Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga 4)

"Born," said Old Valentine.

"You were a dream come true," said Miro, with only a hint of irony.

"He can't sustain all three of us. Ender, Peter, me. One of us is going to fade. One of us at least is going to die. And it's me. I knew that from the start. I'm the one who's going t

o die."

Miro wanted to reassure her. But how do you reassure someone, except by recalling to them similar situations that turned out for the best? There were no similar situations to call upon.

"The trouble is that whatever part of Ender's aiua I still have in me is absolutely determined to live. I don't want to die. That's how I know I still have some shred of his attention: I don't want to die."

"So go to him," said Old Valentine. "Talk to him."

Young Val gave one bitter hoot of laughter and looked away. "Please, Papa, let me live," she said in a mockery of a child's voice. "Since it's not something he consciously controls, what could he possibly do about it, except suffer from guilt? And why should he feel guilty? If I cease to exist, it's because my own self didn't value me. He is myself. Do the dead tips of fingernails feel bad when you pare them away?"

"But you are bidding for his attention," said Miro.

"I hoped that the search for habitable worlds would intrigue him. I poured myself into it, trying to be excited about it. But the truth is it's utterly routine. Important, but routine, Miro."

Miro nodded. "True enough. Jane finds the worlds. We just process them."

"And there are enough worlds now. Enough colonies. Two dozen--pequeninos and hive queens are not going to die out now, even if Lusitania is destroyed. The bottleneck isn't the number of worlds, it's the number of starships. So all our labor--it isn't engaging Ender's attention anymore. And my body knows it. My body knows it isn't needed."

She reached up and took a large hank of her hair into her fist, and pulled--not hard, but lightly--and it came away easily in her hand. A great gout of hair, with not a sign of any pain at its going. She let the hair drop onto the table. It lay there like a dismembered limb, grotesque, impossible. "I think," she whispered, "that if I'm not careful, I could do the same with my fingers. It's slower, but gradually I will turn into dust just as your old body did, Miro. Because he isn't interested in me. Peter is solving mysteries and fighting political wars off on some world somewhere. Ender is struggling to hold on to the woman he loves. But I . . ."

In that moment, as the hair torn from her head revealed the depth of her misery, her loneliness, her self-rejections, Miro realized what he had not let himself think of until now: that in all the weeks they had traveled world to world together, he had come to love her, and her unhappiness hurt him as if it were his own. And perhaps it was his own, his memory of his own self-loathing. But whatever the reason, it still felt like something deeper than mere compassion to him. It was a kind of desire. Yes, it was a kind of love. If this beautiful young woman, this wise and intelligent and clever young woman was rejected by her own inmost heart, then Miro's heart had room enough to take her in. If Ender will not be yourself, let me! he cried silently, knowing as he formed the thought for the first time that he had felt this way for days, for weeks, without realizing it; yet also knowing that he could not be to her what Ender was.

Still, couldn't love do for Young Val what it was doing for Ender himself? Couldn't that engage enough of his attention to keep her alive? To strengthen her?

Miro reached out and gathered up her disembodied hair, twined it around his fingers, and then slid the looping locks into the pocket of his robe. "I don't want you to fade away," he said. Bold words for him.

Young Val looked at him oddly. "I thought the great love of your life was Ouanda."

"She's a middle-aged woman now," said Miro. "Married and happy, with a family. It would be sad if the great love of my life were a woman who doesn't exist anymore, and even if she did she wouldn't want me."

"It's sweet of you to offer," said Young Val. "But I don't think we can fool Ender into caring about my life by pretending to fall in love."

Her words stabbed Miro to the heart, because she had so easily seen how much of his self-declaration came from pity. Yet not all of it came from there; most of it was already seething just under the level of consciousness, just waiting its chance to come out. "I wasn't thinking of fooling anyone," said Miro. Except myself, he thought. Because Young Val could not possibly love me. She is, after all, not really a woman. She's Ender.

But that was absurd. Her body was a woman's body. And where did the choice of loves come from, if not the body? Was there something male or female in the aiua? Before it became master of flesh and bone, was it manly or womanly? And if so, would that mean that the aiuas composing atoms and molecules, rocks and stars and light and wind, that all of those were neatly sorted into boys and girls? Nonsense. Ender's aiua could be a woman, could love like a woman as easily as it now loved, in a man's body and in a man's ways, Miro's own mother. It wasn't any lack in Young Val that made her look at him with such pity. It was a lack in him. Even with his body healed, he was not a man that a woman--or at least this woman, at the moment the most desirable of all women--could love, or wish to love, or hope to win.

"I shouldn't have come here," he murmured. He pushed away from the table and left the room in two strides. Strode up the hall and once again stood in his open doorway. He heard their voices.

"No, don't go to him," said Old Valentine. Then something softer. Then, "He may have a new body, but his self-hatred has never been healed."

A murmur from Young Val.

"Miro was speaking from his heart," Old Valentine assured her. "It was a very brave and naked thing for him to do."

Again Young Val spoke too softly for Miro to hear her.

"How could you know?" Old Valentine said. "What you have to realize is, we took a long voyage together, not that long ago, and I think he fell in love with me a little on that flight."

It was probably true. It was definitely true. Miro had to admit it: some of his feelings for Young Val were really his feelings for Old Valentine, transferred from the woman who was permanently out of reach to this young woman who might be, he had hoped at least, accessible to him.

Now both their voices fell to levels where Miro could not even pick out words. But still he waited, his hands pressed against the doorjamb, listening to the lilting of those two voices, so much alike, but both so well-known to him. It was a music that he could gladly hear forever.

"If there's anyone like Ender in all this universe," said Old Valentine with sudden loudness, "it's Miro. He broke himself trying to save innocents from destruction. He hasn't yet been healed."