Enders In Exile

years
before it's transmitted. But the computers do not forget and cannot be
misused by anyone vindictive enough to want to prevent my saying
good-bye to old friends. I saw to the security of the system, and the
leaders of the I.F. and the FPE understand the importance of
maintaining the independence of the nets. You will see this message
when you come out of stasis yourself upon arriving at Ganges four years
from now.
    I write with two
purposes. First, I want you to know that I understand and remember the
great debt that I and all the world owe to you. Fifty-seven years ago,
before you went to Shakespeare, I assembled your pay during the war
(which was all retroactively at admiral rank), the cash bonuses voted
for you and your jeesh during the first flush of gratitude, and your
salary as governor of Shakespeare, and piggybacked them onto six
different mutual funds of impeccable reputation.
    They will be audited
continuously by the best software I could find, which, it may amuse you
to know, is based on the kernel of the Fantasy Game (or "mind game," as
it was also called in Battle School). The program's ability to
constantly monitor itself and all data sources and inputs, and to
reprogram itself in response to new information, made it seem the best
choice to make sure your best interests, financially, were well watched
out for. Human financial managers can be incompetent, or tempted to
embezzle, or die, only to be replaced by a worse one.
    You may draw freely
from the accruing interest, without paying taxes of any kind until you
come of age—which, since so many children are voyaging, is
now legally accounted using the sum of ship's time during voyages added
to the days spent in real time between voyages, with stasis time
counting zero. I have done my best to shore up your future against the
vicissitudes of time.
    Which brings me to my
second purpose. I am an old man who thought he could manipulate time
and live to see all his plans come to fruition. In a way, I
suppose I have. I have pulled many strings, and most of my puppets have
finished their dance. I have outlived most of the people I knew, and
all of my friends.
    Unless you are my
friend. I have come to think of you that way; I hope that I do not
overstep my bounds, because what I offer you now is a friend's advice.
    In rereading the
message in which you asked me to send you to Ganges, I have seen in the
phrase "reasons of my own" the possibility that you are using
starflight the way I was using stasis—as a way to live
longer. In your case, though, you are not seeking to see all your plans
to fruition—I'm not sure you even have plans. I think instead
that you are seeking to put decades, perhaps centuries, between you and
your past.
    I think the plan is
rather clever, if you mean to outlast your fame and live in quiet
anonymity somewhere, to marry and have children and rejoin the human
race, but among people who cannot even conceive of the idea that their
neighbor, Andrew Wiggin, could possibly have anything to do with the
great Ender Wiggin who saved the world.
    But I fear that you are
trying to distance yourself from something else. I fear that you think
you can hide from what you (all unwittingly) did, the matters that were
exploited in my unfortunate court martial. I fear that you are trying
to outrun the deaths of Stilson, of Bonzo Madrid, of thousands of
humans and billions of formics in the war you so brilliantly and
impossibly won for us all.
    You cannot do it,
Ender. You carry them with you. They will be freshly in your mind long
after all the rest of the world has forgotten. You defended yourself
against children who meant to destroy you, and you did it effectively;
if you had not done so, would you have been capable of your great
victories? You defended the human race against a nonverbal enemy who
destroyed human lives carelessly in the process of taking what it
wanted—our world, our home, our achievements, the future of
planet Earth. What you blame yourself for, I honor you for. Please hear
my voice in your head, as well as your own self-condemnation. Try to
balance them.
    You are the man you
have always been: one who takes responsibility, one who foresees
consequences and acts to protect others and, yes, yourself. That man
will not easily surrender a burden.
    But do not use
starflight like a drug, using it to seek oblivion. I can tell you from
experience that a life lived in short visits to the human race is not a
life. We are only human