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"I don't even know what ideas Andrew was talking about," said Olhado. "I quit studying physics, I--"
"If I want studies, I'll read books. So let me tell you what we told a very bright Chinese servant girl on the world of Path: Let me know your thoughts, and I'll decide for myself what's useful and what isn't."
"How? You're not a physicist either."
Valentine walked to the computer waiting quietly in the corner. "May I turn this on?"
"Pois nao," he said. Of course.
"Once it's on, Jane will be with us."
"Ender's personal program."
"The computer entity whose soul we're trying to locate."
"Ah," he said. "Maybe you should be telling me things."
"I already know what I know. So start talking. About those ideas you had as a child, and what has become of them since."
Quara had a chip on her shoulder from the moment Miro entered the room. "Don't bother," she said.
"Don't bother what?"
"Don't bother telling me my duty to humanity or to the family--two separate, non-overlapping groups, by the way."
"Is that what I came for?" asked Miro.
"Ela sent you to persuade me to tell her how to castrate the descolada."
Miro tried a little humor. "I'm no biologist. Is that possible?"
"Don't be cute," said Quara. "If you cut out their ability to pass information from one virus to another, it's like cutting out their tongues and their memory and everything that makes them intelligent. If she wants to know this stuff, she can study what I studied. It only took me five years of work to get there."
"There's a fleet coming."
"So you are an emissary."
"And the descolada may figure out how to--"
She interrupted him, finished his sentence. "Circumvent all our strategies to control it, I know."
Miro was annoyed, but he was used to people getting impatient with his slowness of speech and cutting him off. And at least she had guessed what he was driving at. "Any day," he said. "Ela feels time pressure."
"Then she should help me learn to talk to the virus. Persuade it to leave us alone. Make a treaty, like Andrew did with the pequeninos. Instead, she's cut me off from the lab. Well, two can play that game. She cuts me off, I cut her off."
"You were telling secrets to the pequeninos."
"Oh, yes, Mother and Ela, the guardians of truth! They get to decide who knows what. Well, Miro, let me tell you a secret. You don't protect the truth by keeping other people from knowing it."
"I know that," said Miro.
"Mother completely screwed up our family because of her damned secrets. She wouldn't even marry Libo because she was determined to keep a stupid secret, which if he'd known might have saved his life."
"I know," said Miro.
This time he spoke with such vehemence that Quara was taken aback. "Oh, well, I guess that was a secret that bothered you more than it did me. But then you should be on my side in this, Miro. Your life would have been a lot better, all our lives would have been, if Mother had only married Libo and told him all her secrets. He'd
still be alive, probably."
