Orson Card - Children of the Mind

"Oh, I almost believe this, Andrew, you're so good at it," said Novinha. "What, you've decided to stop being the hero of your own saga? Or is this just a ploy? Be the servant of all, so you can be the greatest among us?"

"You know I've never tried for greatness, or achieved it, either."

"Oh, Andrew, you're such a storyteller that you believe your own fables."

Ender looked up at her. "Please, Novinha, let me live with you here. You're my wife. There's no meaning to my life if I've lost you."

"We live as man and wife here, but we don't ... you know that we don't ..."

"I know that the Filhos forswear sexual intercourse," said Ender. "I'm your husband. As long as I'm not having sex with anyone, it might as well be you that I'm not having sex with." He smiled wryly.

Her answering smile was only sad and pitying.

"Novinha," he said. "I'm not interested in my own life anymore. Do you understand? The only life I care about in this world is yours. If I lose you, what is there to hold me here?"

He wasn't sure what he meant by this himself. The words had come unbidden to his lips. But he knew as he said them that it was not self-pity, but rather a frank admission of the truth. Not that he was thinking of suicide or exile or any other such low drama. Rather he felt himself fading. Losing his hold. Lusitania seemed less and less real to him. Valentine was still there, his dear sister and friend, and she was like a rock, her life was so real, but it was not real to him because she didn't need him. Plikt, his unasked-for disciple, she might need Ender, but not the reality of him, only the idea of him. And who else was there? The children of Novinha and Libo, the children that he had raised as his own, and loved as his own, he loved them no less now, but they were adults, they didn't need him. Jane, who once had been virtually destroyed by an hour of his inattention, she no longer needed him either, for she was there in the jewel in Miro's ear, and in another jewel in Peter's ear ...

Peter. Young Valentine. Where had they come from? They had stolen his soul and taken it with them when they left. They were doing the living acts that once he would have done himself. While he waited here in Lusitania and ... faded. That's what he meant. If he lost Novinha, what would tie him to this body that he had carried around the universe for all these thousands of years?

"It's not my decision," Novinha said.

"It's your decision," said Ender, "whether you want me with you, as one of the Filhos da Mente de Cristo. If you do, then I believe I can make my way through all the other obstacles."

She laughed nastily. "Obstacles? Men like you don't have obstacles. Just steppingstones."

"Men like me?"

"Yes, men like you," said Novinha. "Just because I've never met any others. Just because no matter how much I loved Libo he was never for one day as alive as you are in every minute. Just because I found myself loving as an adult for the first time when I loved you. Just because I have missed you more than I miss even my children, even my parents, even the lost loves of my life. Just because I can't dream of anyone but you, that doesn't mean that there isn't somebody else just like you somewhere else. The universe is a big place. You can't be all that special, really. Can you?"

He reached through the potato plants and leaned a hand gently on her thigh. "You do still love me, then?" he asked.

"Oh, is that what you came for? To find out if I love you?"

He nodded. "Partly."

"I do," she said.

"Then I can stay?"

She burst into tears. Loud weeping. She sank to the ground; he reached through the plants to embrace her, to hold her, caring nothing for the leaves he crushed between them. After he held her for a long while, she broke off her crying and turned to him and held him at least as tightly as he had been holding her.

"Oh, Andrew," she whispered, her voice cracking and breaking from having wept so much. "Does God love me enough to give you to me now, again, when I need you so much?"

"Until I die," said Ender.

"I know that part," she said. "But I pray that God will let me die first this time."

"THERE ARE TOO MANY OF US"

"Let me tell you the most beautiful story I know.

A man was given a dog, which he loved very much.

The dog went with him everywhere,

but the man could not teach it to do anything useful.

The dog would not fetch or point,

it would not race or protect or stand watch.

Instead the dog sat near him and regarded him,

always with the same inscrutable expression.

'That's not a dog, it's a wolf,' said the man's wife.

'He alone is faithful to me,' said the man,

and his wife never discussed it with him again.

One day the man took his dog with him into his private airplane

and as they flew over high winter mountains,

the engines failed

and the airplane was torn to shreds among the trees.

The man lay bleeding,

his belly torn open by blades of sheared metal,

steam rising from his organs in the cold air,

but all he could think of was his faithful dog.

Was he alive? Was he hurt?

Imagine his relief when the dog came padding up

and regarded him with that same steady gaze.

After an hour the dog nosed the man's gaping abdomen,

then began pulling out intestines and spleen and liver

and gnawing on them, all the while studying the man's face.

'Thank God,' said the man.

'At least one of us will not starve.'

from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

Of all the faster-than-light starships that were flitting Outside and back In under Jane's command, only Miro's looked like an ordinary spacecraft, for the good reason that it was nothing more than the shuttle that had once taken passengers and cargo to and from the great starships that came to orbit around Lusitania. Now that the new starships could go immediately from one planet's surface to another's, there was no need for life support or even fuel, and since Jane had to hold the entire structure of each craft in her memory, the simpler they were the better. Indeed, they could hardly be called vehicles anymore. They were simple cabins now, windowless, almost unfurnished, bare as a primitive schoolroom. The people of Lusitania referred to space travel now as encaixarse , which was Portuguese for "going into the box," or, more literally, "to box oneself up."

Miro, however, was exploring, searching for new planets capable of sustaining the lives of the three sentient species, humans, pequeninos, and hive queens. For this he needed a more traditional spacecraft, for though he still went from planet to planet by way of Jane's instant detour through the Outside, he could not usually count on arriving at a world where he could breathe the air. Indeed, Jane always started him out in orbit high above each new planet, so he could observe, measure, analyze, and only land on the most promising ones to make the final determination of whether the world was usable.

He did not travel alone. It would have been too much for one person to accomplish, and he needed everything he did to be double-checked. Yet of all the work being done by anyone on Lusitania, this was the most dangerous, for he never knew when he cracked open the door of his spaceship whether there would be some unforeseeable menace on the new world. Miro, had long regarded his own life as expendable. For several long years trapped in a brain-damaged body he had wished for death; then, when his first trip Outside enabled him to recreate his body in the perfection of youth, he regarded any moment, any hour, any day of his life as an undeserved gift. He would not waste it, but he would not shrink from putting it at risk for the good of others. But who else could share his easy self-disregard?