“Forgive me, master, but it seems to me that you are the one putting it there. No one noticed that we bore responsibility for this sin until you said it here today.”
“I do not put the sin there. I merely take off the hat that covers it. Yasujiro, you were one of my best students. I forgave you for using what I taught you in such complicated ways, because you did it for your family’s sake.”
“And this that you ask of me now—this is perfectly simple?”
“I have taken the most direct action—I have spoken plainly to the most powerful representative of the richest of the Japanese trading families that I could reach on this day. And what I ask of you is the minimum action required to do what is necessary.”
“In this case the minimum puts my career at great risk,” said Yasujiro thoughtfully.
Aimaina said nothing.
“My greatest teacher once told me,” said Yasujiro, “that a man who has risked his life knows that careers are worthless, and a man who will not risk his career has a worthless life.”
“So you will do it?”
“I will prepare my messages to make your case to all the Tsutsumi family. When the ansibles are linked again, I will send them.”
“I knew you would not disappoint me.”
“Better than that,” said Yasujiro. “When I am thrown out of my job, I will come and live with you.”
Aimaina bowed. “I would be honored to have you dwell in my house.”
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally. Minutes passed in which Val-Jane held the weeping Miro, and then time dried his tears, time loosened her embrace, and time, finally, ended Ela’s patience.
“Let’s get back to work,” said Ela. “I’m not unfeeling, but our predicament is unchanged.”
Quara was surprised. “But Jane’s not dead. Doesn’t that mean we can get back home?”
Val-Jane at once got up and moved back to her computer terminal. Every movement was easy because of the reflexes and habits the Val-brain had developed; but the Jane-mind found each movement fresh and new; she marveled at the dance of her fingers pressing the keys to control the display. “I don’t know,” Jane said, answering the question that Quara had voiced, but all were asking. “I’m still uncertain in this flesh. The ansibles haven’t been restored. I do have a handful of allies who will relink some of my old programs to the network once it is restored—some Samoans on Pacifica, Han Fei-tzu on Path, the Abo university on Outback. Will those programs be enough? Will the new networking software allow me to tap the resources I need to hold all the information of a starship and so many people in my mind? Will having this body interfere? Will my new link to the mothertrees be a help or a distraction?” And then the most important question: “Do we wish to be my first test flight?”
“Somebody has to,” said Ela.
“I think I’ll try one of the starships on Lusitania, if I can reestablish contact with them,” said Jane. “With only a single hive queen worker on board. That way if it is lost, it will not be missed.” Jane turned to nod to the worker who was with them. “Begging your pardon, of course.”
“You don’t have to apologize to the worker,” said Quara. “It’s really just the Hive Queen anyway.”
Jane looked over at Miro and winked. Miro did not wink back, but the look of sadness in his eyes was answer enough. He knew that the workers were not quite what everyone thought. The hive queens sometimes had to tame them, because not all of them were utterly subjected to their mother’s will. But the was-it-or-wasn’t-it-slavery of the workers was a matter for another generation to work out.
“Languages,” said Jane. “Carried by genetic molecules. What kind of grammar must they have? Are they linked to sounds, smells, sights? Let’s see how smart we all are without me inside the computers helping.” That struck her as so amazingly funny that she laughed aloud. Ah, how marvelous it was to have her own laughter sounding in her ears, bubbling upward from her lungs, spasming her diaphragm, bringing tears to her eyes!
Only when her laughter ended did she realize how leaden the sound of it must have been to Miro, to the others. “I’m sorry,” she said, abashed, and felt a blush rising up her neck into her cheeks. Who could have believed it could burn so hot! It almost made her laugh again. “I’m not used to being alive like this. I know I’m rejoicing when the rest of you are grim, but don’t you see? Even if we all die when the air runs out in a few weeks, I can’t help but marvel at how it feels to me!”
“We understand,” said Firequencher. “You have passed into your Second Life. It’s a joyful time for us, as well.”
“I spent time among your trees, you know,” said Jane. “Your mothertrees made space for me. Took me in and nurtured me. Does that make us brother and sister now?”
“I hardly know what it would mean, to have a sister,” said Firequencher. “But if you remember the life in the dark of the mothertree, then you remember more than I do. We have dreams sometimes, but no real memories of the First Life in darkness. Still, that makes this your Third Life after all.”
“Then I’m an adult?” asked Jane, and she laughed again.
And again felt how her laugh stilled the others, hurt them.
But something odd happened as she turned, ready to apologize again. Her glance fell upon Miro, and instead of saying the words she had planned—the Jane-words that would have come out of the jewel in his ear only the day before—other words came to her lips, along with a memory. “If my memories live, Miro, then I’m alive. Isn’t that what you told me?”
Miro shook his head. “Are you speaking from Val’s memory, or from Jane’s memory when she—when you—overheard us speaking in the Hive Queen’s cave? Don’t comfort me by pretending to be her.”
Jane, by habit—Val’s habit? or her own?—snapped, “When I comfort you, you’ll know it.”
“And how will I know?” Miro snapped back.
“Because you’ll be comfortable, of course,” said Val-Jane. “In the meantime, please keep in mind that I’m not listening through the jewel in your ear now. I see only with these eyes and hear only with these ears.”
This was not strictly true, of course. For many times a second, she felt the flowing sap, the unstinting welcome of the mothertrees as her aiúa satisfied its hunger for largeness by touring the vast network of the pequenino philotes. And now and then, outside the mothertrees, she caught a glimmer of a thought, of a word, a phrase, spoken in the language of the fathertrees. Or was it their language? Rather it was the language behind the language, the underlying speech of the speechless. And whose was that other voice? I know you—you are of the kind that made me. I know your voice.
Jane was not prepared for the swelling of pride that glowed through her entire Val-body; she felt the physical effect of the emotion as Val, but her pride came from the praise of a hive-mother. I am a daughter of hive queens, she realized, and so it matters when she speaks to me, and tells me I have done well.
And if I’m the hive queens’ daughter, I am Ender’s daughter, too, his daughter twice over, for they made my lifestuff partly from his mind, so I could be a bridge between them; and now I dwell in a body that also came from him, and whose memories are from a time when he dwelt here and lived this body’s life. I am his daughter, but once again I cannot speak to him.
All this time, all these thoughts, and yet she did not show or even feel the slightest lapse of concentration on what she was doing with her computer on the starship circling the descolada planet. She was still Jane. It wasn’t the computerness of her that had allowed her, all these years, to maintain many layers of attention and focus on many tasks at once. It was her hive-queen nature that allowed this.
said the Hive Queen in her mind.
Which of you is speaking to me? asked Jane.
Am I still myself, then? Will I have again all the powers I lost when the Starways Congress killed my old virtual body?
And now she felt the sharp disappointment from a parent’s unconcern, a sinking feeling in the stomach, a kind of shame. But this was a human emotion; it arose from the Val-body, though it was in response to her relationship with her hive-queen mothers. Everything was more complicated—and yet it was simpler. Her feelings were now flagged by a body, which responded before she understood what she felt herself. In the old days, she scarcely knew she had feelings. She had them, yes, even irrational responses, desires below the level of consciousness—these were attributes of all aiúas, when linked with others in any kind of life—but there had been no simple signals to tell her what her feelings were. How easy it was to be a human, with your emotions expressed on the canvas of your own body. And yet how hard, because you couldn’t hide your feelings from yourself half so easily.
Thank you, she said silently . . . and backed away.
At dawn the sun came up over the mountain that was the spine of the island, so that the sky was light long before any sunlight touched the trees directly. The wind off the sea had cooled them in the night. Peter awoke with Wang-mu curled into the curve of his body, like shrimps lined up on a market rack. The closeness of her felt good; it felt familiar. Yet how could it be? He had never slept so close to her before. Was it some vestigial Ender memory? He wasn’t conscious of having any such memories. It had disappointed him, actually, when he realized it. He had thought that perhaps when his body had complete possession of the aiúa, he would become Ender—he would have a lifetime of real memories instead of the paltry faked-up memories that had come with his body when Ender created it. No such luck.
And yet he remembered sleeping with a woman curled against him. He remembered reaching across her, his arm like a sheltering bough.
But he had never touched Wang-mu that way. Nor was it right for him to do it now—she was not his wife, only his . . . friend? Was she that? She had said she loved him—was that only a way to help him find his way into this body?
Then, suddenly, he felt himself falling away from himself, felt himself recede from Peter and become something else, something small and bright and terrified, descending down into darkness, out into a wind too strong for him to stand against it—
“Peter!”
The voice called him, and he followed it, back along the almost-invisible philotic threads that connected him to . . . himself again. I am Peter. I have nowhere else to go. If I leave like that, I’ll die.
“Are you all right?” asked Wang-mu. “I woke up because I—I’m sorry, but I dreamed, I felt as if I was losing you. But I wasn’t, because here you are.”
“I was losing my way,” said Peter. “You could sense that?”
“I don’t know what I sensed or not. I just—how can I describe it?”
“You called me back from darkness,” said Peter.
“Did I?”
He almost said something, but then stopped. Then laughed, uncomfortable and frightened. “I feel so odd. A moment ago I was about to say something. Something very flippant—about how having to be Peter Wiggin was darkness enough by itself.”
“Oh yes,” said Wang-mu. “You always say such nasty things about yourself.”
“But I didn’t say it,” said Peter. “I was about to, out of habit, but I stopped, because it wasn’t true. Isn’t that funny?”
“I think it’s good.”
“It makes sense that I should feel whole instead of being subdivided—perhaps more content with myself or something. And yet I almost lost the whole thing. I think it wasn’t just a dream. I think I really was letting go. Falling away into—no, out of everything.”
“You had three selves for several months,” said Wang-mu. “Is it possible your aiúa hungers for the—I don’t know, the size of what you used to be?”
“I was spread all over the galaxy, wasn’t I? Except I want to say, ‘Wasn’t he,’ because that was Ender, wasn’t it. And I’m not Ender because I don’t remember anything.” He thought a moment. “Except maybe I do remember some things a little more clearly now. Things from my childhood. My mother’s face. It’s very clear, and I don’t think it was before. And Valentine’s face, when we were all children. But I’d remember that as Peter, wouldn’t I, so it doesn’t mean it comes from Ender, does it? I’m sure this is just one of the memories Ender supplied for me in the first place.” He laughed. “I’m really desperate, aren’t I, to find some sign of him in me.”
Wang-mu sat listening. Silent, not making a great show of interest, but also content not to jump in with an answer or a comment.
Noticing her made him think of something else. “Are you some kind of, what would you call it, an empath? Do you normally feel what other people are feeling?”
“Never,” said Wang-mu. “I’m too busy feeling what I’m feeling.”
“But you knew that I was going. You felt that.”
“I suppose,” said Wang-mu, “that I’m bound up with you now. I hope that’s all right, because it wasn’t exactly voluntary on my part.”
“But I’m bound up with you, too,” said Peter. “Because when I was disconnected, I still heard you. All my other feelings were gone. My body wasn’t giving me anything. I had lost my body. Now, when I remember what it felt like, I remember ‘seeing’ things, but that’s just my human brain making sense of things that it can’t actually make sense of. I know that I didn’t see at all, or hear, or touch or anything at all. And yet I knew you were calling. I felt you—needing me. Wanting me to come back. Surely that means that I am also bound up with you.”
She shrugged, looked away.
“Now what does that mean?” he asked.
“I’m not going to spend the rest of my life explaining myself to you,” said Wang-mu. “Everyone else has the privilege of just feeling and doing sometimes without analyzing it. What did it look like to you? You’re the smart one who’s an expert on human nature.”
“Stop that,” said Peter, pretending to be teasing but really wanting her to stop. “I remember we bantered about that, and I bragged I guess, but . . . well I don’t feel that way now. Is that part of having all of Ender in me? I know I don’t understand people all that well. You looked away, you shrugged when I said I was bound up with you. That hurt my feelings, you know.”
“And why is that?”
“Oh, you can ask why and I can’t, are those the rules now?”
“Those have always been the rules,” said Wang-mu. “You just never obeyed them.”
“Well it hurt my feelings because I wanted you to be glad that I’m tied up with you and you with me.”
“Are you glad?”
“Well it only saved my life, I think I’d have to be the king of the stupid people not to at least find it convenient!”
“Smell,” she said, suddenly leaping to her feet.
She is so young, he thought.
And then, rising to his own feet, he was surprised to realize that he, too, was young, his body lithe and responsive.
And then he was surprised again to realize that Peter never remembered being any other way. It was Ender who had experienced an older body, one that got stiff when sleeping on the ground, a body that did not rise so easily to its feet. I do have Ender in me. I have the memories of his body. Why not the memories of his mind?
Perhaps because this brain has only the map of Peter’s memories in it. Al
l the rest of them are lurking just out of reach. And maybe I’ll stumble on them now and then, connect them up, map new roads to get to them.
In the meantime, he was still getting up, standing beside Wang-mu, sniffing the air with her; and he was surprised again to realize that both activities had had his full attention. He had been thinking continuously of Wang-mu, of smelling what she smelled, wondering all the while whether he could just rest his hand on that small frail shoulder that seemed to need a hand the size of his to rest upon it; and at the same time, he had been engaged completely in speculation on how and whether he would be able to recover Ender’s memories.
I could never do that before, thought Peter. And yet I must have been doing it ever since this body and the Valentine body were created. Concentrating on three things at once, in fact, not two.
But I wasn’t strong enough to think of three things. One of them always sagged. Valentine for a while. Then Ender, until that body died. But two things—I can think of two things at once. Is this remarkable? Or is it something that many humans could do, if only they had some occasion to learn?
What kind of vanity is this! thought Peter. Why should I care whether I’m unique in this ability? Except that I always did pride myself on being smarter and more capable than the people around me. Didn’t let myself say it aloud, of course, or even admit it to myself, but be honest with yourself now, Peter! It’s good to be smarter than other people. And if I can think of two things at once, while they can only think of one, why not take some pleasure in it!
Of course, thinking of two things is rather useless if both trains of thought are dumb. For while he played with questions of vanity and his competitive nature, he had also been concentrating on Wang-mu, and his hand had indeed reached out and touched her, and for a moment she leaned back against him, accepting his touch, until her head rested against his chest. And then, without warning or any provocation that he could think of, she suddenly pulled away from him and began to stride toward the Samoans who were gathered around Malu on the beach.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 157
