Children of the Mind Read online

  "And then he moved."

  "Without even knowing that he had done so," said Peter. "He followed his love."

  Wang-mu heard this fanciful tale and knew that it must be true, for she had overheard many a mention of aiuas in the conversations between Han Fei-tzu and Jane, and now with Peter Wiggin's story, it made sense. It had to be true, if only because this starship really had appeared as if from nowhere on the bank of the river behind Han Fei-tzu's house.

  "But now you must wonder," said Peter, "how I, unloved and unlovable as I know I am, came into existence."

  "You already said. Ender's mind."

  "Miro's most intensely held image was of his own younger, healthier, stronger self. But Ender, the images that mattered most in his mind were of his older sister Valentine and his older brother Peter. Not as they became, though, for his real older brother Peter was long dead, and Valentine--she has accompanied or followed Ender on all his hops through space, so she is still alive, but aged as he has aged. Mature. A real person. Yet on that starship, during that time Outside, he conjured up a copy of her youthful self. Young Valentine. Poor Old Valentine! She didn't know she was so old until she saw this younger self, this perfect being, this angel that had dwelt in Ender's twisted little mind from childhood on. I must say, she's the most put-upon victim in all this little drama. To know that your brother carries around such an image of you, instead of loving you as you really are--well, one can see that Old Valentine--she hates it, but that's how everyone thinks of her now, including, poor thing, herself--one can see that Old Valentine is really having her patience tried."

  "But if the original Valentine is still alive," said Wang-mu, puzzled, "then who is the young Valentine? Who is she really? You can be Peter because he's dead and no one is using his name, but . . ."

  "Quite puzzling, isn't it?" said Peter. "But my point is that whether he's dead or not, I'm not Peter Wiggin. As I said before, I'm not myself."

  He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. The hologram above the terminal turned to look at him. He had not touched the controls.

  "Jane is with us," said Wang-mu.

  "Jane is always with us," said Peter. "Ender's spy."

  The hologram spoke. "Ender doesn't need a spy. He needs friends, if he can get them. Allies at least."

  Peter reached idly for the terminal and turned it off. The hologram disappeared.

  This disturbed Wang-mu very much. Almost as if he had slapped a child. Or beaten a servant. "Jane is a very noble creature, to treat her with such disrespect."

  "Jane is a computer program with a bug in the id routines."

  He was in a dark mood, this boy who had come to take her into his starship and spirit her away from the world of Path. But dark as his mood might be, she understood now, with the hologram gone from the terminal, what she had seen. "It isn't just because you're so young and the holograms of Peter Wiggin the Hegemon are of a mature man," said Wang-mu.

  "What," he said impatiently. "What isn't what?"

  "The physical difference between you and the Hegemon."

  "What is it, then?"

  "He looks--satisfied."

  "He conquered the world," said Peter.

  "So when you have done the same, you will get that look of satisfaction?"

  "I suppose so," said Peter. "It's what passes for a purpose in my life. It's the mission Ender has sent me on."

  "Don't lie to me," said Wang-mu. "On the riverbank you spoke of the terrible things I did for the sake of my ambition. I admit it--I was ambitious, desperate to rise out of my terrible lowborn state. I know the taste of it, and the smell of it, and I smell it coming from you, like the smell of tar on a hot day, you stink of it."

  "Ambition? Has a stench?"

  "I'm drunk with it myself."

  He grinned. Then he touched the jewel in his ear. "Remember, Jane is listening, and she tells Ender everything."

  Wang-mu fell silent, but not because she was embarrassed. She simply had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing.

  "So I'm ambitious. Because that's how Ender imagined me. Ambitious and nasty-minded and cruel."

  "But I thought you were not yourself," she said.

  His eyes blazed with defiance. "That's right, I'm not." He looked away. "Sorry, Gepetto, but I can't be a real boy. I have no soul."

  She didn't understand the name he said, but she understood the word soul. "All my childhood I was thought to be a servant by nature. To have no soul. Then one day they discovered that I have one. So far it has brought me no great happiness."

  "I'm not speaking of some religious idea. I'm speaking of the aiua. I haven't got one. Remember what happened to Miro's broken-down body when his aiua abandoned it."

  "But you don't crumble, so you must have an aiua after all."

  "I don't have it, it has me. I continue to exist because the aiua whose irresistible will called me into existence continues to imagine me. Continues to need me, to control me, to be my will."

  "Ender Wiggin?" she asked.

  "My brother, my creator, my tormentor, my god, my very self."

  "And young Valentine? Her too?"

  "Ah, but he loves her. He's proud of her. He's glad he made her. Me he loathes. Loathes, and yet it's his will that I do and say every nasty thing. When I'm at my most despicable, remember that I do only what my brother makes me do."

  "Oh, to blame him for--"

  "I'm not blaming, Wang-mu. I'm stating simple reality. His will is controlling three bodies now. Mine, my impossibly angelic sister's, and of course his own very tired middle-aged body. Every aiua in my body receives its order and place from his. I am, in all ways that matter, Ender Wiggin. Except that he has created me to be the vessel of every impulse in himself that he hates and fears. His ambition, yes, you smell his ambition when you smell mine. His aggression. His rage. His nastiness. His cruelty. His, not mine, because I am dead, and anyway I was never like this, never the way he saw me. This person before you is a travesty, a mockery! I'm a twisted memory. A despicable dream. A nightmare. I'm the creature hiding under the bed. He brought me out of chaos to be the terror of his childhood."

  "So don't do it," said Wang-mu. "If you don't want to be those things, don't do them."

  He sighed and closed his eyes. "If you're so bright, why haven't you understood a word I've said?"

  She did understand, though. "What is your will, anyway? Nobody can see it. You don't hear it thinking. You only know what your will is afterward, when you look back in your life and see what you've done."

  "That's the most terrible trick he's played on me," said Peter softly, his eyes still closed. "I look back on my life and I see only the memories he has imagined for me. He was taken from our family when he was only five. What does he know of me or my life?"

  "He wrote The Hegemon."

  "That book. Yes, based on Valentine's memories, as she told them to him. And the public documents of my dazzling career. And of course the few ansible communications between Ender and my own late self before I--he--died. I'm only a few weeks old, yet I know a quotation from Henry IV, Part I. Owen Glendower boasting to Hotspur. Henry Percy. How could I know that? When did I go to school? How long did I lie awake at night, reading old plays until I committed a thousand favorite lines to memory? Did Ender somehow conjure up the whole of his dead brother's education? All his private thoughts? Ender only knew the real Peter Wiggin for five years. It's not a real person's memories I draw on. It's the memories Ender thinks that I should have."

  "He thinks you should know Shakespeare, and so you do?" she asked doubtfully.

  "If only Shakespeare were all he had given me. The great writers, the great philosophers. If only those were the only memories I had."

  She waited for him to list the troublesome memories. But he only shuddered and fell silent.

  "So if you are really controlled by Ender, then . . . you are him. Then that is yourself. You are Andrew Wiggin. You have an aiua."

  "I'm Andrew Wiggin's ni
ghtmare," said Peter. "I'm Andrew Wiggin's self-loathing. I'm everything he hates and fears about himself. That's the script I've been given. That's what I have to do."

  He flexed his hand into a fist, then extended it partway, the fingers still bent. A claw. The tiger again. And for a moment, Wang-mu was afraid of him. Only a moment, though. He relaxed his hands. The moment passed. "What part does your script have in it for me?"

  "I don't know," said Peter. "You're very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have such incredible vanity that I can't really believe that anyone is actually smarter than I am. Which means that I'm all the more in need of good advice, since I can't actually conceive of needing any."

  "You talk in circles."

  "That's just part of my cruelty. To torment you with conversation. But maybe it's supposed to go farther than that. Maybe I'm supposed to torture you and kill you the way I so clearly remember doing with squirrels. Maybe I'm supposed to stake your living body out in the woods, nailing your extremities to tree roots, and then open you up layer by layer to see at what point the flies begin to come and lay eggs in your exposed flesh."

  She recoiled at the image. "I have read the book. I know the Hegemon was not a monster!"

  "It wasn't the Speaker for the Dead who created me Outside. It was the frightened boy Ender. I'm not the Peter Wiggin he so wisely understood in that book. I'm the Peter Wiggin he had nightmares about. The one who flayed squirrels."

  "He saw you do that?" she asked.

  "Not me," he said testily. "And no, he never even saw him do it. Valentine told him later. She found the squirrel's body in the woods near their childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina, on the continent of North America back on Earth. But that image fit so tidily into his nightmares that he borrowed it and shared it with me. That's the memory I live with. Intellectually, I can imagine that the real Peter Wiggin was probably not cruel at all. He was learning and studying. He didn't have compassion for the squirrel because he didn't sentimentalize it. It was simply an animal. No more important than a head of lettuce. To cut it up was probably as immoral an act as making a salad. But that's not how Ender imagined it, and so that's not how I remember it."

  "How do you remember it?"

  "The way I remember all my supposed memories. From the outside. Watching myself in horrified fascination as I take a fiendish delight in cruelty. All my memories prior to the moment I came to life on Ender's little voyage Outside, in all of them I see myself through someone else's eyes. A very odd feeling, I assure you."

  "But now?"

  "Now I don't see myself at all," he said. "Because I have no self. I am not myself."

  "But you remember. You have memories. Of this conversation, already you remember it. Looking at me. You must, surely."

  "Yes," he said. "I remember you. And I remember being here and seeing you. But there isn't any self behind my eyes. I feel tired and stupid even when I'm being my most clever and brilliant."

  He smiled a charming smile and now Wang-mu could see again the true difference between Peter and the hologram of the Hegemon. It was as he said: Even at his most self-deprecating, this Peter Wiggin had eyes that flashed with inner rage. He was dangerous. You could see it looking at him. When he looked into your eyes, you could imagine him planning how and when you would die.

  "I am not myself," said Peter.

  "You are saying this to control yourself," said Wang-mu, guessing but also sure she was right. "This is your incantation, to stop yourself from doing what you desire."

  Peter sighed and leaned over, laying his head down on the terminal, his ear pressed against the cold plastic surface.

  "What is it you desire?" she said, fearful of the answer.

  "Go away," he said.

  "Where can I go? This great starship of yours has only one room."

  "Open the door and go outside," he said.

  "You mean to kill me? To eject me into space where I'll freeze before I have time to suffocate?"

  He sat up and looked at her in puzzlement. "Space?"

  His confusion confused her. Where else would they be but in space? That's where starships went, through space.

  Except this one, of course.

  As he saw understanding come to her, he laughed aloud. "Oh, yes, you're the brilliant one, they've remade the entire world of Path to have your genius!"

  She refused to be goaded.

  "I thought there would be some sensation of movement. Or something. Have we traveled, then? Are we already there?"

  "In the twinkling of an eye. We were Outside and then back Inside at another place, all so fast that only a computer could experience our voyage as having any duration at all. Jane did it before I finished talking to her. Before I said a word to you."

  "Then where are we? What's outside the door?"

  "We're sitting in the woods somewhere on the planet Divine Wind. The air is breathable. You won't freeze. It's summer outside the door."

  She walked to the door and pulled down the handle, releasing the airtight seal. The door eased open. Sunlight streamed into the room.

  "Divine Wind," she said. "I read about it--it was founded as a Shinto world the way Path was supposed to be Taoist. The purity of ancient Japanese culture. But I think it's not so very pure these days."

  "More to the point, it's the world where Andrew and Jane and I felt--if one can speak of my having feelings apart from Ender's own--the world where we might find the center of power in the worlds ruled by Congress. The true decision makers. The power behind the throne."

  "So you can subvert them and take over the human race?"

  "So I can stop the Lusitania Fleet. Taking over the human race is a bit later on the agenda. The Lusitania Fleet is something of an emergency. We have only a few weeks to stop it before the fleet gets there and uses the Little Doctor, the M.D. Device, to blow Lusitania into its constituent elements. In the meantime, because Ender and everyone else expects me to fail, they're building these little tin can starships as fast as possible and transporting as many Lusitanians as they can--humans, piggies, and buggers--to other habitable but as yet uninhabited planets. My dear sister Valentine--the young one--is off with Miro--in his fresh new body, the dear lad--searching out new worlds as fast as their little starship can carry them. Quite a project. All of them betting on my--on our--failure. Let's disappoint them, shall we?"

  "Disappoint them?"

  "By succeeding. Let's succeed. Let's find the center of power among humankind, and let's persuade them to stop the fleet before it needlessly destroys a world."

  Wang-mu looked at him doubtfully. Persuade them to stop the fleet? This nasty-minded, cruel-hearted boy? How could he persuade anyone of anything?

  As if he could hear her thoughts, he answered her silent doubt. "You see why I invited you to come along with me. When Ender was inventing me, he forgot the fact that he never knew me during the time in my life when I was persuading people and gathering them together in shifting alliances and all that nonsense. So the Peter Wiggin he created is far too nasty, openly ambitious, and nakedly cruel to persuade a man with rectal itch to scratch his own butt."

  She looked away from him again.

  "You see?" he said. "I offend you again and again. Look at me. Do you see my dilemma? The real Peter, the original one, he could have done the work I've been sent to do. He could have done it in his sleep. He'd already have a plan. He'd be able to win people over, soothe them, insinuate himself into their councils. That Peter Wiggin! He can charm the stings out of bees. But can I? I doubt it. For, you see, I'm not myself."

  He got up from his chair, roughly pushed his way past her, and stepped outside onto the meadow that surrounded the little metal cabin that had carried them from world to world. Wang-mu stood in the doorway, watching him as he wandered away from the ship; away, but not too far.

  I know something of how he feels, she thought. I know something of having to submerge your will in someone else's. To live for them, as if they were the star
of the story of your life, and you merely a supporting player. I have been a slave. But at least in all that time I knew my own heart. I knew what I truly thought even as I did what they wanted, whatever it took to get what I wanted from them. Peter Wiggin, though, has no idea of what he really wants, because even his resentment of his lack of freedom isn't his own, even that comes from Andrew Wiggin. Even his self-loathing is Andrew's self-loathing, and . . .

  And back and back, in circles, like the random path he was tracing through the meadow.

  Wang-mu thought of her mistress--no, her former mistress--Qing-jao. She also traced strange patterns. It was what the gods forced her to do. No, that's the old way of thinking. It's what her obsessive-compulsive disorder caused her to do. To kneel on the floor and trace the grain of the wood in each board, trace a single line of it as far as it went across the floor, line after line. It never meant anything, and yet she had to do it because only by such meaningless mind-numbing obedience could she win a scrap of freedom from the impulses controlling her. It is Qing-jao who was always the slave, and never me. For the master that ruled her controlled her from inside her own mind. While I could always see my master outside me, so my inmost self was never touched.

  Peter Wiggin knows that he is ruled by the unconscious fears and passions of a complicated man many lightyears away. But then, Qing-jao thought her obsessions came from the gods. What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you comes from outside, if in fact you only experience it inside your own heart? Where can you run from it? How can you hide? Qing-jao must be free by now, freed by the carrier virus that Peter brought with him to Path and put into the hands of Han Fei-tzu. But Peter--what freedom can there be for him?

  And yet he must still live as if he were free. He must still struggle for freedom even if the struggle itself is just one more symptom of his slavery. There is a part of him that yearns to be himself. No, not himself. A self.

  So what is my part in all of this? Am I supposed to work a miracle, and give him an aiua? That isn't in my power.

  And yet I do have power, she thought.

  She must have power, or why else had he spoken to her so openly? A total stranger, and he had opened his heart to her at once. Why? Because she was in on the secrets, yes, but something else as well.