to someone else. You never felt that I was fully your son.
Yet I am your son. There is in me, in the abilities I have, in the choices that I make without realizing that I've chosen, in my deep feelings about the religions that you believed in secretly, which I have studied when I could, there is in all these things a trace of you. You are the explanation of much that is un-explainable.
And my ability to shut certain things completely from my mind — to set them aside so I can work on other projects — that also comes from you, for I think that is what you have done with me. You have set me aside, and only by directly asking for it can I win your attention once again.
I have watched painful relationships between parents and children. I have seen parents who control and parents who neglect, parents who make terrible mistakes that hurt their children deeply, and parents who forgive children who have done awful things. I have seen nobility and courage; I have seen dreadful selfishness and utter blindness; and I have seen all these things in the SAME parents, raising the same children.
What I understand now is this: There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right.
For reasons truly out of your control, I became a stranger to you; for reasons I do not understand, you made no effort to come to my defense and bring me home, or to explain to me why you did not or could not or should not. But you let my sister come to me, giving her up from your own lives. That was a great gift, jointly offered by her and you. Even if she now regrets it, that does not reduce the nobility of the sacrifice.
Here is why I am writing. No matter how hard I try to be self-sufficient, I am not. I have read enough psychology and sociology, and I have observed enough families over the past two years, to realize that there is no replacement for parents in a person's life, and no going on without them. I have achieved, at the age of fifteen, more than any but a handful of the greatest men in history. I can look at the records of what I did and see, clearly, that it is so.
But I do not believe it. I look into myself and all I see is the destroyer of lives. Even as I prevented a tyrant from usurping the control of this colony, even as I helped a young girl liberate herself from a domineering mother, I heard a voice in the back of my mind, saying, 'What is this, compared to the pilots who died because of your clumsiness in command? What is this, compared to the death at your hands of two admittedly unpleasant but nevertheless young children? What is this, compared to the slaughter of a species that you killed without first understanding whether they needed killing?'
There is something that only parents can provide, and I need it, and I am not ashamed to ask it from you.
From my mother, I need to know that I still belong, that I am part of you, that I do not stand alone.
From my father, I need to know that I, as a separate being, have earned my place in this world.
Let me resort to the scriptures that I know have meant much to you in your lives. From my mother, I need to know that she has watched my life and 'kept all these sayings in her heart.' From my father, I need to hear these words: 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of the Lord.'
No, I don't think I'm Jesus and I don't think you're God. I just happen to believe that every child needs to have what Mary gave; and the God of the New Testament shows us what a father must be in his children's lives.
Here is the irony: Because I had to ask for these things, I will be suspicious of your replies. So I ask you not only to give me these gifts, but also to help me believe that you mean them.
In return, I give you this: I understand the impossibility of having me for a child. I believe that in every case, you chose to do what you believed would be best for me. Even if I disagree with your choices — and the more I think, the less I disagree — I believe that no one who knew no more than you did could have chosen better.
Look at your children: Peter rules the world, and seems to be doing it with a minimal amount of blood and horror. I destroyed the enemy that terrified us most of all, and now I'm a not-bad governor of a little colony. Valentine is a paragon of selflessness and love — and has written and is writing brilliant histories that will shape the way the human race thinks about its own past.
We're an extraordinary crop of children. Having given us our genes, you then had the terrible problem of trying to raise us. From what I see of Valentine and what she tells me of Peter, you did very well, without your hand ever being heavy in their lives.
And as for me, the absent one, the prodigal who never did come home, I still feel your fingerprints in my life and soul, and where I find those traces of your parenthood I am glad of them. Glad to have been your son.
For me, there have been only three years in which I COULD have written you; I'm sorry that it took me all this time to sort out my heart and mind well enough to have anything coherent to say. For you, there have been forty-one years in which I believe you took my silence as a request for silence.
I am far away from you now, but at least we move through time at the same pace once more, day for day, year for year. As governor of the colony I have constant access to the ansible; as parents of the Hegemon, I believe you have a similar opportunity. When I was on the voyage, you might have taken weeks to compose your reply, and to me it would have seemed that only a day had passed. But now, however long it takes you, that is how long I will wait.
With love and regret and hope,
your son Andrew
Valentine came to Ender, carrying the printed-out pages of his little book. 'What are you calling this?' she asked, and there was a quaver in her voice.
'I don't know,' said Ender.
'To imagine the life of the hive queens, to see our war from their perspective, to dare to invent an entire history for them, and tell it as if a hive queen herself were speaking —»
'I didn't invent it,' said Ender.
Valentine sat down on the edge of the table. 'Out there with Abra, searching for the new colony site. What did you find?'
'You're holding it in your hand,' said Ender. 'I found what I've been searching for ever since the hive queens let me kill them.'
'You're telling me that you found living formics on this planet?'
'No,' said Ender, and technically it was true — he had found only one formic. And was a dormant pupa truly describable as «living»? If you found only one chrysalis, would you say that you had found 'living butterflies'?
Probably. But I have no choice except to lie to everyone. Because if it was known that a single hive queen still lived in this world, a cocoon from which she would emerge with several million fertilized eggs inside her, and the knowledge of all the hive queens before her in her phenomenally capacious mind, the seeds of the technology that nearly destroyed us and the knowledge to create even more terrible weapons if she wanted to — if that became known, how long would that cocoon survive? How long would be the life of anyone who tried to protect it?
'But you found something,' said Valentine, 'that makes you certain that this story you wrote is not just beautiful, but true.'
'If I could tell you more than that, I would.'
'Ender, have we ever told each other everything?'
'Does anyone?'
Valentine reached out and took his hand. 'I want everyone on Earth to read this.'
'Will they care?' Ender hoped and despaired. He wanted his book to change everything. He knew it would change nothing.
'Some will,' said Valentine. 'Enough.'
Ender chuckled. 'So I send it to a publisher and they publish it and then what? I get royalty checks here, which I can redeem for — what exactly can we buy here?'
'Everything we need,' said Valentine, and they both laughed. Then, more seriously, Valentine said, 'Don't sign it.'
'I was wondering if I should.'
'If it's known that this comes from you, from Ender Wiggin, then the reviewers will spend all their time psychoanalyzing you and say almost nothing about the book itself. The received wisdom will be that it's nothing
