Enders In Exile

when we are part of a community. When you first
came to Battle School, I tried to isolate you, but it could not be
done. I surrounded you with hostility; you took most of your enemies
and rivals and made friends of them. You freely taught everything you
knew, and nurtured students that we teachers had, frankly, given up on;
some of them ended up finding greatness in themselves, and achieved
much. You were a part of them; they carried you inside them all their
lives. You were better at our job than we were.
    Your jeesh loved you,
Ender, with a devotion I could only envy—I have had many
friends, but never the kind of passion that those children had for you.
They would have died for you, every one of them. Because they knew you
would have died for them. And the reports I had from Shakespeare
Colony—from Sel Menach, from Ix Tolo and his sons Po and
Abra, and from the colonists who never even knew you, but found the
place you had prepared for them—I can tell you that you were
universally loved and respected, and all of them regarded you as the
best member of their communities, their benefactor and friend.
    I tell you this because
I fear that the lesson I taught you first was the one you learned the
best: that you are always alone, that no one will ever help you, that
whatever must be done, only you can do. I cannot speak to the deep
recesses of your mind, but only to the uppermost part, the conscious
mind that has spoken and written to me so eloquently all these years.
So I hope you can hear my message and pass it along to the part of you
that will not at first believe it:
    You are the least-alone
person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it
everyone who let you love them, and many who did not. The meetingplace
of all these communities you formed was your own heart; they knew you
held them there, and it made them one with each other. Yet the gift you
gave them, none was able to give you, and I fear this is because I did
my evil work too well, and built a wall in your
mind that cannot let you receive the knowledge of what and who you are.
    It galls me to see how
this "Speaker for the Dead" with his silly little books has achieved
the influence that YOU deserved. People are actually turning it into a
religion—there are self-styled "speakers for the dead" who
presume to talk at funerals and tell "the truth" about the dead person,
an appalling desecration—who can know the truth about anyone?
I have left instructions in my will that none of these poseurs is to be
allowed anywhere near my funeral, if anyone even bothers to have one.
You saved the world and were never allowed to come home. This
mountebank makes up a fake history of the formics and then writes an
apologia for your brother Peter and people make a religion out of it.
There's no accounting for the human race.
    You have Valentine with
you. Show her this letter, and see if she does not affirm that every
word I've said about you is true. I may not be alive when you read
this, but many who knew you as students in Battle School are still
alive, including most of your jeesh. They are old, but not one of them
has forgotten you. (I still write to Petra now and then; she has been
widowed twice, and yet remains an astonishingly happy and optimistic
soul. She keeps in touch with all the others.) They and I and Valentine
can all attest to the fact that you have belonged to the human race
more deeply and fully than most people could even imagine.
    Find a way to believe
that, and don't hide from life in the unfathomable, lightless depths of
relativistic space.
    I have achieved much in
my life, but the greatest of my achievements was finding you,
recognizing what you were, and somehow managing not to ruin you before
you could save the world. I only wish I could then have healed you. But
that will have to be your own achievement—or perhaps
Valentine's. Or perhaps it will come from the children that you must,
you
must
have someday.
    For that is my greatest
personal regret. I never married and had children of my own. Instead I
stole other people's children and trained them—not raised
them. It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your
children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and
shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy
and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child
in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms
around you and hearing his voice in your