“Then don’t do it,” Miro said. “If you don’t think you’ll live through it, don’t.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Val. “How did you get to be such a pathetic romantic? If it were you in my place, wouldn’t you be giving speeches right now about how you’re glad you have a body to give to Jane and it’s worth it for you to die for the sake of humans, pequeninos, and hive queens alike?”
“That’s not true,” said Miro.
“That you wouldn’t give speeches? Come on, I know you better than that,” she said.
“No,” said Miro. “I mean I wouldn’t give up my body. Not even to save the world. Humanity. The universe. I lost my body once before. I got it back by a miracle I still don’t understand. I’m not going to give it up without a fight. Do you understand me? No, you don’t, because you don’t have any fight in you. Ender hasn’t given you any fight. He’s made you a complete altruist, the perfect woman, sacrificing everything for the sake of others, creating her identity out of other people’s needs. Well, I’m not like that. I’m not glad to die now. I intend to live. That’s how real people feel, Val. No matter what they say, they all intend to live.”
“Except the suicides?”
“They intended to live, too,” said Miro. “Suicide is a desperate attempt to get rid of unbearable agony. It’s not a noble decision to let someone with more value go on living instead of you.”
“People make choices like that sometimes,” said Val. “It doesn’t mean I’m not a real person because I can choose to give my life to someone else. It doesn’t mean I don’t have any fight in me.”
Miro stopped the hovercar, let it settle to the ground. He was on the edge of the pequenino forest nearest to Milagre. He was aware that there were pequeninos working in the field who stopped their labor to watch them. But he didn’t care what they saw or what they thought. He took Val by the shoulders and with tears streaming down his cheeks he said, “I don’t want you to die. I don’t want you to choose to die.”
“You did,” said Val.
“I chose to live,” said Miro. “I chose to leap to the body in which life was possible. Don’t you see that I’m only trying to get you and Jane to do what I already did? For a moment there in the starship, there was my old body and there was this new one, looking at each other. Val, I remember both views. Do you understand me? I remember looking at this body and thinking, ‘How beautiful, how young, I remember when that was me, who is this now, who is this person, why can’t I be this person instead of the cripple I am right now,’ I thought that and I remember thinking it, I didn’t imagine it later, I didn’t dream it, I remember thinking it at the time. But I also remember standing there looking at myself with pity, thinking, ‘Poor man, poor broken man, how can he bear to live when he remembers what it was like to be alive?’ and then all of a sudden he crumbled into dust, into less than dust, into air, into nothing. I remember watching him die. I don’t remember dying because my aiъa had already leapt. But I remember both sides.”
“Or you remember being your old self until the leap, and your new self after.”
“Maybe,” said Miro. “But there wasn’t even a full second. How could I remember so much from both selves in the same second? I think I kept the memories that were in this body from the split second when my aiъa ruled two bodies. I think that if Jane leaps into you, you’ll keep all your old memories, and take hers, too. That’s what I think.”
“Oh, I thought you knew it.”
“I do know it,” said Miro. “Because anything else is unthinkable and therefore unknown. The reality I live in is a reality in which you can save Jane and Jane can save you.”
“You mean you can save us.”