Enders In Exile

who confronted him in a
dark air vent, or so the story goes, and instead of
killing him, turned him over to the authorities. Have you ever heard
that tale? Did Ender know about it when it happened? Achilles is Hitler
with stealth, Stalin with brains, Mao with energy, Pol Pot with
subtlety—name your monster, and Achilles has all the
inconvenient virtues to make him very hard to stop and even harder to
kill. Bean swears he will do it, but he had the chance before and blew
it, so I'm skeptical.
    I wish you were here.
    More than that, I
actually wish Ender were here. I'm waging war with the help of an army
of a few hundred men—very loyal, brilliantly trained, but
only two hundred of them! Bean is not the most reliable of commanders.
He always wins, but he doesn't always do what he's told or go where I
want him to. He picks and chooses among his assignments. To his credit,
he doesn't argue with me in front of his (supposedly "my") men.
    The trouble is that
these Battle School kids are all so cynical. They don't believe in
anything. Certainly they don't believe in ME. Just because Achilles
keeps trying to assassinate Bean and has all the Battle School kids
terrified, they think they don't owe Ender Wiggin's big brother their
lifelong personal service. (That was a joke. They owe me nothing.)
    Wars here and there
around the world, shifting alliances—it's what I predicted
would happen after the Battle School kids came home. They're such
excellent weapons—potentially devastating, but no fallout, no
mushroom clouds. Somehow, though, I always saw myself riding the crest
of the wave. Now I find myself sucked down to the bottom of the wave so
I can barely tell which way is up and I'm constantly running out of
air. I get to the top, gasp, and then a new wave crashes me back down.
    A few privileges inhere
to this office, for the time being, anyway. Minister of Colonization
Graff tells me I have unlimited access to the ansible—I can
talk to you whenever I want. Congratulate me for not abusing it. I know
you're writing a history of Battle School, and I thought you could use
some information about the careers of the more prominent Battle School
grads, for an epilogue, perhaps. Ender's jeesh fought the formics and
won; but all the others are now involved, one way
or another, as captives or servants or leaders or figureheads or
victims, in the military planning and action of every nation lucky
enough to have a single graduate and strong enough to hold on to him.
    So steel yourself for
reams of information. Graff tells me that it will take weeks to send it
all from his office (in the old Battle School station now), but that at
your end it will seem to arrive all at once. I hope it doesn't annoy
your ship's captain too much—I understand it's a nobody, not
Mazer Rackham after all—but what I'm sending goes with
hegemony priority, which means he won't be able to read any of this and
any messages HE'S expecting will have to wait. Give him my apologies.
Or not, as you see fit.
    I have never been so
alone in my life. I wish for you every day. Fortunately, Father and
Mother have turned out to be surprisingly useful. No, I should have
said "helpful." But I'll leave the "useful" there so you can say, "He
hasn't changed." They also miss you, and among the information you're
getting are letters from both Father and Mother. Also letters from them
to Ender. I hope the boy gets over the snit he's in and writes back to
them. Missing you has given me some idea of how they feel about Ender
(and now you): If he wrote to them it would mean the world. And what
would it cost him?
    No, I'm not going to
write to him myself. I have no stock in that company. Mom and Dad are
miserable, having only me as visible proof that they reproduced.
Brighten their lives, both of you. What ELSE do you have to do? I
picture you gliding along at lightspeed, with servants bringing you
juleps and the fawning colonists begging Ender to tell them once again
about how the formic home world went boom.
    Writing this sometimes
feels as if I'm talking to you like old times. But at this moment it's
a painful reminder that it's nothing like talking to you at all.
    As the official monster
of the family, I hope you will compare me to a real monster like
Achilles and give me some points for not being as awful as it is
possible to be. I also have to tell you that I've learned that when no
one else can be trusted—and I mean no one—there is
family. And somehow I managed to be