So when he complained that she was ignoring him, when he teased about their lack of intimacy during the voyage, there was more to it than an aging husband's playful desire. Whether he knew he was saying it or not, she understood the true meaning of his overtures: After what I've given up for you, have you nothing to give to me?
And he was right– she was pushing herself harder than she needed to. She was making more sacrifices than needed to be made– requiring overmuch from him as well. It wasn't the sheer number of subversive essays that Demosthenes published during this voyage that would make the difference. What mattered was how many people read and believed what she wrote, and how many then thought and spoke and acted as enemies of Starways Congress. Perhaps more important was the hope that some within the bureaucracy of Congress itself would be moved to feel a higher allegiance to humanity and break their maddening institutional solidarity. Some would surely be changed by what she wrote. Not many, but maybe enough. And maybe it would happen in time to stop them from destroying the planet Lusitania.
If not, she and Jakt and those who had given up so much to come with them on this voyage from Trondheim would reach Lusitania just in time to turn around and flee– or be destroyed along with all the others of that world. It was not unreasonable for Jakt to be tense, to want to spend more time with her. It was unreasonable for her to be so single-minded, to use every waking moment writing propaganda.
“You make the sign for the door, and I'll make sure you aren't alone in the room.”
“Woman, you make my heart go flip-flop like a dying flounder,” said Jakt.
“You are so romantic when you talk like a fisherman,” said Valentine. “The children will have a good laugh, knowing you couldn't keep your hands off me even for the three weeks of this voyage.”
“They have our genes. They should be rooting for us to stay randy till we're well into our second century.”
“I'm well into my fourth millennium.”
“When oh when can I expect you in my stateroom, Ancient One?”
“When I've transmitted this essay.”
“And how long will that be?”
“Sometime after you go away and leave me alone.”
With a deep sigh that was more theatre than genuine misery, he padded off down the carpeted corridor. After a moment there came a clanging sound and she heard him yelp in pain. In mock pain, of course; he had accidentally hit the metal beam with his head on the first day of the voyage, but ever since then his collisions had been deliberate, for comic effect. No one ever laughed out loud, of course– that was a family tradition, not to laugh when Jakt pulled one of his physical gags– but then Jakt was not the sort of man who needed overt encouragement from others. He was his own best audience; a man couldn't be a sailor and a leader of men all his life without being quite self-contained. As far as Valentine knew, she and the children were the only people he had ever allowed himself to need.
Even then, he had not needed them so much that he couldn't go on with his life as a sailor and fisherman, away from home for days, often weeks, sometimes months at a time. Valentine went with him sometimes at first, when they were still so hungry for each other that they could never be satisfied. But within a few years their hunger had given way to patience and trust; when he was away, she did her research and wrote her books, and then gave her entire attention to him and the children when he returned.
The children used to complain, “I wish Father would get home, so Mother would come out of her room and talk to us again.” I was not a very good mother, Valentine thought. It's pure luck that the children turned out so well.
The essay remained in the air over the terminal. Only a final touch remained to be given. At the bottom, she centered the cursor and typed the name under which all her writings were published:
DEMOSTHENES
It was a name given to her by her older brother, Peter, when they were children together fifty– no, three thousand years ago.
The mere thought of Peter still had the power to upset her, to make her go hot and cold inside. Peter, the cruel one, the violent one, the one whose mind was so subtle and dangerous that he was manipulating her by the age of two and the world by the age of twenty. When they were still children on Earth in the twenty-second century, he studied the political writings of great men and women, living and dead, not to learn their ideas– those he grasped instantly– but to learn how they said them. To learn, in practical terms, how to sound like an adult. When he had mastered it, he taught Valentine, and forced her to write low political demagoguery under the name Demosthenes while he wrote elevated statesmanlike essays under the name Locke. Then they submitted them to the computer networks and within a few years were at the heart of the greatest political issues of the day.
What galled Valentine then– and still stung a bit today, since it had never been resolved before Peter died– was that he, consumed by the lust for power, had forced her to write the sort of thing that expressed his character, while he got to write the peace-loving, elevated sentiments that were hers by nature. In those days the name “Demosthenes” had felt like a terrible burden to her. Everything she wrote under that name was a lie; and not even her lie– Peter's lie. A lie within a lie.
Not now. Not for three thousand years. I've made the name my own. I've written histories and biographies that have shaped the thinking of millions of scholars on the Hundred Worlds and helped to shape the identities of dozens of nations. So much for you, Peter. So much for what you tried to make of me.
Except that now, looking at the essay she had just written, she realized that even though she had freed herself from Peter's suzerainty, she was still his pupil. All she knew of rhetoric, polemic– yes, of demagoguery– she had learned from him or because of his insistence. And now, though she was using it in a noble cause, she was nevertheless doing exactly the sort of political manipulation that Peter had loved so much.
Peter had gone on to become Hegemon, ruler of all humanity for sixty years at the beginning of the Great Expansion. He was the one who united all the quarreling communities of man for the vast effort that flung starships out to every world where the buggers had once dwelt, and then on to discover more habitable worlds until, by the time he died, all the Hundred Worlds had either been settled or had colony ships on the way. It was almost a thousand years after that, of course, before Starways Congress once again united all of humankind under one government– but the memory of the first true Hegemon– *the* Hegemon– was at the heart of the story that made human unity possible.
Out of a moral wasteland like Peter's soul came harmony and unity and peace. While Ender's legacy, as far as humanity remembered, was murder, slaughter, xenocide.
Ender, Valentine's younger brother, the man she and her family were voyaging to see– he was the tender one, the brother she loved and, in the earliest years, tried to protect. He was the good one. Oh, yes, he had a streak of ruthlessness that rivaled Peter's, but he had the decency to be appalled by his own brutality. She had loved him as fervently as she had loathed Peter; and when Peter exiled his younger brother from the Earth that Peter was determined to rule, Valentine went with Ender– her final repudiation of Peter's personal hegemony over her.
And here I am again, thought Valentine, back in the business of politics.
She spoke sharply, in the clipped voice that told her terminal that she was giving it a command. “Transmit,” she said.
The word transmitting appeared in the air above her essay. Ordinarily, back when she was writing scholarly works, she would have had to specify a destination– submit the essay to a publisher through some roundabout pathway so that it could not readily be traced to Valentine Wiggin. Now, though, a subversive friend of Ender's, working under the obvious code name of “Jane,” was taking care of all that for her– managing the tricky business of translating an ansible message from a ship going at near-light speed to a message readable by a planetbound ansible for which time was passing more than five hundred times faster.