Xenocide

The rest was all fear and excitement, hope and disbelief. They might be moments away from death. They might be moments away from filling the vials on Ela's lap with the viruses that would mean deliverance on two worlds. They might be the pioneers of a new kind of starflight that would save the species threatened by the M.D. Device.

They might also be three fools who would sit on the ground, in a grassy field just outside the compound of the human colony on Lusitania, until at last it grew so hot and stuffy inside that they had to emerge. No one waiting there would laugh, of course, but there'd be laughter throughout the town. It would be the laughter of despair. It would mean that there was no escape, no liberty, only more and more fear until death came in one of its many possible guises.

“Are you with us, Jane?” asked Ender.

The voice in his ear was quiet. “While I do this, Ender, I'll have no part of me that I can spare to talk to you.”

“So you'll be with us, but mute,” said Ender. “How will I know you're there?”

She laughed softly in his ear. “Foolish boy, Ender. If you're still there, I'm still inside you. And if I'm not inside you, you will have no 'there' to be.”

Ender imagined himself breaking into a trillion constituent parts, scattering through chaos. Personal survival depended not only on Jane holding the pattern of the ship, but also on him being able to hold the pattern of his mind and body. Only he had no idea whether his mind was really strong enough to maintain that pattern, once he was where the laws of nature were not in force.

“Ready?” asked Jane.

“She asks if we're ready,” said Ender.

Miro was already nodding. Ela bowed her head. Then, after a moment, she crossed herself, took firm hold on the rack of vials on her lap, and nodded.

“If we go and come again, Ela,” said Ender, “then this was not a failure, even if you didn't create the virus that you wanted. If the ship works well, we can return another time. Don't think that everything depends on what you're able to imagine today.”

She smiled. “I won't be surprised at failure, but I'm also ready for success. My team is ready to release hundreds of bacteria into the world, if I return with the recolada and we can then remove the descolada. It will be chancy, but within fifty years the world will be a self-regulating gaialogy again. I see a vision of deer and cattle in the tall grass of Lusitania, and eagles in the sky.” Then she looked down again at the vials in her lap. “I also said a prayer to the Virgin, for the same Holy Ghost that created God in her womb to come make life again here in these jars.”

“Amen to the prayer,” said Ender. “And now, Jane, if you're ready, we can go.”

Outside the little starship, the others waited. What did they expect? That the ship would start to smoke and jiggle? That there would be a thunderclap, a flash of light?

The ship was there. It was there, and still there, unmoving, unchanged. And then it was gone.

They felt nothing inside the ship when it happened. There was no sound, no movement to hint of motion from Inspace into Outspace.

But they knew the moment it occurred, because there were no longer three of them, but six.

Ender found himself seated between two people, a young man and a young woman. But he had no time even to glance at them, for all he could look at was the man seated in what had been the empty seat across from him.

“Miro,” he whispered. For that was who it was. But not Miro the cripple, the damaged young man who had boarded the ship with him. That one was still sitting in the next chair to Ender's left. This Miro was the strong young man that Ender had first known. The man whose strength had been the hope of his family, whose beauty had been the pride of Ouanda's life, whose mind and whose heart had taken compassion on the pequeninos and refused to leave them without the benefits he thought that human culture might offer them. Miro, whole and restored.

Where had he come from?

"I should have known," said Ender. "We should have thought. The pattern of yourself that you hold in your mind, Miro– it isn't the way you are, it's the way you were. "

The new Miro, the young Miro, he raised his head and smiled to Ender. “I thought of it,” he said, and his speech was clear and beautiful, the words rolling easily off his tongue. “I hoped for it. I begged Jane to take me with her because of it. And it came true. Exactly as I longed for it.”

“But now there are two of you,” said Ela. She sounded horrified.

“No,” said the new Miro. “Just me. Just the real me.”

“But that one's still there,” she said.

“Not for long, I think,” said Miro. “That old shell is empty now.”

And it was true. The old Miro slumped within his seat like a dead man. Ender knelt in front of him, touched him. He pressed his fingers to Miro's neck, feeling for a pulse.

“Why should the heart beat now?” said Miro. “I'm the place where Miro's aiua dwells.”

When Ender took his fingers away from the old Miro's throat, the skin came away in a small puff of dust. Ender shied back. The head dropped forward off the shoulders and landed in the corpse's lap. Then it dissolved into a whitish liquid. Ender jumped to his feet, backed away. He stepped on someone's toe.

“Ow,” said Valentine.

“Watch where you're going,” said a man.

Valentine isn't on this ship, thought Ender. And I know the man's voice, too.

He turned to face them, the man and woman who had appeared in the empty seats beside him.

Valentine. Impossibly young. The way she had looked when, as a young teenager, she had swum beside him in a lake on a private estate on Earth. The way she had looked when he loved her and needed her most, when she was the only reason he could think of to go on with his military training; when she was the only reason he could think of why the world might be worth the trouble of saving it.

“You can't be real,” he said.

“Of course I am,” she said. “You stepped on my foot, didn't you?”

“Poor Ender,” said the young man. “Clumsy and stupid. Not a really good combination.”

Now Ender knew him. “Peter,” he said. His brother, his childhood enemy, at the age when he became Hegemon. The picture that had been playing on all the vids when Peter managed to arrange things so that Ender could never come home to Earth after his great victory.

“I thought I'd never see you face to face again,” said Ender. “You died so long ago.”

“Never believe a rumor of my death,” said Peter. “I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition.”

“Where did you come from?”

Miro offered the answer. “They must have come from patterns in your mind, Ender, since you know them.”

“They do,” said Ender. “But why? It's our self-conception we're supposed to carry with us out here. The pattern by which we know ourselves.”

“Is that so, Ender?” said Peter. “Then you must be really special. A personality so complicated it takes two people to contain it.”

“There's no part of me in you,” said Ender.

“And you'd better keep it that way,” said Peter, leering. “It's girls I like, not dirty old men.”

“I don't want you,” said Ender.

“Nobody ever did,” said Peter. “They wanted you. But they got me, didn't they? They got me up to here. Do you think I don't know my whole story? You and that book of lies, the Hegemon. So wise and understanding. How Peter Wiggin mellowed. How he turned out to be a wise and fair-minded ruler. What a joke. Speaker for the Dead indeed. All the time you wrote it, you knew the truth. You posthumously washed the blood from my hands, Ender, but you knew and I knew that as long as I was alive, I wanted blood there.”

“Leave him alone,” said Valentine. “He told the truth in the Hegemon.”

“Still protecting him, little angel?”