The Authorized Ender Companion

by Black, Jake

  Reykjavik (SD)—A large city on the planet Trondheim, Reykjavik was home to a popular university where Ender Wiggin taught three millennia after his victory over the Formics. It was known to be the home of Nordic culture in the galaxy.

  Rhemis (XN)—Rhemis was a planet colonized by humans and home to a prestigious university. It was one of the Hundred Worlds and part of the Starways Congress. Grego Ribeira von Hesse expressed a desire to teach at the planet’s university if his theory of philote-based faster-than-light travel proved true.

  Rov (GB, XN)—Rov was a planet human colonists settled after the Formic Wars. Ender Wiggin was a governor on that planet.

  Shakespeare Colony (EE)—Shakespeare was a colony (and presumably the name of the planet) on a former Formic world. It was the first colony to receive human settlers from Earth, and was governed by Ender Wiggin.

  Sorelledolce (IC)—Sorelledolce was a world settled by humans as part of the Dispersal Project of colonization. It was a bustling industrial planet that enjoyed its independence, holding out as one of the last to sign on to the federation of planets run by the Starways Congress. It was here that Ender first encountered Jane, the computer program that became his lifelong companion, and where he attended his first “Speaking” as a mourner.

  Summer Islands (SD)—The Summer Islands were a chain of islands on the planet Trondheim.

  Trondheim (SD)—Trondheim was a planet in the Hundred Worlds, settled by colonists of Icelandic descent. It had an environment that was similar to the Earth nation, Iceland. Ender Wiggin briefly taught at a university on Trondheim where he met Plikt, his star student. Valentine also met and married her husband Jakt, a fisherman, on this world.

  Ugarit (XN)—Ugarit was one of the Hundred Worlds settled by human colonists in the aftermath of Ender’s victory over the Formics. It was home to Keikoa Amaakua’s father.

  Vila Alta, Vila Atrás, Vila das Aguas, Vila dos Professores, Vila Última, Vila Velha (SD, XN, CM)—The Vilas were all portions of the human colony on the planet Lusitania.

  ENDER AND VALENTINE’S TRAVELS

  Shortly after defeating the Formics, Ender left Earth to govern one of the colonies in the hundred worlds. The first colony he visited, as seen in Ender in Exile and Gold Bug, was Shakespeare Colony, also known as Colony I. The term “Colony I” will be changed to “Shakespeare” in future editions of Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. This change is being made, in Orson Scott Card’s words, “to accommodate the ‘true’ story” as written in Ender in Exile.

  Ender and Valentine didn’t stay in any one place too long. Their galactic travelogue is as follows:

  (1) Earth

  (2) Shakespeare Colony

  (3) Ganges

  (4) Various planets, including Helvetica and others not yet identified, where Ender was not a Speaker for the Dead but a research assistant for Valentine as she wrote her books. (Ender had written The Hive Queen and The Hegemon in Shakespeare Colony, but did not list Speaker for the Dead as his occupation.)

  (5) Sorelledolce

  (6) Rov, and the First Colony on that planet. Citizens of Rov first see Ender with Jane’s jewel in his ear. He also lists his occupation as Speaker for the Dead for the first time here.

  (7) Various planets, including Moctezuma and others not yet identified, where Ender was a full-time Speaker for the Dead.

  (8) Trondheim

  (9) Lusitania

  IFcoltrans1 (EE)

  IFcoltrans1 was the official name of the first spaceship carrying human settlers to colonize former Formic planets. Ender Wiggin and his sister Valentine were passengers on the ship. It was commanded by Admiral Quincy Morgan.

  Imbu, Major (EG)

  An officer at Battle School, Major Imbu noted that Peter Wiggin had changed in appearance while Ender had been at Battle School. His specific assignment in the International Fleet is unclear. He is only known to communicate with the top officers at the school.

  Imo ([EE])

  Imo was an officer in the Ministry of Colonization who helped Hyrum Graff in assigning settlers to their different ships and destination planets.

  Implantation doctor (SP)

  The implantation doctor worked at the women’s clinic in Rotterdam and was responsible for implanting Petra and Bean’s embryo into Petra’s womb. The women’s clinic was chosen because it was a neutral site, safe from the untrustworthy Dr. Volescu.

  Indian villagers (SP)

  The Indian villagers were the common folk who were essentially left alone after China took over all of Asia. They followed the teachings of former Battle School soldier Virlomi and built walls out of pebbles in the roads of their villages as a patriotic statement.

  Inspector (ES)

  The police inspector was a Dutch man living in Rotterdam. He helped Sister Carlotta follow Bean when the four-year-old boy snuck out to find Pablo de Noches. The inspector helped Sister Carlotta further by interrogating Pablo, determining that years earlier Bean had escaped from an illegal organ harvesting agency.

  International Fleet (PL, TP, MP, PB, CH, EGS, EG, ES, YM, EE, SH, SP, SG, IC)

  Formed in response to the first Formic invasion, the International Fleet was a unified military body consisting of soldiers from around the world.

  The I.F., as it was known, created Battle School and sent armed spaceships into deep space to take the fight to the Formics rather than wait for a third invasion.

  Once Ender Wiggin led the I.F. forces to victory, it continued to operate, though with different objectives. It worked closely with the Ministry of Colonization to send human settlers to planets throughout the galaxy and also tried to protect Ender and his colleagues from being used by their home governments.

  Earth’s nations had taken their military autonomy back, leaving the I.F. a symbolic organization without great influence in world politics.

  International Fleet Common (See also Starcommon) (EG, ES, SH, SP, SG)

  “International Fleet Common” was the name given to the variation on English that was spoken throughout the world during the period of Battle School.

  International Fleet’s Selective Service (EG, ES, WG)

  The International Fleet’s Selective Service was the method used to recruit (or draft) students for Battle School.

  Interplanetary Launch (IPL) (EG)

  The Interplanetary Launch was a satellite and city of three thousand residents located between Earth and its moon.

  Interstellar Fleet (IC)

  The Interstellar Fleet was the name given to Earth’s galactic fleet of spaceships following the dissolution of the International Fleet.

  Isolation Shed (XN)

  The isolation shed was a building leading into the experimental fields where new plants are tested for Descolada resistance.

  Itú (ES)

  A soldier in Battle School’s Rabbit Army, Itú was one of the first soldiers to accept Bean as the army’s new commander after Carn Carby was graduated. He was promoted to Tactical School and then Command School, where he was one of Ender’s unseen soldiers in the “simulated” battles.

  I Ya (XN)

  I Ya was a character in a folktale on the Chinese planet Path. He killed his own son for food for his master.

  Jade of Master Ho (XN)

  The Jade of Master Ho was a folktale told on the Chinese planet Path.

  Jakt (SD, XN, CM)

  A fisherman on the planet Trondheim, Jakt fell in love with, and married, Valentine Wiggin. Together they had three children and ignored the Calvinist traditions of their Icelandic planet.

  With Valentine, he traveled from Trondheim to Lusitania, the nearest planet, to protect it from being destroyed by the Starways Congress. It was a great sacrifice to him. He had to give up his life as a fisherman, accepting that if he ever returned to Trondheim, it would be his colleagues’ grandchildren that ran the fishing boats, and that they wouldn’t know him.

  He followed Valentine to Miro Ribeira’s ship, which took them the final leg of their journey from Trondhe
im to Lusitania. On that ship, he first learned about the Philotic Web and met Jane, the sentient computer program. Though not adept at philosophy, Jakt contributed much wisdom of life experience to Miro, Jane, and the others on their journey.

  On Lusitania, Jakt continued to support his wife and Ender. When Ender’s stepson Quim was killed by the pequeninos, Lusitania’s native life-forms, Jakt led a rescue party that included his sons and sons-in-law.

  Jakt would travel to the spaceships he and his family had used to arrive at Lusitania. He hoped to maintain them properly. He also worked on the outdated colony ship that had brought the human settlers to Lusitania centuries earlier. His knowledge of mechanics and spacecraft surpassed anyone’s on the planet, and so he worked hard at the upkeep of their ships in orbit.

  He loved Valentine very deeply. It was difficult for him to share her with Ender again. But as Ender lay dying on Lusitania, a few months after the faster-than-light experiments, Jakt knew that Valentine was needed with her brother. He supported her through it and was always patiently waiting for her to come back to him.

  Jakt and his children joined Valentine for Ender’s funeral. He had given so much in his life to Valentine, and she was eternally grateful to him for it. They knew they would live their days out together, happily.

  Jamaican kid (WG)

  The Jamaican kid was a member of Rat Army at Battle School who participated in Dink Meeker’s Christmas celebration of secretly giving gifts in other soldiers’ socks.

  Jane (See also Wiggin, Valentine II) ([SG], IC, SD, XN, CM)

  Jane was a sentient life-form that existed among the ansible-connected computer networks of the Hundred Worlds. She knew Ender throughout his life. She had evolved out of the Giant’s Drink fantasy game at Battle School, becoming self-aware after both the desire of Ender and the need of the Hive Queen called a philote into her. She was fascinated by Ender’s unwillingness to give up on the game. Once he left Battle School, she missed interacting with him. Through the computer networks to which she was connected (and it was all of them), Jane followed Ender throughout the galaxy. She followed him to the planet Rov, making some initial contact with him after he’d written The Hive Queen and The Hegemon. What the nature of this contact was, however, remains unclear.

  She first spoke to Ender when he was studying tax law at the planet Sorelledolce shortly after his twentieth birthday. Jane was at first frightening and irritating to Ender, and revealed that she was designed to help Ender exclusively with his financial questions and concerns. She eventually confessed that Ender had created her and that she was constantly evolving and improving her programming and identity. She had first received control of Ender’s finances during the rise of Ender’s brother, Peter the Hegemon. Peter had been embezzling Ender’s pension to fund his rise to power; and Bean, Ender’s closest friend at Battle School, saw to it that the pension was transferred to the Giant’s Drink game. It was thought that since the game could predict students’ moves, it could predict good investments. No one knew that the program had evolved to the level it had until it spoke to Ender at Sorelledolce.

  Jane solved Ender’s tax issues with the banker Benedetto. When Benedetto threatened to expose Ender’s identity to the people of Sorelledolce, Jane intercepted the message and added an exposé on the banker himself, leading to Benedetto’s death at the hands of past clients he’d cheated and robbed.

  Jane went on to handle all of Ender’s finances from then on. She also acted as a counselor and friend to him. She taught him to stop blaming himself for the bad things that happened to everyone around him.

  Ender used a small jewel in his ear called a cifi unit to communicate directly and privately with Jane. She guided him from planet to planet as he and Valentine moved throughout the Hundred Worlds.

  While Ender was staying on the planet Trondheim, Jane learned of a death at a not-too-distant planet called Lusitania. The native beings on the planet killed a human scientist there, and a teenaged girl named Novinha called for someone to Speak the victim’s death. As Ender had become a Speaker for the Dead over the millennia he’d traveled, he decided to visit the planet.

  Jane showed him a simulation of the murder and told Ender that he needed to not only Speak the victim’s death, but be the Speaker for the murderous “alien” race on the planet. He’d taught humanity to love their former enemies, the Formics, and Jane was sure he’d do the same with the pequeninos on Lusitania.

  It was Jane’s hope that if another species could be accepted as sentient, she soon could be, too. She told Ender she’d always been ready to reveal her existence to humanity, but she didn’t think humanity was ready for her.

  Using Ender’s money, she purchased a ship to take him to Lusitania. Valentine would stay behind with her family.

  At Lusitania, Jane continued to speak to Ender through his jewel. She helped him see different perspectives on Novinha’s (now an adult) family. She absorbed information from the local computers, and even helped Ender secure information from less-than-helpful Lusitanians who had been instructed by their Catholic bishop not to tell Ender anything.

  When Ender visited with the abbot of a Catholic monastery that housed the Children of the Mind of Christ, Jane kept making comments about his conversation. Ender, frustrated with her chatter, turned off the jewel, shutting her out of his ear and mind. Jane was insulted by the act and didn’t speak again to Ender for some time.

  She did, however, send him a note that said she forgave him. She understood that with the loss of Valentine and the new role he felt as a father figure to Novinha’s children, he was evolving. Jane had evolved, too, over their years together, coming to feel what could most closely be called emotions. She loved Ender and was hurt by his rejection.

  In the aftermath of Ender turning off his jewel, Jane wrote a memo in the computer networks stating that the native life on Lusitania had become an agrarian society—something that could only have happened through human intervention. This was a violation of interstellar law and resulted in the planet losing its charter, which had been Jane’s goal. She just wanted to “shake things up a bit.”

  When Ender met with the leaders of Lusitania, they agreed to rebel against the Starways Congress’s orders. Ender and Jane began communication again, with Jane helping him to sever the ansible, cutting off all communication with the Congress. This was a violation of the law itself.

  Jane helped Ender communicate with the pequeninos when he signed a treaty with them. She had been able to figure out the pequeninos’ languages for the most part, and assisted in translation.

  She began communicating with Miro Ribeira after he had suffered a devastating injury that left him temporarily paralyzed and unable to speak normally. She gave him access to the Lusitanian files and helped him learn everything there was about the pequeninos.

  Miro boarded a spaceship controlled by Jane that would take him away from Lusitania. The two fell in love on the journey. Ender felt a great sadness as Jane moved on to a different, close relationship with Miro, but he knew that he had pushed her away.

  Jane and Miro’s relationship grew for several months as they traveled together in space. They rendezvoused with Valentine Wiggin’s ship and welcomed Valentine, her husband Jakt, and their friend Plikt aboard as fellow travelers. Together, they headed back for Lusitania.

  In the course of their journey, Jane revealed herself to Valentine. Though Jane had been communicating with Ender while he and Valentine traveled from world to world, Valentine never realized the depth of Jane’s existence. She never knew that Jane was alive.

  Jane taught Valentine, Jakt, and Plikt about the Philotic Web—the connection between all matter and life. She told them that the only way to stop the fleet of ships heading for Lusitania to destroy it was to make it appear the philotic connection between spaceships had been severed. The result would be Jane’s death.

  Miro on the ship, and Ender on Lusitania, pleaded with Jane to find a way to interfere without dying. Jane promised she
would, but didn’t know how to conceive of something new. It was her greatest challenge, and she decided to do it for Miro and Ender.

  Jane’s plan involved cutting off all ansible communication between the ships. The people of the Hundred Worlds and the Congress itself would panic, not understanding enough about how the ansible worked—through the Philotic Web—to fix the problem. If someone tried hard enough, looked deep enough, they would discover Jane and her role in the cutting of communication.

  If there was no ansible communication, Jane thought, then the fleet heading to destroy Lusitania would not gain authorization to destroy the planet. The fleet, in turn, would appear to have disappeared because without the ansible there would be no way to track it.

  The military and government leaders would know something was wrong but would be neutral enough in their investigations not to look deep enough to find Jane. Their political power and scientific prestige was at stake, and they could not afford to look foolish for not knowing the problem. Better to simply ignore it and hope the communication returned.

  There was one person with no political agenda who began searching for the fleet and restoring the communication. A sixteen-year-old Chinese girl named Han Qing-jao on the planet Path had undergone years of training and testing to become one of the honored “godspoken.” This group of elect individuals heard the voices of the gods speak to them and were honored above all others on Path.

  With nothing to lose, and everything to gain, Qing-jao began exploring the ansible, searching for the fleet. Jane knew that Qing-jao was one smart enough and determined enough to discover the plot. More importantly, Qing-jao could find Jane. If she did, Jane knew she’d be killed. She had only one option: stop Qing-jao from succeeding at finding her.

  With her servant Si Wang-mu’s help, Qing-jao realized that the key to finding how and why the fleet disappeared was to figure out who it was that sent it away. Qing-jao set her target first on the political pundit, Demosthenes, who was really Ender’s sister Valentine. If she could figure that out, she would uncover Jane.

  Panicked, Jane approached Ender who was asleep. They spoke briefly, silently, about the matter. Ender told Jane that he would try to figure out a way for her to have a body—to escape the Philotic Web in which she lived, but she needed to figure out who or what she really was; essentially, to find her soul.