter of the Pacifican ambassador. She had never been to Lumana’i, of course, and so she clung all the more tightly to its customs and became quite a proselytizer for Leiloa Lavea. This was long before Hikari ever wrote a thing. He never speaks of it, he’s never written of Ua Lava, but now that he’s tipped his hand to us, Jane is finding all sorts of influence of Ua Lava in all his work. And he has friends in Lumana’i. He’s never met them, but they correspond through the ansible net.”

“What about the granddaughter of the ambassador?”

“She’s on a starship right now, headed home to Lumana’i. She left twenty years ago, when her grandfather died. She should get there … oh, in another ten years or so. Depending on the weather. She’ll be received with great honor, no doubt, and her grandfather’s body will be buried or burned or whatever they do— burned, Jane says— with great ceremony.”

“But Hikari won’t try to talk to her.”

“It would take a week to space out even a simple message enough for her to receive it, at the speed the ship is going. No way to have a philosophical discussion. She’d be home before he finished explaining his question.”

For the first time, Wang-mu began to understand the implications of the instantaneous starflight that she and Peter had used. These long, life-wrenching voyages could be done away with.

“If only,” she said.

“I know,” said Peter. “But we can’t.”

She knew he was right. “So we go there ourselves,” she said, returning to the subject. “Then what?”

“Jane is watching to see whom Hikari writes to. That’s the person who’ll be in a position to influence him. And so …”

“That’s who we’ll talk to.”

“That’s right. Do you need to pee or something before we arrange transportation back to our little cabin in the woods?”

“That would be nice,” said Wang-mu. “And you could do with a change of clothes.”

“What, you think even this conservative outfit might be too bold?”

“What are they wearing on Lumana’i?”

“Oh, well, a lot of them just go around naked. In the tropics. Jane says that given the massive bulk of many adult Polynesians, it can be an inspiring sight.”

Wang-mu shuddered. “We aren’t going to try to pretend to be natives, are we?”

“Not there,” said Peter. “Jane’s going to fake us as passengers on a starship that arrived there yesterday from Moskva. We’re probably going to be government officials of some kind.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” she asked.

Peter looked at her oddly. “Wang-mu, we’re already committing treason against Congress just by having left Lusitania. It’s a capital offense. I don’t think impersonating a government official is going to make much of a difference.”

“But I didn’t leave Lusitania,” said Wang-mu. “I’ve never seen Lusitania. “

“Oh, you haven’t missed much. It’s just a bunch of savannahs and woods, with the occasional Hive Queen factory building starships and a bunch of piglike aliens living in the trees.”

“I’m an accomplice to treason though, right?” asked Wang-mu.

“And you’re also guilty of ruining a Japanese philosopher’s whole day.”

“Off with my head.”

An hour later they were in a private floater— so private that there were no questions asked by their pilot; and Jane saw to it that all their papers were in order. Before night they were back at their little starship.

“We should have slept in the apartment,” said Peter, balefully eyeing the primitive sleeping accommodations.

Wang-mu only laughed at him and curled up on the floor. In the morning, rested, they found that Jane had already taken them to Pacifica in their sleep.

***

Aimaina Hikari awoke from his dream in the light that was neither night nor morning, and arose from his bed into air that was neither warm nor cold. His sleep had not been restful, and his dreams had been ugly ones, frantic ones, in which all that he did kept turning back on him as the opposite of what he intended. In his dream, Aimaina would climb to reach the bottom of a canyon. He would speak and people would go away from him. He would write and the pages of the book would spurt out from under his hand, scattering themselves across the floor.

All this he understood to be in response to the visit from those lying foreigners yesterday. He had tried to ignore them all afternoon, as he read stories and essays; to forget them all evening, as he conversed with seven friends who came to visit him. But the stories and essays all seemed to cry out to him: These are the words of the insecure people of an Edge nation; and the seven friends were all, he realized, Necessarians, and when he turned the conversation to the Lusitania Fleet, he soon understood that every one of them believed exactly as the two liars with their ridiculous names had said they did.

So Aimaina found himself in the predawn almost-light, sitting on a mat in his garden, fingering the casket of his ancestors, wondering: Were my dreams sent to me by the ancestors? Were these lying visitors sent by them as well? And if their accusations against me were not lies, what was it they were lying about? For he knew from the way they watched each other, from the young woman’s hesitancy followed by boldness, that they were doing a performance, one that was unrehearsed but nevertheless followed some kind of script.

Dawn came fully, seeking out each leaf of every tree, then of all the lower plants, to give each one its own distinct shading and coloration; the breeze came up, making the light infinitely changeable. Later, in the heat of the day, all the leaves would become the same: still, submissive, receiving sunlight in a massive stream like a firehose. Then, in the afternoon, the clouds would roll overhead, the light rains would fall; the limp leaves would recover their strength, would glisten with water, their color deepening, readying for night, for the life of the night, for the dreams of plants growing in the night, storing away the sunlight that had been beaten into them by day, flowing with the cool inward rivers that had been fed by the rains. Aimaina Hikari became one of the leaves, driving all thoughts but light and wind and rain out of his mind until the dawn phase was ended and the sun began to drive downward with the day’s heat. Then he rose up from his seat in the garden.

Kenji had prepared a small fish for his breakfast. He ate it slowly, delicately, so as not to disturb the perfect skeleton that had given shape to the fish. The muscles pulled this way and that, and the bones flexed but did not break. I will not break them now, but I take the strength of the muscles into my own body. Last of all he ate the eyes. From the parts that move comes the strength of the animal. He touched the casket of his ancestors again. What wisdom I have, however, comes not from what I eat, but from what I am given each hour, by those who whisper into my ear from ages past. Living men forget the lessons of the past. But the ancestors never forget.

Aimaina arose from his breakfast table and went to the computer in his gardening shed. It was just another tool— that’s why he kept it here, instead of enshrining it in his house or in a special office the way so many others did. His computer was like a trowel. He used it, he set it aside.

A face appeared in the air above his terminal. “I am calling my friend Yasunari,” said Aimaina. “But do not disturb him. This matter is so trivial that I would be ashamed to have him waste his time with it.”

“Let me help you on his behalf then,” said the face in the air.

“Yesterday I asked for information about Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-mu, who had an appointment to visit with me.”

“I remember. It was a pleasure finding them so quickly for you.”

“I found their visit very disturbing,” said Aimaina. “Something that they told me was not true, and I need more information in order to find out what it was. I do not wish to violate their privacy, but are there matters of public record— perhaps their school attendance, or places of employment, or some matters of family connections … “

“Yasunari has told us that all things you ask for are for a wise purpose. Let me search.”

The face disappeared for a moment, then flickered back almost immediately.

“This is very odd. Have I made a mistake?” She spelled the names carefully.

“That’s correct,” said Aimaina. “Exactly like yesterday.”

“I remember them, too. They live in an apartment only a few blocks from your house. But I can’t find them at all today. And here I search the apartment building and find that the apartment they occupied has been empty for a year. Aimaina, I am very surprised. How can two people exist one day and not exist the next day? Did I make some mistake, either yesterday or today?”

“You made no mistake, helper of my friend. This is the information I needed. Please, I beg you to think no more about it. What looks like a mystery to you is in fact a solution to my questions.”

They bade each other polite farewells.

Aimaina walked from his garden workroom past the struggling leaves that bowed under the pressure of the sunlight. The ancestors have pressed wisdom on me, he thought, like sunlight on the leaves; and last night the water flowed through me, carrying this wisdom through my mind like sap through the tree. Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-mu were flesh and blood, and filled with lies, but they came to me and spoke the truth that I needed to hear. Is this not how the ancestors bring messages to their living children? I have somehow launched ships armed with the most terrible weapons of war. I did this when I was young; now the ships are near their destination and I am old and I cannot call them back. A world will be destroyed and Congress will look to the Necessarians for approval and they will give it, and then the Necessarians will look to me for approval, and I will hide my face in shame. My leaves will fall and I will stand bare before them. That is why I should not have lived my life in this tropical place. I have forgotten winter. I have forgotten shame and death.

Perfect simplicity— I thought I had achieved it. But instead I have been a bringer of bad fortune.

He sat in the garden for an hour, drawing single characters in the fine gravel of the path, then wiping it smooth and writing again. At last he returned to the garden shed and on the computer typed the message he had been composing:

Ender the Xenocide was a child and did not know the war was real; yet he chose to destroy a populated planet in his game. I am an adult and have known all along that the game was real; but I did not know I was a player. Is my blame greater or less than the Xenocide’s if another world is destroyed and another raman species obliterated? What is my path to simplicity now?

His friend would know few of the circumstances surrounding this query; but he would not need more. He would consider the question. He would find an answer.

A moment later, an ansible on the planet Pacifica received his message. On the way, it had already been read by the entity that sat astride all the strands of the ansible web. For Jane, though, it was not the message that mattered so much as the address. Now Peter and Wang-mu would know where to go for the next step in their quest.

Chapter 5 — “NOBODY IS RATIONAL”

My father often told me, We have servants and machines in order that our will may be carried out beyond the reach of our own arms. Machines are more powerful than servants and more obedient and less rebellious, but machines have no judgment and will not remonstrate with us when our will is foolish, and will not disobey us when our will is evil. In times and places where people despise the gods, those most in need of servants have machines, or choose servants who will behave like machines. I believe this will continue until the gods stop laughing.”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

The hovercar skimmed over the fields of amaranth being tended by buggers under the morning sun of Lusitania. In the distance, clouds already arose, cumulus stacks billowing upward, though it was not yet noon.

“Why aren’t we going to the ship?” asked Val.

Miro shook his head. “We’ve found enough worlds,” he said.

“Does Jane say so?”

“Jane is impatient with me today,” said Miro, “which makes us about even.”

Val fixed her gaze on him. “Imagine my impatience then,” she said. “You haven’t even bothered to ask me what I want to do. Am I so inconsequential, then?”

He glanced at her. “You’re the one who’s dying,” he said. “I tried talking to Ender, but it didn’t accomplish anything.”

“When did I ask you for help? And what exactly are you doing to help me right now?”

“I’m going to the Hive Queen.”

“You might as well say you’re going to see your fairy godmother.”

“Your problem, Val, is that you are completely dependent on Ender’s will. If he loses interest in you, you’re gone. Well, I’m going to find out how we can get you a will of your own.”

Val laughed and looked away from him. “You’re so romantic, Miro. But you don’t think things through.”

“I think them through very well,” said Miro. “I spend all my time thinking things through. It’s acting on my thoughts that gets tricky. Which ones should I act on, and which ones should I ignore?”

“Act on the thought of steering us without crashing,” said Val.

Miro swerved to avoid a starship under construction.

“She still makes more,” said Miro, “even though we have enough.”

“Maybe she knows that when Jane dies, starflight ends for us. So the more ships, the more we can accomplish before she dies.”

“Who can guess how the Hive Queen thinks?” said Miro. “She promises, but even she can’t predict whether her predictions will come true.”

“So why are you going to see her?”

“The hive queens made a bridge one time, a living bridge to allow them to link their minds with the mind of Ender Wiggin when he was just a boy, and their most dangerous enemy. They called an aiua out of darkness and set it in place somewhere between the stars. It was a being that partook of the nature of the hive queens, but also of the nature of human beings, specifically of Ender Wiggin, as nearly as they could understand him. When they were done with the bridge— when Ender killed them all but the one they had cocooned to wait for him— the bridge remained, alive among the feeble ansible connections of humankind, storing its memory in the small, fragile computer networks of the first human world and its few outposts. As the computer networks grew, so did that bridge, that being, drawing on Ender Wiggin for its life and character.”

“Jane,” said Val.

“Yes, that’s Jane. What I’m going to try to learn, Val, is how to get Jane’s aiua into you.”

“Then I’ll be Jane, and not myself.”

Miro smacked the joystick of the hovercar with his fist. The craft wobbled, then automatically righted itself.

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” demanded Miro. “But you’re not yourself now! You’re Ender— you’re Ender’s dream or his need or something like that.”

“I don’t feel like Ender. I feel like me.”

“That’s right. You have your memories. The feelings of your own body. Your own experiences. But none of those will be lost. Nobody’s conscious of their own underlying will. You’ll never know the difference.”

She laughed. “Oh, you’re the expert now in what would happen, with something that has never been done before?”

“Yes,” said Miro. “Somebody has to decide what to do. Somebody has to decide what to believe, and then act on it.”

“What if I tell you that I don’t want you to do this?”

“Do you want to die?”

“It seems to me that you’re the one trying to kill me,” said Val. “Or, to be fair, you want to commit the slightly lesser crime of cutting me off from my own deepest self and replacing that with someone else.”

“You’re dying now. The self you have doesn’t want you.”

“Miro, I’ll go see the Hive Queen with you because that sounds like an interesting experience. But I’m not going to let you extinguish me in order to save my life.”

“All right then,” said Miro, “since you represent the utterly altruistic side of Ender’s nature, let me put it to you a different way. If Jane’s aiua can be placed in your body, then she won’t die. And if she doesn’t die, then maybe, after they’ve shut down the computer links that she lives in and then reconnected them, confident that she’s dead, maybe then she’ll be able to link with them again and maybe then instantaneous starflight won’t have to end. So if you die, you’ll be dying to save, not just Jane, but the power and freedom to expand as we’ve never expanded before. Not just us, but the pequeninos and hive queens too.”

Val fell silent.

Miro watched the route ahead of him. The Hive Queen’s cave was nearing on the left, in an embankment by a stream. He had gone down there once before, in his old body. He knew the way. Of course, Ender had been with him then, and that was why he could communicate with the Hive Queen— she could talk to Ender, and because those who loved and followed him were philotically twined with him, they overheard the echoes of her speech. But wasn’t Val a part of Ender? And wasn’t he now more tightly twined to her than he had ever been with Ender? He needed Val with him to speak to the Hive Queen; he needed to speak to the Hive Queen in order to keep Val from being obliterated like his own old damaged body.

They got out, and sure enough, the Hive Queen was expecting them; a single worker waited for them at the cavern’s mouth. It took Val by the hand and led them wordlessly down into darkness, Miro clinging to Val, Val holding to the strange creature. It frightened Miro just as it had the first time, but Val seemed utterly unafraid.

Or was it that she was unconcerned? Her deepest self was Ender, and Ender did not really care what happened to her. This made her fearless. It made her unconcerned with survival. All she was concerned with was keeping her connection to Ender— the one thing that was bound to kill her if she kept it up. To her it seemed as though Miro was trying to extinguish her; but Miro knew that his plan was the only way to save any part of her. Her body. Her memories. Her habits, her mannerisms, every aspect of her that he actually knew, those would be preserved. Every part of her that she herself was aware of or remembered, those would all be there. As far as Miro was concerned, that would mean her life was saved, if those endured. And once the change had been made, if it could be made at all, Val would thank him for it.

And so would Jane.

And so would everyone.

<The difference between you and Ender,> said a voice in his mind, a low murmur behind the level of actual hearing, <is that when Ender thinks of a plan to save others, he puts himself and only himself on the line.>

“That’s a lie,” said Miro to the Hive Queen. “He killed Human, didn’t he? It was Human that he put on the line.”

Human was now one of the fathertrees that grew by the gate of the village of Milagre. Ender had killed him slowly, so that he could take root in the soil and go through the passage into the third life with all his memories intact.

“I suppose Human didn’t actually die,” said Miro. “But Planter did, and Ender let him do that, too. And how many hive queens died in the final battle between your people and Ender? Don’t brag to me about how Ender pays his own prices. He just sees to it that the price is paid, by whoever has the means to pay it.”

The Hive Queen’s answer was immediate. <I don’t want you to find me. Stay lost in the darkness.>

“You don’t want Jane to die either,” said Miro.

“I don’t like her voice inside me,” said Val softly.

“Keep walking. Keep following.”

“I can’t,” said Val. “The worker— she let go of my hand.”

“You mean we’re stranded here?” asked Miro.

Val’s answer was silence. They held hands tightly in the dark, not daring to step in any direction.

<I can’t do the thing you want me to do.>

“When I was here before,” said Miro, “you told us how all the hive queens made a web to trap Ender, only they couldn’t, so they made a bridge, they drew an aiua from Outside and made a bridge out of it and used it to speak to Ender through his mind, through the fantasy game that he played on the computers in the Battle School. You did that once— you called an aiua from Outside. Why can’t you find that same aiua and put it somewhere else? Link it to something else?”

<The bridge was part of ourselves. Partly ourselves. We were calling to this aiua the way we call for aiuas to make new hive queens. This is something completely different. That ancient bridge is now a full self, not some wandering, starving singleton desperate for connection.>

“All you’re saying is that it’s something new. Something you don’t know how to do. Not that it can’t be done.”

<She doesn’t want you to do it. We can’t do it if she doesn’t want it to happen.>

“So you can stop me,” Miro murmured to Val.

“She’s not talking about me,” Val answered.

<Jane doesn’t want to steal someone else’s body.>

“It’s Ender’s. He has two others. This is a spare. He doesn’t even want it himself.”

<We can’t. We won’t. Go away.>

“We can’t go away in the dark,” said Miro.

Miro felt Val pull her hand away from him.

“No!” he cried. “Don’t let go!”

<What are you doing?>

Miro knew the question was not directed toward him.

<Where are you going? It’s dangerous in the dark.>

Miro heard Val’s voice— from surprisingly far away. She must be moving rapidly in the darkness. “If you and Jane are so concerned about saving my life,” she said, “then give me and Miro a guide. Otherwise, who cares if I drop down some shaft and break my neck? Not Ender. Not me. Certainly not Miro.”

“Stop moving!” cried Miro. “Just hold still, Val!”

“You hold still,” Val called back to him. “You’re the one with a life worth saving!”

Suddenly Miro felt a hand groping for his. No, a claw. He gripped the foreclaw of a worker and she led him forward through the darkness. Not very far. Then they turned a corner and it was lighter, turned another and they could see. Another, another, and there they were in a chamber illuminated by light through a shaft that led to the surface. Val was already there, seated on the ground before the Hive Queen.

When Miro saw her before, she had been in the midst of laying eggs— eggs that would grow into new hive queens, a brutal process, cruel and sensuous. Now, though, she simply lay in the damp earth of the tunnel, eating what a steady stream of workers brought to her. Clay dishes filled with a mash of amaranth and water. Now and then, gathered fruit. Now and then, meat. No interruption, worker after worker. Miro had never seen, had never imagined anyone eating so much.

<How do you think I make my eggs?>

“We’ll never stop the fleet without starflight,” said Miro. “They’re about to kill Jane, any day now. Shut down the ansible network, and she’ll die. What then? What are your ships for then? The Lusitania Fleet will come and destroy this world.”

<There are endless dangers in the universe. This is not the one you’re supposed to worry about.>

“I worry about everything,” said Miro. “It’s all my concern. Besides, my job is done. Finished. There are already enough worlds. More worlds than we can settle. What we need is more starships and more time, not more destinations.”

<Are you a fool? Do you think Jane and I are sending you out for nothing? You aren’t searching for worlds to be colonized anymore.>

“Really? When did this change of assignment come about?”

<Colonizable worlds are only an afterthought. Only a byproduct. >

“Then why have Val and I been killing ourselves all these weeks? And that’s literal, for Val— the work is so boring that it doesn’t interest Ender and so she’s fading.”

<A worse danger than the fleet. We’ve already beaten the fleet. We’ve already dispersed. What does it matter if I die? My daughters have all my memories.>

“You see, Val?” said Miro. “The Hive Queen knows— your memories are your self. If your memories live, then you’re alive.”

“In a pig’s eye,” said Val softly. “What’s the worse danger she’s talking about?”

“There is no worse danger,” said Miro. “She just wants me to go away, but I won’t go away. Your life is worth saving, Val. So is Jane’s. And the Hive Queen can find a way to do it, if it can be done. If Jane could be the bridge between Ender and the hive queens, then why can’t Ender be the bridge between Jane and you?”

<If I say that I will try, will you go back to doing your work?>

There was the catch: Ender had warned Miro long ago that the Hive Queen looks upon her own intentions as facts, just like her memories. But when her intentions change, then the new intention is the new fact, and she doesn’t remember ever having intended anything else. Thus a promise from the Hive Queen was written on water. She would only keep the promises that still made sense for her to keep.

Yet there was no better promise to be had.

“You’ll try,” said Miro.

<I’m trying right now to figure out how it might be done. I’m consulting with Human and Rooter and the other fathertrees. I’m consulting with all my daughters. I’m consulting with Jane, who thinks this is all foolishness.>

“Do you ever intend,” asked Val, “to consult with me?”

<Already you are saying yes.>

Val sighed. “I suppose I am,” she said. “Deep down inside myself, where I am really an old man who doesn’t give a damn whether this young new puppet lives or dies— I suppose that at that level, I don’t mind.”

<All along you said yes. But you’re afraid. You’re afraid of losing what you have, not knowing what you’ll be.>

“You’ve got it,” said Val. “And don’t tell me again that stupid lie that you don’t mind dying because your daughters have your memories. You damn well do mind dying, and if keeping Jane alive might save your life, you want to do it.”

<Take the hand of my worker and go out into the light. Go out among the stars and do your work. Back here, I’ll try to find a way to save your life. Jane’s life. All our lives.>

***

Jane was pouting. Miro tried to talk to her all the way back to Milagre, back to the starship, but she was as silent as Val, who would hardly look at him, let alone converse.

“So I’m the evil one,” said Miro. “Neither of you was doing a damn thing about it, but because I actually take action, I’m bad and you’re the victims.”

Val shook her head and did not answer.

“You’re dying!” he shouted over the noise of the air rushing past them, over the noise of the engines. “Jane’s about to be executed! Is there some virtue in being passive about this? Can’t somebody at least make an effort?”

Val said something that Miro didn’t hear.

“What?”

She turned her head away.

“You said something, now let me hear it!”

The voice that answered was not Val’s. It was Jane who spoke into his ear. “She said, You can’t have it both ways.”

“What do you mean I can’t have it both ways?” Miro spoke to Val as if she had actually repeated what she said.

Val turned toward him. “If you save Jane, it’s because she remembers everything about her life. It doesn’t do any good if you just slip her into me as an unconscious source of will. She has to remain herself, so she can be restored when the ansible network is restored. And that would wipe me out. Or if I’m preserved, my memories and personality, then what difference does it make if it’s Jane or Ender providing my will? You can’t save us both.”

“How do you know?” demanded Miro.

“The same way you know all these things you’re saying as if they were facts when nobody can possibly know anything about it!” cried Val. “I’m reasoning it out! It seems reasonable. That’s enough.”

“Why isn’t it just as reasonable that you’ll have your memories, and hers, too?”

“Then I’d be insane, wouldn’t I?” said Val. “Because I’d remember being a woman who sprang into being on a starship, whose first real memory is seeing you die and come to life. And I’d also remember three thousand years worth of life outside this body, living somehow in space and— what kind of person can hold memories like that? Did you think of that? How can a human being possibly contain Jane and all that she is and remembers and knows and can do?”

“Jane’s very strong,” Miro said. “But then, she doesn’t know how to use a body. She doesn’t have the instinct for it. She’s never had one. She’ll have to use your memories. She’ll have to leave you intact.”

“As if you know.”

“I do know,” said Miro. “I don’t know why or how I know it, but I know.”

“And I thought men were the rational ones,” she said scornfully.

“Nobody’s rational,” said Miro. “We all act because we’re sure of what we want, and we believe that the actions we perform will get us what we want, but we never know anything for sure, and so all our rationales are invented to justify what we were going to do anyway before we thought of any reasons.”

“Jane’s rational,” said Val. “Just one more reason why my body wouldn’t work for her.”

“Jane isn’t rational either,” said Miro. “She’s just like us. Just like the Hive Queen. Because she’s alive. Computers, now, those are rational. You feed them data, they reach only the conclusions that can be derived from that data— but that means they are perpetually helpless victims of whatever information and programs we feed into them. We living sentient beings, we are not slaves to the data we receive. The environment floods us with information, our genes give us certain impulses, but we don’t always act on that information, we don’t always obey our inborn needs. We make leaps. We know what can’t be known and then spend our lives seeking to justify that knowledge. I know that what I’m trying to do is possible.”

“You mean you want it to be possible.”

“Yes,” said Miro. “But just because I want it doesn’t mean it can’t be true.”

“But you don’t know.”

“I know it as much as anyone knows anything. Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. I don’t know the sun will rise tomorrow. The Little Doctor might blow up the world before I wake. A volcano might rise out of the ground and blast us all to smithereens. But I trust that tomorrow will come, and I act on that trust.”

“Well, I don’t trust that letting Jane replace Ender as my inmost self will leave anything resembling me in existence,” said Val.

“But I know— I know— that it’s our only chance, because if we don’t get you another aiua Ender is going to extinguish you, and if we don’t get Jane another place to be her physical self, she’s also going to die. What’s your better plan?”

“I don’t have one,” said Val. “I don’t. If Jane can somehow be brought to dwell in my body, then it has to happen because Jane’s survival is so important to the future of three raman species. So I won’t stop you. I can’t stop you. But don’t think for a moment that I believe that I will live through it. You’re deluding yourself because you can’t bear to face the fact that your plan depends on one simple fact: I’m not a real person. I don’t exist, I don’t have a right to exist, and so my body is up for grabs. You tell yourself you love me and you’re trying to save me, but you’ve known Jane a lot longer, she was your truest friend during your months of loneliness as a cripple, I understand that you love her and would do anything to save her life, but I won’t pretend what you’re pretending. Your plan is for me to die and Jane to take my place. You can call that love if you want, but I will never call it that.”

“Then don’t do it,” Miro said. “If you don’t think you’ll live through it, don’t.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Val. “How did you get to be such a pathetic romantic? If it were you in my place, wouldn’t you be giving speeches right now about how you’re glad you have a body to give to Jane and it’s worth it for you to die for the sake of humans, pequeninos, and hive queens alike?”

“That’s not true,” said Miro.

“That you wouldn’t give speeches? Come on, I know you better than that,” she said.

“No,” said Miro. “I mean I wouldn’t give up my body. Not even to save the world. Humanity. The universe. I lost my body once before. I got it back by a miracle I still don’t understand. I’m not going to give it up without a fight. Do you understand me? No, you don’t, because you don’t have any fight in you. Ender hasn’t given you any fight. He’s made you a complete altruist, the perfect woman, sacrificing everything for the sake of others, creating her identity out of other people’s needs. Well, I’m not like that. I’m not glad to die now. I intend to live. That’s how real people feel, Val. No matter what they say, they all intend to live.”

“Except the suicides?”

“They intended to live, too,” said Miro. “Suicide is a desperate attempt to get rid of unbearable agony. It’s not a noble decision to let someone with more value go on living instead of you.”

“People make choices like that sometimes,” said Val. “It doesn’t mean I’m not a real person because I can choose to give my life to someone else. It doesn’t mean I don’t have any fight in me.”

Miro stopped the hovercar, let it settle to the ground. He was on the edge of the pequenino forest nearest to Milagre. He was aware that there were pequeninos working in the field who stopped their labor to watch them. But he didn’t care what they saw or what they thought. He took Val by the shoulders and with tears streaming down his cheeks he said, “I don’t want you to die. I don’t want you to choose to die.”

“You did,” said Val.

“I chose to live,” said Miro. “I chose to leap to the body in which life was possible. Don’t you see that I’m only trying to get you and Jane to do what I already did? For a moment there in the starship, there was my old body and there was this new one, looking at each other. Val, I remember both views. Do you understand me? I remember looking at this body and thinking, ‘How beautiful, how young, I remember when that was me, who is this now, who is this person, why can’t I be this person instead of the cripple I am right now,’ I thought that and I remember thinking it, I didn’t imagine it later, I didn’t dream it, I remember thinking it at the time. But I also remember standing there looking at myself with pity, thinking, ‘Poor man, poor broken man, how can he bear to live when he remembers what it was like to be alive?’ and then all of a sudden he crumbled into dust, into less than dust, into air, into nothing. I remember watching him die. I don’t remember dying because my aiua had already leapt. But I remember both sides.”

“Or you remember being your old self until the leap, and your new self after.”

“Maybe,” said Miro. “But there wasn’t even a full second. How could I remember so much from both selves in the same second? I think I kept the memories that were in this body from the split second when my aiua ruled two bodies. I think that if Jane leaps into you, you’ll keep all your old memories, and take hers, too. That’s what I think.”

“Oh, I thought you knew it.”

“I do know it,” said Miro. “Because anything else is unthinkable and therefore unknown. The reality I live in is a reality in which you can save Jane and Jane can save you.”

“You mean you can save us.”

“I’ve already done all I can do,” said Miro. “All. I’m done. I asked the Hive Queen. She’s thinking about it. She’s going to try. She’ll have to have your consent. Jane’s consent. But it’s none of my business now. I’ll just be an observer. I’ll either watch you die or watch you live.” He pulled her close to him and held her. “I want you to live.”

Her body in his arms was stiff and unresponsive, and he soon let her go. He pulled away from her.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait until Jane has this body, then do whatever she’ll let you do with it. But don’t touch me again, because I can’t bear the touch of a man who wants me dead.”

The words were too painful for him to answer. Too painful, really, for him to absorb them. He started the hovercar. It rose a little into the air. He tipped it forward and they flew on, circling the wood until they came to the place where the fathertrees named Human and Rooter marked the old entrance to Milagre. He could feel her presence beside him the way a man struck by lightning might feel the nearness of a power line; without touching it, he tingles with the pain that he knows it carries within it. The damage he had done could not be undone. She was wrong, he did love her, he didn’t want her dead, but she lived in a world in which he wanted her extinguished and there was no reconciling it. They could share this ride, they could share the next voyage to another star system, but they would never be in the same world again, and it was too painful to bear, he ached with the knowledge of it but the ache was too deep for him to reach it or even feel it right now. It was there, he knew it was going to tear at him for years to come, but he couldn’t touch it now. He didn’t need to examine his feelings. He had felt them before, when he lost Ouanda, when his dream of life with her became impossible. He couldn’t touch it, couldn’t heal it, couldn’t even grieve at what he had only just discovered that he wanted and once again couldn’t have.

“Aren’t you the suffering saint,” said Jane in his ear.

“Shut up and go away,” Miro subvocalized.

“That doesn’t sound like a man who wants to be my lover,” said Jane.

“I don’t want to be your anything,” said Miro. “You don’t even trust me enough to tell me what you’re up to in our searching of worlds.”

“You didn’t tell me what you were up to when you went to see the Hive Queen either.”

“You knew what I was doing,” said Miro.

“No I didn’t,” said Jane. “I’m very smart— much smarter then you or Ender, and don’t you forget it for an instant— but I still can’t outguess you meat-creatures with your much-vaunted ‘intuitive leaps.’ I like how you make a virtue out of your desperate ignorance. You always act irrationally because you don’t have enough information for rational action. But I do resent your saying I’m irrational. I never am. Never.”

“Right, I’m sure,” said Miro silently. “You’re right about everything. You always are. Go away.”

“I’m gone.”

“No you’re not,” said Miro. “Not till you tell me what Val’s and my voyages have actually been about. The Hive Queen said that colonizable worlds were an afterthought.”

“Nonsense,” said Jane. “We needed more than one world if we were going to be sure to save the two nonhuman species. Redundancy.”

“But you send us out again and again.”

“Interesting, isn’t it?” said Jane.

“She said you were dealing with a worse danger than the Lusitania Fleet.”

“How she does go on.”

“Tell me,” said Miro.

“If I tell you,” said Jane, “you might not go.”

“Do you think I’m such a coward?”

“Not at all, my brave boy, my bold and handsome hero.”

He hated it when she patronized him, even as a joke. He wasn’t in the mood for joking right now anyway.

“Then why do you think I wouldn’t go?”

“You wouldn’t think you were up to the task,” said Jane.

“Am I?” asked Miro.

“Probably not,” said Jane. “But then, you have me with you.”

“And what if you’re suddenly not there?” asked Miro.

“Well, that’s just a risk we’re going to have to take.”

“Tell me what we’re doing. Tell me our real mission.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. If you think about it, you’ll know.”

“I don’t like puzzles, Jane. Tell me.”

“Ask Val. She knows.”

“What?”

“She already searches for exactly the data I need. She knows.”

“Then that means Ender knows. At some level,” said Miro.

“I suspect you’re right, though Ender is not terribly interesting to me anymore and I don’t much care what he knows.”

Yes, you’re so rational, Jane.

He must have subvocalized this thought, out of habit, because she answered him just as she answered his deliberate subvocalizations. “You say that ironically,” she said, “because you think I am only saying that Ender doesn’t interest me because I’m protecting myself from my hurt feelings because he took his jewel out of his ear. But in fact he is no longer a source of data and he is no longer a cooperative part of the work I’m engaged in, and therefore I simply don’t have much interest in him anymore, except as one is somewhat interested in hearing from time to time about the doings of an old friend who has moved away.”

“Sounds like rationalization after the fact to me,” said Miro.

“Why did you even bring Ender up?” asked Jane. “What does it matter whether he knows the real work you and Val are doing?”

“Because if Val really knows our mission, and our mission involves an even worse danger than the Lusitania Fleet, then why has Ender lost interest in her so that she’s fading?”

Silence for a moment. Was it actually taking Jane so long to think of an answer that the time lag was noticeable to a human?

“I suppose Val doesn’t know,” said Jane. “Yes, that’s likely. I thought she did, but see now that she might well have fed me the data she emphasized for reasons completely unrelated to your mission. Yes, you’re right, she doesn’t know.”

“Jane,” said Miro. “Are you admitting you were wrong? Are you admitting you leapt to a false, irrational conclusion?”

“When I get my data from humans,” said Jane, “sometimes my rational conclusions are incorrect, being based on false premises.”

“Jane,” said Miro silently. “I’ve lost her, haven’t I? Whether she lives or dies, whether you get into her body or die out in space or wherever you live, she’ll never love me, will she?”

“I’m not an appropriate person to ask. I’ve never loved anybody.”

“You loved Ender,” said Miro.

“I paid a lot of attention to Ender and was disoriented when he first disconnected me, many years ago. I have since rectified that mistake and I don’t link myself so closely to anyone.”

“You loved Ender,” said Miro again. “You still do.”

“Well, aren’t you the wise one,” said Jane. “Your own love life is a pathetic series of miserable failures, but you know all about mine. Apparently you’re much better at understanding the emotional processes of utterly alien electronic beings than you are at understanding, say, the woman beside you.”

“You got it,” said Miro. “That’s the story of my life.”

“You also imagine that I love you,” said Jane.

“Not really,” said Miro. But even as he said it, he felt a wave of cold pass over him, and he trembled.

“I feel the seismic evidence of your true feelings,” said Jane. “You imagine that I love you, but I do not. I don’t love anyone. I act out of intelligent self-interest. I can’t survive right now without my connection with the human ansible network. I’m exploiting Peter’s and Wang-mu’s labors in order to forestall my planned execution, or subvert it. I’m exploiting your romantic notions in order to get myself that extra body that Ender seems to have little use for. I’m trying to save pequeninos and hive queens on the principle that it’s good to keep sentient species alive— of which I am one. But at no point in any of my activities is there any such thing as love.”

“You are such a liar,” said Miro.

“And you are not worth talking to,” said Jane. “Delusional. Megalomaniac. But you are entertaining, Miro. I do enjoy your company. If that’s love, then I love you. But then, people love their pets on precisely the same grounds, don’t they? It’s not exactly a friendship between equals, and it never will be.”

“Why are you so determined to hurt me worse than I’m already hurt right now?” asked Miro.

“Because I don’t want you to get emotionally attached to me. You have a way of fixating on doomed relationships. I mean, really, Miro. What could be more hopeless than loving Young Valentine? Why, loving me, of course. So naturally you were bound to do that next.”

“Vai te morder,” said Miro.

“I can’t bite myself or anyone else,” said Jane. “Old toothless Jane, that’s me.”

Val spoke up from the seat next to him. “Are you going to sit there all day, or are you coming with me?”

He looked over. She wasn’t in the seat. He had reached the starship during his conversation with Jane, and without noticing it he had stopped the hovercar and Val had gotten out and he hadn’t even noticed that.

“You can talk to Jane inside the ship,” said Val. “We’ve got work to do, now that you’ve had your little altruistic expedition to save the woman you love.”

Miro didn’t bother answering the scorn and anger in her words. He just turned off the hovercar, got out, and followed Val into the ship.

“I want to know,” said Miro, when they had the door closed. “I want to know what our real mission is.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Val. “I’ve been thinking about where we’ve gone. A lot of skipping around. At first it was near and far star systems, randomly distributed. But lately we’ve tended to go only in a certain range. A certain cone of space, and I think it’s narrowing. Jane has a particular destination in mind, and something in the data we collect about each planet tells her that we’re getting closer, that we’re going in the right direction. She’s looking for something.”

“So if we examine the data about the worlds we’ve already explored, we should find a pattern?”

“Particularly the worlds that define the cone of space that we’re searching in. There’s something about worlds lying in this region that tells her to keep searching farther and farther this way.”

One of Jane’s faces appeared in the air above Miro’s computer terminal in the starship. “Don’t waste your time trying to discover what I already know. You’ve got a world to explore. Get to work.”

“Just shut up,” said Miro. “If you aren’t going to tell us, then we’re going to spend whatever time it takes to figure it out on our own.”

“That’s telling me, you bold brave hero,” said Jane.

“He’s right,” said Val. “Just tell us and we won’t waste any more time trying to figure it out.”

“And here I thought one of the attributes of living creatures was that you make intuitive leaps that transcend reason and reach beyond the data you have,” said Jane. “I’m disappointed that you haven’t already guessed it.”

And in that moment, Miro knew. “You’re searching for the home planet of the descolada virus,” he said.

Val looked at him, puzzled. “What?”

“The descolada virus was manufactured. Somebody made it and sent it out, perhaps to terraform other planets in preparation for an attempt at colonization. Whoever it is might still be out there, making more, sending more probes, perhaps sending out viruses we won’t be able to contain and defeat. Jane is looking for their home planet. Or rather, she’s having us look.”

“Easy guess,” said Jane. “You really had more than enough data.”

Val nodded. “Now it’s obvious. Some of the worlds we’ve explored have had very limited flora and fauna. I even commented on it with a couple of them. There must have been a major die-off. Nothing like the limitations on the native life of Lusitania, of course. And no descolada virus.”

“But some other virus, less durable, less effective than the descolada,” said Miro. “Their early attempts, maybe. That’s what caused a die-off of species on those other worlds. Their probe virus finally died out, but those ecosystems haven’t yet recovered from the damage.”

“I was quite pointed about those limited worlds,” said Val. “I searched those ecosystems at greater depth, searching for the descolada or something like it, because I knew that a recent major die-off was a sign of danger. I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection and realize that was what Jane was looking for.”

“So what if we find their home world?” asked Miro. “What then?”

“I imagine,” said Val, “we study them from a safe distance, make sure we’re right, and then alert Starways Congress so they can blow the world to hell.”

“Another sentient species?” asked Miro, incredulous. “You think we’d actually invite Congress to destroy them?”

“You forget that Congress doesn’t wait for an invitation,” said Val. “Or for permission. And if they think Lusitania is so dangerous as to need to be destroyed, what will they do with a species that manufactures and broadcasts hideously destructive viruses willy-nilly? I’m not even sure Congress would be wrong. It was pure chance that the descolada helped the ancestors of the pequeninos make the transition into sentience. If they did help— there’s evidence that the pequeninos were already sentient and the descolada very nearly wiped them out. Whoever sent that virus out has no conscience. No concept of other species having a right to survive.”

“Maybe they have no such concept now,” said Miro. “But when they meet us …”

“If we don’t catch some terrible disease and die thirty minutes after landing,” said Val. “Don’t worry, Miro. I’m not plotting to destroy anyone and everyone we meet. I’m strange enough myself not to hope for the wholesale destruction of strangers.”

“I can’t believe we only just realized we’re looking for these people, and you’re already talking about killing them all!”

“Whenever humans meet foreigners, weak or strong, dangerous or peaceable, the issue of destruction comes up. It’s built into our genes.”

“So is love. So is the need for community. So is the curiosity that overcomes xenophobia. So is decency.”

“You left out the fear of God,” said Val. “Don’t forget that I’m really Ender. There’s a reason they call him the Xenocide, you know.”

“Yes, but you’re the gentle side of him, right?”

“Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

“So you didn’t know me after all,” said Val, wearing a prim little smile.

“I don’t like you smug,” said Miro.

“Good,” said Val. “Then you won’t be so sad when I die.” She turned her back on him. He watched her for a while in silence, baffled. She sat there, leaning back in her chair, looking at the data coming in from the probes on their starship. Sheets of information queued up in the air in front of her; she pushed a button and the front sheet disappeared, the next one moved forward. Her mind was engaged, of course, but there was something else. An air of excitement. Tension. It made him afraid.

Afraid? Of what? It was what he had hoped for. In the past few moments Young Valentine had achieved what Miro, in his conversation with Ender, had failed to do. She had won Ender’s interest. Now that she knew she was searching for the home planet of the descolada, now that a great moral issue was involved, now that the future of the raman races might depend on her actions, Ender would care about what she was doing, would care at least as much as he cared about Peter. She wasn’t going to fade. She was going to live now.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Jane in his ear. “Now she won’t want to give me her body.”

Was that what Miro was afraid of? No, he didn’t think so. He didn’t want Val to die, despite her accusations. He was glad she was suddenly so much more alive, so vibrant, so involved— even if it made her annoyingly smug. No, there was something else.

Maybe it was nothing more complicated than fear for his own life.

The home planet of the descolada virus must be a place of unimaginably advanced technology to be able to create such a thing and send it world to world. To create the antivirus that would defeat and control it, Miro’s sister Ela had had to go Outside, because the manufacture of such an antivirus was beyond the reach of any human technology. Miro would have to meet the creators of the descolada and communicate with them to stop sending out destructive probes. It was beyond his ability. He couldn’t possibly carry out such a mission. He would fail, and in failing would endanger all the raman species. No wonder he was afraid.

“From the data,” said Miro, “what do you think? Is this the world we’re looking for?”

“Probably not,” said Val. “It’s a newish biosphere. No animals larger than worms. Nothing that flies. But a full range of species at those lower levels. No lack of variety. Doesn’t look like a probe was ever here.”

“Well,” said Miro. “Now that we know our real mission, are we going to waste time making a full colonization report on this planet, or shall we move on?”

Jane’s face appeared again above Miro’s terminal.

“Let’s make sure Valentine is right,” said Jane. “Then move on. There are enough colony worlds, and time’s getting short.”

***

Novinha touched Ender’s shoulder. He was breathing heavily, loudly, but it was not the familiar snore. The noisiness was coming from his lungs, not from the back of his throat; it was as if he had been holding his breath for a long time, and now had to take deep draughts of air to make up for it, only no breath was deep enough, his lungs couldn’t hold enough. Gasp. Gasp.

“Andrew. Wake up.” She spoke sharply, for her touch had always been enough to waken him before, and this time it was not enough, he kept on gasping for air yet didn’t open his eyes.

The fact he was asleep at all surprised her. He wasn’t an old man yet. He didn’t take naps in the late morning. Yet here he was, lying in the shade on the croquet lawn of the monastery when he had told her he was going to bring them both a drink of water. And for the first time it occurred to her that he wasn’t taking a nap at all, that he must have fallen, must have collapsed here, and only the fact that he ended up lying on his back in a patch of shade, his hands lying flat on his chest, deceived her into thinking that he had chosen to lie here. Something was wrong. He wasn’t an old man. He shouldn’t be lying here like this, breathing air that didn’t hold enough of what he needed.

“Ajuda-me! ” she cried out. “Me ajuda, por favor, venga agora!” Her voice rose until, quite against her custom, it became a scream, a frantic sound that frightened her even more. Her own scream frightened her. “Ele vai morrer! Socorro!” He’s going to die, that’s what she heard herself shouting.

And in the back of her mind, another litany began: I brought him here to this place, to the hard work of this place. He’s as fragile as other men, his heart is as breakable, I made him come here because of my selfish pursuit of holiness, of redemption, and instead of saving myself from guilt for the deaths of the men I love, I have added another one to the list, I have killed Andrew just as I killed Pipo and Libo, just as I should have somehow saved Estevao and Miro. He is dying and it’s again my fault, always my fault, whatever I do brings death, the people I love have to die to get away from me. Mamde, Papae, why did you leave me? Why did you put death into my life from childhood on? No one that I love can stay.

This is not helpful, she told herself, forcing her conscious mind away from the familiar chant of self-blame. It won’t help Andrew for me to lose myself in irrational guilt right now.

Hearing her cries, several men and women came running from the monastery, and some from the garden. Within moments they were carrying Ender into the building as someone rushed for a doctor. Some stayed with Novinha, too, for her story was not unknown to them, and they suspected that the death of another beloved one would be too much for her.

“I didn’t want him to come,” she murmured. “He didn’t have to come.”

“It isn’t being here that made him sick,” said the woman who held her. “People get sick without it being anyone’s fault. He’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

Novinha heard the words but in some deep place inside her she could not believe them. In that deep place she knew that it was all her fault, that dread evil arose out of the dark shadows of her heart and seeped into the world poisoning everything. She carried the beast inside her heart, the devourer of happiness. Even God was wishing she would die.

No, no, it’s not true, she said silently. It would be a terrible sin. God does not want my death, not by my own hand, never by my own hand. It wouldn’t help Andrew, it wouldn’t help anyone. Wouldn’t help, would only hurt. Wouldn’t help, would only …

Silently chanting her mantra of survival, Novinha followed her husband’s gasping body into the monastery, where perhaps the holiness of the place would drive all thoughts of self-destruction from her heart. I must think of him now, not of me. Not of me. Not of me me me me.

Chapter 6 — “LIFE IS A SUICIDE MISSION”

“Do the gods of different nations talk to each other? Do the gods of Chinese cities speak to the ancestors of the Japanese? To the lords of Xibalba? To Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu? Is there some annual get-together where they compare each other’s worshippers? Mine will bow their faces to the floor and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one. Mine will sacrifice animals, says another. Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third. Here is the question I think of most often: Are there any who can honestly boast, my worshippers obey my good laws, and treat each other kindly, and live simple generous lives?”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Pacifica was as widely varied a world as any other, with its temperate zones, polar ice sheets, tropical rain forests, deserts and savannas, steppes and mountains, lakes and seas, woodlands and beaches. Nor was Pacifica a young world. In more than two thousand years of human habitation, all the niches into which humans could comfortably fit were filled. There were great cities and vast rangelands, villages amid patchwork farms and research stations in the remotest locations, highest and lowest, farthest north and south.

But the heart of Pacifica had always been and remained today the tropical islands of the ocean called Pacific in memory of the largest sea on Earth. The dwellers on these islands lived, not precisely in the old ways, but with the memory of old ways still in the background of all sounds and at the edges of all sights. Here the sacred kava was still sipped in the ancient ceremonies. Here the memories of ancient heroes were kept alive. Here the gods still spoke into the ears of holy men and women. And if they went home to grass huts containing refrigerators and networked computers, what of that? The gods did not give unreceivable gifts. The trick of it was finding a way to let new things into one’s life without killing that life to accommodate them.

There were many on the continents, in the big cities, on the temperate farms, in the research stations— there were many who had little patience with the endless costume dramas (or comedies, depending on one’s point of view) that took place on those islands. And certainly the people of Pacifica were not uniformly Polynesian in race. All races were here, all cultures; all languages were spoken somewhere, or so it seemed. Yet even the scoffers looked to the islands for the soul of the world. Even the lovers of cold and snow took their pilgrimage— a holiday, they probably called it— to tropical shores. They plucked fruit from the trees, they skimmed over the sea in the outrigger canoes, their women went bare-breasted and they all dipped fingers into taro pudding and pulled fishmeat from the bones with wet fingers. The whitest of them, the thinnest, the most elegant of the people of this place called themselves Pacifican and spoke at times as if the ancient music of the place rang in their ears, as if the ancient stories spoke of their own past. Adopted into the family, that’s what they were, and the true Samoans, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Tongans, Maoris, and Fijians smiled and let them feel welcome even though these watch-wearing, reservation-making, hurrying people knew nothing of the true life in the shadow of the volcano, in the lee of the coral barrier, under the sky sparked with parrots, inside the music of the waves against the reef.

Wang-mu and Peter came to a civilized, modern, westernized part of Pacifica, and once again found their identities waiting for them, prepared by Jane. They were career government workers trained on their home planet, Moskva, and given a couple of weeks’ vacation before starting service as bureaucrats in some Congress office on Pacifica. They needed little knowledge of their supposed home planet. They just had to show their papers to get an airplane out of the city where they had supposedly just shuttled down from a starship recently arrived from Moskva. Their flight took them to one of the larger Pacific islands, and they soon showed their papers again to get a couple of rooms in a resort hotel on a sultry tropical shore.

There was no need for papers to get aboard a boat to the island where Jane told them they should go. No one asked them for identification. But then, no one was willing to take them as passengers, either.

“Why you going there?” asked one huge Samoan boatman. “What business you got?”

“We want to speak to Malu on Atatua.”

“Don’t know him,” said the boatman. “Don’t know nothing about him. Maybe you try somebody else who knows what island he’s on.”

“We told you the island,” said Peter. “Atatua. According to the atlas it isn’t far from here.”

“I heard of it but I never went there. Go ask somebody else.”

That’s how it was, time and again.

“You get the idea that papalagis aren’t wanted there?” said Peter to Wang-mu back on the porch of Peter’s room. “These people are so primitive they don’t just reject ramen, framlings, and utlannings. I’m betting even a Tongan or a Hawaiian can’t get to Atatua.”

“I don’t think it’s a racial thing,” said Wang-mu. “I think it’s religious. I think it’s protection of a holy place.”

“What’s your evidence for that?” asked Peter.

“Because thete’s no hatred or fear of us, no veiled anger. Just cheerful ignorance. They don’t mind our existence, they just don’t think we belong in the holy place. You know they’d take us anywhere else.”

“Maybe,” said Peter. “But they can’t be that xenophobic, or Aimaina wouldn’t have become good enough friends with Malu to send a message to him.”

At that, Peter cocked his head a bit to listen as Jane apparently spoke in his ear.

“Oh,” said Peter. “Jane was skipping a step for us. Aimaina didn’t send a message directly to Malu. He messaged a woman named Grace. But Grace immediately went to Malu and so Jane figured we might as well go straight to the source. Thanks Jane. Love how your intuition always works out.”

“Don’t be snide to her,” said Wang-mu. “She’s coming up against a deadline. The order to shut down could come any day. Naturally she wants to hurry.”

“I think she should just kill any such order before anyone receives it and take over all the damn computers in the universe,” said Peter. “Thumb her nose at them.”

“That wouldn’t stop them,” said Wang-mu. “It would only terrify them more.”

“In the meantime, we’re not going to get to Malu by boarding a boat.”

“So let’s find this Grace,” said Wang-mu. “If she can do it, then it is possible for an outsider to get access to Malu.”

“She’s not an outsider, she’s Samoan,” said Peter. “She has a Samoan name as well— Teu ‘Ona— but she’s worked in the academic world and it’s easier to have a Christian name, as they call it. A Western name. Grace is the name she’ll expect us to use. Says Jane.”

“If she had a message from Aimaina, she’ll know at once who we are.”

“I don’t think so,” said Peter. “Even if he mentioned us, how could she possibly believe that the same people could be on his world yesterday and on her world today?”

“Peter, you are the consummate positivist. Your trust in rationality makes you irrational. Of course she’ll believe we’re the same people. Aimaina will also be sure. The fact that we traveled world-to-world in a single day will merely confirm to them what they already believe— that the gods sent us.”

Peter sighed. “Well, as long as they don’t try to sacrifice us to a volcano or anything, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to be gods.”

“Don’t trifle with this, Peter,” said Wang-mu. “Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent. As long as outsiders stay away from their holy places, the Polynesians are the peacefullest people. But when you penetrate within the light of the sacred fire, watch your step, because no enemy is more ruthless or brutal or thorough.”

“Have you been watching vids again?” asked Peter.

“Reading,” said Wang-mu. “In fact, I was reading some articles written by Grace Drinker.”

“Ah,” said Peter. “You already knew about her.”

“I didn’t know she was Samoan,” said Wang-mu. “She doesn’t talk about herself. If you want to know about Malu and his place in the Samoan culture on Pacifica— maybe we should call it Lumana’i, as they do— you have to read something written by Grace Drinker, or someone quoting her, or someone arguing with her. She had an article on Atatua, which is how I came across her writing. And she’s written about the impact of the philosophy of Ua Lava on the Samoan people. My guess is that when Aimaina was first studying Ua Lava, he read some works by Grace Drinker, and then wrote to her with questions, and that’s how the friendship began. But her connection with Malu has nothing to do with Ua Lava. He represents something older. Before Ua Lava, but Ua Lava still depends on it, at least here in its homeland it does.”

Peter regarded her steadily for a few moments. She could feel him reevaluating her, deciding that she had a mind after all, that she might, marginally, be useful. Well, good for you, Peter, thought Wang-mu. How clever you are, to finally notice that I’ve got an analytical mind as well as the intuitive, gnomic, mantic one you decided was all I was good for.

Peter unfolded himself from his chair. “Let’s go meet her. And quote her. And argue with her.”

***

The Hive Queen lay in stillness. Her work of egglaying was done for the day. Her workers slept in the dark of night, though it wasn’t darkness that stopped them down in the cave of her home. Rather it was her need to be alone inside her mind, to set aside the thousand distractions of the eyes and ears, the arms and legs of her workers. All of them demanded her attention, at least now and then, in order to function; but it also took all her thought to reach out in her mind and walk the webs that the humans had taught her to think of as <philotic.> The pequenino fathertree named Human had explained to her that in one of the human languages this had something to do with love. The connections of love. But the Hive Queen knew better. Love was the savage coupling of the drones. Love was the genes of all creatures demanding that they be replicated, replicated, replicated. The philotic twining was something else. There was a voluntary component to it, when the creature was truly sentient. It could bestow its loyalty where it wanted. This was greater than love, because it created something more than random offspring. Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.

<I am bound to you, for instance,> she said to Human, by way of launching their conversation tonight. They spoke every night like this, mind to mind, though they had never met. How could they, she always in the dark of her deep home, he always rooted by the gate of Milagre? But the conversation of the mind was truer than any language, and they knew each other better than they ever could have by use of mere sight and touch.

<You always start in the middle of the thought,> said Human.

<And you always understand everything surrounding it, so what difference does it make?> Then she told him all that had passed between her and Young Valentine and Miro today.

<I overheard some of it,> said Human.

<I had to scream to be heard. They aren’t like Ender— they’re thickheaded and hard of hearing.>

<So can you do it?>

<My daughters are weak and inexperienced, and they’re consumed with egglaying in their new homes. How can we make a good web for catching an aiua? Especially one that already has a home. And where is that home? Where is this bridge my mothers made? Where is this Jane?>

<Ender is dying,> said Human.

The Hive Queen understood that he was answering her question.

<Which of him?> asked the Hive Queen. <I always thought he was the most like us. So it’s no surprise that he should be the first human like us in his ability to control more than one body.>

<Badly,> said Human. <In fact he can’t do it. He’s been sluggish in his own old body ever since the others came into existence. And for a while it looked like he might slough off Young Valentine. But that’s changed now.>

<You can see?>

<His adopted daughter Ela came to me. His body is failing strangely. No known disease. He just doesn’t exchange oxygen well. He can’t rise up into consciousness. Ender’s sister, Old Valentine, says that maybe he’s paying full attention to his other selves, so much so that he can’t spare any for the here and now of his own old body. So his body is starting to fail, here and there. Lungs first. Maybe a little bit everywhere, only it’s the lungs that show it first.>

<He should pay attention. If he doesn’t, he’ll die.>

<So I said,> Human reminded her mildly. <Ender is dying.>

The Hive Queen had already made the connection that Human intended. <So it’s more than needing a web to catch the aiua of this Jane. We need to catch Ender’s aiua, too, and pass it into one of his other bodies.>

<Or they’ll die when he does, I imagine,> said Human. <Just the way when a hive queen dies, so also do all her workers.>

<Some of them actually linger for days afterward, but yes, in effect, that’s right. Only because the workers haven’t the capacity to hold a hive queen’s mind.>

<Don’t pretend,> said Human. <You’ve never tried it, none of you.>

<No. We aren’t afraid of death.>

<That’s why you’ve sent all these daughters out to world after world? Because death means nothing to you?>

<I’m saving my species, not myself, you notice.>

<As am I,> said Human. <Besides, I’m too deep-rooted for transplanting.>

<But Ender has no roots,> said the Hive Queen.

<I wonder if he wants to die,> said Human. <I don’t think so. He’s not dying because he’s lost the will to live. This body is dying because he’s lost interest in the life that it’s leading. But he still wants to live the life of Peter. And the life of Valentine.>

<He says so?>

<He can’t talk,> said Human. <He’s never found his way to the philotic twines. He’s never learned to cast out and link as we fathertrees can. As you do with your workers, and now with me.>

<But we found him once. Connected with him through the bridge, well enough to hear his thoughts and see through his eyes. And he dreamed of us during those days.>

<Dreamed of you but never learned that you were peaceable. Never learned that he shouldn’t kill you.>

<He didn’t know the game was real.>

<Or that the dreams were true. He has his wisdom, of a kind, but the boy has never learned to question his senses half enough.>

<Human,> said the Hive Queen. <What if I teach you how to join a web?>

<So you want to try to catch Ender as he dies?>

<If we can catch him, and take him to one of his other bodies, then perhaps we’ll learn enough to find and catch this Jane, too.>

<And if we fail?>

<Ender dies. Jane dies. We die when the fleet comes. How is this different from the course that any other life takes?>

<It’s all in the timing,> said Human.

<Will you try to join the web? You and Rooter and the other fathertrees?>

<I don’t know what you mean by a web, or if it’s even different from the way we fathers are with each other. You might remember, too, that we are also bound up with the mothertrees. They can’t speak, but they’re filled with life, and we anchor ourselves to them as surely as your workers are tied to you. Find a way to include them in your web, and the fathers will be joined effortlessly.>

<Let’s play with this tonight, Human. Let me try to weave with you. Tell me what it looks like to you, and I’ll try to make you understand what I’m doing and where it leads.>

<Shouldn’t we find Ender first? In case he slips away?>

<In due time,> said the Hive Queen. <And besides, I’m not altogether sure I know how to find him if he’s unconscious.>

<Why not? Once you gave him dreams— he slept then.>

<Then we had the bridge.>

<Maybe Jane is listening to us now.>

<No,> said the Hive Queen. <I’d know her if she were linked to us. Her shape was made to fit too well with mine for it to go unrecognized.>

***

Plikt stood beside Ender’s bed because she could not bear to sit, could not bear to move. He was going to die without uttering another word. She had followed him, had given up home and family to be near him, and what had he said to her? Yes, he let her be his shadow sometimes; yes, she was a silent observer of many of his conversations over the past few weeks and months. But when she tried to speak to him of things more personal, of deep memories, of what he meant by the things that he had done, he only shook his head and said— kindly, because he was kind, but firmly also because he did not wish her to misunderstand— said to her, “Plikt, I’m not a teacher anymore.”

Yes you are, she wanted to say to him. Your books go on teaching even where you have never been. The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and already The Life of Human seems likely to take its place beside them. How can you say you’re through with teaching, when there are other books to write, other deaths to speak? You have spoken the deaths of killers and saints, aliens, and once the death of a whole city swallowed up in a cataclysmic volcano. But in telling these stories of others, where was your story, Andrew Wiggin? How can I speak your death if you never explained it to me?

Or is this your last secret— that you never knew any more about the people whose deaths you spoke than I know about you today. You force me to invent, to guess, to wonder, to imagine— is this what you also did? Discover the most widely believed story, then find an alternate explanation that made sense to others and had meaning and the power to transform, and then tell that tale— even though it was also a fiction, and no truer than the story everyone believed? Is that what I must say as I speak the death of the Speaker for the Dead? His gift was not to discover truth, it was to invent it; he did not unfold, unknot, untwist the lives of the dead, he created them. And so I create his. His sister says he died because he tried to follow his wife with perfect loyalty, into the life of peace and seclusion that she hungered for; but the very peace of that life killed him, for his aiua was drawn into the lives of the strange children that sprang fullgrown from his mind, and his old body, despite all the years most likely left in it, was discarded because he hadn’t the time to pay enough attention to keep the thing alive.

He wouldn’t leave his wife or let her leave him; so he was bored to death and hurt her worse by staying with her than he ever would have done by letting her go without him.

There, is that brutal enough, Ender? He wiped out the hive queens of dozens of worlds, leaving only one survivor of that great and ancient people. He also brought her back to life. Does saving the last of your victims atone for having slain the others? He did not mean to do it, that is his defense; but dead is dead, and when the life is cut off in its prime, does the aiua say, Ah, but the child who killed me, he thought that he was playing a game, so my death counts less, it weighs less? No, Ender himself would have said, no, the death weighs the same, and I carry that weight on my shoulders. No one has more blood on their hands than I have; so I will speak with brutal truth of the lives of those who died without innocence, and show you that even these can be understood. But he was wrong, they can’t be understood, none of them are understood, speaking for the dead is only effective because the dead are silent and can’t correct our mistakes. Ender is dead and he can’t correct my mistakes, so some of you will think that I haven’t made any, you will think that I tell the truth about him but the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they tell us is true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

Plikt stood and practiced speaking desperately, hopelessly beside Ender’s coffin, though he was not yet in a coffin, he was still lying on a bed and air was pumping through a clear mask into his mouth and glucose solution into his veins and he was not yet dead. Just silent.

“A word,” she whispered. “A word from you.”

Ender’s lips moved.

Plikt should have called the others at once. Novinha, who was exhausted with weeping— she was only just outside the room. And Valentine, his sister; Ela, Olhado, Grego, Quara, four of his adopted children; and many others, in and out of the receiving room, wanting a glimpse of him, a word, to touch his hand. If they could send word to other worlds, how they would mourn, the people who remembered his speakings over the three thousand years of his journeys world to world. If they could proclaim his true identity— Speaker for the Dead, author of the two— no, the three— great books of Speaking; and Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide, both selves in the same frail flesh— oh, what shock waves would spread throughout the human universe.

Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.

His lips moved.

“Peter,” he whispered.

He was silent again.

What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don’t hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter, for one smile of yours I’d die or kill. What was his message? What should Plikt say about this word?

She moved from beside his bed. Walked to the door, opened it. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, facing a room full of people who had only rarely heard her speak, and some of whom had never heard a word from her. “He spoke before I could call anyone else to hear. But he might speak again.”

“What did he say?” said Novinha, rising to her feet.

“A name is all,” said Plikt. “He said ‘Peter.’”

“He calls for the abomination he brought back from space, and not for me!” said Novinha. But it was the drugs the doctors had given her, that was what spoke, that was what wept.

“I think he calls for our dead brother,” said Old Valentine. “Novinha, do you want to come inside?”

“Why?” Novinha said. “He hasn’t called for me, he called for him.”

“He’s not conscious,” said Plikt.

“You see, Mother?” said Ela. “He isn’t calling for anyone, he’s just speaking out of some dream. But it’s something, he said something, and isn’t that a good sign?”

Still Novinha refused to go into the room. So it turned out to be Valentine and Plikt and four of his adopted children who stood around his bed when his eyes opened.

“Novinha,” he said.

“She’s grieving outside,” said Valentine. “Drugged to the gills, I’m afraid.”

“That’s all right,” said Ender. “What happened? I take it I’m sick.”

“More or less,” said Ela. “‘Inattentive’ is the more exact description of the cause of your condition, as best we can tell.”

“You mean I had some kind of accident?”

“I mean you’re apparently paying too much attention to what’s going on on a couple of other planets, and so your body here is on the edge of self-destruction. What I see under the microscopes are cells sluggishly trying to reconstruct breaks in their walls. You’re dying by bits, all over your body.”

“Sorry to be so much trouble,” said Ender.

For a moment they thought this was the beginning of a conversation, the start of the process of healing. But having said this little bit, Ender closed his eyes and he was asleep again, the instruments unchanged from what they had said before he said a word.

Oh wonderful, thought Plikt. I beg him for a word, he gives it to me, and I know less now than I did before. We spent his few waking moments telling him what was going on instead of asking him the questions that we may never have the chance to ask again. Why do we all get stupider when we crowd around the brink of death?

But still she stood there, watching, waiting, as the others, in ones or twos, gave up and left the room again. Valentine came to her last of all and touched her arm. “Plikt, you can’t stay here forever.”

“I can stay as long as he can,” she said.

Valentine looked into her eyes and must have seen something there that made her give up trying to persuade her. She left, and again Plikt was alone with the collapsing body of the man whose life was the center of her own.

***

Miro hardly knew whether to be glad or frightened by the change in Young Valentine since they had learned the true purpose of their search for new worlds. Where she had once been softspoken, even diffident, now she could hardly keep from interrupting Miro every time he spoke. The moment she thought she understood what he was going to say, she’d start answering— and when he pointed out that he was really saying something else, she’d answer that almost before he could finish his explanation. Miro knew that he was probably being oversensitive— he had spent a long time with speech so impaired that almost everyone interrupted him, and so he prickled at the slightest affront along those lines. And it wasn’t that he thought there was any malice in it. Val was simply … on. Every moment she was awake— and she hardly seemed to sleep, at least Miro almost never saw her sleeping. Nor was she willing to go home between planets. “There’s a deadline,” she said. “They could give the signal to shut down the ansible networks any day now. We don’t have time for needless rest.”

Miro wanted to answer: Define “needless.” He certainly needed more than he was getting, but when he said so, she merely waved him off and said, “Sleep if you want, I’ll cover.” And so he’d grab a nap and wake up to find that she and Jane had already eliminated three more planets— two of which, however, bore the earmarks of descolada-like trauma within the past thousand years. “Getting closer,” Val would say, and then launch into interesting facts about the data until she’d interrupt herself— she was democratic about this, interrupting herself as easily as she interrupted him— to deal with the data from a new planet.

Now, after only a day of this, Miro had virtually given up speaking. Val was so focused on their work that she spoke of nothing else; and on that subject, there was little Miro needed to say, except periodically to relay some information from Jane that came through his earpiece instead of over the open computers of the ship. His near silence, though, gave him time to think. This is what I asked Ender for, he realized. But Ender couldn’t do it consciously. His aiua does what it does because of Ender’s deepest needs and desires, not because of his conscious decisions. So he couldn’t give his attention to Val; but Val’s work could become so exciting that Ender couldn’t bear to concentrate on anything else.

Miro wondered: How much of this did Jane understand in advance?

And because he couldn’t very well discuss it with Val, he subvocalized his questions so Jane could hear. “Did you reveal our mission to us now so that Ender would give his attention to Val? Or did you withhold it up until now so that Ender wouldn’t?”

“I don’t make that kind of plan,” said Jane into his ear. “I have other things on my mind.”

“But it’s good for you, isn’t it. Val’s body isn’t in any danger of withering away now.”

“Don’t be an ass, Miro. Nobody likes you when you’re an ass.”

“Nobody likes me anyway,” he said, silently but cheerfully. “You couldn’t have hidden out in her body if it was a pile of dust.”

“I can’t slip into it if Ender’s there, utterly engrossed in what she’s doing, either, can I,” said Jane.

“Is he utterly engrossed?”

“Apparently so,” said Jane. “His own body is falling apart. And more rapidly than Val’s was.”

It took Miro a moment to understand this. “You mean he’s dying?”

“I mean Val is very much alive,” said Jane.

“Don’t you love Ender anymore?” asked Miro. “Don’t you care?”

“If Ender doesn’t care about his own life,” said Jane, “why should I? We’re both doing our best to set a very messy situation to rights. It’s killing me, it’s killing him. It very nearly killed you, and if we fail a whole lot of other people will be killed, too.”

“You’re a cold one,” said Miro.

“Just a bunch of blips between the stars, that’s what I am,” said Jane.

“Merda de bode,” said Miro. “What’s this mood you’re in?”

“I don’t have feelings,” said Jane. “I’m a computer program.”

“We all know you have an aiua of your own. As much of a soul, if that’s what you want to call it, as anyone else.”

“People with souls can’t be switched off by unplugging a few machines.”

“Come on, they’re going to have to shut down billions of computers and thousands of ansibles all at once in order to do you in. I’d say that’s pretty impressive. One bullet would do for me. An overgrown electric fence almost polished me off.”

“I suppose I just wanted to die with some kind of splashing sound or cooking smell or something,” said Jane. “If I only had a heart. You probably don’t know that song.”

“We grew up on classic videos,” said Miro. “It drowned out a lot of other unpleasantness at home. You’ve got the brain and the nerve. I think you’ve got the heart.”

“What I don’t have is the ruby slippers. I know there’s no place like home, but I can’t get there,” said Jane.

“Because Ender’s using her body so intensely?” asked Miro.

“I’m not as set on using Val’s body as you were to have me do it,” said Jane. “Peter’s will do as well. Even Ender’s, as long as he’s not using it. I’m not actually female. That was merely my choice of identity to get close to Ender. He had problems bonding readily with men. The dilemma I have is that even if Ender would let go of one of these bodies for me to use it, I don’t know how to get there. I don’t know where my aiua is any more than you do. Can you put your aiua where you want it? Where is it now?”

“But the Hive Queen is trying to find you. She can do that— her people made you.”

“Yes, she and her daughters and the fathertrees, they’re building some kind of web, but it’s never been done before— catching something already alive and leading it into a body that is already owned by someone else’s aiua. It’s not going to work, I’m going to die, but I’m dammed if I’m going to let those bastards who made the descolada come along after I’m dead and wipe out all the other sentient species I’ve known. Humans will pull the plug on me, yes, thinking I’m just a computer program run amok, but that doesn’t mean I want someone else to pull the plug on humanity. Nor on the hive queens. Nor on the pequeninos. If we’re going to stop them, we have to do it before I’m dead. Or at least I have to get you and Val there so you can do something without me.”

“If we’re there when you die, we’ll never come home again.”

“Bad luck, eh?”

“So we’re a suicide mission.”

“Life is a suicide mission, Miro. Check it out— basic philosophy course. You spend your life running out of fuel and when you’re finally out, you croak.”

“You sound like Mother now,” said Miro.

“Oh, no,” said Jane. “I’m taking it with good humor. Your mother always thought her doom was tragic.”

Miro was readying some retort when Val’s voice interrupted his colloquy with Jane.

“I hate it when you do that!” she cried.

“Do what?” said Miro, wondering what she had just been saying before this outburst.

“Tune me out and talk to her.”

“To Jane? I always talk to Jane.”

“But you used to listen to me sometimes,” said Val.

“Well, Val, you used to listen to me, too, but that’s all changed now, apparently.”

Val flung herself out of her chair and stormed over to loom above him. “Is that how it is? The woman you loved was the quiet one, the shy one, the one who always let you dominate every conversation. Now that I’m excited, now that I feel like I’m really myself, well, that’s not the woman you wanted, is that it?”

“It’s not about preferring quiet women or—”

“No, we couldn’t admit to anything so recidivist as that, could we! No, we have to proclaim ourselves to be perfectly virtuous and—”

Miro rose to his feet— not easy, with her so close to his chairand shouted right back in her face. “It’s about being able to finish a sentence now and then!”

“And how many of my sentences did you—”

“Right, turn it right back on—”

“You wanted to have me dispossessed from my own life and put somebody else in—”

“Oh, is that what this is about? Well, be relieved, Val, Jane says—”

“Jane says, Jane says! You said you loved me, but no woman can compete with some bitch that’s always there in your ear, hanging on every word you say and—”

“Now you sound like my mother!” shouted Miro. “Nossa Senhora, I don’t know why Ender followed her into the monastery, she was always griping about how he loved Jane more than he loved her—”

“Well at least he tried to love a woman more than that overgrown appointment book!”

They stood there, face-to-face-or almost so, Miro being somewhat taller, but with his knees bent because he hadn’t quite been able to get all the way out of his chair because she was standing so close and now with her breath in his face, the warmth of her body just a few centimeters away, he thought, This is the moment when …

And then he said it aloud before he had even finished forming the thought, “This is the moment in all the videos when the couple that were screaming at each other suddenly look into each other’s eyes and embrace each other and laugh at their anger and then kiss each other.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the videos,” said Val. “If you lay a hand on me I’ll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it’ll take a heart surgeon to get them out.”

She whirled around and returned to her chair.

Miro eased himself back into his own seat and said— out loud this time, but softly enough that Val would know he wasn’t talking to her— “Now, Jane, where were we before the tornado struck.”

Jane’s answer was drawled out slowly; Miro recognized it as a mannerism of Ender’s when he was being ironically subtle. “You can see now why I might have problems getting the use of any part of her body.”

“Yeah, well, I’m having the same problem,” said Miro silently, but he laughed aloud, a little chuckle that he knew would drive Val crazy. And from the way she stiffened but did not respond at all he knew that it was working.

“I don’t need you two fighting,” said Jane mildly. “I need you working together. Because you may have to work this out without me.”

“As far as I can tell,” said Miro, “you and Val have been working things out without me.”

“Val has been working things out because she’s so full of … whatever she’s full of right now.”

“Ender is what she’s full of,” said Miro.

Val turned around in her chair and looked at him. “Doesn’t it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?”

“Ender is dying,” said Miro. “Or did you already know?”

“Jane mentioned he seemed to be inattentive.”

“Dying,” said Miro again.

“I think it speaks very clearly about the nature of men,” said Val, “that you and Ender both claim to love a flesh-and-blood woman, but in fact you can’t give that woman even a serious fraction of your attention.”

“Yes, well, you have my whole attention, Val,” said Miro. “And as for Ender, if he’s not paying attention to Mother it’s because he’s paying attention to you.”

“To my work, you mean. To the task at hand. Not to me.”

“Well, that’s all you’ve been paying attention to, except when you took a break to rip on me about how I’m talking to Jane and not listening to you.”

“That’s right,” said Val. “You think I don’t see what’s been going on with me this past day? How all of a sudden I can’t shut up about things, I’m so intense I can’t sleep, how I— Ender’s supposedly been the real me all along, only he left me alone till now and that was fine because what he’s doing now is terrifying. Don’t you see that I’m frightened? It’s too much. It’s more than I can stand. I can’t hold that much energy inside me.”

“So talk about it instead of screaming at me,” said Miro.

“But you weren’t listening. I was trying to and you were just subvocalizing to Jane and shutting me out.”

“Because I was sick of hearing endless streams of data and analysis that I could just as easily catch in summary on the computer. How was I supposed to know that you’d take a break in your monologue and start talking about something human?”

“Everything’s bigger than life right now and I don’t have any experience with this. In case you forgot, I haven’t been alive very long. I don’t know things. There are a lot of things I don’t know. I don’t know why I care so much about you, for instance. You’re the one trying to get me replaced as landlord of this body. You’re the one who tunes me out or takes me over but I don’t want that, Miro. I really need a friend right now.”

“So do I,” said Miro.

“But I don’t know how to do it,” said Val.

“I, on the other hand, know perfectly well how to do it,” said Miro. “But the only other time it happened, I fell in love with her and then she turned out to be my half-sister because her father was secretly my mother’s lover, and the man I had thought was my father turned out to be sterile because he was dying of some internally rotting disease. So you can see how I might be hesitant.”

“Valentine was your friend. She is still.”

“Yes,” said Miro. “Yes, I was forgetting. I’ve had two friends.”

“And Ender,” said Val.

“Three,” said Miro. “And my sister Ela makes four. And Human was my friend, so it’s five.”

“See? I think that makes you qualified to show me how to have a friend.”

“To make a friend,” said Miro, echoing his mother’s intonations, “you have to be one.”

“Miro,” said Val. “I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of this world we’re looking for, what we’ll find there. Of what’s going to happen to me if Ender dies. Or if Jane takes over as my— what, my inner light, my puppeteer. Of what it will feel like if you don’t like me anymore.”

“What if I promise to like you no matter what?”

“You can’t make a promise like that.”

“Okay, if I wake up to find you strangling me or smothering me, then I’ll stop liking you.”

“What about drowning?”

“No, I can’t open my eyes under water, so I’d never know it was you.”

They both laughed.

“This is the time in the videos,” said Val, “when the hero and the heroine laugh and then hold each other.”

Jane’s voice interrupted from both their computer terminals. “Sorry to break up a tender moment, but we’ve got a new world here and there are electromagnetic messages being relayed between the planet surface and orbiting artificial objects.”

Immediately they both turned to their terminals and looked at the data Jane was throwing at them.

“It doesn’t take any close analysis,” said Val. “This one is hopping with technology. If it isn’t the descolada planet, I’m betting they know where it is.”

“What I’m worried about is, have they detected us and what are they going to do about it? If they’ve got the technology to put things in space, they might have the technology to shoot things out of space, too.”

“I’m watching for incoming objects,” said Jane.

“Let’s see,” said Val, “if any of these EM-waves are carrying anything that looks like language.”

“Datastreams,” said Jane. “I’m analyzing it for binary patterns. But you know that decoding computerized language requires three or four levels of decoding instead of the normal two and it isn’t easy.”

“I thought binary was simpler than spoken languages,” said Miro.

“It is, when it’s programs and numerical data,” said Jane. “But what if it’s digitized visuals? How long is a line if it’s a rasterized display? How much of a transmission is header material? How much is error-correction data? How much of it is a binary representation of a written representation of a spoken language? What if it’s further encrypted beyond that, to avoid interception? I have no idea what machine is producing the code and no idea what machine is receiving it. So using most of my capacity to work on the problem I’m having a very hard time except that this one—”

A diagram appeared on the front page of the display.

“—I think this one is a representation of a genetic molecule.”

“A genetic molecule?”

“Similar to the descolada,” said Jane. “That is, similar in the way it’s different from Earth and native Lusitanian genetic molecules. Do you think this is a plausible decoding of this?”

A mass of binary digits flashed into the air above their terminals. In a moment it resolved itself into hexadecimal notation. Then into a rasterized image that resembled static interference more than any kind of coherent picture.

“It doesn’t scan well this way. But as a set of vector instructions, I find that it consistently gives me results like this.”

And now picture after picture of genetic molecules appeared on the screen.

“Why would anyone be transmitting genetic information?” said Val.

“Maybe it’s a kind of language,” said Miro.

“Who could read a language like that?” asked Val.

“Maybe the kind of people who could create the descolada,” said Miro.

“You mean they talk by manipulating genes?” said Val.

“Maybe they smell genes,” said Miro. “Only they do it with incredible articulation. Subtlety and shade of meaning. Then when they started sending people up into space, they had to talk to them so they sent pictures and then from the pictures they reconstruct the message and, um, smell it.”

“That’s the most ass-backwards explanation I’ve ever heard,” said Val.

“Well,” said Miro, “like you said, you haven’t lived very long. There are a lot of ass-backwards explanations in the world, and I doubt I hit the jackpot with that one.”

“It’s probably an experiment they’re doing, sending data back and forth,” said Val. “Not all the communications make up diagrams do they, Jane?”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry if I gave that impression. This was just a small class of data streams that I was able to decode in a meaningful way. There’s this stuff that seems to me to be analog rather than digital, and if I make it into sound it’s like this.”

They heard the computers emit a series of staticky screeches and yips.

“Or if I translate it into bursts of light, it looks like this.”

Whereupon their terminals danced with light, pulsing and shifting colors seemingly randomly.

“Who knows what an alien language looks or sounds like?” said Jane.

“I can see this is going to be difficult,” said Miro.

“They do have some pretty good math skills,” said Jane. “The math stuff is easy to catch and I see some glimpses that imply they work at a high level.”

“Just an idle question, Jane. If you weren’t with us, how long would it have taken us to analyze the data and get the results you’ve gotten so far? If we were using just the ship’s computers?”

“Well, if you had to program them for every—”

“No, no, just assuming they had good software,” said Miro.

“Somewhere upwards of seven human generations,” said Jane.

“Seven generations?”

“Of course, you’d never try to do it with just two untrained people and two computers without any useful programs,” said Jane. “You’d put hundreds of people on the project and then it would only take you a few years.”

“And you expect us to carry on this work when they pull the plug on you?”

“I’m hoping to finish the translation problem before I’m toast,” said Jane. “So shut up and let me concentrate for a minute.”

***

Grace Drinker was too busy to see Wang-mu and Peter. Well, actually she did see them, as she shambled from one room to another of her house of sticks and mats. She even waved. But her son went right on explaining how she wasn’t here right now but she would be back later if they wanted to wait, and as long as they were waiting, why not have dinner with the family? It was hard even to be annoyed when the lie was so obvious and the hospitality so generous.

Dinner went a long way toward explaining why Samoans tended to be so large in every dimension. They had to evolve such great size because smaller Samoans must simply have exploded after lunch. They could never have handled dinners. The fruit, the fish, the taro, the sweet potatoes, the fish again, more fruit— Peter and Wang-mu. had thought they were well fed in the resort, but now they realized that the hotel chef was a second-rater compared to what went on in Grace Drinker’s house.

She had a husband, a man of astonishing appetite and heartiness who laughed whenever he wasn’t chewing or talking, and sometimes even then. He seemed to get a kick out of telling these papalagi visitors what different names meant. “My wife’s name, now, it really means, ‘Protector of Drunken People.’”

“It does not,” said his son. “It means ‘One Who Puts Things in Proper Order.’”

“For drinking!” cried the father.

“The last name has nothing to do with the first name.” The son was getting annoyed now. “Not everything has a deep meaning.”

“Children are so easily embarrassed,” said the father. “Ashamed. Must put the best face on everything. The holy island, its name is really ‘Ata Atua, which means, ‘Laugh, God!’”

“Then it would be pronounced ‘Atatua instead of Atatua,” the son corrected again. “Shadow of the God, that’s what the name really means, if it means anything besides just the holy island.”

“My son is a literalist,” said the father. “Everything so serious. Can’t hear a joke when God shouts it in his ear.”

“It’s you always shouting jokes in my ear, Father,” said the son with a smile. “How could I possibly hear the jokes of the God?”

This was the only time the father didn’t laugh. “My son has a dead ear for humor. He thought that was a joke.”

Wang-mu looked at Peter, who was smiling as if he understood what was so funny with these people all the time. She wondered if he had even noticed that no one had introduced these males, except by their relationship to Grace Drinker. Had they no names?

Never mind, the food is good, and even if you don’t get Samoan humor, their laughter and good spirits were so contagious that it was impossible not to feel happy and at ease in their company.

“Do you think we have enough?” asked the father, when his daughter brought in the last fish, a large pink-fleshed sea creature garnished with something that glistened— Wang-mu’s first thought was a sugar glaze, but who would do that to a fish?

At once his children answered him, as if it were a ritual in the family: “Ua lava!”

The name of a philosophy? Or just Samoan slang for “enough already”? Or both at once?

Only when the last fish was half eaten did Grace Drinker herself come in, making no apology for not having spoken to them when she passed them more than two hours before. A breeze off the sea was cooling down the open-walled room, and, outside, light rain fell in fits and starts as the sun kept trying and failing to sink into the water to the west. Grace sat at the low table, directly between Peter and Wang-mu, who had thought they were sitting next to each other with no room for another person, especially not a person of such ample surface area as Grace. But somehow there was room, if not when she began to sit, then certainly by the time she finished the process, and once her greetings were done, she managed what the family had not— she polished off the last fish and ended up licking her fingers and laughing just as maniacally as her husband at all the jokes he told.

And then, suddenly, Grace leaned over to Wang-mu and said, quite seriously, “All right, Chinese girl, what’s your scam?”

“Scam?” asked Wang-mu.

“You mean I have to get the confession from the white boy? They train these boys to lie, you know. If you’re white they don’t let you grow up to adulthood if you haven’t mastered the art of pretending to say one thing while actually intending to do another.”

Peter was appalled.

Suddenly the whole family erupted in laughter. “Bad hospitality!” cried Grace’s husband. “Did you see their faces? They thought she meant it!”

“But I do mean it,” said Grace. “You both intend to lie to me. Arrived on a starship yesterday? From Moskva?” Suddenly she burst into what sounded like pretty convincing Russian, perhaps of the dialect spoken on Moskva.

Wang-mu had no idea how to respond. But she didn’t have to. Peter was the one with Jane in his ear, and he immediately answered her, “I hope to learn Samoan while I’m assigned here on Pacifica. I won’t accomplish that by babbling in Russian, however you might try to goad me with cruel references to my countrymen’s amorous proclivities and lack of pulchritude.”

Grace laughed. “You see, Chinese girl?” she said. “Lie lie lie. And so lofty-sounding as he does it. Of course he has that jewel in his ear to help him. Tell the truth, neither one of you speaks a lick of Russian.”

Peter looked grim and vaguely sick. Wang-mu put him out of his misery-though at the risk of infuriating him. “Of course it’s a lie,” said Wang-mu. “The truth is simply too unbelievable.”

“But the truth is the only thing worth believing, isn’t it?” asked Grace’s son.

“If you can know it,” said Wang-mu. “But if you won’t believe the truth, someone has to help you come up with plausible lies, don’t they?”

“I can make up my own,” said Grace. “Day before yesterday a white boy and a Chinese girl visited my friend Aimaina Hikari on a world at least twenty years’ voyage away. They told him things that disturbed his entire equilibrium so he could hardly function. Today a white boy and a Chinese girl, telling different lies from the ones told by his pair, of course, but nevertheless lying their lips off, these two come to me wanting to get my help or permission or advice about seeing Malu—”

“Malu means ‘being calm,’” added Grace’s husband cheerfully.

“Are you still awake?” asked Grace. “Weren’t you hungry? Didn’t you eat?”

“I’m full but fascinated,” answered her husband. “Go on, expose them!”

“I want to know who you are and how you got here,” said Grace.

“That would be very hard to explain,” said Peter.

“We’ve got minutes and minutes,” said Grace. “Millions of them, really. You’re the ones who seem to have only a few. So much hurry that you jump the gulf from star to star overnight. It strains credulity, of course, since lightspeed is supposed to be an insuperable barrier, but then, not believing you’re the same people my friend saw on the planet Divine Wind also strains credulity, so there we are. Supposing that you really can travel faster than light, what does that tell us about where you’re from? Aimaina takes it for granted that you were sent to him by the gods, more specifically by his ancestors, and he may be right, it’s in the nature of gods to be unpredictable and suddenly do things they’ve never done before. Myself, though, I find that rational explanations always work out better, especially in papers I hope to get published. So the rational explanation is that you come from a real world, not from some heavenly never-never land. And since you can hop from world to world in a moment or a day, you could come from anywhere. But my family and I think you come from Lusitania.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Wang-mu.

“And I’m originally from Earth,” said Peter. “If I’m from anywhere.”

“Aimaina thinks you come from Outside,” said Grace, and for a moment Wang-mu thought the woman must have figured out how Peter came into existence. But then she realized that Grace’s words had a theological meaning, not a literal one. “The land of the gods. But Malu said he’s never seen you there, or if he did he didn’t know it was you. So that leaves me right back where I started. You’re lying about everything, so what good does it do to ask you questions?”

“I told you the truth,” said Wang-mu. “I come from Path. And Peter’s origins, so far as they can be traced to any planet, are on Earth. But the vehicle we came in— that originated on Lusitania.”

Peter’s face went white. She knew he was thinking, Why not just noose ourselves up and hand them the loose ends of the rope? But Wang-mu had to use her own judgment, and in her judgment they were in no danger from Grace Drinker or her family. Indeed, if she meant to turn them in to the authorities, wouldn’t she already have done so?

Grace looked Wang-mu in the eyes and said nothing for a long while. Then: “Good fish, isn’t it?”

“I wondered what the glaze was. Is there sugar in it?”

“Honey and a couple of herbs and actually some pig fat. I hope you aren’t some rare combination of Chinese and Jew or Muslim, because if you are you’re now ritually unclean and I would feel really bad about that, it’s so much trouble getting purified again, or so I’m told, it certainly is in our culture.”

Peter, heartened now by Grace’s lack of concern with their miraculous spaceship, tried to get them back on the subject. “So you’ll let us see Malu?”

“Malu decides who sees Malu, and he says you’re the ones who’ll decide, but that’s just him being enigmatic.”

“Gnomic,” said Wang-mu. Peter winced.

“Not really, not in the sense of being obscure. Malu means to be perfectly clear and for him spiritual things aren’t mystical at all, they’re just a part of life. I myself have never actually walked with the dead or heard the heroes sing their own songs or had a vision of the creation, but I have no doubt that Malu has.”

“I thought you were a scholar,” said Peter.

“If you want to talk to the scholar Grace Drinker,” she said, “read my papers and take a class. I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

“We do,” said Wang-mu quickly. “Peter’s in a hurry. We have several deadlines.”

“The Lusitania Fleet, now, I imagine that’s one of them. But not quite so urgent as another. The computer shutdown that’s been ordered.

Peter stiffened. “The order has been given?”

“Oh, it was given weeks ago,” said Grace, looking puzzled. Then: “Oh, you poor dear, I don’t mean the actual go-ahead. I mean the order telling us how to prepare. You surely knew about that one.”

Peter nodded and relaxed, glum again.

“I think you want to talk to Malu before the ansible connections are shut down. Though why would that matter?” she said, thinking aloud. “After all, if you can travel faster than light, you could simply go and deliver your message yourself. Unless—”

Her son offered a suggestion: “They have to deliver their message to a lot of different worlds.”

“Or a lot of different gods!” cried his father, who then laughed uproariously at what certainly seemed to Wang-mu to be a feeble joke.

“Or,” said the daughter, who was now lying down beside the table, occasionally belching as she let the enormous dinner digest. “Or, they need the ansible connections in order to do their fast travel trick.”

“Or,” said Grace, looking at Peter, who had instinctively moved his hand to touch the jewel in his ear, “you’re connected to the very virus that we’re shutting down all the computers in order to eliminate, and that has something to do with your faster-than-light travel.”

“It’s not a virus,” said Wang-mu. “It’s a person. A living entity. And you’re going to help Congress kill her, even though she’s the only one of her kind and she’s never harmed anybody.”

“It makes them nervous when something— or, if you prefer, somebody— makes their fleet disappear.”

“It’s still there,” said Wang-mu.

“Let’s not fight,” said Grace. “Let’s just say that now that I’ve found you willing to tell the truth, perhaps it will be worthwhile for Malu to take the time to let you hear it.”

“He has the truth?” asked Peter.

“No,” said Grace, “but he knows where it’s kept and he can get a glimpse now and then and tell us what he saw. I think that’s still pretty good.”

“And we can see him?”

“You’d have to spend a week purifying yourselves before you can set foot on Atatua—”

“Impure feet tickling the Gods!” cried her husband, laughing uproariously. “That’s why they call it the Island of the Laughing God!”

Peter shifted uncomfortably.

“Don’t you like my husband’s jokes?” asked Grace.

“No, I think— I mean, they’re simply not— I don’t get them, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s because they’re not very funny,” said Grace. “But my husband is cheerfully determined to keep laughing through all this so he doesn’t get angry at you and kill you with his bare hands.”

Wang-mu gasped, for she knew at once that this was true; without realizing it, she had been aware all along of the rage seething under the huge man’s laughter, and when she looked at his calloused, massive hands, she realized that he could surely tear her apart without even breaking into a sweat.

“Why would you threaten us with death?” asked Peter, acting more belligerent than Wang-mu wished.

“The opposite!” said Grace. “I tell you that my husband is determined not to let rage at your audacity and blasphemy control his behavior. To try to visit Atatua without even taking the trouble to learn that letting you set foot there, uncleansed and uninvited, would shame us and filthy us as a people for a hundred generations— I think he’s doing rather well not to have taken a blood oath against you.”

“We didn’t know,” said Wang-mu.

“He knew,” said Grace. “Because he’s got the all-hearing ear.”

Peter blushed. “I hear what she says to me,” he said, “but I can’t hear what she chooses not to say.”

“So… you were being led. And Aimaina is right, you do serve a higher being. Voluntarily? Or are you being coerced?”

“That’s a stupid question, Mama,” said her daughter, belching again. “If they are coerced, how could they possibly tell you?”

“People can say as much by what they don’t say,” answered Grace, “which you’d know if you’d sit up and look at their eloquent faces, these lying visitors from other planets.”

“She’s not a higher being,” said Wang-mu. “Not like you mean it. Not a god. Though she does have a lot of control and she knows a lot of things. But she’s not omnipotent or anything, and she doesn’t know everything, and sometimes she’s even wrong, and I’m not sure she’s always good, either, so we can’t really call her a god because she’s not perfect.”

Grace shook her head. “I wasn’t talking about some Platonic god, some ethereal perfection that can never be understood, only apprehended. Not some Nicene paradoxical being whose existence is perpetually contradicted by his nonexistence. Your higher being, this jewel-friend your partner wears like a parasite— except who is sucking life from whom, eh? —she could well be a god in the sense that we Samoans use the word. You might be her hero servants. You might be her incarnation, for all I know.”

“But you’re a scholar,” said Wang-mu. “Like my teacher Han Fei-tzu, who discovered that what we used to call gods were really just genetically induced obsessions that we interpreted in such a way as to maintain our obedience to—”

“Just because your gods don’t exist doesn’t mean mine don’t,” said Grace.

“She must have tromped through acres of dead gods just to get here!” cried Grace’s husband, laughing uproariously. Only now that Wang-mu knew what his laughter really meant, his laugh filled her with fear.

Grace reached out and laid a huge, heavy arm across her slight shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “My husband is a civilized man and he’s never killed anybody.”

“Not for lack of trying!” he bellowed. “No, that was a joke!” He almost wept with laughter.

“You can’t go see Malu,” said Grace, “because we would have to purify you and I don’t think you’re ready to make the promises you’d have to make— and I especially don’t believe you’re ready to make them and actually mean what you say. And those are promises that must be kept. So Malu is coming here. He’s being rowed to this island right now— no motors for him, so I want you to know exactly how many people are sweating for hours and hours just so you can have your chat with him. I just want to tell you this— you are being given an extraordinary honor, and I urge you not to look down your noses at him and listen to him with some sort of academic or scientific superciliousness. I’ve met a lot of famous people, some of them even rather smart, but this is the wisest man you’ll ever know, and if you find yourself getting bored just keep this in mind: Malu isn’t stupid enough to think you can isolate facts from their context and have them still be true. So he always puts the things he says in their full context, and if that means you’ll have to listen to a whole history of the human race from beginning to now before he says anything you think is pertinent, well, I suggest you just shut up and listen, because most of the time the best stuff he says is accidental and irrelevant and you’re damn lucky if you have brains enough to notice what it is. Have I made myself clear?”

Wang-mu wished with all her heart that she had eaten less. She felt quite nauseated with dread right now, and if she did throw up, she was sure it would take half an hour just to get it all back out of her.

Peter, though, simply nodded calmly. “We didn’t understand, Grace, even though my partner read some of your writings. We thought we had come to speak to a philosopher, like Aimaina, or a scholar, like you. But now I see that we’ve come to listen to a man of wisdom whose experience reaches into realms that we have never seen or even dreamed of seeing, and we will listen silently until he asks us to ask him questions, and we’ll trust him to know better than we know ourselves what it is we need to hear.”

Wang-mu recognized complete surrender when she saw it, and she was grateful to see that everyone at the table was nodding happily and no one felt obliged to tell a joke.

“We’re also grateful that the honorable one has sacrificed so much, as have so many others, to come personally to us and bless us with wisdom that we do not deserve to receive.”

To Wang-mu’s horror, Grace laughed out loud at her, instead of nodding respectfully.

“Overkill,” Peter murmured.

“Oh, don’t criticize her,” said Grace. “She’s Chinese. From Path, right? And I’ll bet you used to be a servant. How could you possibly have learned the difference between respect and obsequiousness? Masters never are content with mere respect from their servants.”

“But my master was,” said Wang-mu, trying to defend Han Fei-Tzu.

“As is my master,” said Grace. “As you will see, when you meet him.”

***

“Time’s up,” said Jane.

Miro and Val looked up, bleary-eyed, from the documents they were poring over at Miro’s computer, to see that in the air above Val’s computer, Jane’s virtual face now hovered, watching them.

“We’ve been passive observers as long as they’ll let us,” said Jane. “But now there are three spacecraft up in the outer atmosphere, rising toward us. I don’t think any of them are merely remote-controlled weapons, but I can’t be certain of it. And they seem to be directing some transmissions to us in particular, the same messages over and over.”

“What message?”

“It’s the genetic molecule stuff,” said Jane. “I can tell you the composition of the molecules, but I haven’t a clue what they mean.”

“When do their interceptors reach us?”

“Three minutes, plus or minus. They’re zig-zagging evasively, now that they’ve escaped the gravity well.”

Miro nodded. “My sister Quara was convinced that much of the descolada virus consisted of language. I think now we can conclusively say that she was right. It does carry a meaning. She was wrong about the virus being sentient, though, I think. My guess now is that the descolada kept recomposing those sections of itself that constituted a report.”

“A report,” echoed Val. “That makes sense. To tell its makers what it has done with the world it … probed.”

“So the question is,” said Miro, “do we simply disappear and let them ponder the miracle of our sudden arrival and vanishing? Or do we first have Jane broadcast to them the entire, um, text of the descolada virus?”

“Dangerous,” said Val. “The message it contains may also tell these people everything they want to know about human genes. After all, we’re one of the creatures the descolada worked on, and its message is going to tell all of our strategies for controlling it.”

“Except the last one,” said Miro. “Because Jane won’t send them the descolada as it exists now, completely tamed and controlled— that would be inviting them to revise it to circumvent our alterations.”