Tears in the eyes, down the cheeks. Deep grief in the heart. I can’t bear to be here, he thought. I don’t belong. No one wants me here. They all want me out of here and gone.
The grief tore at him, pushed him away. It was an unbearable place for him.
The aiъa that had once been Jane now reached out, tentatively, and touched a single spot, a single cell.
He grew alarmed, but only for a moment. This isn’t mine, he thought. I don’t belong here. It’s yours. You can have it.
She led him here and there inside this body, always touching, taking mastery of it; only this time instead of fighting her, he gave control of it to her, over and over. I’m not wanted here. Take it. Have joy with it. It’s yours. It never was my own.
She felt the flesh become herself, more and more of it, the cells by hundreds, thousands, moving their allegiance from the old master who no longer wanted to be there, to the new mistress who worshipped them. She did not say to them, You are mine, the way she had tried to when she came here before. Instead her cry now was, I am yours; and then, finally, you are me.
She was astonished with the wholeness of this body. She realized, now, that until this moment she had never been a self before. What she had for all those centuries was an apparatus, not a self. She had been on life support, waiting for a life. But now, trying on the arms like sleeves, she found that yes, her arms were this long; yes, this tongue, these lips move just where my tongue and lips must move.
And then, seeping into her awareness, claiming her attention — which had once been divided among ten thousand thoughts at once — came memories that she had never known before. Memories of speech with lips and breath. Memories of sights with eyes, sounds with ears. Memories of walking, running.
And then the memories of people. Standing in that first starship, seeing her first sight — of Andrew Wiggin, the look on his face, the wonder as he saw her, as he looked back and forth between her and —
And Peter.
Ender.
Peter.
She had forgotten. She had been so caught up in this new self she found that she forgot the lost aiъa who had given it to her. Where was he?
Lost, lost. Not in the other one, not anywhere, how could she have lost him? How many seconds, minutes, hours had he been away? Where was he?
Darting away from the body, from herself that called itself Val, she probed, she searched, but could not find.
He’s dead. I lost him. He gave me this life and he had no way of holding on then, yet I forgot him and he’s gone.
But then she remembered he had been gone before. When she chased him through his three bodies and at last he leapt away for a moment, it was that leap that had led her to the lacework of the web of trees. He would do it again, of course. He would leap to the only other place he had ever leapt to.
She followed him and he was there, but not where she had been, not among the mothertrees, nor even among the fathertrees. Not among the trees at all. No, he had followed where she hadn’t wanted then to go, along the thick and ropey twines that led to them; no, not to them, to her. The Hive Queen. The one that he had carried in her dry cocoon for three thousand years, world to world, until at last he found a home for her. Now she at last returned the gift; when Jane’s aiъa probed along the twines that led to her, there he was, uncertain, lost.
He knew her. Cut off as he was, it was astonishing that he knew anything; but he knew her. And once again he followed her. This time she did not lead him into the body that he had given her; that was hers now; no, it was her now. Instead she led him to a different body in a different place.