Grief and anguish for his friend welled up in Human and spilled out into the web that bound him to all fathertrees and to all hive queens, but to them it tasted sweet, for it was born out of love for the life of the man.
Even as she said it, the despair behind her words came out like ooze and everyone on the web that she had helped to weave could taste the poison of it, for it was born of dread for the death of the man, and they all grieved.
Jane found the strength for one last voyage; she held the shuttle, with the six living forms inside it, held the perfect image of the physical forms long enough to hurl them Out and reel them In, orbiting the distant world where the descolada had been made. But when that task was done, she lost control of herself because she could no longer find herself, not the self that she had known. Memories were torn from her; links to worlds that had long been as familiar to her as limbs are to living humans, hive queens, and fathertrees were now gone, and as she reached to use them nothing happened, she was numb all over, shrinking down, not to her ancient core, but into small corners of herself, disparate fragments that were too small to hold her.
I’m dying, I’m dying, she said over and over again, hating the words as she said them, hating the panic that she felt.
Into the computer before which Young Valentine sat, she spoke—and spoke only words, because she couldn’t remember now how to make the face that had been her mask for so many centuries. “Now I am afraid.” But having said it, she couldn’t remember whether it had been Young Valentine to whom she was supposed to say it. That part of her was also gone; a moment ago it had been there, but now it was out of reach.
And why was she talking to this surrogate for Ender? Why did she cry out softly into Miro’s ear, into Peter’s ear, saying, “Speak to me speak to me I’m afraid”? It wasn’t these manshapes that she wanted now. It was the one who had torn her from his ear. It was the one who had rejected her and chosen a sad and weary human woman because—he thought—Novinha’s need was greater. But how can she need you more than I do now? If you die she will still live. But I die now because you have glanced away from me.
Wang-mu heard his voice murmuring beside her on the beach. Was I asleep, she wondered. She lifted her cheek from the sand, rose up on her arms. The tide was out now, the water farthest it could get from where she lay. Beside her Peter was sitting crosslegged in the sand, rocking back and forth, softly saying, “Jane, I hear you. I’m speaking to you. Here I am,” as tears flowed down his cheeks.
And in that moment, hearing him intone these words to Jane, Wang-mu realized two things all at once. First, she knew that Jane must be dying, for what could Peter’s words be but comfort, and what comfort would Jane need, except in the hour of her extremity? The second realization, though, was even more terrible to Wang-mu. For she knew, seeing Peter’s tears for the first time—seeing, for the first time, that he was even capable of crying—that she wanted to be able to touch his heart as Jane touched it; no, to be the only one whose dying would grieve him so.
When did it happen? she wondered. When did I first start wanting him to love me? Did it happen only now, a childish desire, wanting him only because another woman—another creature—possessed him? Or have I, in these days together, come to want his love for its own sake? Has his taunting of me, his condescension, and yet his secret pain, his hidden fear, has all of this somehow endeared him to me? Was it his very disdain toward me that made me want, not just his approval, but his affection? Or was it his pain that made me want to have him turn to me for comfort?
Why should I covet his love so much? Why am I so jealous of Jane, this dying stranger that I hardly know or even know about? Could it be that after so many years of priding myself on my solitude, I must discover that I’ve longed for some pathetic adolescent romance all along? And in this longing for affection, could I have chosen a worse applicant for the position? He loves someone else that I can never compare to, especially after she’s dead; he knows me to be ignorant and cares not at all for any good qualities I might have; and he himself is only some fraction of a human being, and not the nicest part of the whole person who is so divided.
Have I lost my mind?
Or have I, finally, found my heart?
She was suddenly filled with unaccustomed emotion. All her life she had kept her own feelings at such a distance from herself that now she hardly knew how to contain them. I love him, though Wang-mu, and her heart nearly burst with the intensity of her passion. He will never love me, thought Wang-mu, and her heart broke as it had never broken in all the thousand disappointments of her life.
My love for him is nothing compared to his need for her, his knowledge of her. For his ties to her are deeper than these past few weeks since he was conjured into existence on that first voyage Outside. In all the lonely years of Ender’s wandering, Jane was his most constant friend, and that is the love that now pours out of Peter’s eyes with tears. I am nothing to him, I’m a latecome afterthought to his life, I have seen only a part of him and my love was nothing to him in the end.
She, too, wept.
But she turned away from Peter when a cry went up from the Samoans standing on the beach. She looked with tear-weary eyes out over the waves, and rose to her feet so she could be sure she saw what they were seeing. It was Malu’s ship. He had turned back to them. He was coming back.
Had he seen something? Had he heard whatever cry it was from Jane that Peter was hearing now?
Grace was beside her, holding her hand. “Why is he coming back?” she asked Wang-mu.
“You’re the one who understands him,” said Wang-mu.
“I don’t understand him at all,” said Grace. “Except his wo
rds; I know the ordinary meanings of his words. But when he speaks, I can feel the words straining to contain the things he wants to say, and they can’t do it. They aren’t large enough, those words of his, even though he speaks in our largest language, even though he builds the words together into great baskets of meaning, into boats of thought. I can only see the outer shape of the words and guess at what he means. I don’t understand him at all.”
“Why then do you think I do?”
“Because he’s coming back to speak to you.”
“He comes back to speak to Peter. He’s the one connected to the god, as Malu calls her.”
“You don’t like this god of his, do you,” said Grace.
Wang-mu shook her head. “I have nothing against her. Except that she owns him, and so there’s nothing left for me.”
“A rival,” said Grace.
Wang-mu sighed. “I grew up expecting nothing and getting less. But I always had ambition far beyond my reach. Sometimes I reached anyway, and caught in my hands more than I deserved, more than I could handle. Sometimes I reach and never touch the thing I want.”
“You want him?”
“I only just realized that I want him to love me as I love him. He was always angry, always stabbing at me with his words, but he worked beside me and when he praised me I believed his praise.”
“I would say,” said Grace, “that your life till now has not been perfectly simple.”
“Not true,” said Wang-mu. “Till now, I have had nothing that I didn’t need, and needed nothing that I didn’t have.”
“You have needed everything you didn’t have,” said Grace, “and I can’t believe that you’re so weak that you won’t reach for it even now.”
“I lost him before I found I wanted him,” she said. “Look at him.”
Peter rocked back and forth, whispering, subvocalizing, his litany an endless conversation with his dying friend.
“I look at him,” said Grace, “and I see that he’s right there, in flesh and blood, and so are you, right here, in flesh and blood, and I can’t see how a smart girl like you could say that he is gone when your eyes must surely tell you that he’s not.”
Wang-mu looked up at the enormous woman who loomed over her like a mountain range, looked up into her luminous eyes, and glared. “I never asked you for advice.”
“I never asked you, either, but you came here to try to get me to change my mind about the Lusitania Fleet, didn’t you? You wanted to get Malu to get me to say something to Aimaina so he’d say something to the Necessarians of Divine Wind so they’d say something to the faction of Congress that hungers for their respect, and the coalition that sent the fleet will fall apart and they’ll order it to leave Lusitania untouched. Wasn’t that the plan?”
Wang-mu nodded.
“Well, you deceived yourself. You can’t know from the outside what makes a person choose the things they choose. Aimaina wrote to me, but I have no power over him. I taught him the way of Ua Lava, yes, but it was Ua Lava that he followed, he doesn’t follow me. He followed it because it felt true to him. If I suddenly started explaining that Ua Lava also meant not sending fleets to wipe out planets, he’d listen politely and ignore me, because that would have nothing to do with the Ua Lava he believes in. He would see it, correctly, as an attempt by an old friend and teacher to bend him to her will. It would be the end of the trust between us, and still it wouldn’t change his mind.”
“So we failed,” said Wang-mu.
“I don’t know if you failed or not,” said Grace. “Lusitania isn’t blown up yet. And how do you know if that was ever really your purpose for coming here?”
“Peter said it was. Jane said so.”
“And how do they know what their purpose was?”
“Well, if you want to go that far, none of us has any purpose at all,” said Wang-mu. “Our lives are just our genes and our upbringing. We simply act out the script that was forced upon us.”
“Oh,” said Grace, sounding disappointed. “I’m sorry to hear you say something so stupid.”
Again the great canoe was beached. Again Malu rose up from his seat and stepped out onto the sand. But this time—was it possible?—this time he seemed to be hurrying. Hurrying so fast that, yes, he lost a little bit of dignity. Indeed, slow as his progress was, Wang-mu felt that he was fairly bounding up the beach. And as she watched his eyes, saw where he was looking, she realized he was coming, not to Peter, but to her.
Novinha woke up in the soft chair they had brought for her and for a moment she forgot where she was. During her days as xenobiologist, she had often fallen asleep in a chair in the laboratory, and so for a moment she looked around to see what it was that she was working on before she fell asleep. What problem was it she was trying to solve?
Then she saw Valentine standing over the bed where Andrew lay. Where Andrew’s body lay. His heart was somewhere else.
“You should have wakened me,” said Novinha.
“I just arrived,” said Valentine. “And I didn’t have the heart to wake you. They said you almost never sleep.”
Novinha stood up. “Odd. It seems to me as if that’s all I do.”
“Jane is dying,” said Valentine.
Novinha’s heart leapt within her.
“Your rival, I know,” said Valentine.
Novinha looked into the woman’s eyes, to see if there was anger there, or mockery. But no. It was only compassion.
“Trust me, I know how you feel,” said Valentine. “Until I loved and married Jakt, Ender was my whole life. But I was never his. Oh, for a while in his childhood, I mattered most to him then—but that was poisoned because the military used me to get to him, to keep him going when he wanted to give up. And after that, it was always Jane who heard his jokes, his observations, his inmost thoughts. It was Jane who saw what he saw and heard what he heard. I wrote my books, and when they were done I had his attention for a few hours, a few weeks. He used my ideas and so I felt he carried a part of me inside him. But he was hers.”
Novinha nodded. She did understand.
“But I have Jakt, and so I’m not unhappy anymore. And my children. Much as I loved Ender, powerful man that he is, even lying here like this, even fading away—children are more to a woman than any man can be. We pretend otherwise. We pretend we bear them for him, that we raise them for him. But it’s not true. We raise them for themselves. We stay with our men for the children’s sake.” Valentine smiled. “You did.”
“I stayed with the wrong man,” said Novinha.
“No, you stayed with the right one. Your Libo, he had a wife and other children—she was the one, they were the ones who had a right to claim him. You stayed with another man for your own children’s sake, and even though they hated him sometimes, they also loved him, and even though in some ways he was weak, in others he was strong. It was good for you to have him for their sake. It was a kind of protection for them all along.”
“Why are you saying these things to me?”
“Because Jane is dying,” said Valentine, “but she might live if only Ender would reach out to her.”
“Put the jewel back into his ear?” said Novinha scornfully.
“They’re long past needing that,” said Valentine. “Just as Ender is long past needing to live this life in this body.”
“He’s not so old,” said Novinha.
“Three thousand years,” said Valentine.
“That’s just the relativity effect,” said Novinha. “Actually he’s—”
“Three thousand years,” said Valentine again. “All of humanity was his family for most of that time; he was like a father away on a business trip, who comes home only now and then, but when he’s there, he’s the good judge, the kind provider. That’s what happened each time he dipped back down into a human world and spoke the death of someone; he caught up on all the family doings he had missed. He’s had a life of three thousand years, and he saw no end of it, and he got tired. So at last he left that lar
ge family and he chose your small one; he loved you, and for your sake he set aside Jane, who had been like his wife in all those years of his wandering, she’d been at home, so to speak, mothering all his trillions of children, reporting to him on what they were doing, tending house.”
“And her own works praise her in the gates,” said Novinha.
“Yes, the virtuous woman. Like you.”
Novinha tossed her head in scorn. “Never me. My own works mocked me in the gates.”
“He chose you and he loved you and he loved your children and he was their father, those children who had lost two fathers already; and he still is their father, and he still is your husband, but you don’t really need him anymore.”
“How can you say that?” demanded Novinha, furious. “How do you know what I need?”
“You know it yourself. You knew it when you came here. You knew it when Estevão died in the embrace of that rogue fathertree. Your children were leading their own lives now and you couldn’t protect them and neither could Ender. You still loved him, he still loved you, but the family part of your life was over. You didn’t really need him anymore.”
“He never needed me.”
“He needed you desperately,” said Valentine. “He needed you so much he gave up Jane for you.”
“No,” said Novinha. “He needed my need for him. He needed to feel like he was providing for me, protecting me.”
“But you don’t need his providence or his protection anymore,” said Valentine.
Novinha shook her head.
“Wake him up,” said Valentine, “and let him go.”
Novinha thought at once of all the times she had stood at graveside. She remembered the funeral of her parents, who died for the sake of saving Milagre from the descolada during that first terrible outbreak. She thought of Pipo, tortured to death, flayed alive by the piggies because they thought that if they did he’d grow a tree, only nothing grew except the ache, the pain in Novinha’s heart—it was something she discovered that sent him to the pequeninos that night. And then Libo, tortured to death the same way as his father, and again because of her, but this time because of what she didn’t tell him. And Marcão, whose life was all the more painful because of her before he finally died of the disease that had been killing him since he was a child. And Estevão, who let his mad faith lead him into martyrdom, so he could become a venerado like her parents, and no doubt someday a saint as they would be saints. “I’m sick of letting people go,” said Novinha bitterly.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 151