He grew up where he never worried about finding another meal, where people praised him and protected him. I grew up where if I found a scrap of food I had to worry that another street kid might kill me for it. Shouldn't that have made me the one who fought desperately, and Ender the one who held back?
It wasn't the place. Two people in identical situations would
never make exactly the same choices. Ender is who he is, and I am who I am. It was in him to destroy the Formics. It was in me to stay alive.
So what's in me now? I'm a commander without an army. I have a mission to perform, but no knowledge of how to perform it. Petra, if she's still alive, is in desperate peril, and she counts on me to free her. The others are all free. She alone remains hidden. What has Achilles done to her? I will not have Petra end like Poke.
There it was. The difference between Ender and Bean. Ender came out of his bitterest battle of childhood undefeated. He had done what was required. But Bean had not even realized the danger his friend Poke was in until too late. If he had seen in time how immediate her peril was, he could have warned her, helped her. Saved her. Instead, her body was tossed into the Rhine, to be found bobbing like so much garbage among the wharves.
And it was happening again.
Bean stood in front of the Wiggin house. Ender had never spoken of it, nor had pictures of it been shown at the court of inquiry. But it was exactly what Bean had expected. A tree in the front yard, with wooden slats nailed into the trunk to form a ladder to the platform in a high crotch of the tree. A tidy, welltended garden. A place of peace and refuge. What did Ender ever know of fear?
Where is Petra's garden? For that matter, where is mine?
Bean knew he was being unreasonable. If Ender had come back to Earth, he too would no doubt be in hiding, if Achilles hadn't simply killed him straight off. And even as things stood, he couldn't help but wonder if Ender might not prefer to be living as Bean was, on Earth, in hiding, than where he was now, in space, bound for another world and a life of permanent exile from the world of his birth.
A woman came out of the front door of the house. Mrs. Wiggin?
"Are you lost?" she asked.
Bean realized that in his disappointment-no, call it despair-he had forgotten his vigilance. This house might be watched. Even if it was not, Mrs. Wiggin herself might remember him, this young boy who appeared in front of her house during school hours.
"Is this where Ender Wiggin grew up?"
A cloud passed across her face, just momentarily, but Bean saw how her expression saddened before her smile could be put back. "Yes, it is," she said. "But we don't give tours."
For reasons Bean could not understand, on impulse he said, "I was with him. In the last battle. I fought under him."
Her smile changed again, away from mere courtesy and kindness, toward something like warmth and pain. "Ali," she said. "A veteran." And then the warmth faded and was replaced by worry. "I know all the faces of Ender's companions in that last battle. You're the one who's dead. Julian Delphiki."
Just like that, his cover was blown-and he had done it to himself, by telling her that he was in Ender's jeesh. What was he thinking? There were only eleven of them. "Obviously, there's someone who wants to kill me," he said. "If you tell anyone I came here, it will help him do it."
"I won't tell. But it was careless of you to come here."
"I had to see," said Bean, wondering if that was anything like a true explanation.
She didn't wonder. "That's absurd," she said. "You wouldn't risk your life to come here without a reason." And then it came together in her mind. "Peter's not home right now."
"I know," Bean said. "I was just with him at the university." And then he realized-there was no reason for her to think he was coming to see Peter, unless she had some idea of what Peter was doing. "You know," he said.
She closed her eyes, realizing now what she had confessed. "Either we are both very great fools," she said, "or we must have trusted each other at once,