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happened to my old crippled body is happening to her. More slowly, but it's the same thing. She thinks so, Valentine thinks it's possible. So do I. So does Jane."
"Give Jane my love. I do miss her."
"I give Jane my love, Ender."
Ender grinned at his resistance. "If they were about to shoot you, Miro, you'd insist on drinking a lot of water just so they'd have to handle a corpse covered with urine when you were dead."
"Valentine isn't a dream or an illusion, Ender," said Miro, refusing to be sidetracked into a discussion of his own obstreperousness. "She's real, and you're killing her."
"Awfully dramatic way of putting it."
"If you'd seen her pull out tufts of her own hair this morning ..."
"So she's rather theatrical, I take it? Well, you've always been one for the theatrical gesture, too. I'm not surprised you get along."
"Andrew, I'm telling you you've got to--"
Suddenly Ender grew stern and his voice overtopped Miro's even though he was not speaking loudly. "Use your head, Miro. Was your decision to jump from your old body to this newer model a conscious one? Did you think about it and say, 'Well, I think I'll let this old corpse crumble into its constituent molecules because this new body is a nicer place to dwell'?"
Miro got his point at once. Ender couldn't consciously control where his attention went. His aiua, even though it was his deepest self, was not to be ordered about.
"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do," said Ender. "That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously. I can't help it if the part of me that's controlling this girl whose company you're sharing isn't as important to my underlying will as you'd like. As she needs. I can't do a thing."
Miro bowed his head.
The sun came up over the trees. Suddenly the bench turned bright, and Miro looked up to see the sunlight making a halo out of Ender's wildly slept-in hair. "Is grooming against the monastic rule?" asked Miro.
"You're attracted to her, aren't you," said Ender, not really making a question out of it. "And it makes you a little uneasy that she is really me."