Enders In Exile

have no better ideas. And I'm going to
follow Ender's and Graff's advice, too, and write a history of Battle
School. My goal is a simple one: to get it published as quickly as
possible so it can be part of the task of erasing the vile slanders of
the court martial, rehabilitating the reputations of the children who
won this war and the adults who trained and aimed them. Not that I
don't still hate them for taking Ender from us. But I find it quite
possible to hate someone and still see their side of the argument
between us. This is perhaps the only worthwhile gift Peter ever gave me.
    Peter has not written
to me, nor I to him. If he asks, tell him that I think about him often,
I notice that I don't see him anymore, and if that counts as "missing
him," then he is missed.
    Meanwhile, I had a
chance to meet Petra Arkanian in transit and I have
spoken—well, literally WRITTEN—to "Bean," Dink
Meeker, Han Tzu, and have letters out to several others. The better I
understand from them what Ender went through (since Ender's not
telling), the better I will know what I should be doing but am not
because, as you point out, I am not his mother and he has asked me not
to do it. Meanwhile, I am pretending that it's only about writing the
book.
    I am an astonishingly
fast writer. Are you sure we have no genes of Winston Churchill in us?
Some dalliance of his, for instance, with a Pole-in-exile during World
War II? I feel him to be a kindred spirit of mine, except for the
political ambitions, the constant blood alcohol level, and walking
around the house naked. He did those things, by the way, not me.
                                                                                                                    Love,
                                                                                                                    Your
equally sarcastic, just-analytical-enough,
                                                                                                                    not-yet-wounded-nor-satisfied
daughter,
                                                                                                                    Valentine
    Graff had disappeared
from Eros soon after the court martial, but now he was back. It seems
that as Minister of Colonization, he could not miss the
opportunity for publicity that the departure of the first colony ship
would offer.
    "Publicity is good for
the Dispersal Project," said Graff when Mazer laughed at him.
    "And you don't love the
camera?"
    "Look at me," said
Graff. "I've lost twenty-five kilos. I'm a mere shadow of myself."
    "All through the war,
you gain weight, bit by bit. You balloon during the court martial. And
now you lose weight. Was it Earth gravity?"
    "I didn't go to Earth,"
said Graff. "I was busy turning Battle School into the assembly point
for the colonists. No one understood why I insisted that all the beds
be adult-sized. Now they talk about my foresight."
    "Why are you lying to
me
?
You weren't in charge when Battle School was built."
    Graff shook his head.
"Mazer, I wasn't in charge of anything when I talked you into coming
home, was I?"
    "You were in charge of
the get-Rackham-home-to-help-train-Ender-Wiggin project."
    "But no one knew there
was such a project."
    "Except you."
    "So I was also in
charge of the
make-sure-Battle-School-is-fitted-out-for-the-Human-Genome-Dispersal-Project
project."
    "And that's why you're
losing weight," said Mazer. "Because you finally got the funding and
authority to carry out the real project that you've had in mind all
along."
    "Winning the war was
the most important thing. I had my mind on my job of training children!
Who knew we'd win it in circumstances that gave us all these
uninhabited already-terraformed completely habitable planets? I
expected Ender to win, or Bean if Ender failed, but I thought we'd then
be battling the buggers world to world, and racing to found new
colonies in the opposite direction, so we wouldn't be vulnerable to
their