Ender in exile

CHAPTER 21

To: AWiggin%Ganges@ColLeague.adm

From: hgraff%retlist@IFCom.adm

Subj: Welcome back to the human universe

Of course my condolences on the passing of your parents. But I understand from them that you and they corresponded to great mutual satisfaction before they died. The passing of your brother must have come as more of a surprise. He was young, but his heart gave out. Pay no attention to the foolish rumors that always attend the death of the great. I saw the autopsy, and Peter had a weak heart, despite his healthy lifestyle. It was quick, a clot that stopped his life while he slept. He died at the peak of his power and his powers. Not a bad way to go. I hope you'll read the excellent essay on his life written by supposedly the same author as The Hive Queen. It's called The Hegemon, and I've attached it here.

An interesting thing happened to me while you were in stasis, sailing from Shakespeare to Ganges. I was fired.

Here is something I hadn't foreseen (believe it; I have foreseen very little in my long life; I survived and accomplished things because I adapted quickly), though I should have: When you spend ten months of every year in stasis, there is a side effect: Your underlings and superiors begin to regard your awakenings as intrusions. The ones who were fiercely loyal to you retire, pursue their careers into other avenues, or are maneuvered out of office. Soon, everyone around you is loyal to themselves, their careers, or someone who wants your job.

Everyone put on such a show of deference to me whenever I awoke. They reported on how all my decisions from my last awakening had been carried out — or had explanations as to why they had not.

For three awakenings, I should have noticed how unconvincing those explanations had become, and how ineffectively my orders had been carried out. I should have seen that the bureaucratic soup through which I had navigated for so many years had begun to congeal around me; I should have seen that my long absences were making me powerless.

Just because I wasn't having any fun, I didn't realize that my months in stasis were, in effect, vacations. It was an attempt to prolong my tenure in office by not attending to business. When has this ever been a good idea?

It was pure vanity, Ender. It could not work; it could not last. I awoke to find that my name was no longer on my office door. I was on the retired list of IFCom — and at a colonel's pay, to add insult to injury. As for any kind of pension from ColMin, that was out of the question, since I had not been retired, I had been dismissed for nonperformance of my duties. They cited years of missed meetings when I was in stasis; they cited my failure to seek any kind of leave; they even harked back to that ancient court martial to show a "pattern of negligent behavior." So. dismissed with cause, to live on a colonel's half pay.

I think they actually assumed that I had managed to enrich myself during my tenure in office. But I was never that kind of politician.

However, I also care little for material things. I am returning to Earth, where I still own a little property — I did make sure the taxes were kept up. I will be able to live in peaceful retirement on a lovely piece of land in Ireland that I fell in love with and bought during the years when I traveled the world in search of children to exploit and quite possibly destroy in Battle School. No one there will have any idea of who I am — or, rather, who I was. I have outlived my infamy.

One thing about retirement, however: I will have no more ansible privileges. Even this letter is going to you with such a low priority that it will be years before it's transmitted. But the computers do not forget and cannot be misused by anyone vindictive enough to want to prevent my saying good-bye to old friends. I saw to the security of the system, and the leaders of the I.F. and the FPE understand the importance of maintaining the independence of the nets. You will see this message when you come out of stasis yourself upon arriving at Ganges four years from now.

I write with two purposes. First, I want you to know that I understand and remember the great debt that I and all the world owe to you. Fifty-seven years ago, before you went to Shakespeare, I assembled your pay during the war (which was all retroactively at admiral rank), the cash bonuses voted for you and your jeesh during the first flush of gratitude, and your salary as governor of Shakespeare, and piggybacked them onto six different mutual funds of impeccable reputation.

They will be audited continuously by the best software I could find, which, it may amuse you to know, is based on the kernel of the Fantasy Game (or "mind game," as it was also called in Battle School). The program's ability to constantly monitor itself and all data sources and inputs, and to reprogram itself in response to new information, made it seem the best choice to make sure your best interests, financially, were well watched out for. Human financial managers can be incompetent, or tempted to embezzle, or die, only to be replaced by a worse one.

You may draw freely from the accruing interest, without paying taxes of any kind until you come of age — which, since so many children are voyaging, is now legally accounted using the sum of ship's time during voyages added to the days spent in real time between voyages, with stasis time counting zero. I have done my best to shore up your future against the vicissitudes of time.

Which brings me to my second purpose. I am an old man who thought he could manipulate time and live to see all his plans come to fruition. In a way, I suppose I have. I have pulled many strings, and most of my puppets have finished their dance. I have outlived most of the people I knew, and all of my friends.

Unless you are my friend. I have come to think of you that way; I hope that I do not overstep my bounds, because what I offer you now is a friend's advice.

In rereading the message in which you asked me to send you to Ganges, I have seen in the phrase "reasons of my own" the possibility that you are using starflight the way I was using stasis — as a way to live longer. In your case, though, you are not seeking to see all your plans to fruition — I'm not sure you even have plans. I think instead that you are seeking to put decades, perhaps centuries, between you and your past.

I think the plan is rather clever, if you mean to outlast your fame and live in quiet anonymity somewhere, to marry and have children and rejoin the human race, but among people who cannot even conceive of the idea that their neighbor, Andrew Wiggin, could possibly have anything to do with the great Ender Wiggin who saved the world.

But I fear that you are trying to distance yourself from something else. I fear that you think you can hide from what you (all unwittingly) did, the matters that were exploited in my unfortunate court martial. I fear that you are trying to outrun the deaths of Stilson, of Bonzo Madrid, of thousands of humans and billions of formics in the war you so brilliantly and impossibly won for us all.

You cannot do it, Ender. You carry them with you. They will be freshly in your mind long after all the rest of the world has forgotten. You defended yourself against children who meant to destroy you, and you did it effectively; if you had not done so, would you have been capable of your great victories? You defended the human race against a nonverbal enemy who destroyed human lives carelessly in the process of taking what it wanted — our world, our home, our achievements, the future of planet Earth. What you blame yourself for, I honor you for. Please hear my voice in your head, as well as your own self-condemnation. Try to balance them.

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.

"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 issues."

"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.

"I'd invite you to join me for supper tonight," said Virlomi, "only one of my affectations is to eat little, and of course, as a Hindu, I eat an entirely vegetarian cuisine."

"Sounds excellent," said Valentine.

"Tell us when and where, and we'll be there," said Ender.

With a few more parting words, Virlomi left.

Valentine turned on Ender, angry and sad, both at once. "Did you bring me here to watch you die?"

"I didn't bring you anywhere," said Ender. "You just came."

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Everyone dies, Valentine. Mother and Father are dead. Peter is dead. Graff is probably dead by now."

"You forget that I know you, Ender," said Valentine. "You have decided to die. You've decided to provoke this boy into killing you."

"Why would you think that?"

"Look at the names you chose for passwords, Ender! You can't live with the guilt."

"Not guilt, Val," said Ender. "Responsibility."

"Don't make this boy kill you," said Valentine.

"I won't make anybody do anything. How about that?"

"I should have stayed home and watched Peter conquer the world."

"Oh, no, Valentine. We're on a much more interesting trajectory through space-time."

"I'm not going to sleep through my life like you are, Ender. I have work to do. I'm going to write my histories. I'm not burdened with a death wish."

"If I wished to be dead," said Ender, "I would have let Bonzo Madrid and his friends beat my brains out in a bathroom in Battle School."

"I know you," said Valentine.

"I know you think you do," said Ender. "And if I die, you'll think I chose to. The truth is much more complicated. I don't intend to die. But I'm not afraid of the risk of death. Sometimes a soldier has to put himself in harm's way in order to achieve victory."

"It's not your war," said Valentine.

Ender laughed. "It's always my war."