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"Can I visit you?"
"Once a month," she said. Her answer was so quick that he knew she had already considered the question and reached a decision that she had no intention of altering.
"Then once a month I'll visit you," he said.
"Until you're ready to join me," she said.
"Until you're ready to return to me," he answered.
But he knew that she would never bend. Novinha was not a person who could easily change her mind. She had set the bounds of his future.
He should have been resentful, angry. He should have blustered about getting his freedom from a marriage to a woman who refused him. But he couldn't think what he might want his freedom for. Nothing is in my hands now, he realized. No part of the future depends on me. My work, such as it is, is done, and now my only influence on the future is what my children do--such as they are: the monster Peter, the impossibly perfect child Val.
And Miro, Grego, Quara, Ela, Olhado--aren't they my children, too? Can't I also claim to have helped create them, even if they came from Libo's love and Novinha's body, years before I even arrived in this place?
It was full dark when he found young Val, though he couldn't understand why he was even looking for her. She was in Olhado's house, with Plikt; but while Plikt leaned against a shadowed wall, her face inscrutable, young Val was among Olhado's children, playing with them.
Of course she's playing with them, thought Ender. She's still a child herself, however much experience she might have had thrust upon her out of my memories.
But as he stood in the doorway, watching, he realized that she wasn't playing equally with all the children. It was Nimbo who really had her attention. The boy who had been burned, in more ways than one, the night of the mob. The game the children played was simple enough, but it kept them from talking to each other. Still, there was eloquent conversation between Nimbo and young Val. Her smile toward him was warm, not in the manner of a woman encouraging a lover, but rather as a sister gives her brother the silent message of love, of confidence, of trust.
She's healing him, thought Ender. Just as Valentine, so many years ago, healed me. Not with words. Just with her company.
Could I have created her with even that ability intact? Was there that much truth and power in my dream of her? Then maybe Peter also has everything within him that my real brother had--all that was dangerous and terrible, but also that which created a new order.
Try as he might, Ender couldn't get himself to believe that story. Young Val might have healing in her eyes, but Peter had none of that in him. His was the face that, years before, Ender had seen looking back at him from a mirror in the Fantasy Game, in a terrible room where he died again and again before he could finally embrace the element of Peter within himself and go on.
I embraced Peter and destroyed a whole people. I took him into myself and committed xenocide. I thought, in all these years since then, that I had purged him. That he was gone. But he'll never leave me.
The idea of withdrawing from the world and entering into the order of the Children of the Mind of Christ--there was much to attract him in that. Perhaps there, Novinha and he together could purge themselves of the demons that had dwelt inside them all these years. Novinha has never been so much at peace, thought Ender, as she is tonight.
Young Val noticed him, came to him as he stood in the doorway.
"Why are you here?" she said.
"Looking for you," he said.
"Plikt and I are spending the night with Olhado's family," she said. She glanced at Nimbo and smiled. The boy grinned foolishly.
"Jane says that you're going with the starship," Ender said softly.
"If Peter can hold Jane within himself, so can I," she answered. "Miro is going with me. To find habitable worlds."
"Only if you want to," said Ender.
"Don't be foolish," she said. "Since when have you done only what you want to do? I'll do what must be done, that only I can do."
He nodded.
"Is that all you came for?" she asked.
He nodded again. "I guess," he said.
"Or did you come because you wish that you could be the child you were when you last saw a girl with this face?"
The words stung--far worse than when Peter guessed what was in his heart. Her compassion was far more painful than his contempt.
She must have seen the expression of pain on his face, and misunderstood it. He was relieved that she was capable of misunderstanding. I do have some privacy left.
