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"How soon?" asked Miro.
"The fleet should arrive in about fifteen years. A year or less after these two ships get there. That's how I timed your voyage. The order will be sent sometime before. Maybe six months before arrival--which would be about eight hours ship's time before the fleet drops out of lightspeed and staggers down to normal speeds."
"Don't do it," said Miro.
"I haven't decided."
"Yes you have. You've decided to do it."
She said nothing.
"Don't leave me," he said.
"I don't leave my friends if I don't have to," she said. "Some people do, but I don't."
"Just don't," he said again. He was crying. Could she see that, sense it somehow through the jewel in his ear?
"I'll try."
"Find another way. Find another way to stop them. Find some way to put yourself outside the philotic net so they can't kill you."
"That's what Ender said."
"Then do it!"
"I can search for such a way, but who knows if it exists?"
"It has to."
"This is why I wonder sometimes whether I'm alive or not. You living creatures, you think that because you want something very much, it has to happen. That wishing something with all your heart will make it so."
"How can you search for something if you don't believe that it exists?"
"Either I search or I don't," said Jane. "I don't get distracted or bored like humans do. I'll try to think of something else."
"Think of this, too," said Miro. "Think of who you are. Of how your mind works. You can't possibly find a way of saving your life until you understand how you came to life in the first place. And once you understand yourself--"
"Then maybe I can make a copy and store it somewhere."
"Maybe."
"Maybe," she echoed.
But he knew she didn't believe it, and neither did he. She existed in the philotic network of the ansibles; she could store her memories in the network of computers on every world and every ship in space, but there was nowhere that she could put her self, not if it required a network of philotic links.
Unless.
"What about the fathertrees on Lusitania? They communicate philotically, don't they?"
"It's not the same thing," said Jane. "It isn't digital. It isn't coded the way the ansibles are."
"It may not be digital, but the information gets transferred somehow. It works philotically. And the hive queen, too--she communicates with the buggers that way."
"No chance of that," said Jane. "The structure's too simple. Her communication with them isn't a network. They're all connected only to her."
"How do you know it won't work, when you don't even know for sure how you function?"
"All right. I'll think about it."
