"Did I do this to you?" asked Ender.
Miro looked more angry than abashed. "Maybe I needed you to," he said. "Ever think of that? You were so respectful, all of you. Let Miro keep his dignity. Let him brood himself into madness, right? Just don't talk about the thing that's happened to him. Didn't you ever think I needed somebody to jolly me out of it sometimes?"
"Didn't you ever think that I don't need that?"
Miro laughed again, but it came a bit late, and it was gentler. "On target," he said. "You treated me the way you like to be treated when you grieve, and now I'm treating you the way I like to be treated. We prescribe our own medicine for each other."
"Your mother and I are still married," Ender said.
"Let me tell you something," said Miro, "out of the wisdom of my twenty years or so of life. It's easier when you finally start admitting to yourself that you'll never have her back. That she's permanently out of reach."
"Ouanda is out of reach. Novinha isn't."
"She's with the Children of the Mind of Christ. It's a nunnery, Andrew."
"Not so," said Ender. "It's a monastic order that only married couples can join. She can't belong to them without me."
"So," said Miro. "You can have her back whenever you want to join the Filhos. I can just see you as Dom Cristao."
Ender couldn't help chuckling at the idea. "Sleeping in separate beds. Praying all the time. Never touching each other."
"If that's marriage, Andrew, then Ouanda and I are married right now."
"It is marriage, Miro. Because the couples in the Filhos da Mente de Cristo are working together, doing a work together."
"Then we're married," said Miro. "You and I. Because we're trying to save Jane together."
"Just friends," said Ender. "We're just friends."
"Rivals is more like it. Jane keeps us both like lovers on a string."
Miro was sounding too much like Novinha's accusations about Jane. "We're hardly lovers," he said. "Jane isn't human. She doesn't even have a body."
"Aren't you the logical one," said Miro. "Didn't you just say that you and Mother could still be married, without even touching?"
It was an analogy that Ender didn't like, because it seemed to have some truth in it. Was Novinha right to be jealous of Jane, as she had been for so many years?
"She lives inside our heads, practically," said Miro. "That's a place where no wife will ever go."
"I always thought," said Ender, "that your mother was jealous of Jane because she wished she had someone that close to her."
"Bobagem," said Miro. "Lixo." Nonsense. Garbage. "Mother was jealous of Jane because she wanted so badly to be that close to you, and she never could."
"Not your mother. She was always self-contained. There were times when we were very close, but she always turned back to her work."
"The way you always turned back to Jane."
"Did she tell you that?"
"Not in so many words. But you'd be talking to her, and then all of a sudden you'd fall silent, and even though you're good at subvocalizing, there's still a little movement in the jaw, and your eyes and lips react a little to what Jane says to you. She saw. You'd be with Mother, close, and then all of a sudden you were somewhere else."
"That's not what split us apart," said Ender. "It was Quim's death."
"Quim's death was the last straw. If it hadn't been for Jane, if Mother had really believed you belonged to her, heart and soul, she would have turned to you when Quim died, instead of turning away."
Miro had said the thing that Ender had dreaded all along. That it was Ender's own fault. That he had not been the perfect husband. That he had driven her away. And the worst thing was that when Miro said it, Ender knew that it was true. The sense of loss, which he had already thought was unbearable, suddenly doubled, trebled, became infinite inside him.
He felt Miro's hand, heavy, clumsy, on his shoulder.
"As God is my witness, Andrew, I never meant to make you cry."
"It happens," said Ender.
"It's not all your fault," said Miro. "Or Jane's. You've got to remember that Mother's crazy as a loon. She always has been."
"She had a lot of grief as a child."
"She lost everybody she ever loved, one by one," said Miro.
"And I let her believe that she had lost me, too."
"What were you going to do, cut Jane off? You tried that once, remember?"
"The difference is that now she has you. The whole time you were gone, I could have let Jane go, because she had you. I could have talked to her less, asked her to back off. She would have forgiven me."
"Maybe," said Miro. "But you didn't."
"Because I didn't want to," said Ender. "Because I didn't want to let her go. Because I thought I could keep that old friendship and still be a good husband to my wife."
"It wasn't just Jane," said Miro. "It was Valentine, too."
"I suppose," said Ender. "So what do I do? Go join up with the Filhos until the fleet gets here and blows us all to hell?"
"You do what I do," said Miro.
"What's that?"
"You take a breath. You let it out. Then you take another."
Ender thought about it for a moment. "I can do that. I've been doing that since I was little."
Just a moment longer, Miro's hand on his shoulder. This is why I should have had a son of my own, thought Ender. To lean on me when he was small, and then for me to lean on when I'm old. But I never had a child from my own seed. I'm like old Marcao, Novinha's first husband. Surrounded by these children and knowing they're not my own. The difference is that Miro is my friend, not my enemy. And that's something. I may have been a bad husband, but I can still make and keep a friend.
"Stop pitying yourself and get back to work." It was Jane, speaking in his ear, and she had waited almost long enough before speaking, almost long enough that he was ready to have her tease him. Almost but not quite, and so he resented her intrusion. Resented knowing that she had been listening and watching all along.
"Now you're mad," she said.
You don't know what I'm feeling, thought Ender. You can't know. Because you're not human.
"You think I don't know what you're feeling," said Jane.
He felt a moment of vertigo, because for a moment it seemed to him that she had been listening to something far deeper than the conversation.
"But I lost you once, too."
Ender subvocalized: "I came back."
"Never completely," said Jane. "Never like it was before. So you just take a couple of those self-pitying little tears on your cheeks and count them as if they were mine. Just to even up the score."
"I don't know why I bother trying to save your life," said Ender silently.
"Me neither," said Jane. "I keep telling you it's a waste of time."
Ender turned back to the terminal. Miro stayed beside him, watching the display as it simulated the ansible network. Ender had no idea what Jane was saying to Miro--though he was sure that she was saying something, since he had long ago figured out that Jane was capable of carrying on many conversations at once. He couldn't help it--it did bother him a little that Jane had every bit as close a relationship with Miro as with him.
Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl genius with OCD on a planet I never heard of and how will I live without Jane when she's gone?
Ender zoomed in on the display. In and in and in, until the display showed only a few parsecs in each dimension. Now the simulation was modeling a small portion of the network--the crisscrossing of only a half-dozen philotic rays in deep space. Now, instead of looking like an involved, tightly-woven fabric, the philotic rays looked like random lines passing millions of kilometers from each other.
"They never touch," said Miro.
No, they never do. It's something that Ender had never realized. In his mind, the galaxy was flat, the way the starmaps always showed it, a top-down view of the section of the spiral arm of the galaxy where humans had spread out from Earth. But it wasn't flat. No two stars were ever exactly in the same plane as any other two stars. The philotic rays connecting starships and planets and satellites in perfectly straight lines, ansible to ansible--they seemed to intersect when you saw them on a flat map, but in this three-dimensional close-up in the computer display, it was obvious that they never touched at all.
"How can she live in that?" asked Ender. "How can she possibly exist in that when there's no connection between those lines except at the endpoints?"
"So--maybe she doesn't. Maybe she lives in the sum of the computer programs at every terminal."
"In which case she could back herself up into all the computers and then--"
"And then nothing. She could never put herself back together because they're only using clean computers to run the ansibles."
"They can't keep that up forever," said Ender. "It's too important for computers on different planets to be able to talk to each other. Congress will find out pretty soon that there aren't enough human beings in existence to key in by hand, in a year, the amount of information computers have to send to each other by ansible every hour."
"So she just hides? Waits? Sneaks in and restores herself when she sees a chance five or ten years from now?"
"If that's all she is--a collection of programs."
"There has to be more to her than that," said Miro.
"Why?"
"Because if she's nothing more than a collection of programs, even self-writing and self-revising programs, ultimately she was created by some programmer or group of programmers somewhere. In which case she's just acting out the program that was forced on her from the beginning. She has no free will. She's a puppet. Not a person."
"Well, when it comes to that, maybe you're defining free will too narrowly," said Ender. "Aren't human beings the same way, programmed by our genes and our environment?"
"No," said Miro.
"What else, then?"
"Our philotic connections say that we aren't. Because we're capable of connecting with each other by act of will, which no other form of life on Earth can do. There's something we have, something we are, that wasn't caused by anything else."
"What, our soul?"
"Not even that," said Miro. "Because the priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make. God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal--there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause."
"So--as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to."
"Bobagem," said Miro.
"Well, I admit that it's a philosophy with no practical value," said Ender. "Valentine once explained it to me this way. Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you."
"Despair," said Miro.
"So we conceive of ourselves and everyone around us as volitional beings. We treat everyone as if they did things with a purpose in mind, instead of because they're being pushed from behind. We punish criminals. We reward altruists. We plan things and build things together. We make promises and expect each other to keep them. It's all a made-up story, but when everybody believes that everybody's actions are the result of free choice, and takes and gives responsibility accordingly, the result is civilization."
"Just a story."
"That's how Valentine explained it. That is, if there's no free will. I'm not sure what she actually believes herself. My guess is that she'd say that she is civilized, and therefore she must believe the story herself, in which case she absolutely believes in free will and thinks this whole idea of a made-up story is nonsense--but that's what she'd believe even if it were true, and so who can be sure of anything."
Then Ender laughed, because Valentine had laughed when she first told him all this many years ago. When they were still only a little bit past childhood, and he was working on writing the Hegemon, and was trying to understand why his brother Peter had done all the great and terrible things he did.
"It isn't funny," said Miro.
"I thought it was," said Ender.
"Either we're free or we're not," said Miro. "Either the story's true or it isn't."
"The point is that we have to believe that it's true in order to live as civilized human beings," said Ender.
"No, that's not the point at all," said Miro. "Because if it's a lie, why should we bother to live as civilized human beings?"
"Because the species has a better chance to survive if we do," said Ender. "Because our genes require us to believe the story in order to enhance our ability to pass those genes on for many generations in the future. Because anybody who doesn't believe the story begins to act in unproductive, uncooperative ways, and eventually the community, the herd, will reject him and his opportunities for reproduction will be diminished--for instance, he'll be put in jail--and the genes leading to his unbelieving behavior will eventually be extinguished."
"So the puppeteer requires that we believe that we're not puppets. We're forced to believe in free will."
"Or so Valentine explained it to me."
"But she doesn't really believe that, does she?"
"Of course she doesn't. Her genes won't let her."
Ender laughed again. But Miro was not taking this lightly, as a philosophical game. He was outraged. He clenched his fists and swung out his arms in a spastic gesture that plunged his hand into the middle of the display. It caused a shadow above it, a space in which no philotic rays were visible. True empty space. Except that now Ender could see dustmotes floating in that display space, catching the light from the window and the open door of the house. In particular one large dustmote, like a short strand of hair, a tiny fiber of cotton, floating brightly in the midst of space where once only the philotic rays had been visible.
"Calm down," Ender said.
"No," Miro shouted. "My puppeteer is making me furious!"
"Shut up," said Ender. "Listen to me."
"I'm tired of listening to you!" Nevertheless he fell silent, and listened.
"I think you're right," said Ender. "I think that we are free, and I don't think it's just an illusion that we believe in because it has survival value. And I think we're free because we aren't just this body, acting out a genetic script. And we aren't some soul that God created out of nothing. We're free because we always existed. Right back from the beginning of time, only there was no beginning of time so we existed all along. Nothing ever caused us. Nothing ever made us. We simply are, and we always were."
"Philotes?" asked Miro.
"Maybe," said Ender. "Like that mote of dust in the display."
"Where?" asked Miro.
It
was invisible now, of course, since the holographic display again dominated the space above the terminal. Ender reached his hand into the display, causing a shadow to fall upward into the hologram. He moved his hand until he revealed the bright dustmote he had seen before. Or maybe it wasn't the same one. Maybe it was another one, but it didn't matter.
"Our bodies, the whole world around us, they're like the holographic display. They're real enough, but they don't show the true cause of things. It's the one thing we can never be sure of, just looking at the display of the universe--why things are happening. But behind it all, inside it all, if we could see through it, we'd find the true cause of everything. Philotes that always existed, doing what they want."
"Nothing always existed," said Miro.
"Says who? The supposed beginning of this universe, that was only the start of the present order--this display, all of what we think exists. But who says the philotes that are acting out the natural laws that began at that moment didn't exist before? And if the whole universe collapses back in on itself, who says that the philotes won't simply be released from the laws they're following now, and go back into . . ."
"Into what?"
"Into chaos. Darkness. Disorder. Whatever they were before this universe brought them together. Why couldn't they--we--have always existed and always continue to exist?"
"So where was I between the beginning of the universe and the day I was born?" said Miro.
"I don't know," said Ender. "I'm making this up as I go along."
"And where did Jane come from? Was her philote just floating around somewhere, and then suddenly she was in charge of a bunch of computer programs and she became a person?"
"Maybe," said Ender.
"And even if there's some natural system that somehow assigns philotes to be in charge of every organism that's born or spawned or germinated, how would that natural system have ever created Jane? She wasn't born."
Jane, of course, had been listening all along, and now she spoke. "Maybe it didn't happen," said Jane. "Maybe I have no philote of my own. Maybe I'm not alive."
"No," said Miro.
"Maybe," said Ender.
"So maybe I can't die," said Jane. "Maybe when they switch me off, it's just a complicated program shutting down."
"Maybe," said Ender.
"No," said Miro. "Shutting you off is murder."