who's dying," he said. "I tried talking to Ender, but it didn't accomplish anything."
"When did I ask you for help? And what exactly are you doing to help me right now?"
"I'm going to the Hive Queen."
"You might as well say you're going to see your fairy godmother."
"Your problem, Val, is that you are completely dependent on Ender's will. If he loses interest in you, you're gone. Well, I'm going to find out how we can get you a will of your own."
Val laughed and looked away from him. "You're so romantic, Miro. But you don't think things through."
"I think them through very well," said Miro. "I spend all my time thinking things through. It's acting on my thoughts that gets tricky. Which ones should I act on, and which ones should I ignore?"
"Act on the thought of steering us without crashing," said Val.
Miro swerved to avoid a starship under construction.
"She still makes more," said Miro, "even though we have enough."
"Maybe she knows that when Jane dies, starflight ends for us. So the more ships, the more we can accomplish before she dies."
"Who can guess how the Hive Queen thinks?" said Miro. "She promises, but even she can't predict whether her predictions will come true."
"So why are you going to see her?"
"The hive queens made a bridge one time, a living bridge to allow them to link their minds with the mind of Ender Wiggin when he was just a boy, and their most dangerous enemy. They called an aiua out of darkness and set it in place somewhere between the stars. It was a being that partook of the nature of the hive queens, but also of the nature of human beings, specifically of Ender Wiggin, as nearly as they could understand him. When they were done with the bridge -- when Ender killed them all but the one they had cocooned to wait for him -- the bridge remained, alive among the feeble ansible connections of humankind, storing its memory in the small, fragile computer networks of the first human world and its few outposts. As the computer networks grew, so did that bridge, that being, drawing on Ender Wiggin for its life and character."
"Jane," said Val.
"Yes, that's Jane. What I'm going to try to learn, Val, is how to get Jane's aiua into you."
"Then I'll be Jane, and not myself."
Miro smacked the joystick of the hovercar with his fist. The craft wobbled, then automatically righted itself.
"Do you think I haven't thought of that?" demanded Miro. "But you're not yourself now! You're Ender -- you're Ender's dream or his need or something like that."
"I don't feel like Ender. I feel like me."
"That's right. You have your memories. The feelings of your own body. Your own experiences. But none of those will be lost. Nobody's conscious of their own underlying will. You'll never know the difference."
She laughed. "Oh, you're the expert now in what would happen, with something that has never been done before?"
"Yes," said Miro. "Somebody has to decide what to do. Somebody has to decide what to believe, and then act on it."
"What if I tell you that I don't want you to do this?"
"Do you want to die?"
"It seems to me that you're the one trying to kill me," said Val. "Or, to be fair, you want to commit the slightly lesser crime of cutting me off from my own deepest self and replacing that with someone else."
"You're dying now. The self you have doesn't want you."
"Miro, I'll go see the Hive Queen with you because that sounds like an interesting experience. But I'm not going to let you extinguish me in order to save my life."
"All right then," said Miro, "since you represent the utterly altruistic side of Ender's nature, let me put it to you a different way. If Jane's aiua can be placed in your body, then she won't die. And if she doesn't die, then maybe, after they've shut down the computer links that she lives in and then reconnected them, confident that she's dead, maybe then she'll be able to link with them again and maybe then instantaneous starflight won't have to end. So if you die, you'll be dying to save, not just Jane, but the power and freedom to expand as we've never expanded before. Not just us, but the pequeninos and hive queens too."
Val fell silent.
Miro watched the route ahead of him. The Hive Queen's cave was nearing on the left, in an embankment by a stream. He had