"I'm crazy," said Ender. "But I think I'm OK."
"When did you decide that?" asked Alai.
"When I thought you were about to kill me, and I decided to kill you first. I guess I'm just a killer to the core. But I'd rather be alive than dead."
They laughed and agreed with him. Then Ender began to cry and embraced Bean and Petra, who were closest. "I missed you," he said. "I wanted to see you so bad."
"You saw us pretty bad," Petra answered. She kissed his cheek.
"I saw you magnificent," said Ender. "The ones I needed most, I used up soonest. Bad planning on my part."
"Everybody's OK now," said Dink. "Nothing was wrong with any of us that five days of cowering in blacked-out rooms in the middle of a war couldn't cure."
"I don't have to be your commander anymore, do I?" asked Ender. "I don't want to command anybody again."
"You don't have to command anybody," said Dink, "but you're always our commander."
Then they were silent for a while.
"So what do we do now?" asked Alai. "The bugger war's over, and so's the war down there on Earth, and even the war here. What do we do now?"
"We're kids," said Petra. "They'll probably make us go to school. It's a law. You have to go to school till you're seventeen."
They all laughed at that. Laughed until tears streamed down their faces.
15
SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD
The lake was still; there was no breeze. The two men sat together in chairs on the floating dock. A small wooden raft was tied up at the dock; Graff hooked his foot in the rope and pulled the raft in, then let it drift out, then pulled it in again.
"You've lost weight."
"One kind of stress puts it on, another takes it off. I am a creature of chemicals."
"It must have been hard."
Graff shrugged. "Not really. I knew I'd be acquitted."
"Some of us weren't so sure. People were crazy for a while there. Mistreatment of children, negligent homicide--those videos of Bonzo's and Stilson's deaths were pretty gruesome. To watch one child do that to another."
"As much as anything, I think the videos saved me. The prosecution edited them, but we showed the whole thing. It was plain that Ender was not the provocateur. After that, it was just a second-guessing game. I said I did what I believed was necessary for the preservation of the human race, and it worked; we got the judges to agree that the prosecution had to prove beyond doubt that Ender would have won the war without the training we gave him. After that, it was simple. The exigencies of war."
"Anyway, Graff, it was a great relief to us. I know we quarreled, and I know the prosecut
ion used tapes of our conversations against you. But by then I knew that you were right, and I offered to testify for you."
"I know, Anderson. My lawyers told me."
"So what will you do now?"
"I don't know. I'm still relaxing. I have a few years of leave accrued. Enough to take me to retirement, and I have plenty of salary that I never used, sitting around in banks. I could live on the interest. Maybe I'll do nothing."
"It sounds nice. But I couldn't stand it. I've been offered the presidency of three different universities, on the theory that I'm an educator. They don't believe me when I say that all I ever cared about at the Battle School was the game. I think I'll go with the other offer."
"Commissioner?"
"Now that the wars are over, it's time to play games again. It'll be almost like vacation, anyway. Only twenty-eight teams in the league. Though after years of watching those children flying, football is like watching slugs bash into each other."