home."
"She's been reluctant to go before."
"This time I wouldn't even ask her to come." Not with a baby coming, not as happy as she is here in Reykjavik. Here where they love her as a teacher, never guessing that she is really the legendary Demosthenes. Here where her husband, Jakt, is lord of a hundred fishing vessels and master of the fjords, where every day is filled with brilliant conversation or the danger and majesty of the floe-strewn sea, she'll never leave here. Nor will she understand why I must go.
And, thinking of leaving Valentine, Ender wavered in his determination to go to Lusitania. He had been taken from his beloved sister once before, as a child, and resented deeply the years of friendship that had been stolen from him. Could he leave her now, again, after almost twenty years of being together all the time? This time there would be no going back. Once he went to Lusitania, she would have aged twenty-two years in his absence; she'd be in her eighties if he took another twenty-two years to return to her.
Don't taunt me, said Ender silently. I'm entitled to feel regret.
It was the voice of the hive queen in his mind. Of course she had seen all that he saw, and knew all that he had decided. His lips silently formed his words to her: I'll leave her, but not for you. We can't be sure this will bring any benefit to you. It might be just another disappointment, like Trondheim.
But it also belongs to another people. I won't destroy the piggies just to atone for having destroyed your people.
I know what you've told me.
I know you could live in peace with them. But could they live in peace with you?
Ender walked to a tattered bag that stood unlocked in the corner. Everything he truly owned could fit in there-- his change of clothing. All the other things in his room were gifts from people he had Spoken to, honoring him or his office or the truth, he could never tell which. They would stay here when he left. He had no room for them in his bag.
He opened it, pulled out a rolled-up towel, unrolled it. There lay the thick fibrous mat of a large cocoon, fourteen centimeters at its longest point.
He had found the cocoon waiting for him when he came to govern the first human colony on a former bugger world. Foreseeing their own destruction at Ender's hands, knowing him to be an invincible enemy, they had built a pattern that would be meaningful only to him, because it had been taken from his dreams. The cocoon, with its helpless but conscious hive queen, had waited for him in a tower where once, in his dreams, he had found an enemy. "You waited longer for me to find you," he said aloud, "than the few years since I took you from behind the mirror."
"Have I found a place yet that was safe for you?"
"Maybe Lusitania is the place, I don't know."
"I'm trying." Why else do you think I have wandered from world to world for all these years, if not to find a place for you?
I've got to find a place where we won't kill you again the moment you appear. You're still in too many human nightmares. Not that many people really believe my book. They may condemn the Xenocide, but they'd do it again.
He laughed. Me forgive you .
It was me.
It was me.
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