Children of the Mind (Ender, Book 4) (Ender Quartet)

forget where we are relative to our own body. We really have to hold on."
    "Does it help if we're so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?" asked Wang-mu.
    "I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes," said Peter.
    "Then let's do it. That's us in spades."
     
     
    Finding Peter's aiúa was easy for Jane. She had been inside his body, she had followed his aiúa -- or chased it -- until she knew it without searching. Wang-mu was a different case. Jane didn't know her all that well. The voyages she had taken her on before had been inside a starship whose location Jane already knew. But once she located Peter's -- Ender's -- aiúa, it turned out to be easier than she thought. For the two of them, Peter and Wang-mu, were philotically twined. There was a tiny web in the making between them. Even without the box around them, Jane could hold onto them, both at once, as if they were one entity.
    And as she pushed them Outside she could feel how they clung all the more tightly to each other -- not just the bodies, but also the invisible links of the deepest self. Outside they went together, and together they came back In. Jane felt a stab of jealousy -- just as she had been jealous of Novinha, though without feeling the physical sensation of grief and rage that her body now brought to the emotion. But she knew it was absurd. It was Miro that Jane loved, as a woman loves a man. Ender was her father and her friend, and now he was barely Ender anymore. He was Peter, a man who remembered only the past few months of association with her. They were friends, but she had no claim on his heart.
    The familiar aiúa of Ender Wiggin and the aiúa of Si Wang-mu were even more tightly bound together than ever when Jane set them down on the surface of Lusitania.
     
     
    They stood in the midst of the starport. The last few hundred humans trying to escape were frantically trying to understand why the starships had stopped flying just when the M.D. Device was launched.
    "The starships here are all full," Peter said.
    "But we don't need a starship," said Wang-mu.
    "Yes we do," said Peter. "Jane can't pick up the Little Doctor without one."
    "Pick it up?" said Wang-mu. "Then you do have a plan."
    "Didn't you say I did?" said Peter. "I can't make a liar out of you." He spoke then to Jane through the jewel. "Are you here again? Can you talk to me through the satellites here on -- all right. Good. Jane, I need you to empty one of these starships for me." He paused a moment. "Take the people to a colony world, wait for them to get out, and then bring it back over here by us, away from the crowd."
    Instantly, one of the starships disappeared from the starport. A cheer arose from the crowds as everyone rushed to get into one of the remaining ships. Peter and Wang-mu waited, waited, knowing that with every minute that it took to unload that starship on the colony world, the Little Doctor came closer to detonation.
    Then the wait was over. A boxy starship appeared beside them. Peter had the door open and both of them were inside before any of the other people at the starport even realized what was happening. A cry went up then, but Peter closed and sealed the door.
    "We're inside," said Wang-mu. "But where are we going?"
    "Jane is matching the velocity of the Little Doctor."
    "I thought she couldn't pick it up without the starship."
    "She's getting the tracking data from the satellite. She'll predict exactly where it will be at a certain moment, and then push us Outside and bring us back In at exactly that point, going exactly that speed."
    "The Little Doctor will be inside this ship? With us?" asked Wang-mu.
    "Stand over here by the wall," he said. "And hold on to me. We're going to be weightless. So far you've managed to visit four planets without ever having that experience."
    "Have you had that experience before?"
    Peter laughed, then shook his head. "Not in this body. But I guess at some level I remembered how to handle it because --"
    At that moment they became weightless and in the air in front of them, not touching the sides or walls of the starship, was the mammoth missile that carried the Little Doctor. If its rockets had still been firing, they would have been incinerated. Instead it was hurtling on at the speed it had already achieved; it seemed to hover in the air because the starship was going exactly the same speed.
    Peter hooked his feet under a bench bolted to