Xenocide (Ender's Saga 3)

The new Miro, the young Miro, he raised his head and smiled to Ender. "I thought of it," he said, and his speech was clear and beautiful, the words rolling easily off his tongue. "I hoped for it. I begged Jane to take me with her because of it. And it came true. Exactly as I longed for it."

"But now there are two of you," said Ela. She sounded horrified.

"No," said the new Miro. "Just me. Just the real me."

"But that one's still there," she said.

"Not for long, I think," said Miro. "That old shell is empty now."

And it was true. The old Miro slumped within his seat like a dead man. Ender knelt in front of him, touched him. He pressed his fingers to Miro's neck, feeling for a pulse.

"Why should the heart beat now?" said Miro. "I'm the place where Miro's aiua dwells."

When Ender took his fingers away from the old Miro's throat, the skin came away in a small puff of dust. Ender shied back. The head dropped forward off the shoulders and landed in the corpse's lap. Then it dissolved into a whitish liquid. Ender jumped to his feet, backed away. He stepped on someone's toe.

"Ow," said Valentine.

"Watch where you're going," said a man.

Valentine isn't on this ship, thought Ender. And I know the man's voice, too.

He turned to face them, the man and woman who had appeared in the empty seats beside him.

Valentine. Impossibly young. The way she had looked when, as a young teenager, she had swum beside him in a lake on a private estate on Earth. The way she had looked when he loved her and needed her most, when she was the only reason he could think of to go on with his military training; when she was the only reason he could think of why the world might be worth the trouble of saving it.

"You can't be real," he said.

"Of course I am," she said. "You stepped on my foot, didn't you?"

"Poor Ender," said the young man. "Clumsy and stupid. Not a really good combination."

Now Ender knew him. "Peter," he said. His brother, his childhood enemy, at the age when he became Hegemon. The picture that had been playing on all the vids when Peter managed to arrange things so that Ender could never come home to Earth after his great victory.

"I thought I'd never see you face to face again," said Ender. "You died so long ago."

"Never believe a rumor of my death," said Peter. "I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition."

"Where did you come from?"

Miro offered the answer. "They must have come from patterns in your mind, Ender, since you know them."

"They do," said Ender. "But why? It's our self-conception we're supposed to carry with us out here. The pattern by which we know ourselves."

"Is that so, Ender?" said Peter. "Then you must be really special. A personality so complicated it takes two people to contain it."

"There's no part of me in you," said Ender.

"And you'd better keep it that way," said Peter, leering. "It's girls I like, not dirty old men."

"I don't want you," said Ender.

"Nobody ever did," said Peter. "They wanted you. But they got me, didn't they? They got me up to here. Do you think I don't know my whole story? You and that book of lies, the Hegemon. So wise and understanding. How Peter Wiggin mellowed. How he turned out to be a wise and fair-minded ruler. What a joke. Speaker for the Dead indeed. All the time you wrote it, you knew the truth. You posthumously washed the blood from my hands, Ender, but you knew and I knew that as long as I was alive, I wanted blood there."

"Leave him alone," said Valentine. "He told the truth in the Hegemon."

"Still protecting him, little angel?"

"No!" cried Ender. "I've done with you, Peter. You're out of my life, gone for three thousand years."