AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"I suppose I just wanted to die with some kind of splashing sound or cooking smell or something," said Jane. "If I only had a heart. You probably don't know that song."
"We grew up on classic videos," said Miro. "It drowned out a lot of other unpleasantness at home. You've got the brain and the nerve. I think you've got the heart."
"What I don't have is the ruby slippers. I know there's no place like home, but I can't get there," said Jane.
"Because Ender's using her body so intensely?" asked Miro.
"I'm not as set on using Val's body as you were to have me do it," said Jane. "Peter's will do as well. Even Ender's, as long as he's not using it. I'm not actually female. That was merely my choice of identity to get close to Ender. He had problems bonding readily with men. The dilemma I have is that even if Ender would let go of one of these bodies for me to use it, I don't know how to get there. I don't know where my aiua is any more than you do. Can you put your aiua where you want it? Where is it now?"
"But the Hive Queen is trying to find you. She can do that--her people made you."
"Yes, she and her daughters and the fathertrees, they're building some kind of web, but it's never been done before--catching something already alive and leading it into a body that is already owned by someone else's aiua. It's not going to work, I'm going to die, but I'm dammed if I'm going to let those bastards who made the descolada come along after I'm dead and wipe out all the other sentient species I've known. Humans will pull the plug on me, yes, thinking I'm just a computer program run amok, but that doesn't mean I want someone else to pull the plug on humanity. Nor on the hive queens. Nor on the pequeninos. If we're going to stop them, we have to do it before I'm dead. Or at least I have to get you and Val there so you can do something without me."
"If we're there when you die, we'll never come home again."
"Bad luck, eh?"
"So we're a suicide mission."
"Life is a suicide mission, Miro. Check it out--basic philosophy course. You spend your life running out of fuel and when you're finally out, you croak."
"You sound like Mother now," said Miro.
"Oh, no," said Jane. "I'm taking it with good humor. Your mother always thought her doom was tragic."
Miro was readying some retort when Val's voice interrupted his colloquy with Jane.
"I hate it when you do that!" she cried.
"Do what?" said Miro, wondering what she had just been saying before this outburst.
"Tune me out and talk to her."
"To Jane? I always talk to Jane."
"But you used to listen to me sometimes," said Val.
"Well, Val, you used to listen to me, too, but that's all changed now, apparently."
Val flung herself out of her chair and stormed over to loom above him. "Is that how it is? The woman you loved was the quiet one, the shy one, the one who always let you dominate every conversation. Now that I'm excited, now that I feel like I'm really myself, well, that's not the woman you wanted, is that it?"
"It's not about preferring quiet women or--"
"No, we couldn't admit to anything so recidivist as that, could we! No, we have to proclaim ourselves to be perfectly virtuous and--"
Miro rose to his feet--not easy, with her so close to his chair--and shouted right back in her face. "It's about being able to finish a sentence now and then!"
"And how many of my sentences did you--"
"Right, turn it right back on--"
"You wanted to have me dispossessed from my own life and put somebody else in--"
"Oh, is that what this is about? Well, be relieved, Val, Jane says--"
"Jane says, Jane says! You said you loved me, but no woman can compete with some bitch that's always there in your ear, hanging on every word you say and--"
"Now you sound like my mother!" shouted Miro. "Nossa Senhora, I don't know why Ender followed her into the monastery, she was always griping about how he loved Jane more than he loved her--"
