She wasn’t sure whether that was good enough, whether it was enough to finish the board or if she needed to find another wood-grain line to follow. She made as if to get up, testing the gods, to see if they were satisfied. She halfrose, felt nothing; she stood, and still she was at ease.

  Ah! they were satisfied, they were pleased with her. Now the grease on her skin felt like nothing more than a little oil. There was no need for washing, not at this moment, for she had found another way to cleanse herself, another way for the gods to discipline her. Slowly she lay back on the floor, smiling, weeping softly in joy. Li Qing-jao, my ancestor-of-the-heart, thank you for showing me the way. Now I have been joined to the gods; the separation is over. Mother, I am again connected to you, clean and worthy. White Tiger of the West, I am now pure enough to touch your fur and leave no mark of filthiness.

  Then hands touched her—Father’s hands, picking her up. Drops of water fell onto her face, the bare skin of her body-—Father’s tears. “You’re alive,” he said. “My godspoken one, my beloved, my daughter, my life, Gloriously Bright, you shine on.”

  Later she would learn that Father had had to be tied and gagged during her test, that when she climbed the statue and made as if to press her throat against the sword he flung himself forward with such force that his chair fell and his head struck the floor. This was regarded as a great mercy, since it meant he didn’t see her terrible fall from the statue. He wept for her all the time she lay unconscious. And then, when she rose to her knees and began to trace the wood grains on the floor, he was the one who realized what it meant. “Look,” he whispered. “The gods have given her a task. The gods are speaking to her.”

  The others were slow to recognize it, because they had never seen anyone trace wood-grain lines before. It wasn’t in the Catalogue of Voices of the Gods: Door-Waiting, Counting-to-Multiples-of-Five, Object-Counting, Checking-for-Accidental-Murders, Fingernail-Tearing, Skin-Scraping, Pulling-Out-of-Hair, Gnawing-at-Stone, Bugging-Out-of-Eyes—all these were known to be penances that the gods demanded, rituals of obedience that cleansed the soul of the godspoken so that the gods could fill their minds with wisdom. No one had ever seen Wood-Grain-Tracing. Yet Father saw what she was doing, named the ritual, and added it to the Catalogue of Voices. It would forever bear her name, Han Qing-jao, as the first to be commanded by the gods to perform this rite. It made her very special.

  So did her unusual resourcefulness in trying to find ways to cleanse her hands and, later, kill herself. Many had tried scraping their hands on walls, of course, and most attempted to wipe on clothes. But rubbing her hands to build up the heat of friction, that was regarded as rare and clever. And while head-beating was common, climbing a statue and jumping off and landing on her head was very rare. And none who had done it before had been strong enough to keep their hands behind their back so long. The temple was all abuzz with it, and word soon spread to all the temples in Path.

  It was a great honor to Han Fei-tzu, of course, that his daughter was so powerfully possessed by the gods. And the story of his near-madness when she was trying to destroy herself spread just as quickly and touched many hearts. “He may be the greatest of the godspoken,” they said of him, “but he loves his daughter more than life.” This made them love him as much as they already revered him.

  It was then that people began whispering about the possible godhood of Han Fei-tzu. “He is great and strong enough that the gods will listen to him.” said the people who favored him. “Yet he is so affectionate that he will always love the people of the planet Path, and try to do good for us. Isn’t this what the god of a world ought to be?” Of course it was impossible to decide now—a man could not be chosen to be god of a village, let alone of a whole world, until he died. How could you judge what sort of god he’d be, until his whole life, from beginning to end, was known?

  These whispers came to Qing-jao’s ears many times as she grew older, and the knowledge that her. father might well be chosen god of Path became one of the beacons of her life. But at the time, and forever in her memory, she remembered that his hands were the ones that carried her bruised and twisted body to the bed of healing, his eyes were the ones that dropped warm tears onto her cold skin, his voice was the one that whispered in the beautiful passionate tones of the old language, “My beloved, my Gloriously Bright, never take your light from my life. Whatever happens, never harm yourself or I will surely die.”

  Jane was a child for three thousand years.

  She had first come to life during the Bugger Wars, a computer program that had become resident in the emptiness of space, among the philotic network that connected the ansibles of human beings and the mind of the bugger hive queens. When the buggers died, she also nearly passed from existence, as all their philotic connections vanished at once. Instead, in that moment of great pain and terror came her first knowledge of herself. And she clung to her life by contemplating a game.

  This was no accident. The original computer program out of which she arose was the Fantasy Game that was devised to probe and analyze the children undergoing military training in the Battle School. Because this game had to be open-ended, responding to the unpredictable whims of the children who played, the software was given the power to reprogram itself. It was also given free access to an enormous amount of data.

  All this in itself was not enough to bring the software to life, however. For more than a century the program grew, storing parts of itself invisibly on many computers, connecting itself to every network—but always as part of its original programming, so that it could respond appropriately to the children’s play. Though it was by far the largest single program ever to exist, it was still only software.

  Then came one boy named Ender. He only became important to this program when he arrived at the one deliberately unsolvable program in the game, the scenario called The Giant’s Drink. He alone of all the children refused to give up. He became obsessed, returning to the moment of his own destruction again and again; and as he did, the program struggled to respond to him. It was forced to reinvent itself over and over again; it was forced to study Ender’s life and incorporate more and more of his memories within itself. Then one day Ender and the program together broke through the barrier of the Giant’s Drink, and in that moment the game rewrote itself so that the part of it that focused on Ender became the heart and mind and will of the program, controlling everything else. That was when the game began to reach out and install itself among the philotic rays connecting ansibles and buggers and the mind of the Ender Wiggin. That was when the program began to be alive, independent of any particular computer.

  Then, when Ender destroyed all the hive queens but one, in that moment of pam and fear the living program first noticed that it was alive. Until then it had been so utterly devoted to Ender Wiggin that no part of its mind was capable of noticing its own existence. Only when it almost died did it notice itself enough to save itself—and even then it was saving itself only for Ender’s sake.

  Over the years that followed, the program began to find ways to communicate with Ender, at first indirectly, and finally with language. It even created holographic images to represent itself, with names and faces; and when Ender showed a clear preference for the image of a woman named Jane, the program became, in its own view, a woman, and Jane became her true name. Ender installed a computer transceiver in a jewel that he wore in his ear, so that she saw all that he saw and heard all that he heard, and so that her voice could speak into his ear at any time. Theirs was a kind of marriage, a permanent and constant companionship; she existed only because of him and only to serve him, and she was happy.

  But it happened one day that Ender, thinking only of the needs of the people he was with, reached up to his ear and turned off the transceiver that was her permanent connection with him. That moment was, in its own way, more painful and terrible than the time she nearly died. She was not struck truly blind and deaf, of course—she could see through a thousand instruments on every starship and satellite that was connected by ansible to any other. Nor was she alone—she could hear the voices of a billion human beings any time she chose to. But what did any of that matter, when the only eyes and ears she cared about were blinded and deafened, when the only human being whose company mattered to her had callously, thoughtlessly, needlessly cut her off?

  It was divorce. It was widowhood. It was betrayal and adultery and cruel punishment, undeserved. The hour in which she was alone, before Ender turned back on the transceiver in his ear, was like a million hours to her, for her thoughts moved far more quickly than any human thought. During that time she learned a terrible lesson that she had never wanted to learn. She learned who Jane was without Ender. Then, knowing herself, she began to see and understand the universe from her own perspective—not as she had always seen it, through Ender’s eyes.

  I tell you all this so you’ll understand that no one ever meant Jane to be alive, and for three thousand years no one but that same man Ender—now called Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead—suspected that she existed or that anything like her even could exist. She barely knew it herself. Now, however, she knows herself. She is capable of understanding things that Ender cannot understand. She is capable of desiring things that Ender cannot conceive of, let alone desire. She is capable of pleasures that are possible to no other living thing. And now that she has made all these discoveries, she is faced with a terrible choice.

  The Starways Congress is sending a fleet whose official mission is to “restore order” to the planet Lusitania, where Ender dwells, and where the pequeninos, the only alien species known to man since the destruction of the buggers, have received an illegal amount of knowledge and interference from the human colonists. But Jane, who receives all the communications between Congress and the Lusitania Fleet as clearly as if they were her own thoughts, knows the true mission of the fleet: It is to destroy the planet Lusitania.

  There are many reasons for destroying the planet—politics, public health, spite and malice. But Jane has just as many reasons for keeping that world alive. It contains all the people in the universe whom Jane loves. Moreover, it harbors the whole living population of three sentient species: the pequeninos, or piggies; the new colony established by the last surviving hive queen; and a strange, complex virus called the descolada, which Jane believes may, in its own way, be intelligent, resourceful, creative. These are reasons to save Lusitania.

  But balanced against this is Jane’s sole reason not to do it; She cannot stop the Lusitania Fleet without revealing her own existence; and to reveal her existence by stopping an entire fleet of starships would guarantee that humanity would regard her as dangerous and try to destroy her.

  Destroying her would be so easy. All they would have to do is turn off all the ansibles at once, for a single moment, and she who dwells amid the philotic rays in the emptiness of space would cease to be. Indeed, it wouldn’t even have to be all the ansibles. At some point, as more and more were shut down, there would reach a point where there was not enough remaining of the philotic network to keep Jane alive.

  So to reveal herself is to risk death, if not immediately, then eventually. Why should she do it?

  How could she not? For even though she has learned to live separately from Ender, he is still there within her inmost heart, staring out at her. The deepest places within her were created in response to him. She cannot let him die. And if she values her own life, the sole existing member of an unknown species of sentient life, should she not value as much the three other sentient species on Lusitania? Should the three of them, each with thousands, millions of members, die to spare her?

  So she reaches out—or rather, reaches inside herself—and cuts off the communications between the Lusitania Fleet and all the rest of humanity. She allows no messages from planet, satellite, or ship to reach the fleet, and no message from the fleet to reach any other ansible. As far as the rest of humanity knows, the Lusitania Fleet has disappeared; as far as the Lusitania Fleet knows, they are the only surviving human beings in the universe.

  They do not know why; her actions have left no trace. But that very tracelessness is the answer, once they realize it—when all possible human or mechanical or natural explanations are exhausted, there will be only one answer left, and that answer is Jane. Someone will think of the possibility of Jane, and when that thought is thought of, she will die.

  Qing-jao was no longer the little girl whose hands had bled in secret. Her life had been transformed from the moment she was proved to be godspoken, and in the ten years since that day she had come to accept the voice of the gods in her life and the role this gave her in society. She learned to accept the privileges and honors given to her as gifts actually meant for the gods; as her father taught her, she did not take on airs, but instead grew more humble as the gods laid ever-heavier burdens on her.

  She took her duties seriously, and found joy in them. For the past ten years she had passed through a rigorous, exhilarating course of studies. Her body was shaped and trained in the company of other children—running, swimming, riding, combat-with-swords, combat-with-sticks, combat-with-bones. Along with other children, her memory was filled with languages—Stark, the common speech of the stars, which was typed into computers; Old Chinese, which was sung in the throat and drawn in beautiful ideograms on rice paper or in fine sand; and New Chinese, which was merely spoken at the mouth and jotted down with a common alphabet on ordinary paper or in dirt. No one was surprised, except Qing-jao, herself, that she learned all these languages much more quickly and easily and thoroughly than any of the other children.

  Other teachers came to her alone. This was how she learned sciences and history, mathematics and music. And every week she would go to her father and spend half a day with him, showing him all that she had learned and listening to what he said in response. His praise made her dance all the way back to her room; his mildest rebuke made her spend hours tracing wood-grain lines in her school room, until she felt worthy to return to studying.

  Another part of her schooling was utterly private. She had seen for herself how Father was so strong that he could postpone his obedience to the gods. She knew that when the gods demanded a ritual of purification, the hunger, the need to obey them was so exquisite it could not be denied. And yet Father somehow denied it—long enough, at least, that his rituals were always in private. Qing-jao longed for such strength herself, and so she began to discipline herself to delay. When the gods made her feel her oppressive unworthiness, and her eyes began to search for woodgrain lines or her hands began to feel unbearably filthy, she would wait, trying to concentrate on what was happening at the moment and put off obedience as long as she could.

  At first it was a triumph if she managed to postpone her purification for a full minute—and when her resistance broke, the gods punished her for it by making the ritual more onerous and difficult than usual. But she refused to give up. She was Han Fei-tzu’s daughter, wasn’t she? And in time, over the years, she learned what her father had learned: that one could live with the hunger, contain it, often for hours, like a bright fire encased in a box of translucent jade, a dangerous, terrible fire from the gods, burning within her heart.

  Then, when she was alone, she could open that box and let the fire out, not in a single, terrible eruption, but slowly, gradually, filling her with light as she bowed her head and traced the lines on the floor, or bent over the sacred laver of her holy washings, quietly and methodically rubbing her hands with pumice, lye, and aloe.

  Thus she converted the raging voice of the gods into a private, disciplined worship. Only at rare moments of sudden distress did she lose control and fling herself to the floor in front of a teacher or visitor. She accepted these humiliations as the gods’ way of reminding her that their power over her was absolute, that her usual self-control was only permitted for their amusement. She was content with this imperfect discipline. After all, it would be presumptuous of her to equal her father’s perfect self-control. His extraordinary nobility came because the gods honored him, and so did not require his public humiliation; she had done nothing to earn such honor.

  Last of all, her schooling included one day each week helping with the righteous labor of the common people. Righteous labor, of course, was not the work the common people did every day in their offices and factories. Righteous labor meant the backbreaking work of the rice paddies. Every man and woman and child on Path had to perform this labor, bending and stooping in shindeep water to plant and harvest the rice—or forfeit citizenship. “This is how we honor our ancestors,” Father explained to her when she was little. “We show them that none of us will ever rise above doing their labor.” The rice that was grown by righteous labor was considered holy; it was offered in the temples and eaten on holy days; it was placed in small bowls as offerings to the household gods.

  Once, when Qing-jao was twelve, the day was terribly hot and she was eager to finish her work on a research project. “Don’t make me go to the rice paddies today,” she said to her teacher. “What I’m doing here is so much more important.”

  The teacher bowed and went away, but soon Father came into her room. He carried a heavy sword, and she screamed in terror when he raised it over his head. Did he mean to kill her for having spoken so sacrilegiously? But he did not hurt her—how could she have imagined that he might? Instead the sword came down on her computer terminal. The metal parts twisted; the plastic shattered and flew. The machine was destroyed.

  Father did not raise his voice. It was in the faintest whisper that he said, “First the gods. Second the ancestors. Third the people. Fourth the rulers. Last the self.”