She turned away her face from him.
“You don’t understand aiъas?”
“To say that all people have always existed. That we are older than the oldest gods …”
“Well, sort of,” said Peter. “Only aiъas on the Outside, they can’t be said to exist, or at least not any kind of meaningful existence. They’re just … there. Not even that, because there’s no sense of location, no there where they might be. They just are. Until some intelligence calls them, names them, puts them into some kind of order, gives them shape and form.”
“The clay can become a bear,” she said, “but not as long as it rests cold and wet in the riverbank.”
“Exactly. So there was Ender Wiggin and several other people who, with luck, you’ll never need to meet, taking the first voyage Outside. They weren’t going anywhere, really. The point of that first voyage was to get Outside long enough that one of them, a rather talented genetic scientist, could create a new molecule, an extremely complex one, by the image she held of it in her mind. Or rather her image of the modifications she needed to make in an existing… well, you don’t have the biology for it. Anyway, she did what she was supposed to do, she created the new molecule, calloo callay, only the thing is, she wasn’t the only person doing any creating that day.”
“Ender’s mind created you?” asked Wang-mu.
“Inadvertently. I was, shall we say, a tragic accident. An unhappy side effect. Let’s just say that everybody there, everything there, was creating like crazy. The aiъas Outside are frantic to be made into something, you see. There were shadow starships being created all around us. All kinds of weak, faint, fragmented, fragile, ephemeral structures rising and falling in each instant. Only four had any solidity. One was that genetic molecule that Elanora Ribeira had come to create.”
“One was you?”
“The least interesting one, I fear. The least loved and valued. One of the people on the ship was a fellow named Miro, who through a tragic accident some years ago had been left somewhat crippled. Neurologically damaged. Thick of speech, clumsy with his hands, lame when he walked. He held within his mind the powerful, treasured image of himself as he used to be. So — with that perfect self-image, a vast number of aiъa assembled themselves into an exact copy, not of how he was, but of how he once was and longed to be again. Complete with all his memories — a perfect replication of him. So perfect that it had the same utter loathing for his crippled body that he himself had. So … the new, improved Miro — or rather the copy of the old, undamaged Miro — whatever — he stood there as the ultimate rebuke of the crippled one. And before their very eyes, that old rejected body crumbled away into nothing.”
Wang-mu gasped, imagining it. “He died!”
“No, that’s the point, don’t you see? He lived. It was Miro. His own aiъa — not the trillions of aiъas making up the atoms and molecules of his body, but the one that controlled them all, the one that was himself, his will — his aiъa simply moved to the new and perfect body. That was his true self. And the old one …”
“Had no use.”
“Had nothing to give it shape. You see, I think our bodies are held together by love. The love of the master aiъa for the glorious powerful body that obeys it, that gives the self all its experience of the world. Even Miro, even with all his self-loathing when he was crippled, even he must have loved whatever pathetic remnant of his body was left to him. Until the moment that he had a new one.”
“And then he moved.”
“Without even knowing that he had done so,” said Peter. “He followed his love.”
Wang-mu heard this fanciful tale and knew that it must be true, for she had overheard many a mention of aiъas in the conversations between Han Fei-tzu and Jane, and now with Peter Wiggin’s story, it made sense. It had to be true, if only because this starship really had appeared as if from nowhere on the bank of the river behind Han Fei-tzu’s house.