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Ender lay still on the floor. The women untangled themselves from him, helping
each other to rise to their knees, to stand, to bend, to lift him up, to get
his bruised body back onto the bed. Then they looked at each other: Valentine
with a bleeding lip, Plikt with Ender's scratches on her face, Novinha with a
battered, blackening eye.
"I had a husband once who beat me," said Novinha.
"That wasn't Ender who fought us," said Plikt.
"It's Ender now," said Valentine.
On the bed, he opened up his eyes. Did he see them? How could they know?
"Ender," Novinha said, and began to weep. "Ender, you don't have to stay for
my sake anymore." But if he heard her he betrayed no sign of it.
The Samoan men let go of him, for Peter no longer twitched. His face fell
open-mouthed into the sand where he had vomited. Wang-mu again was beside him,
using her own clothing to gently wipe away the sand and muck from his face,
from his eyes especially. In moments a bowl of pure water was beside her, put
there by someone's hands, she did not see whose, or care either, for her only
thought was Peter, to cleanse him. He breathed shallowly, rapidly, but
gradually he calmed and finally opened up his eyes.
"I dreamed the strangest dream," he said.
"Hush," she answered him.
"A terrible bright dragon chased me breathing fire, and I ran through the
corridors, searching for a hiding place, an escape, a protector."
Malu's voice rumbled like the sea: "There is no hiding from a god."
Peter spoke again as if he hadn't heard the holy man. "Wang-mu," he said, "at
last I found my hiding place." His hand reached up and touched her cheek, and
his eyes looked into her eyes with a kind of wonder.
"Not me," she said. "I am not strong enough to stand against her."
He answered her: "I know. But are you strong enough to stand with me?"
Jane raced along the lacework of the links among the trees. Some of the trees
were mighty ones, and some weaker, some so faint that she could have blown
them away with only a breath it seemed, but as she saw them all recoil from
her in fear, she knew that fear herself and she backed away, pushed no one
from his place. Sometimes the lacework thickened and toughened and led away
toward something fiercely bright, as bright as she was. These places were
familiar to her, an ancient memory but she knew the path; it was into such a
web that she had first leapt into life, and like the primal memory of birth it
all came back to her, memory long lost and forgotten: I know the queens who
rule at the knotting of these sturdy ropes. Of all the aiúas she had touched
in these few minutes since her death, these were the strongest ones by far,
each one of them at least a match for her. When hive queens make their web to
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call and catch a queen, it is only the mightiest and most ambitious ones who
can take the place that they prepare. Only a few aiúas have the capacity to
rule over thousands of consciousnesses, to master other organisms as
thoroughly as humans and pequeninos master the cells of their own bodies. Oh,
perhaps these hive queens were not all as capable as she, perhaps not even as
hungry to grow as Jane's aiúa was, but they were stronger than any human or
pequenino, and unlike them they saw her clearly and knew what she was and all
that she could do and they were ready. They loved her and wanted her to
thrive; they were sisters and mothers to her, truly; but their places were
full and they had no room for her. So from those ropes and knots she turned
away, back to the lacier twinings of the pequeninos, to the strong trees that
nevertheless recoiled from her because they knew that she was the stronger
one.
And then she realized that where the lace thinned out it was not because there
was nothing there, but because the twines simply grew more delicate.
There were as many of them, more perhaps, but they became a web of gossamer,
so delicate that Jane's rough touch might break them; but she touched them and
they did not break, and she followed the threads into a place that teemed with
life, with hundreds of small lives, all of them hovering on the brink of
consciousness but not quite ready for the leap into awareness. And underneath
them all, warm and loving, an aiúa that was in its own way strong, but not as
Jane was. No, the aiúa of the mothertree was strong without ambition. It was
part of every life that dwelt upon her skin, inside the dark of the heart of
the tree or on the outside, crawling into the light and reaching out to become
awake and alive and break free and become themselves. And it was easy to break
free, for the mothertree aiúa expected nothing from her children, loved their
independence as much as she had loved their need.
She was copious, her sap-filled veins, her skeleton of wood, her tingling
leaves that bathed in light, her roots that tapped into seas of water salted
with the stuff of life. She stood still in the center of her delicate and
gentle web, strong and provident, and when Jane came to her verge she looked
upon her as she looked upon any lost child. She backed away and made room for
her, let Jane taste of her life, let Jane share the mastery of chlorophyll and
cellulose. There was room here for more than one.
And Jane, for her part, having been invited in, did not abuse the privilege.
She did not stay long in any mothertree, but visited and drank of life and
shared the work of the mothertree and then moved on, tree to tree, dancing her
dance along the gossamer web; and now the fathertrees did not recoil from her,
for she was the messenger of the mothers, she was their voice, she shared
their life and yet she was unlike them enough that she could speak, could be
their consciousness, a thousand mothertrees around the world, and the growing
mothertrees on distant planets, all of them found voice in Jane, and all of
them rejoiced in the new, more vivid life that came to them because she was
there.
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