Enders In Exile

forgotten
that I owe our victory, and therefore this second life, to you and the
other children who led us in the war. I thank you again from this grave
of mine.
    With love and respect,
Vitaly Denisovitch Kolmogorov

    "I don't like what
you're doing to Alessandra," said Valentine.
    Ender looked up from
what he was reading. "And what would that be?"
    "You know perfectly
well that you've made her fall in love with you."
    "Have I?"
    "Don't pretend to be
oblivious to it! She looks at you like a hungry puppy."
    "I've never owned a
dog. They didn't allow team mascots in Battle School, and there weren't
any strays."
    "And you deliberately
made her do it."
    "If I can make a woman
fall in love with me at will, I should have bottled it and sold it and
gotten rich on Earth."
    "You didn't make a
woman
fall in love with you, you made an emotionally dependent, shy,
sheltered
girl
fall in love with you, and that's
pathetically easy. All it took was being extraordinarily nice to her."
    "You're right. If I
hadn't been so selfish, I would have slapped her."
    "Ender, it's me you're
talking to. Do you think I haven't been watching? You seek out
opportunities to praise her. To ask her advice on the most meaningless
things. To thank her all the time for nothing at all. And you smile at
her. Has anyone ever mentioned that when you smile, it would melt
steel?"
    "Inconvenient, in a
spaceship. I'll smile less."
    "You switch it on like
. . . like the stardrive! That smile—with your whole face, as
if you were taking your soul out and putting it into her hands."
    "Val," said Ender.
"This is kind of an important letter. What is your point?"
    "What are you planning
to do with her, now that you own her?"
    "I don't own anybody,"
said Ender. "I haven't laid a hand on her—literally. Not
shaking hands, not a pat on the shoulder, nothing. No physical contact.
I also haven't flirted with her. No sexual innuendoes. No inside jokes.
And I haven't gone off alone with her, either. Month after month, as
her mother conspires to leave us alone, I've simply not done it. Even
if it took walking out of a room quite rudely. What part of that is
making her fall in love with me, exactly?"
    "Ender, I don't like it
when you lie to me."
    "Valentine, if you want
an honest answer, write me an honest letter."
    She sighed and sat down
on her bed. "I can't wait for this voyage to end."
    "A bit more than two
months to go. Almost over. And you did finish your book."
    "Yes, and it's very
good," said Valentine. "Especially when you consider I barely met any
of them and
you
were almost no help to me."
    "I answered every
question you asked."
    "Except to evaluate the
people, to evaluate the school, to—"
    "My opinions aren't
history. It wasn't supposed to be '
Ender Wiggin's School Days
as told to his sister, Valentine.' "
    "I didn't come on this
voyage to quarrel with you."
    Ender looked at her
with such overdone astonishment that she threw a pillow at him.
    "For what it's worth,"
she said, "I've never been as mean to you as I was to Peter all the
time."
    "Then all's right with
the world."
    "But I'm angry at you,
Ender. You shouldn't toy with a girl's feelings. Unless you really plan
to marry her—"
    "I do not," said Ender.
    "Then you shouldn't
lead her on."
    "I have not," said
Ender.
    "And I say you have."
    "No, Valentine," said
Ender. "What I have done is exactly what is needed for her to have the
thing she wants most."
    "Which is you."
    "Which is definitely
not
me." Ender sat beside her on her bed, leaned close to her. "You will
help me most by scrutinizing someone else."
    "I scrutinize
everybody," said Val. "I judge everybody. But you're my brother. I get
to boss you around."
    "And you're my sister.
I have to tickle you until you pee or cry. Or both." Which he proceeded
to attempt, though he didn't really go quite that far. Or at least, she
only peed a little. And then punched him hard in the arm and made him
say, "Ow," in a really snotty, sarcastic way, so she knew he was
pretending it didn't hurt, but it really did. Which he deserved. He
really was being rotten to Alessandra, and he didn't even care, and
worse yet, he thought he could deny it. Just pitiful.

    All that afternoon,
Ender thought about what Valentine said. He knew what he was planning,
and it really was for Alessandra's good, but he
had
miscalculated if the girl was actually falling in love with him. It was
supposed to be friendship, trust, gratitude maybe. Brother-and-sister.
Only Alessandra wasn't