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 in effectively 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 in dependence 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.
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