She sat down in the seat next to him. He swiveled to face her. She, for her part, did not look away. Indeed, she pointedly scanned his body, head to toe, looking him over with an air of cool appraisal. “He said you were tough. He said you had been twisted but not broken.”

“Are you supposed to be my therapist?”

“Are you supposed to be my enemy?”

“Should I be?” asked Miro.

“No more than I should be your therapist. Andrew didn't have us meet so I could heal you. He had us meet so you could help me. If you're not going to, fine. If you are, fine. Just let me make a few things clear. I'm spending every waking moment writing subversive propaganda to try to arouse public sentiment on the Hundred Worlds and in the colonies. I'm trying to turn the people against the fleet that Starways Congress has sent to subdue Lusitania. Your world, not mine, I might add.”

“Your brother's there.” He was not about to let her claim complete altruism.

“Yes, we both have family there. And we both are concerned about keeping the pequeninos from destruction. And we both know that Ender has restored the hive queen on your world, so that there are two alien species that will be destroyed if Starways Congress gets its way. There's a great deal at stake, and I am already doing all that I can possibly do to try to stop that fleet. Now, if spending a few hours with you can help me do it better, it's worth taking time away from my writing in order to talk with you. But I have no intention of wasting my time worrying about whether I'm going to offend you or not. So if you're going to be my adversary, you can sit up here all by yourself and I'll get back to my work.”

“Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew.”

“He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six.”

“Right.”

“And you're the oldest.”

“Yes.”

“That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.”

Miro didn't like hearing this woman leap to conclusions about his mother. “She's nothing like you.”

“Of course not.” She leaned forward in her seat. “Well, have you decided?”

“Decided what?”

“Are we working together or did you just unplug yourself from thirty years of human history for nothing?”

“What do you want from me?”

“Stories, of course. Facts I can get from the computer.”

“Stories about what?”

“You. The piggies. You and the piggies. This whole business with the Lusitania Fleet began with you and the piggies, after all. It was because you interfered with them that–”

“We helped them!”

“Oh, did I use the wrong word again?”

Miro glared at her. But even as he did, he knew that she was right– he was being oversensitive. The word interfered, when used in a scientific context, was almost value-neutral. It merely meant that he had introduced change into the culture he was studying. And if it did have a negative connotation, it was that he had lost his scientific perspective– he had stopped studying the pequeninos and started treating them as friends. Of that he was surely guilty. No, not guilty– he was proud of having made that transition. “Go on,” he said.

“All this began because you broke the law and piggies started growing amaranth.”

“Not anymore.”

“Yes, that's ironic, isn't it? The descolada virus has gotten in and killed every strain of amaranth that your sister developed for them. So your interference was in vain.”

“No it wasn't,” said Miro. “They're learning.”

“Yes, I know. More to the point, they're choosing. What to learn, what to do. You brought them freedom. I approve wholeheartedly of what you decided to do. But my job is to write about you to the people out there in the Hundred Worlds and the colonies, and they won't necessarily see things that way. So what I need from you is the story of how and why you broke the law and interfered with the piggies, and why the government and people of Lusitania rebelled against Congress rather than send you off to be tried and punished for your crimes.”

“Andrew already told you that story.”

“And I've already written about it, in larger terms. Now I need the personal things. I want to be able to let other people know these so-called piggies as people. And you, too. I have to let them know you as a person. If it's possible, it would be nice if I could bring them to like you. Then the Lusitania Fleet will look like what it is– a monstrous overreaction to a threat that never existed.”

“The fleet is xenocide.”

“So I've said in my propaganda,” said Valentine.

He couldn't bear her self-certainty. He couldn't bear her unshakable faith in herself. So he had to contradict her, and the only way he could was to blurt out ideas that he had not yet thought out completely. Ideas that were still only half-formed doubts in his mind. “The fleet is also self-defense.”

It had the desired effect– it stopped her lecture and even made her raise her eyebrows, questioning him. The trouble was, now he had to explain what he meant.

“The descolada,” he said. “It's the most dangerous form of life anywhere.”

“The answer to that is quarantine. Not sending a fleet armed with the M.D. Device, so they have the capacity to turn Lusitania and everybody on it into microscopic interstellar dust.”

“You're so sure you're right?”

“I'm sure that it's wrong for Starways Congress even to contemplate obliterating another sentient species.”

“The piggies can't live without the descolada,” said Miro, “and if the descolada ever spreads to another planet, it will destroy all life there. It will.”

It was a pleasure to see that Valentine was capable of looking puzzled. “But I thought the virus was contained. It was your grandparents who found a way to stop it, to make it dormant in human beings.”

“The descolada adapts,” said Miro. “Jane told me that it's already changed itself a couple of times. My mother and my sister Ela are working on it– trying to stay ahead of the descolada. Sometimes it even looks like the descolada is doing it deliberately. Intelligently. Finding strategies to get around the chemicals we use to contain it and stop it from killing people. It's getting into the Earthborn crops that humans need in order to survive on Lusitania. They have to spray them now. What if the descolada finds a way to get around all our barriers?”

Valentine was silent. No glib answer now. She hadn't faced this question squarely– no one had, except Miro.

“I haven't even told this to Jane,” said Miro. “But what if the fleet is right? What if the only way to save humanity from the descolada is to destroy Lusitania now?”

“No,” said Valentine. “This has nothing to do with the purposes for which Starways Congress sent out the fleet. Their reasons all have to do with interplanetary politics, with showing the colonies who's boss. It has to do with a bureaucracy out of control and a military that–”

“Listen to me!” said Miro. “You said you wanted to hear my stories, listen to this one: It doesn't matter what their reasons are. It doesn't matter if they're a bunch of murderous beasts. I don't care. What matters is– should they blow up Lusitania?”

“What kind of person are you?” asked Valentine. He could hear both awe and loathing in her voice.

“You're the moral philosopher,” said Miro. “You tell me. Are we supposed to love the pequeninos so much that we allow the virus they carry to destroy all of humanity?”

“Of course not. We simply have to find a way to neutralize the descolada.”

“And if we can't?”

“Then we quarantine Lusitania. Even if all the human beings on the planet die– your family and mine– we still don't destroy the pequeninos.”