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"So I don't sign it."
"Oh, you do," said Valentine, "because you want to give them some name to refer to you by. The way I'm still using Demosthenes."
"But nobody thinks it's the same Demosthenes who was such a rabble-rouser back before Peter took over the world."
"Come up with a name."
"How about 'Locke'?"
Valentine laughed. "There are still people who call him that."
"What if I call it 'Obituary' and sign it...what, Mortician?"
"How about 'Eulogy' and you sign it 'Speaker at the Funeral'?"
In the end, he called it simply The Hive Queen and he signed it "Speaker for the Dead." And in his anonymous, untraceable correspondence with his publisher, he insisted that it be printed without any kind of copyright notice. The publisher almost didn't go through with it, but Ender became even more insistent. "Put a notice on the cover that people are free to make as many copies of this book as they want, but that your edition is especially nice, so that people can carry it with them and write in it and underline it."
Valentine was amused. "You realize what you're doing?" she said.
"What?"
"You're having them treat it like scripture. You really think that people will read it like that?"
"I don't know what people will do," said Ender, "but yes, I think of it as something holy. I don't want to make money from it. What would I use money for? I want everyone to read it. I want everyone to know who the hive queens were. What we lost when we took them out of existence."
"We saved our lives, Ender."
"No," said Ender. "That's what we thought we were doing, and that's what we should be judged for--but what we really did was slaughter a species that wanted desperately to make peace with us, to try to understand us--but they never understood what speech and language were. This is the first time they've had a chance to find a voice."
"Too late," said Valentine.
"Tragedies are like that," said Ender.
"And their tragic flaw was...muteness?"
"Their tragic flaw was arrogance--they thought they could terraform any world that didn't have intelligence of the kind they knew how to recognize--beings that spoke to each other mind to mind."
"The way the gold bugs speak to us."
"The gold bugs are grunting--mentally," said Ender.
"You found one," said Valentine. "I asked you if you found 'formics' and you said no, but you found one."
Ender said nothing.
"I will never ask again," said Valentine.
"Good," said Ender.
"And that one--it's alone."
Ender shrugged.
"You didn't kill it. It didn't kill you. It told you--no, showed you--all the memories that you put into your book."
"For someone who was never going to ask again, you sure have a lot of questions, missy," said Ender.
"Don't you dare talk down to me."
