“Ender is dying,” said Miro. “Or did you already know?”
“Jane mentioned he seemed to be inattentive.”
“Dying,” said Miro again.
“I think it speaks very clearly about the nature of men,” said Val, “that you and Ender both claim to love a flesh-and-blood woman, but in fact you can’t give that woman even a serious fraction of your attention.”
“Yes, well, you have my whole attention, Val,” said Miro. “And as for Ender, if he’s not paying attention to Mother it’s because he’s paying attention to you.”
“To my work, you mean. To the task at hand. Not to me.”
“Well, that’s all you’ve been paying attention to, except when you took a break to rip on me about how I’m talking to Jane and not listening to you.”
“That’s right,” said Val. “You think I don’t see what’s been going on with me this past day? How all of a sudden I can’t shut up about things, I’m so intense I can’t sleep, how I — Ender’s supposedly been the real me all along, only he left me alone till now and that was fine because what he’s doing now is terrifying. Don’t you see that I’m frightened? It’s too much. It’s more than I can stand. I can’t hold that much energy inside me.”
“So talk about it instead of screaming at me,” said Miro.
“But you weren’t listening. I was trying to and you were just subvocalizing to Jane and shutting me out.”
“Because I was sick of hearing endless streams of data and analysis that I could just as easily catch in summary on the computer. How was I supposed to know that you’d take a break in your monologue and start talking about something human?”
“Everything’s bigger than life right now and I don’t have any experience with this. In case you forgot, I haven’t been alive very long. I don’t know things. There are a lot of things I don’t know. I don’t know why I care so much about you, for instance. You’re the one trying to get me replaced as landlord of this body. You’re the one who tunes me out or takes me over but I don’t want that, Miro. I really need a friend right now.”
“So do I,” said Miro.
“But I don’t know how to do it,” said Val.
“I, on the other hand, know perfectly well how to do it,” said Miro. “But the only other time it happened, I fell in love with her and then she turned out to be my half-sister because her father was secretly my mother’s lover, and the man I had thought was my father turned out to be sterile because he was dying of some internally rotting disease. So you can see how I might be hesitant.”
“Valentine was your friend. She is still.”
“Yes,” said Miro. “Yes, I was forgetting. I’ve had two friends.”
“And Ender,” said Val.
“Three,” said Miro. “And my sister Ela makes four. And Human was my friend, so it’s five.”
“See? I think that makes you qualified to show me how to have a friend.”
“To make a friend,” said Miro, echoing his mother’s intonations, “you have to be one.”
“Miro,” said Val. “I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of this world we’re looking for, what we’ll find there. Of what’s going to happen to me if Ender dies. Or if Jane takes over as my — what, my inner light, my puppeteer. Of what it will feel like if you don’t like me anymore.”
“What if I promise to like you no matter what?”
“You can’t make a promise like that.”
“Okay, if I wake up to find you strangling me or smothering me, then I’ll stop liking you.”
“What about drowning?”
“No, I can’t open my eyes under water, so I’d never know it was you.”
They both laughed.
“This is the time in the videos,” said Val, “when the hero and the heroine laugh and then hold each other.”
Jane’s voice interrupted from both their computer terminals. “Sorry to break up a tender moment, but we’ve got a new world here and there are electromagnetic messages being relayed between the planet surface and orbiting artificial objects.”