Plikt stood and practiced speaking desperately, hopelessly beside Ender’s coffin, though he was not yet in a coffin, he was still lying on a bed and air was pumping through a clear mask into his mouth and glucose solution into his veins and he was not yet dead. Just silent.
“A word,” she whispered. “A word from you.”
Ender’s lips moved.
Plikt should have called the others at once. Novinha, who was exhausted with weeping — she was only just outside the room. And Valentine, his sister; Ela, Olhado, Grego, Quara, four of his adopted children; and many others, in and out of the receiving room, wanting a glimpse of him, a word, to touch his hand. If they could send word to other worlds, how they would mourn, the people who remembered his speakings over the three thousand years of his journeys world to world. If they could proclaim his true identity — Speaker for the Dead, author of the two — no, the three — great books of Speaking; and Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide, both selves in the same frail flesh — oh, what shock waves would spread throughout the human universe.
Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.
His lips moved.
“Peter,” he whispered.
He was silent again.
What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don’t hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter, for one smile of yours I’d die or kill. What was his message? What should Plikt say about this word?
She moved from beside his bed. Walked to the door, opened it. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, facing a room full of people who had only rarely heard her speak, and some of whom had never heard a word from her. “He spoke before I could call anyone else to hear. But he might speak again.”
“What did he say?” said Novinha, rising to her feet.
“A name is all,” said Plikt. “He said ‘Peter.'”
“He calls for the abomination he brought back from space, and not for me!” said Novinha. But it was the drugs the doctors had given her, that was what spoke, that was what wept.
“I think he calls for our dead brother,” said Old Valentine. “Novinha, do you want to come inside?”
“Why?” Novinha said. “He hasn’t called for me, he called for him.”
“He’s not conscious,” said Plikt.
“You see, Mother?” said Ela. “He isn’t calling for anyone, he’s just speaking out of some dream. But it’s something, he said something, and isn’t that a good sign?”
Still Novinha refused to go into the room. So it turned out to be Valentine and Plikt and four of his adopted children who stood around his bed when his eyes opened.
“Novinha,” he said.
“She’s grieving outside,” said Valentine. “Drugged to the gills, I’m afraid.”
“That’s all right,” said Ender. “What happened? I take it I’m sick.”
“More or less,” said Ela. “‘Inattentive’ is the more exact description of the cause of your condition, as best we can tell.”
“You mean I had some kind of accident?”
“I mean you’re apparently paying too much attention to what’s going on on a couple of other planets, and so your body here is on the edge of self-destruction. What I see under the microscopes are cells sluggishly trying to reconstruct breaks in their walls. You’re dying by bits, all over your body.”
“Sorry to be so much trouble,” said Ender.
For a moment they thought this was the beginning of a conversation, the start of the process of healing. But having said this little bit, Ender closed his eyes and he was asleep again, the instruments unchanged from what they had said before he said a word.