Orson Card - Ender in exile

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."