“Well,” said Carlotta, “that and trying to keep us from destroying our consciences by killing him.”

  “Sergeant was the only one who wanted to kill him,” said Andrew softly.

  “We all knew he was going to die,” said Carlotta. “Sergeant thought sooner better than later. As it was, when we found that Formic colony ship, it took some amazing convolutions to get him from the Herodotus to the Formic habitat.”

  “So he lived for a while in the Formic ship?”

  “He lived long enough to stand up and take a few steps on his own,” said Andrew. “It had been a long time since he could do that. It was too much for his heart. He died.”

  “So you remember him as a giant,” said Graff. “I knew him as an undersized, sassy, brilliant, irritating child. The one who helped Ender refocus his attention in the last battle of the war.”

  “Well, it’s been fun, reminiscing like this,” said Andrew. “But you came an awful long way just to chat about old times and dead friends.”

  “Don’t be rude, Ender,” said Carlotta. “He’s trying to establish rapport so we’ll listen to whatever ridiculous thing he has to propose.”

  Graff was surprised that Jane hadn’t already informed them. But of course she had.

  “You’ve seen the reports by Ela Ribeira,” said Graff.

  “She signs them Ela Wiggin,” said Carlotta. “I don’t know if she loved her stepfather, but she certainly hated her father of record, Marcos Maria Ribeira.”

  “Why would you research her life instead of reading her reports?” asked Graff.

  “In addition to, not instead of,” said Andrew. “Speakings for the Dead are all matters of public record. After we read Ela’s reports, we watched Andrew Wiggin’s Speaking of Marcão Ribeira. First the version dubbed into Starways Common, and then we learned Lusitanian Portuguese so we could hear the original and understand it.”

  That was just showing off.

  “He’s just showing off,” said Carlotta. “We already spoke Portuguese and we listened to the original right from the start.”

  “Why would you learn Portuguese?” asked Graff.

  “Once you’ve learned one Romance language, the others are easy. Armenian, now, that was hard. Indo-European, but hard anyway. Sort of halfway between Old Persian and Phrygian.”

  “I forgot all my schoolboy Phrygian years ago,” said Graff.

  “It’s just Albanian, with a twist,” said Carlotta. “How do you think we amuse ourselves, here in this tiny environment?”

  “So you didn’t learn Portuguese because it’s the language of the Lusitania colony?” said Graff.

  “Obviously you want us to go there,” said Andrew.

  “I don’t have any such plan,” said Graff. “Do you have any reason to doubt the thoroughness of Ela’s report?”

  “She’s a meticulous scientist,” said Andrew. “Carlotta’s our best geneticist, she can practically read the human genome like braille. And she didn’t point out any missing information.”

  “What’s missing,” said Carlotta, “is the context. Who made this terrible thing, this Descolada virus? What was their plan? We’ve been back and forth on this all day.”

  “So you don’t need to go to Lusitania.”

  “It will take a century to get there on the Herodotus,” said Andrew, “but on your ship it apparently takes no time at all.”

  “If you already understand everything,” said Graff, “I can’t think why I needed to come here.”

  “Your job is to persuade us to help you destroy the Descoladores—isn’t that how Ela refers to the makers of this virus?” Andrew was regarding him with an expression Graff well remembered. They may look like Petra Arkanian, their mother; but that smirk was pure Bean.

  “And we’re not sure they need destroying,” said Carlotta.

  “Neither am I,” said Graff.

  “Somebody is,” said Andrew.

  “I am,” said another voice, at a doorway behind Graff.

  Graff turned. It was Sergeant. Not wearing a military uniform, but carrying what was certainly a military indoor weapon—the kind that could kill without putting a hole in the shell of the ship.

  “Put that away,” said Carlotta. “He’s our guest.”

  “Uninvited,” said Sergeant, “and therefore an intruder. An invader.”

  “I don’t eat much,” said Graff. “You don’t have to kill me.”

  “I never have to kill anybody,” said Sergeant. “But someday I’ll want to kill somebody, as long as my mentally deficient siblings try to keep every pet that sneaks into the house.”

  “As far as we know,” said Graff, “the Descolada propagates during its sub-lightspeed journey through raw space.”

  “Anybody from Lusitania is probably a carrier of the virus,” said Sergeant, “and will have to be killed.”

  “Rot,” said Andrew.

  “Shut up, Sergeant,” said Carlotta.

  “Make me,” said Sergeant.

  Graff shook his head. “Ela isn’t in charge of this plot,” said Graff. “I certainly am not. Neither are any of you, so stop behaving like bickering children.”

  “Who is in charge?” asked Sergeant.

  “I believe I understand now why I was sent here,” said Graff. “And I think the moment is now.”

  Graff felt it, and knew he was right. It was subtle, but his momentum through space must have shifted very slightly, because he felt just a twinge of disequilibrium.

  “What was that?” asked Andrew.

  “So you felt it?” asked Graff.

  “Felt what?” said Sergeant.

  “You were standing, and moving,” said Graff. “Of course you didn’t feel it.”

  “I believe we just moved through space,” said Carlotta. “I think Graff’s pet computer just traveled us instantly to some other place, and some other momentum.”

  “The problem with Jane’s spaceflight method is that it always takes its living passengers Outside.”

  “Into Protean Space,” said Andrew. “Where things get made.”

  “Where a focused human mind can cause things it imagines to become real,” said Graff. “And those things return to Settled Space and, if they were well imagined, thrive.”

  “And she, your Jane, didn’t want us to create anything,” said Andrew.

  “So you were a decoy,” said Sergeant.

  “A distraction,” corrected Graff. “I didn’t know that’s what she would use me for, because you distracted me as much as I distracted you. She used us to control each other. For just that split second in which you could have, for instance, created a powerful warship that could blow anything else to dust.”

  “Still sounds like magic to me,” said Sergeant.

  “It is,” said Carlotta. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a technology.”

  “So why doesn’t this all-powerful witch simply go to the planet of the Descoladores and blow their whole planet to bits? It’s what Ender Wiggin would have done,” said Sergeant.

  “Not knowingly,” said Graff. “Only when lied to. But you?”

  “I can face my own choices in the real world,” said Sergeant.

  “You’ve never been in the real world,” said Graff.

  “You mean the world of the misnamed species Homo sapiens? ‘Wise man’?”

  “And what are we?” asked Carlotta.

  “Homo hubris,” said Graff, instantly.

  Andrew laughed at once; it took Carlotta a moment longer.

  “Hubris is a Greek word,” said Sergeant. “Not a Latin one.”

  “I didn’t think you’d like Homo clunes,” said Graff.

  “He has some Latin,” said Sergeant.

  “And less Greek,” said Carlotta.

  “He’s no Shakespeare,” said Andrew.

  It took Graff a moment to follow their progression. Some Latin, less Greek—Ben Jonson’s words about Shakespeare in the preface to the First Folio: “Small Latin and less Greek.”

  Why did Graff remember that? Where had he dredged up “clunes,” Latin for “buttocks” or, he now remembered, Latin slang for the whole pelvic region? Had something in his own mind changed during the two quick passages he just made Outside and back In? Was Jane reimagining him during those moments in Protean Space?

  Or was he reimagining himself? Giving himself a mind more in line with the mental abilities of these children?

  He saw them as children now, though they were of adult stature and appearance. Or at least adolescent appearance. No beard on Andrew, but maybe he shaved; wispy tufts of beardish stuff on Sergeant. A hint of a womanly shape on Carlotta.

  “He’s evaluating us physically,” said Carlotta. “And I’m not flattered.”

  “I don’t give a clunes ratum,” said Sergeant.

  “Of course you meant to say, ‘Non gratum anus rodentum,’” corrected Carlotta.

  “Where are we, Graff?” asked Sergeant.

  “Your ship’s instruments should do a better job of locating us in space than any guesses I might make.”

  In only a few moments, they learned they were reasonably close to the planet Lusitania, and that several other starships were nearby.

  “A convention?” asked Andrew. “Are we the guests of honor?”

  “Or a summit meeting?” asked Sergeant.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Sergeant,” said Carlotta. “You’re nowhere near the summit. That spot is completely occupied by the being who is capable of shuffling us like a deck of cards.”

  “She can hear what we’re saying?” Andrew asked Graff.

  “I don’t know her limitations. She said she couldn’t really get herself installed in your ship, but that might never have been true, or it might have changed during our passage Outside just now.”

  “I don’t care if she hears this,” said Sergeant.

  “You don’t have to say it,” said Graff. “She already knows.”

  “But I want to say it,” said Sergeant. “So she knows I know. She’s the real enemy. She’s the one who holds the future of every species in her hand, so to speak. This instant transportation thing is only the beginning of her powers. She makes the Descolada virus look like a child’s school project.”

  “So you think our real task is to kill her?” asked Andrew. “It sounds unlikely.”

  “More like impossible,” said Carlotta.

  “More like unexplored,” said Sergeant.

  “And if she believes you mean to try to kill her,” said Graff, “what’s to stop her from bringing us back from our next little hop with one less Delphiki on board?”

  “But if she knows we can’t possibly kill her,” said Sergeant, “why wouldn’t she amuse herself by allowing us to try?”

  “I understand nothing about her,” said Graff. “She claims to be a computer construct given a soul—an aiúa—by the Hive Queens back during the Formic Wars. Maybe she has a conscience along with a soul. Maybe she’s the Hive Queens’ instrument of vengeance. Maybe her long association with Ender Wiggin made her more like him, which would be pretty good news for the human race.”

  “But would it be good for us?” asked Sergeant. “The post-human race?”

  Graff smiled. “A race? Founded how? Where are your offspring? What exactly do they inherit from you? Whom will you mate with? Will you get all pharaonic and mate with each other?”

  “There’s such a thing as fertilization outside the body,” said Carlotta.

  “It’s still siblings coupling, and it still pollutes the genome,” said Graff. “I hardly need to tell you that.”

  “We can mate with sapiens and only allow the ones with our changes intact to come to term,” said Carlotta. “These are not hard problems. We’ve already thought them all through.”

  “Because what else will occupy your time, besides learning languages?” asked Graff. “So you’ll drop down onto the world of Sabines, rape their women—no, sorry, implant the women with your seed—and infuse Carlotta’s ova with contributions from their males?”

  “Sabines,” said Sergeant. “Roman stuff again.”

  “We know how to propagate our species,” said Andrew. “No one knows better than we do.”

  “And yet here you are,” said Graff, “on a ship completely under the control of a nonhuman entity that can take you where it pleases, when it pleases. Well, since she has a physical body now, where and when she pleases.”

  “If she’s so all-powerful,” asked Sergeant, “why does she need us?”

  “Ask her yourself,” said Graff.

  “I’m not creative,” said Jane’s voice, from the ship’s internal speakers.

  “You can flip us in and out of reality,” said Andrew, “and you’re not creative?”

  “I extrapolate very well from data. I had data no human had—my memories of my own creation, my familiarity with communication among the Hive Queens,” said Jane. “But I couldn’t make sense of the Descolada virus even with Ela’s data. You looked at it rather briefly and not only understood it, but knew how to counter it.”

  “Guessed at possible ways to counter it,” said Carlotta.

  “I don’t want the Descoladores’ planet destroyed,” said Jane.

  “It’s the only sure fix,” said Sergeant.

  “They’ve already sprayed that virus out into space,” said Graff. “Worlds will keep running into it over and over, with species we haven’t met yet. Whole ecosystems destroyed. Sentient species crippled like the Pequeninos of Lusitania. Or wiped out altogether. Blowing up their planet doesn’t teach us what else they might have developed, what other weaponized viruses might be out there, and what they thought they were accomplishing.”

  “Another one who became a true believer in the Hive Queen and the Hegemon,” said Sergeant.

  “Jane felt the deaths of the Hive Queens at the end of the Third Formic War,” said Graff. “She wants to know who the Descoladores are before we decide that they’re varelse, unredeemable, worthy of utter destruction.”

  “That’s right,” said Sergeant. “Give them time to study a way to destroy us before we can destroy them.”

  “They already tried to destroy us,” said Carlotta. “And failed.”

  “Because Jane took Ela outside to make her countervirus,” said Graff. “And for all we know, the Descolada is already creating a set of protections to make it virulent again.”

  “You’re making my point, Graff,” said Sergeant.

  “My point is that, as Ender Wiggin taught me, you can’t defeat your enemy until you understand your enemy, and you can’t understand your enemy until you love your enemy.”

  “Wow,” said Sergeant. “You believe every slogan you hear.”

  “The only question I care about right now,” said Jane, “is whether you’re with our expedition to the planet of the Descoladores or not.”

  “Apparently we’re wherever you choose to put us,” said Andrew.

  “You’re no good to me if you aren’t willing participants in the expedition.”

  “We’re willing,” said Sergeant.

  “Speak for yourself, Sergeant,” said Andrew.

  “I always do,” said Sergeant. “We’re with Jane because you two are sentimental enough to halfway agree with her quixotic program. And I’m with her because this is the most important thing going on in the universe right now, and I’m sick of being isolated in a near-lightspeed canister.”

  “Is that enough, Jane?” asked Graff.

  “Best I could have hoped for,” said Jane, “under the circumstances.”

  “So now you have no more use for me?” asked Graff.

  “I haven’t begun to use you yet,” said Jane.

  “Still useful to God,” said Graff, “and therefore allowed to live.”

  “I haven’t been able to find or communicate with God,” said Jane, “and I can’t prevent you from meeting with an untimely end.”

  “At my age,” said Graff, “any end is timely.”

  “Overdue,” said Carlotta.

  “He meant that you are God, Jane,” said Sergeant contemptuously.

  “I don’t need you to explain irony to me,” said Jane.

  “Sergeant was explaining it to himself,” said Carlotta. “He does that, but acts as if he’s informing us, so he can pretend he already knew everything.”

  Silence for a long moment.

  “What now?” asked Andrew.

  It was Jane who answered. “I believe you have all decided to take part in this effort, though each of you for your own motives. Am I correct?”

  “Your question suggests a level of humility and uncertainty I had not expected to hear from you,” said Andrew.

  “And yet you do not answer it,” said Jane.

  “Yes,” said Carlotta. “Take us along with you. It’s been a long time since we had any kind of destination. All right, Ender?”

  Andrew nodded. “Yes, Sister Carlotta,” he said.

  Carlotta took in a sharp breath.

  It was Sergeant who explained. “The Giant used to call her Sister Carlotta. When she was very little.”

  Graff remembered Sister Carlotta, the nun who found Bean, tested him, and fought to have him admitted to Battle School even though it was too late to train him in time to make any difference in the war. But with Bean, “too late” meant “just in the nick of time,” and it pleased Graff to think that Bean remembered Sister Carlotta with love and affection. Enough for him to use her as the tender nickname for the daughter he brought with him on the voyage.

  “Course correction,” said the voice of the ship’s own computer. The ship began its rotation in order to decelerate toward its objective.

  “I have a question,” said Graff.

  They waited.

  “Was Bean—was your father, was the Giant, was Julian Delphiki—happy when he died?”

  “I don’t think he was happy to die,” said Sergeant, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I think,” said Andrew, “that he died surrounded by the people he loved most in the world, and knew that we loved him, and that was enough.”

  Sergeant scoffed.

  Graff simply nodded. “Don’t fool yourself, children. You’re still human.”