By your father's age, Petra said silently, he was on his own, trying not to starve to death in Rotterdam.

But you're all going to catch up with him and pass him by. When you're in your twenties and out of college and getting married, he'll still be sixteen years old, crawling through time as his starship races through space. When you bury me, he'll not have turned seventeen yet. And your brothers and sister will still be babies. Not as old as you are. It will be as if they never change.

Which means it's exactly as if they had died. Loved ones who die never change, either. They're always the same age in memory.

So what I'm going through isn't something so different. How many women became widows in the war? How many mothers have buried babies that they hardly had time to hold? I'm just part of the same sentimental comedy as everyone else, the sad parts always followed by laughter, the laughter always by tears.

It wasn't until later, when she was alone in her bed, the children asleep for the night, Mrs. Delphiki gone next door—or, rather, to the other wing of the same house—that she was able to bring herself to read Bean's note again. It was in his handwriting. He had done it in a hurry and in spots it was barely legible. And the paper was stained— Peter hadn't been joking about Ramon peeing on the envelope a couple of times.

She turned the light out and meant to go to sleep.

And then something occurred to her and she switched on the light again and fumbled for the paper and her eyes were so bleary she could hardly read, so maybe she had actually fallen asleep, and this thought had woken her out of a sound slumber.

The letter began, "There's one thing we forgot to decide."

But when Peter read it, he had started with "I love you."

He must have scanned over the letter and realized that Bean never said it. That it was just a note that Bean had jotted at the last moment, and Peter worried that she might be hurt by the omission.

He couldn't have known that Bean just didn't put that kind of thing in writing. Except obliquely. Because the whole note said "I love you," didn't it?

She turned the light off again, but still held the letter. Bean's last message to her.

As she drifted off again, the thought passed briefly through her mind: When Peter said it, he wasn't reading at all.

26

SPEAK FOR ME

From: PeterWiggin%[email protected]

To: ValentineWiggin%[email protected]/AuthorsService

Re: Congratulations

Dear Valentine,

I read your seventh volume and you're not just a brilliant writer (which we always knew) but also a thorough researcher and a perceptive and honest analyst. I knew Hyrum Graff and Mazer Rackham very well before they died, and you treated them with absolute fairness. I doubt they would dispute a word of your book, even where they did not come off as perfect; they were always honest men, even when they lied their zhopas off.

The work of the Hegemon's office is pretty slight these days. The last actual military ventures that were needed took place more than a decade ago—the last gasp of tribalism, which we managed to mostly put down with a show of force. Since then I've tried to retire half a dozen times—no, wait, I'm talking to a historian—twice, but they don't believe I mean it and they keep me in office. They even ask my advice sometimes, and to return the favor I try not to reminisce about how we did things in the early days of the FPE. Only the good old USA refuses to join the FPE and I have hopes they'll get off their "don't tread on me" kick and do the right thing. Polls keep saying that Americans are sick of being the only people in the world who don't get a chance to vote in the world elections. I may see the whole world formally united before I die. And even if I don't, we've got peace on earth.

Petra says hi. Wish you could have known her, but that's star travel. Tell Ender that Petra is more beautiful than ever, he should eat his heart out, and our grandchildren are so adorable that people applaud when we take them out for walks.

Speaking of Ender. I read The Hive Queen. I heard about it before, but never read it till you included it at the end of your last volume—but before the index, or I would never have seen it.

I know who wrote it. If he can speak for the buggers, surely he can speak for me.

Peter

Not for the first time, Peter wished they made a portable ansible. Of course it would make no economic sense. Yes, they miniaturized it as much as possible to put it on starships. But the ansible only made an important difference in communication across the void of space. It saved hours for within-system communication; decades, for communication with the colonies and the ships in flight.

It just wasn't a technology designed for chatting.

There were a few privileges that came with the vestiges of power. Peter might be over seventy—and, as he often pointed out to Petra, an old seventy, an ancient seventy—but he was still Hegemon, and the title had once meant enormous power, it once meant attack choppers in flight and armies and fleets in motion; it once meant punishment for aggression, collection of taxes, enforcement of human rights laws, cleaning up political corruption.

Peter remembered when the title was such an empty joke they gave it to a teenage boy who had written cleverly on the nets.

Peter had brought power to the office. And then, because he gradually stripped away its functions and assigned them to other officials in the FPE—or "EarthGov" as people now called it as often as not—he had returned the position to a figurehead position.

But not a joke. It was no longer a joke and never would be again.

Not a joke, but not necessarily a good thing, either. There were plenty of people left alive who remembered the Hegemon as the coercive power that shattered their dream of how Earth ought to be (though usually their dream was everyone else's nightmare). And historians and biographers had often had at him and would do it again, forever.

The thing about the historians was, they could arrange the data all neatly in rows, but they kept missing what it was for. They kept inventing the strangest motives for people. There was the biography of Virlomi, for instance, that made her an idealistic saint and blamed Suriyawong, of all people, for the slaughter that ended Virlomi's military career. Never mind that Virlomi herself repudiated that interpretation, writing by ansible from the colony on Andhra. Biographers were always irritated when their subject turned out to be alive.

But Peter hadn't bothered to answer any of them. Even the ones that attacked him quite savagely, blaming him for everything that went badly and giving others the credit for everything that went well... Petra would fume over some of them for days until he begged her not to read them anymore. But he couldn't resist reading them himself. He didn't take it personally. Most people never had biographies written about them.

Petra herself had only had a couple about her, and they were both of the "great women" or "role models for girls" variety, not serious scholarship. Which bothered Peter, because he knew what they seemed to neglect—that after all the other members of Ender's Jeesh left Earth and went out to the colonies, she stayed and ran the FPE defense ministry for almost thirty years, until the position became more of a police department than anything else and she insisted on retiring to play with the grandchildren.