Speaker for the Dead (Ender's Saga, #2) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,35

brother. I followed you gladly to two dozen worlds, but you wouldn't stay even two weeks when I asked you."

"Listen to yourself, Val, and then see why I have to leave now, before you tear me to pieces."

"That's a sophistry you wouldn't tolerate in your students, Ender! I wouldn't have said these things if you weren't leaving like a burglar who was caught in the act! Don't turn the cause around and blame it on me!"

He answered breathlessly, his words tumbling over each other in his hurry; he was racing to finish his speech before emotion stopped him. "No, you're right, I wanted to hurry because I have a work to do there, and every day here is marking time, and because it hurts me every time I see you and Jakt growing closer and you and me growing more distant, even though I know that it's exactly as it should be, so when I decided to go, I thought that going quickly was better, and I was right; you know I'm right. I never thought you'd hate me for it."

Now emotion stopped him, and he wept; so did she. "I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart tom out and carried away--"

And that was the end of speech.

Räv's first mate took Ender out to the mareld, the great platform on the equatorial sea, where shuttles were launched into space to rendezvous with orbiting starships. They agreed silently that Valentine wouldn't go with him. Instead, she went home with her husband and clung to him through the night. The next day she went on söndring with her students, and cried for Ender only at night, when she thought no one could see.

But her students saw, and the stories circulated about Professor Wiggin's great grief for the departure of her brother, the itinerant Speaker. They made of this what students always do-- both more and less than reality. But one student, a girl named Plikt, realized that there was more to the story of Valentine and Andrew Wiggin than anyone had guessed.

So she began to try to research their story, to trace backward their voyages together among the stars. When Valentine's daughter Syfte was four years old, and her son Ren was two, Plikt came to her. She was a young professor at the university by then, and she showed Valentine her published story. She had cast it as fiction, but it was true, of course, the story of the brother and sister who were the oldest people in the universe, born on Earth before any colonies had been planted on other worlds, and who then wandered from world to world, rootless, searching.

To Valentine's relief-- and, strangely, disappointment-- Plikt had not uncovered the fact that Ender was the original Speaker for the Dead, and Valentine was Demosthenes. But she knew enough of their story to write the tale of their good-bye when she decided to stay with her husband, and he to go on. The scene was much tenderer and more affecting than it had really been; Plikt had written what should have happened, if Ender and Valentine had had more sense of theatre.

"Why did you write this?" Valentine asked her.

"Isn't it good enough for it to be its own reason for writing?"

The twisted answer amused Valentine, but it did not put her off. "What was my brother Andrew to you, that you've done the research to create this?"

"That's still the wrong question," said Plikt.

"I seem to be failing some kind of test. Can you give me a hint what question I should ask?"

"Don't be angry. You should be asking me why I wrote it as fiction instead of biography."

"Why, then?"

"Because I discovered that Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead, is Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide."

Even though Ender was four years gone, he was still eighteen years from his destination. Valentine felt sick with dread, thinking of what his life would be like if he was welcomed on Lusitania as the most shameworthy man in human history.

"You don't need to be afraid, Professor Wiggin. If I meant to tell, I could have. When I found it out, I realized that he had repented what he did. And such a magnificent penance. It was the Speaker for the Dead who revealed his act as an unspeakable crime-- and so he took the title Speaker, like so many hundreds of others, and acted out the role of his own accuser on