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"I don't need you two fighting," said Jane mildly. "I need you working together. Because you may have to work this out without me."
"As far as I can tell," said Miro, "you and Val have been working things out without me." "Val has been working things out because she's so full of ... whatever she's full of right now." "Ender is what she's full of," said Miro.
Val turned around in her chair and looked at him. "Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?"
"Ender is dying," said Miro. "Or did you already know?" "Jane mentioned he seemed to be inattentive."
"Dying," said Miro again.
"I think it speaks very clearly about the nature of men," said Val, "that you and Ender both claim to love a flesh-and-blood woman, but in fact you can't give that woman even a serious fraction of your attention."
"Yes, well, you have my whole attention, Val," said Miro. "And as for Ender, if he's not paying attention to Mother it's because he's paying attention to you."
"To my work, you mean. To the task at hand. Not to me."
"Well, that's all you've been paying attention to, except when you took a break to rip on me about how I'm talking to Jane and not listening to you."
"That's right," said Val. "You think I don't see what's been going on with me this past day? How all of a sudden I can't shut up about things, I'm so intense I can't sleep, how I-- Ender's supposedly been the real me all along, only he left me alone till now and that was fine because what he's doing now is terrifying. Don't you see that I'm frightened? It's too much. It's more than I can stand. I can't hold that much energy inside me."
"So talk about it instead of screaming at me," said Miro.
"But you weren't listening. I was trying to and you were just subvocalizing to Jane and shutting me out."
"Because I was sick of hearing endless streams of data and analysis that I could just as easily catch in summary on the computer. How was I supposed to know that you'd take a break in your monologue and start talking about something human?"