The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  Ender got out of the skimmer. “Don’t come after me,” he said. “If I’m not back in an hour, it means it’s dangerous here, and you must go home at once and tell them everything.”

  “Eat it, Ender, I’m coming with you,” said Abra.

  Ender looked at him coldly. “Eat it yourself, Abra, or I’ll stuff you with mud.”

  His words were jocular, and so was his tone. But his eyes were not joking, and Abra knew that he meant it.

  So Abra stayed with the skimmer and watched Ender jog over to the castle—for that’s what it was. And then Ender climbed up the outside of the tower and went in through the window.

  Abra stayed, watching the tower, for a long time. He checked the skimmer’s clock now and then. And finally his gaze began to wander. He watched birds and insects, small animals in the grass, clouds moving across the sky.

  That’s why he didn’t see Ender come out of the tower. He only saw him walking toward the skimmer, carrying his jacket in a wad under his arm.

  Only it wasn’t a wad. There was something inside the jacket. But Abra didn’t ask what Ender had found. He figured that if Ender wanted him to know, he’d tell him.

  “We aren’t building the new colony here,” said Ender.

  “OK,” said Abra.

  “Let’s go back and strike camp,” said Ender.

  They searched for five more days, well to the east and south of the place they had first found, until they had another colony site. It was a bigger formic settlement, with a much larger area of fields and all the signs of a much larger annual rainfall. “This is the right place,” said Ender. “Better climate, warmer. Good, rich soil.”

  They spent a week laying out the new site.

  Then it was time to go home. The night before they left, lying out on the open ground—it was too hot at night inside the tent—Abra finally asked. Not what it was that Ender brought back from the tower—he would never ask that—but the deeper question.

  “Ender, what did they mean? Building this for you?”

  Ender was silent for a long time. “I’m not going to tell you the whole truth, Abra. Because I don’t want anyone to know. I don’t even want them to know what we found there. I hope it’s all decayed and crumbled away before people go back there. But even if it’s not, nobody else will understand it. And in the far future, nobody will believe that the formics made that place. They’ll think it’s something that human colonists did.”

  “You don’t have to tell me everything,” said Abra. “And I won’t tell anybody else what we found.”

  “I know you won’t,” said Ender. He hesitated again. “I don’t want to lie to you. So I’ll only tell you true things. I found the answer, Abra.”

  “To what?”

  “My question.”

  “Can’t you tell me any of it?”

  “You’ve never asked the question. I hope to God you never know what it is.”

  “But the message really was for you.”

  “Yes, Abra. They left a message that told me why they died.”

  “Why?”

  “No, Abra. It’s my burden, truly. Mine alone.” Ender reached out a hand, gripped Abra by the arm. “Let there be no rumors of what Ender Wiggin found when he came to this place.”

  “There never will be,” said Abra.

  “You mean that at the age of eleven, you’re prepared to take a secret to your grave?”

  “Yes,” said Abra without hesitation. “But I hope I don’t have to do that very soon.”

  Ender laughed. “I hope the same. I hope you live a long, long time.”

  “I’ll keep the secret all my life. Even though I don’t actually know what it is.”

  Ender came into the house where Valentine was working on the next-to-last volume of her history of the Formic Wars. He set his own desk on the table across from her. She looked up at him. He smiled—a jokey, mechanical smile—and started typing.

  She wasn’t fooled. The smile was fake, but the happiness behind it was real.

  Ender was actually happy.

  What happened on that trip to lay out the new colony?

  He didn’t say. She didn’t ask. It was enough for her that he was happy.

  CHAPTER 19

  To: jpwiggin%ret@gso.nc.pub, twiggin%em@uncg.edu

  From: Gov%ShakespeareCol@MinCol.gov

  Subj: Third

  Dear Mother and Father,

  Some things cannot be helped. For you, it has been 47 years of silence from your third and youngest child. For me, it has been my six years in Battle School, where I lived for one reason only, to destroy the formics; the year after our victory, in which I learned that I had twice killed other children, that I destroyed an entire sentient species that I don’t believe I ever understood, and that every mistake I made caused the deaths of men and women in places lightyears away; and then two years of a voyage in which I could never for a moment speak or show my true feelings about anything.

  Through all of this, I have been trying to sort out what it meant that you gave life to me. To have a child, knowing that you have signed a contract to give him up to the government upon demand—isn’t there a bit of the story of Rumpelstiltskin in this? In the fairy tale, someone happens to overhear the secret name that will free them from their pledge to give their child to the dwarf. In our case, the universe did not conspire in our favor, and when Rumpelstiltskin showed up, you handed over the boy. Me.

  I made a choice myself—though what I really understood at six years of age is hard to fathom. I thought I was already myself; I was aware of no deficiencies of judgment. But now, looking back, I wonder why I chose. It was partly a desire to flee from Peter’s threats and oppression, since Valentine really couldn’t stop him and the two of you had no idea what was going on among us children. It was partly a desire to save the people I knew, most particularly my own protector, Valentine, from the predations of the formics.

  It was partly a hope that I might turn out to be a very important boy. It was partly the challenge of it, the hope of victory over the other children competing to be great commanders. It was partly a wish to leave a world where every day I was reminded that Thirds are illegal, unwanted, despised, taking more than their family’s share of the world’s resources.

  It was partly my sense that while you cried (Mother) and you blustered (Father) it would make a positive difference in our family’s life for me to go. No longer would you be the ones who had an extra child and yet were not suffering the penalties of law. With that monitor gone, there’d be no more visible excuse. I could hear you telling people, “The government authorized his birth so he could enter military training, only when the time came, he refused to go.”

  I existed for one reason only. When the time came, I believed I had no decent choice but to fulfil the purpose of my creation.

  I did it, didn’t I? I dominated the other children in Battle School, though I was not the best strategist (that was Bean). I led my jeesh and, unwittingly, many pilots to complete victory in the war—though again at a crucial moment it was Bean who helped me see my way through. I am not ashamed of having needed help. The task was too great for me, too great for Bean, and too great for any of the other children, but my role was to lead by getting the best from everyone.

  But when the victory was won, I could not go home. There was Graff’s court martial. There was the international situation, with nations fearing what might happen if America had the great war hero to command their Earthbound troops.

  But I confess that there was something else. I became aware that both my brother and my sister were writing essays whose deliberate effect was to keep me from coming home to Earth again. Peter’s reasons I could guess at; they were an outgrowth of our relationship as young children. Peter cannot live in the same world with me. Or at least he could not then.

  Here was the mystery to me. I was a twelve-year-old boy during most of my year on Eros. I was barred from returning to Earth. My siblings were siding with those who wanted me kept
away. And not once on any of the newsvids did I see a quotation or a statement from my parents, pleading with the powers-that-be to let their boy come home. Nor did I hear of any effort on your part to come and see me, since I could not go to you.

  Instead, once Valentine showed up, I got hints, ranging from the blunt to the oblique, that for some reason it was my obligation to write to YOU. Through the two years of our voyage—forty years to you—Valentine reported to me on her correspondence with you, and told me that I should write, I must write. And through all of this, knowing that you could easily obtain my address and that your letters would get through to me as easily as they got through to Valentine, I never heard from you.

  I have waited.

  Now you are getting rather old. Peter is nearly sixty years of age and he rules the world—all his dreams have come true, though there seem to have been many nightmares along the way. From news reports I gather that you have been at his side almost continuously, working for him and his cause. You have made statements to the press in support of him, and at times of crisis you stood by him quite bravely. You have been admirable parents. You know how the job is done.

  And still I waited.

  Recently, having learned the answers to a set of questions unrelated to you, I determined that because half of this silence between us has been mine, I would wait no longer to write to you. Still, I do not understand how it became my obligation to open this door. How did I skip directly from the irresponsibility of a six-year-old to the complete responsibility that seemed to devolve on me to reestablish our relationship after it became possible again?

  I thought: You were ashamed of me. My “victory” came along with the scandal of my killings; you wanted to put me from your mind. Who am I, then, to insist that you recognize me? Yet I killed Stilson when I was still a child living in your house. You cannot blame the Battle School for that. Why didn’t you stand up and take responsibility for creating me, and for raising me those first six years?

  I thought: You were so in awe of my great achievement that you felt unworthy to insist on a relationship, and as with royalty, you waited for me to invite you. Here, though, the fact that you are not too much in awe of Peter to be with him, though his achievements are arguably greater—peace on Earth, after all!—tells me that awe is not a powerful motive in your lives.

  Then I thought: They have divided the family. Valentine is their co-parent, and she has been assigned to me, while they assigned themselves to Peter. Other people had taken care of training me to save the world; but who would train Peter, who would watch out for him, who would pull him up short if he over-reached or became a tyrant? That was where you were needed; that was your life’s work. Valentine would give her life to me, and you would give yours to Peter.

  But if that was your thinking, then I think you made a poor choice. Valentine is as good as I remembered her to be, and as smart. But she cannot understand me or what I need, she does not know me well enough to trust me, and it drives her crazy. She is not my mother or father, she is only my sister, and yet she has been assigned—or assigned herself—to take on a motherly role. She does her best. I hope she is not too unhappy with the bargain she made, to come along on this voyage. The sacrifice she made in order to come with me was far too great. I fear she thinks the results in me have amounted to little of worth.

  I do not know you, a man and a woman in their eighties. I knew a young man and woman in their early thirties, busy with their own extraordinary careers, raising extraordinary children who, for a time, each wore the monitor of the I.F. at the base of their skulls. There was always someone else watching over me. I always belonged to someone else. You never felt that I was fully your son.

  Yet I am your son. There is in me, in the abilities I have, in the choices that I make without realizing that I’ve chosen, in my deep feelings about the religions that you believed in secretly, which I have studied when I could, there is in all these things a trace of you. You are the explanation of much that is unexplainable.

  And my ability to shut certain things completely from my mind—to set them aside so I can work on other projects—that also comes from you, for I think that is what you have done with me. You have set me aside, and only by directly asking for it can I win your attention once again.

  I have watched painful relationships between parents and children. I have seen parents who control and parents who neglect, parents who make terrible mistakes that hurt their children deeply, and parents who forgive children who have done awful things. I have seen nobility and courage; I have seen dreadful selfishness and utter blindness; and I have seen all these things in the SAME parents, raising the same children.

  What I understand now is this: There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right.

  For reasons truly out of your control, I became a stranger to you; for reasons I do not understand, you made no effort to come to my defense and bring me home, or to explain to me why you did not or could not or should not. But you let my sister come to me, giving her up from your own lives. That was a great gift, jointly offered by her and you. Even if she now regrets it, that does not reduce the nobility of the sacrifice.

  Here is why I am writing. No matter how hard I try to be self-sufficient, I am not. I have read enough psychology and sociology, and I have observed enough families over the past two years, to realize that there is no replacement for parents in a person’s life, and no going on without them. I have achieved, at the age of fifteen, more than any but a handful of the greatest men in history. I can look at the records of what I did and see, clearly, that it is so.

  But I do not believe it. I look into myself and all I see is the destroyer of lives. Even as I prevented a tyrant from usurping the control of this colony, even as I helped a young girl liberate herself from a domineering mother, I heard a voice in the back of my mind, saying, “What is this, compared to the pilots who died because of your clumsiness in command? What is this, compared to the death at your hands of two admittedly unpleasant but nevertheless young children? What is this, compared to the slaughter of a species that you killed without first understanding whether they needed killing?”

  There is something that only parents can provide, and I need it, and I am not ashamed to ask it from you.

  From my mother, I need to know that I still belong, that I am part of you, that I do not stand alone.

  From my father, I need to know that I, as a separate being, have earned my place in this world.

  Let me resort to the scriptures that I know have meant much to you in your lives. From my mother, I need to know that she has watched my life and “kept all these sayings in her heart.” From my father, I need to hear these words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant…. Enter into the joy of the Lord.”

  No, I don’t think I’m Jesus and I don’t think you’re God. I just happen to believe that every child needs to have what Mary gave; and the God of the New Testament shows us what a father must be in his children’s lives.

  Here is the irony: Because I had to ask for these things, I will be suspicious of your replies. So I ask you not only to give me these gifts, but also to help me believe that you mean them.

  In return, I give you this: I understand the impossibility of having me for a child. I believe that in every case, you chose to do what you believed would be best for me. Even if I disagree with your choices—and the more I think, the less I disagree—I believe that no one who knew no more than you did could have chosen better.

  Look at your children: Peter rules the world, and seems to be doing it with a minimal amount of blood and horror. I destroyed the enemy that terrified us most of all, and now I’m a not-bad governor of a little colony. Valentine is a paragon of selflessness an
d love—and has written and is writing brilliant histories that will shape the way the human race thinks about its own past.

  We’re an extraordinary crop of children. Having given us our genes, you then had the terrible problem of trying to raise us. From what I see of Valentine and what she tells me of Peter, you did very well, without your hand ever being heavy in their lives.

  And as for me, the absent one, the prodigal who never did come home, I still feel your fingerprints in my life and soul, and where I find those traces of your parenthood I am glad of them. Glad to have been your son.

  For me, there have been only three years in which I COULD have written you; I’m sorry that it took me all this time to sort out my heart and mind well enough to have anything coherent to say. For you, there have been forty-one years in which I believe you took my silence as a request for silence.

  I am far away from you now, but at least we move through time at the same pace once more, day for day, year for year. As governor of the colony I have constant access to the ansible; as parents of the Hegemon, I believe you have a similar opportunity. When I was on the voyage, you might have taken weeks to compose your reply, and to me it would have seemed that only a day had passed. But now, however long it takes you, that is how long I will wait.

  With love and regret and hope,

  your son Andrew