You are the man you have always been: one who takes responsibility, one who foresees consequences and acts to protect others and, yes, yourself. That man will not easily surrender a burden.
But do not use starflight like a drug, using it to seek oblivion. I can tell you from experience that a life lived in short visits to the human race is not a life. We are only human when we are part of a community. When you first came to Battle School, I tried to isolate you, but it could not be done. I surrounded you with hostility; you took most of your enemies and rivals and made friends of them. You freely taught everything you knew, and nurtured students that we teachers had, frankly, given up on; some of them ended up finding greatness in themselves, and achieved much. You were a part of them; they carried you inside them all their lives. You were better at our job than we were.
Your jeesh loved you, Ender, with a devotion I could only envy--I have had many friends, but never the kind of passion that those children had for you. They would have died for you, every one of them. Because they knew you would have died for them. And the reports I had from Shakespeare Colony--from Sel Menach, from Ix Tolo and his sons Po and Abra, and from the colonists who never even knew you, but found the place you had prepared for them--I can tell you that you were universally loved and respected, and all of them regarded you as the best member of their communities, their benefactor and friend.
I tell you this because I fear that the lesson I taught you first was the one you learned the best: that you are always alone, that no one will ever help you, that whatever must be done, only you can do. I cannot speak to the deep recesses of your mind, but only to the uppermost part, the conscious mind that has spoken and written to me so eloquently all these years. So I hope you can hear my message and pass it along to the part of you that will not at first believe it:
You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not. The meetingplace of all these communities you formed was your own heart; they knew you held them there, and it made them one with each other. Yet the gift you gave them, none was able to give you, and I fear this is because I did my evil work too well, and built a wall in your mind that cannot let you receive the knowledge of what and who you are.
It galls me to see how this "Speaker for the Dead" with his silly little books has achieved the influence that YOU deserved. People are actually turning it into a religion--there are self-styled "speakers for the dead" who presume to talk at funerals and tell "the truth" about the dead person, an appalling desecration--who can know the truth about anyone? I have left instructions in my will that none of these poseurs is to be allowed anywhere near my funeral, if anyone even bothers to have one. You saved the world and were never allowed to come home. This mountebank makes up a fake history of the formics and then writes an apologia for your brother Peter and people make a religion out of it. There's no accounting for the human race.
You have Valentine with you. Show her this letter, and see if she does not affirm that every word I've said about you is true. I may not be alive when you read this, but many who knew you as students in Battle School are still alive, including most of your jeesh. They are old, but not one of them has forgotten you. (I still write to Petra now and then; she has been widowed twice, and yet remains an astonishingly happy and optimistic soul. She keeps in touch with all the others.) They and I and Valentine can all attest to the fact that you have belonged to the human race more deeply and fully than most people could even imagine.
Find a way to believe that, and don't hide from life in the unfathomable, lightless depths of relativistic space.
I have achieved much in my life, but the greatest of my achievements was finding you, recognizing what you were, and somehow managing not to ruin you before you could save the world. I only wish I could then have healed you. But that will have to be your own achievement--or perhaps Valentine's. Or perhaps it will come from the children that you must, you must have someday.
For that is my greatest personal regret. I never married and had children of my own. Instead I stole other people's children and trained them--not raised them. It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into his heart.
I had no such moments, because I did not treat my kidnapped Battle School children that way. I was no one's father, by birth or adoption. Marry, Ender. Have children, or adopt them, or borrow them--whatever it takes. But do not live a life like mine.
I have done great things, but now, in the end, I am not happy. I wish I had let the future take care of itself, and instead of skipping forward through time, had stopped, made a family, and died in my proper time, surrounded by children.
See how I pour out my heart to you? Somehow, you took me into your jeesh as well.
Forgive the maudlinness of old men; when you are my age, you will understand.
I never treated you like a son when I had you in my power, but I have loved you like a son; and in this letter I have spoken to you as I'd like to think I might have spoken to the sons I never had. I say to you: Well done, Ender. Now be happy.
Hyrum Graff
I.F. Col. Ret.
Ender was shocked at the difference in Valentine when he emerged from stasis at the end of the voyage. "I told you I wasn't going into stasis until my book was finished," she said when she saw his expression.
"You didn't stay awake for the whole voyage."
"I did," she said. "This wasn't a forty-year voyage in two years like our first one, it was only an eighteen-year voyage in a bit over fourteen months." Ender did the arithmetic quickly and saw that she was right. Acceleration and deceleration always took about the same amount of time, while the length of the voyage in between determined the difference in subjective time.
"Still," he said. "You're a woman."
"How flattering that you noticed. I was disappointed that I didn't have any ship's captains falling in love with me."
"Perhaps the fact that Captain Hong brought his wife and family with him had an effect on that."
"Bit by bit, they're learning that you don't have to sacrifice everything to be a star voyager," said Valentine.
"Arithmetic--I'm still seventeen, and you're nearly twenty-one."
"I am twenty-one," she said. "Think of me as your Auntie Val."
"I will not," he said. "You finished your book?"
"I wrote a history of Shakespeare Colony, up to the time of your arrival. I couldn't have done it if you had been awake."
"Because I would have insisted on accuracy?"
"Because you wouldn't have let me have complete access to your correspondence with Kolmogorov."
"My correspondence is double-password encrypted."
"Oh, Ender, you're talking to me," said Valentine. "Do you think I wouldn't be able to guess 'Stilson' and 'Bonzo'?"
"I didn't use their names just like that, naked."
"To me they were naked, Ender. You think nobody really understands you, but I can guess your passwords. That makes me your password buddy."
"That makes you a snoop," said Ender. "I can't wait to read the book."
"Don't worry. I didn't mention your name. His emails are cited as 'letter to a friend' with the date."
"Aren't you considerate."
"Don't be testy. I haven't seen you in fourteen months and I missed you. Don't make me change my mind."
"I saw you yesterday, and you've snooped my files since then. Don't expect me to ignore that. What else did you snoop?"
"Nothing," said Valentine. "You have your luggage locked. I'm not a yegg."
"When can I read the book?"
"When you buy it and download it.
You can afford to pay."
"I don't have any money."
"You haven't read Hyrum Graff's letter yet," said Valentine. "He got you a nice pension and you can draw on it without paying any taxes until you come of age."
"So you didn't confine yourself to your research topic."
"I can never know whether a letter contains useful data until I read it, can I?"
"So you read all the letters ever written in the history of the human race, in order to write this book?"
"Only the ones written since the founding of Colony One after the Third Formic War." She kissed his cheek. "Good morning, Ender. Welcome back to the world."
Ender shook his head. "Not Ender," he said. "Not here. I'm Andrew."
"Ah," she said. "Why not 'Andy,' then? Or 'Drew'?"
"Andrew," Ender repeated.
"Well, you should have told the governor that, because her letter of invitation is addressed to 'Ender Wiggin.'"
Ender frowned. "We never knew each other in Battle School."
"I imagine she thinks she knows you, having been so intimately involved with half your jeesh."
"Having had her army beaten into the ground by them," said Ender.
"That's a kind of intimacy, isn't it? A sort of Grant-and-Lee thing?"
"I suppose Graff had to warn her that I was coming."
"Your name was also on the manifest, and it included the fact that you were governor of Shakespeare until your two-year term ended. That narrows you down among all the possible Andrew Wiggins in the human race."
"Have you been down to the surface?"
"No one has. I asked the captain to let me wake you so you could be on the first shuttle. Of course he was pleased to do anything for the great Ender Wiggin. He's of that generation--he was on Eros when you won that final victory. He says he saw you in the corridors there, more than once."
Ender thought back to his brief meeting with the captain before going into stasis. "I didn't recognize him."
"He didn't expect you to. He really is a nice man. Much better at his job than old what's-his-name."
"Quincy Morgan."
"I remembered his name, Ender, I just didn't want to say it or hear it."
Ender cleaned himself up. Stasis left him with a sort of scum all over his body; his skin seemed to crackle just a little when he moved. This can't be good for you, he thought as he scrubbed it off and the skin protested by giving him little stabbing pains. But Graff does stasis ten months of the year and he's still going strong.
And he got me a pension. Isn't that nice. I can't imagine Ganges is using Hegemony money any more than Shakespeare was, but once interstellar trade starts up, maybe there'll start being some buying power in the FPE dollar.
Dried and dressed, Ender got his luggage out of storage and, in the privacy of Valentine's locked stateroom, from which she had discreetly absented herself, Ender opened the case containing the cocoon of the last hive queen in the universe.
He was afraid, for a moment, that she had died during the voyage. But no. After he had held the cocoon in his bare hands for a few minutes, an image flickered into his mind. Or rather a rapid series of images--the faces of hundreds of hive queens, a thousand of them, in such rapid succession that he couldn't register any of them. It was as if, upon waking--upon rebooting--all the ancestors in this hive queen's memory had to make an appearance in her mind before settling back and letting her have control of her own brain.
What ensued was not a conversation--it could not be. But when Ender thought back on it, it seemed to him like a conversation, complete with dialogue. It was as if his brain was not designed to remember what had passed between them--the direct transfer of shaped memory. Instead, it translated the exchange into the normal human mode of interresponsive language.
"Is this my new home? Will you let me come out?" she asked him--or rather, she showed herself emerging from the cocoon into the cool air of a cave, and the feeling of a question--or a demand?--came along with the image.
"Too soon," he said--and in his mind there really were words, or at least ideas shapable into language. "Nobody's forgotten anything yet. They would be terrified. They'd kill you as soon as they discovered you or any of your children."
"More waiting," she said. "Wait forever."
"Yes," he said. "I will voyage as often as I can, as far as I can. Five hundred years. A thousand years. I don't know how long it will be before I can safely bring you out, or where we'll be."
She reminded him that she was not affected by the relativistic effects of time travel. "Our minds work on the principle of your ansible. We are always connected to the real time of the universe." For this she used images of clocks that she drew from his own memory. Her own metaphor for time was the sweep of sun across sky for days, and its drift northward and south again to show years. Hive queens never needed to subdivide time into hours and minutes and seconds, because with her own children--the formics--everything was infinitely now.
"I'm sorry that you have to experience all the time of the voyage," said Ender. "But you want me in stasis during the voyage, so I'll stay young long enough to find you a home."
Stasis--she compared his hibernation with her own pupation. "But you come out the same. No change."
"We humans don't change in cocoons. We stay awake through our maturation process."
"So for you, this sleep isn't birth."
"No," said Ender. "It's temporary death. Extinguishment, but with a spark left glowing in the ash. I didn't even dream."
"All I do is dream," she said. "I dream the whole history of my people. They are my mothers, but now they are also my sisters, because I remember doing all the things they do."
For this, she had drawn on the images of Valentine and Peter to say "sisters." And when Peter's face appeared, there was fear and pain in the memory.
"I don't fear him anymore," said Ender. "Or hate him. He turned out to be a great man."
But the hive queen didn't believe him. She drew from his mind the image of the old man from their ansible conversations, and compared it with the child Peter in Ender's deepest memory. They were too different to be the same.
And Ender could not argue the point. Peter the Hegemon was not Peter the monster. Maybe he never was. Maybe both were an illusion. But Peter the monster was the one buried deep in Ender's memory, and he was unlikely to expunge him from it.
He put the cocoon back in its hiding place, locked it, and then left it on the cart of luggage being taken down to the surface.
Virlomi actually came to meet the shuttle; and in moments she made it clear she was extending this courtesy only for Ender's sake. She came aboard the shuttle to talk to him.
Ender did not take this as a good sign. While they waited for her to come aboard, Ender said to Valentine, "She doesn't want me here. She wants me to go back onto the ship."
"Wait and see what she wants," said Valentine. "Maybe she just wants to know what you intend."
When she came in, Virlomi looked so much older than the girl whose face Ender had seen on the vids of the Sino-Indian War. A year or two of brooding over defeat, and then sixteen years of governing a colony--they were bound to take their toll.
"Thank you for letting me visit you so early," she said.
"You have flattered us beyond measure," said Ender. "To come out and receive us yourself."
"I had to see you," she said, "before you emerged into the colony. I swear to you that I told no one of your coming."
"I believe you," said Ender. "But your remark seems to imply that people know I'm here."
"No," she said. "No, there's no rumor of that, thank God."
Which God, Ender wondered. Or, being reputed a goddess, did she thank herself?
"When Colonel Graff--oh, whatever his title was then--he'll always be Colonel Graff to me--when he told me he had asked you to come, it was because he anticipated problems with a particular mother and son."
"Nichelle and Randall Firth," said Ender.
"Yes,
" she said. "It happens that I had also noticed them as a potential problem during setup back in Battle School--Ellis Island--whatever the name of the place was by then. So I understood his concern. What I didn't know was why he thought you could handle them better than I could."
"I'm not sure he thought I could. Perhaps he only wanted you to have a resource to draw on, in case I had some ideas. Have they been a problem?"
"The mother was your ordinary reclusive paranoid," said Virlomi. "But she worked hard, and if she seemed obsessively protective of her son, there was nothing perverse about their relationship--she never tried to keep him in her bed, for instance, and she never bathed him after infancy--none of the danger signs. He was such a tiny baby. Almost like a toy. But he walked and talked incredibly young. Shockingly young."
"And he stayed small," said Ender, "until he was in his teens. Just kept growing at an ordinary pace and then didn't stop. I imagine he's something of a giant now."
"Two full meters in height with no sign of stopping," said Virlomi. "How did you know this?"
"Because of who his parents are."
Virlomi gasped. "Graff knows who the real father is. And he didn't tell me. How was I supposed to deal with this situation if he didn't give me all the information?"
"Forgive me for reminding you," said Ender, "but you were not widely trusted at the time."
"No," she said. "But I thought if he made me governor, he'd give me...but that's past and gone."
Ender wondered if, indeed, Graff was gone. He wasn't on any of the registries he could access--but he didn't have ansible privileges like those he'd had before, as a new governor coming to his colony. There were deep searches he simply wasn't given time to pursue.
"Graff didn't want to leave you without knowledge. But he gave it to me, and left it to me to judge how much to tell you."
"So you don't trust me either?" Her voice sounded jocular, but there was pain under it.
Ender in Exile Page 34
