it always has been. With me! We're good together. We belong together. Peter! Ender -- whoever you think you are -- do you think it makes any difference to me? You've always been yourself, the same man you are now, and this has always been your body. Come home! Come back!" And on and on she babbled.
And then his eyes opened, and his lips parted in a smile. "Now that's acting," he said.
Angrily she pushed him down again. "How can you laugh at me like that!"
"So you didn't mean it," he said. "You don't like me after all."
"I never said I did like you," she answered.
"I know what you said."
"Well," she said. "Well."
"And it was true," he said. "Was and is."
"You mean I said something right? I hit upon truth?"
"You said that I belonged here," Peter answered. "And I do." His hand reached up to touch her cheek, but didn't stop there. He put his hand behind her neck, and drew her down, and held her close to him. Around them two dozen huge Samoans laughed and laughed.
This is you now, Jane said to him. This is the whole of you. One again. You are at one.
Whatever he had experienced during his reluctant control of the body was enough. There was no more timidity, no more uncertainty. This aiua she had led through the body now took grateful mastery, eagerly as if this were the first body he had ever had. And perhaps it was. Having been cut off, however briefly, would he even remember being Andrew Wiggin? Or was the old life gone? The aiua was the same, the brilliant, powerful aiua; but would any memory linger, beyond the memories mapped by the mind of Peter Wiggin?
Not mine to worry about now, she thought. He has his body now. He will not die, for now. And I have my body, I have the gossamer web among the mothertrees, and somewhere, someday, I will also have my ansibles again. I never knew how limited I was until now, how little and small I was; but now I feel as my friend feels, surprised by how alive I am.
Back in her new body, her new self, she let the thoughts and memories flow again, and this time held back nothing. Her aiua -- consciousness -- was soon overwhelmed by all she sensed and felt and thought and remembered. It would come back to her, the way the Hive Queen noticed her own aiua and her philotic connections; it came back even now, in flashes, like a childhood skill that she had mastered once and then forgotten. She was also aware, vaguely, in the back of her mind, that she was still leaping several times a second to make the circuit of the trees, but did it all so quickly that she missed nothing of the thoughts that passed through her mind as Valentine.
As Val.
As Val who sat weeping, the terrible words that Miro said still ringing in her ears. He never loved me. He wanted Jane. They all want Jane and not me.
But I am Jane. And I am me. I am Val.
She stopped crying. She moved.
Moved! The muscles tautening and relaxing, flex, extend, miraculous cells working their collective way to move great heavy bones and sacs of skin and organs, shift them, balance them so delicately. The joy of it was too great. It erupted from her in -- what was this convulsive spasming of her diaphragm? What was this gust of sound erupting from her own throat?
It was laughter. How long had she faked it with computer chips, simulated speech and laughter, and never, never knew what it meant, how it felt. She never wanted to stop.
"Val," said Miro.
Oh, to hear his voice through ears!
"Val, are you all right?"
"Yes," she said. Her tongue moved so, her lips; she breathed, she pushed, all these habits that Val already had, so fresh and new and wonderful to her. "And yes, you must keep on calling me Val. Jane was something else. Someone else. Before I was myself, I was Jane. But now I'm Val."
She looked at him and saw (with eyes!) how tears flowed down his cheeks. She understood at once.
"No," she said. "You don't have to call me Val at all. Because I'm not the Val you knew, and I don't mind if you grieve for her. I know what you said to her. I know how it hurt you to say it; I remember how it hurt her to