“I don’t see how you could be,” said Valentine. “There’s not a one of all the people who have died on you that you can honestly say you ‘let go.’ You clung to them tooth and nail.”
“What if I did? Everyone I love has died and left me!”
“That’s such a weak excuse,” said Valentine. “Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they’re gone. You continued your parents’ work, and Pipo’s, and Libo’s — and you raised Libo’s children, didn’t you? And they were partly Marcгo’s children, weren’t they? Something of him remained in them, and not all bad. As for Estevгo, he built something rather fine out of his death, I think, but instead of letting him go you still resent him for it. You resent him for building something more valuable to him than life itself. For loving God and the pequeninos more than you. You still hang on to all of them. You don’t let anybody go.”
“Why do you hate me for that?” said Novinha. “Maybe it’s true, but that’s my life, to lose and lose and lose.”
“Just this once,” said Valentine, “why don’t you set the bird free instead of holding it in the cage until it dies?”
“You make me sound like a monster!” cried Novinha. “How dare you judge me!”
“If you were a monster Ender couldn’t have loved you,” said Valentine, answering rage with mildness. “You’ve been a great woman, Novinha, a tragic woman with many accomplishments and much suffering and I’m sure your story will make a moving saga when you die. But wouldn’t it be nice if you learned something instead of acting out the same tragedy at the end?”
“I don’t want another one I love to die before me!” cried Novinha.
“Who said anything about death?” said Valentine.
The door to the room swung open. Plikt stood in the doorway. “I heard,” she said. “What’s happening?”
“She wants me to wake him up,” said Novinha, “and tell him he can die.”
“Can I watch?” said Plikt.
Novinha took the waterglass from beside her chair and flung the water at Plikt and screamed at her. “No more of you!” she cried. “He’s mine now, not yours!”
Plikt, dripping with water, was too astonished to find an answer.
“It isn’t Plikt who’s taking him away,” said Valentine softly.
“She’s just like all the rest of them, reaching out for a piece of him, tearing bits of him away and devouring him, they’re all cannibals.”
“What,” said Plikt nastily, angrily. “What, you wanted to feast on him yourself? Well, there was too much of him for you. What’s worse, cannibals who nibble here and there, or a cannibal who keeps the whole man for herself when there’s far more than she can ever absorb?”
“This is the most disgusting conversation I think I’ve ever heard,” said Valentine.
“She hangs around for months, watching him like a vulture,” said Novinha. “Hanging on, loitering in his life, never saying six words all at once. And now she finally speaks and listen to the poison that comes out of her.”
“All I did was spit your own bile back at you,” said Plikt. “You’re nothing but a greedy, hateful woman and you used him and used him and never gave anything to him and the only reason he’s dying now is to get away from you.”
Novinha did not answer, had no words, because in her secret heart she knew at once that what Plikt had said was true.
But Valentine strode around the bed, walked to the door, and slapped Plikt mightily across the face. Plikt staggered under the blow, sank down against the doorframe until she was sitting on the floor, holding her stinging cheek, tears flowing down her face. Valentine towered over her. “You will never speak his death, do you understand me? A woman who would tell a lie like that, just to cause pain, just to lash out at someone that you envy — you’re no speaker for the dead. I’m ashamed I ever let you teach my children. What if some of the lie inside you got in them? You make me sick!”