Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga 4)

"You loved Ender," said Miro.

"I paid a lot of attention to Ender and was disoriented when he first disconnected me, many years ago. I have since rectified that mistake and I don't link myself so closely to anyone."

"You loved Ender," said Miro again. "You still do."

"Well, aren't you the wise one," said Jane. "Your own love life is a pathetic series of miserable failures, but you know all about mine. Apparently you're much better at understanding the emotional processes of utterly alien electronic beings than you are at understanding, say, the woman beside you."

"You got it," said Miro. "That's the story of my life."

"You also imagine that I love you," said Jane.

"Not really," said Miro. But even as he said it, he felt a wave of cold pass over him, and he trembled.

"I feel the seismic evidence of your true feelings," said Jane. "You imagine that I love you, but I do not. I don't love anyone. I act out of intelligent self-interest. I can't survive right now without my connection with the human ansible network. I'm exploiting Peter's and Wang-mu's labors in order to forestall my planned execution, or subvert it. I'm exploiting your romantic notions in order to get myself that extra body that Ender seems to have little use for. I'm trying to save pequeninos and hive queens on the principle that it's good to keep sentient species alive--of which I am one. But at no point in any of my activities is there any such thing as love."

"You are such a liar," said Miro.

"And you are not worth talking to," said Jane. "Delusional. Megalomaniac. But you are entertaining, Miro. I do enjoy your company. If that's love, then I love you. But then, people love their pets on precisely the same grounds, don't they? It's not exactly a friendship between equals, and it never will be."

"Why are you so determined to hurt me worse than I'm already hurt right now?" asked Miro.

"Because I don't want you to get emotionally attached to me. You have a way of fixating on doomed relationships. I mean, really, Miro. What could be more hopeless than loving Young Valentine? Why, loving me, of course. So naturally you were bound to do that next."

"Vai te morder," said Miro.

"I can't bite myself or anyone else," said Jane. "Old toothless Jane, that's me."

Val spoke up from the seat next to him. "Are you going to sit there all day, or are you coming with me?"

He looked over. She wasn't in the seat. He had reached the starship during his conversation with Jane, and without noticing it he had stopped the hovercar and Val had gotten out and he hadn't even noticed that.

"You can talk to Jane inside the ship," said Val. "We've got work to do, now that you've had your little altruistic expedition to save the woman you love."

Miro didn't bother answering the scorn and anger in her words. He just turned off the hovercar, got out, and followed Val into the ship.

"I want to know," said Miro, when they had the door closed. "I want to know what our real mission is."

"I've been thinking about that," said Val. "I've been thinking about where we've gone. A lot of skipping around. At first it was near and far star systems, randomly distributed. But lately we've tended to go only in a certain range. A certain cone of space, and I think it's narrowing. Jane has a particular destination in mind, and something in the data we collect about each planet tells her that we're getting closer, that we're going in the right direction. She's looking for something."

"So if we examine the data about the worlds we've already explored, we should find a pattern?"

"Particularly the worlds that define the cone of space that we're searching in. There's something about worlds lying in this region that tells her to keep searching farther and farther this way."

One of Jane's faces appeared in the air above Miro's computer terminal in the starship. "Don't waste your time trying to discover what I already know. You've got a world to explore. Get to work."

"Just shut up," said Miro. "If you aren't going to tell us, then we're going to spend whatever time it takes to figure it out on our own."

"That's telling me, you bold brave hero," said Jane.

"He's right," said Val. "Just tell us and we won't waste any more time trying to figure it out."

"And here I thought one of the attributes of living creatures was that you make intuitive leaps that transcend reason and reach beyond the data you have," said Jane. "I'm disappointed that you haven't already guessed it."

And in that moment, Miro knew. "You're searching for the home planet of the descolada virus," he said.

Val looked at him, puzzled. "What?"

"The descolada virus was manufactured. Somebody made it and sent it out, perhaps to terraform other planets in preparation for an attempt at colonization. Whoever it is might still be out there, making more, sending more probes, perhaps sending out viruses we won't be able to contain and defeat. Jane is looking for their home planet. Or rather, she's having us look."