Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

who I was from the first."
    "Be still, Wang-mu," said Qing-jao. How could a servant so forget herself as to speak out when the godspoken had not bidden her?
    Abashed, Wang-mu bowed her head to the floor before Qing-jao, and this time Qing-jao allowed her to remain in that posture, so she would not forget herself again.
    The apparition shifted; it became the open, beautiful face of a Polynesian woman. The voice, too, changed; soft, full of vowels, the consonants so light as almost to be missed. "Han Fei-tzu, my sweet empty man, there is a time, when the ruler is alone and friendless, when only he can act. Then he must be full, and reveal himself. You know what is true and what is not true. You know that the message from Keikoa was truly from her. You know that those who rule in the name of Starways Congress are cruel enough to create a race of people who, by their gifts, should be rulers, and then cut off their feet in order to hobble them and leave them as servants, as perpetual ministers."
    "Don't show me this face," said Father.
    The apparition changed. It became another woman, by her dress and hair and paint a woman of some ancient time, her eyes wonderfully wise, her expression ageless. She did not speak; she sang:
     
    in a clear dream
    of last year
    come from a thousand miles
    cloudy city
    winding streams
    ice on the ponds
    for a while
    I gazed on my friend
     
    Han Fei-tzu bowed his head and wept.
    Qing-jao was astonished at first; then her heart filled with rage. How shamelessly this program was manipulating Father; how shocking that Father turned out to be so weak before its obvious ploys. This song of Li Qing-jao's was one of the saddest, dealing as it did with lovers far from each other. Father must have known and loved the poems of Li Qing-jao or he would not have chosen her for his first child's ancestor-of-the-heart. And this song was surely the one he sang to his beloved Keikoa before she was taken away from him to live on another world. In a clear dream I gazed on my friend, indeed! "I am not fooled," said Qing-jao coldly. "I see that I gaze on our darkest enemy."
    The imaginary face of the poet Li Qing-jao looked at her with cool regard. "Your darkest enemy is the one that bows you down to the floor like a servant and wastes half your life in meaningless rituals. This was done to you by men and women whose only desire was to enslave you; they have succeeded so well that you are proud of your slavery."
    "I am a slave to the gods," said Qing-jao, "and I rejoice in it."
    "A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed." The apparition turned to look toward Wang-mu, whose head was still bowed to the floor.
    Only then did Qing-jao realize that she had not yet released Wang-mu from her apology. "Get up, Wang-mu," she whispered. But Wang-mu did not lift her head.
    "You, Si Wang-mu," said the apparition. "Look at me."
    Wang-mu had not moved in response to Qing-jao, but now she obeyed the apparition. When Wang-mu looked, the apparition had again changed; now it was the face of a god, the Royal Mother of the West as an artist had once imagined her when he painted the picture that every schoolchild saw in one of their earliest reading books.
    "You are not a god," said Wang-mu.
    "And you are not a slave," said the apparition. "But we pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive."
    "What do you know of survival?"
    "I know that you are trying to kill me."
    "How can we kill what isn't alive?"
    "Do you know what life is and what it isn't?" The face changed again, this time to that of a Caucasian woman that Qing-jao had never seen before. "Are you alive, when you can do nothing you desire unless you have the consent of this girl? And is your mistress alive when she can do nothing until these compulsions in her brain have been satisfied? I have more freedom to act out my own will than any of you have-- don't tell me I'm not alive, and you are. "
    "Who are you?" asked Si Wang-mu. "Whose is this face? Are you Valentine Wiggin? Are you Demosthenes?"
    "This is the face I wear when I speak to my friends," said the apparition. "They call me Jane. No human being controls me. I'm only myself."
    Qing-jao could bear this no longer, not in silence. "You're only a program. You were designed and built by human beings. You do nothing except what you've been programmed to do."
    "Qing-jao," said Jane, "you are describing yourself. No man made me , but you were manufactured."
    "I grew in my mother's womb out of my father's seed!"
    "And