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“Miro’s right,” said Quara, pouncing. Miro winced. He hated being on Quara’s side, because now everybody’s annoyance with her would rub off on him. “Either the cows are already out of the barn, so why bother shutting the door, or they can’t get the door open anyway, so why put a lock on it?”

“What do you know about cows?” asked Ela disdainfully.

“After all these years of living and working with you,” said Quara nastily, “I’d say I’m an expert.”

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“Girls, girls,” said Jane. “Get a grip on yourselves.”

Again, everyone but Miro turned to her in surprise. Val wouldn’t have spoken up during a family conflict like this; nor would the Jane they knew— though of course Miro was used to her speaking up all the time.

“We all know the risks of giving them information about us,” said Miro. “We also know that we’re making no headway and maybe we’ll be able to learn something about the way this language works after having some give and take.”

“It’s not give and take,” said Jane. “It’s give and give. We give them information they probably can’t get any other way, information that may well tell them everything they need to know in order to create new viruses that might well circumvent all our weapons against them. But since we have no idea how that information is coded, or even where each specific datum is located, how can we interpret the answer? Besides, what if the answer is a new virus to destroy us?”

“They’re sending us the information necessary to construct the virus,” said Quara, her voice thick with contempt, as if she thought Jane were the stupidest person who ever lived, instead of arguably the most godlike in her brilliance. “But we’re not going to build it. As long as it’s just a graphic representation on a computer screen—”

“That’s it,” said Ela.

“What’s it?” said Quara. It was her turn to be annoyed now, for obviously Ela was a step ahead of her on something.

“They aren’t taking these signals and putting them up on a computer screen. We do that because we have a language written with symbols that we see with the naked eye. But they must read these broadcast signals more directly. The code comes in, and they somehow interpret it by following the instruction to make the molecule that’s described in the broadcast. Then they ‘read’ it by— what, smelling it? Swallowing it? The point is, if genetic molecules are their language, then they must somehow take them into their body as appropriately as the way we get the images of our writing from the paper into our eyes.”

“I see,” said Jane. “You’re hypothesizing that they’re expecting us to make a molecule out of what they send us, instead of just reading it on a screen and trying to abstract it and intellectualize it.”

“For all we know,” said Ela, “this could be how they discipline people. Or attack them. Send them a message. If they ‘listen’ they have to do it by reading the molecule into their bodies and letting it have its effect on them. So if the effect is poison or a killing disease, just hearing the message subjects them to the discipline. It’s as if all our language had to be tapped out on the back of our neck. To listen, we’d have to lie down and expose ourself to whatever tool they chose to use to send the message. If it’s a finger or a feather, well and good— but if it’s a broadaxe or a machete or a sledgehammer, too bad for us.”

“It doesn’t even have to be fatal,” said Quara, her rivalry with Ela forgotten as she developed the idea in her own mind. “The molecules could be behavior-altering devices. To hear is literally to obey.”

“I don’t know if you’re right in the particulars,” said Jane. “But it gives the experiment much more potential for success. And it suggests that they might not have a delivery system that can attack us directly. That changes the probable risk.”

“And people say you can’t think well without your computer,” said Miro.

At once he was embarrassed. He had inadvertently spoken to her as flippantly as he used to when he subvocalized so she could overhear him through the jewel. But now it sounded strangely cold of him, to tease her about having lost her computer network. He could joke that way with Jane-in-the-jewel. But Jane-in-the-flesh was a different matter. She was now a human person. With feelings that had to be worried about.

Jane had feelings all along, thought Miro. But I didn’t think much about them because … because I didn’t have to. Because I didn’t see her. Because she wasn’t, in a sense, real to me.

“I just meant …” Miro said. “I just mean, good thinking.”

“Thank you,” said Jane. There wasn’t a trace of irony in her voice, but Miro knew the irony was there all the same, because it was inherent in the situation. Miro, this uniprocessing human, was telling this brilliant being that she had thought well— as if he were fit to judge her.

Suddenly he was angry, not at Jane, but at himself. Why should he have to watch every word he said, just because she had not acquired this body in the normal way? She may not have been human before, but she was certainly human now, and could be talked to like a human. If she was somehow different from other human beings, so what? All human beings were different from all others, and yet to be decent and polite, wasn’t he supposed to treat everyone basically alike? Wouldn’t he say, “Do you see what I mean?” to a blind person, expecting the metaphorical use of “see” to be taken without umbrage? Well, why not say, “Good thinking,” to Jane? Just because her thought processes were unfathomably deep to a human didn’t mean that a human couldn’t use a standard expression of agreement and approval when speaking to her.

Looking at her now, Miro could see a kind of sadness in her eyes. No doubt it came from his obvious confusion— after joking with her as he always had, suddenly he was embarrassed, suddenly he backtracked. That was why her “Thank you” had been ironic. Because she wanted him to be natural with her, and he couldn’t.

No, he hadn’t been natural, but he certainly could.

And what did it matter, anyway? They were here to solve the problem of the descoladores, not to work out the kinks in their personal relationships after the wholesale body swap.

“Do I take it we have agreement?” asked Ela. “To send messages encoded with the information contained on the descolada virus?”

“The first one only,” said Jane. “At least to start.”

“And when they answer,” said Ela, “I’ll try to run a simulation of what would happen if we constructed and ingested the molecule they send us.”

“If they send us one,” said Miro. “If we’re even on the right track.”

“Well aren’t you Mr. Cheer,” said Quara.

“I’m Mr. Scared-From-Ass-To-Ankles,” said Miro. “Whereas you are just plain old Miss Ass.”

“Can’t we all get along?” said Jane, whining, teasing. “Can’t we all be friends?”

Quara whirled on her. “Listen, you! I don’t care what kind of superbrain you used to be, you just stay out of family conversations, do you hear?”

“Look around, Quara!” Miro snapped at her. “If she stayed out of family conversations, when could she talk?”

Firequencher raised his hand. “I’ve been staying out of family conversations. Do I get credit for that?”

Jane gestured to quell both Miro and Firequencher. “Quara,” she said quietly, “I’ll tell you the real difference between me and your brother and sister here. They’re used to you because they’ve known you all your life. They’re loyal to you because you and they went through some lousy experiences in your family. They’re patient with your childish outbursts and your asinine bullheadedness because they tell themselves, over and over, she can’t help it, she had such a troubled childhood. But I’m not a family member, Quara. I, however, as someone who has observed you in times of crisis for some time, am not afraid to tell you my candid conclusions. You are quite brilliant and very good at what you do. You are often perceptive and creative, and you drive toward solutions with astonishing directness and perseverence.”

“Excuse me,” said Quara, “are you telling me off or what?”

“But,” said Jane, “you are not smart and creative and clever and direct and perseverent enough to make it worth putting up with more than fifteen seconds of the egregious bullshit you heap on your family and everyone else around you every minute you’re awake. So you had a lousy childhood. That was a few years ago, and you are expected now to put that behind you and get along with other people like a normally courteous adult.”

“In other words,” said Quara, “you don’t like having to admit that anybody but you might be smart enough to have an idea that you didn’t think of.”

“You aren’t understanding me,” said Jane. “I’m not your sister. I’m not even, technically speaking, human. If this ship ever gets back to Lusitania, it will be because I, with my mind, send it there. Do you get that? Do you understand the difference between us? Can you send even one fleck of dust from your lap to mine?”

“I don’t notice you sending starships anywhere right at the moment,” said Quara triumphantly.

“You continue to attempt to score points off me without realizing that I am not having an argument with you or even a discussion. What you say to me right now is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what I’m saying to you. And I’m saying that while your siblings put up with the unendurable from you, I will not. Keep on the way you’re going, you spoiled little baby, and when this starship goes back to Lusitania you might not be on it.”

The look on Quara’s face almost made Miro laugh aloud. He knew, however, that this would not be a wise moment to express his mirth.

“She’s threatening me,” said Quara to the others. “Do you hear this? She’s trying to coerce me by threatening to kill me.”

“I would never kill you,” said Jane. “But I might be unable to conceive of your presence on this starship when I push it Outside and then pull it back In. The thought of you might be so unendurable that my unconscious mind would reject that thought and exclude you. I really don’t understand, consciously, how the whole thing works. I don’t know how it relates to my feelings. I’ve never tried to transport anybody I really hated before. I would certainly try to bring you along with the others, if only because, for reasons passing understanding, Miro and Ela would probably be testy with me if I didn’t. But trying isn’t necessarily succeeding. So I suggest, Quara, that you expend some effort on trying to be a little less loathsome.”

“So that’s what power is to you,” said Quara. “A chance to push other people around and act like the queen.”

“You really can’t do it, can you?” said Jane.

“Can’t what?” said Quara. “Can’t bow down and kiss your feet?”

“Can’t shut up to save your own life.”

“I’m trying to solve the problem of communicating with an alien species, and you’re busy worrying about whether I’m nice enough to you.”

“But Quara,” said Jane, “hasn’t it ever occurred to you that once they get to know you, even the aliens will wish you had never learned their language?”

“I’m certainly wishing you had never learned mine,” said Quara. “You’re certainly full of yourself, now that you have this pretty little body to play around with. Well, you’re not queen of the universe and I’m not going to dance through hoops for you. It wasn’t my idea to come on this voyage, but I’m here— I’m here, the whole obnoxious package— and if there’s something about me that you don’t like, why don’t you shut up about it? And as long as we’re making threats, I think that if you push me too far I’ll rearrange your face more to my liking. Is that clear?”

Jane unstrapped herself from her seat and drifted from the main cabin into the corridor leading into the storage compartments of the shuttle. Miro followed her, ignoring Quara as she said to the others, “Can you believe how she talked to me? Who does she think she is, judging who’s too irritating to live?”

Miro followed Jane into a storage compartment. She was clinging to a handhold on the far wall, bent over and heaving in a way that made Miro wonder if she was throwing up. But no. She was crying. Or rather, she was so enraged that her body was sobbing and producing tears from the sheer uncontainability of the emotion. Miro touched her shoulder to try to calm her. She recoiled.

For a moment he almost said, Fine, have it your way; then he would have left, angry himself, frustrated that she wouldn’t accept his comfort. But then he remembered that she had never been this angry before. She had never had to deal with a body that responded like this. At first, when she began rebuking Quara, Miro had thought, It’s about time somebody laid it on the line. But when the argument went on and on, Miro realized that it wasn’t Quara who was out of control, it was Jane. She didn’t know how to deal with her emotions. She didn’t know when it wasn’t worth going on. She felt what she was feeling, and she didn’t know how to do anything but express it.

“That was hard,” Miro said. “Cutting off the argument and coming in here.”

“I wanted to kill her,” said Jane. Her voice was almost unintelligible from the weeping, from the savage tension in her body. “I’ve never felt anything like it. I wanted to get out of the chair and tear her apart with my bare hands.”

“Welcome to the club,” said Miro.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I really wanted to do it. I felt my muscles flexing, I was ready to do it. I was going to do it.”

“As I said. Quara makes us all feel that way.”

“No,” said Jane. “Not like this. You all stay calm, you all stay in control.”

“And you will, too,” said Miro, “when you have a little more practice.”

Jane lifted her head, leaned it back, shook it. Her hair swung weightlessly free in the air. “Do you really feel this?”

“All of us do,” said Miro. “That’s why we have a childhood— to learn to get over our violent tendencies. But they’re in us all. Chimps and baboons do it. All the primates. We display. We have to express our rage physically.”

“But you don’t. You stay so calm. You let her spout off and say these horrible—”

“Because it’s not worth the trouble of stopping her,” said Miro. “She pays the price for it. She’s desperately lonely and nobody deliberately seeks an opportunity to spend time in her company.”

“Which is the only reason she isn’t dead.”

“That’s right,” said Miro. “That’s what civilized people dothey avoid the circumstance that enrages them. Or if they can’t avoid it, they detach. That’s what Ela and I do, mostly. We just detach. We just let her provocations roll over us.”

“I can’t do it,” said Jane. “It was so simple before I felt these things. I could tune her out.”

“That’s it,” said Miro. “That’s what we do. We tune her out.”

“It’s more complicated than I thought,” said Jane. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t have much choice right now, do you,” he said.

“Miro, I’m so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and … now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement.”

“It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It’s the neighborly way to live.”

It took a moment— a sob, and then a hiccough— but then she did laugh. A sweet, soft chuckle that was such a welcome sound to Miro. Welcome because it was a voice he knew and loved, a laugh that he liked to hear. And it was his dear friend who was doing the laughing. His dear friend Jane. The laugh, the voice of his beloved Val. One person now. After all this time, he could reach out his hand and touch Jane, who had always been impossibly far away. Like having a friendship over the telephone and finally meeting face-to-face.

He touched her again, and she took his hand and held it.

“I’m sorry I let my own weakness get in the way of what we’re doing,” said Jane.

“You’re only human,” said Miro.

She looked at him, searched his face for irony, for bitterness.

“I mean it,” said Miro. “The price of having these emotions, these passions, is that you have to control them, you have to bear them when they’re too strong to bear. You’re only human now. You’ll never make these feelings go away. You just have to learn not to act on them.”

“Quara never learned.”

“Quara learned, all right,” said Miro. “It’s just my opinion, but Quara loved Marcao, adored him, and when he died and the rest of us felt so liberated, she was lost. What she does now, this constant provocation— she’s asking somebody to abuse her. To hit her. The way Marcao always hit Mother whenever he was provoked. I think in some perverse way Quara was always jealous of Mother when she got to go off alone with Papa, and even though she finally figured out that he was beating her up, when Quara wanted her papa back the only way she knew of to demand his attention was— this mouth of hers.” Miro laughed bitterly. “It reminds me of Mother, to tell the truth. You’ve never heard her, but in the old days, when she was trapped in marriage with Marcao and having Libo’s babies— oh, she had a mouth on her. I’d sit there and listen to her provoking Marcao, goading him, stabbing at him, until he’d hit her— and I’d think, Don’t you dare lay a hand on my mother, and at the same time I’d absolutely understand his impotent rage, because he could never, never, never say anything that would shut her up. Only his fist could do it. And Quara has that mouth, and needs that rage.”

“Well, how happy for us all, then, that I gave her just what she needed.”

Miro laughed. “But she didn’t need it from you. She needed it from Marcao, and he’s dead.”

And then, suddenly, Jane burst into real tears. Tears of grief, and she turned to Miro and clung to him.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Miro,” she said. “Ender’s dead. I’ll never see him again. I have a body at last, I have eyes to see him, and he isn’t there.”

Miro was stunned. Of course she missed Ender. She had thousands of years with him, and only a few years, really, with me. How could I have thought she could love me? How can I ever hope to compare with Ender Wiggin? What am I, compared to the man who commanded fleets, who transformed the minds of trillions of people with his books, his speakings, his insight, his ability to see into the hearts of other people and speak their own most private stories back to them? And yet even as he resented Ender, even as he envied him because Jane would always love him more and Miro couldn’t hope to compete with him even in death, despite these feelings it finally came home to him that yes, Ender was dead. Ender, who had transformed his family, who had been a true friend to him, who had been the only man in Miro’s life that he longed with all his heart to be, Ender was gone. Miro’s tears of grief flowed along with Jane’s.

“I’m sorry,” said Jane. “I can’t control any of my emotions.”

“Yes, well, it’s a common failing, actually,” said Miro.

She reached up and touched the tears on his cheek. Then she touched her damp finger to her own cheek. The tears commingled. “Do you know why I thought of Ender right then?” she said. “Because you’re so much like him. Quara annoys you as much as she annoys anyone, and yet you look past that and see what her needs are, why she says and does these things. No, no, relax, Miro, I’m not expecting you to be like Ender, I’m just saying that one of the things I liked best about him is also in you— that’s not bad, is it? The compassionate perception— I may be new at being human, but I’m pretty sure that’s a rare commodity.”

“I don’t know,” said Miro. “The only person I’m feeling compassion for right now is me. They call it self-pity, and it isn’t an attractive trait.”

“Why are you feeling sorry for yourself?”

“Because you’ll go on needing Ender all your life, and all you’ll ever find is poor substitutes, like me.”

She held him tighter then. She was the one giving comfort now. “Oh, Miro, maybe that’s true. But if it is, it’s true the way it’s true that Quara is still trying to get her father’s attention. You never stop needing your father or your mother, isn’t that right? You never stop reacting to them, even when they’re dead.”

Father? That had never crossed Miro’s mind before. Jane loved Ender, deeply, yes, loved him forever— but as a father?

“I can’t be your father,” said Miro. “I can’t take his place.” But what he was really doing was making sure he had understood her. Ender was her father?

“I don’t want you to be my father,” said Jane. “I still have all these old Val-feelings, you know. I mean, you and I were friends, right? That was very important to me. But now I have this Val body, and when you touch me, it keeps feeling like the answer to a prayer.” At once she regretted saying it. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miro, I know you miss her.”

“I do,” said Miro. “But then, it’s hard to miss her quite the way I might, since you do look a lot like her. And you sound like her. And here I am holding you the way I wanted to hold her, and if that sounds awful because I’m supposedly comforting you and I shouldn’t be thinking of base desires, well then I’m just an awful kind of guy, right?”

“Awful,” she said. “I’m ashamed to know you.” And she kissed him. Sweetly, awkwardly.

He remembered his first kiss with Ouanda years ago, when he was young and didn’t know how badly things could turn out. They had both been awkward then, new, clumsy. Young. Jane, now, Jane was one of the oldest creatures in the universe. But also one of the youngest. And Val— there would be no reflexes in the Val body for Jane to draw upon, for in Val’s short life, what chance had she had to find love?

“Was that even close to the way humans do that?” asked Jane.

“That was exactly the way humans sometimes do it,” said Miro. “Which isn’t surprising, since we’re both human.”

“Am I betraying Ender, to grieve for him one moment, and then be so happy to have you holding me the next?”

“Am I betraying him, to be so happy only hours after he died?”

“Only he’s not dead,” said Jane. “I know where he is. I chased him there.”

“If he’s exactly the same person he was,” said Miro, “then what a shame. Because good as he was, he wasn’t happy. He had his moments, but he was never— what, he was never really at peace. Wouldn’t it be nice if Peter could live out a full life without ever having to bear the guilt of xenocide? Without ever having to feel the weight of all of humanity on his shoulders?”

“Speaking of which,” said Jane, “we have work to do.”

“We also have lives to live,” said Miro. “I’m not going to be sorry we had this encounter. Even if it took Quara’s bitchiness to make it happen.”

“Let’s do the civilized thing,” said Jane. “Let’s get married. Let’s have babies. I do want to be human, Miro, I want to do everything. I want to be part of human life from edge to edge. And I want to do it all with you.”

“Is this a proposal?” asked Miro.

“I died and was reborn only a dozen hours ago,” said Jane. “My— hell, I can call him my father, can’t I? —my father died, too. Life is short, I feel how short it is: after three thousand years, all of them intense, it still feels too short. I’m in a hurry. And you, haven’t you wasted enough time, too? Aren’t you ready?”

“But I don’t have a ring.”

“We have something much better than a ring,” said Jane. She touched her cheek again, where she had put his tear. It was still damp; still damp, too, when she touched the finger now to his cheek. “I’ve had your tears with mine, and you’ve had mine with yours. I think that’s more intimate even than a kiss.”

“Maybe,” said Miro. “But not as fun.”

“This emotion I’m feeling now, this is love, right?”

“I don’t know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you’re with me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s influenza,” said Miro. “Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.”

She shoved him, and in the weightless starship the movement sent him helplessly into midair until he struck another surface. “What?” he said, pretending innocence. “What did I say?”

She pushed herself away from the wall and went to the door. “Come on,” she said. “Back to work.”

“Let’s not announce our engagement,” he said softly.

“Why not?” she asked. “Ashamed already?”

“No,” he said. “Maybe it’s petty of me, but when we announce it, I don’t want Quara there.”

“That’s very small of you,” said Jane. “You need to be more magnanimous and patient, like me.”

“I know,” said Miro. “I’m trying to learn.”

They drifted back into the main chamber of the shuttle. The others were working on preparing their genetic message for broadcast on the frequency that the descoladores had used to challenge them when they first showed up closer to the planet. They all looked up. Ela smiled wanly. Firequencher waved cheerfully.

Quara tossed her head. “Well I hope we’re done with that little emotional outburst,” she said.

Miro could feel Jane seethe at the remark. But Jane said nothing. And when they were both sitting down and strapped back into their seats, they looked at each other, and Jane winked.

“I saw that,” said Quara.

“We meant you to,” said Miro.

“Grow up,” Quara said disdainfully.

An hour later they sent their message. And at once they were inundated with answers that they could not understand, but had to. There was no time for quarreling then, or for love, or for grief. There was only language, thick, broad fields of alien messages that had to be understood somehow, by them, right now.

Chapter 13 — “TILL DEATH ENDS ALL SURPRISES”

“I can’t say that I’ve much enjoyed the work the gods required of me. My only real pleasure was my days of schooling, in those hours between the gods’ sharp summonses. I am gladly at their service, always, but oh it was so sweet to learn how wide the universe could be, to test myself against my teachers, and to fail sometimes without much consequence.”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

“Do you want to come to the university and watch us turn on our new godproof computer network?” asked Grace.

Of course Peter and Wang-mu wanted to. But to their surprise, Malu cackled with delight and insisted that he must go, too. The god once dwelt in computers, didn’t she? And if she found her way back, shouldn’t Malu be there to greet her?

This complicated matters a little— for Malu to visit the university required notifying the president so he could assemble a proper welcome. This was not needed for Malu, who was neither vain nor much impressed with ceremonies that didn’t have some immediate purpose. The point was to show the Samoan people that the university still had proper respect for the old ways, of which Malu was the most revered protector and practitioner.

From luaus of fruit and fish on the beach, from open fires, palm mats, and thatch-roof huts, to a hovercar, a highway, and the brightpainted buildings of the modern university— it felt to Wang-mu like a journey through the history of the human race. And yet she had already made that journey once before, from Path; it seemed a part of her life, to step from the ancient to the modern, back and forth. She felt rather sorry for those who knew only one and not the other. It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.

Peter and Wang-mu were discreetly dropped off before the hovercar took Malu to the official reception. Grace’s son took them on a brief tour of the brand-new computer facility. “These new computers all follow the protocols sent to us from Starways Congress. There will be no more direct connections between computer networks and ansibles. Rather there must be a time delay, with each infopacket inspected by referee software that will catch unauthorized piggybacking.”

“In other words,” said Peter, “Jane will never get back in.”

“That’s the plan.” The boy— for despite his size, that’s what he seemed to be— grinned broadly. “All perfect, all new, all in total compliance.”

Wang-mu felt sick inside. This is how it would be all over the Hundred Worlds— Jane blocked out of everything. And without access to the enormous computing capacity of the combined networks of all of human civilization, how could she possibly regain the power to pop a starship Out and In again? Wang-mu had been glad enough to leave Path. But she was by no means certain that Pacifica was the world where she wanted to live the rest of her life. Especially if she was to stay with Peter, for there was no chance he would be content for long with the slower, more lackadaisical timeflow of life in the islands. Truth be known, it was too slow for her, too. She loved her time with the Samoans, but the impatience to be doing something was growing inside her. Perhaps those who grew up among these people might somehow sublimate their ambition, or perhaps there was something in the racial genotype that suppressed it or replaced it, but Wang-mu’s incessant drive to strengthen and expand her role in life was certainly not going to go away just because of a luau on the beach, however much she enjoyed it and would treasure the memory of it.

The tour wasn’t over yet, of course, and Wang-mu dutifully followed Grace’s son wherever he led. But she hardly paid attention beyond what was needed to make polite responses. Peter seemed even more distracted, and Wang-mu could guess why. He would have not only the same feelings Wang-mu had, but he must also be grieving for the loss of connection with Jane through the jewel in his ear. If she did not recover her ability to control data flow through the communications satellites orbiting this world, he would not hear her voice again.

They came to an older section of campus, some rundown buildings in a more utilitarian architectural style. “Nobody likes coming here,” he said, “because it reminds them of how recently our university became anything more than a school for training engineers and teachers. This building is three hundred years old. Come inside.”

“Do we have to?” asked Wang-mu. “I mean, is it necessary? I think we get the idea from the outside.”

“Oh, but I think you want to see this place. Very interesting, because it preserves some of the old ways of doing things.”

Wang-mu of course agreed to follow, as courtesy required, and Peter wordlessly went along. They came inside and heard the humming of ancient air-conditioning systems and felt the harsh refrigerated air. “These are the old ways?” asked Wang-mu. “Not as old as life on the beach, I think.”

“Not as old, that’s true,” said their guide. “But then, we’re not preserving the same thing here.”

They came into a large room with hundreds and hundreds of computers arranged in crowded rows along tables that stretched from end to end. There was no room for anyone to sit at these machines; there was barely enough space between the tables for technicians to slide along to tend to them. All the computers were on, but the air above all the terminals was empty, giving no clue about what was going on inside them.

“We had to do something with all those old computers that Starways Congress made us take offline. So we put them here. And also the old computers from most of the other universities and businesses in the islands— Hawaiian, Tahitian, Maori, on and on— everyone helped. It goes up six stories, every floor just like this, and three other buildings, though this one is the biggest.”

“Jane,” said Peter, and he smiled.

“Here’s where we stored everything she gave us. Of course, on the record these computers are not connected by any network. They are only used for training students. But Congress inspectors never come here. They saw all they wanted to see when they looked at our new installation. Up to code, complying with the rules— we are obedient and loyal citizens! Here, though, I’m afraid there have been some oversights. For instance, there seems to be an intermittent connection with the university’s ansible. Whenever the ansible is actually passing messages offworld, it is connected to no computers except through the official safeguarded time-delayed link. But when the ansible is connected to a handful of eccentric destinations— the Samoan satellite, for instance, or a certain faroff colony that is supposedly incommunicado to all ansibles in the Hundred Worlds— then an old forgotten connection kicks in, and the ansible has complete use of all of this.”

Peter laughed with genuine mirth. Wang-mu loved the sound of it, but also felt just a little jealousy at the thought that Jane might well come back to him.

“And another odd thing,” said Grace’s son. “One of the new computers has been installed here, only there’ve been some alterations. It doesn’t seem to report correctly to the master program. It neglects to inform that master program that there is a hyperfast realtime link to this nonexistent old-style network. It’s a shame that it doesn’t report on this, because of course it allows a completely illegal connection between this old, ansible-connected network and the new godproof system. And so requests for information can be passed, and they’ll look perfectly legal to any inspection software, since they come from this perfectly legal but astonishingly flawed new computer.”

Peter was grinning broadly. “Well, somebody had to work pretty fast to get this done.”

“Malu told us that the god was going to die, but between us and the god we were able to devise a plan. Now the only question is— can she find her way back here?”

“I think she will,” said Peter. “Of course, this isn’t what she used to have, not even a small fraction of it.”

“We understand that she has a couple of similar installations here and there. Not many, you’re right, and the new time-delay barriers will make it so that yes, she has access to all the information, but she can’t use most of the new networks as part of her thought processes. Still, it’s something. Maybe it’s enough.”

“You knew who we were before we got here,” said Wang-mu. “You were already part of Jane’s work.”

“I think the evidence speaks for itself,” said Grace’s son.

“Then why did Jane bring us here?” asked Wang-mu. “What was all this nonsense about needing to have us here so we could stop the Lusitania Fleet?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “And I doubt anyone here knows, either. Maybe, though, Jane simply wanted us in a friendly environment, so she could find us again. I doubt there’s anything like this on Divine Wind.”

“And maybe,” Wang-mu said, following her own speculations, “maybe she wanted you here, with Malu and Grace, when the time came for her to die.”

“And for me to die as well,” said Peter. “Meaning me as Ender, of course.”

“And maybe,” said Wang-mu, “if she was no longer going to be there to protect us through her manipulations of data, she wanted us to be among friends.”

“Of course,” said Grace’s son. “She is a god, she takes care of her people.”

“Her worshipers, you mean?” asked Wang-mu.

Peter snorted.

“Her friends,” said the boy. “In Samoa we treat the gods with great respect, but we are also their friends, and we help the good ones when we can. Gods need the help of humans now and then. I think we did all right, don’t you?”

“You did well,” said Peter. “You have been faithful indeed.”

The boy beamed.

Soon they were back in the new computer installation, watching as with great ceremony the president of the university pushed the key to activate the program that turned on and monitored the university ansible. Immediately there were messages and test programs from Starways Congress, probing and inspecting the university’s system to make sure there were no lapses in security and that all protocols had been properly followed. Wang-mu could feel how tense everyone was— except Malu, who seemed incapable of dread— until, a few minutes later, the programs finished their inspection and made their report. The message came immediately from Congress that this network was compliant and secure. The fakes and fudges had not been detected.

“Any time now,” murmured Grace.

“How will we know if all of this has worked?” asked Wang-mu soffly.

“Peter will tell us,” answered Grace, sounding surprised that Wang-mu had not already understood this. “The jewel in his ear— the Samoan satellite will speak to it.”

***

Olhado and Grego stood watching the readout from the ansible that for twenty years had connected only to the shuttle and Jakt’s starship. It was receiving a message again. Links were being established with four ansibles on other worlds, where groups of Lusitanian sympathizers— or at least friends of Jane’s— had followed Jane’s instructions on how to partially circumvent the new regulations. No actual messages were sent, because there was nothing for the humans to say to each other. The point was simply to keep the link alive so Jane might travel on it and link herself with some small part of her old capacity.

None of this had been done with any human participation on Lusitania. All the programming that was required had been accomplished by the relentlessly efficient workers of the Hive Queen, with the help of pequeninos now and then. Olhado and Grego had been invited at the last minute, as observers only. But they understood. Jane was talking to the Hive Queen and the Hive Queen talked to the fathertrees. Jane had not worked through humans because the Lusitanian humans she worked with had been Miro, who had other work to do for her, and Ender, who had removed the jewel from his ear before he died. Olhado and Grego had talked this out as soon as the pequenino Waterjumper had explained to them what was going on and asked them to come observe. “I think she was feeling a bit defiant,” said Olhado. “If Ender rejected her and Miro was busy—”

“Or gaga-eyed over Young Valentine, don’t forget,” said Grego.

“Well, she’d do it without human help.”

“How can it work?” said Grego. “She was connected to billions of computers before. At most she’ll have several thousand now, at least directly usable. It’s not enough. Ela and Quara are never coming home. Or Miro.”

“Maybe not,” said Olhado. “It won’t be the first time we’ve lost family members in the service of a higher cause.” He thought of Mother’s famous parents, Os Venerados, who lacked only the years now for sainthood— if a representative of the Pope should ever come to Lusitania to examine the evidence. And their real father, Libo, and his father, both of whom died before Novinha’s children ever guessed that they were kin. All dead in the cause of science, Os Venerados in the struggle to contain the descolada, Pipo and Libo in the effort to communicate with and understand the pequeninos. Their brother Quim had died as a martyr, trying to heal a dangerous breach in the relationship between humans and pequeninos on Lusitania. And now Ender, their adoptive father, had died in the cause of trying to find a way to save Jane’s life and, with her, faster-than-light travel. If Miro and Ela and Quara should die in the effort to establish communications with the descoladores, it would be a part of the family tradition. “What I wonder,” said Olhado, “is what’s wrong with us, that we haven’t been asked to die in a noble cause.”

“I don’t know about noble causes,” said Grego, “but we do have a fleet aimed at us. That will do, I think, for getting us dead.”

A sudden flurry of activity at the computer terminals told them that their wait was over. “We’ve linked with Samoa,” said Waterjumper. “And now Memphis. And Path. Hegira.” He did the little jig that pequeninos invariably did when they were delighted. “They’re all going to come online. The snooper programs didn’t find them.”

“But will it be enough?” asked Grego. “Do the starships move again?”

Waterjumper shrugged elaborately. “We’ll know when your family gets back, won’t we?”

“Mother doesn’t want to schedule Ender’s funeral until they’re back,” said Grego.

At the mention of Ender’s name, Waterjumper slumped. “The man who took Human into the Third Life,” he said. “And there’s almost nothing of him to bury.”

“I’m just wondering,” said Grego, “if it will be days or weeks or months before Jane finds her way back into her powers— if she can do it at all.”

“I don’t know,” said Waterjumper.

“They only have a few weeks of air,” said Grego.

“He doesn’t know, Grego,” said Olhado.

“I know that,” said Grego. “But the Hive Queen knows. And she’ll tell the fathertrees. I thought … word might have seeped down.”

“How could even the Hive Queen know what will happen in the future?” asked Olhado. “How can anyone know what Jane can or can’t accomplish? We’ve linked again with worlds outside of this one. Some parts of her core memory have been restored to the ansible net, however surreptitiously. She might find them. She might not. If found, they might be enough, or might not. But Waterjumper doesn’t know.”

Grego turned away. “I know,” he said.

“We’re all afraid,” said Olhado. “Even the Hive Queen. None of us wants to die.”

“Jane died, but didn’t stay dead,” said Grego. “According to Miro, Ender’s aiua is supposedly off living as Peter on some other world. Hive queens die and their memories live on in their daughters’ minds. Pequeninos get to live as trees.”

“Some of us,” said Waterjumper.

“But what of us?” said Grego. “Will we be extinguished? What difference does it make then, the ones of us who had plans, what does it matter the work we’ve done? The children we’ve raised?” He looked pointedly at Olhado. “What will it matter then, that you have such a big happy family, if you’re all erased in one instant by that … bomb?”

“Not one moment of my life with my family has been wasted,” said Olhado quietly.

“But the point of it is to go on, isn’t it? To connect with the future?”

“That’s one part, yes,” said Olhado. “But part of the purpose of it is now, is the moment. And part of it is the web of connections. Links from soul to soul. If the purpose of life was just to continue into the future, then none of it would have meaning, because it would be all anticipation and preparation. There’s fruition, Grego. There’s the happiness we’ve already had. The happiness of each moment. The end of our lives, even if there’s no forward continuation, no progeny at all, the end of our lives doesn’t erase the beginning.”

“But it won’t have amounted to anything,” said Grego. “If your children die, then it was all a waste.”

“No,” said Olhado quietly. “You say that because you have no children, Greguinho. But none of it is wasted. The child you hold in your arms for only a day before he dies, that is not wasted, because that one day is enough of a purpose in itself. Entropy has been thrown back for an hour, a day, a week, a month. Just because we might all die here on this little world does not undo the lives before the deaths.”

Grego shook his head. “Yes it does, Olhado. Death undoes everything.”

Olhado shrugged. “Then why do you bother doing everything, Grego? Because someday you will die. Why should anyone ever have children? Someday they will die, their children will die, all children will die. Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we were there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That’s the truth— what is, what was, what will be— not what could be, what should have been, what never can be. If we die, then our death has meaning to the rest of the universe. Even if our lives are unknown, the fact that someone lived here, and died, that will have repercussions, that will shape the universe.”

“So that’s meaning enough for you?” said Grego. “To die as an object lesson? To die so that people can feel awful about having killed you?”

“There are worse meanings for a life to have.”

Waterjumper interrupted them. “The last of the ansibles we expected is online. We have them all connected now.”

They stopped talking. It was time for Jane to find her way back into herself, if she could.

They waited.

***

Through one of her workers, the Hive Queen saw and heard the news of the restoration of the ansible links. <It’s time,> she told the fathertrees.

<Can she do it? Can you lead her?>

<I can’t lead her to a place where I can’t go myself,> said the Hive Queen. <She has to find her own way. All I can do right now is tell her that it’s time.>

<So we can only watch?>

<I can only watch,> said the Hive Queen. <You are part of her, or she of you. Her aiua is tied now to your web through the mothertrees. Be ready.>

<For what?>

<For Jane’s need.>

<What will she need? When will she need it?>

<I have no idea.>

***

At his terminal on the stranded starship, the Hive Queen’s worker suddenly looked up, then arose from her seat and walked to Jane.

Jane looked up from her work. “What is it?” she asked distractedly. And then, remembering the signal she was waiting for, she looked over at Miro, who had turned to see what was happening. “I’ve got to go now,” she said.

Then she flopped back in her seat as if she had fainted.

At once Miro was out of his chair; Ela wasn’t far behind. The worker had already unfastened Jane from the chair and was lifting her off. Miro helped her draw Jane’s body through the corridors of weightless space to the beds in the back of the ship. There they laid her down and secured her to a bed. Ela checked her vital signs.

“She’s sleeping deeply,” said Ela. “Breathing very slowly.”

“A coma?” asked Miro.

“She’s doing the minimum to stay alive,” said Ela. “Other than that, there’s nothing.”

“Come on,” said Quara from the door. “Let’s get back to work.”

Miro rounded on her, furious— but Ela restrained him. “You can stay and watch over her if you want,” she said, “but Quara’s right. We have work to do. She’s doing hers.”

Miro turned back to Jane and touched her hand, took it, held it. The others left the sleeping quarters. You can’t hear me, you can’t feel me, you can’t see me, Miro said silently. So I guess I’m not here for you. Yet I can’t leave you. What am I afraid of? We’re all dead if you don’t succeed at what you’re doing now. So it isn’t your death I fear.

It’s your old self. Your old existence among the computers and the ansibles. You’ve had your fling in a human body, but when your old powers are restored, your human life will be just a small part of you again. Just one sensory input device among millions. One small set of memories lost in an overwhelming sea of memory. You’ll be able to devote one tiny part of your attention to me, and I’ll never know that I am perpetually an afterthought in your life.

That’s just one of the drawbacks when you love somebody so much greater than yourself, Miro told himself. I’ll never know the difference. She’ll come back and I’ll be happy with all the time we have together and I’ll never know how little time and effort she actually devotes to being with me. A diversion, that’s what I am.

Then he shook his head, let go of her hand, and left the room. I will not listen to the voice of despair, he told himself. Would I tame this great being and make her so much my slave that every moment of her life belongs to me? Would I focus her eyes so they can see nothing but my face? I must rejoice that I am part of her, instead of resenting that I’m not more of her.

He returned to his place and got back to work. But a few moments later he got up again and went back to her. He was useless until she came back. Until he knew the outcome, he could think of nothing else.

***

Jane was not precisely adrift. She had her unbroken connection to the three ansibles of Lusitania, and she found them easily. And just as easily found the new connections to ansibles on a half dozen worlds. From there, she quickly found her way through the thicket of interrupts and cutouts that protected her back door into the system from discovery by Congress’s snoop programs. All was as she and her friends had planned.

It was small, cramped, as she had known it would be. But she had almost never used the full capacity of the system— except when she was controlling starships. Then she needed every scrap of fast memory to hold the complete image of the ship she was transporting. Obviously there wasn’t enough capacity on these mere thousands of machines. Yet it was such a relief, nonetheless, to tap back into the programs that she had so long used to do so much of her thought for her, servants she made use of like the Hive Queen’s workers— just one more way that I am like her, Jane realized. She got them running, then explored the memories that for these long days had been so painfully missing. Once again she was in possession of a mental system that allowed her to maintain dozens of levels of attention to simultaneously running processes.

And yet it was still all wrong. She had been in her human body only a day, and yet already the electronic self that once had felt so copious was far too small. It wasn’t just because there were so few computers where once there had been so many. Rather it was small by nature. The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world. She had been alive, and so she knew now that her electronic dwellingplace gave her only a fraction of a life. However much she had accomplished during her millennia of life in the machine, it brought no satisfaction compared to even a few minutes in that body of flesh and blood.

If she had thought she might ever leave the Val-body, she knew now that she never could. That was the root of her, now and forever. Indeed, she would have to force herself to spread out into these computer systems when she needed them. By inclination, she would not readily go into them.

But there was no reason to speak to anyone of her disappointment. Not yet. She would tell Miro when she got back to him. He would listen and talk to no one else. Indeed, he would probably be relieved. No doubt he was worried that she would be tempted to remain in the computers and not go back into the body that she could still feel, strong and insistent on her attention, even in the slackness of such a deep sleep. But he had no reason to fear. Hadn’t he spent many long months in a body that was so limited he could hardly bear to live in it? She would as soon go back to being just a computer-dweller as he would go back to the brain-damaged body that had so tortured him.

Yet it is myself, part of myself. That’s what these friends had given to her, and she would not tell them how painful it was to fit into this small sort of life again. She brought up her old familiar Jane-face above a terminal in each world, and smiled at them, and spoke:

“Thank you, my friends. I will never forget your love and loyalty to me. It will take a while for me to find out how much is open to me, and how much is closed. I’ll tell you what I know when I know it. But be assured that whether or not I can achieve anything comparable to what I did before, I owe this restoration of myself to you, to all of you. I was already your friend forever; I am forever in your debt.”

They answered; she heard all the answers, conversed with them using only small parts of her attention.

The rest of her explored. She found the hidden interfaces with the main computer systems that the Starways Congress’s programmers had designed. It was easy enough to raid them for whatever information she wanted— indeed, within moments she had found her way into the most secret files of the Starways Congress and found out every technical specification and every protocol of the new nets. But all her probing was done at second-hand, as if she were dipping into a cookie jar in the darkness, unable to see what she could touch. She could send out little finder programs that brought back to her whatever she wanted; they were guided by fuzzy protocols that let them even be somewhat serendipitous, dragging back tangential information that had somehow tickled them into bringing it aboard. She certainly had the power to sabotage, if she had wanted to punish them. She could have crashed everything, destroyed all the data. But none of that, neither finding secrets nor wreaking vengeance, had anything to do with what she needed now. The information most vital to her had been saved by her friends. What she needed was capacity, and it wasn’t there. The new networks were stepped back and delayed far enough from the immediacy of the ansibles that she couldn’t use them for her thought. She tried to find ways to offload and reload data quickly enough that she could use it to push a starship Out and In again, but it simply wasn’t fast enough. Only bits and pieces of each starship would go Out, and almost nothing would make it come back Inside.

I have all my knowledge. I just haven’t got the space.

Through all of this, however, her aiua was making its circuit. Many times a second it passed through the Val-body strapped to a bed in the starship. Many times a second it touched the ansibles and computers of its restored, if truncated, network. And many times a second it wandered the lacy links among the mothertrees.

A thousand, ten thousand times her aiua made these circuits before she finally realized that the mothertrees were also a storage place. They had so few thoughts of their own, but the structures were there that could hold memories, and there were no delays built in. She could think, could hold the thought, could retrieve it instantly. And the mothertrees were fractally deep; she could store memory mapped in layers, thoughts within thoughts, farther and farther into the structures and patterns of the living cells, without ever interfering with the dim sweet thoughts of the trees themselves. It was a far better storage system than the computer nets had ever been; it was inherently larger than any binary device. Though there were far fewer mothertrees than there were computers, even in her new shrunken net, the depth and richness of the memory array meant that there was far more room for data that could be recalled far more rapidly. Except for retrieving basic data, her own memories of past starflights, Jane would not need to use the computers at all. The pathway to the stars now lay along an avenue of trees.

***

Alone in a starship on the surface of Lusitania, a worker of the Hive Queen waited. Jane found her easily, found and remembered the shape of the starship. Though she had “forgotten” how to do starflight for a day or so, the memory was back again and she did it easily, pushing the starship Out, then bringing it back In an instant later, only many kilometers away, in a clearing before the entrance to the Hive Queen’s nest. The worker arose from its terminal, opened the door, and came outside. Of course there was no celebration. The Hive Queen merely looked through the worker’s eyes to verify that the flight had been successful, then explored the worker’s body and the starship itself to make sure that nothing had been lost or damaged in the flight.

Jane could hear the Hive Queen’s voice as if from a distance, for she recoiled instinctively from such a powerful source of thought. It was the relayed message that she heard, the voice of Human speaking in her mind. <All is well,> Human said to her. <You can go ahead.>

She returned then to the starship that contained her own living body. When she transported other people, she left it to their own aiuas to watch over their flesh and hold it intact. The result of that had been the chaotic creations of Miro and Ender, with their hunger for bodies different from the ones they actually lived in. But that effect was now prevented easily by letting travelers linger only a moment, a tiny fraction of a second Outside, just long enough to make sure the bits of everything and everyone were all together.

This time, though, she had to hold a starship and the Val-body together, and also drag along Miro, Ela, Firequencher, Quara, and a worker of the hive queen’s. There could be no mistakes.

Yet it functioned easily enough. The familiar shuttle she easily held in memory; the people she had carried so often before she carried along. Her new body was already so well known to her that, to her relief, it took no special effort to hold it together along with the ship. The only novelty was that instead of sending and pulling back, she went along. Her own aiua went with the rest of them Outside.

That was itself the only problem. Once Outside, she had no way of telling how long they had been there. It might have been an hour. A year. A picosecond. She had never herself gone Outside before. It was distracting, baffling, then frightening to have no root or anchor. How can I get back in? What am I connected to?

In the very asking of the panicked question, she found her anchor, for no sooner had her aiua done a single circuit of the Val-body Outside than it jumped to do her circuit of the mothertrees. In that moment she called the ship and all within it back again, and placed them where she wanted, in the landing zone of the starport on Lusitania.

She inspected them quickly. All were there. It had worked. They would not die in space. She could still do starflight, even with herself aboard. And though she would not often take herself along on voyages— it had been too frightening, even though her connection with the mothertrees sustained her— she now knew she could put the ships back into flight without worry.

***

Malu shouted and the others turned to look at him. They had all seen the Jane-face in the air above the terminals, a hundred Jane-faces around the room. They had all cheered and celebrated at the time. So Wang-mu wondered: What could this be now?

“The god has moved her starship!” Malu cried. “The god has found her power again!”

Wang-mu heard the words and wondered mutely how he knew. But Peter, whatever he might have wondered, took the news more personally. He threw his arms around her, lifted her from the ground, and spun around with her. “We’re free again,” he cried, his voice as joyful as Malu’s had been. “We’re free to roam again!”

At that moment Wang-mu finally realized that the man she loved was, at the deepest level, the same man, Ender Wiggin, who had wandered world to world for three thousand years. Why had Peter been so silent and glum, only to relax into such exuberance now? Because he couldn’t bear the thought of having to live out his life on only one world.

What have I got myself into? Wang-mu wondered. Is this going to be my life, a week here, a month there?

And then she thought: What if it is? If the week is with Peter, if the month is at his side, then that may well be home enough for me. And if it’s not, there’ll be time enough to work out some sort of compromise. Even Ender settled down at last, on Lusitania.

Besides, I may be a wanderer myself. I’m still young— how do I even know what kind of life I want to lead? With Jane to take us anywhere in just a heartbeat, we can see all of the Hundred Worlds and all the newest colonies, and anything else we want to see before we even have to think of settling down.

***

Someone was shouting out in the control room. Miro knew he should get up from Jane’s sleeping body and find out. But he did not want to let go of her hand. He did not want to take his eyes away from her.

“We’re cut off!” came the cry again— Quara, shouting, terrified and angry. “I was getting their broadcasts and suddenly now there’s nothing.”

Miro almost laughed aloud. How could Quara fail to understand? The reason she couldn’t receive the descolador broadcasts anymore was because they were no longer orbiting the planet of the descoladores. Couldn’t Quara feel the onset of gravity? Jane had done it. Jane had brought them home.

But had she brought herself? Miro squeezed her hand, leaned over, kissed her cheek. “Jane,” he whispered. “Don’t be lost out there. Be here. Be here with me.”

“All right,” she said.

He raised his face from hers, looked into her eyes. “You did it,” he said.

“And rather easily, after all that worry,” she said. “But I don’t think my body was designed to sleep so deeply. I can’t move.”

Miro pushed the quick release on her bed, and all the straps came free.

“Oh,” she said. “You tied me down.”

She tried to sit up, but lay back down again immediately.

“Feeling faint?” Miro asked.

“The room is swimming,” she said. “Maybe I can do future starflights without having to lay my own body out so thoroughly.”

The door crashed open. Quara stood in the doorway, quivering with rage. “How dare you do it without so much as a warning!”

Ela was behind her, remonstrating with her. “For heaven’s sake, Quara, she got us home, isn’t that enough?”

“You could have some decency!” Quara shouted. “You could tell us that you were performing your experiment!”

“She brought you with us, didn’t she?” said Miro, laughing.

His laughter only infuriated Quara more. “She isn’t human! That’s what you like about her, Miro! You never could have fallen in love with a real woman. What’s your track record? You fell in love with a woman who turned out to be your half-sister, then Ender’s automaton, and now a computer wearing a human body like a puppet. Of course you laugh at a time like this. You have no human feelings.”

Jane was up now, standing on somewhat shaky legs. Miro was pleased to see that she was recovering so quickly from her hour in a comatose state. He hardly noticed Quara’s vilification.

“Don’t ignore me, you smug self-righteous son-of-a-bitch!” Quara screamed in his face.

He ignored her, feeling, in fact, rather smug and self-righteous as he did. Jane, holding his hand, followed close behind him, past Quara, out of the sleeping chamber. As she passed, Quara shouted at her, “You’re not some god who has a right to toss me from place to place without even asking!” and she gave Jane a shove.

It wasn’t much of a shove. But Jane lurched against Miro. He turned, worried she might fall. Instead he got himself turned in time to see Jane spread her fingers against Quara’s chest and shove her back, much harder. Quara knocked her head against the corridor wall and then, utterly off balance, she fell to the floor at Ela’s feet.

“She tried to kill me!” cried Quara.

“If she wanted to kill you,” said Ela mildly, “you’d be sucking space in orbit around the planet of the descoladores.”

“You all hate me!” Quara shouted, and then burst into tears.

Miro opened the shuttle door and led Jane out into sunlight. It was her first step onto the surface of a planet, her first sight of sunlight with these human eyes. She stood there, frozen, then turned her head to see more, raised her face up to the sky, and then burst into tears and clung to Miro. “Oh, Miro! It’s too much to bear! It’s all too beautiful!”

“You should see it in the spring,” he said inanely.

A moment later, she recovered enough to face the world again, to take tentative steps along with him. Already they could see a hovercar rushing toward them from Milagre— it would be Olhado and Grego, or perhaps Valentine and Jakt. They would meet Jane-as-Val for the first time. Valentine, more than anyone, would remember Val and miss her, while unlike Miro she would have no particular memories of Jane, for they had not been close. But if Miro knew Valentine at all, he knew that she would keep to herself whatever grief she felt for Val; to Jane she would show only welcome, and perhaps curiosity. It was Valentine’s way. It was more important to her to understand than it was for her to grieve. She felt all things deeply, but she didn’t let her own grief or pain stand between her and learning all she could.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” said Jane.

“Done what?”

“Used physical violence against Quara,” Jane said miserably.

Miro shrugged. “It’s what she wanted,” he said. “You can hear how much she’s still enjoying it.”

“No, she doesn’t want that,” Jane said. “Not in her deepest heart. She wants what everybody wants— to be loved and cared for, to be part of something beautiful and fine, to have the respect of those she admires.”

“Yes, well, I’ll take your word for it,” said Miro.

“No, Miro, you see it,” Jane insisted.

“Yes, I see it,” Miro answered. “But I gave up trying years ago. Quara’s need was and is so great that a person like me could be swallowed up in it a dozen times over. I had problems of my own then. Don’t condemn me because I wrote her off. Her barrel of misery has depth enough to hold a thousand bushels of happiness.”

“I don’t condemn you,” said Jane. “I just … I had to know that you saw how much she loves you and needs you. I needed you to be …”

“You needed me to be like Ender,” said Miro.

“I needed you to be your own best self,” said Jane.

“I loved Ender too, you know. I think of him as every man’s best self. And I don’t resent the fact that you would like me to be at least some of the things he was to you. As long as you also want a few of the things that are me alone, and no part of him.”

“I don’t expect you to be perfect,” said Jane. “And I don’t expect you to be Ender. And you’d better not expect perfection from me, either, because wise as I’m trying to be right now, I’m still the one who knocked your sister down.”

“Who knows?” said Miro. “That may have turned you into Quara’s dearest friend.”

“I hope not,” said Jane. “But if it’s true, I’ll do my best for her. After all, she’s going to be my sister now.”

***

<So you were ready,> said the Hive Queen.

<Without knowing it, yes, we were,> said Human.

<And you are part of her, all of you.>

<Her touch is gentle,> said Human, <and her presence in us is easily borne. The mothertrees don’t mind her. Her vividness envigorates them. And if having her memories is strange to them, it brings more variety to their lives than they have ever had before.>

<So she’s a part of all of us,> said the Hive Queen. <What she is now, what she has become, is part hive queen, part human, and part pequenino.>

<Whatever she does, no one can say she doesn’t understand us. If someone had to play with godlike powers, better her than anyone.>

<I’m jealous of her, I confess,> the Hive Queen said. <She’s a part of you as I can never be. After all our conversations, I still have no notion of what it is to be one of you.>

<Nor do I understand anything more than a glimmer of the way you think,> said Human. <But isn’t that a good thing, too? The mystery is endless. We will never cease to surprise each other.>

<Till death ends all surprises,> said the Hive Queen.

Chapter 14 — “HOW THEY COMMUNICATE WITH ANIMALS”

“If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do.”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

The moment Admiral Bobby Lands received the news that the ansible connections to Starways Congress were restored, he gave the order to the entire Lusitania Fleet to decelerate forthwith to a speed just under the threshold of invisibility. Obedience was immediate, and he knew that within an hour, to any telescopic observer on Lusitania, the whole fleet would seem to spring into existence from nowhere. They would be hurtling toward a point near Lusitania at an astonishing speed, their massive foreshields still in place to protect them from taking devastating damage from collisions with interstellar particles as small as dust.

Admiral Lands’s strategy was simple. He would arrive near Lusitania at the highest possible speed that would not cause relativistic effects; he would launch the Little Doctor during the period of nearest approach, a window of no more than a couple of hours; and then he would bring his whole fleet back up to relativistic speeds so rapidly that when the M.D. Device went off, it would not catch any of his ships within its all-destroying field.

It was a good, simple strategy, based on the assumption that Lusitania had no defenses. But to Lands, that assumption could not be taken for granted. Somehow the Lusitanian rebels had acquired enough resources that for a period of time near the end of the voyage, they were able to cut off all communications between the fleet and the rest of humanity. Never mind that the problem had been ascribed to a particularly resourceful and pervasive computer saboteur program; never mind that his superiors assured him that the saboteur program had been wiped out through prudently radical action timed to eliminate the threat just prior to the arrival of the fleet at its destination. Lands had no intention of being deceived by an illusion of defenselessness. The enemy had proved itself to be an unknown quantity, and Lands had to be prepared for anything. This was war, total war, and he was not going to allow his mission to be compromised through carelessness or overconfidence.

From the moment he received this assignment he had been keenly aware that he would be remembered throughout human history as the Second Xenocide. It was not an easy thing to contemplate the destruction of an alien race, particularly when the piggies of Lusitania were, by all reports, so primitive that in themselves they offered no threat to humanity. Even when alien enemies were a threat, as the buggers were at the time of the First Xenocide, some bleeding heart calling himself the Speaker for the Dead had managed to paint a glowing picture of those murderous monsters as some kind of utopian hive community that really meant no harm to humanity. How could the writer of this work possibly know what the buggers intended? It was a monstrous thing to write, actually, for it utterly destroyed the name of the child-hero who had so brilliantly defeated the buggers and saved humanity.

Lands had not hesitated to accept command of the Lusitania Fleet, but from the start of the voyage he had spent a considerable amount of time every day studying the scant information about Ender the Xenocide that was available. The boy had not known, of course, that he was actually commanding the real human fleet by ansible; he had thought he was involved in a brutally rigorous schedule of training simulations. Nevertheless, he had made the correct decision at the moment of crisis— he chose to use the weapon he had been forbidden to use against planets, and thus blew up the last bugger world. That was the end of the threat to humanity. It was the correct action, it was what the art of war required, and at the time the boy had been deservedly hailed as a hero.

Yet within a few decades, the tide of opinion had been swung by that pernicious book called The Hive Queen, and Ender Wiggin, already in virtual exile as governor of a new colony planet, disappeared entirely from history as his name became a byword for annihilation of a gentle, wellmeaning, misunderstood species.

If they could turn against such an obvious innocent as the child Ender Wiggin, what will they make of me? thought Lands, over and over. The buggers were brutal, soulless killers, with fleets of starships armed with devastating killing power, whereas I will be destroying the piggies, who have done their share of killing, but only on a tiny scale, a couple of scientists who may well have violated some tabu. Certainly the piggies have no means now or in the reasonably foreseeable future of rising from the surface of their planet and challenging the dominance of humans in space.

Yet Lusitania was every bit as dangerous as the buggers— perhaps more so. For there was a virus loose on that planet, a virus which killed every human it infected, unless the victim got continuous dosages of a decreasingly effective antidote at regular intervals for the rest of his life. Furthermore, the virus was known to be prone to rapid adaptation.

As long as this virus was contained on Lusitania, the danger was not severe. But then two arrogant scientists on Lusitania— the legal record named them as the xenologers Marcos “Miro” Vladimir Ribeira von Hesse and Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi— violated the terms of the human settlement by “going native” and providing illegal technology and bioforms to the piggies. Starways Congress reacted properly by remanding the violators to trial on another planet, where of course they would have to be kept in quarantine— but the lesson had to be swift and severe so no one else on Lusitania would be tempted to flout the wise laws that protected humanity from the spread of the descolada virus. Who could have guessed that such a tiny human colony would dare to defy Congress by refusing to arrest the criminals? From the moment of that defiance, there was no choice but to send this fleet and destroy Lusitania. For as long as Lusitania was in revolt, the risk of stargoing ships’ escaping the planet and carrying unspeakable plague to the rest of humanity was too great to endure.

All was so clear. Yet Lands knew that the moment the danger was gone, the moment the descolada virus no longer posed a threat to anyone, people would forget how great the danger had been and would begin to wax sentimental about the lost piggies, that poor race of victims of ruthless Admiral Bobby Lands, the Second Xenocide.

Lands was not an insensitive man. It kept him awake at night, knowing how he would be hated. Nor did he love the duty that had come to him— he was not a man of violence, and the thought of destroying not only the piggies but also the entire human population of Lusitania made him sick at heart. No one in his fleet could doubt his reluctance to do what must be done; but neither could anyone doubt his grim determination to do it.

If only some way could be found, he thought over and over. If only when I come out into realtime the Congress would send us word that a real antidote or a workable vaccine had been found to curb the descolada. Anything that would prove that there was no more danger. Anything to be able to keep the Little Doctor, unarmed, in its place in his flagship.

Such wishes, however, could hardly even be called hopes. There was no chance of this. Even if a cure had been found on the surface of Lusitania, how could the fact be made known? No, Lands would have to knowingly do what Ender Wiggin did in all innocence. And he would do it. He would bear the consequence. He would face down those who vilified him. For he would know that he did what was necessary for the sake of all of humanity; and compared to that, what did it matter whether one individual was honored or unfairly hated?

***

The moment the ansible network was restored, Yasujiro Tsutsumi sent his messages, then betook himself to the ansible installation on the ninth floor of his building and waited there in trepidation. If the family decided that his idea had merit enough to be worth discussing, they would want a realtime conference, and he was determined not to be the one who kept them waiting. And if they answered him with a rebuke, he wanted to be the first to read it, so that his underlings and colleagues on Divine Wind would hear of it from him instead of as a rumor behind his back.

Did Aimaina Hikari understand what he had asked Yasujiro to do? He was at the cusp of his career. If he did well, he would begin to move from world to world, one of the elite caste of managers who were cut loose from time and sent into the future through the time-dilation effect of interstellar travel. But if he was judged to be a second-rater, he would be moved sideways or down within the organization here on Divine Wind. He would never leave, and so he would continuously face the pity of those who would know that he was one who did not have what it took to rise from one small lifetime into the freefloating eternity of upper management.

Probably Aimaina knew all about this. But even if he had not known how fragile Yasujiro’s position was, finding out would not have stopped him. To save another species from needless annihilation— that was worth a few careers. Could Aimaina help it that it was not his own career that would be ruined? It was an honor that Aimaina had chosen Yasujiro, that he had thought him wise enough to recognize the moral peril of the Yamato people and courageous enough to act on that knowledge regardless of personal cost.

Such an honor— Yasujiro hoped it would be sufficient to make him happy if all else slipped away. For he meant to leave the Tsutsumi company if he was rebuked. If they did not act to avert the peril then he could not remain. Nor could he remain silent. He would speak out and include Tsutsumi in his condemnation. He would not threaten to do this, for the family rightly viewed all threats with contempt. He would simply speak. Then, for his disloyalty, they would work to destroy him. No company would hire him. No public appointment would long remain in his hands. It was no jest when he told Aimaina that he would come to live with him. Once Tsutsumi decided to punish, the miscreant would have no choice but to throw himself on the mercy of his friends— if he had any friends who were not themselves terrified by the Tsutsumi wrath.

All these dire scenarios played themselves out in Yasujiro’s mind as he waited, waited, hour after hour. Surely they had not simply ignored his message. They must be reading and discussing it even now.

He finally dozed off. The ansible operator awakened him— a woman who had not been on duty when he fell asleep. “Are you by any chance the honorable Yasujiro Tsutsumi?”

The conference was already under way; despite his best intention, he was indeed the last to arrive. The cost of such an ansible conference in realtime was phenomenal, not to mention the annoyance. Under the new computer system every participant in a conference had to be present at the ansible, since no conference would be possible if they had to wait for the built-in time delay between each comment and its reply.

When Yasujiro saw the identification bands under the faces shown in the terminal display he was both thrilled and horrified. This matter had not been delegated to secondary or tertiary officials in the home office on Honshu. Yoshiaki-Seiji Tsutsumi himself was there, the ancient man who had led Tsutsumi all of Yasujiro’s life. This must be a good sign. Yoshiaki-Seiji— or “Yes Sir,” as he was called, though not to his face, of course— would never waste his time coming to an ansible merely to slap down an upstart underling.

Yes Sir himself did not speak, of course. Rather it was old Eiichi who did the talking. Eiichi was known as the conscience of Tsutsumi— which some said, rather cynically, meant he must be a deaf mute.

“Our young brother has been bold, but he was wise to pass on to us the thoughts and feelings of our honored teacher, Aimaina Hikari. While none of us here on Honshu has been privileged personally to know the Guardian of Yamato, we have all been aware of his words. We were not prepared to think of the Japanese as being responsible, as a people, for the Lusitania Fleet. Nor were we prepared to think of Tsutsumi as having any special responsibility toward a political situation with no obvious connection to finances or the economy in general.

“Our young brother’s words were heartfelt and outrageous, and if they had not come from one who has been properly modest and respectful for all his years of work with us, careful and yet bold enough to take risks when the time was right, we might not have heeded his message. But we did heed it; we studied it and found from our government sources that the Japanese influence on Starways Congress was and continues to be pivotal on this issue in particular. And in our judgment there is no time for us to try to build a coalition of other companies or to change public opinion. The fleet might arrive at any moment. Our fleet, if Aimaina Hikari is correct; and even if he is not, it is a human fleet, and we are humans, and it might just be within our power to stop it. A quarantine will easily do all that is necessary to protect the human species from annihilation by the descolada virus. Therefore we wish to inform you, Yasujiro Tsutsumi, that you have proven yourself worthy of the name that was given you at birth. We will commit all the resources of the Tsutsumi family to the task of convincing a sufficient number of Congressmen to oppose the fleet— and to oppose it so vigorously that they force an immediate vote to recall the fleet and forbid it to strike against Lusitania. We may succeed in this task or we may fail, but either way, our younger brother Yasujiro Tsutsumi has served us well, not only through his many achievements in company management, but also because he knew when to listen to an outsider, when to put moral questions into a position of primacy over financial considerations, and when to risk all in order to help Tsutsumi be and do what is right. Therefore we summon Yasujiro Tsutsumi to Honshu, where he will serve Tsutsumi as my assistant.” At this Eiichi bowed. “I am honored that such a distinguished young man is being trained to be my replacement when I die or retire.”

Yasujiro bowed gravely. He was relieved, yes, that he was being called directly to Honshu— no one had ever been summoned so young. But to be Eiichi’s assistant, groomed to replace him— that was not the life’s work Yasujiro had dreamed of. It was not to be a philosopher-cum-ombudsman that he had worked so hard and served so faithfully. He wanted to be in the thick of management of the family enterprises.

But it would be years of starflight before he arrived on Honshu. Eiichi might well be dead. Yes Sir would surely be dead by then as well. Instead of replacing Eiichi, he might as easily be given a different assignment better suited to his real abilities. So Yasujiro would not refuse this strange gift. He would embrace his fate and follow where it led.

“O Eiichi my father, I bow before you and before all the great fathers of our company, most particularly Yoshiaki-Seiji-san. You honor me beyond anything I could ever deserve. I pray that I will not disappoint you too much. And I also give thanks that at this difficult time the Yamato spirit is in such good protecting hands as yours.”

With his public acceptance of his orders, the meeting ended— it was expensive, after all, and the Tsutsumi family was careful to avoid waste if it could help it. The ansible conference ended. Yasujiro sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was trembling.

“Oh, Yasujiro-san,” said the ansible attendant. “Oh, Yasujiro-san.”

Oh, Yasujiro-san, thought Yasujiro. Who would have guessed that Aimaina’s visit to me would lead to this? So easily it could have gone the other way. Now he would be one of the men of Honshu. Whatever his role, he would be among the supreme leaders of Tsutsumi. There was no happier outcome. Who would have guessed.

Before he rose from his chair beside the ansible, Tsutsumi representatives were talking to all the Japanese Congressmen, and many who were not Japanese but nevertheless followed the Necessarian line. And as the tally of compliant politicians rose, it became clear that support for the fleet was shallow indeed. It would not be all that expensive to stop the fleet after all.

***

The pequenino on duty monitoring the satellites that orbited Lusitania heard the alarm going off and at first had no idea what was happening. The alarm had never, to his knowledge, sounded. At first he assumed it was some kind of dangerous weather pattern that had been detected. But it was nothing of the kind. It was the outward-searching telescopes that had triggered the alarm. Dozens of armed starships had just appeared, traveling at very high but nonrelativistic speeds, on a course that would allow them to launch the Little Doctor within the hour.

The duty officer gave the urgent message to his colleagues, and very quickly the mayor of Milagre was notified and the rumor began to spread throughout what was left of the village. Anyone who doesn’t leave within the hour will be destroyed, that was the message, and within minutes hundreds of human families were gathered around the starships, anxiously waiting to be taken in. Remarkably, it was only humans insisting on these last-minute runs. Faced with the inevitable death of their own forests of fathertrees, mothertrees, and brothertrees, the pequeninos felt no urgency to save their own lives. Who would they be without their forest? Better to die among loved ones than as perpetual strangers in a distant forest that was not and never could be their own.

As for the Hive Queen, she had already sent her last daughter-queen and had no particular interest in trying to leave herself. She was the last of the hive queens who had been alive before Ender’s destruction of their home planet. She felt it fitting that she, too, should submit to the same kind of death three thousand years later. Besides, she told herself, how could she bear to live when her great friend, Human, was rooted to Lusitania and could not leave it? It was not a queenly thought, but then, no hive queen before her had ever had a friend. It was a new thing in the world, to have someone to talk to who was not substantially yourself. It would grieve her too much to live on without Human. And since her survival was no longer crucial to the perpetuation of her species, she would do the grand, brave, tragic, romantic, and least complicated thing: She would stay. She rather liked the idea of being noble in human terms; and it proved, to her own surprise, that she had not been utterly unchanged by her close contact with humans and pequeninos. They had transformed her quite against her own expectations. There had been no Hive Queen like her in all the history of her people.

<I wish you would go,> Human told her. <I prefer the thought of you alive. >

But for once she did not answer him.

***

Jane was adamant. The team working on the language of the descoladores had to leave Lusitania and get back to work in orbit around the descolada planet. Of course that included herself, but no one was foolish enough to begrudge the survival of the person who was making all the starships go, nor of the team that would perhaps save all of humanity from the descoladores. But Jane was on shakier moral ground when she also insisted that Novinha, Grego, and Olhado and his family be taken to a place of safety. Valentine, too, was informed that if she did not go with her husband and children and their crew and friends to Jakt’s starship, Jane would be forced to waste precious mental resources by transporting them bodily against their will, sans spacecraft if necessary.

“Why us?” demanded Valentine. “We haven’t asked for special treatment.”

“I don’t care what you do or do not ask for,” said Jane. “You are Ender’s sister. Novinha is his widow, her children are his adopted children; I will not stand by and let you be killed when I have it in my power to save the family of my friend. If that seems unfairly preferential to you, then complain about it to me later, but for now get yourselves into Jakt’s spaceship so I can lift you off this world. And you will save more lives if you don’t waste another moment of my attention with useless argument.”

Feeling ashamed at having special privileges, yet grateful they and their loved ones would live through the next few hours, the descoladores team gathered in the shuttle-turned-starship, which Jane had relocated away from the crowded landing area; the others hurried toward Jakt’s landing craft, which she had also moved to an isolated spot.

In a way, for many of them at least, the appearance of the fleet was almost a relief. They had lived for so long in its shadow that to have it here at last gave respite from the endless anxiety. Within an hour or two, the issue would be decided.

***

In the shuttle that hurtled along in a high orbit above the planet of the descoladores, Miro sat numbly at his terminal. “I can’t work,” he said at last. “I can’t concentrate on language when my people and my home are on the brink of destruction.” He knew that Jane, strapped into her bed in the back of the shuttle, was using her whole concentration to move ship after ship from Lusitania to other colony worlds that were ill-prepared to receive them. While all he could do was puzzle over molecular messages from inscrutable aliens.

“Well I can,” said Quara. “After all, these descoladores are just as great a threat, and to all of humanity, not just to one small world.”

“How wise of you,” said Ela dryly, “to take the long view.”

“Look at these broadcasts we’re getting from the descoladores,” said Quara. “See if you recognize what I’m seeing here.”

Ela called up Quara’s display on her own terminal; so did Miro. However annoying Quara might be, she was good at what she did.

“See this? Whatever else this molecule does, it’s exactly designed to work at precisely the same location in the brain as the heroin molecule.”

It could not be denied that the fit was perfect. Ela, though, found it hard to believe. “The only way they could do this,” she said, “is if they took the historical information contained in the descolada descriptions we sent them, used that information to build a human body, studied it, and found a chemical that would immobilize us with mindless pleasure while they do whatever they want to us. There’s no way they’ve had time to grow a human since we sent that information.”

“Maybe they don’t have to build the whole human body,” said Miro. “Maybe they’re so adept at reading genetic information that they can extrapolate everything there is to know about the human anatomy and physiology from our genetic information alone.”

“But they didn’t even have our DNA set,” Ela said.

“Maybe they can compress the information in our primitive, natural DNA,” said Miro. “Obviously they got the information somehow, and obviously they figured out what would make us sit as still as stones with dumb, happy smiles.”

“What’s even more obvious to me,” said Quara, “is that they meant us to read this molecule biologically. They meant us to take this drug instantly. As far as they’re concerned, we’re now sitting here waiting for them to come take us over.”

Miro immediately changed displays over his terminal. “Damn, Quara, you’re right. Look— they have three ships closing in on us already.”

“They’ve never even approached us before,” said Ela.

“Well, they’re not going to approach us now,” said Miro. “We’ve got to give them a demonstration that we didn’t fall for their trojan horse.” He got up from his seat and fairly flew back down the corridor to where Jane was sleeping. “Jane!” he shouted even before he got there. “Jane!”

It took a moment, and then her eyes fluttered open.

“Jane,” he said. “Move us about a hundred miles over and drop us into a closer orbit.”

She looked at him quizzically, then must have decided to trust him because she asked nothing. She closed her eyes again, as Firequencher shouted from the control room, “She did it! We moved!”

Miro, drifted back to the others. “Now I know they can’t do that,” he said. Sure enough, his display now reported that the alien ships were no longer approaching, but rather were poised warily a dozen miles off in three— no, four now— directions. “Got us nicely framed in a tetrahedron,” said Miro.

“Well, now they know that we didn’t succumb to their die-happy drug,” said Quara.

“But we’re no closer to understanding them than we were before.”

“That’s because,” said Miro, “we’re so stupid.”

“Self-vilification won’t help us now,” said Quara, “even if in your case it happens to be true.”

“Quara,” said Ela sharply.

“It was a joke, dammit!” said Quara. “Can’t a girl tease her big brother?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Miro dryly. “You’re such a tease.”

“What did you mean by saying we’re stupid?” said Firequencher.

“We’ll never decipher their language,” said Miro, “because it’s not a language. It’s a set of biological commands. They don’t talk. They don’t abstract. They just make molecules that do things to each other. It’s as if the human vocabulary consisted of bricks and sandwiches. Throw a brick or give a sandwich, punish or reward. If they have abstract thoughts we’re not going to get them through reading these molecules.”

“I find it hard to believe that a species with no abstract language could possibly create spaceships like those out there,” said Quara scornfully. “And they broadcast these molecules the way we broadcast vids and voices.”

“What if they all have organs inside their bodies that directly translate molecular messages into chemicals or physical structures? Then they could—”

“You’re missing my point,” insisted Quara. “You don’t build up a fund of common knowledge by throwing bricks and sharing sandwiches. They need language in order to store information outside their bodies so that they can pass knowledge from person to person, generation after generation. You don’t get out into space or make broadcasts using the electromagnetic spectrum on the basis of what one person can be persuaded to do with a brick.”

“She’s probably right,” said Ela.

“So maybe parts of the molecular messages they send are memory sets,” said Miro. “Again, not a language— it stimulates the brain to ‘remember’ things that the sender experienced but the receiver did not.”

“Listen, whether you’re right or not,” said Firequencher, “we have to keep trying to decode the language.”

“If I’m right, we’re wasting our time,” said Miro.

“Exactly,” said Firequencher.

“Oh,” said Miro. Firequencher’s point was well taken. If Miro was right, their whole mission was useless anyway— they had already failed. So they had to continue to act as if Miro was wrong and the language could be decoded, because if it couldn’t, there was nothing they could do anyway.

And yet …

“We’re forgetting something,” said Miro.

“I’m not,” said Quara.

“Jane. She was created because the hive queens built a bridge between species.”

“Between humans and hive queens, not between unknown virus-spewing aliens and humans,” said Quara.

But Ela was interested. “The human way of communication— speech between equals— that was surely as foreign to the hive queens as this molecular language is to us. Maybe Jane can find some way to connect to them philotically.”

“Mind-reading?” said Quara. “Remember, we don’t have a bridge.”

“It all depends,” said Miro, “on how they deal with philotic connections. The Hive Queen talks all the time to Human, right? Because the fathertrees and the hive queens already both use philotic links to communicate. They speak mind to mind, without the intervention of language. And they’re no more biologically similar than hive queens and humans are.”

Ela nodded thoughtfully. “Jane can’t try anything like this now, not till the whole issue of the Congress fleet is resolved. But once she’s free to return her attention to us, she can try, at least, to contact these … people directly.”

“If these aliens communicated through philotic links,” said Quara, “they wouldn’t have to use molecules.”

“Maybe these molecules,” said Miro, “are how they communicate with animals.”

***

Admiral Lands could not believe what he was hearing. The First Speaker of Starways Congress and the First Secretary of the Starfleet Admiralty were both visible above the terminal, and their message was the same. “Quarantine, exactly,” said the Secretary. “You are not authorized to use the Molecular Disruption Device.”

“Quarantine is impossible,” said Lands. “We’re going too rapidly. You know the battle plan I filed at the beginning of the voyage. It would take us weeks to slow down. And what about the men? It’s one thing to take a relativistic voyage and then return to their home worlds. Yes, their friends and family are gone, but at least they aren’t stuck off on permanent duty inside a starship! Keeping our velocity at near-relativistic speeds, I’m saving them months of their lives spent in acceleration and deceleration. You’re talking about expecting them to give up years!”

“Surely you’re not saying,” said the First Speaker, “that we should blow up Lusitania and wipe out the pequeninos and thousands of human beings so that your crews don’t get depressed.”

“I’m saying that if you don’t want us to blow up this planet, fine— but let us come home.”

“We can’t do that,” said the First Secretary. “The descolada is too dangerous to leave it unsupervised on a planet that has rebelled.”

“You mean you’re canceling the use of the Little Doctor when nothing has been done to contain the descolada?”

“We will send a landing team with due precautions to ascertain the exact conditions on the ground,” said the First Secretary.

“In other words, you’ll send men into mortal danger from this disease with no knowledge of the situation on the ground, when the means exist to eliminate the danger without peril to any uninfected person.”

“Congress has reached the decision,” said the First Speaker coldly. “We will not commit xenocide while any legitimate alternative remains. Are these orders received and understood?”

“Yes sir,” said Lands.

“Will they be obeyed?” asked the First Speaker.

The First Secretary looked aghast. You did not insult a flag officer by questioning whether he meant to obey orders.

Yet the First Speaker did not withdraw the insult. “Well?”

“Sir, I always have and always will live by my oath.” With that, Lands broke the connection. He immediately turned to Causo, his X.O., the only other person present with him in the sealed communications office. “You are under arrest, sir,” said Lands.

Causo raised an eyebrow. “So you don’t intend to comply with this order?”

“Do not tell me your personal feelings on the matter,” said Lands. “I know that you’re of Portuguese ethnic heritage like the people of Lusitania—”

“They’re Brazilian,” said the X.O.

Lands ignored him. “I will have it on record that you were given no opportunity to speak and that you are utterly blameless in any action I might take.”

“What about your oath, sir?” asked Causo calmly.

“My oath is to take all actions I am ordered to take in service of the best interests of humanity. I will invoke the war crimes clause.”

“They aren’t ordering you to commit a war crime. They’re ordering you not to.”

“On the contrary,” said Lands. “To fail to destroy this world and the deadly peril on it would be a crime against humanity far worse than the crime of blowing it up.” Lands drew his sidearm. “You are under arrest, sir.”

The X.O. put his hands on his head and turned his back. “Sir, you may be right and you may be wrong. But either choice could be monstrous. I don’t know how you can make such a decision by yourself.”

Lands put the docility patch on the back of Causo’s neck, and as the drug began feeding into his system, Lands said to him, “I had help in deciding, my friend. I asked myself, What would Ender Wiggin, the man who saved humanity from the buggers, what would he have done if suddenly, at the last minute, he had been told, This is no game, this is real. I asked myself, What if at the moment before he killed the boy Stilson or the boy Madrid in his infamous First and Second Killings, some adult had intervened and ordered him to stop. Would he have done it, knowing that the adult did not have the power to protect him later, when his enemy attacked him again? Knowing that it might well be this time or never? If the adults at Command School had said to him, We think there’s a chance the buggers might not mean to destroy humanity, so don’t kill them all, do you think Ender Wiggin would have obeyed? No. He would have done— he always did— exactly what was necessary to obliterate a danger and make sure it did not survive to pose a threat in the future. That is the person I consulted with. That is the person whose wisdom I will follow now.”

Causo did not answer. He just smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded.

“Sit down and do not get up until I order you otherwise.”

Causo sat down.

Lands switched the ansible to relay communications throughout the fleet. “The order has been given and we will proceed. I am launching the M.D. Device immediately and we will return to relativistic speeds forthwith. May God have mercy on my soul.”

A moment later, the M.D. Device separated from the Admiral’s flagship and continued at just-under-relativistic speed toward Lusitania. It would take nearly an hour for it to arrive at the proximity that would automatically trigger it. If for some reason the proximity detector did not work properly, a timer would set it off just moments before its estimated time of collision.

Lands accelerated his flagship above the threshold that cut it off from the timeframe of the rest of the universe. Then he pulled the docility patch from Causo’s neck and replaced it with the antidote patch. “You may arrest me now, sir, for the mutiny that you witnessed.”

Causo shook his head. “No sir,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere, and the fleet is yours to command until we get home. Unless you have some stupid plan to try to escape the war crimes trial that awaits you.”

“No, sir,” said Lands. “I will bear whatever penalty they impose on me. What I did has saved humankind from destruction, but I am prepared to join the humans and pequeninos of Lusitania as a necessary sacrifice to achieve that end.”

Causo saluted him, then sat back down on his chair and wept.

Chapter 15 — “WE’RE GIVING YOU A SECOND CHANCE”

“When I was a little girl, I used to believe that if I could please the gods well enough, they would go back and do my life over, and this time they would not take my mother away from me.”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

A satellite orbiting Lusitania detected the launch of the M.D. Device and the divergence of its course toward Lusitania, as the starship disappeared from the satellite’s instruments. The most dreaded event was happening. There had been no attempt to communicate or negotiate. Clearly the fleet had never intended anything but the obliteration of this world, and with it an entire sentient race. Most people had hoped, and many had expected, that there would be a chance to tell them that the descolada had been completely tamed and no longer posed a threat to anyone; that it was too late to stop anything anyway, since several dozen new colonies of humans, pequeninos, and hive queens had already been started on as many different planets. Instead there was only death hurtling toward them on a course that gave them no more than an hour to survive, and probably less, since the Little Doctor would no doubt be detonated some distance from the planet’s surface.

It was pequeninos manning all the instruments now, since all but a handful of humans had fled to the starships. So it was that a pequenino cried out the news over the ansible to the starship at the descolada planet; and by chance it was Firequencher who was at the ansible terminal to hear his report. He immediately began keening, his high voice liquid with the music of grief.

When Miro and his sisters understood what had happened, he went at once to Jane. “They launched the Little Doctor,” he said, shaking her gently.

He waited only a few moments. Her eyes came open. “I thought we had beaten them,” she whispered. “Peter and Wang-mu, I mean. Congress voted to establish a quarantine and specifically denied the fleet the authority to launch the M.D. Device. And yet still they launched.”

“You look so tired,” said Miro.

“It takes everything I have,” she said. “Over and over again. And now I lose them, the mothertrees. They’re a part of myself, Miro. Remember how you felt when you lost control of your body, when you were crippled and slow? That’s what will happen to me when the mothertrees are gone.”

She wept.

“Stop it,” said Miro. “Stop it right now. Get control of your emotions, Jane, you don’t have time for this.”

At once she freed herself from the straps that held her. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s almost too strong to control, sometimes, this body.”

“The Little Doctor has to be close to a planet for it to have any effect on it— the field dissipates fairly quickly unless it has mass to sustain it. So we have time, Jane. Maybe an hour. Certainly more than half an hour.”

“And in that time, what do you imagine I can do?”

“Pick the damn thing up,” said Miro. “Push it Outside and don’t bring it back!”

“And if it goes off Outside?” asked Jane. “If something that destructive is echoed and repeated out there? Besides, I can’t pick things up that I haven’t had a chance to examine. There’s no one near it, no ansible connected to it, nothing to lead me to find it in the dead of space.”

“I don’t know,” said Miro. “Ender would know. Damn that he’s dead!”

“Well, technically speaking,” said Jane. “But Peter hasn’t found his way into any of his Ender memories. If he has them.”

“What’s to remember?” said Miro. “This has never happened before.”

“It’s true that it is Ender’s aiua. But how much of his brilliance was the aiua, and how much was his body and brain? Remember that the genetic component was strong— he was born in the first place because tests showed the original Peter and Valentine came so close to being the ideal military commander.”

“Right,” said Miro. “And now he’s Peter.”

“Not the real Peter,” said Jane.

“Look, it’s sort of Ender and it’s sort of Peter. Can you find him? Can you talk to him?”

“When our aiuas meet, we don’t talk. We sort of— what, dance around each other. It’s not like Human and the Hive Queen.”

“Doesn’t he still have the jewel in his ear?” asked Miro, touching his own.

“But what can he do? He’s hours distant from his starship—”

“Jane,” said Miro. “Try.”

***

Peter looked stricken. Wang-mu touched his arm, leaned close to him. “What’s wrong?”

“I thought we made it,” he said. “When Congress voted to revoke the order to use the Little Doctor.”

“What do you mean?” said Wang-mu, though she already knew what he meant.

“They launched it. The Lusitania Fleet disobeyed Congress. Who could have guessed? We have less than an hour before it detonates.”

Tears leapt to Wang-mu’s eyes, but she blinked them away. “At least the pequeninos and the hive queens will survive.”

“But not the network of mothertrees,” said Peter. “Starflight will end until Jane finds some other way to hold all that information in memory. The brothertrees are too stupid, the fathertrees have egos far too strong to share their capacity with her— they would if they could, but they can’t. You think Jane hasn’t explored all the possibilities? Faster-than-light flight is over.”

“Then this is our home,” said Wang-mu.

“No it isn’t,” said Peter.

“We’re hours away from the starship, Peter. We’ll never get there before it detonates.”

“What’s the starship? A box with a lightswitch and a tight-sealing door. For all we know, we don’t even need the box. I’m not staying here, Wang-mu.”

“You’re going back to Lusitania? Now?”

“If Jane can take me,” he said. “And if she can’t, then I guess this body goes back where it came from— Outside.”

“I’m going with you,” said Wang-mu.

“I’ve had three thousand years of life,” said Peter. “I don’t actually remember them too well, but you deserve better than to disappear from the universe if Jane can’t do this.”

“I’m going with you,” said Wang-mu, “so shut up. There’s no time to waste.”

“I don’t even know what I’m going to do when I get there,” said Peter.

“Yes you do,” said Wang-mu.

“Oh? What is it I’m planning?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well isn’t that a problem? What good is this plan of mine if nobody knows it?”

“I mean that you are who you are,” said Wang-mu. “You are the same will, the same tough resourceful boy who refused to be beaten down by anything they threw at him in Battle School or Command School. The boy who wouldn’t let bullies destroy himno matter what it took to stop them. Naked with no weapons except the soap on his body, that’s how Ender fought Bonzo Madrid in the bathroom at Battle School.”

“You’ve been doing your research.”

“Peter,” said Wang-mu, “I don’t expect you to be Ender, his personality, his memories, his training. But you are the one who can’t be beaten down. You are the one who finds a way to destroy the enemy.”

Peter shook his head. “I’m not him, I’m truly not.”

“You told me back when we first met that you weren’t yourself. Well, now you are. The whole of you, one man, intact in this body. Nothing is missing from you now. Nothing has been stolen from you, nothing is lost. Do you understand? Ender lived his life under the shadow of having caused xenocide. Now is the chance to be the opposite. To live the opposite life. To be the one who prevents it.”

Peter closed his eyes for a moment. “Jane,” he said. “Can you take us without a starship?” He listened for a moment. “She says the real question is, can we hold ourselves together. It’s the ship she controls and moves around, plus our aiuas— our own bodies are held together by us, not by her.”

“Well, we do that all the time anyway, so it’s fine,” said Wang-mu.

“It’s not fine,” said Peter. “Jane says that inside the starship, we have visual clues, we have a sense of safety. Without those walls, without the light, in the deep emptiness, we can lose our place. We can forget where we are relative to our own body. We really have to hold on.”

“Does it help if we’re so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?” asked Wang-mu.

“I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes,” said Peter.

“Then let’s do it. That’s us in spades.”

***

Finding Peter’s aiua was easy for Jane. She had been inside his body, she had followed his aiua— or chased it— until she knew it without searching. Wang-mu was a different case. Jane didn’t know her all that well. The voyages she had taken her on before had been inside a starship whose location Jane already knew. But once she located Peter’s— Ender’s— aiua, it turned out to be easier than she thought. For the two of them, Peter and Wang-mu, were philotically twined. There was a tiny web in the making between them. Even without the box around them, Jane could hold onto them, both at once, as if they were one entity.

And as she pushed them Outside she could feel how they clung all the more tightly to each other— not just the bodies, but also the invisible links of the deepest self. Outside they went together, and together they came back In. Jane felt a stab of jealousy— just as she had been jealous of Novinha, though without feeling the physical sensation of grief and rage that her body now brought to the emotion. But she knew it was absurd. It was Miro that Jane loved, as a woman loves a man. Ender was her father and her friend, and now he was barely Ender anymore. He was Peter, a man who remembered only the past few months of association with her. They were friends, but she had no claim on his heart.

The familiar aiua of Ender Wiggin and the aiua of Si Wang-mu were even more tightly bound together than ever when Jane set them down on the surface of Lusitania.

They stood in the midst of the starport. The last few hundred humans trying to escape were frantically trying to understand why the starships had stopped flying just when the M.D. Device was launched.

“The starships here are all full,” Peter said.

“But we don’t need a starship,” said Wang-mu.

“Yes we do,” said Peter. “Jane can’t pick up the Little Doctor without one.”

“Pick it up?” said Wang-mu. “Then you do have a plan.”

“Didn’t you say I did?” said Peter. “I can’t make a liar out of you.” He spoke then to Jane through the jewel. “Are you here again? Can you talk to me through the satellites here on— all right. Good. Jane, I need you to empty one of these starships for me.” He paused a moment. “Take the people to a colony world, wait for them to get out, and then bring it back over here by us, away from the crowd.”

Instantly, one of the starships disappeared from the starport. A cheer arose from the crowds as everyone rushed to get into one of the remaining ships. Peter and Wang-mu waited, waited, knowing that with every minute that it took to unload that starship on the colony world, the Little Doctor came closer to detonation.

Then the wait was over. A boxy starship appeared beside them. Peter had the door open and both of them were inside before any of the other people at the starport even realized what was happening. A cry went up then, but Peter closed and sealed the door.

“We’re inside,” said Wang-mu. “But where are we going?”

“Jane is matching the velocity of the Little Doctor.”

“I thought she couldn’t pick it up without the starship.”

“She’s getting the tracking data from the satellite. She’ll predict exactly where it will be at a certain moment, and then push us Outside and bring us back In at exactly that point, going exactly that speed.”

“The Little Doctor will be inside this ship? With us?” asked Wang-mu.

“Stand over here by the wall,” he said. “And hold on to me. We’re going to be weightless. So far you’ve managed to visit four planets without ever having that experience.”

“Have you had that experience before?”

Peter laughed, then shook his head. “Not in this body. But I guess at some level I remembered how to handle it because—”

At that moment they became weightless and in the air in front of them, not touching the sides or walls of the starship, was the mammoth missile that carried the Little Doctor. If its rockets had still been firing, they would have been incinerated. Instead it was hurtling on at the speed it had already achieved; it seemed to hover in the air because the starship was going exactly the same speed.

Peter hooked his feet under a bench bolted to the wall, then reached out his hands and touched the missile. “We need to bring it into contact with the floor,” he said.

Wang-mu tried to reach for it, too, but immediately she came loose from the wall and started drifting. Intense nausea began immediately, as her body desperately searched for some direction that would serve as down.

“Think of the device as downward,” said Peter urgently. “The device is down. You’re falling toward the device.”

She felt herself reorient. It helped. And as she drifted closer she was able to take hold of it and cling. She could only watch, grateful simply not to be vomiting, as Peter slowly, gently pushed the mass of the missile toward the floor. When they touched, the whole ship shuddered, for the mass of the missile was probably greater than the mass of the ship that now surrounded it.

“Okay?” Peter asked.

“I’m fine,” said Wang-mu. Then she realized he had been talking to Jane, and his “okay” was part of that conversation.

“Jane is tracing the thing right now,” said Peter. “She does it with the starships, too, before she ever takes them anywhere. It used to be analytical, by computer. Now her aiua sort of tours the inner structure of the thing. She couldn’t do it till it was in solid contact with something she knew: the starship. Us. When she gets a sense of the inner shape of the thing, she can hold it together Outside.”

“We’re just going to take it there and leave it?” asked Wang-mu.

“No,” said Peter. “It would either hold together and detonate, or it would break apart, and either way, who knows what the damage would be out there? How many little copies of it would wink into existence?”

“None at all,” said Wang-mu. “It takes an intelligence to make something new.”

“What do you think this thing is made of? Just like every bit of your body, just like every rock and tree and cloud, it’s all aiuas, and there’ll be other unconnected aiuas out there desperate to belong, to imitate, to grow. No, this thing is evil, and we’re not taking it out there.”

“Where are we taking it?”

“Home to meet its sender,” said Peter.

***

Admiral Lands stood glumly alone on the bridge of his flagship. He knew that Causo would have spread the word by now— the launch of the Little Doctor had been illegal, mutinous; the Old Man would be court-martialed or worse when they got back to civilization. No one spoke to him; no one dared look at him. And Lands knew that he would have to relieve himself of command and turn the ship over to Causo, as his X.O., and the fleet to his second-in-command, Admiral Fukuda. Causo’s gesture in not arresting him immediately was kind, but it was also useless. Knowing the truth of his disobedience, it would be impossible for the men and officers to follow him and unfair to ask it of them.

Lands turned to give the order, only to find his X.O. already heading toward him. “Sir,” said Causo.

“I know,” said Lands. “I relieve myself of command.”

“No sir,” said Causo. “Come with me, sir.”

“What do you plan to do?” asked Lands.

“The cargo officer has reported something in the main hold of the ship.”

“What is it?” asked Lands.

Causo just looked at him. Lands nodded, and they walked together from the bridge.

***

Jane had taken the box of the starship, not into the weapons bay of the flagship, for that could hold only the Little Doctor, not the box around it, but rather into the main hold, which was much more copious and which also lacked any practical means of relaunching the weapon.

Peter and Wang-mu stepped out of the starship and into the hold.

Then Jane took away the starship, leaving Peter, Wang-mu, and the Little Doctor behind.

Back on Lusitania, the starship would reappear. But no one would get into it. No one needed to. The M.D. Device was no longer heading for Lusitania. Now it was in the hold of the flagship of the Lusitania Fleet, traveling at a relativistic speed toward oblivion. The proximity sensor on the Little Doctor would not be triggered, of course, since it was nowhere near an object of planetary mass. But the timer was still chugging away.

“I hope they notice us soon,” said Wang-mu.

“Oh, don’t worry. We have whole minutes left.”

“Has anyone seen us yet?”

“There was a fellow in that office,” said Peter, pointing toward an open door. “He saw the starship, then he saw us, then he saw the Little Doctor. Now he’s gone. I don’t think we’ll be alone much longer.”

A door high up the front wall of the hold opened. Three men stepped onto the balcony that overlooked the hold on three sides.

“Hi,” said Peter.

“Who the hell are you?” asked the one with the most ribbons and trim on his uniform.

“I’m betting you’re Admiral Bobby Lands,” said Peter. “And you must be the executive officer, Causo. And you must be the cargo officer, Lung.”

“I said who the hell are you!” demanded Admiral Lands.

“I don’t think your priorities are straight,” said Peter. “I think there’ll be plenty of time for us to discuss my identity after you deactivate the timer on this weapon that you so carelessly tossed out into space perilously close to a settled planet.”

“If you think you can—”

But the Admiral didn’t finish his sentence, because the X.O. was diving over the rail and jumping down to the deck of the cargo hold, where he immediately began twisting the fingerbolts that held the casing over the timer. “Causo,” said Lands, “that can’t be the—”

“It’s the Little Doctor, all right, sir,” said Causo.

“We launched it!” shouted the Admiral.

“But that must have been a mistake,” said Peter. “An oversight. Because Starways Congress revoked your authorization to launch it.”

“Who are you and how did you get here?”

Causo stood up, sweat dripping off his brow. “Sir, I am pleased to report that with more than two minutes’ leeway, I have managed to prevent our ship from being blown into its constituent atoms.”

“I’m glad to see that you didn’t have any nonsense about requiring two separate keys and a secret combination to get that thing switched off,” said Peter.

“No, it was designed to make turning it off pretty easy,” said Causo. “There are directions on how to do it all over this thing. Now, turning it on— that’s hard.”

“But somehow you managed to do it,” said Peter.

“Where is your vehicle?” said the Admiral. He was climbing down a ladder to the deck. “How did you get here?”

“We came in a nice box, which we discarded when it was no longer needed,” said Peter. “Haven’t you gathered, yet, that we did not come to be interrogated by you?”

“Arrest these two,” Lands ordered.

Causo looked at the admiral as if he were crazy. But the cargo officer, who had followed the admiral down the ladder, moved to obey, taking a couple of steps toward Peter and Wang-mu.

Instantly, they disappeared and reappeared up on the balcony where the three officers had come in. Of course it took a moment or two for the officers to find them. The cargo officer was merely baffled. “Sir,” he said. “They were right here a second ago.”

Causo, on the other hand, had already decided that something unusual was going on for which there was no appropriate military response. So he was responding according to another pattern. He crossed himself and began murmuring a prayer.

Lands, however, took a few steps backward, until he bumped into the Little Doctor. He clung to it, then suddenly pulled his hands away from it with loathing, perhaps even with pain, as if the surface of it had suddenly become scorching hot to his hands. “Oh God,” he said. “I tried to do what Ender Wiggin would have done.”

Wang-mu couldn’t help it. She laughed aloud.

“That’s odd,” said Peter. “I was trying to do exactly the same thing.”

“Oh God,” said Lands again.

“Admiral Lands,” said Peter, “I have a suggestion. Instead of spending a couple of months of realtime trying to turn this ship around and launch this thing illegally again, and instead of trying to establish a useless, demoralizing quarantine around Lusitania, why don’t you just head on back to one of the Hundred Worlds— Trondheim is close— and in the meantime, make a report to Starways Congress. I even have some ideas about what the report might say, if you want to hear them.”

In answer, Lands took out a laser pistol and pointed it at Peter.

Immediately, Peter and Wang-mu disappeared from where they were and reappeared behind Lands. Peter reached out and deftly disarmed the Admiral, unfortunately breaking two of his fingers in the process. “Sorry, I’m out of practice,” said Peter. “I haven’t had to use my martial arts skills in— oh, thousands of years.”

Lands sank to his knees, nursing his injured hand.

“Peter,” Wang-mu said, “can we stop having Jane move us around like that? It’s really disorienting.”

Peter winked at her. “Want to hear my ideas about your report?” Peter asked the admiral.

Lands nodded.

“Me too,” said Causo, who clearly foresaw that he would be commanding this ship for some time.

“I think you need to use your ansible to report that due to a malfunction, it was reported that a launch of the Little Doctor took place. But in fact, the launch was aborted in time, and to prevent further mishap, you had the M.D. Device moved to the main hold where you disarmed and disabled it. You get the part about disabling it?” Peter asked Causo.

Causo nodded. “I’ll do it at once, sir.” He turned to the cargo officer. “Get me a tool kit.”

While the cargo officer went to pull a kit out of the storage bin on the wall, Peter continued. “Then you can report that you entered into contact with a native of Lusitania— that’s me— who was able to satisfy you that the descolada virus was completely under control and that it no longer poses a threat to anybody.”

“And how do I know that?” said Lands.

“Because I carry what’s left of the virus, and if it weren’t utterly killed, you would catch the descolada and die of it in a couple of days. Now, in addition to certifying that Lusitania poses no threat, your report should also state that the rebellion of Lusitania was no more than a misunderstanding, and that far from there being any human interference in the pequenino culture, the pequeninos exercised their free rights as sentient beings on their own planet to acquire information and technology from friendly visiting aliens— namely, the human colony of Milagre. Since that time, many of the pequeninos have become very adept at much human science and technology, and at some reasonable time in the future they will send ambassadors to Starways Congress and hope that Congress will return the courtesy. Are you getting this?”

Lands nodded. Causo, working on taking apart the firing mechanism of the Little Doctor, grunted his assent.

“You may also report that the pequeninos have entered into alliance with yet another alien race, which contrary to various premature reports, was not completely extinguished in the notorious xenocide of Ender Wiggin. One cocooned hive queen survived, she being the source of all the information contained in the famous book The Hive Queen, whose accuracy is now proved to be unassailable. The Hive Queen of Lusitania, however, does not wish to exchange ambassadors with Starways Congress at the present time, and prefers instead that her interests be represented by the pequeninos.”

“There are still buggers?” asked Lands.

“Ender Wiggin did not, technically speaking, commit xenocide after all. So if your launch of this missile, here, hadn’t been aborted, you would have been the cause of the first xenocide, not the second one. And as it stands right now, however, there has never been a xenocide, though not for lack of trying both times, I must admit.”

Tears coursed down Lands’s face. “I didn’t want to do it. I thought it was the right thing. I thought I had to do it to save—”

“Let’s say you take that up with the ship’s therapist at some later time,” said Peter. “We still have one more point to address. We have a technology of starflight that I think the Hundred Worlds would like to have. You’ve already seen a demonstration of it. Usually, though, we prefer to do it inside our rather unstylish and boxy-looking starships. Still, it’s a pretty good method and it lets us visit other worlds without losing even a second of our lives. I know that those who hold the keys to our method of starflight would be delighted, over the next few months, to instantaneously transport all relativistic starships currently in flight to their destinations.”

“But there’s a price for it,” said Causo, nodding.

“Well, let’s just say that there’s a precondition,” said Peter. “A key element of our instantaneous starflight includes a computer program that Starways Congress recently tried to kill. We found a substitute method, but it’s not wholly adequate or satisfactory, and I think I can safely say that Starways Congress will never have the use of instantaneous starflight until all the ansibles in the Hundred Worlds are reconnected to all the computer networks on every world, without delays and without those pesky little snoop programs that keep yipping away like ineffectual little dogs.”

“I don’t have any authority to—”

“Admiral Lands, I didn’t ask you to decide. I merely suggested the contents of the message you might want to send, by ansible, to Starways Congress. Immediately.”

Lands looked away. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I think I’m incapacitated. Executive Officer Causo, in front of Cargo Officer Lung, I hereby transfer command of this ship to you, and order you to notify Admiral Fukuda that he is now commander of this fleet.”

“Won’t work,” said Peter. “The message I’ve described has to come from you. Fukuda isn’t here and I don’t intend to go repeat all of this to him. So you will make the report, and you will retain command of fleet and ship, and you will not weasel out of your responsibility. You made a hard choice a while back. You chose wrong, but at least you chose with courage and determination. Show the same courage now, Admiral. We haven’t punished you here today, except for my unfortunate clumsiness with your fingers, for which I really am sorry. We’re giving you a second chance. Take it, Admiral.”

Lands looked at Peter and tears began to flow down his cheeks. “Why did you give me a second chance?”

“Because that’s what Ender always wanted,” said Peter. “And maybe by giving you a second chance, he’ll get one, too.”

Wang-mu took Peter’s hand and squeezed it.

Then they disappeared from the cargo hold of the flagship and reappeared inside the control room of a shuttle orbiting the planet of the descoladores.

Wang-mu looked around at a room full of strangers. Unlike Admiral Lands’s starship, this craft had no artificial gravity, but by holding onto Peter’s hand Wang-mu kept from either fainting or throwing up. She had no idea who any of these people were, but she did know that Firequencher had to be a pequenino and the nameless worker at one of the computer terminals was a creature of the kind once hated and feared as the merciless buggers.

“Hi, Ela, Quara, Miro,” said Peter. “This is Wang-mu.”

Wang-mu would have been terrified, except that the others were so obviously terrified to see them.

Miro was the first to recover enough to speak. “Didn’t you forget your spaceship?” he asked.

Wang-mu laughed.

“Hi, Royal Mother of the West,” said Miro, using the name of Wang-mu’s ancestor-of-the-heart, a god worshiped on the world of Path. “I’ve heard all about you from Jane,” Miro added.

A woman drifted in through a corridor at one end of the control room.

“Val?” said Peter.

“No,” answered the woman. “I’m Jane.”

“Jane,” whispered Wang-mu. “Malu’s god.”

“Malu’s friend,” said Jane. “As I am your friend, Wang-mu.” She reached Peter and, taking him by both hands, looked him in the eye. “And your friend too, Peter. As I’ve always been your friend.”

Chapter 16 — “HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY AREN’T QUIVERING IN TERROR?”

“O Gods! You are unjust! My mother and father deserved to have a better child than me!”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

“You had the Little Doctor in your possession and you gave it back?” asked Quara, sounding incredulous.

Everyone, Miro included, assumed she meant that she didn’t trust the fleet not to use it.

“It was dismantled in front of my eyes,” said Peter.

“Well, can it be mantled again?” she asked.

Wang-mu tried to explain. “Admiral Lands isn’t going to be able to go down that road now. We wouldn’t have left things unsettled. Lusitania is safe.”

“She’s not talking about Lusitania,” said Ela coldly. “She’s talking about here. The descolada planet.”

“Am I the only person who thought of it?” said Quara. “Tell the truth— it would solve all our worries about followup probes, about new outbreaks of even worse versions of the descolada—”

“You’re thinking of blowing up a world populated by a sentient race?” asked Wang-mu.

“Not right now,” said Quara, sounding as if Wang-mu were the stupidest person she had ever wasted time talking to. “If we determine that they’re, you know, what Valentine called them. Varelse. Unable to be reasoned with. Impossible to coexist with.”

“So what you’re saying,” said Wang-mu, “is that—”

“I’m saying what I said,” Quara answered.

Wang-mu went on. “What you’re saying is that Admiral Lands wasn’t wrong in principle, he simply was wrong about the facts of the particular case. If the descolada had still been a threat on Lusitania, then it’s his duty to blow up the planet.”

“What are the lives of the people of one planet compared to all sentient life?” asked Quara.

“Is this,” said Miro, “the same Quara Ribeira who tried to keep us from wiping out the descolada virus because it might be sentient?” He sounded amused.

“I’ve thought a lot about that since then,” said Quara. “I was being childish and sentimental. Life is precious. Sentient life is more precious. But when one sentient group threatens the survival of another, then the threatened group has the right to protect themselves. Isn’t that what Ender did? Over and over again?”

Quara looked from one to another, triumphant.

Peter nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what Ender did.”

“In a game,” said Wang-mu.

“In his fight with two boys who threatened his life. He made sure they could never threaten him again. That’s how war is fought, in case any of you have foolish ideas to the contrary. You don’t fight with minimum force, you fight with maximum force at endurable cost. You don’t just pink your enemy, you don’t even bloody him, you destroy his capability to fight back. It’s the strategy you use with diseases. You don’t try to find a drug that kills ninety-nine percent of the bacteria or viruses. If you do that, all you’ve accomplished is to create a new drug-resistant strain. You have to kill a hundred percent.”

Wang-mu tried to think of an argument against this. “Is disease really a valid analogy?”

“What is your analogy?” answered Peter. “A wrestling match? Fight to wear down your opponent’s resistance? That’s fine— if your opponent is playing by the same rules. But if you stand there ready to wrestle and he pulls out a knife or a gun, what then? Or is it a tennis match? Keep score until your opponent sets off the bomb under your feet? There aren’t any rules. In war.”

“But is this war?” asked Wang-mu.

“As Quara said,” Peter answered. “If we find out there’s no dealing with them, then yes, it’s a war. What they did to Lusitania, to the defenseless pequeninos, was devastating, soulless, total war without regard to the rights of the other side. That’s our enemy, unless we can bring them to understand the consequences of what they did. Isn’t that what you were saying, Quara?”

“Perfectly,” said Quara.

Wang-mu knew there was something wrong with this reasoning, but she couldn’t lay her finger on it. “Peter, if you really believe this, why didn’t you keep the Little Doctor?”

“Because,” said Peter, “we might be wrong, and the danger is not imminent.”

Quara clicked her tongue in disdain. “You weren’t here, Peter. You didn’t see what they were throwing at us— a newly engineered and specially tailored virus to make us sit as still as idiots while they came and took over our ship.”

“And they sent this how, in a nice envelope?” said Peter. “They sent an infected puppy, knowing you couldn’t resist picking it up and hugging it?”

“They broadcast the code,” said Quara. “But they expected us to interpret it by making the molecule and then it would have its effect.”

“No,” said Peter, “you speculated that that’s how their language works, and then you started to act as if your speculation were true.”

“And somehow you know that it’s not?” said Quara.

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Peter. “That’s my point. We just don’t know. We can’t know. Now, if we saw them launching probes, or if they started trying to blast this ship out of the sky, we’d have to start taking action. Like sending ships after the probes and carefully studying the viruses they were sending out. Or if they attacked this ship, we’d take evasive action and analyze their weapons and tactics.”

“That’s fine now,” said Quara. “Now that Jane’s safe and the mothertrees are intact so she can handle the starflight thing she does. Now we can catch up with probes and dance out of the way of missiles or whatever. But what about before, when we were helpless here? When we had only a few weeks to live, or so we thought?”

“Back then,” said Peter, “you didn’t have the Little Doctor, either, so you couldn’t have blown up their planet. We didn’t get our hands on the M. D. Device until after Jane’s power of flight was restored. And with that power, it was no longer necessary to destroy the descolada planet until and unless it posed a danger too great to be resisted any other way.”

Quara laughed. “What is this? I thought Peter was supposed to be the nasty side of Ender’s personality. Turns out you’re the sweetness and light.”

Peter smiled. “There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally.”

“We couldn’t be engaging in a bit of self-justification, could we?” said Quara. “You’re Ender’s successor. Therefore you find it convenient to believe that those boys Ender killed were the exceptions to your niceness rule.”

“I justify Ender by his ignorance and helplessness. We aren’t helpless. Starways Congress and the Lusitania Fleet were not helpless. And they chose to act before alleviating their ignorance.”

“Ender chose to use the Little Doctor while he was ignorant.”

“No, Quara. The adults who commanded him used it. They could have intercepted and blocked his decision. There was plenty of time for them to use the overrides. Ender thought he was playing a game. He thought that by using the Little Doctor in the simulation he would prove himself unreliable, disobedient, or even too brutal to trust with command. He was trying to get himself kicked out of Command School. That’s all. He was doing the necessary thing to get them to stop torturing him. The adults were the ones who decided simply to unleash their most powerful weapon: Ender Wiggin. No more effort to talk with the buggers, to communicate. Not even at the end when they knew that Ender was going to destroy the buggers’ home planet. They had decided to go for the kill no matter what. Like Admiral Lands. Like you, Quara.”

“I said I’d wait until we found out!”

“Good,” said Peter. “Then we don’t disagree.”

“But we should have the Little Doctor here!”

“The Little Doctor shouldn’t exist at all,” said Peter. “It was never necessary. It was never appropriate. Because the cost of it is too high.”

“Cost!” hooted Quara. “It’s cheaper than the old nuclear weapons!”

“It’s taken us three thousand years to get over the destruction of the hive queens’ home planet. That’s the cost. If we use the Little Doctor, then we’re the sort of people who wipe out other species. Admiral Lands was just like the men who were using Ender Wiggin. Their minds were made up. This was the danger. This was the evil. This had to be destroyed. They thought they meant well. They were saving the human race. But they weren’t. There were a lot of different motives involved, but along with deciding to use the weapon, they also decided not to attempt to communicate with the enemy. Where was the demonstration of the Little Doctor on a nearby moon? Where was Lands’s attempt to verify that the situation on Lusitania had not changed? And you, Quara— what methodology, exactly, were you planning to use to determine whether the descoladores were too evil to be allowed to live? At what point do you know they are an unbearable danger to all other sentient species?”

“Turn it around, Peter,” said Quara. “At what point do you know they’re not?”

“We have better weapons than the Little Doctor. Ela once designed a molecule to block the descolada’s efforts to cause harm, without destroying its ability to help the flora and fauna of Lusitania to pass through their transformations. Who’s to say that we can’t do the same thing for every nasty little plague they send at us until they give up? Who’s to say that they aren’t already trying desperately to communicate with us? How do you know that the molecule they sent wasn’t an attempt to make us happy with them the only way they knew how, by sending us a molecule that would take away our anger? How do you know they aren’t already quivering in terror down on that planet because we have a ship that can disappear and reappear anywhere else? Are we trying to talk to them?”

Peter looked around at all of them.

“Don’t you understand, any of you? There’s only one species that we know of that has deliberately, consciously, knowingly tried to destroy another sentient species without any serious attempt at communication or warning. We’re the ones. The first xenocide failed because the victims of the attack managed to conceal exactly one pregnant female. The second time it failed for a better reason— because some members of the human species determined to stop it. Not just some, many. Congress. A big corporation. A philosopher on Divine Wind. A Samoan divine and his fellow believers on Pacifica. Wang-mu and I. Jane. And Admiral Lands’s own officers and men, when they finally understood the situation. We’re getting better, don’t you see? But the fact remains— we humans are the sentient species that has shown the most tendency to deliberately refuse to communicate with other species and instead destroy them utterly. Maybe the descoladores are varelse and maybe they’re not. But I’m a lot more frightened at the thought that we are varelse. That’s the cost of using the Little Doctor when it isn’t needed and never will be, given the other tools in our kit. If we choose to use the M. D. Device, then we are not ramen. We can never be trusted. We are the species that would deserve to die for the safety of all other sentient life.”

Quara shook her head, but the smugness was gone. “Sounds to me like somebody is still trying to earn forgiveness for his own crimes.”

“That was Ender,” said Peter. “He spent his life trying to turn himself and everyone else into ramen. I look around me in this ship, I think of what I’ve seen, the people I’ve known in the past few months, and I think that the human race isn’t doing too badly. We’re moving in the right direction. A few throwbacks now and then. A bit of blustery talk. But by and large, we’re coming closer to being worthy to associate with the hive queens and the pequeninos. And if the descoladores are perhaps a bit farther from being ramen than we are, that doesn’t mean we have a right to destroy them. It means we have all the more reason to be patient with them and try to nurse them along. How many years has it taken us to get here from marking the sites of battles with piles of human skulls? Thousands of years. And all the time, we had teachers trying to get us to change, pointing the way. Bit by bit we learned. Let’s teach them— if they don’t already know more than we do.”

“It could take years just to learn their language,” said Ela.

“Transportation is cheap now,” said Peter. “No offense intended, Jane. We can keep teams shuttling back and forth for a long time without undue hardship to anyone. We can keep a fleet watching this planet. With pequeninos and hive workers alongside the human researchers. For centuries. For millennia. There’s no hurry.”

“I think that’s dangerous,” said Quara.

“And I think you have the same instinctive desire that we all have, the one that gets us in so damn much trouble all the time,” said Peter. “You know that you’re going to die, and you want to see it all resolved before you do.”

“I’m not old yet!” Quara said.

Miro spoke up. “He’s right, Quara. Ever since Marcao died, you’ve had death looming over you. Think about it, everybody. Humans are the short-lived species. Hive queens think they live forever. Pequeninos have the hope of many centuries in the third life. We’re the ones who are in a hurry all the time. We’re the ones who are determined to make decisions without getting enough information, because we want to act now, while we still have time.”

“So that’s it?” said Quara. “That’s your decision? Let this grave threat to all life continue to sit here hatching their plans while we watch and watch from the sky?”

“Not we,” said Peter.

“No, that’s right,” said Quara, “you’re not part of this project.”

“Yes I am,” said Peter. “But you’re not. You’re going back down to Lusitania, and Jane will never bring you back here. Not until you’ve spent years proving that you’ve got your personal bugbears under control.”

“You arrogant son-of-a-bitch!” Quara cried.

“Everybody here knows that I’m right,” said Peter. “You’re like Lands. You’re too ready to make devastatingly far-reaching decisions and then refuse to let any argument change your mind. There are plenty of people like you, Quara. But we can never let any of them anywhere near this planet until we know more. The day may come when all the sentient species reach the conclusion that the descoladores are in fact varelse who must be destroyed. But I seriously doubt any of us here, with the exception of Jane, will be alive when that day comes.”

“What, you think I’ll live forever?” said Jane.

“You’d better,” said Peter. “Unless you and Miro can figure out how to have children who can launch starships when they grow up.” Peter turned to Jane. “Can you take us home now?”

“Even as we speak,” said Jane.

They opened the door. They left the ship. They stepped onto the surface of a world that was not going to be destroyed after all.

All except Quara.

“Isn’t Quara coming with us?” asked Wang-mu.

“Maybe she needs to be alone for a while,” said Peter.

“You go on ahead,” said Wang-mu.

“You think you can deal with her?” said Peter.

“I think I can try,” said Wang-mu.

He kissed her. “I was hard on her. Tell her I’m sorry.”

“Maybe later you can tell her yourself,” said Wang-mu.

She went back inside the starship. Quara still sat facing her terminal. The last data she had been looking at before Peter and Wang-mu arrived in the starship still hung in the air over her terminal.

“Quara,” said Wang-mu.

“Go away.” The husky sound of her voice was ample evidence that she had been crying.

“Everything Peter said was true,” said Wang-mu.

“Is that what you came to say? Rub salt in the wound?”

“Except that he gave the human race too much credit for our slight improvement.”

Quara snorted. It was almost a yes.

“Because it seems to me that he and everyone else here had already decided you were varelse. To be banished without hope of Parole. Without understanding you first.”

“Oh, they understand me,” said Quara. “Little girl devastated by loss of brutal father whom she nevertheless loved. Still searching for father figure. Still responding to everyone else with the mindless rage she saw her father show. You think I don’t know what they’ve decided?”

“They’ve got you pegged.”

“Which is not true of me. I might have suggested that the Little Doctor ought to be kept around in case it was necessary, but I never said just to use it without any further attempt at communication. Peter just treated me as if I was that admiral all over again.”

“I know,” said Wang-mu.

“Yeah, right. I’m sure you’re so sympathetic with me and you know he’s wrong. Come on, Jane told us already that the two of you are— what was the bullshit phrase? —in love.”

“I wasn’t proud of what Peter did to you. It was a mistake. He makes them. He hurts my feelings sometimes, too. So do you. You did just now. I don’t know why. But sometimes I hurt other people, too. And sometimes I do terrible things because I’m so sure that I’m right. We’re all like that. We all have a little bit of varelse in us. And a little bit of raman.”

“Isn’t that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life,” said Quara.

“It’s the best I could come up with,” said Wang-mu. “I’m not educated like you.”

“And is that the make-her-feel-guilty technique?”

“Tell me, Quara, if you’re not really acting out your father’s role or trying to call him back or whatever the analysis was, why are you so angry at everybody all the time?”

Quara finally swiveled in her chair and looked Wang-mu in the face. Yes, she had been crying. “You really want to know why I’m so filled with irrational fury all the time?” The taunting hadn’t left her voice. “You really want to play shrink with me? Well try this one. What has me so completely pissed off is that all through my childhood, my older brother Quim was secretly molesting me, and now he’s a martyr and they’re going to make him a saint and nobody will ever know how evil he was and the terrible, terrible things he did to me.”

Wang-mu stood there horrified. Peter had told her about Quim. How he died. The kind of man he was. “Oh, Quara,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

A look of complete disgust passed across Quara’s face. “You are so stupid. Quim never touched me, you stupid meddlesome little do-gooder. But you’re so eager to get some cheap explanation about why I’m such a bitch that you’ll believe any story that sounds halfway plausible. And right now you’re probably still wondering whether maybe my confession was true and I’m only denying it because I’m afraid of the repercussions or some dumb merda like that. Get this straight, girl. You do not know me. You will never know me. I don’t want you to know me. I don’t want any friends, and if I did want friends, I would not want Peter’s pet bimbo to do the honors. Can I possibly make myself clearer?”

In her life Wang-mu had been beaten by experts and vilified by champions. Quara was damn good at it by any standards, but not so good that Wang-mu couldn’t bear it without flinching. “I notice, though,” said Wang-mu, “that after your vile slander against the noblest member of your family, you couldn’t stand to leave me believing that it was true. So you do have loyalty to someone, even if he’s dead.”

“You just don’t take a hint, do you?” said Quara.

“And I notice that you still keep talking to me, even though you despise me and try to offend me.”

“If you were a fish, you’d be a remora, you just clamp on and suck for dear life, don’t you!”

“Because at any point you could just walk out of here and you wouldn’t have to hear my pathetic attempts at making friends with you,” said Wang-mu. “But you don’t go.”

“You are unbelievable,” said Quara. She unstrapped herself from her chair, got up, and went out the open door.

Wang-mu watched her go. Peter was right. Humans were still the most alien of alien species. Still the most dangerous, the most unreasonable, the least predictable.

Even so, Wang-mu dared to make a couple of predictions to herself.

First, she was confident that the research team would someday establish communications with the descoladores.

The second prediction was much more iffy. More like a hope. Maybe even just a wish. That someday Quara would tell Wang-mu the truth. That someday the hidden wound that Quara bore would be healed. That someday they might be friends.

But not today. There was no hurry. Wang-mu would try to help Quara because she was so obviously in need, and because the people who had been around her the longest were clearly too sick of her to help. But helping Quara was not the only thing or even the most important thing she had to accomplish. Marrying Peter and starting a life with him— that was a much higher priority. And getting something to eat, a drink of water, and a place to pee— those were the highest priorities of all at this precise moment in her life.

I guess that means I’m human, thought Wang-mu. Not a god. Maybe just a beast after all. Part raman. Part varelse. But more raman than varelse, at least on her good days. Peter, too, just like her. Both of them part of the same flawed species, determined to join together to make a couple of more members of that species. Peter and I together will call forth some aiua to come in from Outside and take control of a tiny body that our bodies have made, and we’ll see that child be varelse on some days and raman on others. On some days we’ll be good parents and some days we’ll be wretched failures. Some days we’ll be desperately sad and some days we’ll be so happy we can hardly contain it. I can live with that.

Chapter 17 — “THE ROAD GOES ON WITHOUT HIM NOW”

“I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two. The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew. The changeless part was always true, The growing part was always new, And I wondered, when the tale was through, Which part was me, and which was you.”

— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Valentine arose on the morning of Ender’s funeral full of bleak reflection. She had come here to this world of Lusitania in order to be with him again and help him in his work; it had hurt Jakt, she knew, that she wanted so badly to be part of Ender’s life again, yet her husband had given up the world of his childhood to come with her. So much sacrifice. And now Ender was gone.

Gone and not gone. Sleeping in her house was the man that she knew had Ender’s aiua in him. Ender’s aiua, and the face of her brother Peter. Somewhere inside him were Ender’s memories. But he hadn’t touched them yet, except unconsciously from time to time. Indeed, he was virtually hiding in her house in order not to rekindle those memories.

“What if I see Novinha? He loved her, didn’t he?” Peter had asked almost as soon as he arrived. “He felt this awful sense of responsibility to her. And in a sense, I worry that I’m somehow married to her.”

“Interesting question of identity, isn’t it?” Valentine had answered. But it wasn’t just an interesting question to Peter. He was terrified of getting caught up in Ender’s life. Afraid, too, of living a life wracked with guilt as Ender’s had been. “Abandonment of family,” he had said. To which Valentine had replied, “The man who married Novinha died. We watched him die. She isn’t looking for some young husband who doesn’t want her, Peter. Her life is full of grief enough without that. Marry Wang-mu, leave this place, go on, be a new self. Be Ender’s true son, have the life he might have had if the demands of others hadn’t tainted it from the start.”

Whether he fully accepted her advice or not, Valentine couldn’t guess. He remained hidden in the house, avoiding even those visitors who might trigger memories. Olhado came, and Grego, and Ela, each in turn, to express their condolences to Valentine on the death of her brother, but Peter never came into the room. Wang-mu did, however, this sweet young girl who nevertheless had a kind of steel in her that Valentine quite liked. Wang-mu played the gracious friend of the bereaved, keeping the conversation going as each of these children of Ender’s wife talked about how Ender had saved their family, blessed their lives when they had thought themselves beyond the reach of all blessing.

And in the corner of the room, Plikt sat, absorbing, listening, fueling the speech that she had lived her whole life for.

Oh, Ender, the jackals have gnawed at your life for three thousand years. And now your friends will have their turn. In the end, will the toothmarks on your bones be all that different?

Today all would come to a close. Others might divide time differently, but to Valentine the Age of Ender Wiggin had come to a close. The age that began with one xenocide attempted had now ended with other xenocides prevented or, at least, postponed. Human beings might now be able to live with other peoples in peace, working out a shared destiny on dozens of colony worlds. Valentine would write the history of this, as she had written a history on every world that she and Ender had visited together. She would write, not a kind of oracle or scripture, the way Ender had done with his three books, The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and The Life of Human; rather her book would be scholarly, with sources cited. She aspired to be, not Paul or Moses, but Thucydides. Though she wrote all under the name Demosthenes, her legacy from those childhood days when she and Peter, the first Peter, the dark and dangerous and magnificent Peter, had used their words to change the world. Demosthenes would publish a book chronicling the history of human involvement on Lusitania, and in that book would be much about Ender— how he brought the cocoon of the Hive Queen here, how he became a part of the family most pivotal in dealings with the pequeninos. But it would not be a book about Ender. It would be a book about utlanning and framling, raman and varelse. Ender, who was a stranger in every land, belonging nowhere, serving everywhere, until he chose this world as his home, not just because there was a family that needed him, but also because in this place he did not have to be entirely a member of the human race. He could belong to the tribe of the pequenino, to the hive of the queen. He could be part of something larger than mere humanity.

And though there was no child with Ender’s name as father on its birth certificate, he had become a father here. Of Novinha’s children. Of Novinha herself, in a way. Of a young copy of Valentine herself. Of Jane, the first spawn of a mating between races, who now was a bright and beautiful creature who lived in mothertrees, in digital webs, in the philotic twinings of the ansibles, and in a body that had once been Ender’s and which, in a way, had once been Valentine’s, for she remembered looking into mirrors and seeing that face and calling it herself.

And he was father of this new man, Peter, this strong and whole man. For he was not the Peter who had first come out of the starship. He was not the cynical, nasty, barbed young boy who strutted with arrogance and seethed with rage. He had become whole. There was the cool of ancient wisdom in him, even as he burned with the hot sweet fire of youth. He had a woman who was his equal in wit and virtue and vigor by his side. He had a normal lifetime of a man before him. Ender’s truest son would make of this life, if not something as profoundly world-changing as Ender’s life had been, then something happier. Ender would have wanted neither more nor less for him. Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

Valentine and Jakt and their children gathered on the porch of their house. Wang-mu was waiting there alone. “Will you take me with you?” asked the girl. Valentine offered her an arm. What is the name of her relationship to me? Niece-in-law-to-be? Friend would be a better word.

Plikt’s speaking of Ender’s death was eloquent and piercing. She had learned well from the master speaker. She wasted no time on inconsequentials. She spoke at once of his great crime, explaining what Ender thought he was doing at the time, and what he thought of it after he knew each layer of truth that was revealed to him. “That was Ender’s life,” said Plikt, “unpeeling the onion of truth. Only unlike most of us, he knew that there was no golden kernel inside. There were only the layers of illusion and misunderstanding. What mattered was to know all the errors, all the self-serving explanations, all the mistakes, all the twisted observations, and then, not to find, but to make a kernel of truth. To light a candle of truth where there was no truth to be found. That was Ender’s gift to us, to free us from the illusion that any one explanation will ever contain the final answer for all time, for all hearers. There is always, always more to learn.”

Plikt went on then, recounting incidents and memories, anecdotes and pithy sayings; the gathered people laughed and cried and laughed again, and fell silent many times to connect these stories with their own lives. How like Ender I am! they sometimes thought, and then, Thank God my life is not like that!

Valentine, though, knew stories that would not be told here because Plikt did not know them, or at least could not see them through the eyes of memory. They weren’t important stories. They revealed no inner truth. They were the flotsam and jetsam of shared years together. Conversations, quarrels, funny and tender moments on dozens of worlds or on the starships in between. And at the root of them all, the memories of childhood. The baby in Valentine’s mother’s arms. Father tossing him into the air. His early words, his babbling. None of that goo-goo stuff for baby Ender! He needed more syllables to speak: Deedle-deedle. Wagada wagada. Why am I remembering his baby talk?

The sweet-faced baby, eager for life. Baby tears from the pain of falling down. Laughter at the simplest things— laughter because of a song, because of seeing a beloved face, because life was pure and good for him then, and nothing had caused him pain. He was surrounded by love and hope. The hands that touched him were strong and tender; he could trust them all. Oh, Ender, thought Valentine. How I wish you could have kept on living such a life of joy. But no one can. Language comes to us, and with it lies and threats, cruelty and disappointment. You walk, and those steps lead you outside the shelter of your home. To keep the joy of childhood you would have to die as a child, or live as one, never becoming a man, never growing. So I can grieve for the lost child, and yet not regret the good man braced with pain and riven with guilt, who yet was kind to me and to many others, and whom I loved, and whom I also almost knew. Almost, almost knew.

Valentine let her tears of memory flow as Plikt’s words washed over her, touching her now and then, but also not touching her because she knew far more about Ender than anyone here, and had lost more by losing him. Even more than Novinha, who sat near the front, her children gathered near her. Valentine watched as Miro put his arm around his mother even as he held to Jane on the other side of him. Valentine noticed also how Ela clung to and one time kissed Olhado’s hand, and how Grego, weeping, leaned his head into stern Quara’s shoulder, and how Quara reached out her arm to hold him close and comfort him. They loved Ender too, and knew him too; but in their grief, they leaned upon each other, a family that had strength to share because Ender had been part of them and healed them, or at least opened up the door of healing. Novinha would survive and perhaps grow past her anger at the cruel tricks life had played on her. Losing Ender was not the worst thing that happened to her; in some ways it was the best, because she had let him go.

Valentine looked at the pequeninos, who sat, some of them among the humans, some of them apart. To them this was a doubly holy place, where Ender’s few remains were to be buried. Between the trees of Rooter and of Human, where Ender had shed a pequenino’s blood to seal the pact between the species. There were many friends among pequeninos and humans now, though many fears and enmities remained as well, but the bridges had been built, in no small part because of Ender’s book, which gave the pequeninos hope that some human, someday, would understand them; hope that sustained them until, with Ender, it became the truth.

And one expressionless hiveworker sat at a remote distance, neither human nor pequenino near her. She was nothing but a pair of eyes there. If the Hive Queen grieved for Ender, she kept it to herself. She would always be mysterious, but Ender had loved her, too; for three thousand years he had been her only friend, her protector. In a sense, Ender could count her among his children, too, among the adopted children who thrived under his protection.

In only three-quarters of an hour, Plikt was done. She ended simply:

“Even though Ender’s aiua lives on, as all aiuas live on undying, the man we knew is gone from us. His body is gone, and whatever parts of his life and works we take with us, they aren’t him any longer, they are ourselves, they are the Ender-within-us just as we also have other friends and teachers, fathers and mothers, lovers and children and siblings and even strangers within us, looking out at the world through our eyes and helping us determine what it all might mean. I see Ender in you looking out at me. You see Ender in me looking out at you. And yet not one of us is truly him; we are each our own self, all of us strangers on our own road. We walked awhile on that road with Ender Wiggin. He showed us things we might not otherwise have seen. But the road goes on without him now. In the end, he was no more than any other man. But no less, either.”

And then it was over. No prayer— the prayers had all been said before she spoke, for the bishop had no intention of letting this unreligious ritual of Speaking be a part of the services of Holy Mother Church. The weeping had been done as well, the grief purged. They rose from their places on the ground, the older ones stiffly, the children with exuberance, running and shouting to make up for the long confinement. It was good to hear laughter and shouting. That was also a good way to say good-bye to Ender Wiggin.

Valentine kissed Jakt and her children, embraced Wang-mu, then made her way alone through the crush of citizens. So many of the humans of Milagre had fled to other colonies; but now, with their planet saved, many of them chose not to stay on the new worlds. Lusitania was their home. They weren’t the pioneering kind. Many others, though, had come back solely for this ceremony. Jane would return them to their farms and houses on virgin worlds. It would take a generation or two to fill the empty houses in Milagre.

On the porch Peter waited for her. She smiled at him. “I think you have an appointment now,” said Valentine.

They walked together out of Milagre and into the newgrowth forest that still could not utterly hide the evidence of recent fire. They walked until they came to a bright and shining tree. They arrived almost at the same time that the others, walking from the funeral site, arrived. Jane came to the glowing mothertree and touched it— touched a part of herself, or at least a dear sister. Then Peter took his place beside Wang-mu, and Miro stood with Jane, and the priest married the two couples under the mothertree, with pequeninos looking on, and Valentine as the only human witness of the ceremony. No one else even knew the ceremony was taking place; it would not do, they had decided, to distract from Ender’s funeral or Plikt’s speaking. Time enough to announce the marriages later on.

When the ceremony was done, the priest left, with pequeninos as his guide to take him back through the wood. Valentine embraced the newly married couples, Jane and Miro, Peter and Wang-mu, spoke to them for a moment one by one, murmured words of congratulations and farewell, and then stood back and watched.

Jane closed her eyes, smiled, and then all four of them were gone. Only the mothertree remained in the middle of the clearing, bathed in light, heavy with fruit, festooned with blossoms, a perpetual celebrant of the ancient mystery of life.

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