“She had a lot of grief as a child.”

“She lost everybody she ever loved, one by one,” said Miro.

“And I let her believe that she had lost me, too.”

“What were you going to do, cut Jane off? You tried that once, remember?”

“The difference is that now she has you. The whole time you were gone, I could have let Jane go, because she had you. I could have talked to her less, asked her to back off. She would have forgiven me.”

“Maybe,” said Miro. “But you didn't.”

“Because I didn't want to,” said Ender. “Because I didn't want to let her go. Because I thought I could keep that old friendship and still be a good husband to my wife.”

“It wasn't just Jane,” said Miro. “It was Valentine, too.”

“I suppose,” said Ender. “So what do I do? Go join up with the Filhos until the fleet gets here and blows us all to hell?”

“You do what I do,” said Miro.

“What's that?”

“You take a breath. You let it out. Then you take another.”

Ender thought about it for a moment. “I can do that. I've been doing that since I was little.”

Just a moment longer, Miro's hand on his shoulder. This is why I should have had a son of my own, thought Ender. To lean on me when he was small, and then for me to lean on when I'm old. But I never had a child from my own seed. I'm like old Marcao, Novinha's first husband. Surrounded by these children and knowing they're not my own. The difference is that Miro is my friend, not my enemy. And that's something. I may have been a bad husband, but I can still make and keep a friend.

“Stop pitying yourself and get back to work.” It was Jane, speaking in his ear, and she had waited almost long enough before speaking, almost long enough that he was ready to have her tease him. Almost but not quite, and so he resented her intrusion. Resented knowing that she had been listening and watching all along.

“Now you're mad,” she said.

You don't know what I'm feeling, thought Ender. You can't know. Because you're not human.

“You think I don't know what you're feeling,” said Jane.

He felt a moment of vertigo, because for a moment it seemed to him that she had been listening to something far deeper than the conversation.

“But I lost you once, too.”

Ender subvocalized: “I came back.”

“Never completely,” said Jane. “Never like it was before. So you just take a couple of those self-pitying little tears on your cheeks and count them as if they were mine. Just to even up the score.”

“I don't know why I bother trying to save your life,” said Ender silently.

“Me neither,” said Jane. “I keep telling you it's a waste of time.”

Ender turned back to the terminal. Miro stayed beside him, watching the display as it simulated the ansible network. Ender had no idea what Jane was saying to Miro– though he was sure that she was saying something, since he had long ago figured out that Jane was capable of carrying on many conversations at once. He couldn't help it– it did bother him a little that Jane had every bit as close a relationship with Miro as with him.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl genius with OCD on a planet I never heard of and how will I live without Jane when she's gone?

Ender zoomed in on the display. In and in and in, until the display showed only a few parsecs in each dimension. Now the simulation was modeling a small portion of the network– the crisscrossing of only a half-dozen philotic rays in deep space. Now, instead of looking like an involved, tightlywoven fabric, the philotic rays looked like random lines passing millions of kilometers from each other.

“They never touch,” said Miro.

No, they never do. It's something that Ender had never realized. In his mind, the galaxy was flat, the way the starmaps always showed it, a topdown view of the section of the spiral arm of the galaxy where humans had spread out from Earth. But it wasn't flat. No two stars were ever exactly in the same plane as any other two stars. The philotic rays connecting starships and planets and satellites in perfectly straight lines, ansible to ansible– they seemed to intersect when you saw them on a flat map, but in this three-dimensional close-up in the computer display, it was obvious that they never touched at all.

“How can she live in that?” asked Ender. “How can she possibly exist in that when there's no connection between those lines except at the endpoints?”

“So– maybe she doesn't. Maybe she lives in the sum of the computer programs at every terminal.”

“In which case she could back herself up into all the computers and then–”

“And then nothing. She could never put herself back together because they're only using clean computers to run the ansibles.”

“They can't keep that up forever,” said Ender. “It's too important for computers on different planets to be able to talk to each other. Congress will find out pretty soon that there aren't enough human beings in existence to key in by hand, in a year, the amount of information computers have to send to each other by ansible every hour.”

“So she just hides? Waits? Sneaks in and restores herself when she sees a chance five or ten years from now?”

“If that's all she is– a collection of programs.”

“There has to be more to her than that,” said Miro.

“Why?”

“Because if she's nothing more than a collection of programs, even self-writing and self-revising programs, ultimately she was created by some programmer or group of programmers somewhere. In which case she's just acting out the program that was forced on her from the beginning. She has no free will. She's a puppet. Not a person.”

“Well, when it comes to that, maybe you're defining free will too narrowly,” said Ender. “Aren't human beings the same way, programmed by our genes and our environment?”

“No,” said Miro.

“What else, then?”

“Our philotic connections say that we aren't. Because we're capable of connecting with each other by act of will, which no other form of life on Earth can do. There's something we have, something we are, that wasn't caused by anything else.”

“What, our soul?”

“Not even that,” said Miro. “Because the priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make. God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal– there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.”

“So– as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to.”

“Bobagem,” said Miro.

“Well, I admit that it's a philosophy with no practical value,” said Ender. “Valentine once explained it to me this way. Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you.”