Page 645 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

<It's a silly idea, isn't it-- to arrive somewhere before your image does. Like stepping through a mirror in order to try to meet yourself on the other side.>
<Ender and Rooter have talked about this a lot-- I've heard them. Ender thinks that perhaps matter and energy are composed of nothing but information. That physical reality is nothing but the message that philotes are transmitting to each other.>
<What does Rooter say?>
<He says that Ender is half right. Rooter says that physical reality is a message-- and the message is a question that the philotes are continually asking God.>
<What is the question?>
<One word: Why?>
<And how does God answer them?>
<With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.>
Miro's whole family came to meet him when he returned to Lusitania. After all, they loved him. And he loved them, too, and after a month in space he was looking forward to their company. He knew-- intellectually, at least-- that his month in space had been a quarter-century to them. He had prepared himself for the wrinkles in Mother's face, for even Grego and Quara to be adults in their thirties. What he had not anticipated, not viscerally, anyway, was that they would be strangers. No, worse than strangers. They were strangers who pitied him and thought they knew him and looked down on him like a child. They were all older than him. All of them. And all younger, because pain and loss hadn't touched them the way it had touched him.
Ela was the best of them, as usual. She embraced him, kissed him, and said, "You make me feel so mortal. But I'm glad to see you young." At least she had the courage to admit that there was an immediate barrier between them, even though she pretended that the barrier was his youth. True, Miro was exactly as they remembered him-- his face, at least. The long-lost brother returned from the dead; the ghost who comes to haunt the family, eternally young. But the real barrier was the way he moved. The way he spoke.
They had obviously forgotten how disabled he was, how badly his body responded to his damaged brain. The shuffling step, the twisted, difficult speech-- their memories had excised all that unpleasantness and had remembered him the way he was before his accident. After all, he had only been disabled for a few months before leaving on his time-dilating voyage. It was easy to forget that, and recall instead the Miro they had known for so many years before. Strong, healthy, the only one able to stand up to the man they had called Father. They couldn't conceal their shock. He could