Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

killing it. Because we can't wait any longer. The descolada is trying to destroy us, and there's no time to dither. If we could, we would."
    "I understand all that," said Quara. "I cooperated, didn't I? It just makes me sick to hear you talking as if the pequeninos were somehow brave about collaborating in an act of xenocide in order to save their own skin."
    "Us or them, kid," said Peter. "Us or them."
    "You can't possibly understand," said Ender, "how ashamed I am to hear my own arguments on his lips."
    Peter laughed. "Andrew pretends not to like me," he said. "But the kid's a fraud. He admires me. He worships me. He always has. Just like his pretty little angel here."
    Peter poked at young Val. She didn't shy away. She acted instead as if she hadn't even felt his finger in the flesh of her upper arm.
    "He worships us both. In his twisted little mind, she's the moral perfection that he can never achieve. And I am the power and genius that was always just out of poor little Andrew's reach. It was really quite modest of him, don't you think? For all these years, he's carried his betters with him inside his mind."
    Young Val reached out and took Quara's hand. "It's the worst thing you'll ever do in your life," she said, "helping the people you love to do something that in your heart you believe is deeply wrong."
    Quara wept.
    But it was not Quara that worried Ender. He knew that she was strong enough to hold the moral contradictions of her own actions, and still remain sane. Her ambivalence toward her own actions would probably mellow her, make her less certain from moment to moment that her judgment was absolutely correct, and that all who disagreed with her were absolutely wrong. If anything, at the end of this she would emerge more whole and compassionate and, yes, decent than she had been before in her hotheaded youth. And perhaps young Val's gentle touch-- along with her words naming exactly the pain that Quara was feeling-- would help her to heal all the sooner.
    What worried Ender was the way Grego was looking at Peter with such admiration. Of all people, Grego should have learned what Peter's words could lead to. Yet here he was, worshiping Ender's walking nightmare. I have to get Peter out of here, thought Ender, or he'll have even more disciples on Lusitania than Grego had-- and he'll use them far more effectively and, in the long run, the effect will be more deadly.
    Ender had little hope that Peter would turn out to be like the real Peter, who grew to be a strong and worthy Hegemon. This Peter, after all, was not a fully fleshed-out human being, full of ambiguity and surprise. Rather he had been created out of the caricature of attractive evil that lingered in the deepest recesses of Ender's unconscious mind. There would be no surprises here. Even as they prepared to save Lusitania from the descolada, Ender had brought a new danger to them, potentially just as destructive.
    But not as hard to kill.
    Again he stifled the thought, though it had come up a dozen times since he first realized that it was Peter sitting at his left hand in the starship. I created him. He isn't real, just my nightmare. If I kill him, it wouldn't be murder, would it? It would be the moral equivalent of-- what? Waking up? I have imposed my nightmare on the world, and if I killed him the world would just be waking up to find the nightmare gone, nothing more.
    If it had been Peter alone, Ender might have talked himself into such a murder, or at least he thought he might. But it was young Val who stopped him. Fragile, beautiful of soul-- if Peter could be killed, so could she. If he should be killed, then perhaps she ought to be as well-- she had as little right to exist; she was as unnatural, as narrow and distorted in her creation. But he could never do that. She must be protected, not harmed. And if the one was real enough to remain alive, so must the other be. If harming young Val would be murder, so would harming Peter. They were spawned in the same creation.
    My children, thought Ender bitterly. My darling little offspring, who leaped fully-formed from my head like Athena from the mind of Zeus. Only what I have here isn't Athena. More like Diana and Hades. The virgin huntress and the master of hell.
    "We'd better go," said Peter. "Before Andrew talks himself into killing me."
    Ender smiled wanly. That was the worst thing-- that Peter and young Val seemed to have come into existence knowing more about his own mind than be knew