Your jeesh loved you, Ender, with a devotion I could only envy — I have had many friends, but never the kind of passion that those children had for you. They would have died for you, every one of them. Because they knew you would have died for them. And the reports I had from Shakespeare Colony — from Sel Menach, from Ix Tolo and his sons Po and Abra, and from the colonists who never even knew you, but found the place you had prepared for them — I can tell you that you were universally loved and respected, and all of them regarded you as the best member of their communities, their benefactor and friend.
I tell you this because I fear that the lesson I taught you first was the one you learned the best: that you are always alone, that no one will ever help you, that whatever must be done, only you can do. I cannot speak to the deep recesses of your mind, but only to the uppermost part, the conscious mind that has spoken and written to me so eloquently all these years. So I hope you can hear my message and pass it along to the part of you that will not at first believe it:
You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not. The meetingplace of all these communities you formed was your own heart; they knew you held them there, and it made them one with each other. Yet the gift you gave them, none was able to give you, and I fear this is because I did my evil work too well, and built a wall in your mind that cannot let you receive the knowledge of what and who you are.
It galls me to see how this 'Speaker for the Dead' with his silly little books has achieved the influence that YOU deserved. People are actually turning it into a religion — there are self-styled 'speakers for the dead' who presume to talk at funerals and tell 'the truth' about the dead person, an appalling desecration — who can know the truth about anyone? I have left instructions in my will that none of these poseurs is to be allowed anywhere near my funeral, if anyone even bothers to have one. You saved the world and were never allowed to come home. This mountebank makes up a fake history of the formics and then writes an apologia for your brother Peter and people make a religion out of it. There's no accounting for the human race.
You have Valentine with you. Show her this letter, and see if she does not affirm that every word I've said about you is true. I may not be alive when you read this, but many who knew you as students in Battle School are still alive, including most of your jeesh. They are old, but not one of them has forgotten you. (I still write to Petra now and then; she has been widowed twice, and yet remains an astonishingly happy and optimistic soul. She keeps in touch with all the others.) They and I and Valentine can all attest to the fact that you have belonged to the human race more deeply and fully than most people could even imagine.
Find a way to believe that, and don't hide from life in the unfathomable, lightless depths of relativistic space.
I have achieved much in my life, but the greatest of my achievements was finding you, recognizing what you were, and somehow managing not to ruin you before you could save the world. I only wish I could then have healed you. But that will have to be your own achievement — or perhaps Valentine's. Or perhaps it will come from the children that you must, you must have someday.
For that is my greatest personal regret. I never married and had children of my own. Instead I stole other people's children and trained them — not raised them. It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into his heart.
I had no such moments, because I did not treat my kidnapped Battle School children that way. I was no one's father, by birth or adoption. Marry, Ender. Have children, or adopt them, or borrow them — whatever it takes. But do not live a life like mine.
I have done great things, but now, in the end, I am not happy. I wish I had let the future take care of itself, and instead of skipping forward through time, had stopped, made a family, and died in my proper time, surrounded by children.
See how I pour out my heart to you? Somehow, you took me into your jeesh as well.
Forgive the maudlinness of old men; when you are my age, you will understand.
I never treated you like a son when I had you in my power, but I have loved you like a son; and in this letter I have spoken to you as I'd like to think I might have spoken to the sons I never had. I say to you: Well done, Ender. Now be happy.
Hyrum Graff
I.F. Col. Ret.
Ender was shocked at the difference in Valentine when he emerged from stasis at the end of the voyage. 'I told you I wasn't going into stasis until my book was finished,' she said when she saw his expression.
'You didn't stay awake for the whole voyage.'
'I did,' she said. 'This wasn't a forty-year voyage in two years like our first one, it was only an eighteen-year voyage in a bit over fourteen months.' Ender did the arithmetic quickly and saw that she was right. Acceleration and deceleration always took about the same amount of time, while the length of the voyage in between determined the difference in subjective time.
'Still,' he said. 'You're a woman.'
'How flattering that you noticed. I was disappointed that I didn't have any ship's captains falling in love with me.'
'Perhaps the fact that Captain Hong brought his wife and family with him had an effect on that.'
'Bit by bit, they're learning that you don't have to sacrifice everything to be a star voyager,' said Valentine.
'Arithmetic — I'm still seventeen, and you're nearly twenty-one.'
'I am twenty-one,' she said. 'Think of me as your Auntie Val.'
'I will not,' he said. 'You finished your book?'
'I wrote a history of Shakespeare Colony, up to the time of your arrival. I couldn't have done it if you had been awake.'
'Because I would have insisted on accuracy?'
'Because you wouldn't have let me have complete access to your correspondence with Kolmogorov.'
'My correspondence is double-password encrypted.'
'Oh, Ender, you're talking to me,' said Valentine. 'Do you think I wouldn't be able to guess 'Stilson' and 'Bonzo'?'
'I didn't use their names just like that, naked.'
'To me they were naked, Ender. You think nobody really understands you, but I can guess your passwords. That makes me your password buddy.'
'That makes you a snoop,' said Ender. 'I can't wait to read the book.'
'Don't worry. I didn't mention your name. His emails are cited as 'letter to a friend' with the date.'
'Aren't you considerate.'
'Don't be testy. I haven't seen you in fourteen months and I missed you. Don't make me change my mind.'
'I saw you yesterday, and you've snooped my files since then. Don't expect me to ignore that. What else did you snoop?'
'Nothing,' said Valentine. 'You have your luggage locked. I'm not a yegg.'
'When can I read the book?'
'When you buy it and download it. You can afford to pay.'
'I don't have any money.'
'You haven't read Hyrum Graff's letter yet,' said Valentine. 'He got you a nice pension and you can draw on it without paying any taxes until you come of age.'
'So you didn't confine yourself to your research topic.'
'I can never know whether a letter contains useful data until I read it, can I?'
'So you read all the letters ever written in the history of the human race, in order to write this book?'
'Only the ones written since the founding of Colony One after the Third Formic War.' She kissed his cheek. 'Good morning, Ender. Welcome back to the world.'
Ender shook his head. 'Not Ender,' he said. 'Not here. I'm Andrew.'
