"As I said, it all depends on what Jane can conceive of. She has to be able to comprehend the whole ship and its contents. She has to be able to imagine us Outside and Inside again. She has to be able to conceive of the exact relative positions of the startpoint and endpoint of the journey."
"So faster-than-light travel depends completely on Jane," said Valentine.
"If she didn't exist, it would be impossible. Even if they linked all the computers together, even if someone could write the program to accomplish it, it wouldn't help. Because a program is just a collection, not an entity. It's just parts. Not a--what was the word Jane found for it? An aiua."
"Sanskrit for life," Olhado explained to Valentine. "The word for the philote who controls a pattern that holds other philotes in order. The word for entities--like planets and atoms and animals and stars--that have an intrinsic, enduring form."
"Jane is an aiua, not just a program. So she can be a knower. She can incorporate the starship as a pattern within her own pattern. She can digest it and contain it and it will still be real. She makes it part of herself and knows it as perfectly and unconsciously as your aiua knows your own body and holds it together. Then she can carry it with her Outside and back Inside again."
"So Jane has to go?" asked Valentine.
"If this can be done at all, it'll be done because Jane travels with the ship, yes," said Grego.
"How?" asked Valentine. "We can't exactly go pick her up and carry her with us in a bucket."
"This is something Andrew learned from the hive queen," said Grego. "She actually exists in a particular place--that is, her aiua has a specific location in our space."
"Where?"
"Inside Andrew Wiggin."
It took a while for them to explain to her what Ender had learned about Jane from the hive queen. It was strange to think of this computer entity as being centered inside Ender's body, but it made a kind of sense that Jane had been created by the hive queens during Ender's campaign against them. To Valentine, though, there was another, immediate consequence. If the faster-than-light ship could only go where Jane took it, and Jane was inside Ender, there could be only one conclusion.
"Then Andrew has to go?"
"Claro. Of course," said Grego.
"He's a little old to be a test pilot," said Valentine.
"In this case he's only a test passenger," said Grego. "He just happens to hold the pilot inside him."
"It's not as if the voyage will have any physical stress," said Olhado. "If Grego's theory works out exactly right, he'll just sit there and after a couple of minutes or actually a microsecond or two, he'll be in the other place. And if it doesn't work at all, he'll just stay right here, with all of us feeling foolish for thinking we could wish our way through space."
"And if it turns out Jane can get him Outside but can't hold things together there, then he'll be stranded in a place that doesn't even have any placeness to it," said Valentine.
"Well, yes," said Grego. "If it works halfway, the passengers are effectively dead. But since we'll be in a place without time, it won't matter to us. It'll just be an eternal instant. Probably not enough time for our brains to notice that the experiment failed. Stasis."
"Of course, if it works," said Olhado, "then we'll carry our own spacetime with us, so there would be duration. Therefore, we'll never know if we fail. We'll only notice if we succeed."
"But I'll know if he never comes back," said Valentine.
"Right," said Grego. "If he never comes back, then
you'll have a few months of knowing it until the fleet gets here and blasts everything and everybody all to hell."
"Or until the descolada turns everybody's genes inside out and kills us all," added Olhado.
"I suppose you're right," said Valentine. "Failure won't kill them any deader than they'll be if they stay."
"But you see the deadline pressure that we're under," said Grego. "We don't have much time left before Jane loses her ansible connections. Andrew says that she might well survive it after all--but she'll be crippled. Brain-damaged."
"So even if it works, the first flight might be the last."
"No," said Olhado. "The flights are instantaneous. If it works, she can shuttle everybody off this planet in no more time than it takes people to get in and out of the starship."
"You mean it can take off from a planet surface?"
"That's still iffy," said Grego. "She might only be able to calculate location within, say ten thousand kilometers. There's no explosion or displacement problem, since the philotes will reenter Inside space ready to obey natural laws again. But if the starship reappears in the middle of a planet it'll still be pretty hard to dig to the surface."