Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga 4)

"I'm drunk with it myself."

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

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

"So I'm ambitious. Because that's how Ender imagined me. Ambitious and nasty-minded and cruel."

"But I thought you were not yourself," she said.

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

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

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

"But you don't crumble, so you must have an aiua after all."

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

"Ender Wiggin?" she asked.

"My brother, my creator, my tormentor, my god, my very self."

"And young Valentine? Her too?"

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

"Oh, to blame him for--"

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

"So don't do it," said Wang-mu. "If you don't want to be those things, don't do them."

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

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

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

"He wrote The Hegemon."

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm Andrew Wiggin's ni

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

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

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