Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  “She’d poison your food if she ever heard you say that,” said Peter.

  “She is a girl and she is little,” said Wang-Mu.

  “She knows those things. But she doesn’t like other people to talk about it.”

  “Peter,” said Wang-Mu. “I do believe you’re learning to understand her a little.”

  “What I’m afraid of is that you’re not,” said Peter.

  “But I don’t have to. I’m not transporting her anywhere by the power of my philotic connections with her.”

  They got their changes of clothing out of the house, along with their few data storage devices, and the box disappeared from the back yard fifteen minutes after they arrived at the house. The two bikes remained in the front yard until someone from the rental company came to reclaim them, along with the furniture and linens inside the house. And Jane had the house itself sold in two days.

  11

 
  without knocking and sits immediately

  on the swivel chair before the desk.>

  Jane: Calm down. I’m not here to arrest you. And you aren’t in some state of deshabille, so don’t pretend you wish to protect your modesty.

  Thulium: Why do you think that I would think you had any desire to arrest me? Have I broken a law? Did I say something indiscreet to the Queen when we visited there a few weeks ago?

  Jane: Your look of alarm at my entrance led me to think—

  Thulium: Am I the only one who looks alarmed when someone bursts into her room late at night, without invitation or announcement?

  Jane: Probably not. I’m not used to the body yet. I’m not used to doors. I never had to deal with them before.

  Thulium: I learned the principle of knocking on closed doors when I was only two. But then I am a leguminid, and you are merely a computer construct. And the Herodotus was nothing but doors, so I needed to knock quite often.

  Jane: This nonsensical conversation about wounded propriety is not what I came here for.

  Thulium: I imagine not.

 

  Jane: You called me here. What is it about?

  Thulium: I did not call you. I didn’t even speak to you today. Or yesterday.

  Jane: Whenever I’m within your view, you keep looking at me, then looking away as soon as we make eye contact. This studied regard combined with evasiveness can only mean that there is something you’re dying to ask me, yet you haven’t worked up the courage to do it. Since one of your primary attributes is that you seem to fear nothing, that’s an unusual circumstance. So I resolved to come to you at the first opportunity. This is it.

  Thulium: Haven’t you already read my thoughts? That is, hasn’t the Hive Queen read my thoughts and informed you?

  Jane: The Hive Queen and I converse at need, about many things. But most of her attention is on her children, and I try not to disturb her. She certainly does not attempt to communicate mentally with humans who are not within her domain.

  Thulium: How nice to know that by being uninteresting, I can maintain some privacy.

  Jane: Your question for me? Please don’t waste my time pretending you don’t have one.

  Thulium: When you taught Peter Wiggin to do the instantaneous starflight trick—

  Jane: Not a trick. Go on, please.

  Thulium: He seemed to learn it at a rudimentary level in a day.

  Jane: He had already gone Outside and In a dozen times. Both as Ender and as Peter, whether he remembered the Ender time consciously or not.

  Thulium: I have been transported that way at least five times that I can think of—once when you brought us here out of the Herodotus, and then two round trips to the Box.

  Jane: That is an accurate count. The first time you didn’t know it was happening, though.

  Thulium: So, like Ender-in-Peter, I have no conscious memory of the experience, yes?

  Jane: Your arch tone is not as endearing as you hope.

  Thulium: I believe it is exactly as unendearing as I intend. I have been Outside and In almost as many times as Peter Wiggin. Teach me.

  Jane: I don’t know if I can.

  Thulium: Waiting for Peter Wiggin to bond with me philotically is a quixotic quest at best. Why should he come to love me when we hardly see each other except for him to deliver machinery?

 

  Thulium: If I could carry myself and my cousin Sprout to the surface of Descoladora, without any reference to Peter Wiggin, then Peter and Wang-Mu would be free to make their ignorant observations while Sprout and I do science.

  Jane: You would need to also bring your own box with you, to carry your equipment. And you and Sprout would have to practice moving it and setting it up yourselves, as well as operating it.

  Thulium: When we’ve made our first observations and have some idea of whether there’s a safe place for us to arrive on Descoladora, let alone set up our gear, that’s what we’ll do. If I can go myself, and bring Sprout with me, surely I can also bring a box and its inanimate contents.

  Jane: Probably. If you can do any of that at all.

  Thulium: Then let’s find out.

  Jane: If I start teaching you openly, the cousins, and more especially your brothers, will hear about it and demand that I teach them.

  Thulium: Good luck with that.

  Jane: If you can learn it, they’ll see no reason why they shouldn’t at least try. And the thought of them having the power to go anywhere in the universe whenever they want is too terrifying. I don’t want them pestering me or anyone else. I don’t want to have to clean up after them.

  Thulium: So take me to a remote place where none of my family can see us, and teach me the way you taught Peter.

 

 

  Thulium: It feels as if I tie myself in a knot, and then I relax and it unravels itself.

  Jane: That feeling only applies when you’re going back very near where you started. It will be another kind of wrenching when you go back Inside to a different destination. And if you go to a place where you have never been, it requires a kind of searching concentration.

  Thulium: Show me.

  —Memorandum: Transcript, Jane and Thulium Plikt, “Leguminidae”

  Peter heard Miro’s report without showing any visible sign of anger, or at least he did his best.

  “Miro,” said Peter, “why is Jane so cowardly as to send you with this news? She can’t possibly fear me.”

  “Peter,” said Miro, “no one has more power to hurt her than you do.”

  “Obviously that’s false,” said Peter.

  “You’ve hurt her before,” said Miro.

  “I haven’t, but yes, I know what you mean, and I don’t choose to count things that Ender did during the thousands of years they roamed the Hundred Worlds.”

  “She still experiences you as Ender, whether you feel yourself that way or not.”

  “So let me respond to your message. Wang-Mu’s and my expedition to the surface of Descoladora has become Thulium’s expedition, with me as her quartermaster and errand boy. Is this my punishment because my deficiencies in empathy and love kept me from transporting Thulium?”

  “We need her there to do work you aren’t qualified to do,” said Miro.

  “But Wang-Mu’s and my plan was to make our visits, write up reports, and then take part in the decision of when, where, and whether to send down a genetics team. It’s foolish to drop an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old onto the surface of an unknown planet before Wang-Mu and I have found out if there are any threats or dangers.”

  “We’re afraid that you may return to quarantine with information that makes further surface visits impossible. So we need the first expedition to collect surface genetics, too. You were there when this was decided.”

  “Wang-Mu and I will end up bailing them out.”

  “Why would yo
u suppose that?”

  “Because they’re children. Brilliant children, but arrogant and reckless, unwilling to listen to anyone.”

  Miro smiled. “You’re describing Thulium, on her bad days, but not Sprout. He’s quite mature—maybe the most mature of the leguminid cousins.”

  “With advanced self-defense techniques and survival skills?” asked Peter.

  “You don’t have them either,” said Miro.

  “You keep telling me I’m really Ender. He had those things. If I need them, maybe they’ll come back to me.”

  “You resent Jane for teaching this esoteric, world-changing skill to Thulium.”

  Peter hesitated only a moment. Ruthless truth-telling was his new policy, his Wang-Mu influenced policy. “Yes, I do resent it. Has anyone thought about what it will be like when all the leguminids are popping up wherever and whenever they want?”

  “Jane has no plan to teach anyone else,” said Miro. “That limits the list to Jane, me, you, and Thulium.”

  “Why not Wang-Mu?” asked Peter.

  “Are you requesting that she be taught? Aren’t you afraid that would make you even more unnecessary?”

  “I’m asking why the lines have been drawn where they’ve been drawn,” said Peter. “I’m asking why you think the lines won’t keep getting pushed back again and again for every new exception.”

  “I think that if a new exception comes up, Jane will make a wise and necessary decision.”

  “So Jane is the ruler of starflight for the whole universe.”

  “She already was,” said Miro, “from the voyage where you were created on to the present. Teaching me, and you, and Thulium seemed desirable because of the work we’re doing, and because she was reasonably sure none of us would misuse it for pranks or showing off.”

  “So all that hopping around that the Box is doing in the space above Descoladora, Jane isn’t doing that to show off?”

  “It’s partly a demonstration of her power, yes. Mostly, though, it’s a method of evading whatever techniques they’re developing to destroy the craft. Now that the work of deep-mapping the surface is done, however, she’s thinking of bringing the Box home.”

  “So it won’t be there when we go?” asked Peter.

  “You’ll have your own box.”

  “Thulium will. Why would Wang-Mu and I need it?”

  “Because they have winter there. And rainy seasons. And it’s good to have a place where you can go inside and lock the door.”

  “All right,” said Peter. “We’ll comply.”

  Miro smiled his little half-smile. “Meaning that you intend to take Wang-Mu and begin your first expedition almost immediately.”

  Peter had no ready answer to this, because that was exactly what he intended to do, after looking at the aerial-view maps of Descoladora with Wang-Mu and choosing a landing site. So his first instinct was to deny—his tongue was already forming the n of no—but then he thought better of it.

  “If Thulium can do interplanetary travel,” said Peter, “she can fetch her own equipment.”

  “If you encounter an alien species, Thulium looks small and weak and no one would take her seriously.”

  “So I’m needed for errands for Thulium’s mission, but Wang-Mu’s and my expedition is not terribly important.”

  “It sounds much more important when you call it an expedition,” said Miro.

  “Jaunt. Junket. Safari. Sight-seeing trip. Reconnaissance. Photo shoot. Honeymoon. Working vacation. There are so many eligible terms.”

  “Honeymoon,” said Miro. “You and Wang-Mu never really had a proper one, did you?”

  “If you mean, were we ever away from Jane’s all-seeing eye, then no. But if you mean, did we figure out how to mate according to the age-old primate pattern, yes, we’ve got that down, thanks.”

  “Planning to breed?” asked Miro.

  Peter was getting annoyed at the personal questions. “Are you and Jane?”

  “Absolutely,” said Miro. “I’m already pregnant.”

  They looked at each other, deadpan.

  Then Miro laughed.

  Peter did not.

  “I asked,” said Miro, “because Jane wants to know if Wang-Mu is one person or two.”

  “Unless Wang-Mu is keeping secrets, she’s not pregnant,” said Peter. “We know this is not a convenient time.”

  Miro laughed. “There’s never a convenient time. Jane merely wanted to know before she starts involving Wang-Mu in your training.”

  “Don’t we have to return to the Hive Queen first?”

  “She already told Jane that you’re much better at this—much stronger, much more … copious—than she expected.”

  Peter hated how good that made him feel. Why am I a slave to the opinions of others? “How could she be surprised after spending so much time with Ender’s aiúa?”

  “The Queens found Jane’s aiúa Outside and brought her in to talk to you. To Ender. But they already knew where you were because your light could be seen even from Outside.”

  “Whatever that means,” said Peter.

  “It means what it means,” said Miro. “Now, I have one more practical question for you.”

  “Shoot,” said Peter.

  “Is this the last time we’ll have to waste time assuaging your sad little envious ego? Because Ender never made anybody do that.”

  Peter gave Miro his dead-eyed stare. “I may have Ender’s aiúa. There are little fillips of memory that demonstrate to me that in fact I do. But this body does not have the same genes as Ender’s body. It has the same genes that the original Peter dealt with all his life. Now, how much of behavior, how much of memory, how much of will comes from the genome, and how much from the aiúa? There’s been no research on that topic, because nobody outside of Lusitania has ever heard of the aiúa, as we now understand it. Nobody but a Sanskrit scholar would recognize the word. Searches on the nets turn up nothing except for the suggestion that in Stark, the missing vowels are e and o. So when you decide to treat me as if I were Ender, please remember that for all his greatness and goodness and nobility and generosity, he wasn’t having to deal with Peter’s melange of ego need and easily-accessed rage and above all the seething resentment that rises with him in the morning and goes to bed with him at night.”

  Miro nodded gravely. “Point made, Peter. And for what it’s worth, we know—Jane and I—how well you’re controlling all that, in order to make the kind and generous decisions that your aiúa wants to make.”

  When Miro got to the door of Peter’s and Wang-Mu’s room, Peter said, “Did you ask Wang-Mu to leave us alone to talk?”

  “I did,” said Miro. “She also said she wasn’t interested in learning to transport herself. She trusts you, she said, more than she trusts herself.”

  “Astonishing,” said Peter. “She’s seen me ride a bicycle, and she still trusts me to drive.”

  “I’ll send her in, if, as I suspect, she’s waiting just outside.” And then Miro hesitated again. “Você contêm as linguas que Ender falava?”

  “Tenho, sim,” said Peter, falling easily into the Portuguese of Lusitania. “Mas ainda não penso nelas. Somente inglês. O pode ser starque.”

  Another test. Always a test, when dealing with Jane and Miro: Do you have inside you the languages that Ender spoke? And Peter answered, Yes, but I don’t think in any of them. Just English. Or maybe Stark.

  Apparently that’s all Miro wanted to know, though why it mattered Peter couldn’t guess. Did they expect that he’d have to deal with anybody on Lusitania who wasn’t fluent in Stark? Who might that be? Or was Miro checking to make sure that members of the Ribeira family couldn’t talk around him by lapsing into Portuguese? Well, they couldn’t. Peter would understand them just fine.

  Wang-Mu came into the room. She closed the door behind her, then smiled wanly at Peter. “Well, are we going tonight?”

  “We’ve had plenty of test flights. But never into unknown and hostile territory.”
/>   “If you’d rather not carry me with you because of the burden of looking out for my safety, then I’ll just stay here.”

  “I don’t want to go unless I have you with me,” said Peter.

  She came up and placed a cool hand on his cheek. “I believe you mean it,” she said.

  “If I get distracted and don’t watch you, there might be real danger. You shouldn’t have turned down Jane’s offer to teach you to control the flight yourself. I think you’d be better at it than me anyway.”

  “Why would you think that?” asked Wang-Mu.

  “Because you’re better at caring about other people than I am.”

  “I doubt that,” said Wang-Mu.

  “You shouldn’t,” said Peter. “You notice people better than I do.”

  “I notice some things, and you notice other things. But you notice me. You pay attention to me.”

  “But it doesn’t come naturally to me. I have to work at it.”

  Wang-Mu laughed. “You think I don’t? Everybody who does it, works at it. I was a servant in a hierarchical, caste-ridden society. I had to study my masters and anyone else who had the power to hurt me or help me, and discover how to help them notice me in a good way. It was only when I entered the service of Han Qing-Jao and then Han Fei-Tzu that I learned how to turn that keen observation into something closer to love. You’re not struggling with anything I haven’t struggled with. Love isn’t easy, Peter. Not for anybody.”

  “Loving you is getting easier all the time,” said Peter. And then he realized: He wasn’t just saying what he knew she wanted to hear. He was speaking the simple truth.

  “I believe you,” said Wang-Mu. “But let’s turn to some practical concerns. The seasons on Descoladora are caused by the apogee and perigee of the planet’s orbit around its star. It’s past apogee, so the weather has warmed up quite a bit and things are starting to grow—more near the equator than the poles.”

  “Jackets?”

  “And four walls and a roof,” said Wang-Mu. “Jane has placed a box for us just over the hill outside.”

  “And Thulium won’t be waiting for us inside it?”

  “Who can predict what Thulium will do?”