I forgive myself and yet I cannot stop the shame and grief I feel, not because Andrew Wiggin died, but because in the hour of his death I showed myself to be what I really am: utterly selfish, concerned only with my own career. I chose to be the speaker of Ender’s death. Therefore the moment of his death can only be the fulfillment of my life. What kind of vulture does that make me? What kind of parasite, a leech upon his life …
And yet her fingers continued to type, sentence after sentence, despite the tears flowing down her cheeks. Off in Jakt’s house, Valentine grieved with her husband and children. Over in Olhado’s house, Grego and Olhado and Novinha had gathered to comfort each other, at the loss of the man who had been husband and father to them. They had their relationship to him, and I have mine. They have their private memories; mine will be public. I will speak, and then I will publish what I said, and what I am writing now will give new shape and meaning to the life of Ender Wiggin in the minds of every person of a hundred worlds. Ender the Xenocide; Andrew the Speaker for the Dead; Andrew the private man of loneliness and compassion; Ender the brilliant analyst who could pierce to the heart of problems and of people without being deflected by fear or ambition or … or mercy. The man of justice and the man of mercy, coexisting in one body. The man whose compassion let him see and love the hive queens even before he ever touched one of them with his hands; the man whose fierce justice let him destroy them all because he believed they were his enemy.
Would Ender judge me harshly for my ugly feelings on this day? Of course he would — he would not spare me, he would know the worst that is in my heart.
But then, having judged me, he would also love me. He would say, So what? Get up and speak my death. If we waited for perfect people to be speakers for the dead, all funerals would be conducted in silence.
And so she wrote, and wept; and when the weeping was done, the writing went on. When the hair that he had left behind was sealed in a small box and buried in the grass near Human’s root, she would stand and speak. Her voice would raise him from the dead, make him live again in memory. And she would also be merciful; and she would also be just. That much, at least, she had learned from him.
CHAPTER 12
“AM I BETRAYING ENDER?”
[Image]
“Why do people act as if war and murder were unnatural?
What’s unnatural is to go your whole life
without ever raising your hand in violence.”
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
“We’re going about this all wrong,” said Quara.
Miro felt the old familiar anger surge inside him. Quara had a knack for making people angry, and it didn’t help that she seemed to know that she annoyed people and relished it. Anyone else in the ship could have said exactly the same sentence and Miro would have given them a fair hearing. But Quara managed to put an edge on the words that made it sound as if she thought everyone in the world but herself was stupid. Miro loved her as a sister, but he couldn’t help it that he hated having to spend hour upon hour in her company.
Yet, because Quara was in fact the one among them most knowledgeable about the ur-language she had discovered months before in the descolada virus, Miro did not allow his inward sigh of exasperation to become audible. Instead he swiveled in his seat to listen.
So did the others, though Ela made less effort to hide her annoyance. Actually, she made none. “Well, Quara, why weren’t we smart enough to notice our stupidity before.”
Quara was oblivious to Ela’s sarcasm — or chose to appear oblivious, anyway. “How can we decipher a language out of the blue? We don’t have any referents. But we do have complete records of the versions of the descolada virus. We know what it looked like before it adapted to the human metabolism. We know how it changed after each of our attempts to kill it. Some of the changes were functional — it was adapting. But some of them were clerical — it was keeping a record of what it did.”