Have I lost my mind?
Or have I, finally, found my heart?
She was suddenly filled with unaccustomed emotion. All her life she had kept her own feelings at such a distance from herself that now she hardly knew how to contain them. I love him, though Wang-mu, and her heart nearly burst with the intensity of her passion. He will never love me, thought Wang-mu, and her heart broke as it had never broken in all the thousand disappointments of her life.
My love for him is nothing compared to his need for her, his knowledge of her. For his ties to her are deeper than these past few weeks since he was conjured into existence on that first voyage Outside. In all the lonely years of Ender’s wandering, Jane was his most constant friend, and that is the love that now pours out of Peter’s eyes with tears. I am nothing to him, I’m a latecome afterthought to his life, I have seen only a part of him and my love was nothing to him in the end.
She, too, wept.
But she turned away from Peter when a cry went up from the Samoans standing on the beach. She looked with tear-weary eyes out over the waves, and rose to her feet so she could be sure she saw what they were seeing. It was Malu’s ship. He had turned back to them. He was coming back.
Had he seen something? Had he heard whatever cry it was from Jane that Peter was hearing now?
Grace was beside her, holding her hand. “Why is he coming back?” she asked Wang-mu.
“You’re the one who understands him,” said Wang-mu.
“I don’t understand him at all,” said Grace. “Except his words, I know the ordinary meanings of his words. But when he speaks, I can feel the words straining to contain the things he wants to say, and they can’t do it. They aren’t large enough, those words of his, even though he speaks in our largest language, even though he builds the words together into great baskets of meaning, into boats of thought. I can only see the outer shape of the words and guess at what he means. I don’t understand him at all.”
“Why then do you think I do?”
“Because he’s coming back to speak to you.”
“He comes back to speak to Peter. He’s the one connected to the god, as Malu calls her.”
“You don’t like this god of his, do you,” said Grace.
Wang-mu shook her head. “I have nothing against her. Except that she owns him, and so there’s nothing left for me.”
“A rival,” said Grace.
Wang-mu sighed. “I grew up expecting nothing and getting less. But I always had ambition far beyond my reach. Sometimes I reached anyway, and caught in my hands more than I deserved, more than I could handle. Sometimes I reach and never touch the thing I want.”
“You want him?”
“I only just realized that I want him to love me as I love him. He was always angry, always stabbing at me with his words, but he worked beside me and when he praised me I believed his praise.”
“I would say,” said Grace, “that your life till now has not been perfectly simple. ”
“Not true,” said Wang-mu. “Till now, I have had nothing that I didn’t need, and needed nothing that I didn’t have.”
“You have needed everything you didn’t have,” said Grace, “and I can’t believe that you’re so weak that you won’t reach for it even now.”
“I lost him before I found I wanted him,” she said. “Look at him.”
Peter rocked back and forth, whispering, subvocalizing, his litany an endless conversation with his dying friend.
“I look at him,” said Grace, “and I see that he’s right there, in flesh and blood, and so are you, right here, in flesh and blood, and I can’t see how a smart girl like you could say that he is gone when your eyes must surely tell you that he’s not.”
Wang-mu looked up at the enormous woman who loomed over her like a mountain range, looked up into her luminous eyes, and glared. “I never asked you for advice.”