all day simply to remember the day before? Because each new moment shouts louder than memory.
Yet each time Jane touched a memory or felt a sensation from the living body, there was the aiua that was properly the master of this flesh, driving her away, asserting its control.
And finally, annoyed, when that familiar aiua herded her Jane refused to move. Instead she claimed this spot, this part of the body, this part of the brain, she demanded the obedience of these cells, and the other aiua recoiled before her.
I am stronger than you, Jane said to him silently. I can take from you all that you are and all that you have and all that you will ever be and ever have and you can't stop me.
The aiua that once had been the master here fled before her, and now the chase resumed, with roles reversed.
"She's killing him."
"Wait and see."
In the starship orbiting the planet of the descoladores, everyone was startled by a sudden cry from Young Val's mouth. As they turned to look, before anyone could reach her, her body convulsed and she flung herself away from her chair; in the weightlessness of orbit she flew until she struck brutally against the ceiling, and all the time her voice came out as a thin ribbon of a wail and her face held a rictus smile that seemed to speak at once of endless agony and boundless joy.
On the world Pacifica, on an island, on a beach, Peter's weeping suddenly stopped and he flopped over in the sand and twitched silently. "Peter!" cried Wang-mu, flinging herself onto him, touching him, trying to hold the limbs that bounced like jackhammers. Peter gasped for breath, and, gasping, vomited. "He's drowning himself!" cried Wang-mu. In that instant huge strong hands pulled her away, took Peter's body by its limbs and flopped it over so that now the vomitus flowed out and down into the sand, and the body, coughing and choking, nevertheless breathed. "What's happening?" Wang-mu cried.
Malu laughed, and then when he spoke his voice was like a song. "The god has come here! The dancing god has touched flesh! Oh, the body is too weak to hold it! Oh, the body cannot dance the dance of gods! But oh, how blessed, bright, and beautiful is the body when the god is in it!"
Wang-mu saw nothing beautiful about what was happening to Peter. "Get out of him!" she screamed. "Get out, Jane! You have no right to him! You have no right to kill him!"
In a room in the monastery of the Children of the Mind of Christ, Ender sat bolt upright in bed, eyes open but seeing nothing for someone else controlled his eyes; but for a moment his voice was his own, for here if nowhere else his aiua knew the flesh so well and was so known itself that it could do battle with the interloper. "God help me!" cried Ender. "I have nowhere else to go! Leave me something! Leave me something!"
The women gathered around him -- Valentine, Novinha, Plikt -- at once forgot their quarrels and laid their hands on him, trying to get him to lie down, trying to calm him, but then his eyes rolled back in his head, his tongue protruded, his back arched, and he flung himself about so violently that despite their strongest grip on him in moments he was off the bed, on the floor, tangling his body with theirs, hurting them with his convulsive swinging of arms, kicking of legs, jerking of head.
"She's too much for him," said the Hive Queen. "But for now the body is also too much for her. Not an easy thing, to tame unwilling flesh. They know Ender, all those cells that he has ruled so long. They know him, and they don't know her. Some kingdoms can only be inherited, never usurped."
"I felt him, I think. I saw him."
"There are moments when she drove him out entirely, yes, and he followed what twines he found. He can't get into any of the flesh around him because he knows better, having had experience of flesh himself. But he found you and touched you because you're a different kind of being."
"Will he take me over, then? Or some tree in our web? That's not what we meant when we twined together."
"Ender? No, he'll hold to his own body, one of them, or else he'll die. Wait and see."
Jane could feel it, the anguish of the bodies that