Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

out there start copying the pattern, but you've got no ship ."
    "Fatal."
    "No, probably not," said Grego. "Who can guess? The rules are all different out there. The point is that you can't possibly bring them back into our space in that condition, because that definitely would be fatal."
    "So we can't."
    "I don't know. Reality holds together in Inside space because all the philotes that it's comprised of agree on the rules. They all know each other's patterns and follow the same patterns themselves. Maybe it can all hold together in Outside space as long as the spaceship and its cargo and passengers are fully known . As long as there's a knower who can hold the entire structure in her head."
    "Her?"
    "As I said, I have to have Jane do the calculations. She has to see if she has access to enough memory to contain the pattern of relationships within a spaceship. She has to then see if she can take that pattern and imagine its new location."
    "That's the wishing part," said Olhado. "I'm very proud of it, because I'm the one who thought of needing a knower to move the ship."
    "This whole thing is really Olhado's," said Grego, "but I intend to put my name first on the paper because he doesn't care about career advancement and I have to look good enough for people to overlook this felony conviction if I'm going to get a job at a university on another world somewhere."
    "What are you talking about?" said Valentine.
    "I'm talking about getting off this two-bit colony planet. Don't you understand? If this is all true, if it works , then I can fly to Rheims or Baia or-- or Earth and come back here for weekends. The energy cost is zero because we're stepping outside natural laws entirely. The wear and tear on the vehicles is nothing."
    "Not nothing ," said Olhado. "We've still got to taxi close to the planet of destination."
    "As I said, it all depends on what Jane can conceive of. She has to be able to comprehend the whole ship and its contents. She has to be able to imagine us Outside and Inside again. She has to be able to conceive of the exact relative positions of the startpoint and endpoint of the journey."
    "So faster-than-light travel depends completely on Jane," said Valentine.
    "If she didn't exist, it would be impossible. Even if they linked all the computers together, even if someone could write the program to accomplish it, it wouldn't help. Because a program is just a collection, not an entity. It's just parts. Not a-- what was the word Jane found for it? An aiúa ."
    "Sanskrit for life," Olhado explained to Valentine. "The word for the philote who controls a pattern that holds other philotes in order. The word for entities-- like planets and atoms and animals and stars-- that have an intrinsic, enduring form."
    "Jane is an aiúa , not just a program. So she can be a knower. She can incorporate the starship as a pattern within her own pattern. She can digest it and contain it and it will still be real. She makes it part of herself and knows it as perfectly and unconsciously as your aiúa knows your own body and holds it together. Then she can carry it with her Outside and back Inside again."
    "So Jane has to go?" asked Valentine.
    "If this can be done at all, it'll be done because Jane travels with the ship, yes," said Grego.
    "How?" asked Valentine. "We can't exactly go pick her up and carry her with us in a bucket."
    "This is something Andrew learned from the Hive Queen," said Grego. "She actually exists in a particular place-- that is, her aiúa has a specific location in our space."
    "Where?"
    "Inside Andrew Wiggin."
    It took a while for them to explain to her what Ender had learned about Jane from the Hive Queen. It was strange to think of this computer entity as being centered inside Ender's body, but it made a kind of sense that Jane had been created by the Hive Queens during Ender's campaign against them. To Valentine, though, there was another, immediate consequence. If the faster-than-light ship could only go where Jane took it, and Jane was inside Ender, there could be only one conclusion.
    "Then Andrew has to go?"
    " Claro . Of course," said Grego.
    "He's a little old to be a test pilot," said Valentine.
    "In this case he's only a test passenger ," said Grego. "He just happens to hold the pilot inside him."
    "It's not as if the voyage will have any physical stress," said Olhado. "If Grego's theory works out exactly right, he'll just sit there and after a couple of minutes or actually a microsecond or