Children of the Mind Read online

  In that moment, as the hair torn from her head revealed the depth of her misery, her loneliness, her self-rejections, Miro realized what he had not let himself think of until now: that in all the weeks they had traveled world to world together, he had come to love her, and her unhappiness hurt him as if it were his own. And perhaps it was his own, his memory of his own self-loathing. But whatever the reason, it still felt like something deeper than mere compassion to him. It was a kind of desire. Yes, it was a kind of love. If this beautiful young woman, this wise and intelligent and clever young woman was rejected by her own inmost heart, then Miro's heart had room enough to take her in. If Ender will not be yourself, let me! he cried silently, knowing as he formed the thought for the first time that he had felt this way for days, for weeks, without realizing it; yet also knowing that he could not be to her what Ender was.

  Still, couldn't love do for Young Val what it was doing for Ender himself? Couldn't that engage enough of his attention to keep her alive? To strengthen her?

  Miro reached out and gathered up her disembodied hair, twined it around his fingers, and then slid the looping locks into the pocket of his robe. "I don't want you to fade away," he said. Bold words for him.

  Young Val looked at him oddly. "I thought the great love of your life was Ouanda."

  "She's a middle-aged woman now," said Miro. "Married and happy, with a family. It would be sad if the great love of my life were a woman who doesn't exist anymore, and even if she did she wouldn't want me."

  "It's sweet of you to offer," said Young Val. "But I don't think we can fool Ender into caring about my life by pretending to fall in love."

  Her words stabbed Miro to the heart, because she had so easily seen how much of his self-declaration came from pity. Yet not all of it came from there; most of it was already seething just under the level of consciousness, just waiting its chance to come out. "I wasn't thinking of fooling anyone," said Miro. Except myself, he thought. Because Young Val could not possibly love me. She is, after all, not really a woman. She's Ender.

  But that was absurd. Her body was a woman's body. And where did the choice of loves come from, if not the body? Was there something male or female in the aiua? Before it became master of flesh and bone, was it manly or womanly? And if so, would that mean that the aiuas composing atoms and molecules, rocks and stars and light and wind, that all of those were neatly sorted into boys and girls? Nonsense. Ender's aiua could be a woman, could love like a woman as easily as it now loved, in a man's body and in a man's ways, Miro's own mother. It wasn't any lack in Young Val that made her look at him with such pity. It was a lack in him. Even with his body healed, he was not a man that a woman--or at least this woman, at the moment the most desirable of all women--could love, or wish to love, or hope to win.

  "I shouldn't have come here," he murmured. He pushed away from the table and left the room in two strides. Strode up the hall and once again stood in his open doorway. He heard their voices.

  "No, don't go to him," said Old Valentine. Then something softer. Then, "He may have a new body, but his self-hatred has never been healed."

  A murmur from Young Val.

  "Miro was speaking from his heart," Old Valentine assured her. "It was a very brave and naked thing for him to do."

  Again Young Val spoke too softly for Miro to hear her.

  "How could you know?" Old Valentine said. "What you have to realize is, we took a long voyage together, not that long ago, and I think he fell in love with me a little on that flight."

  It was probably true. It was definitely true. Miro had to admit it: some of his feelings for Young Val were really his feelings for Old Valentine, transferred from the woman who was permanently out of reach to this young woman who might be, he had hoped at least, accessible to him.

  Now both their voices fell to levels where Miro could not even pick out words. But still he waited, his hands pressed against the doorjamb, listening to the lilting of those two voices, so much alike, but both so well-known to him. It was a music that he could gladly hear forever.

  "If there's anyone like Ender in all this universe," said Old Valentine with sudden loudness, "it's Miro. He broke himself trying to save innocents from destruction. He hasn't yet been healed."

  She meant me to hear that, Miro realized. She spoke loudly, knowing I was standing here, knowing I was listening. The old witch was listening for my door to close and she never heard it so she knows that I can hear them and she's trying to give me a way to see myself. But I'm no Ender, I'm barely Miro, and if she says things like that about me it's just proof that she doesn't know who I am.

  A voice spoke up in his ear. "Oh, shut up if you're just going to lie to yourself."

  Of course Jane had heard everything. Even his thoughts, because, as was his habit, his conscious thoughts were echoed by his lips and tongue and teeth. He couldn't even think without moving his lips. With Jane attached to his ear he spent his waking hours in a confessional that never closed.

  "So you love the girl," said Jane. "Why not? So your motives are complicated by your feelings toward Ender and Valentine and Ouanda and yourself. So what? What love was ever pure, what lover was ever uncomplicated? Think of her as a succubus. You'll love her, and she'll crumble in your arms."

  Jane's taunting was infuriating and amusing at once. He went inside his room and gently closed the door. When it was closed, he whispered to her, "You're just a jealous old bitch, Jane. You only want me for yourself."

  "I'm sure you're right," said Jane. "If Ender had ever really loved me, he would have created my human body when he was being so fertile Outside. Then I could make a play for you myself."

  "You already have my whole heart," said Miro. "Such as it is."

  "You are such a liar," said Jane. "I'm just a talking appointment book and calculator, and you know it."

  "But you're very very rich," said Miro. "I'll marry you for your money."

  "By the way," said Jane, "she's wrong about one thing."

  "What's that?" asked Miro, wondering which "she" Jane was referring to.

  "You aren't done with exploring worlds. Whether Ender is still interested in it or not--and I think he is, because she hasn't turned to dust yet--the work doesn't end just because there are enough habitable planets to save the piggies and buggers."

  Jane frequently used the old diminutive and pejorative terms for them. Miro often wondered, but never dared to ask, if she had any pejoratives for humans. But he thought he knew what her answer would be anyway: "The word 'human' is a pejorative," she'd say.

  "So what are we still looking for?" asked Miro.

  "Every world that we can find before I die," said Jane.

  He thought about that as he lay back down on his bed. Thought about it as he tossed and turned a couple of times, then got up, got dressed for real, and set out under the lightening sky, walking among the other early risers, people about their business, few of whom knew him or even knew of him. Being a scion of the strange Ribeira family, he hadn't had many childhood friends in ginasio; being both brilliant and shy, he'd had even fewer of the more rambunctious adolescent friendships in colegio. His only girlfriend had been Ouanda, until his penetration of the sealed perimeter of the human colony left him brain-damaged and he refused to see even her anymore. Then his voyage out to meet Valentine had severed the few fragile ties that remained between him and his birthworld. For him it was only a few months in a starship, but when he came back, years had passed, and he was now his mother's youngest child, the only one whose life was unbegun. The children he had once watched over were adults who treated him like a tender memory from their youth. Only Ender was unchanged. No matter how many years. No matter what happened. Ender was the same.

  Could it still be true? Could he be the same man even now, locking himself away at a time of crisis, hiding out in a monastery just because Mother had finally given up on life? Miro knew the bare outline of Ender's life. Taken from his family at the tender age of five. Brought to the orbitin
g Battle School, where he emerged as the last best hope of humankind in its war with the ruthless invaders called buggers. Taken next to the fleet command on Eros, where he was told he was in advanced training, but where, without realizing it, he was commanding the real fleets, lightyears away, his commands transmitted by ansible. He won that war through brilliance and, in the end, the utterly unconscionable act of destroying the home world of the buggers. Except that he had thought it was a game.

  Thought it was a game, but at the same time knowing that the game was a simulation of reality. In the game he had chosen to do the unspeakable; it meant, to Ender at least, that he was not free of guilt when the game turned out to be real. Even though the last Hive Queen forgave him and put herself, cocooned as she was, into his care, he could not shake himself free of that. He was only a child, doing what adults led him to do; but somewhere in his heart he knew that even a child is a real person, that a child's acts are real acts, that even a child's play is not without moral context.

  Thus before the sun was up, Miro found himself facing Ender as they both straddled a stone bench in a spot in the garden that would soon be bathed in sunlight but now was clammy with the morning chill; and what Miro found himself saying to this unchangeable, unchanging man was this: "What is this monastery business, Andrew Wiggin, except for a backhanded, cowardly way of crucifying yourself?"

  "I've missed you too, Miro," said Ender. "You look tired, though. You need more sleep."

  Miro sighed and shook his head. "That wasn't what I meant to say. I'm trying to understand you, I really am. Valentine says that I'm like you."

  "You mean the real Valentine?" asked Ender.

  "They're both real," said Miro.

  "Well, if I'm like you, then study yourself and tell me what you find."

  Miro wondered, looking at him, if Ender really meant this.

  Ender patted Miro's knee. "I'm really not needed out there now," he said.

  "You don't believe that for a second," said Miro.

  "But I believe that I believe it," said Ender, "and for me that's pretty good. Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet."

  "No, you're exploiting the convenience of having split yourself into three. This part of you, the aging middle-aged man, can afford the luxury of devoting himself entirely to his wife--but only because he has two young puppets to go out and do the work that really interests him."

  "But it doesn't interest me," said Ender. "I don't care."

  "You as Ender don't care because you as Peter and you as Valentine are taking care of everything else for you. Only Valentine isn't well. You're not caring enough about what she's doing. What happened to my old crippled body is happening to her. More slowly, but it's the same thing. She thinks so, Valentine thinks it's possible. So do I. So does Jane."

  "Give Jane my love. I do miss her."

  "I give Jane my love, Ender."

  Ender grinned at his resistance. "If they were about to shoot you, Miro, you'd insist on drinking a lot of water just so they'd have to handle a corpse covered with urine when you were dead."

  "Valentine isn't a dream or an illusion, Ender," said Miro, refusing to be sidetracked into a discussion of his own obstreperous-ness. "She's real, and you're killing her."

  "Awfully dramatic way of putting it."

  "If you'd seen her pull out tufts of her own hair this morning . . ."

  "So she's rather theatrical, I take it? Well, you've always been one for the theatrical gesture, too. I'm not surprised you get along."

  "Andrew, I'm telling you you've got to--"

  Suddenly Ender grew stern and his voice overtopped Miro's even though he was not speaking loudly. "Use your head, Miro. Was your decision to jump from your old body to this newer model a conscious one? Did you think about it and say, 'Well, I think I'll let this old corpse crumble into its constituent molecules because this new body is a nicer place to dwell'?"

  Miro got his point at once. Ender couldn't consciously control where his attention went. His aiua, even though it was his deepest self, was not to be ordered about.

  "I find out what I really want by seeing what I do," said Ender. "That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously. I can't help it if the part of me that's controlling this girl whose company you're sharing isn't as important to my underlying will as you'd like. As she needs. I can't do a thing."

  Miro bowed his head.

  The sun came up over the trees. Suddenly the bench turned bright, and Miro looked up to see the sunlight making a halo out of Ender's wildly slept-in hair. "Is grooming against the monastic rule?" asked Miro.

  "You're attracted to her, aren't you," said Ender, not really making a question out of it. "And it makes you a little uneasy that she is really me."

  Miro shrugged. "It's a root in the path. But I think I can step over it."

  "But what if I'm not attracted to you?" asked Ender cheerfully.

  Miro spread his arms and turned to show his profile. "Unthinkable," he said.

  "You are cute as a bunny," said Ender. "I'm sure young Valentine dreams about you. I wouldn't know. The only dreams I have are of planets blowing up and everyone I love being obliterated."

  "I know you haven't forgotten the world in here, Andrew." He meant that as the beginning of an apology, but Ender waved him off.

  "I can't forget it, but I can ignore it. I'm ignoring the world, Miro. I'm ignoring you, I'm ignoring those two walking psychoses of mine. At this moment, I'm trying to ignore everything but your mother."

  "And God," said Miro. "You mustn't forget God."

  "Not for a single moment," said Ender. "As a matter of fact, I can't forget anything or anybody. But yes, I am ignoring God, except insofar as Novinha needs me to notice him. I'm shaping myself into the husband that she needs."

  "Why, Andrew? You know Mother's as crazy as a loon."

  "No such thing," said Ender reprovingly. "But even if it were true, then . . . all the more reason."

  "What God has joined, let no man put asunder. I do approve, philosophically, but you don't know how it . . ." Miro's weariness swept over him then. He couldn't think of the words to say what he wanted to say, and he knew that it was because he was trying to tell Ender how it felt, at this moment, to be Miro Ribeira, and Miro had no practice in even identifying his own feelings, let alone expressing them. "Desculpa," he murmured, changing to Portuguese because it was his childhood language, the language of his emotions. He found himself wiping tears off his cheeks. "Se nao posso mudar nem voce, nao ha nada que possa, nada." If I can't get even you to move, to change, then there's nothing I can do.

  "Nem eu?" Ender echoed. "In all the universe, Miro, there's nobody harder to change than me."

  "Mother did it. She changed you."

  "No she didn't," said Ender. "She only allowed me to be what I needed and wanted to be. Like now, Miro. I can't make everybody happy. I can't make me happy, I'm not doing much for you, and as for the big problems, I'm worthless there too. But maybe I can make your mother happy, or at least somewhat happier, at least for a while, or at least I can try." He took Miro's hands in his, pressed them to his own face, and they did not come away dry.

  Miro watched as Ender got up from the bench and walked away toward the sun, into the shining orchard. Surely this is how Adam would have looked, thought Miro, if he had never eaten the fruit. If he had stayed and stayed and stayed and stayed in the garden. Three thousand years Ender has skimmed the surface of life. It was my mother he finally snagged on. I spent my whole childhood trying to be free of her, and he comes along and chooses to attach himself and . . .

  And what am I snagged on, except him? Him in women's flesh. Him with a handful of hair on a kitchen table.

  Miro was getting up from
the bench when Ender suddenly turned to face him and waved to attract his attention. Miro started to walk toward him, but Ender didn't wait; he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.

  "Tell Jane!" he called. "If she can figure out! How to do it! She can have that body!"

  It took Miro a moment to realize that he was speaking of Young Val.

  She's not just a body, you self-centered old planet-smasher. She's not just an old suit to be given away because it doesn't fit or the style has changed.

  But then his anger fled, for he realized that he himself had done precisely that with his old body. Tossed it away without a backward glance.

  And the idea intrigued him. Jane. Was it even possible? If her aiua could somehow be made to take up residence in Young Val, could a human body hold enough of Jane's mind to enable her to survive when Starways Congress tried to shut her down?

  "You boys are so slow," Jane murmured in his ear. "I've been talking to the Hive Queen and Human and trying to figure out how the thing is done--assigning an aiua to a body. The hive queens did it once, in creating me. But they didn't exactly pick a particular aiua. They took what came. What showed up. I'm a little fussier."

  Miro said nothing as he walked to the monastery gate.

  "Oh, yes, and then there's the little matter of your feelings toward Young Val. You hate the fact that in loving her, it's really, in a way, Ender that you love. But if I took over, if I were the will inside Young Val's life, would she still be the woman you love? Would anything of her survive? Would it be murder?"

  "Oh, shut up," said Miro aloud.

  The monastery gatekeeper looked up at him in surprise.

  "Not you," said Miro. "But that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea."

  Miro was aware of her eyes on his back until he was out and on the path winding down the hill toward Milagre. Time to get back to the ship. Val will be waiting for me. Whoever she is.