"I'll be glad to see the last of you."
"Aren't you curious what I intend to do?"
"No," said Ender.
But it was a lie, and of course Peter knew it. "I intend to do what you have neither the brains nor the stomach to do. I intend to stop the fleet."
"How? Magically appear on the flagship?"
"Well, if worse came to worst, dear lad, I could always deliver an M.D. Device to the fleet before they even knew I was there. But that wouldn't accomplish much, would it? To stop the fleet, I need to stop Congress. And to stop Congress, I need to get control."
Ender knew at once what this meant. "So you think you can be Hegemon again? God help humanity if you succeed."
"Why shouldn't I?" said Peter. "I did it once before, and I didn't do so badly. You should know--you wrote the book yourself."
"That was the real Peter," said Ender. "Not you, the twisted version conjured up out of my hatred and fear."
Did Peter have soul enough to resent these harsh words? Ender thought, for a moment at least, that Peter paused, that his face showed a moment of--what, hurt? Or simply rage?
"I'm the real Peter now," he answered, after that momentary pause. "And you'd better hope that I have all the skill I had before. After all, you managed to give Valette the same genes as Valentine. Maybe I'm all that Peter ever was."
"Maybe pigs have wings."
Peter laughed. "They would, if you went Outside and believed hard enough."
"Go, then," said Ender.
"Yes, I know you'll be glad to get rid of me."
"And sic you on the rest of humanity? Let that be punishment enough, for their having sent the fleet." Ender gripped Peter by the arm, pulled him close. "Don't think that this time you can maneuver me into helplessness. I'm not a little boy anymore, and if you get out of hand, I'll destroy you."
"You can't," said Peter. "You could more easily kill yourself."
The ceremony began. This time there was no pomp, no ring to kiss, no homily. Ela and her assistants simply brought several hundred sugar cubes impregnated with the viricide bacterium, and as many vials of solution containing the recolada. They were passed among the congregation, and each of the pequeninos took the sugar cube, dissolved and swallowed it, and then drank off the contents of the vial.
"This is my body which is given for you," intoned Peter. "This do in remembrance of me."
"Have you no respect for anything?" asked Ender.
"This is my blood, which I shed for you. Drink in remembrance of me." Peter smiled. "This is a communion even I can take, unbaptized as I am."
"I can promise you this," said Ender. "They haven't invented the baptism yet that can purify you."
"I'll bet you've been saving up all your life, just to say that to me." Peter turned to him, so Ender could see the ear in which the jewel had been implanted, linking him to Jane. In case Ender didn't notice what he was pointing out, Peter touched the jewel rather ostentatiously. "Just remember, I have the source of all wisdom here. She'll show you what I'm doing, if you ever care. If you don't forget me the moment I'm gone."
"I won't forget you," said Ender.
"You could come along," said Peter.
"And risk making more like you Outside?"
"I could use the company."
"I promise you, Peter, you'd soon get as sick of yourself as I am sick of you."
"Never," said Peter. "I'm not filled with self-loathing the way you are, you poor guilt-obsessed tool of better, stronger men. And if you won't make more companions for me, why, I'll find my own along the way."
"I have no doubt of it," said Ender.
The sugar cubes and vials came to them; they ate, drank.
"The taste of freedom," said Peter. "Delicious."
"Is it?" said Ender. "We're killing a species that we never understood."
"I know what you mean," said Peter. "It's a lot more fun to destroy an opponent when he's able to understand how thoroughly you defeated him."
Then, at last, Peter walked away.
Ender stayed through the end of the ceremony, and spoke to many there: Human and Rooter, of course, and Valentine, Ela, Ouanda, and Miro.
He had another visit to make, however. A visit he had made several times before, always to be rebuffed, sent away without a word. This time, though, Novinha came out to speak with him. And instead of being filled with rage and grief, she seemed quite calm.
"I'm much more at peace," she said. "And I know, for what it's worth, that my rage at you was unrighteous."
Ender was glad to hear the sentiment, but surprised at the terms she used. When had Novinha ever spoken of righteousness?
"I've come to see that perhaps my boy was fulfilling the purposes of God," she said. "That you couldn't have stopped him, because God wanted him to go to the pequeninos to set in motion the miracles that have come since then." She wept. "Miro came to me. Healed," she said. "Oh, God is merciful after all. And I'll have Quim again in heaven, when I die."
She's been converted, thought Ender. After all these years of despising the church, of taking part in Catholicism only because there was no other way to be a citizen of Lusitania Colony, these weeks with the Children of the Mind of Christ have converted her. I'm glad of it, he thought. She's speaking to me again.
"Andrew," she said, "I want us to be together again."
He reached out to embrace her, wanting to weep with relief and joy, but she recoiled from his touch.
"You don't understand," she said. "I won't go home with you. This is my home now."
She was right--he hadn't understood. But now he did. She hadn't just been converted to Catholicism. She had been converted to this order of permanent sacrifice, where only husbands and wives could join, and only together, to take vows of permanent abstinence in the midst of their marriage. "Novinha," he said, "I haven't the faith or the strength to be one of the Children of the Mind of Christ."
"When you do," she said, "I'll be waiting for you here."
"Is this the only hope I have of being with you?" he whispered. "To forswear loving your body as the only way to have your companionship?"
"Andrew," she whispered, "I long for you. But my sin for so many years was adultery that my only hope of joy now is to deny the flesh and live in the spirit. I'll do it alone if I must. But with you--oh, Andrew, I miss you."
And I miss you, he thought. "Like breath itself I miss you," he whispered. "But don't ask this of me. Live with me as my wife until the last of our youth is spent, and then when desire is slack we can come back here together. I could be happy then."
"Don't you see?" she said. "I've made a covenant. I've made a promise."
"You made one to me, too," he said.
"Should I break a vow to God, so I can keep my vow with you?"
"God would understand."
"How easily those who never hear his voice declare what he would and would not want."
"Do you hear his voice these days?"
"I hear his song in my heart, the way the Psalmist did. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want."
"The twenty-third. While the only song I hear is the twenty-second."
She smiled wanly. " 'Why hast thou forsaken me?' " she quoted.
"And the part about the bulls of Bashan," said Ender. "I've always felt like I was surrounded by bulls."
She laughed. "Come to me when you can," she said. "I'll be here, when you're ready."
She almost left him then.
"Wait."
She waited.
"I brought you the viricide and the recolada."
"Ela's triumph," she said. "It was beyond me, you know. I cost you nothing, by abandoning my work. My time was past, and she had far surpassed me." Novinha took the sugar cube, let it melt for a moment, swallowed it.
Then she held the vial up against the last light of evening. "With the red sky, it looks like it's all afire inside." She drank it--sipped it, really, so that the flavor would linger. Even though, as Ender knew, the taste wa
s bitter, and lingered unpleasantly in the mouth long afterward.
"Can I visit you?"
"Once a month," she said. Her answer was so quick that he knew she had already considered the question and reached a decision that she had no intention of altering.
"Then once a month I'll visit you," he said.
"Until you're ready to join me," she said.
"Until you're ready to return to me," he answered.
But he knew that she would never bend. Novinha was not a person who could easily change her mind. She had set the bounds of his future.
He should have been resentful, angry. He should have blustered about getting his freedom from a marriage to a woman who refused him. But he couldn't think what he might want his freedom for. Nothing is in my hands now, he realized. No part of the future depends on me. My work, such as it is, is done, and now my only influence on the future is what my children do--such as they are: the monster Peter, the impossibly perfect child Val.
And Miro, Grego, Quara, Ela, Olhado--aren't they my children, too? Can't I also claim to have helped create them, even if they came from Libo's love and Novinha's body, years before I even arrived in this place?
It was full dark when he found young Val, though he couldn't understand why he was even looking for her. She was in Olhado's house, with Plikt; but while Plikt leaned against a shadowed wall, her face inscrutable, young Val was among Olhado's children, playing with them.
Of course she's playing with them, thought Ender. She's still a child herself, however much experience she might have had thrust upon her out of my memories.
But as he stood in the doorway, watching, he realized that she wasn't playing equally with all the children. It was Nimbo who really had her attention. The boy who had been burned, in more ways than one, the night of the mob. The game the children played was simple enough, but it kept them from talking to each other. Still, there was eloquent conversation between Nimbo and young Val. Her smile toward him was warm, not in the manner of a woman encouraging a lover, but rather as a sister gives her brother the silent message of love, of confidence, of trust.
She's healing him, thought Ender. Just as Valentine, so many years ago, healed me. Not with words. Just with her company.
Could I have created her with even that ability intact? Was there that much truth and power in my dream of her? Then maybe Peter also has everything within him that my real brother had--all that was dangerous and terrible, but also that which created a new order.
Try as he might, Ender couldn't get himself to believe that story. Young Val might have healing in her eyes, but Peter had none of that in him. His was the face that, years before, Ender had seen looking back at him from a mirror in the Fantasy Game, in a terrible room where he died again and again before he could finally embrace the element of Peter within himself and go on.
I embraced Peter and destroyed a whole people. I took him into myself and committed xenocide. I thought, in all these years since then, that I had purged him. That he was gone. But he'll never leave me.
The idea of withdrawing from the world and entering into the order of the Children of the Mind of Christ--there was much to attract him in that. Perhaps there, Novinha and he together could purge themselves of the demons that had dwelt inside them all these years. Novinha has never been so much at peace, thought Ender, as she is tonight.
Young Val noticed him, came to him as he stood in the doorway.
"Why are you here?" she said.
"Looking for you," he said.
"Plikt and I are spending the night with Olhado's family," she said. She glanced at Nimbo and smiled. The boy grinned foolishly.
"Jane says that you're going with the starship," Ender said softly.
"If Peter can hold Jane within himself, so can I," she answered. "Miro is going with me. To find habitable worlds."
"Only if you want to," said Ender.
"Don't be foolish," she said. "Since when have you done only what you want to do? I'll do what must be done, that only I can do."
He nodded.
"Is that all you came for?" she asked.
He nodded again. "I guess," he said.
"Or did you come because you wish that you could be the child you were when you last saw a girl with this face?"
The words stung--far worse than when Peter guessed what was in his heart. Her compassion was far more painful than his contempt.
She must have seen the expression of pain on his face, and misunderstood it. He was relieved that she was capable of misunderstanding. I do have some privacy left.
"Are you ashamed of me?" she asked.
"Embarrassed," he said. "To have my unconscious mind made so public. But not ashamed. Not of you." He glanced toward Nimbo, then back to her. "Stay here and finish what you started."
She smiled slightly. "He's a good boy who thought that he was doing something fine."
"Yes," he said. "But it got away from him."
"He didn't know what he was doing," she said. "When you don't understand the consequences of your acts, how can you be blamed for them?"
He knew that she was talking as much about him, Ender the Xenocide, as about Nimbo. "You don't take the blame," he answered. "But you still take responsibility. For healing the wounds you caused."
"Yes," she said. "The wounds you caused. But not all the wounds in the world."
"Oh?" he asked. "And why not? Because you plan to heal them all yourself?"
She laughed--a light, girlish laugh. "You haven't changed a bit, Andrew," she said. "Not in all these years."
He smiled at her, hugged her lightly, and sent her back into the light of the room. He himself, though, turned back out into the darkness and headed home. There was light enough for him to find his way, yet he stumbled and got lost several times.
"You're crying," said Jane in his ear.
"This is such a happy day," he said.
"It is, you know. You're just about the only person wasting any pity on you tonight."
"Fine, then," said Ender. "If I'm the only one, then at least there's one."
"You've got me," she said. "And our relationship has been chaste all along."
"I've really had enough of chastity in my life," he answered. "I wasn't hoping for more."
"Everyone is chaste in the end. Everyone ends up out of the reach of all the deadly sins."
"But I'm not dead," he said. "Not yet. Or am I?"
"Does this feel like heaven?" she asked.
He laughed, and not nicely.
"Well, then, you can't be dead."
"You forget," he said. "This could easily be hell."
"Is it?" she asked him.
He thought about all that had been accomplished. Ela's viruses. Miro's healing. Young Val's kindness to Nimbo. The smile of peace on Novinha's face. The pequeninos' rejoicing as their liberty began its passage through their world. Already, he knew, the viricide was cutting an ever-widening swath through the prairie of capim surrounding the colony; by now it must already have passed into other forests, the descolada, helpless now, giving way as the mute and passive recolada took its place. All these changes couldn't possibly take place in hell.
"I guess I'm still alive," he said.
"And so am I," she said. "That's something, too. Peter and Val, they're not the only people to spring from your mind."
"No, they're not," he said.
"We're both still alive, even if we have hard times coming."
He remembered what lay in store for her, the mental crippling that was only weeks away, and he was ashamed of himself for having mourned his own losses. "Better to have loved and lost," he murmured, "than never to have loved at all."
"It may be a cliche," said Jane, "but that doesn't mean it can't be true."
18
THE GOD OF PATH
my genetic molecules into its own structure.>
Wang-mu and Master Han waited together on the riverbank some hundred meters from their house, a pleasant walk through the garden. Jane had told them that someone would be coming to see them, someone from Lusitania. They both knew this meant that faster-than-light travel had been achieved, but beyond that they could only assume that their visitor must have come to an orbit around Path, shuttled down, and was now making his way stealthily toward them.