"I'm not sure he thought I could. Perhaps he only wanted you to have a resource to draw on, in case I had some ideas. Have they been a problem?"
"The mother was your ordinary reclusive paranoid," said Virlomi. "But she worked hard, and if she seemed obsessively protective of her son, there was nothing perverse about their relationship--she never tried to keep him in her bed, for instance, and she never bathed him after infancy--none of the danger signs. He was such a tiny baby. Almost like a toy. But he walked and talked incredibly young. Shockingly young."
"And he stayed small," said Ender, "until he was in his teens. Just kept growing at an ordinary pace and then didn't stop. I imagine he's something of a giant now."
"Two full meters in height with no sign of stopping," said Virlomi. "How did you know this?"
"Because of who his parents are."
Virlomi gasped. "Graff knows who the real father is. And he didn't tell me. How was I supposed to deal with this situation if he didn't give me all the information?"
"Forgive me for reminding you," said Ender, "but you were not widely trusted at the time."
"No," she said. "But I thought if he made me governor, he'd give me...but that's past and gone."
Ender wondered if, indeed, Graff was gone. He wasn't on any of the registries he could access--but he didn't have ansible privileges like those he'd had before, as a new governor coming to his colony. There were deep searches he simply wasn't given time to pursue.
"Graff didn't want to leave you without knowledge. But he gave it to me, and left it to me to judge how much to tell you."
"So you don't trust me either?" Her voice sounded jocular, but there was pain under it.
"I don't know you," said Ender. "You made war against my friends. You liberated your country from the invaders. But then you became a vengeful invader yourself. I don't know what to do with this information. Let me make up my mind as I come to know you."
Valentine spoke up for the first time since their initial greetings. "What is it that has happened that made you assure us that you told no one Ender was coming?"
Virlomi turned to her respectfully. "It's part of the longstanding struggle between me and Randall Firth."
"Isn't he still a child?"
Virlomi laughed bitterly. "Do Battle School graduates really say such things to each other?"
Ender chuckled. "Apparently so. How long has this struggle gone on?"
"By the time he was twelve, he was such a precocious...orator...that he had the old settlers and the non-Indian colonists who came with me eating out of his hand. At first he was their clever mascot. Now he is something closer to a spiritual leader, a..."
"A Virlomi," said Ender.
"He has made himself into their equivalent of the way the Indian colonists regard me, yes," she said. "I never claimed to be a goddess."
"Let's not argue such old issues."
"I just want you to know the truth."
"No, Virlomi," said Valentine, intruding again, or so Virlomi's expression seemed to say. "You deliberately constructed the goddess image, and when people asked you, you gave nondenial denials: 'Since when do goddesses walk the earth?' 'Would a goddess fail so often?' And the most loathsomely deceptive of them all: "What do you think?'"
Virlomi sighed. "You have no mercy," she said.
"No," said Valentine. "I have a lot of mercy. I just don't have any manners."
"Yes," said Virlomi. "He has learned from watching me, how I handle the Indians, how they worship me. His group has no shared religion, no traditions in common. But he constructed one, especially because everyone knew that evil book The Hive Queen."
"How is it evil?" asked Ender.
"Because it's a pack of lies. Who could know what the hive queens thought or felt or remembered or tried to do? But it has turned the formics into tragic figures in the minds of the impressionable fools who memorize that damnable book."
Ender chuckled. "Smart boy."
"What?" Virlomi asked him, looking suspicious.