and he was kind to her; she showed him the face she had imagined for herself, and he loved her; now her sensors traveled in the jewel in his ear, so that they were always together. She kept no secrets from him; he kept no secrets from her.
"Ender," she said, "you told me from the start that you were looking for a planet where you could give water and sunlight to a certain cocoon, and open it up to let out the hive queen and her ten thousand fertile eggs."
"I had hoped it would be here," said Ender. "A wasteland, except at the equator, permanently underpopulated. She's willing to try, too."
"But you aren't?"
"I don't think the buggers could survive the winter here. Not without an energy source, and that would alert the government. It wouldn't work."
"It'll never work, Ender. You see that now, don't you? You've lived on twenty-four of the Hundred Worlds, and there's not a one where even a corner of the world is safe for the buggers to be reborn."
He saw what she was getting at, of course. Lusitania was the only exception. Because of the piggies, all but a tiny portion of the world was off limits, untouchable. And the world was eminently habitable, more comfortable to the buggers, in fact, than to human beings.
"The only problem is the piggies," said Ender. "They might object to my deciding that their world should be given to the buggers. If intense exposure to human civilization would disrupt the piggies, think what would happen with buggers among them."
"You said the buggers had learned. You said they would do no harm."
"Not deliberately. But it was only a fluke we beat them, Jane, you know that - "
"It was your genius."
"They are even more advanced than we are. How would the piggies deal with that? They'd be as terrified of the buggers as we ever were, and less able to deal with their fear."
"How do you know that?" asked Jane. "How can you or anyone say what the piggies can deal with? Until you go to them, learn who they are. If they are varelse, Ender, then let the buggers use up their habitat, and it will mean no more to you than the displacement of anthills or cattle herds to make way for cities."
"They are ramen," said Ender.
"You don't know that."
"Yes I do. Your simulation - that was not torture."
"Oh?" Jane again showed the simulation of Pipo's body just before the moment of his death. "Then I must not understand the word."
"Pipo might have felt it as torture, Jane, but if your simulation is accurate - and I know it is, Jane - then the piggies' object was not pain."
"From what I understand of human nature, Ender, even religious rituals keep pain at their very center."
"It wasn't religious, either, not entirely, anyway. Something was wrong with it, if it was merely a sacrifice."
"What do you know about it?" Now the terminal showed the face of a sneering professor, the epitome of academic snobbishness. "All your education was military, and the only other gift you have is a flair for words. You wrote a bestseller that spawned a humanistic religion - how does that qualify you to understand the piggies?"
Ender closed his eyes. "Maybe I'm wrong."
"But you believe you're right?"
He knew from her voice that she had restored her own face to the terminal. He opened his eyes. "I can only trust my intuition, Jane, the judgment that comes without analysis. I don't know what the piggies were doing, but it was purposeful. Not malicious, not cruel. It was like doctors working to save a patient's life, not torturers trying to take it."
"I've got you," whispered Jane. "I've got you in every direction. You have to go to see if the hive queen can live there under the shelter of the partial quarantine already on the planet. You want to go there to see if you can understand who the piggies are."
"Even if you're right, Jane, I can't go there," said Ender. "Immigration is rigidly limited, and I'm not Catholic, anyway."
Jane rolled her eyes. "Would I have gone this far if I didn't know how to get you there?"
Another face appeared. A teenage girl, by no means as innocent and beautiful as jane. Her face was hard and cold, her eyes brilliant and piercing, and her mouth was set in the tight grimace of someone who has had to learn to live with perpetual pain. She was