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Valentine started to go with him, but Jarrko touched her shoulder. "Please, Val," he whispered. "Alone."
Ender grinned at her and took off with real bounce in his step, as if he was truly excited to be going to see the admiral.
"What's this about?" Valentine asked Jarrko quietly.
"I can't say," he said. "Truly. Just have my orders. No play, theater closed for the night, would the governor please come see the admiral immediately."
So Valentine stayed with Jarrko, helping soothe the players and other colonists, whose reactions ranged from disappointment to outrage to revolutionary fervor. Some of them even started reciting lines there in the corridor, until Valentine asked them not to. "Poor Colonel Kitunen will be in trouble if you keep this up, and he's too nice to stop you himself."
The result was that everyone was quite angry with Admiral Morgan for his arbitrary cancellation of a completely harmless event. And Valentine herself couldn't help but wonder: What was the man thinking? Hadn't he ever heard of morale? Maybe he'd heard of it, but was against it.
Something was going on here, and Valentine began to wonder if somehow Ender was behind it. Could it be that in his own way, Ender was just as sneaky and snaky as Peter?
No. Not possible. Especially because Valentine could always see through Peter. Ender wasn't devious at all. He always said what he meant and meant what he said.
What is the boy doing?
CHAPTER 9
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]/hegemon
Re: While you were out
I had one of my staff run a set of calculations about how long it has been for you since you began your relativistic voyage into the future. At best he could give me only a range of possible subjective durations--a few weeks, anyway. For me, a couple of years. So I am fairly safe in saying that I miss you a great deal more than you miss me. At present you probably still think that you will never miss me at all. The world is full of people who are convinced of the same thing. They vaguely remember that I was elected to the office of Hegemon. They just can't remember what that office does. They think my name is Locke when they think of me at all.
Yet I am at war. My force is tiny, commanded by--of all people--Ender's old friend Bean. The other children from Ender's jeesh--Battle School slang for "army," but it's caught on here and that's what they're called--were all kidnapped by the Russians, inspired by a conniving little bastard named Achilles, who was kicked out of Battle School. It appears that Achilles chose his main enemy better than Bonito de Madrid did--it was Bean who confronted him in a dark air vent, or so the story goes, and instead of killing him, turned him over to the authorities. Have you ever heard that tale? Did Ender know about it when it happened? Achilles is Hitler with stealth, Stalin with brains, Mao with energy, Pol Pot with subtlety--name your monster, and Achilles has all the inconvenient virtues to make him very hard to stop and even harder to kill. Bean swears he will do it, but he had the chance before and blew it, so I'm skeptical.
I wish you were here.
More than that, I actually wish Ender were here. I'm waging war with the help of an army of a few hundred men--very loyal, brilliantly trained, but only two hundred of them! Bean is not the most reliable of commanders. He always wins, but he doesn't always do what he's told or go where I want him to. He picks and chooses among his assignments. To his credit, he doesn't argue with me in front of his (supposedly "my") men.
The trouble is that these Battle School kids are all so cynical. They don't believe in anything. Certainly they don't believe in ME. Just because Achilles keeps trying to assassinate Bean and has all the Battle School kids terrified, they think they don't owe Ender Wiggin's big brother their lifelong personal service. (That was a joke. They owe me nothing.)
Wars here and there around the world, shifting alliances--it's what I predicted would happen after the Battle School kids came home. They're such excellent weapons--potentially devastating, but no fallout, no mushroom clouds. Somehow, though, I always saw myself riding the crest of the wave. Now I find myself sucked down to the bottom of the wave so I can barely tell which way is up and I'm constantly running out of air. I get to the top, gasp, and then a new wave crashes me back down.
A few privileges inhere to this office, for the time being, anyway. Minister of Colonization Graff tells me I have unlimited access to the ansible--I can talk to you whenever I want. Congratulate me for not abusing it. I know you're writing a history of Battle School, and I thought you could use some information about the careers of the more prominent Battle School grads, for an epilogue, perhaps. Ender's jeesh fought the formics and won; but all the others are now involved, one way or another, as captives or servants or leaders or figureheads or victims, in the military planning and action of every nation lucky enough to have a single graduate and strong enough to hold on to him.
So steel yourself for reams of information. Graff tells me that it will take weeks to send it all from his office (in the old Battle School station now), but that at your end it will seem to arrive all at once. I hope it doesn't annoy your ship's captain too much--I understand it's a nobody, not Mazer Rackham after all--but what I'm sending goes with hegemony priority, which means he won't be able to read any of this and any messages HE'S expecting will have to wait. Give him my apologies. Or not, as you see fit.
I have never been so alone in my life. I wish for you every day. Fortunately, Father and Mother have turned out to be surprisingly useful. No, I should have said "helpful." But I'll leave the "useful" there so you can say, "He hasn't changed." They also miss you, and among the information you're getting are letters from both Father and Mother. Also letters from them to Ender. I hope the boy gets over the snit he's in and writes back to them. Missing you has given me some idea of how they feel about Ender (and now you): If he wrote to them it would mean the world. And what would it cost him?
No, I'm not going to write to him myself. I have no stock in that company. Mom and Dad are miserable, having only me as visible proof that they reproduced. Brighten their lives, both of you. What ELSE do you have to do? I picture you gliding along at lightspeed, with servants bringing you juleps and the fawning colonists begging Ender to tell them once again about how the formic home world went boom.
Writing this sometimes feels as if I'm talking to you like old times. But at this moment it's a painful reminder that it's nothing like talking to you at all.
As the official monster of the family, I hope you will compare me to a real monster like Achilles and give me some points for not being as awful as it is possible to be. I also have to tell you that I've learned that when no one else can be trusted--and I mean no one--there is family. And somehow I managed to be complicit in driving away two of the four people I could trust. Clumsy of me, n'est-ce pas?
I love you, Valentine. I wish I had treated you better from childhood on up
. Ender too. Now, happy reading. The world is such a mess, you're glad you aren't here. But I promise you this: I will do all I can to put things back in order and bring peace. Without, I hope, waging too much war along the way.
With all my heart, your bratty brother,
Peter
Admiral Morgan kept Ender waiting outside his office for two full hours. It was exactly what Ender expected, however, so he closed his eyes and used the time to take a long, refreshing nap. He awoke to hear someone shouting from the other side of a door: "Well, wake him up and send him in, I'm ready!"
