Ender in exile

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 Rumpelstilt-skin 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 overreached 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 un-explainable.

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 and 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

Valentine came to Ender, carrying the printed-out pages of his little book. "What are you calling this?" she asked, and there was a quaver in her voice.

"I don't know," said Ender.

"To imagine the life of the hive queens, to see our war from their perspective, to dare to invent an entire history for them, and tell it as if a hive queen herself were speaking —»

"I didn't invent it," said Ender.

Valentine sat down on the edge of the table. "Out there with Abra, searching for the new colony site. What did you find?"

"You're holding it in your hand," said Ender. "I found what I've been searching for ever since the hive queens let me kill them."

"You're telling me that you found living formics on this planet?"

"No," said Ender, and technically it was true — he had found only one formic. And was a dormant pupa truly describable as «living»? If you found only one chrysalis, would you say that you had found "living butterflies"?

Probably. But I have no choice except to lie to everyone. Because if it was known that a single hive queen still lived in this world, a cocoon from which she would emerge with several million fertilized eggs inside her, and the knowledge of all the hive queens before her in her phenomenally capacious mind, the seeds of the technology that nearly destroyed us and the knowledge to create even more terrible weapons if she wanted to — if that became known, how long would that cocoon survive? How long would be the life of anyone who tried to protect it?

"But you found something," said Valentine, "that makes you certain that this story you wrote is not just beautiful, but true."

"If I could tell you more than that, I would."

"Ender, have we ever told each other everything?"

"Does anyone?"

Valentine reached out and took his hand. "I want everyone on Earth to read this."

"Will they care?" Ender hoped and despaired. He wanted his book to change everything. He knew it would change nothing.

"Some will," said Valentine. "Enough."

Ender chuckled. "So I send it to a publisher and they publish it and then what? I get royalty checks here, which I can redeem for — what exactly can we buy here?"

"Everything we need," said Valentine, and they both laughed. Then, more seriously, Valentine said, "Don't sign it."

"I was wondering if I should."

"If it's known that this comes from you, from Ender Wiggin, then the reviewers will spend all their time psychoanalyzing you and say almost nothing about the book itself. The received wisdom will be that it's nothing more than your conscience trying to deal with your various sins."

"I expect no better."

"But if it's published with real anonymity, then it'll get read on its own merits."

"People will think it's fiction. That I made it up."

"They will anyway," said Valentine. "But it doesn't sound like fiction. It sounds like truth. And some will take it that way."

"So I don't sign it."

"Oh, you do," said Valentine, "because you want to give them some name to refer to you by. The way I'm still using Demosthenes."

"But nobody thinks it's the same Demosthenes who was such a rabble-rouser back before Peter took over the world."

"Come up with a name."

"How about 'Locke'?"

Valentine laughed. "There are still people who call him that."

"What if I call it 'Obituary' and sign it. what, Mortician?"

"How about 'Eulogy' and you sign it 'Speaker at the Funeral'?"

In the end, he called it simply The Hive Queen and he signed it "Speaker for the Dead." And in his anonymous, untraceable correspondence with his publisher, he insisted that it be printed without any kind of copyright notice. The publisher almost didn't go through with it, but Ender became even more insistent. "Put a notice on the cover that people are free to make as many copies of this book as they want, but that your edition is especially nice, so that people can carry it with them and write in it and underline it."

Valentine was amused. "You realize what you're doing?" she said.

"What?"

"You're having them treat it like scripture. You really think that people will read it like that?"

"I don't know what people will do," said Ender, "but yes, I think of it as something holy. I don't want to make money from it. What would I use money for? I want everyone to read it. I want everyone to know who the hive queens were. What we lost when we took them out of existence."

"We saved our lives, Ender."

"No," said Ender. "That's what we thought we were doing, and that's what we should be judged for — but what we really did was slaughter a species that wanted desperately to make peace with us, to try to understand us — but they never understood what speech and language were. This is the first time they've had a chance to find a voice."

"Too late," said Valentine.

"Tragedies are like that," said Ender.

"And their tragic flaw was. muteness?"

"Their tragic flaw was arrogance — they thought they could terraform any world that didn't have intelligence of the kind they knew how to recognize — beings that spoke to each other mind to mind."

"The way the gold bugs speak to us."

"The gold bugs are grunting — mentally," said Ender.

"You found one," said Valentine. "I asked you if you found 'formics' and you said no, but you found one."

Ender said nothing.

"I will never ask again," said Valentine.

"Good," said Ender.

"And that one — it's alone."

Ender shrugged.

"You didn't kill it. It didn't kill you. It told you — no, showed you — all the memories that you put into your book."

"For someone who was never going to ask again, you sure have a lot of questions, missy," said Ender.

"Don't you dare talk down to me."

"I'm a fifty-four-year-old man," said Ender.

"You may have been born fifty-four years ago," said Valentine, "but you're only sixteen, and no matter how old you are, I'm two years older."

"When the colony ship arrives, I'm getting on it," said Ender.

"I think I knew that," said Valentine.

"I can't stay here. I have to take a long journey. To get away from every living human."

"The ships only go from world to world, with people on all of them."

"But they take time doing it," said Ender. "If I take voyage after voyage, eventually I'll leave behind the human race as it now is."

"That's a long, lonely journey."

"Only if I go alone."

"Is that an invitation?"

"To come with me as long as you find it interesting," said Ender.

"Fair enough," said Valentine. "My guess is that you'll be better company now that you aren't in a perpetual funk."

"I don't think so," said Ender. "I intend to remain in stasis through every voyage."

"And miss the play readings on the way?"

"Can you finish your book before it's time to leave?" asked Ender.

"Probably," she said. "Certainly this volume."

"I thought this was the last one."

"Last but one," said Valentine.

"You've covered every aspect of the Formic Wars and you're writing the last battle now."

"There are two great knots to unravel."

Ender closed his eyes. "I think my book unravels one of them," he said.

"Yes," said Valentine. "I'd like to include it at the end of my last volume."

"It's not copyrighted," said Ender. "You can do what you want."

"Do you want to know what the other knot is?" asked Valentine.

"I assume it's Peter bringing the whole world together after the war was over," said Ender.

"What does that have to do with a history of the Formic Wars?" she said. "The last knot is you."

"I'm a Gordian knot. Don't unravel, just slice."

"I'm going to write about you."

"I won't read it."

"Fine," said Valentine. "I won't show it to you."

"Can't you please wait?" He wanted to say: Until I'm dead. But he didn't get that specific.

"Maybe a while," said Valentine. "We'll see."

Ender filled his days now with the business of the new colony, laying the groundwork for their arrival, making sure there were plenty of surplus crops being grown at all four of the villages as well as the new colony site, so that the newcomers could have failed harvests for two, even three years, and there'd still be no hunger. "And we'll need money," said Ender. "Here where we all know each other, this sort of ad hoc communism we've been using has worked out. But for trade to work well, we need a medium of exchange."

"Po and I found you the gold bugs," said Sel Menach. "So you've got the gold. Make coins."

Abra figured out how to adapt an oil press to make a coin stamper, and one of the chemists came up with an alloy that wouldn't constantly be shedding gold as the coins passed from hand to hand. One of the talented youngsters drew a picture of Sel Menach and one of the old women drew, from memory, the face of Vitaly Kolmogorov. Sel insisted that Kolmogorov get the cheaper coin, "Because that's the face they'll see the most. You always give the greatest man the smallest denomination."

They practiced using the money, so the prices would be set before the new colonists arrived. It was a joke at first. "Five chickens don't make a cow." And instead of calling the coins «fives» and "ones," they became «sels» and "vits." "Render unto Sel that which is Sel's, but hang on to Vit." "Sel wise, Vit foolish."

Ender wrestled with trying to set a value for the coins relative to the international dollar of the Hegemony, but Valentine stopped him. "Let it find its own value, tied to whatever people eventually pay for whatever it is we eventually export to other worlds." So the currency floated within their own private universe.

The first edition of The Hive Queen sold slowly at first, but then faster and faster. It was translated into many languages, even though almost everyone on Earth had a working knowledge of Common, since that was the official language of Peter's "Free People of Earth" — the propagandistic name he had chosen for his new international government.

Meanwhile, free copies circulated on the nets, and one day it was included in a message one of the xenobotanists received. She started telling everyone in Miranda about it, and copies were printed out and handed around. Ender and Valentine made no comment; when Alessandra pressed a copy on Ender, he accepted it, waited a while, and returned it. "Isn't it wonderful?" Alessandra asked.

"I think it is, yes," said Ender.

"Oh, yes, that analytical voice, that dispassionate attitude."

"What can I say?" said Ender. "I am who I am."

"I think this book has changed my life," said Alessandra.

"For the better, I hope," said Ender. And then, glancing at her swollen belly, he asked, "Changed your life more than that?"

Alessandra smiled. "I don't know yet. I'll tell you in a year."

Ender did not say: In a year I'll be on a starship and far away.

Valentine finished her penultimate volume and when it was published, she included the full text of The Hive Queen at the end, with an introductory note:

"We know so little of the formics that it is impossible for me, as a historian, to tell of this war from their point of view. So I will include an artistic imagining of the history, because even if it can't be proved, I believe this is the true story."

Not long after, Valentine came to Ender. "Peter read my book," she said.

"I'm glad someone did," said Ender.

"He sent me a message about the last chapter. He said, 'I know who wrote it.»

"And was he right?"

"He was."

"Isn't he the clever one."

"He was moved, Ender."

"People seem to be liking it."

"More than liking, and you know it. Let me read what Peter said: 'If he can speak for the buggers, surely he can speak for me.»

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"He wants you to write about him. About his life."

"When I last saw Peter I was six and he had threatened to kill me just a few hours before."

"So you're saying no."

"I'm saying that I'll talk to him and we'll see what happens."

On the ansible, they talked for an hour at a time, Peter in his late fifties, with a weak heart that had the doctors worried, Ender still a boy of sixteen. But Peter was still himself, and so was Ender, only now there was no anger between them. Maybe because Peter had achieved everything he dreamed of, and Ender hadn't stood in his way or even, at least in Peter's mind, surpassed him.

In Ender's mind, too. "What you did," said Ender, "you knew you were doing."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Nobody had to trick Alexander into conquering Persia," said Ender. "If they had, would we call him 'the Great'?"

When Peter had told of his whole life, everything he did that mattered enough to come up in these conversations, Ender spent only five days writing a slim volume called "The Hegemon."

He sent a copy to Peter with a note: "Since the author will be 'Speaker for the Dead, this can't be published until after you die."

Peter wrote back: "It can't happen a moment too soon for me." But in a letter to Valentine, he poured out his heart about what it meant to him to feel so completely understood. "He didn't conceal any of the bad things I did. But he kept them in balance. In perspective."

Valentine showed the letter to Ender and he laughed. "Balance! How can anybody know the relative weight of sins and great achievements? Five chickens do not make a cow."