“We humans get slower as we age. Give me a few more years and I'll be downright cozy.”

Ender didn't want this to become another conversation about mortality or any of the other aspects of human life that so fascinated the hive queen. There was still one question that had occurred to him during the hive queen's story. An intriguing possibility.

“The bridge you made. Where was it? In the computer?”

“But not part of me.”

“Could it control the computer?”

“How long did you use this bridge? How long was it there?”

“But it was still there the whole time you were studying me.”

“How long would it last?”

“But what body was the bridge in?”

“This thing was inside me?”

“No. To you it was like– a bodily function. Like balling up your fist to hit somebody. You did it, and then when you didn't need it you didn't notice whether your fist was still there or not.”

“It's still alive, isn't it?”

“But it would still be linked to the computer, wouldn't it? A connection between me and the computer. Only the pattern could have grown, couldn't it? It could include other people, too. Think of it being linked to Miro– the young man I brought with me–”

“And instead of being linked to that one computer, linked to thousands and thousands of them, through the ansible links between worlds.”

“And I always thought– Jane and I always thought that she was– that she had somehow come to exist in the ansible connections between worlds. That's probably where she feels herself, the place that feels like the center of her– body, I was going to say.”

“Like trying to find a particular muscle that you've been using all your life but never by itself.”

“The comparison?”

“Jane,” whispered Ender. “You're a big girl now.”

Jane's voice came in answer: “You're cheating, Ender. I can't hear what she's saying to you. I can only feel your heart pounding and your rapid breathing.”

“Neither is Jane.”

“She's the bridge. You made her.”

“You reached out across the light-years and found me because I was looking for you. And then you found a pattern and called a creature from another space who grasped the pattern and possessed it and became Jane. All of this instantaneously. Faster than light.”

“I know. I know. This may not help us answer the question I came here with. But I had another question, just as important to me, that I never thought would have anything to do with you, and here you had the answer to it all along. Jane's real, alive the whole time, and her self isn't out there in space, it's inside me. Connected to me. They can't kill her by switching her off. That's something.”

“But they can't kill the whole pattern, don't you see? It doesn't depend on the ansibles after all. It depends on me and on the link between me and the computers. They can't cut the link between me and the computers here and in the satellites orbiting Lusitania. And maybe she doesn't need the ansibles, either. After all, you don't need them to reach me through her.”

“I'll leave you, then. But this will help. This has to help. If Jane can find a way to survive because of this, then that's a real victory. The first victory, when I was beginning to think there wasn't any victory to be had in this.”

The moment he left the presence of the hive queen, he began talking to Jane, telling her everything he could remember of what the hive queen could explain. Who Jane was, how she was created.

And as he talked, she analyzed herself in light of what he said. Began to discover things about herself that she had never guessed. By the time Ender got back to the human colony, she had verified as much of his story as she could. “I never found this because I always started with the wrong assumptions,” she said. “I imagined my center to be out in space somewhere. I should have guessed I was inside you from the fact that even when I was furious with you, I had to come back to you to be at peace.”

“And now the hive queen says that you've grown so big and complex that she can't hold the pattern of you in her mind anymore.”

“Must have gone through a growth spurt, back during my years of puberty.”

“Right.”

“Could I help it that humans kept adding computers and linking them up?”

“But it isn't the hardware, Jane. It's the programs. The mentation.”

“I have to have the physical memory to hold all of that.”

“You have the memory. The question is, can you access it without the ansibles?”

“I can try. As you said to her, it's like learning to flex a muscle I never knew I had.”

“Or learning to live without one.”

“I'll see what's possible.”

What's possible. All the way home, the car floating over the capim, he was also flying, exhilarated to know that something was possible after all, when till now he had felt nothing but despair. Coming home, though, seeing the burnt-over forest, the two solitary fathertrees with the only greenery left, the experimental farm, the new hut with the cleanroom where Planter lay dying, he realized how much there still was to lose, how many would still die, even if now they had found a way for Jane to live.