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myself into it, trying to be excited about it. But the truth is it's utterly
routine. Important, but routine, Miro."
Miro nodded. "True enough. Jane finds the worlds. We just process them."
"And there are enough worlds now. Enough colonies. Two dozen -- pequeninos and
hive queens are not going to die out now, even if Lusitania is destroyed. The
bottleneck isn't the number of worlds, it's the number of starships. So all our
labor -- it isn't engaging Ender's attention anymore. And my body knows it. My
body knows it isn't needed."
She reached up and took a large hank of her hair into her fist, and pulled --
not hard, but lightly -- and it came away easily in her hand. A great gout of
hair, with not a sign of any pain at its going. She let the hair drop onto the
table. It lay there like a dismembered limb, grotesque, impossible. "I think,"
she whispered, "that if I'm not careful, I could do the same with my fingers.
It's slower, but gradually I will turn into dust just as your old body did,
Miro. Because he isn't interested in me. Peter is solving mysteries and fighting
political wars off on some world somewhere. Ender is struggling to hold on to
the woman he loves. But I ..."
In that moment, as the hair torn from her head revealed the depth of her misery,
her loneliness, her self-rejections, Miro realized what he had not let himself
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think of until now: that in all the weeks they had traveled world to world
together, he had come to love her, and her unhappiness hurt him as if it were
his own. And perhaps it was his own, his memory of his own self-loathing. But
whatever the reason, it still felt like something deeper than mere compassion to
him. It was a kind of desire. Yes, it was a kind of love. If this beautiful
young woman, this wise and intelligent and clever young woman was rejected by
her own inmost heart, then Miro's heart had room enough to take her in. If Ender
will not be yourself, let me! he cried silently, knowing as he formed the
thought for the first time that he had felt this way for days, for weeks,
without realizing it; yet also knowing that he could not be to her what Ender
was.
Still, couldn't love do for Young Val what it was doing for Ender himself?
Couldn't that engage enough of his attention to keep her alive? To strengthen
her?
Miro reached out and gathered up her disembodied hair, twined it around his
fingers, and then slid the looping locks into the pocket of his robe. "I don't
want you to fade away," he said. Bold words for him.
Young Val looked at him oddly. "I thought the great love of your life was
Ouanda."
"She's a middle-aged woman now," said Miro. "Married and happy, with a family.
It would be sad if the great love of my life were a woman who doesn't exist
anymore, and even if she did she wouldn't want me."
"It's sweet of you to offer," said Young Val. "But I don't think we can fool
Ender into caring about my life by pretending to fall in love."
Her words stabbed Miro to the heart, because she had so easily seen how much of
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his self-declaration came from pity. Yet not all of it came from there; most of
it was already seething just under the level of consciousness, just waiting its
chance to come out. "I wasn't thinking of fooling anyone," said Miro. Except
myself, he thought. Because Young Val could not possibly love me. She is, after
all, not really a woman. She's Ender.
But that was absurd. Her body was a woman's body. And where did the choice of
loves come from, if not the body? Was there something male or female in the
aiúa? Before it became master of flesh and bone, was it manly or womanly? And if
so, would that mean that the aiúas composing atoms and molecules, rocks and
stars and light and wind, that all of those were neatly sorted into boys and
girls? Nonsense. Ender's aiúa could be a woman, could love like a woman as
easily as it now loved, in a man's body and in a man's ways, Miro's own mother.
It wasn't any lack in Young Val that made her look at him with such pity. It was
a lack in him. Even with his body healed, he was not a man that a woman -- or at
least this woman, at the moment the most desirable of all women -- could love,
or wish to love, or hope to win.
"I shouldn't have come here," he murmured. He pushed away from the table and
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