“You wouldn’t think you were up to the task,” said Jane.
“Am I?” asked Miro.
“Probably not,” said Jane. “But then, you have me with you.”
“And what if you’re suddenly not there?” asked Miro.
“Well, that’s just a risk we’re going to have to take.”
“Tell me what we’re doing. Tell me our real mission.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. If you think about it, you’ll know.”
“I don’t like puzzles, Jane. Tell me.”
“Ask Val. She knows.”
“What?”
“She already searches for exactly the data I need. She knows.”
“Then that means Ender knows. At some level,” said Miro.
“I suspect you’re right, though Ender is not terribly interesting to me anymore and I don’t much care what he knows.”
Yes, you’re so rational, Jane.
He must have subvocalized this thought, out of habit, because she answered him just as she answered his deliberate subvocalizations. “You say that ironically,” she said, “because you think I am only saying that Ender doesn’t interest me because I’m protecting myself from my hurt feelings because he took his jewel out of his ear. But in fact he is no longer a source of data and he is no longer a cooperative part of the work I’m engaged in, and therefore I simply don’t have much interest in him anymore, except as one is somewhat interested in hearing from time to time about the doings of an old friend who has moved away.”
“Sounds like rationalization after the fact to me,” said Miro.
“Why did you even bring Ender up?” asked Jane. “What does it matter whether he knows the real work you and Val are doing?”
“Because if Val really knows our mission, and our mission involves an even worse danger than the Lusitania Fleet, then why has Ender lost interest in her so that she’s fading?”
Silence for a moment. Was it actually taking Jane so long to think of an answer that the time lag was noticeable to a human?
“I suppose Val doesn’t know,” said Jane. “Yes, that’s likely. I thought she did, but see now that she might well have fed me the data she emphasized for reasons completely unrelated to your mission. Yes, you’re right, she doesn’t know.”
“Jane,” said Miro. “Are you admitting you were wrong? Are you admitting you leapt to a false, irrational conclusion?”
“When I get my data from humans,” said Jane, “sometimes my rational conclusions are incorrect, being based on false premises.”
“Jane,” said Miro silently. “I’ve lost her, haven’t I? Whether she lives or dies, whether you get into her body or die out in space or wherever you live, she’ll never love me, will she?”
“I’m not an appropriate person to ask. I’ve never loved anybody.”
“You loved Ender,” said Miro.
“I paid a lot of attention to Ender and was disoriented when he first disconnected me, many years ago. I have since rectified that mistake and I don’t link myself so closely to anyone.”
“You loved Ender,” said Miro again. “You still do.”
“Well, aren’t you the wise one,” said Jane. “Your own love life is a pathetic series of miserable failures, but you know all about mine. Apparently you’re much better at understanding the emotional processes of utterly alien electronic beings than you are at understanding, say, the woman beside you.”
“You got it,” said Miro. “That’s the story of my life.”
“You also imagine that I love you,” said Jane.
“Not really,” said Miro. But even as he said it, he felt a wave of cold pass over him, and he trembled.
“I feel the seismic evidence of your true feelings,” said Jane. “You imagine that I love you, but I do not. I don’t love anyone. I act out of intelligent self-interest. I can’t survive right now without my connection with the human ansible network. I’m exploiting Peter’s and Wang-mu’s labors in order to forestall my planned execution, or subvert it. I’m exploiting your romantic notions in order to get myself that extra body that Ender seems to have little use for. I’m trying to save pequeninos and hive queens on the principle that it’s good to keep sentient species alive — of which I am one. But at no point in any of my activities is there any such thing as love.”