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"And maybe there are other kinships in the universe that you know nothing of till now," said the Miro-image. "Maybe there's a kind of life you haven't met."
Valentine, watching Miro, saw that he seemed worried. Agitated. As if he didn't like what the Miro-image was doing now.
"What kind of life are you talking about?" asked Jakt.
"There's a physical phenomenon in the universe, a very common one, that is completely unexplained, and yet everyone takes it for granted and no one has seriously investigated why and how it happens. This is it: None of the ansible connections has ever broken."
"Nonsense," said Jakt. "One of the ansibles on Trondheim was out of service for six months last year--it doesn't happen often, but it happens."
Again Miro's lips and jaw were motionless; again the image answered immediately. Clearly he was not controlling it now. "I didn't say that the ansibles never break down. I said that the connections--the philotic twining between the parts of a split meson--have never broken. The machinery of the ansible can break down, the software can get corrupted, but never has a meson fragment within an ansible made the shift to allow its philotic ray to entwine with another local meson or even with the nearby planet."
"The magnetic field suspends the fragment, of course," said Jakt.
"Split mesons don't endure long enough in nature for us to know how they naturally act," said Valentine.
"I know all the standard answers," said the image. "All nonsense. All the kind of answers parents give their children when they don't know the truth and don't want to bother finding out. People still treat the ansibles like magic. Everybody's glad enough that the ansibles keep on working; if they tried to figure out why, the magic might go out of it and then the ansibles would stop."
"Nobody feels that way," said Valentine.
"They all do," said the image. "Even if it took hundreds of years, or a thousand years, or three thousand years, one of those connections should have broken by now. One of those meson fragments should have shifted its philotic ray--but they never have."
"Why?" asked Miro.
Valentine assumed at first that Miro was asking a rhetorical question. But no--he was looking at the image just like the rest of them, asking it to tell him why.
"I thought this program was reporting your speculations," said Valentine.
"It was," said Miro. "But not now."
"What if there's a being who lives among the philotic connections between ansibles?" asked the image.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" asked Miro. Again he was speaking to the image on the screen.
And the image on the screen changed, to the face of a young woman, one that Valentine had never seen before.
"What if there's a being who dwells in the web of philotic rays connecting the ansibles on every world and every starship in the human universe? What if she is composed of those philotic connections? What if her thoughts take place in the spin and vibration of the split pairs? What if her memories are stored in the computers of every world and every ship?"
"Who are you?" asked Valentine, speaking directly to the image.
"Maybe I'm the one who keeps all those philotic connections alive, ansible to ansible. Maybe I'm a new kind of organism, one that doesn't twine rays together, but instead keeps them twined to each other so that they never break apart. And if that's true, then if those connections ever broke, if the ansibles ever stopped moving--if the ansibles ever fell silent, then I would die."
"Who are you?" asked Valentine again.
"Valentine, I'd like you to meet Jane," said Miro. "Ender's friend. And mine."
"Jane."
So Jane wasn't the code name of a subversive group within the Starways Congress bureaucracy. Jane was a computer program, a piece of software.
No. If what she had just suggested was true, then Jane was more than a program. She was a being who dwelt in the web of philotic rays, who stored her memories in the computers of every world. If she was right, then the philotic web--the network of crisscrossing philotic rays that connected ansible to ansible on every world--was her body, her substance. And the philotic links continued working with never a breakdown because she willed it so.
"So now I ask the great Demosthenes," said Jane. "Am I raman or varelse? Am I alive at all? I need your answer, because I think I can stop the Lusitania Fleet. But before I do it, I have to know: Is it a cause worth dying for?"
Jane's words cut Miro to the heart. She could stop the fleet--he could see that at once. Congress had sent the M.D. Device with several ships of the fleet, but they had not yet sent the order to use it. They couldn't send the order without Jane knowing it beforehand, and with her complete penetration of all the ansible communications, she could intercept the order before it was sent.
The trouble was that she couldn't do it without Congress realizing that she existed--or at least that something was wrong. If the fleet didn't confirm the order, it would simply be sent again, and again, and again. The more she blocked the messages, the clearer it would be to Congress that someone had an impossible degree of control over the ansible computers.
She might avoid this by sending a counterfeit confirmation, but then she would have to monitor all the communications between the ships of the fleet, and between the fleet and all planetside stations, in order to keep up the pretense that the fleet knew something about the kill order. Despite Jane's enormous abilities, this would soon be beyond her--she could pay some degree of attention to hundreds, even thousands of things at a time, but it didn't take Miro long to realize that there was no way she could handle all the monitoring and alterations this would take, even if she did nothing else.
