Children of the Mind Page 5

  "Resentment between the species is nothing new," said Miro.

  "But until now we had Ender to contain it," said Grego. "Pequeninos, the Hive Queen, and most of the human population saw Ender as a fair broker, someone they could trust. They knew that as long as he was in charge of things, as long as his voice was heard, their interests would be protected."

  "Ender isn't the only good person leading this exodus," said Miro.

  "It's a matter of trust, not of virtue," said Valentine. "The non-humans know that Ender is the Speaker for the Dead. No other human has ever spoken for another species that way. And yet the humans know that Ender is the Xenocide--that when the human race was threatened by an enemy countless generations ago, he was the one who acted to stop them and save humanity from, as they feared, annihilation. There isn't exactly a candidate with equivalent qualifications ready to step into Ender's role."

  "What's that to me?" asked Miro bluntly. "Nobody listens to me here. I have no connections. I certainly can't take Ender's place either, and right now I'm tired and I need to sleep. Look at Young Val, she's half-dead with weariness, too."

  It was true; she was barely able to stand. Miro at once reached out to support her; she gratefully leaned against his shoulder.

  "We don't want you to take Ender's place," said Olhado. "We don't want anybody to take his place. We want him to take his place."

  Miro laughed. "You think I can persuade him? You've got his sister right there! Send her!"

  Old Valentine grimaced. "Miro, he won't see me."

  "Then what makes you think he'll see me?"

  "Not you, Miro. Jane. The jewel in your ear."

  Miro looked at them in bafflement. "You mean Ender has removed his jewel?"

  In his ear, he heard Jane say, "I've been busy. I didn't think it was important to mention it to you."

  But Miro knew how it had devastated Jane before, when Ender cut her off. Now she had other friends, yes, but that didn't mean it would be painless.

  Old Valentine continued. "If you can go to him and get him to talk to Jane . . ."

  Miro shook his head. "Taking out the jewel--don't you see that that was final? He's committed himself to following Mother into exile. Ender doesn't back away from his commitments."

  They all knew it was true. Knew, in fact, that they had really come to Miro, not with the real hope that he would accomplish what they needed, but as a last feeble act of desperation. "So we let things wind down," said Grego. "We let things slide into chaos. And then, beset by interspecies war, we will die in shame when the fleet comes. Jane's lucky, I think; she'll already be dead when it gets here."

  "Tell him thanks," Jane said to Miro.

  "Jane says thanks," said Miro. "You're just too soft-hearted, Grego."

  Grego blushed, but he didn't take back what he said.

  "Ender isn't God," said Miro. "We'll just do our best without him. But right now the best thing I can do is--"

  "Sleep, we know," said Old Valentine. "Not on the ship this time, though. Please. It makes us sick at heart to see how weary you both are. Jakt has brought the taxi. Come home and sleep in a bed."

  Miro glanced at Young Val, who still leaned sleepily on his shoulder.

  "Both of you, of course," said Old Valentine. "I'm not as distressed by her existence as you all seem to think."

  "Of course you're not," said Young Val. She reached out a weary arm, and the two women who bore the same name took each other's hand. Miro watched as Young Val slipped from his side to take Old Valentine's arm, and lean on her instead of him. His own feelings surprised him. Instead of relief that there was less tension between the two of them than he had thought, he found himself being rather angry. Jealous anger, that's what it was. She was leaning on me, he wanted to say. What kind of childish response was that?

  And then, as he watched them walk away, he saw what he should not have seen--Valentine's shudder. Was it a sudden chill? The night was cool. But no, Miro was sure it was the touch of her young twin, and not the night air that made Old Valentine tremble.

  "Come on, Miro," said Olhado. "We'll get you to the hovercar and into bed at Valentine's house."

  "Is there a food stop along the way?"

  "It's Jakt's house, too," said Elanora. "There's always food."

  As the hovercar carried them toward Milagre, the human town, they passed near some of the dozens of starships currently in service. The work of migration didn't take the night off. Stevedores--many of them pequeninos--were loading supplies and equipment for transport. Families were shuffling in lines to fill up whatever spaces were left in the cabins. Jane would be getting no rest tonight as she took box after box Outside and back In. On other worlds, new homes were rising, new fields being plowed. Was it day or night in those other places? It didn't matter. In a way they had already succeeded--new worlds were being colonized, and, like it or not, every world had its hive, its new pequenino forest, and its human village.

  If Jane died today, thought Miro, if the fleet came tomorrow and blew us all to bits, in the grand scheme of things, what would it matter? The seeds have been scattered to the wind; some, at least, will take root. And if faster-than-light travel dies with Jane, even that might be for the best, for it will force each of these worlds to fend for itself. Some colonies will fail and die, no doubt. On some of them, war will come, and perhaps one species or another will be wiped out there. But it will not be the same species that dies on every world, or the same one that lives; and on some worlds, at least, we'll surely find a way to live in peace. All that's left for us now is details. Whether this or that individual lives or dies. It matters, of course. But not the way that the survival of species matters.

  He must have been subvocalizing some of his thoughts, because Jane answered them. "Hath not an overblown computer program eyes and ears? Have I no heart or brain? When you tickle me do I not laugh?"

  "Frankly, no," said Miro silently, working his lips and tongue and teeth to shape words that only she could hear.

  "But when I die, every being of my kind will also die," she said. "Forgive me if I think of this as having cosmic significance. I'm not as self-abnegating as you are, Miro. I don't regard myself as living on borrowed time. It was my firm intention to live forever, so anything less is a disappointment."

  "Tell me what I can do and I'll do it," he said. "I'd die to save you, if that's what it took."

  "Fortunately, you'll die eventually no matter what," said Jane. "That's my one consolation, that by dying I'll do no more than face the same doom that every other living creature has to face. Even those long-living trees. Even those hive queens, passing their memories along from generation to generation. But I, alas, will have no children. How could I? I'm a creature of mind alone. There's no provision for mental mating."

  "Too bad, too," said Miro, "because I bet you'd be great in the virtual sack."

  "The best," Jane said.

  And then silence for a little while.

  Only when they approached Jakt's house, a new building on the outskirts of Milagre, did Jane speak again. "Keep in mind, Miro, that whatever Ender does with his own self, when Young Valentine speaks it's still Ender's aiua talking."

  "The same with Peter," said Miro. "Now there's a charmer. Let's just say that Young Val, sweet as she is, doesn't exactly represent a balanced view of anything. Ender may control her, but she's not Ender."

  "There are just too many of him, aren't there," said Jane. "And, apparently, too many of me, at least in the opinion of Starways Congress."

  "There are too many of us all," said Miro. "But never enough."

  They arrived. Miro and Young Val were led inside. They ate feebly; they slept the moment they reached their beds. Miro was aware that voices went on far into the night, for he did not sleep well, but rather kept waking a little, uncomfortable on such a soft mattress, and perhaps uncomfortable at being away from his duty, like a soldier who feels guilty at having abandoned his post.

  Despite his weariness, Miro di
d not sleep late. Indeed, the sky outside was still dim with the predawn seepage of sunlight over the horizon when he awoke and, as was his habit, rose immediately from his bed, standing shakily as the last of sleep fled from his body. He covered himself and went out into the hall to find the bathroom and discharge his bladder. When he emerged, he heard voices from the kitchen. Either last night's conversation was still going on, or some other neurotic early risers had rejected morning solitude and were chatting away as if dawn were not the dark hour of despair.

  He stood before his own open door, ready to go inside and shut out those earnest voices, when Miro realized that one of them belonged to Young Val. Then he realized that the other one was Old Valentine. At once he turned and made his way to the kitchen, and again hesitated in a doorway.

  Sure enough, the two Valentines were sitting across the table from each other, but not looking at each other. Instead they stared out the window as they sipped one of Old Valentine's fruit-and-vegetable decoctions.

  "Would you like one, Miro?" asked Old Valentine without looking up.

  "Not even on my deathbed," said Miro. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

  "Good," said Old Valentine.

  Young Val continued to say nothing.

  Miro came inside the kitchen, went to the sink, and drew himself a glass of water, which he drank in one long draught.

  "I told you it was Miro in the bathroom," said Old Valentine. "No one processes so much water every day as this dear lad."

  Miro chuckled, but he did not hear Young Val laugh.

  "I am interfering with the conversation," he said. "I'll go."

  "Stay," said Old Valentine.

  "Please," said Young Val.

  "Please which?" asked Miro. He turned toward her and grinned.

  She shoved a chair toward him with her foot. "Sit," she said. "The lady and I were having it out about our twinship."

  "We decided," said Old Valentine, "that it's my responsibility to die first."

  "On the contrary," said Young Val, "we decided that Gepetto did not create Pinocchio because he wanted a real boy. It was a puppet he wanted all along. That real-boy business was simply Gepetto's laziness. He still wanted the puppet to dance--he just didn't want to go to all the trouble of working the strings."

  "You being Pinocchio," said Miro. "And Ender . . ."

  "My brother didn't try to make you," said Old Valentine. "And he doesn't want to control you, either."

  "I know," whispered Young Val. And suddenly there were tears in her eyes.

  Miro reached out a hand to lay atop hers on the table, but at once she snatched hers away. No, she wasn't avoiding his touch, she was simply bringing her hand up to wipe the annoying tears out of her eyes.

  "He'd cut the strings if he could, I know," said Young Val. "The way Miro cut the strings on his old broken body."

  Miro remembered it very clearly. One moment he was sitting in the starship, looking at this perfect image of himself, strong and young and healthy; the next moment he was that image, had always been that image, and what he looked at was the crippled, broken, brain-damaged version of himself. And as he watched, that unloved, unwanted body crumbled into dust and disappeared.

  "I don't think he hates you," said Miro, "the way I hated my old self."

  "He doesn't have to hate me. It wasn't hate anyway that killed your old body." Young Val didn't meet his eyes. In all their hours together exploring worlds, they had never talked about anything so personal. She had never dared to discuss with him that moment when both of them had been created. "You hated your old body while you were in it, but as soon as you were back in your right body, you simply stopped paying any attention to the old one. It wasn't part of you anymore. Your aiua had no more responsibility for it. And with nothing to hold it together--pop goes the weasel."

  "Wooden doll," said Miro. "Now weasel. What else am I?"

  Old Valentine ignored his bid for a laugh. "So you're saying Ender finds you uninteresting."

  "He admires me," said Young Val. "But he finds me dull."

  "Yes, well, me too," said Old Valentine.

  "That's absurd," said Miro.

  "Is it?" asked Old Valentine. "He never followed me anywhere; I was always the one who followed him. He was searching for a mission in life, I think. Some great deed to do, to match the terrible act that ended his childhood. He thought writing The Hive Queen would do it. And then, with my help in preparing it, he wrote The Hegemon and he thought that might be enough, but it wasn't. He kept searching for something that would engage his full attention and he kept almost finding it, or finding it for a week or a month, but one thing was certain, the thing that engaged his attention was never me, because there I was in all the billion miles he traveled, there I was across three thousand years. Those histories I wrote--it was no great love for history, it was because it helped in his work. The way my writing used to help in Peter's work. And when I was finished, then, for a few hours of reading and discussion, I had his attention. Only each time it was less satisfying because it wasn't I who had his attention, it was the story I had written. Until finally I found a man who gave me his whole heart, and I stayed with him. While my adolescent brother went on without me, and found a family that took his whole heart, and there we were, planets apart, but finally happier without each other than we'd ever been together."

  "So why did you come to him again?" asked Miro.

  "I didn't come for him. I came for you." Old Valentine smiled. "I came for a world in danger of destruction. But I was glad to see Ender, even though I knew he would never belong to me."

  "This may be an accurate description of how it felt to you," said Young Val. "But you must have had his attention, at some level. I exist because you're always in his heart."

  "A fantasy of his childhood, perhaps. Not me."

  "Look at me," said Young Val. "Is this the body you wore when he was five and was taken away from his home and sent up to the Battle School? Is this even the teenage girl that he knew that summer by the lake in North Carolina? You must have had his attention even when you grew up, because his image of you changed to become me."

  "You are what I was when we worked on The Hegemon together," said Old Valentine sadly.

  "Were you this tired?" asked Young Val.

  "I am," said Miro.

  "No you're not," said Old Valentine. "You are the picture of vigor. You're still celebrating your beautiful new body. My twin here is heartweary."

  "Ender's attention has always been divided," said Young Val. "I'm filled with his memories, you see--or rather, with the memories that he unconsciously thought I should have, but of course they consist almost entirely of things that he remembers about my friend here, which means that all I remember is my life with Ender. And he always had Jane in his ear, and the people whose deaths he was speaking, and his students, and the Hive Queen in her cocoon, and so on. But they were all adolescent connections. Like every itinerant hero of epic, he wandered place to place, transforming others but remaining himself unchanged. Until he came here and finally gave himself wholly to somebody else. You and your family, Miro. Novinha. For the first time he gave other people the power to tear at him emotionally, and it was exhilarating and painful both at once, but even that he could handle just fine, he's a strong man, and strong men have borne more. Now, though, it's something else entirely. Peter and I, we have no life apart from him. To say that he is one with Novinha is metaphorical; with Peter and me it's literal. He is us. And his aiua isn't great enough, it isn't strong or copious enough, it hasn't enough attention in it to give equal shares to the three lives that depend on it. I realized this almost as soon as I was . . . what shall we call it, created? Manufactured?"

  "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 . . ."