me, this woman who loves him despite his supposed wickedness. Ender-as-Peter is the part of him that most needs to be loved because he least deserves it -- so it is my love, because it is for Peter, that will be most precious to him.
If anyone wins at all, I will win, Peter will win, not because of the glorious purity of our love, but because of the desperate hunger of the lovers.
Well, the story of our lives won't be as noble or pretty, but then, we'll have a life, and that's enough.
She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.
Over the ansible, Olhado told his brother and sisters on the starship what had happened with Jane and the mothertrees.
"The Hive Queen says it can't last long this way," said Olhado. "The mothertrees aren't all that strong. They'll slip, they'll lose control, and pretty soon Jane will be a forest, period. Not a talking one, either. Just some very lovely, very bright, very nurturing trees. It was beautiful to see, I promise you, but the way the Hive Queen tells it, it still sounds like death."
"Thanks, Olhado," Miro said. "It doesn't make much difference to us either way. We're stranded here, and so we're going to get to work, now that Val isn't bouncing off the walls. The descoladores haven't found us yet -- Jane got us in a higher orbit this time -- but as soon as we have a workable translation of their language we'll wave at them and let them know we're here."
"Keep at it," said Olhado. "But don't give up on coming back home, either."
"The shuttle really isn't good for a two-hundred-year flight," said Miro. "That's how far away we are, and this little vehicle can't even get close to the speeds necessary for relativistic flight. We'd have to play solitaire the whole two hundred years. The cards would wear out long before we got back home."
Olhado laughed -- too lightly and sincerely, Miro thought -- and said, "The Hive Queen says that once Jane gets out of the trees, and once the Congress gets their new system up and running, she may be able to jump back in. At least enough to get into the ansible traffic. And if she does that, then maybe she can go back into the starflight business. It's not impossible."
Val grew alert at that. "Is that what the Hive Queen guesses, or does she know?"
"She's predicting the future," said Olhado. "Nobody knows the future. Not even really smart queen bees who bite their husbands' heads off when they mate."
They had no answer to what he said, and certainly nothing to say to his jocular tone.
"Well, if that's all right now," said Olhado, "back on your heads, everybody. We'll leave the station open and recording in triplicate for any reports you make."
Olhado's face disappeared from the terminal space.
Miro swiveled his chair and faced the others: Ela, Quara, Val, the pequenino Firequencher, and the nameless worker, who watched them in perpetual silence, only able to speak by typing into the terminal. Through him, though, Miro knew that the Hive Queen was watching everything they did, hearing everything they said. Waiting. She was orchestrating this, he knew. Whatever happened to Jane, the Hive Queen would be the catalyst to get it started. Yet the things she said, she had said to Olhado through some worker there in Milagre. This one had typed in nothing but ideas concerning the translation of the language of the descoladores.
She isn't saying anything, Miro realized, because she doesn't want to be seen to push. Push what? Push whom?
Val. She can't be seen to push Val, because ... because the only way to let Jane have one of Ender's bodies was for him to freely give it up. And it had to be truly free -- no pressure, no guilt, no persuasion -- because it wasn't a decision that could be made consciously. Ender had decided that he wanted to share Mother's life in the monastery, but his unconscious mind was far more interested in the translation project here and in whatever it is Peter's doing. His unconscious choice reflected his true will. If Ender is to let go of Val, it has to be his desire to do it, all the way to the core of him. Not