Enders In Exile

home. It broke our hearts to realize it. And it's wonderful of
you to want to join him, even if neither of you ends up going with a
colony. Even if it's just a few months in space. Even a few years. It's
a good thing for him to be with you again."
    "It would be better to
have the two of you out there, too."
    Father shook his head.
Mother pressed a finger to each eye—her gesture that said,
I'm not going to cry.
    "We can't go," said
Father. "Our work is here."
    "They could spare you
for a year or two."
    "That's easy for you to
say," said Father. "You're young. What's a couple of years to you? But
we're older. Not old, but older than you. Time means something
different to us. We love Ender, but we can't spend months or years just
going out to visit him. We don't have that much time left."
    "That's exactly the
point," said Valentine. "You don't have much time—and still
less time to get a chance to see Ender again."
    "Val," said Mother, her
voice quavering. "Nothing we do now will give us back the years we've
lost."
    She was right, and
Valentine knew it. But she didn't see the relevance. "So you're going
to treat him as if he's dead?"
    "Val," said Father. "We
know he's not dead. But we also know he doesn't want us. We've written
to him—since the war ended. Graff—the one who's on
trial—he wrote back. Ender doesn't want to write letters to
us. He reads them, but he told Graff that he had nothing to say."
    "Graff's a liar," said
Valentine. "He probably hasn't shown Ender anything."
    "That's possible," said
Father. "But Ender doesn't need us. He's thirteen. He's becoming a man.
He's done brilliantly since he left us, but he also went through
terrible things, and we weren't there. I'm not sure he'll ever forgive
us for letting him go."
    "You had no choice,"
said Valentine. "They would have taken him to Battle School whether you
liked it or not."
    "I'm sure he knows that
in his head," said Mother. "But in his heart?"
    "So I'm going without
you," she said. It had never crossed her mind that they wouldn't even
want to go.
    "You're going to leave
us behind," said Father. "It's what children do. They live at home
until they leave. Then they're gone. Even if they visit, even if they
move back, it's never the same. You think it will be, but it won't. It
happened with Ender, and it'll happen with you."
    "The good thing," said
Mother, who was crying a little now, "is that you won't be with Peter
anymore."
    Valentine couldn't
believe her mother was saying such a thing.
    "You've spent too much
time with him," said Mother. "He's a bad influence on you. He makes you
unhappy. He sucks you into his life so you can't have one of your own."
    "That'll be our job
now," said Father.
    "Good luck," was all
Valentine could say. Was it possible that her parents really did
understand Peter? But if they did, why had they let him have his way
for all these years?
    "You see, Val," said
Father, "if we went to Ender now, we'd want to be his parents, but we
don't have any authority over him. Nor anything to offer him. He
doesn't need parents anymore."
    "A sister, now," said
Mother. "A sister, he can use." She took Valentine's hand. She was
asking for something.
    So Valentine gave her
the only thing she could think of that she might want. A promise. "I'll
stick with him," said Valentine, "as long as he needs me."
    "We would expect
nothing less of you, dear," said Mother. She squeezed Valentine's hand
and let go. Apparently that was what she had wanted.
    "It's a kind and loving
thing," said Father. "It's always been your nature. And Ender was
always your darling baby brother."
    Valentine winced at the
old phrase from childhood. Darling baby brother. Ick. "I'll make sure
to call him that."
    "Do," said Mother.
"Ender likes to be reminded of good things."
    Did Mother really
imagine that anything she knew about Ender at age six would still apply
to him now, at age thirteen?
    As if she had read
Valentine's mind, Mother answered her. "People don't change, Val. Not
their fundamental character. Whatever you're going to be as an adult is
already visible to someone who really knows you from your birth onward."
    Valentine laughed. "So
. . . why did you let Peter live?"
    They laughed, but
uncomfortably. "Val," said Father, "we don't expect you to understand
this, but some of the things that make Peter . . . difficult . . . are
the very things that might also make him great someday."
    "What about me?" asked
Valentine. "As long as you're telling fortunes."
    "Oh,