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"Then don't! What are the piggies to you? The buggers are ramen enough for one man's life. Stay, marry as I've married. You opened the stars to colonization, Ender, now stay here and taste the good fruits of your labor!"
"You have Jakt. I have obnoxious students who keep trying to convert me to Calvinism. My labor isn't done yet, and Trondheim isn't my home."
Valentine felt his words like an accusation: You rooted yourself here without thought of whether I could live in this soil. But it's not my fault, she wanted to answer--you're the one who's leaving, not me. "Remember how it was," she said, "when we left Peter on Earth and took a decades-long voyage to our first colony, to the world you governed? It was as if he had died. By the time we got there he was old, and we were still young; when we talked by ansible he had become an ancient uncle, the power-ripened Hegemon, the legendary Locke, anyone but our brother."
"It was an improvement, as I recall." Ender was trying to make things lighter.
But Valentine took his words perversely. "Do you think I'll improve, too, in twenty years?"
"I think I'll grieve for you more than if you had died."
"No, Ender, it will be exactly as if I died, and you'll know that you're the one who killed me."
He winced. "You don't mean that."
"I won't write to you. Why should I? To you it'll be only a week or two. You'd arrive on Lusitania, and the computer would have twenty years of letters for you from a person you left only the week before. The first five years would be grief, the pain of losing you, the loneliness of not having you to talk to--"
"Jakt is your husband, not me."
"And then what would I write? Clever, newsy little letters about the baby? She'd be five years old, six, ten, twenty and married, and you wouldn't even know her, wouldn't even care."
"I'll care."
"You won't have the chance. I won't write to you until I'm very old, Ender. Until you've gone to Lusitania and then to another place, swallowing the decades in vast gulps. Then I'll send you my memoir. I'll dedicate it to you. To Andrew, my beloved 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 torn out and carried away--"
And that was the end of speech.
Rav'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 sondring with her students, and cried for Ender only in darkness, 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, became obsessed with the idea 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 Valentine
recognized at once 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 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?"
