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.”
AFTERWORD
I never meant this book to go this way. I was supposed to spend a few chapters getting Ender from Eros to Shakespeare and on to Ganges. But I found that all the real story setting up the confrontation on Ganges took place earlier, and to my own consternation, I ended up with a novel which mostly takes place between chapters 14 and 15 of Ender’s Game.
But as I wrote it, I knew this was the true story, and one that had been missing. The war ends. You come home. Then you deal with all the things that happened in the war. Only Ender doesn’t get to come home. He has to deal with that, too.
Yet none of this material was “missing” from the original novel, any more than anything was missing from the novelette version before the novel was written. If, at the end of chapter 14, we had then had Ender in Exile, neither story would have worked. For one thing, Exile is partly a sequel to Shadow of the Giant—that’s where Virlomi’s, Randi’s, and Achilles/Randall/Arkanian’s stories are left hanging, in need of this resolution. For another, Ender’s Game ends as it should. The story you’ve just read works better as it is here—in a separate book. The book of the soldier after the war.
Except for one tiny problem. When I wrote the novel Ender’s Game back in 1984, my focus in the last chapter, chapter 15, was entirely on setting up Speaker for the Dead. I had no notion of any sequel between those two books. So I was rather careless and cavalier with my account of Ender’s time on the first colony. I was so careless I completely forgot that on all but the last formic planet, there would have been human pilots and crew left alive. Where would they go? Of course they would begin colonizing the formic worlds. And those who sent them would have at least allowed for that possibility, sending people trained to do whatever jobs they anticipated would be necessary.
So while the meat of chapter 15 of Ender’s Game is exactly right, the details and timeline are not. They aren’t what they should have been then, and they certainly aren’t what they need to be now. Since writing that chapter, I have written stories like “Investment Counselor” (in First Meetings), where Ender meets Jane (a major character in Speaker) when he is legally coming of age on a planet called Sorelledolce; but this contradicted the timeline stated in Ender’s Game. All in all, I realized, it was chapter 15 that was wrong, not the later stories, which took more details into account and developed the story in a superior way.
Why should I be stuck now with decisions carelessly made twenty-four years ago? What I’ve written since is right; those contradictory but unimportant details in the original novel are wrong.
Therefore I have rewritten chapter 15 of Ender’s Game, and at some future date there will be an edition of the novel that includes the revised chapter. Meanwhile, the entire text is online for anyone who has ever bought or ever buys any issue of my magazine Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (oscIGMS.com). I have linked it to that magazine because ever
y issue of it contains a story from the Ender’s Game universe. My hope is that if you buy an issue in order to read that revised chapter, you’ll also sample all the stories in that issue and find out what an excellent group of writers we’ve been publishing there.
But rest assured that nothing significant is changed in that chapter. You have not missed anything if you don’t read it.
In fact, the most important purpose for that revised chapter is to keep people from writing to me about contradictions between the original version of chapter 15 and this novel. So if you’re content to take my word for it that all the contradictions are now resolved, you won’t need to look it up online.
In preparing this novel, I had to venture back into old territory. It’s not just that I had to fit in with Ender’s Game (where that was even possible). This story also had to fit in with every casual decision I made in Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, not to mention all the short stories.
There was no way I had the time or the inclination to reread all those books. It would just depress me to notice all the things in all those books that now, being a better or at least more experienced writer, I would like to change.
Fortunately, I had the aid of people who have read my fiction more carefully and more recently than I have.
First and foremost, Jake Black recently wrote The Ender’s Game Companion, in which he deals with every event, character, location, and situation in all the Ender novels and stories. He was a consultant on this book (as he is on the Marvel Comics adaptation of Ender’s Game) and vetted everything.
And in preparing his book, he also had the help of Ami Chopine, a writer in her own right, who also has been the mother superior and/or nanny of PhiloticWeb.Net, and Andy Wahr (alias “Hobbes” on my website at Hatrack.com), who also helped me directly by answering many questions I had in preparing to write this book. I hope I never have to write an Ender novel without their help; and in the meantime, I count them all as good friends.
I also have the benefit of a community of kind people and friends at http://www.hatrack.com, whom I exploit mercilessly as a resource. As I set out to write this novel, I had several questions I needed to have answered. If I had never addressed the issue in any of the books, I needed to know that; if I had, I needed to know what I had said so I could try not to contradict it.
Here is the original request I posted at Hatrack.com:
I can’t trust my memory about details in Ender’s Game and the Shadow books, and I’m afraid that in writing Ender in Exile I might be contradicting some points in the EG universe. Perhaps someone can help on the following questions:
Who decided Ender should not come back to Earth, and why? Peter was involved, but I think he gives different motives from what Valentine and/or the narrator of EG specifies.
I think there’s already a contradiction between EG and the Shadow books (Giant?) about the circumstances surrounding Ender’s governorship and who commanded the colony ship. But was it already fully resolved? That is, Mazer was announced as commander of the ship, but then didn’t go? I remember that in conversation with Han Tzu, this was solved (after Hatrack citizens helped by pointing out the contradiction in the first place!).
I’m referring to that last chapter in EG, but what I can’t do is ferret out details from the four Shadow books or any stray references elsewhere in EG or the Speaker series. I’ll be grateful for any reminders people can give me of details from this time period—from the end of Ender’s last battle to the arrival on his new colony world, not just what happens to Ender, but what happens to Peter and Valentine, Mazer and Graff, and the world at large.
I had valuable responses to this cri de coeur, from C. Porter Bassett, Jaime Benlevy, Chris Wegford, Marc Van Pelt, Rob Taber, Steven R Beers, Shannon Blood, Jason Bradshaw, Lloyd Waldo, Simeon Anfinrud, Jonathan Barbee, Adam Hobart, Beau Pearce, and Robert Prince. Thank you to all of them for plunging back into the books to find the answers to my questions.
In addition, Clinton Parks found an issue I hadn’t even thought of, and sent my staff this letter:
I know you guys probably got this already, but I wanted to put it out there just in case. Did you remember that there was a discussion in “Shadow of the Giant” where the first colony’s name is revealed as “Shakespeare”? It stuck in my mind cause I wondered why Ender would name his colony that. Anyway, I just wanted to be vigilant and send a reminder. Take care!
This was, in fact, a real contradiction—elsewhere, I definitively stated that the first colony was named Rov. That’s because in writing those earlier books I did not have the resource of a community of generous readers, or didn’t think to ask for their help as I should have, and so thought up cool new ideas for things that I had already dealt with in earlier books, but forgot about in the years that followed.
This, too, I have resolved.
I was once a professional proofreader. I know from experience that even the brightest, most careful readers, working in teams so we could catch each other’s mistakes, still missed errors. A world as complex, with as many stories set in it, as this one is bound to contain other contradictions as yet undetected. Please post any that you find (except the ones from the former chapter 15 of Ender’s Game) at Hatrack.com, and maybe I can find a way to fix them later.
Or take it philosophically, and realize that if these were genuine histories or biographies instead of works of fiction, there would be contradictions between them anyway—because even in factual accounts of the real world, errors and contradictions creep in. There are few events in history that were recounted identically by all witnesses. Pretend, then, that any remaining contradictions are the result of errors in historical transmission. Even if it’s a “history” of events hundreds of years in the future.
Besides these helpful friends, I showed my chapters as I wrote them to my usual crew of unbelievably patient friends. Getting a novel piecemeal is an old tradition—Charles Dickens’s fans always had to read his novels as they came out in installments in the newspaper. But getting a chapter every few days and having to respond quickly because I’m on such a tight writing schedule is making more demands than I should rightly make of friends.
Jake Black was, for the first time, one of those first readers, in order to bring his encyclopedic knowledge of the Ender universe to bear. Kathryn H. Kidd, my longsuffering collaborator on the long-overdue-and-entirely-my-fault sequel to Lovelock, called Rasputin, has been one of my first readers for years. Erin and Phillip Absher have also been longtime prereaders of mine, and Phillip bears the distinction of making me throw out several chapters in order to follow up on a plot thread that I had thought was a throwaway, and he convinced me was at the heart and soul of the story. He was right, I was wrong, and the book was better for it. This time, fortunately, he didn’t make me rewrite whole swaths of my book. But his, Erin’s, Kathy’s, and Jake’s encouragement helped me feel as though I was telling a story that was worth the time spent on it.
My very first reader, however, remains my wife, Kristine, who also bears the brunt of the burden of the family when I’m in writing mode. Her suggestions might seem small to her, but they’re large to me, and if she has any doubts, I rewrite until they go away.
Kristine and our youngest child, Zina, the last at home, have to deal with a father who haunts the house like a distracted, irritable ghost during the writing of a book. But we do have those nights watching Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, where we actually inhabit the same universe for an hour or two at a time.
I have also had the help of Kathleen Bellamy, the managing editor of The InterGalactic Medicine Show—who does not read my books until they are in page proofs, whereupon she reads them for the first time—as our very last proofreader before the book goes to press. That makes her our final line of defense. And our webwright and IT manager, Scott Allen, keeps Hatrack and oscIGMS going so that I have that community to call upon.
On this book, Beth Meacham, my editor at Tor, played a larger role than I usually ask of my editors. Because this book was so quirky—being a “midquel” that overlapped with my most popular novel—I did not want to proceed without her assurance that the book was actually something Tor wanted to publish! Her suggestions and caveats were wise and helpful at every stage of the development and writing of this book.
And I thank the production team at Tor for the sacrifices they had to make because I was so late with this manuscript. That this book still came out on time is owed to their extra work and sharp concern for quality. Even when rushing, they do their work with pride and so I end up with a book I can be proud of. Where would I be, if other good souls did not make up for my shortcomings?
The character of Ender as depicted in the original novel was in some ways drawn from my son Geoffrey, who was five and then six when I was writing that book. He is now thirty years old and the father of two children (with the good offices of his wife, the former Heather Heavener). To my great relief, Geoffrey was never called upon to serve his country in war.
So in examining what Ender’s experience might be like, I have drawn upon much reading, of course, but also from correspondence and conversation with good men and women who have served our country in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other trouble spots where our responsibilities as the only nation with the strength and the will to help beleaguered people against tyranny have been fulfilled. You bear a burden for us all, and I salute you.
I grieve for those who have fallen, or who, surviving with dire injuries or broken hearts, have been deprived of much or most of the future that you once dreamed of. As a citizen of the United States, I bear some of the responsibility for sending you where you have gone, and certainly reap the benefits. Like Ender, I might not have known what was being sacrificed in my name, but I recognize the connection between us.
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