left me alone till now and that was fine because what he's doing now is terrifying. Don't you see that I'm frightened? It's too much. It's more than I can stand. I can't hold that much energy inside me."
"So talk about it instead of screaming at me," said Miro.
"But you weren't listening. I was trying to and you were just subvocalizing to Jane and shutting me out."
"Because I was sick of hearing endless streams of data and analysis that I could just as easily catch in summary on the computer. How was I supposed to know that you'd take a break in your monologue and start talking about something human?"
"Everything's bigger than life right now and I don't have any experience with this. In case you forgot, I haven't been alive very long. I don't know things. There are a lot of things I don't know. I don't know why I care so much about you, for instance. You're the one trying to get me replaced as landlord of this body. You're the one who tunes me out or takes me over but I don't want that, Miro. I really need a friend right now."
"So do I," said Miro.
"But I don't know how to do it," said Val.
"I, on the other hand, know perfectly well how to do it," said Miro. "But the only other time it happened, I fell in love with her and then she turned out to be my half-sister because her father was secretly my mother's lover, and the man I had thought was my father turned out to be sterile because he was dying of some internally rotting disease. So you can see how I might be hesitant."
"Valentine was your friend. She is still."
"Yes," said Miro. "Yes, I was forgetting. I've had two friends."
"And Ender," said Val.
"Three," said Miro. "And my sister Ela makes four. And Human was my friend, so it's five."
"See? I think that makes you qualified to show me how to have a friend."
"To make a friend," said Miro, echoing his mother's intonations, "you have to be one."
"Miro," said Val. "I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"Of this world we're looking for, what we'll find there. Of what's going to happen to me if Ender dies. Or if Jane takes over as my -- what, my inner light, my puppeteer. Of what it will feel like if you don't like me anymore."
"What if I promise to like you no matter what?"
"You can't make a promise like that."
"Okay, if I wake up to find you strangling me or smothering me, then I'll stop liking you."
"What about drowning?"
"No, I can't open my eyes under water, so I'd never know it was you."
They both laughed.
"This is the time in the videos," said Val, "when the hero and the heroine laugh and then hold each other."
Jane's voice interrupted from both their computer terminals. "Sorry to break up a tender moment, but we've got a new world here and there are electromagnetic messages being relayed between the planet surface and orbiting artificial objects."
Immediately they both turned to their terminals and looked at the data Jane was throwing at them.
"It doesn't take any close analysis," said Val. "This one is hopping with technology. If it isn't the descolada planet, I'm betting they know where it is."
"What I'm worried about is, have they detected us and what are they going to do about it? If they've got the technology to put things in space, they might have the technology to shoot things out of space, too."
"I'm watching for incoming objects," said Jane.
"Let's see," said Val, "if any of these EM-waves are carrying anything that looks like language."
"Datastreams," said Jane. "I'm analyzing it for binary patterns. But you know that decoding computerized language requires three or four levels of decoding instead of the normal two and it isn't easy."
"I thought binary was simpler than spoken languages," said Miro.
"It is, when it's programs and numerical data," said Jane. "But what if it's digitized visuals? How long is a line if it's a rasterized display? How much of a transmission is header material? How much is error-correction data? How much of it is a binary representation of a written representation of a spoken language? What if it's further encrypted beyond that, to avoid interception? I have no idea what machine is producing the code and no idea what machine is receiving it. So using most of my capacity to work on the problem I'm having a very hard time except that this one --"