more than your conscience trying to deal with your various sins.'
'I expect no better.'
'But if it's published with real anonymity, then it'll get read on its own merits.'
'People will think it's fiction. That I made it up.'
'They will anyway,' said Valentine. 'But it doesn't sound like fiction. It sounds like truth. And some will take it that way.'
'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.'
'I'm a fifty-four-year-old man,' said Ender.
'You may have been born fifty-four years ago,' said Valentine, 'but you're only sixteen, and no matter how old you are, I'm two years older.'
'When the colony ship arrives, I'm getting on it,' said Ender.
'I think I knew that,' said Valentine.
'I can't stay here. I have to take a long journey. To get away from every living human.'
'The ships only go from world to world, with people on all of them.'
'But they take time doing it,' said Ender. 'If I take voyage after voyage, eventually I'll leave behind the human race as it now is.'
'That's a long, lonely journey.'
'Only if I go alone.'
'Is that an invitation?'
'To come with me as long as you find it interesting,' said Ender.
'Fair enough,' said Valentine. 'My guess is that you'll be better company now that you aren't in a perpetual funk.'
'I don't think so,' said Ender. 'I intend to remain in stasis through every voyage.'
'And miss the play readings on the way?'
'Can you finish your book before it's time to leave?' asked Ender.
'Probably,' she said. 'Certainly this volume.'
'I thought this was the last one.'
'Last but one,' said Valentine.
'You've covered every aspect of the Formic Wars and you're writing the last battle now.'
'There are two great knots to unravel.'
Ender closed his eyes. 'I think my book unravels one of them,' he said.
'Yes,' said Valentine. 'I'd like to include it at the end of my last volume.'
'It's not copyrighted,' said Ender. 'You can do what you want.'
'Do you want to know what the other knot is?' asked Valentine.
'I assume it's Peter bringing the whole world together after the war was over,' said Ender.
'What does that have to do with a history of the Formic Wars?' she said. 'The last knot is you.'
'I'm a Gordian knot. Don't unravel, just slice.'
'I'm going to write about you.'
'I won't read it.'
'Fine,' said Valentine. 'I won't show it to you.'
'Can't you please wait?' He wanted to say: Until I'm dead. But he didn't get that specific.
'Maybe a while,' said Valentine. 'We'll see.'
Ender filled his days now with the business of the new colony, laying the groundwork for their arrival, making sure there were plenty of surplus crops being grown at all four of the villages as well as the new colony site, so that the newcomers could have failed harvests for two, even three years, and there'd still be no hunger. 'And we'll need money,' said Ender. 'Here where we all know each other, this sort of ad hoc communism we've been using has worked out. But for trade to work well, we need a medium of exchange.'
'Po and I found you the gold bugs,' said Sel Menach. 'So you've got the gold. Make coins.'
Abra figured out how to adapt an oil press to make a coin stamper, and one of the chemists came up with an alloy that wouldn't constantly be shedding gold as the coins passed from hand to hand. One of the talented youngsters drew a picture of Sel Menach and one of the old women drew, from memory, the face of Vitaly Kolmogorov. Sel insisted that Kolmogorov get the cheaper coin, 'Because that's the face they'll see the most. You always give the greatest man the smallest denomination.'
They practiced using the money, so the prices would be set before the new colonists arrived. It was a joke at first. 'Five chickens don't make a cow.' And instead of calling the coins «fives» and 'ones,' they became «sels» and 'vits.' 'Render unto Sel that which is Sel's, but hang on to Vit.' 'Sel wise, Vit foolish.'
Ender wrestled with trying to set a value for the coins relative to the international dollar of the Hegemony,
