Orson Card - Children of the Mind

She wept.

"Stop it," said Miro. "Stop it right now. Get control of your emotions, Jane, you don't have time for this."

At once she freed herself from the straps that held her. "You're right," she said. "It's almost too strong to control, sometimes, this body."

"The Little Doctor has to be close to a planet for it to have any effect on it -- the field dissipates fairly quickly unless it has mass to sustain it. So we have time, Jane. Maybe an hour. Certainly more than half an hour."

"And in that time, what do you imagine I can do?"

"Pick the damn thing up," said Miro. "Push it Outside and don't bring it back!"

"And if it goes off Outside?" asked Jane. "If something that destructive is echoed and repeated out there? Besides, I can't pick things up that I haven't had a chance to examine. There's no one near it, no ansible connected to it, nothing to lead me to find it in the dead of space."

"I don't know," said Miro. "Ender would know. Damn that he's dead!"

"Well, technically speaking," said Jane. "But Peter hasn't found his way into any of his Ender memories. If he has them."

"What's to remember?" said Miro. "This has never happened before."

"It's true that it is Ender's aiúa. But how much of his brilliance was the aiúa, and how much was his body and brain? Remember that the genetic component was strong -- he was born in the first place because tests showed the original Peter and Valentine came so close to being the ideal military commander."

"Right," said Miro. "And now he's Peter."

"Not the real Peter," said Jane.

"Look, it's sort of Ender and it's sort of Peter. Can you find him? Can you talk to him?"

"When our aiúas meet, we don't talk. We sort of -- what, dance around each other. It's not like Human and the Hive Queen."

"Doesn't he still have the jewel in his ear?" asked Miro, touching his own.

"But what can he do? He's hours distant from his starship --"

"Jane," said Miro. "Try."

Peter looked stricken. Wang-mu touched his arm, leaned close to him. "What's wrong?"

"I thought we made it," he said. "When Congress voted to revoke the order to use the Little Doctor."

"What do you mean?" said Wang-mu, though she already knew what he meant.

"They launched it. The Lusitania Fleet disobeyed Congress. Who could have guessed? We have less than an hour before it detonates."

Tears leapt to Wang-mu's eyes, but she blinked them away. "At least the pequeninos and the hive queens will survive."

"But not the network of mothertrees," said Peter. "Starflight will end until Jane finds some other way to hold all that information in memory. The brothertrees are too stupid, the fathertrees have egos far too strong to share their capacity with her -- they would if they could, but they can't. You think Jane hasn't explored all the possibilities? Faster-than-light flight is over."

"Then this is our home," said Wang-mu.

"No it isn't," said Peter.

"We're hours away from the starship, Peter. We'll never get there before it detonates."

"What's the starship? A box with a lightswitch and a tight-sealing door. For all we know, we don't even need the box. I'm not staying here, Wang-mu."

"You're going back to Lusitania? Now ?"

"If Jane can take me," he said. "And if she can't, then I guess this body goes back where it came from -- Outside."

"I'm going with you," said Wang-mu.

"I've had three thousand years of life," said Peter. "I don't actually remember them too well, but you deserve better than to disappear from the universe if Jane can't do this."

"I'm going with you," said Wang-mu, "so shut up. There's no time to waste."

"I don't even know what I'm going to do when I get there," said Peter.

"Yes you do," said Wang-mu.

"Oh? What is it I'm planning?"

"I have no idea."

"Well isn't that a problem? What good is this plan of mine if nobody knows it?"

"I mean that you are who you are," said Wang-mu. "You are the same will, the same tough resourceful boy who refused to be beaten down by anything they threw at him in Battle School or Command School. The boy who wouldn't let bullies destroy him -- no matter what it took to stop them. Naked with no weapons except the soap on his body, that's how Ender fought Bonzo Madrid in the bathroom at Battle School."

"You've been doing your research."

"Peter," said Wang-mu, "I don't expect you to be Ender, his personality, his memories, his training. But you are the one who can't be beaten down. You are the one who finds a way to destroy the enemy."

Peter shook his head. "I'm not him, I'm truly not."

"You told me back when we first met that you weren't yourself. Well, now you are. The whole of you, one man, intact in this body. Nothing is missing from you now. Nothing has been stolen from you, nothing is lost. Do you understand? Ender lived his life under the shadow of having caused xenocide. Now is the chance to be the opposite. To live the opposite life. To be the one who prevents it."

Peter closed his eyes for a moment. "Jane," he said. " Can you take us without a starship?" He listened for a moment. "She says the real question is, can we hold ourselves together. It's the ship she controls and moves around, plus our aiúas -- our own bodies are held together by us, not by her."

"Well, we do that all the time anyway, so it's fine," said Wang-mu.

"It's not fine," said Peter. "Jane says that inside the starship, we have visual clues, we have a sense of safety. Without those walls, without the light, in the deep emptiness, we can lose our place. We can forget where we are relative to our own body. We really have to hold on."

"Does it help if we're so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?" asked Wang-mu.

"I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes," said Peter.

"Then let's do it. That's us in spades."

Finding Peter's aiúa was easy for Jane. She had been inside his body, she had followed his aiúa -- or chased it -- until she knew it without searching. Wang-mu was a different case. Jane didn't know her all that well. The voyages she had taken her on before had been inside a starship whose location Jane already knew. But once she located Peter's -- Ender's -- aiúa, it turned out to be easier than she thought. For the two of them, Peter and Wang-mu, were philotically twined. There was a tiny web in the making between them. Even without the box around them, Jane could hold onto them, both at once, as if they were one entity.

And as she pushed them Outside she could feel how they clung all the more tightly to each other -- not just the bodies, but also the invisible links of the deepest self. Outside they went together, and together they came back In. Jane felt a stab of jealousy -- just as she had been jealous of Novinha, though without feeling the physical sensation of grief and rage that her body now brought to the emotion. But she knew it was absurd. It was Miro that Jane loved, as a woman loves a man. Ender was her father and her friend, and now he was barely Ender anymore. He was Peter, a man who remembered only the past few months of association with her. They were friends, but she had no claim on his heart.

The familiar aiúa of Ender Wiggin and the aiúa of Si Wang-mu were even more tightly bound together than ever when Jane set them down on the surface of Lusitania.