Shadow of the Giant (34 page)

She turned the light out and meant to go to sleep.

And then something occurred to her and she switched on the light again and fumbled for the paper and her eyes were so bleary she could hardly read, so maybe she had actually fallen asleep, and this thought had woken her out of a sound slumber.

The letter began, “There’s one thing we forgot to decide.”

But when Peter read it, he had started with “I love you.”

He must have scanned over the letter and realized that Bean never said it. That it was just a note that Bean had jotted at the last moment, and Peter worried that she might be hurt by the omission.

He couldn’t have known that Bean just didn’t put that kind of thing in writing. Except obliquely. Because the whole note said “I love you,” didn’t it?

She turned the light off again, but still held the letter. Bean’s last message to her.

As she drifted off again, the thought passed briefly through her mind: When Peter said it, he wasn’t reading at all.

Not for the first time, Peter wished they made a portable ansible. Of course it would make no economic sense. Yes, they miniaturized it as much as possible to put it on starships. But the ansible only made an important difference in communication across the void of space. It saved hours for within-system communication; decades, for communication with the colonies and the ships in flight.

It just wasn’t a technology designed for chatting.

There were a few privileges that came with the vestiges of power. Peter might be over seventy—and, as he often pointed out to Petra, an
old
seventy, an
ancient
seventy—but he was still Hegemon, and the title had once meant enormous power, it once meant attack choppers in flight and armies and fleets in motion; it once meant punishment for aggression, collection of taxes, enforcement of human rights laws, cleaning up political corruption.

Peter remembered when the title was such an empty joke they gave it to a teenage boy who had written cleverly on the nets.

Peter had brought power to the office. And then, because he gradually stripped away its functions and assigned them to other officials in the FPE—or “EarthGov” as people now called it as often as not—he had returned the position to a figurehead position.

But not a joke. It was no longer a joke and never would be again.

Not a joke, but not necessarily a good thing, either. There were plenty of people left alive who remembered the Hegemon as the coercive power that shattered their dream of how Earth ought to be (though usually their dream was everyone else’s nightmare). And historians and biographers had often had at him and would do it again, forever.

The thing about the historians was, they could arrange the data all neatly in rows, but they kept missing what it was for. They kept inventing the strangest motives for people. There was the biography of Virlomi, for instance, that made her an idealistic saint and blamed Suriyawong, of all people, for the slaughter that ended Virlomi’s military career. Never mind that Virlomi herself repudiated that interpretation, writing by ansible from the colony on Andhra. Biographers were always irritated when their subject turned out to be alive.

But Peter hadn’t bothered to answer any of them. Even the ones that attacked him quite savagely, blaming him for everything that went badly and giving others the credit for everything that went well…Petra would fume over some of them for days until he begged her not to read them anymore. But he couldn’t resist reading them himself. He didn’t take it personally. Most people never had biographies written about them.

Petra herself had only had a couple about her, and they were both of the “great women” or “role models for girls” variety, not serious scholarship. Which bothered Peter, because he knew what they seemed to neglect—that after all the other members of Ender’s Jeesh left Earth and went out to the colonies, she stayed and ran the FPE defense ministry for almost thirty years, until the position became more of a police department than anything else and she insisted on retiring to play with the grandchildren.

She was there for
everything
, Peter said to her when he was griping about this. “You were Ender’s and Bean’s friend in Battle School—you taught Ender how to
shoot
, for heaven’s sake. You were in his Jeesh—”

But at those points Petra would shush him. “I don’t want those stories told,” she said. “I wouldn’t come off very well if the truth came out.”

Peter didn’t believe it. And you could skip all of that and start when she returned to Earth and…wasn’t it Petra who, when the Jeesh was almost all kidnapped, found a way to get a message out to Bean? Wasn’t she the one who knew Achilles better than anybody that he didn’t succeed in killing? She was one of the great military leaders of all time, and she also married Julian Delphiki, the Giant of legend, and then Peter the Hegemon, another legend, and on top of all that raised five of the children she had with Bean and five more that she had with Peter.

And no biography. So why should he complain that there were dozens about him and every one of them got simple, obvious things wrong, things that you could actually
check
, let alone the more arcane things like motive and secret agreements and…

And then Valentine’s book on the Bugger wars started to come out, volume by volume. One on the first invasion, two on the second—the one Mazer Rackham won. Then four volumes on the Third Invasion, the one that Ender and his Jeesh fought and won from what they thought was a training game on the asteroid Eros. One whole volume was about the development of Battle School—short biographies of dozens of children who were pivotal to the improvements in the school that eventually led to truly effective training and the legendary Battle Room games.

Peter saw what she wrote about Graff and Rackham and about the kids in Ender’s Jeesh—including Petra—and even though he knew part of her insight came from having Ender right there with her in Shakespeare colony, the real source of the book’s excellence was her own keen self-questioning. She did not find “themes” and impose them 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 and video were so wasteful of bandwidth that they were routinely compressed and then reinflated at the other end, so despite the instantaneity of ansible communications, there was a noticeable timelag between sides of the conversation.

No picture. Peter had to draw the line somewhere. And Ender hadn’t insisted. It would be too painful for both of them—for Ender to see how much time had passed during his relativistic voyage out to Shakespeare, and for Peter to be forced to see how young Ender still was, how much life he still had ahead of him while Peter was looking coolly at his own old age and approaching death.

“I’m here, Ender.”

“It’s good to hear your voice, Peter.”

And then silence.

“No small talk, is there?” said Peter. “It’s been too long a time for me, too brief a time for you. Ender, I know I was a slumbitch to you as a kid. No excuses. I was full of rage and shame and I took it out on you and Valentine but mostly on you. I don’t think I ever said a kind thing to you, not when you were awake anyway. I can talk about that if you want.”

“Later maybe,” said Ender. “This isn’t a family therapy session. I just want to know what you did and why.”

“Which things I did?”

“The ones that matter to you,” said Ender. “What you choose to tell me is as important as what you say about those events.”

“There’s a lot. My mind is still clear. I remember a lot.”

“Good. I’m listening.”

He listened for hours that day. And more hours, more days. Peter poured out everything. The political struggles. The wars. The negotiations. The essays on the nets. Building up intelligence networks. Seizing opportunities. Finding worthwhile allies.

It wasn’t until near the end of their last session that Peter dredged up memories of when Ender was a baby. “I really loved you. Kept begging Mom to let me feed you. Change you. Play with you. I thought you were the best thing that ever existed. But then I noticed. I’d be playing with you and have you laughing and then Valentine would walk into the room and you’d just rivet on her. I didn’t exist anymore.

“She was luminous, of course you reacted that way. Everybody did.
I
did. But at the same time, I was just a kid. I saw it as, Ender loves Valentine more than me. And when I realized you were born because they regarded me as a failure—the Battle School people, I mean—it was just one more resentment. That doesn’t excuse anything. I didn’t have to be a bastard about it. I’m just telling you, I realize now that’s where it started.”

“OK,” said Ender.

“I’m sorry,” said Peter. “That I wasn’t better to you as a kid. Because, see, my whole life, all the things I’ve told you about in all these incredibly expensive conversations, I would find myself thinking, that was OK. I did OK that time. Ender would like that I did that.”