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We're an extraordinary crop of children. Having given us our genes, you then had the terrible problem of trying to raise us. From what I see of Valentine and what she tells me of Peter, you did very well, without your hand ever being heavy in their lives.

And as for me, the absent one, the prodigal who never did come home, I still feel your fingerprints in my life and soul, and where I find those traces of your parenthood I am glad of them. Glad to have been your son.

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."


Tags: Orson Scott Card Ender's Saga Science Fiction