Ender in exile

CHAPTER 23

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

From: EWiggin%Ganges@ColLeague.Adm/voy

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

Dear Petra, Dear Arkanian,

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

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

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

With love,

Andrew Wiggin

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

"Can't stay," said O'Connor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How can you tell?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not? I have."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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