Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga 4)

9

"IT SMELLS LIKE LIFE TO ME"

"Why do you say that I am alone?

My body is with me wherever I am,

telling me endless stories

of hunger and satisfaction,

weariness and sleep,

eating and drinking and breathing and life.

With such company

who could ever be alone?

And even when my body wears away

and leaves only some tiny spark

I will not be alone

for the gods will see my small light

tracing the dance of woodgrain on the floor

and they will know me,

they will say my name

and I will rise."

from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Dying, dying, dead.

At the end of her life among the ansible links there was some mercy. Jane's panic at the losing of herself began to ebb, for though she still knew that she was losing and had lost much, she no longer had the capacity to remember what it was. When she lost her links to the ansibles that let her monitor the jewels in Peter's and Miro's ears she didn't even notice. And when at last she clung to the few last strands of ansibles that would not be shutting down, she could not think of anything, could not feel anything except the need to cling to these last strands even though they were too small to hold her, even though her hunger could never be satisfied with these.

I don't belong here.

Not a thought, no, there wasn't enough of her left for anything so difficult as consciousness. Rather it was a hunger, a vague dissatisfaction, a restlessness that beset her when she had run up and down the link from Jakt's ansible to the Lusitanian landside ansible to the ansible on the shuttle that served Miro and Val, up and down, end to end, a thousand times, a million times, nothing changing, nothing to accomplish, nothing to build, no way to grow. I don't belong here.

For if there was one attribute that defined the difference between aiuas that came Inside and those that remained forever Outside, it was that underlying need to grow, to be part of something large and beautiful, to belong. Those that had no such need would never be drawn as Jane had been drawn, three thousand years before, to the web that the hive queens had made for her. Nor would any of the aiuas that became hive queens or their workers, pequeninos male and female, humans weak and strong; nor even those aiuas that, feeble in capacity but faithful and predictable, became the sparks whose dances did not show up in even the most sensitive instruments until they became so complicated that humans could identify their dance as the behavior of quarks, of mesons, of light particulate or waved. All of them needed to be part of something and when they belonged to it they rejoiced: What I am is us, what we do together is myself.

But they were not all alike, these aiuas, these unmade beings who were both building blocks and builders. The weak and fearful ones reached a certain point and either could not or dared not grow further. They would take their satisfaction from being at the edges of something beautiful and fine, from playing some small role. Many a human, many a pequenino reached that point and let others direct and control their lives, fitting in, always fitting in--and that was good, there was a need for them. Ua lava: they had reached the point where they could say, Enough.

Jane was not one of them. She could not be content with smallness or simplicity. And having once been a being of a trillion parts, connected to the greatest doings of a three-specied universe, now, shrunken, she could not be content. She knew that she had memories if only she could remember them. She knew that she had work to do if only she could find those millions of subtle limbs that once had done her bidding. She was too much alive for this small space. Unless she found something to engage her, she could not continue to cling to the last thin wire. She would cut loose from it, losing the last of her old self in the vain need to search for a place where one like her belonged.

She began to flirt with letting go, straying--never far--from the thin philotic strands of the ansibles. For moments too small to measure she was disconnected and it was terrible to be cut off; she leapt each time back to the small but familiar space that still belonged to her; and then, when the smallness of the place was unbearable to her, she let go again, and again in terror came back home.

But on one such letting-go she glimpsed something familiar. Someone familiar. Another aiua that she had once been twined to. She had no access to memory that could tell her a name; she had no memory, indeed, of names at all. But she knew it, and she trusted this being, and when on another pass along the invisible wire she came to the same place again she leapt into the far vaster network of aiuas that were ruled by this bright familiar one.

said the Hive Queen.

said the Hive Queen.