First meetings in the Enderverse

him from the child-hero to the child-monster, from the victor in the Third Bugger War to the Xenocide who destroyed another species quite unnecessarily. Not that they demonized him at first. It was a gradual, step-by-step process. First they pitied the child who had been manipulated into using his genius to destroy the Hive Queen. Then his name came to be used for anyone who did monstrous things without understanding what he was doing. And then his name-popularized as Ender the Xenocide-became a simple shorthand for anyone who does the unconscionable on a monstrous scale. Andrew understood how it happened, and didn’t even disapprove. For no one could blame him more than he blamed himself. He knew that he hadn’t known the truth, but he felt that he should have known, and that even if he couldn’t have intended that the Hive Queens be destroyed, the whole species in one blow, that was nevertheless the effect of his actions. He did what he did, and had to accept responsibility for it.
    Which included the cocoon in which the Hive Queen traveled with him, dry and wrapped up like a family heirloom. He had privileges and clearances that still clung to him from his old status with the military, so his luggage was never inspected. Or at least had not been inspected up to now. His encounter with the tax man Benedetto was the first sign that things might be different for him as an adult. Different, but not different enough. He already carried the burden of the destruction of a species. Now he carried the burden of their salvation, their restoration. How would he, a twenty-year-old, barely a man, find a place where the Hive Queen could emerge and lay her fertilized eggs, where no human would discover her and interfere? How could he possibly protect her?
    The money might be the answer. Judging from the way Benedetto’s eyes got large when he saw the list of Andrew’s holdings, there might be quite a lot of money. And Andrew knew that money could be turned into power, among other things. Power, perhaps, to buy safety for the Hive Queen. If, that is, he could figure out how much money there was, and how much tax he owed. There were experts in this sort of thing, he knew. Lawyers and accountants for whom this was a specialty. But again he thought of Benedetto’s eyes.
    Andrew knew avarice when he saw it. Anyone who knew about him and his apparent wealth would start trying to find ways to get part of it. Andrew knew that the money was not his. It was blood money, his reward for destroying the Buggers; he needed to use it to restore them before any of the rest of it could ever rightfully be called his own. How could he find someone to help him without opening the door to let the jackals in?
    He discussed this with Valentine, and she promised to ask among her acquaintances here (for she had acquaintances everywhere, through her correspondence) who might be trusted. The answer came quickly: No one.
    If you have a large fortune and want to find someone to help you protect it, Sorelledolce was not the place to be.
    So day after day Andrew studied tax law for an hour or two and then, for another few hours, tried to come to grips with his own holdings and analyze them from a taxability standpoint. It was mind-numbing work, and every time he thought he understood it, he’d begin to suspect that there was some loophole he was missing, some trick he needed to know to make things work for him. The language in a paragraph that had seemed unimportant now loomed large, and he’d go back and study it and see how it created an exception to a rule he thought applied to him. At the same time, there were special exemptions that applied to only special cases and sometimes only to one company, but almost invariably he had some ownership of that company, or owned shares of a fund that had a holding in it. This wasn’t a matter of a month’s study, this was a career, just tracking what he owned. A lot of wealth can accrue in four hundred years, especially if you’re spending almost none of it. Whatever portion of his allowance he hadn’t used each year was plowed back into new investments. Without even knowing it, it seemed to him that he had his finger in every pie.
    He didn’t want it. It didn’t interest him. The better he understood it the less he cared. He was getting to the point that he didn’t understand why tax attorneys didn’t just kill themselves. That’s when the ad showed up in his e-mail. He wasn’t supposed to get