there'll be an outcry for quarantine. For replacing Milagre with a military garrison whose sole purpose is to keep the piggies ever from acquiring a technology to let them get off planet."
"The piggies will have a public relations problem," said Jane. "And the new xenologer is only a boy. Pipo's son. Libo. Short for Liberdade Gracas a Deus Figueira de Medici."
"Liberdade. Liberty?"
"I didn't know you spoke Portuguese."
"It's like Spanish. I Spoke the deaths of Zacatecas and San Angelo, remember?"
"On the planet Moctezuma. That was two thousand years ago."
"Not to me."
"To you it was subjectively eight years ago. Fifteen worlds ago. Isn't relativity wonderful? It keeps you so young."
"I travel too much," said Ender. "Valentine is married, she's going to have a baby. I've already turned down two calls for a Speaker. Why are you trying to tempt me to go again?"
The piggy on the terminal laughed viciously. "You think that was temptation? Look! I can turn stones to bread!" The piggy picked up jagged rocks and crunched them in his mouth. "Want a bite?"
"Your sense of humor is perverse, Jane."
"All the kingdoms of all the worlds." The piggy opened his hands, and star systems drifted out of his grasp, planets in exaggeratedly quick orbits, all the Hundred Worlds. "I can give them to you. All of them."
"Not interested."
"It's real estate, the best investment. I know, I know, you're already rich. Three thousand years of collecting interest, you could afford to build your own planet. But what about this? The name of Ender Wiggin, known throughout all the Hundred Worlds - "
"It already is."
" - with love, and honor, and affection." The piggy disappeared. In its place Jane resurrected an ancient video from Ender's childhood and transformed it into a holo. A crowd shouting, screaming. Ender! Ender! Ender! And then a young boy standing on a platform, raising his hand to wave. The crowd went wild with rapture.
"It never happened," said Ender. "Peter never let me come back to Earth."
"Consider it a prophecy. Come, Ender, I can give that to you. Your good name restored."
"I don't care," said Ender. "I have several names now. Speaker for the Dead - that holds some honor."
The piggy reappeared in its natural form, not the devilish one Jane had faked. "Come," said the piggy softly.
"Maybe they are monsters, did you think of that?" said Ender.
"Everyone will think of that, Ender. But not you."
No. Not me. "Why do you care, Jane? Why are you trying to persuade me?"
The piggy disappeared. And now Jane herself appeared, or at least the face that she had used to appear to Ender ever since she had first revealed herself to him, a shy, frightened child dwelling in the vast memory of the interstellar computer network. Seeing her face again reminded him of the first time she showed it to him. I thought of a face for myself, she said. Do you like it?
Yes, he liked it. Liked her. Young, clear-faced, honest, sweet, a child who would never age, her smile heartbreakingly shy. The ansible had given birth to her. Even worldwide computer networks operated no faster than lightspeed, and heat limited the amount of memory and speed of operation. But the ansible was instantaneous, and tightly connected with every computer in every world. Jane first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net.
The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to computers, and read every book in every library on every world. She learned that human beings had long been afraid that someone like her would come to exist; in all the stories she was hated, and her coming meant either her certain murder or the destruction of mankind. Even before she was born, human beings had imagined her, and, imagining her, slain her a thousand times.
So she gave them no sign that she was alive. Until she found the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, as everyone eventually did, and knew that the author of that book was a human to whom she dared reveal herself. For her it was a simple matter to trace the book's history to its first edition, and to name its source. Hadn't the ansible carried it from the world where Ender, scarcely twenty years old, was governor of the first human colony? And who there could have written it but him? So she spoke to him,