Enders In Exile

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."
    "So I don't sign it."
    "Oh, you do," said
Valentine, "because you want to give them some name to refer to you by.
The way I'm still using Demosthenes."
    "But nobody thinks it's
the
same
Demosthenes who was such a rabble-rouser
back before Peter took over the world."
    "Come up with a name."
    "How about 'Locke'?"
    Valentine laughed.
"There are still people who call him that."
    "What if I call it
'Obituary' and sign it . . . what, Mortician?"
    "How about 'Eulogy' and
you sign it 'Speaker at the Funeral'?"
    In the end, he called
it simply The Hive Queen and he signed it "Speaker for the Dead." And
in his anonymous, untraceable correspondence with his publisher, he
insisted that it be printed without any kind of copyright notice. The
publisher almost didn't go through with it, but Ender became even more
insistent. "Put a notice on the cover that people are free to make as
many copies of this book as they want, but that your edition is
especially nice, so that people can carry it with them and write in it
and underline it."
    Valentine was amused.
"You realize what you're doing?" she said.
    "What?"
    "You're having them
treat it like scripture. You really think that people will read it like
that?"
    "I don't know what
people will do," said Ender, "but yes, I think of it as something holy.
I don't want to make money from it. What would I use money for? I want
everyone to read it. I want everyone to know who the hive queens were.
What we lost when we took them out of existence."
    "We saved our lives,
Ender."
    "No," said Ender.
"That's what we thought we were doing, and that's what we should be
judged for—but what we really did was slaughter a species
that wanted desperately to make peace with us, to try to understand
us—but they never understood what speech and language were.
This is the first time they've had a chance to find a voice."
    "Too late," said
Valentine.
    "Tragedies are like
that," said Ender.
    "And their tragic flaw
was . . . muteness?"
    "Their tragic flaw was
arrogance—they thought they could terraform any world that
didn't have intelligence of the kind they knew how to
recognize—beings that spoke to each other mind to mind."
    "The way the gold bugs
speak to us."
    "The gold bugs are
grunting—mentally," said Ender.
    "You found one," said
Valentine. "I asked you if you found 'formics' and you said no, but you
found
one
."
    Ender said nothing.
    "I will never ask
again," said Valentine.
    "Good," said Ender.
    "And that
one—it's alone."
    Ender shrugged.
    "You didn't kill it. It
didn't kill you. It told you—no, showed you—all the
memories that you put into your book."
    "For someone who was
never going to ask again, you sure have a lot of questions, missy,"
said Ender.
    "Don't you dare talk
down