“Why?” asked Master Han.

“Because I can never go back to my old life,” she answered. “I know too much now about the world and the universe, about Congress and the gods. I would have the taste of poison in my mouth all the days of my life, if I went back home and pretended to be what I was before.”

Master Han nodded gravely, but then he smiled, and soon he laughed.

“Why are you laughing at me, Master Han?”

“I'm laughing because I think that you never were what you used to be.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think you were always pretending. Maybe you even fooled yourself. But one thing is certain. You were never an ordinary girl, and you could never have led an ordinary life.”

Wang-mu shrugged. “The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven. Maybe I could have been content. Maybe not.”

“So here we are together, the three of us.”

Only then did Wang-mu turn to see that they were not alone. In the air above the display she saw the face of Jane, who smiled at her.

“I'm glad you came back,” said Jane.

For a moment, Jane's presence here caused Wang-mu to leap to a hopeful conclusion. “Then you aren't dead! You've been spared!”

“It was never Qing-jao's plan for me to be dead already,” answered Jane. “Her plan to destroy me is proceeding nicely, and I will no doubt die on schedule.”

“Why do you come to this house, then,” asked Wang-mu, “when it was here that your death was set in motion?”

“I have a lot of things to accomplish before I die,” said Jane, “including the faint possibility of discovering a way to survive. It happens that the world of Path contains many thousands of people who are much more intelligent, on average, than the rest of humanity.”

“Only because of Congress's genetic manipulation,” said Master Han.

“True,” said Jane. “The godspoken of Path are, properly speaking, not even human anymore. You're another species, created and enslaved by Congress to give them an advantage over the rest of humanity. It happens, though, that a single member of that new species is somewhat free of Congress.”

“This is freedom?” said Master Han. “Even now, my hunger to purify myself is almost irresistible.”

“Then don't resist it,” said Jane. “I can talk to you while you contort yourself.”

Almost at once, Master Han began to fling out his arms and twist them in the air in his ritual of purification. Wang-mu turned her face away.

“Don't do that,” said Master Han. “Don't hide your face from me. I can't be ashamed to show this to you. I'm a cripple, that's all; if I had lost a leg, my closest friends would not be afraid to see the stump.”

Wang-mu saw the wisdom in his words, and did not hide her face from his affliction.

“As I was saying,” said Jane, “it happens that a single member of this new species is somewhat free of Congress. I hope to enlist your help in the works I'm trying to accomplish in the few months left to me.”

“I'll do anything I can,” said Master Han.

“And if I can help, I will,” said Wang-mu. Only after she said it did she realize how ridiculous it was for her to offer such a thing. Master Han was one of the godspoken, one of those with superior intellectual abilities. She was only an uneducated specimen of ordinary humanity, with nothing to offer.

And yet neither of them mocked her offer, and Jane accepted it graciously. Such a kindness proved once again to Wang-mu that Jane had to be a living thing, not just a simulation.

“Let me tell you the problems that I hope to resolve.”

They listened.

“As you know, my dearest friends are on the planet Lusitania. They are threatened by the Lusitania Fleet. I am very interested in stopping that fleet from causing any irrevocable harm.”

“By now I'm sure they've already been given the order to use the Little Doctor,” said Master Han.

“Oh, yes, I know they have. My concern is to stop that order from having the effect of destroying not only the humans of Lusitania, but two other raman species as well.” Then Jane told them of the hive queen, and how it came to be that buggers once again lived in the universe. “The hive queen is already building starships, pushing herself to the limit to accomplish as much as she can before the fleet arrives. But there's no chance that she can build enough to save more than a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of Lusitania. The hive queen can leave, or send another queen who shares all her memories, and it matters little to her whether her workers go with her or not. But the pequeninos and the humans are not so self-contained. I'd like to save them all. Especially because my dearest friends, a particular speaker for the dead and a young man suffering from brain damage, would refuse to leave Lusitania unless every other human and pequenino could be saved.”

“Are they heroes, then?” asked Master Han.

“Each has proved it several times in the past,” said Jane.

“I wasn't sure if heroes still existed in the human race.”

Si Wang-mu did not speak what was in her heart: that Master Han himself was such a hero.

“I am searching for every possibility,” said Jane. “But it all comes down to an impossibility, or so humankind has believed for more than three thousand years. If we could build a starship that traveled faster than light, that traveled as quickly as the messages of the ansible pass from world to world, then even if the hive queen can build only a dozen starships, they could easily shuttle all the inhabitants of Lusitania to other planets before the Lusitania Fleet arrives.”

“If you could actually build such a starship,” said Han Fei-tzu, “you could create a fleet of your own that could attack the Lusitania Fleet and destroy it before it could harm anyone.”

“Ah, but that is impossible,” said Jane.

“You can conceive of faster-than-light travel, and yet you can't imagine destroying the Lusitania Fleet?”

“Oh, I can imagine it,” said Jane. “But the hive queen wouldn't build it. She has told Andrew– my friend, the Speaker for the Dead–”

“Valentine's brother,” said Wang-mu. “He also lives?”

“The hive queen has told him that she will never build a weapon for any reason.”

“Even to save her own species?”

“She'll have the single starship she needs to get offplanet, and the others will also have enough starships to save their species. She's content with that. There's no need to kill anybody.”

“But if Congress has its way, millions will be killed!”

“Then that is their responsibility,” said Jane. “At least that's what Andrew tells me she answers whenever he raises that point.”

“What kind of strange moral reasoning is this?”

“You forget that she only recently discovered the existence of other intelligent life, and she came perilously close to destroying it. Then that other intelligent life almost destroyed her. But it was her own near brush with committing the crime of xenocide that has had the greater effect on her moral reasoning. She can't stop other species from such things, but she can be certain that she doesn't do it herself. She will only kill when that's the only hope she has of saving the existence of her species. And since she has another hope, she won't build a warship.”

“Faster-than-light travel,” said Master Han. “Is that your only hope?”

“The only one I can think of that has a glimmer of possibility. At least we know that something in the universe moves faster than light– information is passed down the philotic ray from one ansible to another with no detectable passage of time. A bright young physicist on Lusitania who happens to be locked in jail at the present time is spending his days and nights working on this problem. I perform all his calculations and simulations for him. At this very moment he is testing a hypothesis about the nature of philotes by using a model so complex that in order to run the program I'm stealing time from the computers of almost a thousand different universities. There's hope.”