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lap. Then it dissolved into a whitish liquid. Ender jumped to his feet, backed away. He stepped on someone's toe.
"Ow," said Valentine.
"Watch where you're going," said a man.
Valentine isn't on this ship, thought Ender. And I know the man's voice, too.
He turned to face them, the man and woman who had appeared in the empty seats beside him.
Valentine. Impossibly young. The way she had looked when, as a young teenager, she had swum beside him in a lake on a private estate on Earth. The way she had looked when he loved her and needed her most, when she was the only reason he could think of to go on with his military training; when she was the only reason he could think of why the world might be worth the trouble of saving it.
"You can't be real," he said.
"Of course I am," she said. "You stepped on my foot, didn't you?"
"Poor Ender," said the young man. "Clumsy and stupid. Not a really good combination."
Now Ender knew him. "Peter," he said. His brother, his childhood enemy, at the age when he became Hegemon. The picture that had been playing on all the vids when Peter managed to arrange things so that Ender could never come home to Earth after his great victory.
"I thought I'd never see you face to face again," said Ender. "You died so long ago."
"Never believe a rumor of my death," said Peter. "I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition."
"Where did you come from?"
Miro offered the answer. "They must have come from patterns in your mind, Ender, since you know them."
"They do," said Ender. "But why? It's our self-conception we're supposed to carry with us out here. The pattern by which we know ourselves."
"Is that so, Ender?" said Peter. "Then you must be really special. A personality so complicated it takes two people to contain it."
"There's no part of me in you," said Ender.
"And you'd better keep it that way," said Peter, leering. "It's girls I like, not dirty old men."