"So why did you come to him again?" asked Miro.

"I didn't come for him. I came for you." Old Valentine smiled. "I came for a world in danger of destruction. But I was glad to see Ender, even though I knew he would never belong to me."

"This may be an accurate description of how it felt to you," said Young Val. "But you must have had his attention, at some level. I exist because you're always in his heart."

"A fantasy of his childhood, perhaps. Not me."

"Look at me," said Young Val. "Is this the body you wore when he was five and was taken away from his home and sent up to the Battle School? Is this even the teenage girl that he knew that summer by the lake in North Carolina? You must have had his attention even when you grew up, because his image of you changed to become me."

"You are what I was when we worked on The Hegemon together," said Old Valentine sadly.

"Were you this tired?" asked Young Val.

"I am," said Miro.

"No you're not," said Old Valentine. "You are the picture of vigor. You're still celebrating your beautiful new body. My twin here is heartweary."

"Ender's attention has always been divided," said Young Val. "I'm filled with his memories, you see -- or rather, with the memories that he unconsciously thought I should have, but of course they consist almost entirely of things that he remembers about my friend here, which means that all I remember is my life with Ender. And he always had Jane in his ear, and the people whose deaths he was speaking, and his students, and the Hive Queen in her cocoon, and so on. But they were all adolescent connections. Like every itinerant hero of epic, he wandered place to place, transforming others but remaining himself unchanged. Until he came here and finally gave himself wholly to somebody else. You and your family, Miro. Novinha. For the first time he gave other people the power to tear at him emotionally, and it was exhilarating and painful both at once, but even that he could handle just fine, he's a strong man, and strong men have borne more. Now, though, it's something else entirely. Peter and I, we have no life apart from him. To say that he is one with Novinha is metaphorical; with Peter and me it's literal. He is us. And his aiúa isn't great enough, it isn't strong or copious enough, it hasn't enough attention in it to give equal shares to the three lives that depend on it. I realized this almost as soon as I was ... what shall we call it, created? Manufactured?"

"Born," said Old Valentine.

"You were a dream come true," said Miro, with only a hint of irony.

"He can't sustain all three of us. Ender, Peter, me. One of us is going to fade. One of us at least is going to die. And it's me. I knew that from the start. I'm the one who's going to die."

Miro wanted to reassure her. But how do you reassure someone, except by recalling to them similar situations that turned out for the best? There were no similar situations to call upon.

"The trouble is that whatever part of Ender's aiúa I still have in me is absolutely determined to live. I don't want to die. That's how I know I still have some shred of his attention: I don't want to die."

"So go to him," said Old Valentine. "Talk to him."

Young Val gave one bitter hoot of laughter and looked away. "Please, Papa, let me live," she said in a mockery of a child's voice. "Since it's not something he consciously controls, what could he possibly do about it, except suffer from guilt? And why should he feel guilty? If I cease to exist, it's because my own self didn't value me. He is myself. Do the dead tips of fingernails feel bad when you pare them away?"

"But you are bidding for his attention," said Miro.

"I hoped that the search for habitable worlds would intrigue him. I poured myself into it, trying to be excited about it. But the truth is it's utterly routine. Important, but routine, Miro."

Miro nodded. "True enough. Jane finds the worlds. We just process them."

"And there are enough worlds now. Enough colonies. Two dozen -- pequeninos and hive queens are not going to die out now, even if Lusitania is destroyed. The bottleneck isn't the number of worlds, it's the number of starships. So all our labor -- it isn't engaging Ender's attention anymore. And my body knows it. My body knows it isn't needed."

She reached up and took a large hank of her hair into her fist, and pulled -- not hard, but lightly -- and it came away easily in her hand. A great gout of hair, with not a sign of any pain at its going. She let the hair drop onto the table. It lay there like a dismembered limb, grotesque, impossible. "I think," she whispered, "that if I'm not careful, I could do the same with my fingers. It's slower, but gradually I will turn into dust just as your old body did, Miro. Because he isn't interested in me. Peter is solving mysteries and fighting political wars off on some world somewhere. Ender is struggling to hold on to the woman he loves. But I ..."

In that moment, as the hair torn from her head revealed the depth of her misery, her loneliness, her self-rejections, Miro realized what he had not let himself think of until now: that in all the weeks they had traveled world to world together, he had come to love her, and her unhappiness hurt him as if it were his own. And perhaps it was his own, his memory of his own self-loathing. But whatever the reason, it still felt like something deeper than mere compassion to him. It was a kind of desire. Yes, it was a kind of love. If this beautiful young woman, this wise and intelligent and clever young woman was rejected by her own inmost heart, then Miro's heart had room enough to take her in. If Ender will not be yourself, let me! he cried silently, knowing as he formed the thought for the first time that he had felt this way for days, for weeks, without realizing it; yet also knowing that he could not be to her what Ender was.

Still, couldn't love do for Young Val what it was doing for Ender himself? Couldn't that engage enough of his attention to keep her alive? To strengthen her?

Miro reached out and gathered up her disembodied hair, twined it around his fingers, and then slid the looping locks into the pocket of his robe. "I don't want you to fade away," he said. Bold words for him.

Young Val looked at him oddly. "I thought the great love of your life was Ouanda."

"She's a middle-aged woman now," said Miro. "Married and happy, with a family. It would be sad if the great love of my life were a woman who doesn't exist anymore, and even if she did she wouldn't want me."

"It's sweet of you to offer," said Young Val. "But I don't think we can fool Ender into caring about my life by pretending to fall in love."

Her words stabbed Miro to the heart, because she had so easily seen how much of his self-declaration came from pity. Yet not all of it came from there; most of it was already seething just under the level of consciousness, just waiting its chance to come out. "I wasn't thinking of fooling anyone," said Miro. Except myself, he thought. Because Young Val could not possibly love me. She is, after all, not really a woman. She's Ender.

But that was absurd. Her body was a woman's body. And where did the choice of loves come from, if not the body? Was there something male or female in the aiúa? Before it became master of flesh and bone, was it manly or womanly? And if so, would that mean that the aiúas composing atoms and molecules, rocks and stars and light and wind, that all of those were neatly sorted into boys and girls? Nonsense. Ender's aiúa could be a woman, could love like a woman as easily as it now loved, in a man's body and in a man's ways, Miro's own mother. It wasn't any lack in Young Val that made her look at him with such pity. It was a lack in him. Even with his body healed, he was not a man that a woman -- or at least this woman, at the moment the most desirable of all women -- could love, or wish to love, or hope to win.