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

But I think it's not so very pure these days."
    "More to the point, it's the world where Andrew and Jane and I felt -- if one can speak of my having feelings apart from Ender's own -- the world where we might find the center of power in the worlds ruled by Congress. The true decision makers. The power behind the throne."
    "So you can subvert them and take over the human race?"
    "So I can stop the Lusitania Fleet. Taking over the human race is a bit later on the agenda. The Lusitania Fleet is something of an emergency. We have only a few weeks to stop it before the fleet gets there and uses the Little Doctor, the M.D. Device, to blow Lusitania into its constituent elements. In the meantime, because Ender and everyone else expects me to fail, they're building these little tin can starships as fast as possible and transporting as many Lusitanians as they can -- humans, piggies, and buggers -- to other habitable but as yet uninhabited planets. My dear sister Valentine -- the young one -- is off with Miro -- in his fresh new body, the dear lad -- searching out new worlds as fast as their little starship can carry them. Quite a project. All of them betting on my -- on our -- failure. Let's disappoint them, shall we?"
    "Disappoint them?"
    "By succeeding. Let's succeed. Let's find the center of power among humankind, and let's persuade them to stop the fleet before it needlessly destroys a world."
    Wang-mu looked at him doubtfully. Persuade them to stop the fleet? This nasty-minded, cruel-hearted boy? How could he persuade anyone of anything?
    As if he could hear her thoughts, he answered her silent doubt. "You see why I invited you to come along with me. When Ender was inventing me, he forgot the fact that he never knew me during the time in my life when I was persuading people and gathering them together in shifting alliances and all that nonsense. So the Peter Wiggin he created is far too nasty, openly ambitious, and nakedly cruel to persuade a man with rectal itch to scratch his own butt."
    She looked away from him again.
    "You see?" he said. "I offend you again and again. Look at me. Do you see my dilemma? The real Peter, the original one, he could have done the work I've been sent to do. He could have done it in his sleep. He'd already have a plan. He'd be able to win people over, soothe them, insinuate himself into their councils. That Peter Wiggin! He can charm the stings out of bees. But can I ? I doubt it. For, you see, I'm not myself."
    He got up from his chair, roughly pushed his way past her, and stepped outside onto the meadow that surrounded the little metal cabin that had carried them from world to world. Wang-mu stood in the doorway, watching him as he wandered away from the ship; away, but not too far.
    I know something of how he feels, she thought. I know something of having to submerge your will in someone else's. To live for them, as if they were the star of the story of your life, and you merely a supporting player. I have been a slave. But at least in all that time I knew my own heart. I knew what I truly thought even as I did what they wanted, whatever it took to get what I wanted from them. Peter Wiggin, though, has no idea of what he really wants, because even his resentment of his lack of freedom isn't his own, even that comes from Andrew Wiggin. Even his self-loathing is Andrew's self-loathing, and ...
    And back and back, in circles, like the random path he was tracing through the meadow.
    Wang-mu thought of her mistress -- no, her former mistress -- Qing-jao. She also traced strange patterns. It was what the gods forced her to do. No, that's the old way of thinking. It's what her obsessive-compulsive disorder caused her to do. To kneel on the floor and trace the grain of the wood in each board, trace a single line of it as far as it went across the floor, line after line. It never meant anything, and yet she had to do it because only by such meaningless mind-numbing obedience could she win a scrap of freedom from the impulses controlling her. It is Qing-jao who was always the slave, and never me. For the master that ruled her controlled her from inside her own mind. While I could always see my master outside me, so my inmost self was never touched.
    Peter Wiggin knows that he is ruled by the unconscious fears and passions of a complicated man many light-years away. But then, Qing-jao thought her obsessions came from the gods. What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you