person like me could be swallowed up in it a dozen times over. I had problems of my own then. Don't condemn me because I wrote her off. Her barrel of misery has depth enough to hold a thousand bushels of happiness."
"I don't condemn you," said Jane. "I just ... I had to know that you saw how much she loves you and needs you. I needed you to be ..."
"You needed me to be like Ender," said Miro.
"I needed you to be your own best self," said Jane.
"I loved Ender too, you know. I think of him as every man's best self. And I don't resent the fact that you would like me to be at least some of the things he was to you. As long as you also want a few of the things that are me alone, and no part of him."
"I don't expect you to be perfect," said Jane. "And I don't expect you to be Ender. And you'd better not expect perfection from me, either, because wise as I'm trying to be right now, I'm still the one who knocked your sister down."
"Who knows?" said Miro. "That may have turned you into Quara's dearest friend."
"I hope not," said Jane. "But if it's true, I'll do my best for her. After all, she's going to be my sister now."
said the Hive Queen.
said Human.
said Human,
said the Hive Queen.
the Hive Queen said.
said Human.
said the Hive Queen.
CHAPTER 14
“HOW THEY COMMUNICATE WITH ANIMALS”
"If only we were wiser or better people,
perhaps the gods would explain to us
the mad, unbearable things they do."
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
The moment Admiral Bobby Lands received the news that the ansible connections to Starways Congress were restored, he gave the order to the entire Lusitania Fleet to decelerate forthwith to a speed just under the threshold of invisibility. Obedience was immediate, and he knew that within an hour, to any telescopic observer on Lusitania, the whole fleet would seem to spring into existence from nowhere. They would be hurtling toward a point near Lusitania at an astonishing speed, their massive foreshields still in place to protect them from taking devastating damage from collisions with interstellar particles as small as dust.
Admiral Lands's strategy was simple. He would arrive near Lusitania at the highest possible speed that would not cause relativistic effects; he would launch the Little Doctor during the period of nearest approach, a window of no more than a couple of hours; and then he would bring his whole fleet back up to relativistic speeds so rapidly that when the M.D. Device went off, it would not catch any of his ships within its all-destroying field.
It was a good, simple strategy, based on the assumption that Lusitania had no defenses. But to Lands, that assumption could not be taken for granted. Somehow the Lusitanian rebels had acquired enough resources that for a period of time near the end of the voyage, they were able to cut off all communications between the fleet and the rest of humanity. Never mind that the problem had been ascribed to a particularly resourceful and pervasive computer saboteur program; never mind that his superiors assured him that the saboteur program had been wiped out through prudently radical action timed to eliminate the threat just prior to the arrival of the fleet at its destination. Lands had no intention of being deceived by an illusion of defenselessness. The enemy had proved itself to be an unknown quantity, and Lands had to be prepared for anything. This was war, total war, and he was not going to allow his mission to be compromised through
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