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"They intended to live, too," said Miro. "Suicide is a desperate attempt to get rid of unbearable agony. It's not a noble decision to let someone with more value go on living instead of you."
"People make choices like that sometimes," said Val. "It doesn't mean I'm not a real person because I can choose to give my life to someone else. It doesn't mean I don't have any fight in me."
Miro stopped the hovercar, let it settle to the ground. He was on the edge of the pequenino forest nearest to Milagre. He was aware that there were pequeninos working in the field who stopped their labor to watch them. But he didn't care what they saw or what they thought. He took Val by the shoulders and with tears streaming down his cheeks he said, "I don't want you to die. I don't want you to choose to die."
"You did," said Val.
"I chose to live," said Miro. "I chose to leap to the body in which life was possible. Don't you see that I'm only trying to get you and Jane to do what I already did? For a moment there in the starship, there was my old body and there was this new one, looking at each other. Val, I remember both views. Do you understand me? I remember looking at this body and thinking, 'How beautiful, how young, I remember when that was me, who is this now, who is this person, why can't I be this person instead of the cripple I am right now,' I thought that and I remember thinking it, I didn't imagine it later, I didn't dream it, I remember thinking it at the time. But I also remember standing there looking at myself with pity, thinking, 'Poor man, poor broken man, how can he bear to live when he remembers what it was like to be alive?' and then all of a sudden he crumbled into dust, into less than dust, into air, into nothing. I remember watching him die. I don't remember dying because my aiua had already leapt. But I remember both sides."
"Or you remember being your old self until the leap, and your new self after."
"Maybe," said Miro. "But there wasn't even a full second. How could I remember so much from both selves in the same second? I think I kept the memories that were in this body from the split second when my aiua ruled two bodies. I think that if Jane leaps into you, you'll keep all your old memories, and take hers, too. That's what I think."
"Oh, I thought you knew it."
"I do know it," said Miro. "Because anything else is unthinkable and therefore unknown. The reality I live in is a reality in which you can save Jane and Jane can save you."
"You mean you can save us."
"I've already done all I can do," said Miro. "All. I'm done. I asked the Hive Queen. She's thinking about it. She's going to try. She'll have to have your consent. Jane's consent. But it's none of my business now. I'll just be an observer. I'll either watch you die or watch you live." He pulled her close to him and held her. "I want you to live."
Her body in his arms was stiff and unresponsive, and he soon let her go. He pulled away from her.
"Wait," she said. "Wait until Jane has this body, then do whatever she'll let you do with it. But don't touch me again, because I can't bear the touch of a man who wants me dead."
The words were too painful for him to answer. Too painful, really, for him to absorb them. He started the hovercar. It rose a little into the air. He tipped it forward and they flew on, circling the wood until they came to the place where the fathertrees named Human and Rooter marked the old entrance to Milagre. He could feel her presence beside him the way a man struck by lightning might feel the nearness of a power line; without touching it, he tingles with the pain that he knows it carries within it. The damage he had done could not be undone. She was wrong, he did love her, he didn't want her dead, but she lived in a world in which he wanted her extinguished and there was no reconciling it. They could share this ride, they could share the next voyage to another star system, but they would never be in the same world again, and it was too painful to bear, he ached with the knowledge of it but the ache was too deep for him to reach it or even feel it right now. It was there, he knew it was going to tear at him for years to come, but he couldn't touch it now. He didn't need to examine his feelings. He had felt them before, when he lost Ouanda, when his dream of life with her became impossible. He couldn't touch it, couldn't heal it, couldn't even grieve at what he had only just discovered that he wanted and once again couldn't have.
"Aren't you the suffering saint," said Jane in his ear.
"Shut up and go away," Miro subvocalized.
"That doesn't sound like a man who wants to be my lover," said Jane.
"I don't want to be your anything," said Miro. "You don't even trust me enough to tell me what you're up to in our searching of worlds."
"You didn't tell me what you were up to when you went to see the Hive Queen either."
"You knew what I was doing," said Miro.
"No I didn't," said Jane. "I'm very smart--much smarter then you or Ender, and don't you forget it for an instant--but I still can't outguess you meat-creatures with your much-vaunted 'intuitive leaps.' I like how you make a virtue out of your desperate ignorance. You always act irrationally because you don't have enough information for rational action. But I do resent your saying I'm irrational. I never am. Never."
"Right, I'm sure," said Miro silently. "You're right about everything. You always are. Go away."
"I'm gone."
"No you're not," said Miro. "Not till you tell me what Val's and my voyages have actually been about. The Hive Queen said that colonizable worlds were an afterthought."
"Nonsense," said Jane. "We needed more than one world if we were going to be sure to save the two nonhuman species. Redundancy."
"But you send us out again and again."
"Interesting, isn't it?" said Jane.
"She said you were dealing with a worse danger than the Lusitania Fleet."
"How she does go on."
"Tell me," said Miro.
