Xenocide (Ender's Saga 3)

Miro laughed. Too loudly. "Feeling grumpy, Andrew?" he cackled. "A bit out of sorts?"

It was too much to take. Ender spun his chair, turning away from the terminal where he had been studying a simplified model of the ansible network, trying to imagine where in that random latticework Jane's soul might dwell. He gazed steadily at Miro until he stopped laughing.

"Did I do this to you?" asked Ender.

Miro looked more angry than abashed. "Maybe I needed you to," he said. "Ever think of that? You were so respectful, all of you. Let Miro keep his dignity. Let him brood himself into madness, right? Just don't talk about the thing that's happened to him. Didn't you ever think I needed somebody to jolly me out of it sometimes?"

"Didn't you ever think that I don't need that?"

Miro laughed again, but it came a bit late, and it was gentler. "On target," he said. "You treated me the way you like to be treated when you grieve, and now I'm treating you the way I like to be treated. We prescribe our own medicine for each other."

"Your mother and I are still married," Ender said.

"Let me tell you something," said Miro, "out of the wisdom of my twenty years or so of life. It's easier when you finally start admitting to yourself that you'll never have her back. That she's permanently out of reach."

"Ouanda is out of reach. Novinha isn't."

"She's with the Children of the Mind of Christ. It's a nunnery, Andrew."

"Not so," said Ender. "It's a monastic order that only married couples can join. She can't belong to them without me."

"So," said Miro. "You can have her back whenever you want to join the Filhos. I can just see you as Dom Cristao."

Ender couldn't help chuckling at the idea. "Sleeping in separate beds. Praying all the time. Never touching each other."

"If that's marriage, Andrew, then Ouanda and I are married right now."

"It is marriage, Miro. Because the couples in the Filhos da Mente de Cristo are working together, doing a work together."

"Then we're married," said Miro. "You and I. Because we're trying to save Jane together."

"Just friends," said Ender. "We're just friends."

"Rivals is more like it. Jane keeps us both like lovers on a string."

Miro was sounding too much like Novinha's accusations about Jane. "We're hardly lovers," he said. "Jane isn't human. She doesn't even have a body."

"Aren't you the logical one," said Miro. "Didn't you just say that you and Mother could still be married, without even touching?"

It was an analogy that Ender didn't like, because it seemed to have some truth in it. Was Novinha right to be jealous of Jane, as she had been for so many years?

"She lives inside our heads, practically," said Miro. "That's a place where no wife will ever go."

"I always thought," said Ender, "that your mother was jealous of Jane because she wished she had someone that close to her."

"Bobagem," said Miro. "Lixo." Nonsense. Garbage. "Mother was jealous of Jane because she wanted so badly to be that close to you, and she never could."

"Not your mother. She was always self-contained. There were times when we were very close, but she always turned back to her work."

"The way you always turned back to Jane."

"Did she tell you that?"

"Not in so many words. But you'd be talking to her, and then all of a sudden you'd fall silent, and even though you're good at subvocalizing, there's still a little movement in the jaw, and your eyes and lips react a little to what Jane says to you. She saw. You'd be with Mother, close, and then all of a sudden you were somewhere else."

"That's not what split us apart," said Ender. "It was Quim's death."

"Quim's death was the last straw. If it hadn't been for Jane, if Mother had really believed you belonged to her, heart and soul, she would have turned to you when Quim died, instead of turning away."