“You boys are so slow,” Jane murmured in his ear. “I’ve been talking to the Hive Queen and Human and trying to figure out how the thing is done — assigning an aiъa to a body. The hive queens did it once, in creating me. But they didn’t exactly pick a particular aiъa. They took what came. What showed up. I’m a little fussier.”
Miro said nothing as he walked to the monastery gate.
“Oh, yes, and then there’s the little matter of your feelings toward Young Val. You hate the fact that in loving her, it’s really, in a way, Ender that you love. But if I took over, if I were the will inside Young Val’s life, would she still be the woman you love? Would anything of her survive? Would it be murder?”
“Oh, shut up,” said Miro aloud.
The monastery gatekeeper looked up at him in surprise.
“Not you,” said Miro. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea.”
Miro was aware of her eyes on his back until he was out and on the path winding down the hill toward Milagre. Time to get back to the ship. Val will be waiting for me. Whoever she is.
What Ender is to Mother, so loyal, so patient — is that how I feel toward Val? Or no, it isn’t feeling, is it? It’s an act of will. It’s a decision that can never be revoked. Could I do that for any woman, any person? Could I give myself forever?
He remembered Ouanda then, and walked with the memory of bitter loss all the way back to the starship.
CHAPTER 4
“I AM A MAN OF PERFECT SIMPLICITY!”
[Image]
“When I was a child, I thought
a god was disappointed
whenever some distraction
interrupted my tracing of the lines
revealed in the grain of the wood.
Now I know the gods expect such interruptions,
for they know our frailty.
It is completion that surprises them.”
— from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
Peter and Wang-mu ventured out into the world of Divine Wind on their second day. They did not have to worry about learning a language. Divine Wind was an older world, one of the first wave settled in the initial emigration from Earth. It was originally as recidivist as Path, clinging to the ancient ways. But the ancient ways of Divine Wind were Japanese ways, and so it included the possibility of radical change. Scarcely three hundred years into its history, the world transformed itself from being the isolated fiefdom of a ritualized shogunate to being a cosmopolitan center of trade and industry and philosophy. The Japanese of Divine Wind prided themselves on being hosts to visitors from all worlds, and there were still many places where children grew up speaking only Japanese until they were old enough to enter school. But by adulthood, all the people of Divine Wind spoke Stark with fluency, and the best of them with elegance, with grace, with astonishing economy; it was said by Mil Fiorelli, in his most famous book, Observations of Distant Worlds with the Naked Eye, that Stark was a language that had no native speakers until it was whispered by a Divine Wind.
So it was that when Peter and Wang-mu hiked through the woods of the great natural preserve where their starship had landed and emerged in a village of foresters, laughing about how long they had been “lost” in the woods, no one thought twice about Wang-mu’s obviously Chinese features and accent, or even about Peter’s white skin and lack of an epicanthic fold. They had lost their documents, they claimed, but a computer search showed them to be licensed automobile drivers in the city of Nagoya, and while Peter seemed to have had a couple of youthful traffic offenses there, otherwise they were not known to have committed any illegal acts. Peter’s profession was given as “independent teacher of physics” and Wang-mu’s as “itinerant philosopher,” both quite respectable positions, given their youth and lack of family attachment. When they were asked casual questions (“I have a cousin who teaches progenerative grammars in the Komatsu University in Nagoya”) Jane gave Peter appropriate comments to say: