Thus before the sun was up, Miro found himself facing Ender as they both straddled a stone bench in a spot in the garden that would soon be bathed in sunlight but now was clammy with the morning chill; and what Miro found himself saying to this unchangeable, unchanging man was this: “What is this monastery business, Andrew Wiggin, except for a backhanded, cowardly way of crucifying yourself?”
“I’ve missed you too, Miro,” said Ender. “You look tired, though. You need more sleep.”
Miro sighed and shook his head. “That wasn’t what I meant to say. I’m trying to understand you, I really am. Valentine says that I’m like you.”
“You mean the real Valentine?” asked Ender.
“They’re both real,” said Miro.
“Well, if I’m like you, then study yourself and tell me what you find.”
Miro wondered, looking at him, if Ender really meant this.
Ender patted Miro’s knee. “I’m really not needed out there now,” he said.
“You don’t believe that for a second,” said Miro.
“But I believe that I believe it,” said Ender, “and for me that’s pretty good. Please don’t disillusion me. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“No, you’re exploiting the convenience of having split yourself into three. This part of you, the aging middle-aged man, can afford the luxury of devoting himself entirely to his wife — but only because he has two young puppets to go out and do the work that really interests him.”
“But it doesn’t interest me,” said Ender. “I don’t care.”
“You as Ender don’t care because you as Peter and you as Valentine are taking care of everything else for you. Only Valentine isn’t well. You’re not caring enough about what she’s doing. What happened to my old crippled body is happening to her. More slowly, but it’s the same thing. She thinks so, Valentine thinks it’s possible. So do I. So does Jane.”
“Give Jane my love. I do miss her.”
“I give Jane my love, Ender.”
Ender grinned at his resistance. “If they were about to shoot you, Miro, you’d insist on drinking a lot of water just so they’d have to handle a corpse covered with urine when you were dead.”
“Valentine isn’t a dream or an illusion, Ender,” said Miro, refusing to be sidetracked into a discussion of his own obstreperousness. “She’s real, and you’re killing her.”
“Awfully dramatic way of putting it.”
“If you’d seen her pull out tufts of her own hair this morning …”
“So she’s rather theatrical, I take it? Well, you’ve always been one for the theatrical gesture, too. I’m not surprised you get along.”
“Andrew, I’m telling you you’ve got to –”
Suddenly Ender grew stern and his voice overtopped Miro’s even though he was not speaking loudly. “Use your head, Miro. Was your decision to jump from your old body to this newer model a conscious one? Did you think about it and say, ‘Well, I think I’ll let this old corpse crumble into its constituent molecules because this new body is a nicer place to dwell’?”
Miro got his point at once. Ender couldn’t consciously control where his attention went. His aiъa, even though it was his deepest self, was not to be ordered about.
“I find out what I really want by seeing what I do,” said Ender. “That’s what we all do, if we’re honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously. I can’t help it if the part of me that’s controlling this girl whose company you’re sharing isn’t as important to my underlying will as you’d like. As she needs. I can’t do a thing.”
Miro bowed his head.
The sun came up over the trees. Suddenly the bench turned bright, and Miro looked up to see the sunlight making a halo out of Ender’s wildly slept-in hair. “Is grooming against the monastic rule?” asked Miro.
“You’re attracted to her, aren’t you,” said Ender, not really making a question out of it. “And it makes you a little uneasy that she is really me.”