"He thinks you should know Shakespeare, and so you do?" she asked doubtfully.

"If only Shakespeare were all he had given me. The great writers, the great philosophers. If only those were the only memories I had."

She waited for him to list the troublesome memories. But he only shuddered and fell silent.

"So if you are really controlled by Ender, then ... you are him. Then that is yourself. You are Andrew Wiggin. You have an aiúa."

"I'm Andrew Wiggin's nightmare," said Peter. "I'm Andrew Wiggin's self-loathing. I'm everything he hates and fears about himself. That's the script I've been given. That's what I have to do."

He flexed his hand into a fist, then extended it partway, the fingers still bent. A claw. The tiger again. And for a moment, Wang-mu was afraid of him. Only a moment, though. He relaxed his hands. The moment passed. "What part does your script have in it for me?"

"I don't know," said Peter. "You're very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have such incredible vanity that I can't really believe that anyone is actually smarter than I am. Which means that I'm all the more in need of good advice, since I can't actually conceive of needing any."

"You talk in circles."

"That's just part of my cruelty. To torment you with conversation. But maybe it's supposed to go farther than that. Maybe I'm supposed to torture you and kill you the way I so clearly remember doing with squirrels. Maybe I'm supposed to stake your living body out in the woods, nailing your extremities to tree roots, and then open you up layer by layer to see at what point the flies begin to come and lay eggs in your exposed flesh."

She recoiled at the image. "I have read the book. I know the Hegemon was not a monster!"

"It wasn't the Speaker for the Dead who created me Outside. It was the frightened boy Ender. I'm not the Peter Wiggin he so wisely understood in that book. I'm the Peter Wiggin he had nightmares about. The one who flayed squirrels."

"He saw you do that?" she asked.

"Not me," he said testily. "And no, he never even saw him do it. Valentine told him later. She found the squirrel's body in the woods near their childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina, on the continent of North America back on Earth. But that image fit so tidily into his nightmares that he borrowed it and shared it with me. That's the memory I live with. Intellectually, I can imagine that the real Peter Wiggin was probably not cruel at all. He was learning and studying. He didn't have compassion for the squirrel because he didn't sentimentalize it. It was simply an animal. No more important than a head of lettuce. To cut it up was probably as immoral an act as making a salad. But that's not how Ender imagined it, and so that's not how I remember it."

"How do you remember it?"

"The way I remember all my supposed memories. From the outside. Watching myself in horrified fascination as I take a fiendish delight in cruelty. All my memories prior to the moment I came to life on Ender's little voyage Outside, in all of them I see myself through someone else's eyes. A very odd feeling, I assure you."

"But now?"

"Now I don't see myself at all," he said. "Because I have no self. I am not myself."

"But you remember. You have memories. Of this conversation, already you remember it. Looking at me. You must, surely."

"Yes," he said. "I remember you. And I remember being here and seeing you. But there isn't any self behind my eyes. I feel tired and stupid even when I'm being my most clever and brilliant."

He smiled a charming smile and now Wang-mu could see again the true difference between Peter and the hologram of the Hegemon. It was as he said: Even at his most self-deprecating, this Peter Wiggin had eyes that flashed with inner rage. He was dangerous. You could see it looking at him. When he looked into your eyes, you could imagine him planning how and when you would die.

"I am not myself," said Peter.

"You are saying this to control yourself," said Wang-mu, guessing but also sure she was right. "This is your incantation, to stop yourself from doing what you desire."

Peter sighed and leaned over, laying his head down on the terminal, his ear pressed against the cold plastic surface.

"What is it you desire?" she said, fearful of the answer.

"Go away," he said.

"Where can I go? This great starship of yours has only one room."

"Open the door and go outside," he said.

"You mean to kill me? To eject me into space where I'll freeze before I have time to suffocate?"

He sat up and looked at her in puzzlement. "Space?"

His confusion confused her. Where else would they be but in space? That's where starships went, through space.

Except this one, of course.

As he saw understanding come to her, he laughed aloud. "Oh, yes, you're the brilliant one, they've remade the entire world of Path to have your genius!"

She refused to be goaded.

"I thought there would be some sensation of movement. Or something. Have we traveled, then? Are we already there?"

"In the twinkling of an eye. We were Outside and then back Inside at another place, all so fast that only a computer could experience our voyage as having any duration at all. Jane did it before I finished talking to her. Before I said a word to you."

"Then where are we? What's outside the door?"

"We're sitting in the woods somewhere on the planet Divine Wind. The air is breathable. You won't freeze. It's summer outside the door."

She walked to the door and pulled down the handle, releasing the airtight seal. The door eased open. Sunlight streamed into the room.

"Divine Wind," she said. "I read about it -- it was founded as a Shinto world the way Path was supposed to be Taoist. The purity of ancient Japanese culture. But I think it's not so very pure these days."

"More to the point, it's the world where Andrew and Jane and I felt -- if one can speak of my having feelings apart from Ender's own -- the world where we might find the center of power in the worlds ruled by Congress. The true decision makers. The power behind the throne."

"So you can subvert them and take over the human race?"

"So I can stop the Lusitania Fleet. Taking over the human race is a bit later on the agenda. The Lusitania Fleet is something of an emergency. We have only a few weeks to stop it before the fleet gets there and uses the Little Doctor, the M.D. Device, to blow Lusitania into its constituent elements. In the meantime, because Ender and everyone else expects me to fail, they're building these little tin can starships as fast as possible and transporting as many Lusitanians as they can -- humans, piggies, and buggers -- to other habitable but as yet uninhabited planets. My dear sister Valentine -- the young one -- is off with Miro -- in his fresh new body, the dear lad -- searching out new worlds as fast as their little starship can carry them. Quite a project. All of them betting on my -- on our -- failure. Let's disappoint them, shall we?"

"Disappoint them?"

"By succeeding. Let's succeed. Let's find the center of power among humankind, and let's persuade them to stop the fleet before it needlessly destroys a world."

Wang-mu looked at him doubtfully. Persuade them to stop the fleet? This nasty-minded, cruel-hearted boy? How could he persuade anyone of anything?

As if he could hear her thoughts, he answered her silent doubt. "You see why I invited you to come along with me. When Ender was inventing me, he forgot the fact that he never knew me during the time in my life when I was persuading people and gathering them together in shifting alliances and all that nonsense. So the Peter Wiggin he created is far too nasty, openly ambitious, and nakedly cruel to persuade a man with rectal itch to scratch his own butt."