“Ender Wiggin,” said Peter.
Malu answered before Grace could translate.
“Andrew Wiggin,” he said, forming the name with difficulty, for it contained sounds not used in the Samoan language. Then he spoke in a stream of high language again, and Grace translated.
“The Speaker for the Dead came and spoke of the life of a monster who had poisoned and darkened the people of Tonga and through them all the people of this world of Future Dreaming. He walked into the shadow and out of the shadow he made a torch which he held up high, and it rose into the sky and became a new star, which cast a light that shone only into the shadow of death, where it drove out the darkness and purified our hearts and the hate and fear and shame were gone. This is the dreamer from whom the god’s dreams were taken; they were strong enough to give her life in the day when she came from Outside and began her dance along the web. His is the light that half-fills you and half-fills your sister and has only a drop of light left over for his own cracked vessel. He has touched the heart of a god, and it gave him great power — that is how he made you when she blew him outside the universe of light. But it did not make him a god, and in his loneliness he could not reach outside and find you your own light. He could only put his own in you, and so you are half-filled and you hunger for the other half of yourself, you and your sister are both so hungry, and he himself is wasted and broken because he has nothing more to give you. But the god has more than enough, the god has enough and to spare, and that is what I came to tell you and now I have told you and I am done.”
Before Grace could even begin to translate he was rising up; she was still stammering her interpretation as he walked out from under the canopy. Immediately the rowers pulled up the posts that supported the roof; Peter and Wang-mu barely had time to step outside before it collapsed. The men of this island set torches to the ruined canopy and it was a bonfire behind them as they followed Malu down to the canoe. Grace finally finished the translation just as they reached the water. Malu stepped into the canoe and with imperturbable dignity installed himself on the seat amidships as the rowers, also with stateliness, took their places beside the boat and lifted it up and dragged it into the water and pushed it out into the crashing surf and then swung their vast bodies over the side and began to row with strength so massive it was as if great trees, not oars, were plunging into rock, not the sea, and churning it to leap forward, away from the beach, out into the water, toward the island of Atatua.
“Grace,” said Peter. “How could he know things that aren’t seen even by the most perceptive and powerful of scientific instruments?”
But Grace could not answer, for she lay prostrate in the sand, weeping and weeping, her arms extended toward the sea as if her dearest child had just been taken away by a shark. All the men and women of this place lay in the sand, arms reaching toward the sea; all of them wept.
Then Peter knelt; then Peter lay down in the sand and reached out his arms, and he might have wept, Wang-mu couldn’t see.
Only Wang-mu remained standing, thinking, Why am I here, since I’m no part of any of these events, there is nothing of any god in me, and nothing of Andrew Wiggin; and also thinking, How can I be worried about my own selfish loneliness at a time like this, when I have heard the voice of a man who sees into heaven?
In a deeper place, though, she also knew something else: I am here because I am the one that must love Peter so much that he can feel worthy, worthy enough to bear to let the goodness of Young Valentine flow into him, making him whole, making him Ender. Not Ender the Xenocide and Andrew the Speaker for the Dead, guilt and compassion mingled in one shattered, broken, unmendable heart, but Ender Wiggin the four-year-old boy whose life was twisted and broken when he was too young to defend himself. Wang-mu was the one who could give Peter permission to become the man that child should have grown up to be, if the world had been good.