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

make us brother and sister now?"
    "I hardly know what it would mean, to have a sister," said Firequencher. "But if you remember the life in the dark of the mothertree, then you remember more than I do. We have dreams sometimes, but no real memories of the First Life in darkness. Still, that makes this your Third Life after all."
    "Then I'm an adult?" asked Jane, and she laughed again.
    And again felt how her laugh stilled the others, hurt them.
    But something odd happened as she turned, ready to apologize again. Her glance fell upon Miro, and instead of saying the words she had planned -- the Jane-words that would have come out of the jewel in his ear only the day before -- other words came to her lips, along with a memory. "If my memories live, Miro, then I'm alive. Isn't that what you told me?"
    Miro shook his head. "Are you speaking from Val's memory, or from Jane's memory when she -- when you -- overheard us speaking in the Hive Queen's cave? Don't comfort me by pretending to be her."
    Jane, by habit -- Val's habit? or her own? -- snapped, "When I comfort you, you'll know it."
    "And how will I know?" Miro snapped back.
    "Because you'll be comfortable, of course," said Val-Jane. "In the meantime, please keep in mind that I'm not listening through the jewel in your ear now . I see only with these eyes and hear only with these ears."
    This was not strictly true, of course. For many times a second, she felt the flowing sap, the unstinting welcome of the mothertrees as her aiúa satisfied its hunger for largeness by touring the vast network of the pequenino philotes. And now and then, outside the mothertrees, she caught a glimmer of a thought, of a word, a phrase, spoken in the language of the fathertrees. Or was it their language? Rather it was the language behind the language, the underlying speech of the speechless. And whose was that other voice? I know you -- you are of the kind that made me. I know your voice.
     said the Hive Queen in her mind.
    Jane was not prepared for the swelling of pride that glowed through her entire Val-body; she felt the physical effect of the emotion as Val, but her pride came from the praise of a hive-mother. I am a daughter of hive queens, she realized, and so it matters when she speaks to me, and tells me I have done well.
    And if I'm the hive queens' daughter, I am Ender's daughter, too, his daughter twice over, for they made my lifestuff partly from his mind, so I could be a bridge between them; and now I dwell in a body that also came from him, and whose memories are from a time when he dwelt here and lived this body's life. I am his daughter, but once again I cannot speak to him.
    All this time, all these thoughts, and yet she did not show or even feel the slightest lapse of concentration on what she was doing with her computer on the starship circling the descolada planet. She was still Jane. It wasn't the computerness of her that had allowed her, all these years, to maintain many layers of attention and focus on many tasks at once. It was her hive-queen nature that allowed this.
     said the Hive Queen in her mind.
    Which of you is speaking to me? asked Jane.
    
    Am I still myself, then? Will I have again all the powers I lost when the Starways Congress killed my old virtual body?
    
    And now she felt the sharp disappointment from a parent's unconcern, a sinking feeling in the stomach, a kind of shame. But this was a human emotion; it arose from the Val-body, though it was in response to her relationship with her hive-queen mothers. Everything was more complicated -- and yet it was simpler. Her feelings were now flagged by a body, which responded before she understood what she felt herself. In the old days, she scarcely knew she had feelings. She had them, yes, even irrational responses, desires below the level of consciousness -- these were attributes of all aiúas, when linked with others in any kind of life -- but there had been no simple signals to tell her what her feelings were. How easy it was to be a human, with your emotions expressed on the canvas of your own body. And yet how hard, because you couldn't hide your