Queen's cave? Don't comfort me by pretending to be her."
Jane, by habit -- Val's habit? or her own? -- snapped, "When I comfort you, you'll know it."
"And how will I know?" Miro snapped back.
"Because you'll be comfortable, of course," said Val-Jane. "In the meantime, please keep in mind that I'm not listening through the jewel in your ear now. I see only with these eyes and hear only with these ears."
This was not strictly true, of course. For many times a second, she felt the flowing sap, the unstinting welcome of the mothertrees as her aiua satisfied its hunger for largeness by touring the vast network of the pequenino philotes. And now and then, outside the mothertrees, she caught a glimmer of a thought, of a word, a phrase, spoken in the language of the fathertrees. Or was it their language? Rather it was the language behind the language, the underlying speech of the speechless. And whose was that other voice? I know you -- you are of the kind that made me. I know your voice.
"We lost track of you," said the Hive Queen in her mind. "But you did well without us."
Jane was not prepared for the swelling of pride that glowed through her entire Val-body; she felt the physical effect of the emotion as Val, but her pride came from the praise of a hive-mother. I am a daughter of hive queens, she realized, and so it matters when she speaks to me, and tells me I have done well.
And if I'm the hive queens' daughter, I am Ender's daughter, too, his daughter twice over, for they made my lifestuff partly from his mind, so I could be a bridge between them; and now I dwell in a body that also came from him, and whose memories are from a time when he dwelt here and lived this body's life. I am his daughter, but once again I cannot speak to him.
All this time, all these thoughts, and yet she did not show or even feel the slightest lapse of concentration on what she was doing with her computer on the starship circling the descolada planet. She was still Jane. It wasn't the computerness of her that had allowed her, all these years, to maintain many layers of attention and focus on many tasks at once. It was her hive-queen nature that allowed this.
"It was because you were an aiua powerful enough to do this that you were able to come to us in the first place," said the Hive Queen in her mind.
Which of you is speaking to me? asked Jane.
"Does it matter? We all remember the making of you. We remember being there. We remember drawing you out of darkness into light."
Am I still myself, then? Will I have again all the powers I lost when the Starways Congress killed my old virtual body?
"You might. When you find out, tell us. We will be very interested."
And now she felt the sharp disappointment from a parent's unconcern, a sinking feeling in the stomach, a kind of shame. But this was a human emotion; it arose from the Val-body, though it was in response to her relationship with her hive-queen mothers. Everything was more complicated -- and yet it was simpler. Her feelings were now flagged by a body, which responded before she understood what she felt herself. In the old days, she scarcely knew she had feelings. She had them, yes, even irrational responses, desires below the level of consciousness -- these were attributes of all aiuas, when linked with others in any kind of life -- but there had been no simple signals to tell her what her feelings were. How easy it was to be a human, with your emotions expressed on the canvas of your own body. And yet how hard, because you couldn't hide your feelings from yourself half so easily.
"Get used to being frustrated with us, daughter," said the Hive Queen. "You have a partly human nature, and we do not. We will not be tender with you as human mothers are. When you can't bear it, back away -- we won't pursue you."
Thank you, she said silently ... and backed away.
At dawn the sun came up over the mountain that was the spine of the island, so that the sky was light long before any sunlight touched the trees directly. The wind off the sea had cooled them in the night. Peter awoke with Wang-mu curled into the curve of