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

yet also knowing that he could not be to her what Ender was.
    Still, couldn't love do for Young Val what it was doing for Ender himself? Couldn't that engage enough of his attention to keep her alive? To strengthen her?
    Miro reached out and gathered up her disembodied hair, twined it around his fingers, and then slid the looping locks into the pocket of his robe. "I don't want you to fade away," he said. Bold words for him.
    Young Val looked at him oddly. "I thought the great love of your life was Ouanda."
    "She's a middle-aged woman now," said Miro. "Married and happy, with a family. It would be sad if the great love of my life were a woman who doesn't exist anymore, and even if she did she wouldn't want me."
    "It's sweet of you to offer," said Young Val. "But I don't think we can fool Ender into caring about my life by pretending to fall in love."
    Her words stabbed Miro to the heart, because she had so easily seen how much of his self-declaration came from pity. Yet not all of it came from there; most of it was already seething just under the level of consciousness, just waiting its chance to come out. "I wasn't thinking of fooling anyone," said Miro. Except myself, he thought. Because Young Val could not possibly love me. She is, after all, not really a woman. She's Ender.
    But that was absurd. Her body was a woman's body. And where did the choice of loves come from, if not the body? Was there something male or female in the aiúa? Before it became master of flesh and bone, was it manly or womanly? And if so, would that mean that the aiúas composing atoms and molecules, rocks and stars and light and wind, that all of those were neatly sorted into boys and girls? Nonsense. Ender's aiúa could be a woman, could love like a woman as easily as it now loved, in a man's body and in a man's ways, Miro's own mother. It wasn't any lack in Young Val that made her look at him with such pity. It was a lack in him. Even with his body healed, he was not a man that a woman -- or at least this woman, at the moment the most desirable of all women -- could love, or wish to love, or hope to win.
    "I shouldn't have come here," he murmured. He pushed away from the table and left the room in two strides. Strode up the hall and once again stood in his open doorway. He heard their voices.
    "No, don't go to him," said Old Valentine. Then something softer. Then, "He may have a new body, but his self-hatred has never been healed."
    A murmur from Young Val.
    "Miro was speaking from his heart," Old Valentine assured her. "It was a very brave and naked thing for him to do."
    Again Young Val spoke too softly for Miro to hear her.
    "How could you know?" Old Valentine said. "What you have to realize is, we took a long voyage together, not that long ago, and I think he fell in love with me a little on that flight."
    It was probably true. It was definitely true. Miro had to admit it: some of his feelings for Young Val were really his feelings for Old Valentine, transferred from the woman who was permanently out of reach to this young woman who might be, he had hoped at least, accessible to him.
    Now both their voices fell to levels where Miro could not even pick out words. But still he waited, his hands pressed against the doorjamb, listening to the lilting of those two voices, so much alike, but both so well-known to him. It was a music that he could gladly hear forever.
    "If there's anyone like Ender in all this universe," said Old Valentine with sudden loudness, "it's Miro. He broke himself trying to save innocents from destruction. He hasn't yet been healed."
    She meant me to hear that, Miro realized. She spoke loudly, knowing I was standing here, knowing I was listening. The old witch was listening for my door to close and she never heard it so she knows that I can hear them and she's trying to give me a way to see myself. But I'm no Ender, I'm barely Miro, and if she says things like that about me it's just proof that she doesn't know who I am.
    A voice spoke up in his ear. "Oh, shut up if you're just going to lie to yourself."
    Of course Jane had heard everything. Even his thoughts, because, as was his habit, his conscious thoughts were echoed by his lips and tongue and teeth. He couldn't even think without moving his lips. With Jane attached to his ear he spent his waking hours in a confessional that never closed.
    "So you love the girl," said Jane. "Why not? So your motives are complicated by your feelings toward Ender and Valentine and