Children of the Mind Read online

  "Then don't do it," Miro said. "If you don't think you'll live through it, don't."

  "Oh, shut up," said Val. "How did you get to be such a pathetic romantic? If it were you in my place, wouldn't you be giving speeches right now about how you're glad you have a body to give to Jane and it's worth it for you to die for the sake of humans, pequeninos, and hive queens alike?"

  "That's not true," said Miro.

  "That you wouldn't give speeches? Come on, I know you better than that," she said.

  "No," said Miro. "I mean I wouldn't give up my body. Not even to save the world. Humanity. The universe. I lost my body once before. I got it back by a miracle I still don't understand. I'm not going to give it up without a fight. Do you understand me? No, you don't, because you don't have any fight in you. Ender hasn't given you any fight. He's made you a complete altruist, the perfect woman, sacrificing everything for the sake of others, creating her identity out of other people's needs. Well, I'm not like that. I'm not glad to die now. I intend to live. That's how real people feel, Val. No matter what they say, they all intend to live."

  "Except the suicides?"

  "They intended to live, too," said Miro. "Suicide is a desperate attempt to get rid of unbearable agony. It's not a noble decision to let someone with more value go on living instead of you."

  "People make choices like that sometimes," said Val. "It doesn't mean I'm not a real person because I can choose to give my life to someone else. It doesn't mean I don't have any fight in me."

  Miro stopped the hovercar, let it settle to the ground. He was on the edge of the pequenino forest nearest to Milagre. He was aware that there were pequeninos working in the field who stopped their labor to watch them. But he didn't care what they saw or what they thought. He took Val by the shoulders and with tears streaming down his cheeks he said, "I don't want you to die. I don't want you to choose to die."

  "You did," said Val.

  "I chose to live," said Miro. "I chose to leap to the body in which life was possible. Don't you see that I'm only trying to get you and Jane to do what I already did? For a moment there in the starship, there was my old body and there was this new one, looking at each other. Val, I remember both views. Do you understand me? I remember looking at this body and thinking, 'How beautiful, how young, I remember when that was me, who is this now, who is this person, why can't I be this person instead of the cripple I am right now,' I thought that and I remember thinking it, I didn't imagine it later, I didn't dream it, I remember thinking it at the time. But I also remember standing there looking at myself with pity, thinking, 'Poor man, poor broken man, how can he bear to live when he remembers what it was like to be alive?' and then all of a sudden he crumbled into dust, into less than dust, into air, into nothing. I remember watching him die. I don't remember dying because my aiua had already leapt. But I remember both sides."

  "Or you remember being your old self until the leap, and your new self after."

  "Maybe," said Miro. "But there wasn't even a full second. How could I remember so much from both selves in the same second? I think I kept the memories that were in this body from the split second when my aiua ruled two bodies. I think that if Jane leaps into you, you'll keep all your old memories, and take hers, too. That's what I think."

  "Oh, I thought you knew it."

  "I do know it," said Miro. "Because anything else is unthinkable and therefore unknown. The reality I live in is a reality in which you can save Jane and Jane can save you."

  "You mean you can save us."

  "I've already done all I can do," said Miro. "All. I'm done. I asked the Hive Queen. She's thinking about it. She's going to try. She'll have to have your consent. Jane's consent. But it's none of my business now. I'll just be an observer. I'll either watch you die or watch you live." He pulled her close to him and held her. "I want you to live."

  Her body in his arms was stiff and unresponsive, and he soon let her go. He pulled away from her.

  "Wait," she said. "Wait until Jane has this body, then do whatever she'll let you do with it. But don't touch me again, because I can't bear the touch of a man who wants me dead."

  The words were too painful for him to answer. Too painful, really, for him to absorb them. He started the hovercar. It rose a little into the air. He tipped it forward and they flew on, circling the wood until they came to the place where the fathertrees named Human and Rooter marked the old entrance to Milagre. He could feel her presence beside him the way a man struck by lightning might feel the nearness of a power line; without touching it, he tingles with the pain that he knows it carries within it. The damage he had done could not be undone. She was wrong, he did love her, he didn't want her dead, but she lived in a world in which he wanted her extinguished and there was no reconciling it. They could share this ride, they could share the next voyage to another star system, but they would never be in the same world again, and it was too painful to bear, he ached with the knowledge of it but the ache was too deep for him to reach it or even feel it right now. It was there, he knew it was going to tear at him for years to come, but he couldn't touch it now. He didn't need to examine his feelings. He had felt them before, when he lost Ouanda, when his dream of life with her became impossible. He couldn't touch it, couldn't heal it, couldn't even grieve at what he had only just discovered that he wanted and once again couldn't have.

  "Aren't you the suffering saint," said Jane in his ear.

  "Shut up and go away," Miro subvocalized.

  "That doesn't sound like a man who wants to be my lover," said Jane.

  "I don't want to be your anything," said Miro. "You don't even trust me enough to tell me what you're up to in our searching of worlds."

  "You didn't tell me what you were up to when you went to see the Hive Queen either."

  "You knew what I was doing," said Miro.

  "No I didn't," said Jane. "I'm very smart--much smarter then you or Ender, and don't you forget it for an instant--but I still can't outguess you meat-creatures with your much-vaunted 'intuitive leaps.' I like how you make a virtue out of your desperate ignorance. You always act irrationally because you don't have enough information for rational action. But I do resent your saying I'm irrational. I never am. Never."

  "Right, I'm sure," said Miro silently. "You're right about everything. You always are. Go away."

  "I'm gone."

  "No you're not," said Miro. "Not till you tell me what Val's and my voyages have actually been about. The Hive Queen said that colonizable worlds were an afterthought."

  "Nonsense," said Jane. "We needed more than one world if we were going to be sure to save the two nonhuman species. Redundancy."

  "But you send us out again and again."

  "Interesting, isn't it?" said Jane.

  "She said you were dealing with a worse danger than the Lusitania Fleet."

  "How she does go on."

  "Tell me," said Miro.

  "If I tell you," said Jane, "you might not go."

  "Do you think I'm such a coward?"

  "Not at all, my brave boy, my bold and handsome hero."

  He hated it when she patronized him, even as a joke. He wasn't in the mood for joking right now anyway.

  "Then why do you think I wouldn't go?"

  "You wouldn't think you were up to the task," said Jane.

  "Am I?" asked Miro.

  "Probably not," said Jane. "But then, you have me with you."

  "And what if you're suddenly not there?" asked Miro.

  "Well, that's just a risk we're going to have to take."

  "Tell me what we're doing. Tell me our real mission."

  "Oh, don't be silly. If you think about it, you'll know."

  "I don't like puzzles, Jane. Tell me."

  "Ask Val. She knows."

  "What?"

  "She already searches for exactly the data I need. She knows."

  "Then that means Ender knows. At some level," said Miro.

  "I suspect you're right, though Ender is n
ot terribly interesting to me anymore and I don't much care what he knows."

  Yes, you're so rational, Jane.

  He must have subvocalized this thought, out of habit, because she answered him just as she answered his deliberate subvocalizations. "You say that ironically," she said, "because you think I am only saying that Ender doesn't interest me because I'm protecting myself from my hurt feelings because he took his jewel out of his ear. But in fact he is no longer a source of data and he is no longer a cooperative part of the work I'm engaged in, and therefore I simply don't have much interest in him anymore, except as one is somewhat interested in hearing from time to time about the doings of an old friend who has moved away."

  "Sounds like rationalization after the fact to me," said Miro.

  "Why did you even bring Ender up?" asked Jane. "What does it matter whether he knows the real work you and Val are doing?"

  "Because if Val really knows our mission, and our mission involves an even worse danger than the Lusitania Fleet, then why has Ender lost interest in her so that she's fading?"

  Silence for a moment. Was it actually taking Jane so long to think of an answer that the time lag was noticeable to a human?

  "I suppose Val doesn't know," said Jane. "Yes, that's likely. I thought she did, but see now that she might well have fed me the data she emphasized for reasons completely unrelated to your mission. Yes, you're right, she doesn't know."

  "Jane," said Miro. "Are you admitting you were wrong? Are you admitting you leapt to a false, irrational conclusion?"

  "When I get my data from humans," said Jane, "sometimes my rational conclusions are incorrect, being based on false premises."

  "Jane," said Miro silently. "I've lost her, haven't I? Whether she lives or dies, whether you get into her body or die out in space or wherever you live, she'll never love me, will she?"

  "I'm not an appropriate person to ask. I've never loved anybody."

  "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."

  "Easy guess," said Jane. "You really had more than enough data."

  Val nodded. "Now it's obvious. Some of the worlds we've explored have had very limited flora and fauna. I even commented on it with a couple of them. There must have been a major die-off. Nothing like the limitations on the native life of Lusitania, of course. And no descolada virus."

  "But some other virus, less durable, less effective than the descolada," said Miro. "Their early attempts, maybe. That's what caused a die-off of species on those other worlds. Their probe virus finally died out, but those ecosystems haven't yet recovered from the damage."

  "I was quite pointed about those limited worlds," said Val. "I searched those ecosystems at greater depth, searching for the descolada or something like it, because I knew that a recent major die-off was a sign of danger. I can't believe I didn't make the connection and realize that was what Jane was looking for."

  "So what if we find their home world?" asked Miro. "What then?"

  "I imagine," said Val, "we study them from a safe distance, make sure we're right, and then alert Starways Congress so they can blow the world to hell."

  "Ano
ther sentient species?" asked Miro, incredulous. "You think we'd actually invite Congress to destroy them?"

  "You forget that Congress doesn't wait for an invitation," said Val. "Or for permission. And if they think Lusitania is so dangerous as to need to be destroyed, what will they do with a species that manufactures and broadcasts hideously destructive viruses willy-nilly? I'm not even sure Congress would be wrong. It was pure chance that the descolada helped the ancestors of the pequeninos make the transition into sentience. If they did help--there's evidence that the pequeninos were already sentient and the descolada very nearly wiped them out. Whoever sent that virus out has no conscience. No concept of other species having a right to survive."

  "Maybe they have no such concept now," said Miro. "But when they meet us . . ."

  "If we don't catch some terrible disease and die thirty minutes after landing," said Val. "Don't worry, Miro. I'm not plotting to destroy anyone and everyone we meet. I'm strange enough myself not to hope for the wholesale destruction of strangers."

  "I can't believe we only just realized we're looking for these people, and you're already talking about killing them all!"

  "Whenever humans meet foreigners, weak or strong, dangerous or peaceable, the issue of destruction comes up. It's built into our genes."

  "So is love. So is the need for community. So is the curiosity that overcomes xenophobia. So is decency."

  "You left out the fear of God," said Val. "Don't forget that I'm really Ender. There's a reason they call him the Xenocide, you know."

  "Yes, but you're the gentle side of him, right?"

  "Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die."