"Nobody has control of anything," said Petra. "We're all beggars at the throne of fate. But sometimes he has mercy!"
Because it was not carrying Randall Firth into exile, the starship did not have to go back to Eros by the most direct route. It added four months to the subjective voyage—six years to the realtime trip—but it was cleared at IFCom and the captain didn't mind. He would drop off his passengers wherever they wanted, for even if no one at IFCom understood just who Andrew and Valentine Wiggin were, the captain knew. He would justify the detour to his superiors. His crew had started when he did, and also remembered, and did not mind.
In their stateroom, Valentine nursed Ender back to health between shifts of writing her history of Ganges Colony.
"I read that stupid letter of yours," she said one day.
"Which? I write so many," he answered.
"The one that I was only supposed to see if you died."
"Not my fault the doctor put me under total anesthetic to reset my nose and pull out the shards of bone that didn't fit back in place."
"I suppose you want me to forget what I read."
"Why not? I have."
"You have not," she said. "You're not just hiding from your infamy, with all this voyaging, are you?"
"I'm also enjoying the company of my sister, the professional nosy person."
"That case—you're looking for a place where you can open it."
"Val," said Ender, "do I ask you about your plans?"
"You don't have to. My plan is to follow you around until I get too bored to stand it anymore."
"Whatever you think you know," said Ender, "you're wrong."
"Well, as long as you explain it so clearly."
Then, a little later: "Val, you know something? I thought for a minute there that he was really going to kill me."
"Oh, you poor thing. It must have been devastating to realize you had bet wrong on the outcome."
"I had thought that if it came to that moment, if I really knew that I was going to die, it would come as a relief. None of this would be my problem anymore. Someone else could clean up the mess."
"Yes, me, I'm so grateful that you were going to dump it all on me."
"But when he was coming back to finish me off—I knew he planned a kick or two in the head, and my head was already so foggy from concussion that I knew it would finish me—when he came walking up to me, I wasn't relieved at all. I wanted to get up. Would have if I could."
"And run away, if you had any brains."
"No, Val," said Ender sadly. "I wanted to get up and kill him first. I didn't want to die. It didn't matter what I thought I deserved, or how I thought it would bring me peace, or at least oblivion. None of that was in my head by then. It was just: Live. Live, whatever it takes. Even if you have to kill to do it."
"Wow," said Valentine. "You've just discovered the survival instinct. Everybody else has known about it for years."
"There are people who don't have that instinct, not the same way," said Ender, "and we give them medals for throwing themselves on grenades or running into a burning house to save a baby. Posthumously, mind you. But all sorts of honors."
"They have the instinct," said Valentine. "They just care about something else more."
"I don't," said Ender. "Care about anything more."
"You let him beat you until you couldn't fight him," said Valentine. "Only when you knew you couldn't hurt him did you let yourself feel that survival instinct. So don't give me any more of this crap about how you're still the same evil person who killed those other boys. You proved that you could win by deliberately losing. Done. Enough. Please don't pick a fight with anybody again unless you intend to win it. All right? Promise?"
"No promises," said Ender. "But I'll try not to get killed. I still have things to do."
AFTERWORD
I never meant this book to go this way. I was supposed to spend a few chapters getting Ender from Eros to Shakespeare and on to Ganges. But I found that all the real story setting up the confrontation on Ganges took place earlier, and to my own consternation, I ended up with a novel which mostly takes place between chapters 14 and 15 of Ender's Game.
But as I wrote it, I knew this was the true story, and one that had been missing. The war ends. You come home. Then you deal with all the things that happened in the war. Only Ender doesn't get to come home. He has to deal with that, too.
Yet none of this material was "missing" from the original novel, any more than anything was missing from the novelette version before the novel was written. If, at the end of chapter 14, we had then had Ender in Exile, neither story would have worked. For one thing, Exile is partly a sequel to Shadow of the Giant—that's where Virlomi's, Randi's, and Achilles/Randall/Arkanian's stories are left hanging, in need of this resolution. For another, Ender's Game ends as it should. The story you've just read works better as it is here—in a separate book. The book of the soldier after the war.
Except for one tiny problem. When I wrote the novel Ender's Game back in 1984, my focus in the last chapter, chapter 15, was entirely on setting up Speaker for the Dead. I had no notion of any sequel between those two books. So I was rather careless and cavalier with my account of Ender's time on the first colony. I was so careless I completely forgot that on all but the last formic planet, there would have been human pilots and crew left alive. Where would they go? Of course they would begin colonizing the formic worlds. And those who sent them would have at least allowed for that possibility, sending people trained to do whatever jobs they anticipated would be necessary.
So while the meat of chapter 15 of Ender's Game is exactly right, the details and timeline are not. They aren't what they should have been then, and they certainly aren't what they need to be now. Since writing that chapter, I have written stories like "Investment Counselor" (in First Meetings), where Ender meets Jane (a major character in Speaker) when he is legally coming of age on a planet called Sorelledolce; but this contradicted the timeline stated in Ender's Game. All in all, I realized, it was chapter 15 that was wrong, not the later stories, which took more details into account and developed the story in a superior way.
Why should I be stuck now with decisions carelessly made twenty-four years ago? What I've written since is right; those contradictory but unimportant details in the original novel are wrong.