Ender in Exile

by Orson Scott Card

  "He calls himself Achilles. She calls him that."

  "How can I...undo this?" he asked her.

  "Poor boy," said Valentine. "That's what Ender's spent the past few years trying to figure out for himself. I think he just used you to get a partial answer. I think he just got you to give him the beating that Stilson and Bonzo Madrid both intended. The only difference is, you're the son of Julian Delphiki and Petra Arkanian, and so there's something deep inside you that cannot do murder--cold or hot. Or maybe it has nothing to do with your parents. It has to do with being raised by a mother who you know was mentally ill, and feeling compassion for her--such deep compassion that you could never challenge her fantasy world. Maybe that's it. Or maybe it's your soul. The thing that God wrapped in a body and turned into a man. Whatever it was, you stopped."

  "Arkanian Delphiki," he said.

  "That would be a good name," said Valentine. "Doctor, will my brother live?"

  "He took blows to the head," said the doctor. "Look at his eyes. There's serious concussion. Maybe worse. We have to get him to the clinic."

  "I'll carry him," said...not Achilles...Arkanian.

  The doctor grimaced. "Letting the beater carry the beaten? But I don't want to wait for anyone else. What a hideous time of day for you to have this...duel?"

  As they walked along the road to the clinic, a few early risers looked at them quizzically, and one even approached, but the doctor waved her off.

  "I meant for him to kill me," said Arkanian.

  "I know," said Valentine.

  "What he did to those other boys. I thought he'd do again."

  "He meant for you to think he'd fight back."

  "And then the things he said. The opposite of everything."

  "But you believed him. Right away, you knew it was true," she said.

  "Yes."

  "Made you furious."

  Arkanian made a sound, somewhere between a whimper and a howl. He didn't plan it; he didn't understand it. Like a wolf baying at the moon, he only knew that the sound was in him and had to come out.

  "But you couldn't kill him," she said. "Because you're not such a fool as to think you can hide from the truth by killing the messenger."

  "We're here," said the doctor. "And I can't believe you're reassuring the one who beat your brother like this."

  "Oh, didn't you know?" said Valentine. "This is Ender the Xenocide. He deserves whatever anyone does to him."

  "Nobody deserves this," the doctor said.

  "How can I undo this," said Arkanian. And this time he did not mean Ender's injuries.

  "You can't," said Valentine. "And it was already there, it was inherent in that book, The Hive Queen. If you hadn't said it, somebody else would have. As soon as the human race understood that it was a tragedy to destroy the hive queens, we had to find someone to blame for it, so that the rest of us could be absolved. It would have happened without you."

  "But it didn't happen without me. I have to tell the truth--I have to admit what I was..."

  "No you don't," she said. "You have to live your life. Yours. And Ender will live his."

  "And what about you?" asked the doctor, sounding even more cynical than before.

  "Oh, I'll live Ender's life, too. It's so much more interesting than my own."

  CHAPTER 23

  To: ADelphiki%Ganges@ColLeague.Adm, PWiggin%ret@FPE.adm

  From: EWiggin%Ganges@ColLeague.Adm/voy

  Subj: Arkanian Delphiki, behold your mother. Petra, behold your son.

  Dear Petra, Dear Arkanian,

  In so many ways too late, but in the ways that count, just in time. The last of your children, Petra; your real mother, Arkanian. I will let him tell you his story, and you can tell him yours. Graff did the genetic testing long ago, and there is no doubt. He never told you, because he could never bring you together and I think he believed it would only make you sad. He might be right, but I think you deserve to have the sadness, if that's what it is, because it belongs to you by right. This is what life has done to the two of you. Now let's see what YOU do for each other's lives.

  Let me tell you this much, though, Petra. He's a good boy. Despite the madness of his upbringing, in the crisis, he was Bean's son, and yours. He will never know his father, except through you. But Petra, I have seen, in him, what Bean became. The giant in body. The gentle heart.

  Meanwhile, I voyage on, my friends. It's what I already planned to do, Arkanian. I'm on another errand. You did not deflect me from my course. Except that they won't let me go into stasis on this ship until my wounds are healed--there's no healing in stasis.

  With love,

  Andrew Wiggin

  In his little house overlooking the wild coast of Ireland, not far from Doonalt, a feeble old man knelt in his garden, pulling up weeds. O'Connor rode up on his skimmer to deliver groceries and mail, and the old man rose slowly to his feet to receive him. "Come in," he said. "There's tea."

  "Can't stay," said O'Connor.

  "You can never stay," said the old man.

  "Ah, Mr. Graff," said O'Connor, "that's the truth. I can never stay. But it's not for lack of will. I have a lot of houses waiting for me to bring them what I brought you."

  "And we have nothing to say to each other," said Graff, smiling. No, laughing silently, his frail chest heaving.

  "Sometimes you don't need to say a thing," said O'Connor. "And sometimes a man has no time for tea."

  "I used to be a fat man," said Graff. "Can you believe it?"

  "And I used to be a young man," said O'Connor. "Nobody believes that."

  "There," said Graff. "We had a conversation after all."

  O'Connor laughed--but he did not stay, once he had helped put the groceries away.

  And so Graff was alone when he opened the letter from Valentine Wiggin.

  He read the account as if he was hearing it in her own voice--that was her gift as a writer, now that she had left off being the Demosthenes that Peter made her create, and had become herself, even if she did still use that name for her histories.

  This was a history that she would never publish. Graff knew he was the only audience. And since his body was continuing to lose weight, slowly but surely, and he grew more feeble all the time, he thought it was rather a shame she had spent so much time to put memories into a brain that would hold them for so little time before letting all the memories go at once into the ground.

  Yet she had done this for him, and he was grateful to receive it. He read of Ender's contest with Quincy Morgan on the ship, and the story of the poor girl who thought she loved him. And the story of the gold bugs, some of which Ender had told him--but Valentine's version relied also on interviews with others, so that it would include things that Ender either did not know or deliberately left out.

  And then, on Ganges. Virlomi seemed to have turned out well. That was a relief. She was one of the great ones; it had turned to ashes because of her pride, yes, but not until after she had singlehandedly taught her people how to free themselves of a conqueror.

  Finally, the account of Ender and the boy Randall Firth, who once called himself Achilles, and now was named Arkanian Delphiki.

  At the end of it, Graff nodded and then burned the letter. She had asked him to, because Ender didn't want a copy of it floating around somewhere on Earth. "My goal is to be forgotten," she quoted Ender as saying.

  Not likely, though whether he would be remembered for good or ill, Graff could not predict.

  "He thinks he finally got the beating Stilson and Bonzo meant to give him," Graff said to the teapot. "The boy's a fool, for all his brains. Stilson and Bonzo would not have stopped. They weren't this boy of Bean's and Petra's. That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and...I don't even know which of them is me."

  He fondled the teapot. "I don't even have a soul to hear me talk."

  He sipped from the cup before the teabag had reall
y done its job. It was weak, but he didn't mind having it weak. He didn't really mind much of anything these days, as long as he kept breathing in and out and there was no pain.

  "Going to say it anyway," said Graff. "Poor fool of a boy. Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?"

  Petra Arkanian Delphiki Wiggin was visiting with her son Andrew and his wife Lani and their two youngest children, the last ones still at home, when the letter came from Ender.

  She came into the room where the family was playing a card game, her face awash with tears, brandishing the letter, unable to speak.

  "Who died!" Lani cried out, but Andrew came up to her and folded her into a giant hug. "This isn't grief, Lani. This is joy."

  "How can you tell?"

  "Mother tears things when she's grieving, and this letter is only wrinkled and wet."

  Petra slapped him lightly but still she laughed enough that she could talk. "Read it aloud, Andrew. Read it out loud. Our last little boy is found. Ender found him for me. Oh, if only Julian could know it! If only I could talk to Julian again!" And then she wept some more, until he started to read. The letter was so short. But Andrew and Lani, because they had children of their own, understood exactly what it meant to her, and they joined her in her tears, until the teenagers left the room in disgust, one of them saying, "Call us when you get some control."

  "Nobody has control of anything," said Petra. "We're all beggars at the throne of fate. But sometimes he has mercy!"

  Because it was not carrying Randall Firth into exile, the starship did not have to go back to Eros by the most direct route. It added four months to the subjective voyage--six years to the realtime trip--but it was cleared at IFCom and the captain didn't mind. He would drop off his passengers wherever they wanted, for even if no one at IFCom understood just who Andrew and Valentine Wiggin were, the captain knew. He would justify the detour to his superiors. His crew had started when he did, and also remembered, and did not mind.

  In their stateroom, Valentine nursed Ender back to health between shifts of writing her history of Ganges Colony.

  "I read that stupid letter of yours," she said one day.

  "Which? I write so many," he answered.

  "The one that I was only supposed to see if you died."

  "Not my fault the doctor put me under total anesthetic to reset my nose and pull out the shards of bone that didn't fit back in place."

  "I suppose you want me to forget what I read."

  "Why not? I have."

  "You have not," she said. "You're not just hiding from your infamy, with all this voyaging, are you?"

  "I'm also enjoying the company of my sister, the professional nosy person."

  "That case--you're looking for a place where you can open it."

  "Val," said Ender, "do I ask you about your plans?"

  "You don't have to. My plan is to follow you around until I get too bored to stand it anymore."

  "Whatever you think you know," said Ender, "you're wrong."

  "Well, as long as you explain it so clearly."

  Then, a little later: "Val, you know something? I thought for a minute there that he was really going to kill me."

  "Oh, you poor thing. It must have been devastating to realize you had bet wrong on the outcome."

  "I had thought that if it came to that moment, if I really knew that I was going to die, it would come as a relief. None of this would be my problem anymore. Someone else could clean up the mess."

  "Yes, me, I'm so grateful that you were going to dump it all on me."

  "But when he was coming back to finish me off--I knew he planned a kick or two in the head, and my head was already so foggy from concussion that I knew it would finish me--when he came walking up to me, I wasn't relieved at all. I wanted to get up. Would have if I could."

  "And run away, if you had any brains."

  "No, Val," said Ender sadly. "I wanted to get up and kill him first. I didn't want to die. It didn't matter what I thought I deserved, or how I thought it would bring me peace, or at least oblivion. None of that was in my head by then. It was just: Live. Live, whatever it takes. Even if you have to kill to do it."

  "Wow," said Valentine. "You've just discovered the survival instinct. Everybody else has known about it for years."

  "There are people who don't have that instinct, not the same way," said Ender, "and we give them medals for throwing themselves on grenades or running into a burning house to save a baby. Posthumously, mind you. But all sorts of honors."

  "They have the instinct," said Valentine. "They just care about something else more."

  "I don't," said Ender. "Care about anything more."

  "You let him beat you until you couldn't fight him," said Valentine. "Only when you knew you couldn't hurt him did you let yourself feel that survival instinct. So don't give me any more of this crap about how you're still the same evil person who killed those other boys. You proved that you could win by deliberately losing. Done. Enough. Please don't pick a fight with anybody again unless you intend to win it. All right? Promise?"

  "No promises," said Ender. "But I'll try not to get killed. I still have things to do."

  AFTERWORD

  I never meant this book to go this way. I was supposed to spend a few chapters getting Ender from Eros to Shakespeare and on to Ganges. But I found that all the real story setting up the confrontation on Ganges took place earlier, and to my own consternation, I ended up with a novel which mostly takes place between chapters 14 and 15 of Ender's Game.

  But as I wrote it, I knew this was the true story, and one that had been missing. The war ends. You come home. Then you deal with all the things that happened in the war. Only Ender doesn't get to come home. He has to deal with that, too.

  Yet none of this material was "missing" from the original novel, any more than anything was missing from the novelette version before the novel was written. If, at the end of chapter 14, we had then had Ender in Exile, neither story would have worked. For one thing, Exile is partly a sequel to Shadow of the Giant--that's where Virlomi's, Randi's, and Achilles/Randall/Arkanian's stories are left hanging, in need of this resolution. For another, Ender's Game ends as it should. The story you've just read works better as it is here--in a separate book. The book of the soldier after the war.

  Except for one tiny problem. When I wrote the novel Ender's Game back in 1984, my focus in the last chapter, chapter 15, was entirely on setting up Speaker for the Dead. I had no notion of any sequel between those two books. So I was rather careless and cavalier with my account of Ender's time on the first colony. I was so careless I completely forgot that on all but the last formic planet, there would have been human pilots and crew left alive. Where would they go? Of course they would begin colonizing the formic worlds. And those who sent them would have at least allowed for that possibility, sending people trained to do whatever jobs they anticipated would be necessary.

  So while the meat of chapter 15 of Ender's Game is exactly right, the details and timeline are not. They aren't what they should have been then, and they certainly aren't what they need to be now. Since writing that chapter, I have written stories like "Investment Counselor" (in First Meetings), where Ender meets Jane (a major character in Speaker) when he is legally coming of age on a planet called Sorelledolce; but this contradicted the timeline stated in Ender's Game. All in all, I realized, it was chapter 15 that was wrong, not the later stories, which took more details into account and developed the story in a superior way.

  Why should I be stuck now with decisions carelessly made twenty-four years ago? What I've written since is right; those contradictory but unimportant details in the original novel are wrong.

  Therefore I have rewritten chapter 15 of Ender's Game, and at some future date there will be an edition of the novel that includes the revised chapter. Meanwhile, the entire text is online for anyone who has ever bought or ever buys
any issue of my magazine Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (oscIGMS.com). I have linked it to that magazine because every issue of it contains a story from the Ender's Game universe. My hope is that if you buy an issue in order to read that revised chapter, you'll also sample all the stories in that issue and find out what an excellent group of writers we've been publishing there.

  But rest assured that nothing significant is changed in that chapter. You have not missed anything if you don't read it.

  In fact, the most important purpose for that revised chapter is to keep people from writing to me about contradictions between the original version of chapter 15 and this novel. So if you're content to take my word for it that all the contradictions are now resolved, you won't need to look it up online.

  In preparing this novel, I had to venture back into old territory. It's not just that I had to fit in with Ender's Game (where that was even possible). This story also had to fit in with every casual decision I made in Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, not to mention all the short stories.

  There was no way I had the time or the inclination to reread all those books. It would just depress me to notice all the things in all those books that now, being a better or at least more experienced writer, I would like to change.

  Fortunately, I had the aid of people who have read my fiction more carefully and more recently than I have.

  First and foremost, Jake Black recently wrote The Ender's Game Companion, in which he deals with every event, character, location, and situation in all the Ender novels and stories. He was a consultant on this book (as he is on the Marvel Comics adaptation of Ender's Game) and vetted everything.

  And in preparing his book, he also had the help of Ami Chopine, a writer in her own right, who also has been the mother superior and/or nanny of PhiloticWeb.Net, and Andy Wahr (alias "Hobbes" on my website at Hatrack.com), who also helped me directly by answering many questions I had in preparing to write this book. I hope I never have to write an Ender novel without their help; and in the meantime, I count them all as good friends.

  I also have the benefit of a community of kind people and friends at https://www.hatrack.com, whom I exploit mercilessly as a resource. As I set out to write this novel, I had several questions I needed to have answered. If I had never addressed the issue in any of the books, I needed to know that; if I had, I needed to know what I had said so I could try not to contradict it.