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"Nao quero." Don't want one.
"Yes you do," said Ender. "She's already helped you. Now that you know she exists, you'll find that she's--a good friend. You can't have a better one. More loyal. More helpful."
"Puppy dog?"
"Don't be a jackass," said Ender. "I'm introducing you to a fourth alien species. You're supposed to be a xenologer, aren't you? She knows you, Miro. Your physical problems are nothing to her. She has no body at all. She exists among the philotic disturbances in the ansible communications of the Hundred Worlds. She's the most intelligent creature alive, and you're the second human being she's ever chosen to reveal herself to."
"How?" How did she come to be? How did she know me, to choose me?
"Ask her yourself." Ender touched the jewel in his ear. "Just a word of advice. Once she comes to trust you, keep her with you always. Keep no secrets from her. She once had a lover who switched her off. Only for an hour, but things were never the same between them after that. They became--just friends. Good friends, loyal friends, always until he dies. But all his life he will regret that one thoughtless act of disloyalty."
Ender's eyes glistened, and Miro realized that whatever this creature was that lived in the computer, it was no phantom, it was part of this man's life. And he was passing it down to Miro, like father to son, the right to know this friend.
Ender left without another word, and Miro turned to the terminal. There was a holo of a woman there. She was small, sitting on a stool, leaning against a holographic wall. She was not beautiful. Not ugly, either. Her face had character. Her eyes were haunting, innocent, sad. Her mouth delicate, about to smile, about to weep. Her clothing seemed veil-like, insubstantial, and yet instead of being provocative, it revealed a sort of innocence, a girlish, small-breasted body, the hands clasped lightly in her lap, her legs childishly parted with the toes pointing inward. She could have been sitting on a teeter-totter in a playground. Or on the edge of her lover's bed.
"Bom dia," Miro said softly.
"Hi," she said. "I asked him to introduce us."
She was quiet, reserved, but it was Miro who felt shy. For so long, Ouanda had been the only woman in his life, besides the women of his family, and he had little confidence in the social graces. At the same time, he was aware that he was speaking to a hologram. A completely convincing one, but a midair laser projection all the same.
She reached up one hand and laid it gently on her breast. "Feels nothing," she said. "No nerves."
Tears came to his eyes. Self-pity, of course. That he would probably never have a woman more substantial than this one. If he tried to touch one, his caresses would be crude pawing. Sometimes, when he w
asn't careful, he drooled and couldn't even feel it. What a lover.
"But I have eyes," she said. "And ears. I see everything in all the Hundred Worlds. I watch the sky through a thousand telescopes. I overhear a trillion conversations every day." She giggled a little. "I'm the best gossip in the universe."
Then, suddenly, she stood up, grew larger, closer, so that she only showed from the waist up, as if she had moved closer to an invisible camera. Her eyes burned with intensity as she stared right at him. "And you're a parochial schoolboy who's never seen anything but one town and one forest in his life."
"Don't get much chance to travel," he said.
"We'll see about that," she answered. "So. What do you want to do today?"
"What's your name?" he asked.
"You don't need my name," she said.
"How do I call you?"
"I'm here whenever you want me."
"But I want to know," he said.
She touched her ear. "When you like me well enough to take me with you wherever you go, then I'll tell you my name."
Impulsively, he told her what he had told no one else. "I want to leave this place," said Miro. "Can you take me away from Lusitania?"
She at once became coquettish, mocking. "And we only just met! Really, Mr. Ribeira, I'm not that sort of girl."
"Maybe when we get to know each other," Miro said, laughing.
She made a subtle, wonderful transition, and the woman on the screen was a lanky feline, sprawling sensuously on a tree limb. She purred noisily, stretched out a limb, groomed herself. "I can break your neck with a single blow from my paw," she whispered; her tone of voice suggested seduction; her claws promised murder. "When I get you alone, I can bite your throat out with a single kiss."
He laughed. Then he realized that in all this conversation, he had actually forgotten how slurred his speech was. She understood every word. She never said, "What? I didn't get that," or any of the other polite but infuriating things that people said. She understood him without any special effort at all.
"I want to understand everything," said Miro. "I want to know everything and put it all together to see what it means."
