Enders In Exile

mother
raised you to take vengeance for her fantasy lover, your fraudulent
father. Do it—do what she raised you to do, be who she
planned you to be. But I will not raise my hand against the son of my
friends, no matter how deluded you are."
    "Then you're the fool,"
said Achilles. "Because I
will
do it. For my
father's sake, and my mother's, for that poor boy Stilson, and Bonzo
Madrid, and the formics, and the whole human race."
    Achilles began the
beating in earnest then. Another blow to the belly. Another blow to the
face. Two more kicks to the body as he lay unmoving on the ground. "Is
this what you did to the Stilson boy?" he asked. "Kicking him again and
again—that's what the report said."
    "Son," said Ender. "Of
my friends."
    "Please," begged
Valentine. Yet she made no move to stop him. Nor did she summon help.
    "Now it's time for you
to die," said Achilles.
    A kick to the head
would do it. And if it didn't, two kicks. The human brain could not
stand being rattled around inside the skull like that. Either dead or
so brain-damaged he might as well be. That was how the life of Ender
the Xenocide would end.
    He approached Wiggin's
supine body. The eyes were looking up at him through the blood still
pouring from his broken nose.
    But for some reason,
despite the hot rage pounding in his own head, Achilles did not kick
him.
    Stood there unmoving.
    "The son of Achilles
would do it," whispered Ender.
    Why am I not killing
him? Am I a coward after all? Am I so unworthy of my father? Ender is
right—my father would have killed him because it was
necessary,
without any qualms, without this hesitation.
    In that moment, he saw
what all of Ender's words really meant. Mother had been deceived. She
had been told the child was Achilles Flandres's. She had lied to him as
he grew up, telling him that he was her son, but she was only a
surrogate. He knew her well enough by now to recognize that her stories
were shaped more by what she needed the truth to be than by what it
actually was. Why hadn't he reached the obvious
conclusion—that everything she said was a lie? Because she
never let up, not for an instant. She shaped his world and did not
allow any contrary evidence to come to light.
    The way the teachers
manipulated the children who fought the war for them.
    Achilles knew it, had
always known it. Ender Wiggin won a war that he
didn't know he was fighting; he slaughtered a species that he thought
was just a computer simulation. The way that I believed that Achilles
Flandres was my father, that I bore his name and had a duty to fulfil
his destiny or avenge his murder.
    Surround a child with
lies, and he clings to them like a teddy bear, like his mother's hand.
And the worse, the darker the lie, the more deeply he has to draw it
inside himself in order to bear the lie at all.
    Ender said he would
rather die than raise his hand against the son of his friends. And he
was
not
a lunatic like Achilles' mother was.
    Achilles. He was not
Achilles. That was his mother's fantasy. It was all his mother's
fantasy. He knew she was crazy, and yet he lived inside her nightmare
and shaped his life to make it come true.
    "What is my name?" he
whispered.
    On the ground at his
feet, Ender whispered back: "Don't know. Delphiki. Arkanian. Their
faces. In yours."
    Valentine was beside
them now. "Please," she said. "Can this be over now?"
    "I knew," whispered
Ender. "Bean's son. Petra's. Could never."
    "Could never what? He's
broken your nose. He could have killed you."
    "I was going to," said
Achilles. And then the enormity of it washed over him. "I was going to
kill him with a kick to the head."
    "And the stupid fool
would have let you," said Valentine.
    "One chance," said
Ender. "In five. Kill me. Good odds."
    "Please," said
Valentine. "I can't carry him. Bring him to the doctor. Please. You're
strong enough."
    Only when he bent down
and lifted Ender up did he realize how badly he had damaged his own
hands, so hard had been his blows.
    What if he dies? What
if he still dies, even though I don't want him dead now after all?
    He bore Ender with
studied haste along the ragged ground and Valentine had to jog to keep
up. They reached the doctor's house long before he was due to leave for
the clinic. He took one look at Ender and had him brought in at once
for an emergency examination. "I can see who lost," said the doctor.
"But who won?"
    "Nobody," said . . .
Achilles.
    "There's not a mark on
you,
"
said the doctor.
    He held out his