Children of the Mind (Ender, Book 4) (Ender Quartet) Read Free

least."
    Peter reached idly for the terminal and turned it off. The hologram disappeared.
    This disturbed Wang-mu very much. Almost as if he had slapped a child. Or beaten a servant. "Jane is a very noble creature, to treat her with such disrespect."
    "Jane is a computer program with a bug in the id routines."
    He was in a dark mood, this boy who had come to take her into his starship and spirit her away from the world of Path. But dark as his mood might be, she understood now, with the hologram gone from the terminal, what she had seen. "It isn't just because you're so young and the holograms of Peter Wiggin the Hegemon are of a mature man," said Wang-mu.
    "What," he said impatiently. "What isn't what?"
    "The physical difference between you and the Hegemon."
    "What is it, then?"
    "He looks -- satisfied."
    "He conquered the world," said Peter.
    "So when you have done the same, you will get that look of satisfaction?"
    "I suppose so," said Peter. "It's what passes for a purpose in my life. It's the mission Ender has sent me on."
    "Don't lie to me," said Wang-mu. "On the riverbank you spoke of the terrible things I did for the sake of my ambition. I admit it -- I was ambitious, desperate to rise out of my terrible lowborn state. I know the taste of it, and the smell of it, and I smell it coming from you, like the smell of tar on a hot day, you stink of it."
    "Ambition? Has a stench?"
    "I'm drunk with it myself."
    He grinned. Then he touched the jewel in his ear. "Remember, Jane is listening, and she tells Ender everything ."
    Wang-mu fell silent, but not because she was embarrassed. She simply had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing.
    "So I'm ambitious. Because that's how Ender imagined me. Ambitious and nasty-minded and cruel."
    "But I thought you were not yourself," she said.
    His eyes blazed with defiance. "That's right, I'm not ." He looked away. "Sorry, Gepetto, but I can't be a real boy. I have no soul."
    She didn't understand the name he said, but she understood the word soul . "All my childhood I was thought to be a servant by nature. To have no soul. Then one day they discovered that I have one. So far it has brought me no great happiness."
    "I'm not speaking of some religious idea. I'm speaking of the aiúa. I haven't got one. Remember what happened to Miro's broken-down body when his aiúa abandoned it."
    "But you don't crumble, so you must have an aiúa after all."
    "I don't have it, it has me . I continue to exist because the aiúa whose irresistible will called me into existence continues to imagine me. Continues to need me, to control me, to be my will."
    "Ender Wiggin?" she asked.
    "My brother, my creator, my tormentor, my god, my very self."
    "And young Valentine? Her too?"
    "Ah, but he loves her. He's proud of her. He's glad he made her. Me he loathes. Loathes, and yet it's his will that I do and say every nasty thing. When I'm at my most despicable, remember that I do only what my brother makes me do."
    "Oh, to blame him for --"
    "I'm not blaming , Wang-mu. I'm stating simple reality. His will is controlling three bodies now. Mine, my impossibly angelic sister's, and of course his own very tired middle-aged body. Every aiúa in my body receives its order and place from his. I am, in all ways that matter, Ender Wiggin. Except that he has created me to be the vessel of every impulse in himself that he hates and fears. His ambition, yes, you smell his ambition when you smell mine. His aggression. His rage. His nastiness. His cruelty. His, not mine, because I am dead, and anyway I was never like this, never the way he saw me. This person before you is a travesty, a mockery! I'm a twisted memory. A despicable dream. A nightmare. I'm the creature hiding under the bed. He brought me out of chaos to be the terror of his childhood."
    "So don't do it," said Wang-mu. "If you don't want to be those things, don't do them."
    He sighed and closed his eyes. "If you're so bright, why haven't you understood a word I've