First meetings in the Enderverse

Of course, the people writing to her had no idea they were corresponding with a young woman of about twenty-five years (subjective age). They thought they were corresponding with the noted historian Demosthenes. Not that anyone thought for a moment that the name was anything but a pseudonym; and some reporters, responding to her first rush of fame with this latest book, had attempted to identify the “real Demosthenes” by figuring out from her long spates of slow responses or no responses at all when she was voyaging, and then working from passenger lists of candidate flights. It took an enormous amount of calculation, but that’s what computers were for, wasn’t it? So several men of varying degrees of scholarliness were accused of being Demonsthenes, and some were not trying all that hard to deny it.
    All this amused Valentine no end. As long as the royalty checks came to the right place and nobody tried to slip in a faked-up book under her pseudonym, she couldn’t care less who claimed the credit personally. She had worked with pseudonyms-this pseudonym, actually-since childhood, and she was comfortable with that odd mix of fame and anonymity. Best of both worlds, she said to Andrew. She had fame, he had notoriety. Thus he used no pseudonym-everyone just assumed his name was a horrible faux pas on the part of his parents.
    No one named Wiggin should have the gall to name their child Andrew, not after what the Xenocide did, that’s what they seemed to believe. At twenty years of age, it was unthinkable that this young man could be the same Andrew Wiggin. They had no way of knowing that for the past three centuries, he and Valentine had skipped from world to world only long enough for her to find the next story she wanted to research, gather the materials, and then get on the next starship so she could write the book while they journeyed to the next planet. Because of relativistic effects, they had scarcely lost two years of life in the past three hundred of realtime.
    Valentine immersed herself deeply and brilliantly-who could doubt it, from what she wrote?-into each culture, but Andrew remained a tourist. Or less. He helped Valentine with her research and played with languages a little, but he made almost no friends and stayed aloof from the places. She wanted to know everything; he wanted to love no one.
    Or so he thought, when he thought of it at all. He was lonely, but then told himself that he was glad to be lonely, that Valentine was all the company he needed, while she, needing more, had all the people she met through her research, all the people she corresponded with.
    Right after the war, when he was still Ender, still a child, some of the other children who had served with him wrote letters to him. Since he was the first of them to travel at lightspeed, however, the correspondence soon faltered, for by the time he got a letter and answered it, he was five, ten years younger than they were. He who had been their leader was now a little kid. Exactly the kid they had known, had looked up to; but years had passed in their lives. Most of them had been caught up in the wars that tore Earth apart in the decade following the victory over the Buggers, had grown to maturity in combat or politics. By the time they got Ender’s letter replying to their own, they had come to think of those old days as ancient history, as another life. And here was this voice from the past, answering the child who had written to him, only that child was no longer there. Some of them wept over the letter, remembering their friend, grieving that he alone had not been allowed to return to Earth after the victory. But how could they answer him? At what point could their lives touch? Later, most of them took flight to other worlds, while Ender served as the child-governor of a colony on one of the conquered Bugger colony worlds.
    He came to maturity in that bucolic setting, and, when he was ready, was guided to encounter the last surviving Hive Queen, who told him her story and begged him to take her to a safe place, where her people could be restored. He promised he would do it, and as the first step toward making a world safe for her, he wrote a short book about her, called The Hive Queen. He published it anonymously-at Valentine’s suggestion. He signed it, “The Speaker for the Dead.”
    He had no idea what this book would do, how it would transform humanity’s perception of the Bugger Wars. It was this very book that changed