Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

fish, the desperately sweet green meadows of summer would still be there. But his crews would be gone, were already gone. The men he had known better than his own children, better than his wife-- those men were already fifteen years older, and when he returned, if he returned, another forty years would have passed. Their grandsons would be working the boats then. They wouldn't know the name of Jakt. He'd be a foreign shipowner, come from the sky, not a sailor, not a man with the stink and yellowy blood of skrika on his hands. He would not be one of them.
    So when he complained that she was ignoring him, when he teased about their lack of intimacy during the voyage, there was more to it than an aging husband's playful desire. Whether he knew he was saying it or not, she understood the true meaning of his overtures: After what I've given up for you, have you nothing to give to me?
    And he was right-- she was pushing herself harder than she needed to. She was making more sacrifices than needed to be made-- requiring overmuch from him as well. It wasn't the sheer number of subversive essays that Demosthenes published during this voyage that would make the difference. What mattered was how many people read and believed what she wrote, and how many then thought and spoke and acted as enemies of Starways Congress. Perhaps more important was the hope that some within the bureaucracy of Congress itself would be moved to feel a higher allegiance to humanity and break their maddening institutional solidarity. Some would surely be changed by what she wrote. Not many, but maybe enough. And maybe it would happen in time to stop them from destroying the planet Lusitania.
    If not, she and Jakt and those who had given up so much to come with them on this voyage from Trondheim would reach Lusitania just in time to turn around and flee-- or be destroyed along with all the others of that world. It was not unreasonable for Jakt to be tense, to want to spend more time with her. It was unreasonable for her to be so single-minded, to use every waking moment writing propaganda.
    "You make the sign for the door, and I'll make sure you aren't alone in the room."
    "Woman, you make my heart go flip-flop like a dying flounder," said Jakt.
    "You are so romantic when you talk like a fisherman," said Valentine. "The children will have a good laugh, knowing you couldn't keep your hands off me even for the three weeks of this voyage."
    "They have our genes. They should be rooting for us to stay randy till we're well into our second century."
    "I'm well into my fourth millennium."
    "When oh when can I expect you in my stateroom, Ancient One?"
    "When I've transmitted this essay."
    "And how long will that be?"
    "Sometime after you go away and leave me alone."
    With a deep sigh that was more theatre than genuine misery, he padded off down the carpeted corridor. After a moment there came a clanging sound and she heard him yelp in pain. In mock pain, of course; he had accidentally hit the metal beam with his head on the first day of the voyage, but ever since then his collisions had been deliberate, for comic effect. No one ever laughed out loud, of course-- that was a family tradition, not to laugh when Jakt pulled one of his physical gags-- but then Jakt was not the sort of man who needed overt encouragement from others. He was his own best audience; a man couldn't be a sailor and a leader of men all his life without being quite self-contained. As far as Valentine knew, she and the children were the only people he had ever allowed himself to need.
    Even then, he had not needed them so much that he couldn't go on with his life as a sailor and fisherman, away from home for days, often weeks, sometimes months at a time. Valentine went with him sometimes at first, when they were still so hungry for each other that they could never be satisfied. But within a few years their hunger had given way to patience and trust; when he was away, she did her research and wrote her books, and then gave her entire attention to him and the children when he returned.
    The children used to complain, "I wish Father would get home, so Mother would come out of her room and talk to us again." I was not a very good mother, Valentine thought. It's pure luck that the children turned out so well.
    The essay remained in the air over the terminal. Only a final touch remained to be given. At the bottom, she centered the cursor and typed the name under which all her writings were