Shadow of the giant

on the history. Things happened,
and they were connected to each other, but when a motive was unknowable, she
didn't pretend to know it. Yet she understood human beings.
    Even the awful ones, she seemed to love.
    So he thought: Too bad she isn't here to write a biography
of Petra.
    Though of course that was silly—she didn't have to be there,
she had access to any documents she wanted through the ansible, since one of
the key provisions of Graff's ColMin was the absolute assurance that every
colony had complete access to every library and repository of records in all
the human worlds.
    It wasn't until the seventh volume came out and Peter read
The Hive Queen that he found the biographer that made him think: I want him to
write about me.
    The Hive Queen wasn't long. And while it was well written,
it wasn't particularly poetic. It was very simple. But it painted a picture of
the Hive Queens that was as they might have written it themselves. The monsters
that had frightened children for more than a century—and continued to do so
even though all were now dead—suddenly became beautiful and tragic.
    But it wasn't a propaganda job. The terrible things they did
were recognized, not dismissed.
    And then it dawned on him who wrote it. Not Valentine, who
rooted things in fact. It was written by someone who could understand an enemy
so well that he loved him. How often had he heard Petra quote what Ender said
about that? She—or Bean, or somebody—had written it down. "I think it's
impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe,
and not love them the way they love themselves."
    That's what the writer of The Hive Queen, who called himself
Speaker for the Dead, had done for the aliens who once haunted our nightmares.
    And the more people read that book, the more they wished
they had understood their enemy, that the language barrier had not been
insuperable, that the Hive Queens had not all been destroyed.
    The Speaker for the Dead had made humans love their ancient
enemy.
    Fine, it's easy to love your enemies after they're safely
dead. But still. Humans give up their villains only reluctantly.
    It had to be Ender. And so Peter had written to Valentine,
congratulating her, but also asking her to invite Ender to write about him.
There was some back and forth, with Peter insisting that he didn't want
approval of anything. He wanted to talk to his brother. If a book emerged from
it, fine. If the book painted him to be a monster, if that's what Speaker for
the Dead saw in him, so be it. "Because I know that whatever he writes,
it'll be a lot closer than most of the kuso that gets published here."
    Valentine scoffed at his use of words like kuso. "What
are you doing using Battle School slang?"
    "It's just part of the language now," Peter told
her in an answering email.
    And then she wrote, "He won't email you. He doesn't
know you anymore, he says. The last he saw of you, he was five years old and
you were the worst older brother in the world. He has to talk to you."
    "That's expensive," Peter wrote back, but in fact
he knew the FPE could afford it and would not refuse him. What really held him
back was fear. He had forgotten that Ender had only known him as a bully. Had
never seen him struggle to build a world government, not by conquest, but by
free choice of the people voting nation by nation. He doesn't know me.
    But then Peter told himself, Yes he does. The Peter that he
knew is part of the Peter who became Hegemon. The Peter that Petra agreed to
marry and permitted to raise children with her, that Peter was the same one
that had terrorized Ender and Valentine and was filled with venom and
resentment at having been deemed unworthy by the judges who chose which
children would grow up to save the world.
    How much of my achievement was the acting out of that
resentment?
    "He should interview Mother," Peter wrote back.
"She's still lucid and she likes me better than she used to."
    "He writes to her," said Valentine. "When he
has time to write to anyone. He takes his duties here very seriously. It's a
small world, but he governs it as carefully as if it were Earth."
    Finally Peter swallowed his fears and set a date and time
and now he sat down at vocal interface of the ansible in the Blackstream
Interstellar Communication Center. Of course, BICC didn't communicate directly
with any ansible except ColMin's Stationary Ansible Array, which relayed
everything to the appropriate colony or starship.
    Audio