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"Randall?" asked the doctor.
"Not...no."
"He calls himself Achilles. She calls him that."
"How can I...undo this?" he asked her.
"Poor boy," said Valentine. "That's what Ender's spent the past few years trying to figure out for himself. I think he just used you to get a partial answer. I think he just got you to give him the beating that Stilson and Bonzo Madrid both intended. The only difference is, you're the son of Julian Delphiki and Petra Arkanian, and so there's something deep inside you that cannot do murder--cold or hot. Or maybe it has nothing to do with your parents. It has to do with being raised by a mother who you know was mentally ill, and feeling compassion for her--such deep compassion that you could never challenge her fantasy world. Maybe that's it. Or maybe it's your soul. The thing that God wrapped in a body and turned into a man. Whatever it was, you stopped."
"Arkanian Delphiki," he said.
"That would be a good name," said Valentine. "Doctor, will my brother live?"
"He took blows to the head," said the doctor. "Look at his eyes. There's serious concussion. Maybe worse. We have to get him to the clinic."
"I'll carry him," said...not Achilles...Arkanian.
The doctor grimaced. "Letting the beater carry the beaten? But I don't want to wait for anyone else. What a hideous time of day for you to have this...duel?"
As they walked along the road to the clinic, a few early risers looked at them quizzically, and one even approached, but the doctor waved her off.
"I meant for him to kill me," said Arkanian.
"I know," said Valentine.
"What he did to those other boys. I thought he'd do again."
"He meant for you to think he'd fight back."
"And then the things he said. The opposite of everything."
"But you believed him. Right away, you knew it was true," she said.
"Yes."
"Made you furious."
Arkanian made a sound, somewhere between a whimper and a howl. He didn't plan it; he didn't understand it. Like a wolf baying at the moon, he only knew that the sound was in him and had to come out.
"But you couldn't kill him," she said. "Because you're not such a fool as to think you can hide from the truth by killing the messenger."
"We're here," said the doctor. "And I can't believe you're reassuring the one who beat your brother like this."
"Oh, didn't you know?" said Valentine. "This is Ender the Xenocide. He deserves whatever anyone does to him."
"Nobody deserves this," the doctor said.
"How can I undo this," said Arkanian. And this time he did not mean Ender's injuries.
"You can't," said Valentine. "And it was already there, it was inherent in that book, The Hive Queen. If you hadn't said it, somebody else would have. As soon as the human race understood that it was a tragedy to destroy the hive queens, we had to find someone to blame for it, so that the rest of us could be absolved. It would have happened without you."
"But it didn't happen without me. I have to tell the truth--I have to admit what I was..."
"No you don't," she said. "You have to live your life. Yours. And Ender will live his."
"And what about you?" asked the doctor, sounding even more cynical than before.
"Oh, I'll live Ender's life, too. It's so much more interesting than my own."
