"Nobody deserves this," the doctor said.
"How can I undo this," said Arkanian. And this time he did not mean Ender's injuries.
"You can't," said Valentine. "And it was already there, it was inherent in that book, The Hive Queen. If you hadn't said it, somebody else would have. As soon as the human race understood that it was a tragedy to destroy the hive queens, we had to find someone to blame for it, so that the rest of us could be absolved. It would have happened without you."
"But it didn't happen without me. I have to tell the truth—I have to admit what I was . . ."
"No you don't," she said. "You have to live your life. Yours. And Ender will live his."
"And what about you?" asked the doctor, sounding even more cynical than before.
"Oh, I'll live Ender's life, too. It's so much more interesting than my own."
CHAPTER
23
To: ADelphiki%Ganges@ColLeague.Adm, PWiggin%ret@FPE.adm
From: EWiggin%Ganges@ColLeague.Adm/voy
Subj: Arkanian Delphiki, behold your mother. Petra, behold your son.
Dear Petra, Dear Arkanian,
In so many ways too late, but in the ways that count, just in time. The last of your children, Petra; your real mother, Arkanian. I will let him tell you his story, and you can tell him yours. Graff did the genetic testing long ago, and there is no doubt. He never told you, because he could never bring you together and I think he believed it would only make you sad. He might be right, but I think you deserve to have the sadness, if that's what it is, because it belongs to you by right. This is what life has done to the two of you. Now let's see what YOU do for each other's lives.
Let me tell you this much, though, Petra. He's a good boy. Despite the madness of his upbringing, in the crisis, he was Bean's son, and yours. He will never know his father, except through you. But Petra, I have seen, in him, what Bean became. The giant in body. The gentle heart.
Meanwhile, I voyage on, my friends. It's what I already planned to do, Arkanian. I'm on another errand. You did not deflect me from my course. Except that they won't let me go into stasis on this ship until my wounds are healed—there's no healing in stasis.
With love,
Andrew Wiggin
In his little house overlooking the wild coast of Ireland, not far from Doonalt, a feeble old man knelt in his garden, pulling up weeds. O'Connor rode up on his skimmer to deliver groceries and mail, and the old man rose slowly to his feet to receive him. "Come in," he said. "There's tea."
"Can't stay," said O'Connor.
"You can never stay," said the old man.
"Ah, Mr. Graff," said O'Connor, "that's the truth. I can never stay. But it's not for lack of will. I have a lot of houses waiting for me to bring them what I brought you."
"And we have nothing to say to each other," said Graff, smiling. No, laughing silently, his frail chest heaving.
"Sometimes you don't need to say a thing," said O'Connor. "And sometimes a man has no time for tea."
"I used to be a fat man," said Graff. "Can you believe it?"
"And I used to be a young man," said O'Connor. "Nobody believes that."
"There," said Graff. "We had a conversation after all."
O'Connor laughed—but he did not stay, once he had helped put the groceries away.
And so Graff was alone when he opened the letter from Valentine Wiggin.
He read the account as if he was hearing it in her own voice—that was her gift as a writer, now that she had left off being the Demosthenes that Peter made her create, and had become herself, even if she did still use that name for her histories.
This was a history that she would never publish. Graff knew he was the only audience. And since his body was continuing to lose weight, slowly but surely, and he grew more feeble all the time, he thought it was rather a shame she had spent so much time to put memories into a brain that would hold them for so little time before letting all the memories go at once into the ground.
Yet she had done this for him, and he was grateful to receive it. He read of Ender's contest with Quincy Morgan on the ship, and the story of the poor girl who thought she loved him. And the story of the gold bugs, some of which Ender had told him—but Valentine's version relied also on interviews with others, so that it would include things that Ender either did not know or deliberately left out.
And then, on Ganges. Virlomi seemed to have turned out well. That was a relief. She was one of the great ones; it had turned to ashes because of her pride, yes, but not until after she had singlehandedly taught her people how to free themselves of a conqueror.
Finally, the account of Ender and the boy Randall Firth, who once called himself Achilles, and now was named Arkanian Delphiki.
At the end of it, Graff nodded and then burned the letter. She had asked him to, because Ender didn't want a copy of it floating around somewhere on Earth. "My goal is to be forgotten," she quoted Ender as saying.
Not likely, though whether he would be remembered for good or ill, Graff could not predict.
"He thinks he finally got the beating Stilson and Bonzo meant to give him," Graff said to the teapot. "The boy's a fool, for all his brains. Stilson and Bonzo would not have stopped. They weren't this boy of Bean's and Petra's. That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and . . . I don't even know which of them is me."
He fondled the teapot. "I don't even have a soul to hear me talk."
He sipped from the cup before the teabag had really done its job. It was weak, but he didn't mind having it weak. He didn't really mind much of anything these days, as long as he kept breathing in and out and there was no pain.
"Going to say it anyway," said Graff. "Poor fool of a boy. Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?"
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."