Sum
@Summmluv
She smiles. She says his name.
Ender Wiggin, my precious.
Wang-mu knew that she had seen what Demosthenes described: Mother had bowed to Father because he had the power to hurt her. And Wang-mu had been afraid, both at the time and again when she remembered; so as she heard the words of Demosthenes she knew that they were true, and marveled that her father could say those words and even agree with them and not realize that he had acted them out himself. That was why Wang-mu had always listened with great interest to all the words of the great – the terrible – Demosthenes, because, great or terrible, she knew that he told the truth.
Goz yaşım pit
I was wrong about Novinha, he thought. It wasn’t Valentine she was jealous of. It was Jane. All these years, she’s seen me speaking silently with Jane; all the time, saying things that she could never hear, hearing things that she could never say.
I’ve lost her trust in me, and I never even realized I was losing it. Even now, he must have been subvocalizing.
He must have been talking to Jane out of a habit so deep that he didn’t even know he was doing it.
Because she answered him. ‘I warned you,’ she said.
I suppose you did, Ender answered silently.
‘You never think I understand anything about human beings.’
I guess you’re learning.
‘She’s right, you know. You are my puppet. I manipulate you all the time. You haven’t had a thought of your own in years.’
‘Shut up,’ he whispered. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘Ender,’ she said, ‘if you think it would help you keep from losing Novinha, take the jewel out of your ear. I wouldn’t mind.’
‘I would,’ he said.
‘I was lying – so would I,’ she said. ‘But if you have to do it, to keep her, then do it.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But I’d be hard-pressed to keep someone that I’ve clearly lost already.’
‘When Quim comes back, everything will be fine.’
Right, thought Ender. Right. Please, God, take good care of Father Estevão.
‘Has she successfully trained any viruses?’
‘She’s not even testing for that. It’s like she’s run to the window and hollered, “They’re coming to kill you!” She’s not doing science, she’s doing interspecies politics, only we don’t know that the other side even has politics, we only know that with her help it might just kill us faster than we ever imagined.’
‘What she’s doing?’
‘She’s been raiding my files – which isn’t hard, because I didn’t think I needed to block them off from a fellow xenobiologist. She’s been constructing the inhibitors I’ve been trying to splice into plants – easy enough, because I’ve laid out exactly how it’s done. Only instead of splicing it into anything, she’s giving it directly to the Descolada.’
If she feared that they would be taken away from her, she withdrew from them; she stopped permitting herself to need them.
Not ‘them.’ Him. Ender. She was trying to stop needing him. And this silence, if she kept it up, would drive such a wedge between them that their marriage would never recover.