Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

laughed again, but it came a bit late, and it was gentler. "On target," he said. "You treated me the way you like to be treated when you grieve, and now I'm treating you the way I like to be treated. We prescribe our own medicine for each other."
    "Your mother and I are still married," Ender said.
    "Let me tell you something," said Miro, "out of the wisdom of my twenty years or so of life. It's easier when you finally start admitting to yourself that you'll never have her back. That she's permanently out of reach."
    "Ouanda is out of reach. Novinha isn't."
    "She's with the Children of the Mind of Christ. It's a nunnery, Andrew."
    "Not so," said Ender. "It's a monastic order that only married couples can join. She can't belong to them without me."
    "So," said Miro. "You can have her back whenever you want to join the Filhos . I can just see you as Dom Cristão."
    Ender couldn't help chuckling at the idea. "Sleeping in separate beds. Praying all the time. Never touching each other."
    "If that's marriage, Andrew, then Ouanda and I are married right now."
    "It is marriage, Miro. Because the couples in the Filhos da Mente de Cristo are working together, doing a work together."
    "Then we're married," said Miro. "You and I. Because we're trying to save Jane together."
    "Just friends," said Ender. "We're just friends."
    "Rivals is more like it. Jane keeps us both like lovers on a string."
    Miro was sounding too much like Novinha's accusations about Jane. "We're hardly lovers," he said. "Jane isn't human. She doesn't even have a body."
    "Aren't you the logical one," said Miro. "Didn't you just say that you and Mother could still be married, without even touching?"
    It was an analogy that Ender didn't like, because it seemed to have some truth in it. Was Novinha right to be jealous of Jane, as she had been for so many years?
    "She lives inside our heads, practically," said Miro. "That's a place where no wife will ever go."
    "I always thought," said Ender, "that your mother was jealous of Jane because she wished she had someone that close to her."
    " Bobagem ," said Miro. " Lixo ." Nonsense. Garbage. "Mother was jealous of Jane because she wanted so badly to be that close to you , and she never could."
    "Not your mother. She was always self-contained. There were times when we were very close, but she always turned back to her work."
    "The way you always turned back to Jane."
    "Did she tell you that?"
    "Not in so many words. But you'd be talking to her, and then all of a sudden you'd fall silent, and even though you're good at subvocalizing, there's still a little movement in the jaw, and your eyes and lips react a little to what Jane says to you. She saw. You'd be with Mother, close, and then all of a sudden you were somewhere else."
    "That's not what split us apart," said Ender. "It was Quim's death."
    "Quim's death was the last straw. If it hadn't been for Jane, if Mother had really believed you belonged to her , heart and soul, she would have turned to you when Quim died, instead of turning away."
    Miro had said the thing that Ender had dreaded all along. That it was Ender's own fault. That he had not been the perfect husband. That he had driven her away. And the worst thing was that when Miro said it, Ender knew that it was true. The sense of loss, which he had already thought was unbearable, suddenly doubled, trebled, became infinite inside him.
    He felt Miro's hand, heavy, clumsy, on his shoulder.
    "As God is my witness, Andrew, I never meant to make you cry."
    "It happens," said Ender.
    "It's not all your fault," said Miro. "Or Jane's. You've got to remember that Mother's crazy as a loon. She always has been."
    "She had a lot of grief as a child."
    "She lost everybody she ever loved, one by one," said Miro.
    "And I let her believe that she had lost me, too."
    "What were you going to do, cut Jane off? You tried that once, remember?"
    "The difference is that now she has you. The whole time you were gone, I could have let Jane go, because she had you . I could have talked to her less, asked her to back off. She would have forgiven me."
    "Maybe," said Miro. "But you didn't."
    "Because I didn't want to," said Ender. "Because I didn't want to let her go. Because I thought I could keep that old friendship and still be a good husband to my wife."
    "It wasn't just Jane," said Miro. "It was Valentine, too."
    "I suppose," said Ender. "So what do I do? Go join up with the Filhos until the fleet gets here and blows us all to