Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition

Cincinnatus -- Sergeant -- had been located while Petra and Bean were both caught up in military campaigns. She learned of his existence at the same time Bean handed her their divorce papers and announced his decision to take the three children who had Bean's giantism off on a relativistic voyage in order to buy time for scientists to find the cure.
    The closest Sergeant ever came to meeting Petra was that for a time Petra's mother took care of him in Armenia.
    So whatever Sergeant thought he remembered, it was all manufactured memory, based on stories he had heard and opinions he had formed long after the fact. "I never liked you, I liked Petra," Sergeant said. What he really meant was, "I don't like you now, and invoking the name of my mother is the only thing I can think of that will really hurt you."
    Sergeant's complaint was not unjustified. He
had
been torn from the family into which he had been born. They were given no choice; he was given no choice. And it was likely that Sergeant did have some memories, however fragmentary and vague, of the family that took care of him through the first year of his life. Maybe he even suffered from some separation anxiety for a while.
    But Sergeant was too much like Bean for Bean to believe that it had really bothered him at the time. Sergeant was a fighter, and these words he said were weapons, not memories.

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    Additional Content From Chapter 3
     
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    The children had grown up with holograms of their mother, Petra, talking to them. "I love you. I miss you. I wish you could have known your brothers and sisters here on Earth. I know that you're still very young in years, and your siblings here are already adults who have moved on into their lives, married, having children. I hope that someday the same things become possible for you. The great regret of my life is that I was separated from the three of you, from your father. But I see now that it was the only decision that offered any kind of hope for a normal life for the children I kept here
and
for the children your father took with him."
    The children had all memorized every word. They could say them along with her. And at various times they had wept while hearing them, repeated them mockingly, screamed them at the hologram, refused to listen, and finally just watched her thoughtfully.
    Until they stopped summoning the holograms at all.
    Bean thought that the holograms had done their job. They had given the children a relationship with their absent mother. She was grateful that Petra had made the recordings.
    Even thought she had never actually sent them.

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    Additional Content From Chapter 9
     
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    It made Carlotta feel a little bitter that the communication between the Hive Queen and her daughters had been so perfect that they didn't need writing, they didn't need intercoms or radios, they didn't even need language. Memories were transferred perfectly. The mother was present within her children's minds always.
    While
my
mother ...
    Alone of the children, Carlotta knew that Mother had never sent them the hologram messages they had played over and over again.
    The question had arisen quite early. "Why are the holograms so jumpy? Between every sentence she shifts."
    The Giant's explanations had made perfect sense. "Your mother didn't like making speeches or sending messages. She always felt like she made constant mistakes. I'm sure she edited this a hundred times before she sent it."
    Ender had been his normal complacent self, accepting the explanation completely. Sergeant had naturally made snotty remarks about how it was so nice of her to go to so much trouble to send them exactly one highly-edited, unnatural message in all the years that she had known they were on this voyage.
    Carlotta alone seemed to understand that the Giant's explanation sounded like a just-so story, designed to fend off a child's question without actually answering it.
    Obviously the holograms had been edited. Also, the histories and biographies agreed that Petra wasn't much for public speaking and had largely dropped out of public life after she married Peter the Hegemon. Yet there was still something wrong with the Giant's explanation, and Carlotta thought she knew what it was.
    It seemed obvious to her that it wasn't Mother who had edited her messages, it was the Giant. And that meant that somewhere in the ship's computers there must be some