Enders In Exile

They are my mothers,
but now they are also my sisters, because I remember doing all the
things they do."
    For this, she had drawn
on the images of Valentine and Peter to say "sisters." And when Peter's
face appeared, there was fear and pain in the memory.
    "I don't fear him
anymore," said Ender. "Or hate him. He turned out to be a great man."
    But the hive queen
didn't believe him. She drew from his mind the image of the old man
from their ansible conversations, and compared it with the child Peter
in Ender's deepest memory. They were too different to be the same.
    And Ender could not
argue the point. Peter the Hegemon was not Peter the monster. Maybe he
never was. Maybe both were an illusion. But Peter
the monster was the one buried deep in Ender's memory, and he was
unlikely to expunge him from it.
    He put the cocoon back
in its hiding place, locked it, and then left it on the cart of luggage
being taken down to the surface.

    * * * * *
    Virlomi actually came
to meet the shuttle; and in moments she made it clear she was extending
this courtesy only for Ender's sake. She came aboard the shuttle to
talk to him.
    Ender did not take this
as a good sign. While they waited for her to come aboard, Ender said to
Valentine, "She doesn't want me here. She wants me to go back onto the
ship."
    "Wait and see what she
wants," said Valentine. "Maybe she just wants to know what you intend."
    When she came in,
Virlomi looked so much older than the girl whose face Ender had seen on
the vids of the Sino-Indian War. A year or two of brooding over defeat,
and then sixteen years of governing a colony—they were bound
to take their toll.
    "Thank you for letting
me visit you so early," she said.
    "You have flattered us
beyond measure," said Ender. "To come out and receive us yourself."
    "I had to see you," she
said, "before you emerged into the colony. I swear to you that I told
no one of your coming."
    "I believe you," said
Ender. "But your remark seems to imply that people know I'm here."
    "No," she said. "No,
there's no rumor of that, thank God."
    Which God, Ender
wondered. Or, being reputed a goddess, did she thank herself?
    "When Colonel
Graff—oh, whatever his title was then—he'll always
be Colonel Graff to me—when he told me he had asked you to
come, it was because he anticipated problems with a particular mother
and son."
    "Nichelle and Randall
Firth," said Ender.
    "Yes," she said. "It
happens that I had also noticed them as a potential problem during
setup back in Battle School—Ellis Island—whatever
the name of the place was by then. So I understood his concern. What I
didn't know was why he thought you could handle them better than I
could."
    "I'm not sure he
thought I could. Perhaps he only wanted you to have a resource to draw
on, in case I had some ideas. Have they been a problem?"
    "The mother was your
ordinary reclusive paranoid," said Virlomi. "But she worked hard, and
if she seemed obsessively protective of her son, there was nothing
perverse about their relationship—she never tried to keep him
in her bed, for instance, and she never bathed him after
infancy—none of the danger signs. He was such a tiny baby.
Almost like a toy. But he walked and talked incredibly young.
Shockingly young."
    "And he stayed small,"
said Ender, "until he was in his teens. Just kept growing at an
ordinary pace and then didn't stop. I imagine he's something of a giant
now."
    "Two full meters in
height with no sign of stopping," said Virlomi. "How did you know this?"
    "Because of who his
parents are."
    Virlomi gasped. "Graff
knows who the real father is. And he didn't tell me. How was I supposed
to deal with this situation if he didn't give me all the information?"
    "Forgive me for
reminding you," said Ender, "but you were not widely trusted at the
time."
    "No," she said. "But I
thought if he made me governor, he'd give me . . . but that's past and
gone."
    Ender wondered if,
indeed, Graff was gone. He wasn't on any of the registries he could
access—but he didn't have ansible privileges like those he'd
had before, as a new governor coming to his colony. There were deep
searches he simply wasn't given time to pursue.
    "Graff didn't want to
leave you without knowledge. But he gave it to me, and left it to me to
judge how much to tell you."
    "So you don't trust me
either?" Her voice sounded jocular, but there was pain under it.
    "I don't know you,"
said Ender. "You made war against my friends. You liberated your
country from the