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.
“I don’t know you,” said Ender. “You made war against my friends. You liberated your country from the invaders. But then you became a vengeful invader yourself. I don’t know what to do with this information. Let me make up my mind as I come to know you.”
Valentine spoke up for the first time since their initial greetings. “What is it that has happened that made you assure us that you told no one Ender was coming?”
Virlomi turned to her respectfully. “It’s part of the longstanding struggle between me and Randall Firth.”
“Isn’t he still a child?”
Virlomi laughed bitterly. “Do Battle School graduates really say such things to each other?”
Ender chuckled. “Apparently so. How long has this struggle gone on?”
“By the time he was twelve, he was such a precocious…orator…that he had the old settlers and the non-Indian colonists who came with me eating out of his hand. At first he was their clever mascot. Now he is something closer to a spiritual leader, a…”
“A Virlomi,” said Ender.
“He has made himself into their equivalent of the way the Indian colonists regard me, yes,” she said. “I never claimed to be a goddess.”
“Let’s not argue such old i
ssues.”
“I just want you to know the truth.”
“No, Virlomi,” said Valentine, intruding again, or so Virlomi’s expression seemed to say. “You deliberately constructed the goddess image, and when people asked you, you gave nondenial denials: ‘Since when do goddesses walk the earth?’ ‘Would a goddess fail so often?’ And the most loathsomely deceptive of them all: “What do you think?’”
Virlomi sighed. “You have no mercy,” she said.
“No,” said Valentine. “I have a lot of mercy. I just don’t have any manners.”
“Yes,” said Virlomi. “He has learned from watching me, how I handle the Indians, how they worship me. His group has no shared religion, no traditions in common. But he constructed one, especially because everyone knew that evil book The Hive Queen.”
“How is it evil?” asked Ender.
“Because it’s a pack of lies. Who could know what the hive queens thought or felt or remembered or tried to do? But it has turned the formics into tragic figures in the minds of the impressionable fools who memorize that damnable book.”
Ender chuckled. “Smart boy.”
“What?” Virlomi asked him, looking suspicious.
“I assume you’re telling me this because he somehow claims that he is the heir of the hive queens.”
“Which is absolutely absurd because ours is the first colony that was not founded on the ruins of formic civilization.”
“So how does he manage it?” asked Ender.
“He claims that the Indian population—eighty percent of the total—are merely trying to reestablish here the exact culture they had on Earth. While he and the others are the ones who are trying to create something new. He really does have the gall to call his little movement the ‘Natives of Ganges.’ And he says we Indians are like the jackals who have settled other worlds—destroying the natives and then stealing all that they accomplished.”
“And people buy this?”
“Oddly enough,” she said, “not that many do. Most of the non-Indian colonists are trying to get along.”
“But some believe him,” said Ender.
“Millions.”
“There aren’t that many colonists,” said Valentine.
“He isn’t just playing to the local crowd,” said Virlomi. “He sends his writings out by ansible. There are chapters of the Natives of Ganges in most of the major cities of Earth. Even in India. Millions, as I told you.”
Valentine sighed. “I saw them referred to only as ‘the Natives’ on the nets and I wasn’t interested. That originated here?”
“They regard The Hive Queen as their scripture, and the formics as their spiritual forebears,” said Virlomi. “On Earth, their doctrine is almost the opposite of what Randall preaches here. They claim that the FPE should be abolished because it erases all the ‘genuine,’ ‘native’ cultures of Earth. They refuse to speak Common. They make a big show of following native religions.”
“While here, Randall condemns your people for doing exactly that,” said Ender. “Preserving your culture from Earth.”
“Yes,” said Virlomi. “But he claims it isn’t inconsistent—this is not where Indian culture originated. It’s a new place, and so he and his ‘Natives of Ganges’ are creating the real native culture of this world, instead of a warmed-over copy of an old one from Earth.”
Ender chuckled.
“It’s funny to you,” Virlomi said.
“Not at all,” said Ender. “I’m just thinking that Graff really was such a genius. Not as smart as the kids he trained in Battle School, but…with Randall just an infant in his mother’s arms, he knew that they would cause trouble.”
“And sent you to save me,” she said.
“I doubt you need saving,” said Ender.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “I’ve already dealt with it. I provoked him into assaulting me in my house. It’s on vid and we’ve already held the trial and sentenced him to be exiled. He’s going back to Earth—along with any of his malcontents who want to go with him.”
Ender shook his head. “And it doesn’t occur to you that that’s exactly what he wants you to do?”
“Of course it did. But I also don’t care, as long as I don’t have to deal with him.”
Ender sighed. “Of course you care, Virlomi. If he already has a following there, and then he returns to Earth as an exile from what he calls his ‘native world,’ then you have just sown the seed that can bring down the FPE and restore the Earth to the miserable chaos of war and hatred that Peter Wiggin ended such a short time ago.”
“That’s not my problem,” said Virlomi.
“Our generation is gone from power, Virlomi,” said Ender, “except in a few remote colonies. Peter is dead. His successors are lackluster placeholders. Do you think they’ll be competent to deal with this Randall Firth?”
Virlomi hesitated. “No.”
“So if you knowingly infect someone with a virus that you know their body can’t fight off, have you not murdered them?”
Virlomi buried her face in her hands. “I know,” she said. “I tried not to know, but I know.”
“What I can’t yet determine,” said Valentine, “is why your first words to us were a protest that you hadn’t told anyone that Ender was coming. Why would that matter?”
Virlomi raised her face. “Because at the trial and ever since then, he has been using you. And linking himself to his monster of a father. Who he thinks his father is.”
“Specifically,” prompted Valentine.
“He calls you ‘Ender the Xenocide,’” said Virlomi. “He says you’re the worst war criminal in all of history, because you were the one who slaughtered the native people of all these worlds so that the robbers could come in and steal their houses and lands.”
“Predictable,” said Ender.
“And Peter is called the ‘Brother of the Xenocide,’ who tried to extinguish all the native cultures of Earth.”
“Oh my,” said Ender.
“While Achilles Flandres was not a monster—that’s just propaganda from the pro-xenocide party. He was the only one who stood against Peter’s and Ender’s evil plans. He tried to stop you in Battle School, so your friends got him sent back to be imprisoned in an insane asylum on Earth. Then, when he escaped and began his work of opposing the threat of the Hegemon becoming dictator of the world, Peter’s propaganda mill went to work, slandering him.” Virlomi sighed. “Here’s the irony. Through all of this, he pretends to honor me greatly. As a hero who stood against the jeesh of the xenocides—Han Tzu, Alai, Petra, all who served with you.”
“And yet he struck you.”
“He states that he was provoked. That it was all a setup. That a man of his size—if he had meant to hurt me, I’d be dead. He was merely trying to wake me up to the enormity of the lies I was telling and believing. His followers accept this explanation completely. Or don’t care whether it’s true or not.”
“Well, it’s nice that even while I’m in stasis, somebody found me useful,” said Ender.
“It’s not a joke,” said Virlomi. “All over the nets, his revisionist view is gaining more and more acceptance. All the nonsense from Graff’s court martial came into even more prominence. Pictures of the dead bodies of…those bullies…”
“Oh, I can guess,” said Ender.
“You had to know before you got off the shuttle,” said Virlomi. “He can’t have known you were coming. He just chose this time to invoke your name. I think it’s because I was using Achilles’ name as the symbol of a monster. So he decided to use your name to outmonster Achilles. If it weren’t for that horrible pack of lies called The Hive Queen, he wouldn’t have found so much fertile ground for his nonsense.”
“I did everything he accuses me of,” said Ender. “Those boys died. So did all the formics.”
“But you’re not a murderer. I read those trial transcripts too, you know. I understood—I was in Battle School, I talked to people who knew you, we all knew how the
adults shaped our lives and controlled us. And we all recognized that your devastating self-defense was perfect military doctrine.”
Ender did what he always did when somebody tried to exonerate him—he shunted her words aside without comment. “Well, Virlomi, I’m not sure what you think I should do about this.”
“You could get back on the ship and go.”
“Is that what you’re asking me to do?” asked Ender.
“He’s not here to take over your job,” said Valentine. “He’s not a threat to you.”
Virlomi laughed. “I’m not trying to get rid of your brother, Valentine. He’s welcome to stay. If he does, then I will definitely need and take his help and advice. For my own sake, I’m happy he’s here. Randall will have no choice but to turn all his hatred onto you. Please, stay.”
“I’m glad you asked,” said Ender. “I accept.”
“No,” said Valentine. “This is the kind of situation that leads to violence.”
“I promise not to kill anybody, Valentine,” said Ender.
“I’m talking about violence against you,” she said.
“So am I,” said Ender.
“If he chooses to whip a mob into a frenzy—”
“No,” said Virlomi. “You have nothing to fear on that score. We will protect you fully.”
“Nobody can protect anybody fully,” said Valentine.
“Oh, I’m sure Virlomi’s people will do a splendid job,” said Ender. “As I said, I accept your kind invitation. Now, let’s leave this boat and go ashore, neh?”
“As you wish,” said Virlomi. “I’ll be glad to have you. But I also warned you, and as long as this ship is still here, you’re free to move on. You won’t like it when Randall turns his wrath on you. He has a way with words.”
“Just words?” said Ender. “So he’s nonviolent?”
“So far,” said Virlomi.
“Then I’m safe,” said Ender. “Thank you for the great honor you paid me. Please let it be known that I’m here. And that I really am that Andrew Wiggin.”
“Are you sure?” asked Virlomi.
“Insane people are always sure,” said Valentine.
Ender laughed, and so Virlomi did, too—a nervous chuckle.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 204
