Enders In Exile

ADelphiki%[email protected], PWiggin%[email protected]
From: EWiggin%[email protected]/voy
Subj: Arkanian Delphiki, behold your
mother. Petra, behold your son.
    Dear Petra, Dear
Arkanian,
    In so many ways too
late, but in the ways that count, just in time. The last of your
children, Petra; your real mother, Arkanian. I will let him tell you
his story, and you can tell him yours. Graff did the genetic testing
long ago, and there is no doubt. He never told you, because he could
never bring you together and I think he believed it would only make you
sad. He might be right, but I think you deserve to have the sadness, if
that's what it is, because it belongs to you by right. This is what
life has done to the two of you. Now let's see what YOU do for each
other's lives.
    Let me tell you this
much, though, Petra. He's a good boy. Despite the madness of his
upbringing, in the crisis, he was Bean's son, and yours. He will never
know his father, except through you. But Petra, I have seen, in him,
what Bean became. The giant in body. The gentle heart.
    Meanwhile, I voyage on,
my friends. It's what I already planned to do, Arkanian. I'm on another
errand. You did not deflect me from my course. Except that they won't
let me go into stasis on this ship until my wounds are
healed—there's no healing in stasis.
     
    With love,
Andrew Wiggin

    In his little house
overlooking the wild coast of Ireland, not far from Doonalt, a feeble
old man knelt in his garden, pulling up weeds. O'Connor rode up on his
skimmer to deliver groceries and mail, and the old man rose slowly to
his feet to receive him. "Come in," he said. "There's tea."
    "Can't stay," said
O'Connor.
    "You can never stay,"
said the old man.
    "Ah, Mr. Graff," said
O'Connor, "that's the truth. I can never stay. But it's not for lack of
will. I have a lot of houses waiting for me to bring them what I
brought you."
    "And we have nothing to
say to each other," said Graff, smiling. No, laughing silently, his
frail chest heaving.
    "Sometimes you don't
need to say a thing," said O'Connor. "And sometimes a man has no time
for tea."
    "I used to be a fat
man," said Graff. "Can you believe it?"
    "And I used to be a
young man," said O'Connor. "Nobody believes
that.
"
    "There," said Graff.
"We had a conversation after all."
    O'Connor
laughed—but he did not stay, once he had helped put the
groceries away.
    And so Graff was alone
when he opened the letter from Valentine Wiggin.
    He read the account as
if he was hearing it in her own voice—that was her gift as a
writer, now that she had left off being the Demosthenes that Peter made
her create, and had become herself, even if she did still use that name
for her histories.
    This was a history that
she would never publish. Graff knew he was the only
audience. And since his body was continuing to lose weight, slowly but
surely, and he grew more feeble all the time, he thought it was rather
a shame she had spent so much time to put memories into a brain that
would hold them for so little time before letting all the memories go
at once into the ground.
    Yet she had done this
for him, and he was grateful to receive it. He read of Ender's contest
with Quincy Morgan on the ship, and the story of the poor girl who
thought she loved him. And the story of the gold bugs, some of which
Ender had told him—but Valentine's version relied also on
interviews with others, so that it would include things that Ender
either did not know or deliberately left out.
    And then, on Ganges.
Virlomi seemed to have turned out well. That was a relief. She was one
of the great ones; it had turned to ashes because of her pride, yes,
but not until after she had singlehandedly taught her people how to
free themselves of a conqueror.
    Finally, the account of
Ender and the boy Randall Firth, who once called himself Achilles, and
now was named Arkanian Delphiki.
    At the end of it, Graff
nodded and then burned the letter. She had asked him to, because Ender
didn't want a copy of it floating around somewhere on Earth. "My goal
is to be forgotten," she quoted Ender as saying.
    Not likely, though
whether he would be remembered for good or ill, Graff could not predict.
    "He thinks he finally
got the beating Stilson and Bonzo meant to give him," Graff said to the
teapot. "The boy's a fool, for all his brains. Stilson and Bonzo would
not have stopped. They weren't this boy of Bean's and Petra's. That's
what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world,