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

could not continue to cling to the last thin wire. She would cut loose from it, losing the last of her old self in the vain need to search for a place where one like her belonged.
    She began to flirt with letting go, straying -- never far -- from the thin philotic strands of the ansibles. For moments too small to measure she was disconnected and it was terrible to be cut off -- she leapt each time back to the small but familiar space that still belonged to her; and then, when the smallness of the place was unbearable to her, she let go again, and again in terror came back home.
    But on one such letting-go she glimpsed something familiar. Someone familiar. Another aiúa that she had once been twined to. She had no access to memory that could tell her a name; she had no memory, indeed, of names at all. But she knew it, and she trusted this being, and when on another pass along the invisible wire she came to the same place again she leapt into the far vaster network of aiúas that were ruled by this bright familiar one.
     
     
     said the Hive Queen.
    
    
    
    
    
     said the Hive Queen.
     
     
    Jane spun joyously through this body, so different from any she had ever remembered before, but within moments she realized that the aiúa she had recognized, the aiúa she had followed here, was not willing to give up even a small part of itself to her. Wherever she touched, there it was, touching also, affirming its control; and now in panic Jane began to sense that while she might be inside a lacework of extraordinary beauty and fineness -- this temple of living cells on a frame of bone -- no part of it belonged to her and if she stayed it would only be as a fugitive. She did not belong here, no matter how she loved it.
    And she did love it. For all the thousands of years that she had lived, so vast in space, so fast in time, she had nevertheless been crippled without knowing it. She was alive, but nothing that was part of her large kingdom was alive. All had been ruthlessly under her control, but here in this body, this human body, this woman named Val, there were millions of small bright lives, cell upon cell of life, thriving, laboring, growing, dying, linked body to body and aiúa to aiúa, and it was in these links that creatures of flesh dwelt and it was far more vivid, despite the sluggishness of thought, than her own experience of life had been. How can they think at all, these flesh-beings, with all these dances going on around them, all these songs to distract them?
    She touched the mind of Valentine and was flooded with memory. It had nothing like the precision and depth of Jane's old memory, but every moment of experience was vivid and powerful, alive and real as no memory had been that Jane had ever known before. How can they keep from holding still all day simply to remember the day before? Because each new moment shouts louder than memory.
    Yet each time Jane touched a memory or felt a sensation from the living body, there was the aiúa that was properly the master of this flesh, driving her away, asserting its control.
    And finally, annoyed, when that familiar aiúa herded her Jane refused to move. Instead she claimed this spot, this part of the body, this part of the brain, she demanded the obedience of these cells, and the other aiúa recoiled before her.
    I am stronger than you, Jane said to him silently. I can take from you all that you are and all that you have and all that you will ever be and ever have and you can't stop me.
    The aiúa that once had been the master here fled