Except for her. And when the Lutheran minister– not a Calvinist– married them, they both seemed more surprised than happy. Yet they were happy. And for the first time since she left Earth she felt whole, at peace, at home. That's why the baby grew within her. The wandering was over. And she was so grateful to Ender that he had understood this, that without their having to discuss it he had realized that Trondheim was the end of their three-thousand-mile odyssey, the end of Demosthenes' career; like the ishaxa, she had found a way to root in the ice of this world and draw nourishment that the soil of other lands had not provided.

The baby kicked hard, taking her from her reverie; she looked around to see Ender coming toward her, walking along the wharf with his duffel slung over his shoulder. She understood at once why he had brought his bag: He meant to go along on the sўndring. She wondered whether she was glad of it. Ender was quiet and unobtrusive, but he could not possibly conceal his brilliant understanding of human nature. The average students would overlook him, but the best of them, the ones she hoped would come up with original thought, would inevitably follow the subtle but powerful clues he would inevitably drop. The result would be impressive, she was sure– after all, she owed a great debt to his insights over the years– but it would be Ender's brilliance, not the students'. It would defeat somewhat the purpose of the sўndring.

But she wouldn't tell him no when he asked to come. Truth to tell, she would love to have him along. Much as she loved Jakt, she missed the constant closeness that she and Ender used to have before she married. It would be years before she and Jakt could possibly be as tightly bound together as she and her brother were. Jakt knew it, too, and it caused him some pain; a husband shouldn't have to compete with his brother-in-law for the devotion of his wife.

“Ho, Val,” said Ender.

“Ho, Ender.” Alone on the dock, where no one else could hear, she was free to call him by the childhood name, ignoring the fact that the rest of humanity had turned it into an epithet.

«What'll you do if the rabbit decides to bounce out during the sўndring?»

She smiled. “Her papa would wrap her in a skrika skin, I would sing her silly Nordic songs, and the students would suddenly have great insights to the impact of reproductive imperatives on history.”

They laughed together for a moment, and suddenly Valentine knew, without noticing why she knew, that Ender did not want to go on the sўndring, that he had packed his bag to leave Trondheim, and that he had come, not to invite her along, but to say good-bye. Tears came unbidden to her eyes, and a terrible devastation wrenched at her. He reached out and held her, as he had so many times in the past; this time, though, her belly was between them, and the embrace was awkward and tentative.

“I thought you meant to stay,” she whispered. “You turned down the calls that came.”

“One came that I couldn't turn down.”

«I can have this baby on sўndring, but not on another world.»

As she guessed, Ender hadn't meant her to come. “The baby's going to be shockingly blond,” said Ender. “She'd look hopelessly out of place on Lusitania. Mostly black Brazilians there.”

So it would be Lusitania. Valentine understood at once why he was going– the piggies' murder of the xenologer was public knowledge now, having been broadcast during the supper hour in Reykjavik. “You're out of your mind.”

“Not really.”

“Do you know what would happen if people realized that the Ender is going to the piggies' world? They'd crucify you!”

“They'd crucify me here, actually, except that no one but you knows who I am. Promise not to tell.”

“What good can you do there? He'll have been dead for decades before you arrive.”

“My subjects are usually quite cold before I arrive to Speak for them. It's the main disadvantage of being itinerant.”

“I never thought to lose you again.”

“But I knew we had lost each other on the day you first loved Jakt.”

“Then you should have told me! I wouldn't have done it!”

“That's why I didn't tell you. But it isn't true, Val. You would have done it anyway. And I wanted you to. You've never been happier.” He put his hands astride her waist. “The Wiggin genes were crying out for continuation. I hope you have a dozen more.”

«It's considered impolite to have more than four, greedy to go past five, and barbaric to have more than six.» Even though she joked, she was deciding how best to handle the sўndring– let the graduate assistants take it without her, cancel it altogether, or postpone it until Ender left?

But Ender made the question moot. “Do you think your husband would let one of his boats take me out to the mareld overnight, so I can shuttle to my starship in the morning?”

His haste was cruel. “If you hadn't needed a ship from Jakt, would you have left me a note on the computer?”

“I made the decision five minutes ago, and came straight to you.”

“But you already booked passage– that takes planning!”

“Not if you buy the starship.”

“Why are you in such a hurry? The voyage takes decades–”

“Twenty-two years.”

“Twenty-two years! What difference would a couple of days make? Couldn't you wait a month to see my baby born?”

“In a month, Val, I might not have the courage to leave you.”

“Then don't! What are the piggies to you? The buggers are ramen enough for one man's life. Stay, marry as I've married; you opened the stars to colonization, Ender, now stay here and taste the good fruits of your labor!”

“You have Jakt. I have obnoxious students who keep trying to convert me to Calvinism. My labor isn't done yet, and Trondheim isn't my home.”

Valentine felt his words like an accusation: You rooted yourself here without thought of whether I could live in this soil. But it's not my fault, she wanted to answer– you're the one who's leaving, not me. “Remember how it was,” she said, “when we left Peter on Earth and took a decades-long voyage to our first colony, to the world you governed? It was as if he died. By the time we got there he was old, and we were still young; when we talked by ansible he had become an ancient uncle, the power-ripened Hegemon, the legendary Locke, anyone but our brother.”

“It was an improvement, as I recall.” Ender was trying to make things lighter.

But Valentine took his words perversely. “Do you think I'll improve, too, in twenty years?”

“I think I'll grieve for you more than if you had died.”

“No, Ender, it's exactly as if I died, and you'll know that you're the one who killed me.”

He winced. “You don't mean that.”

“I won't write to you. Why should I? To you it'll be only a week or two. You'd arrive on Lusitania, and the computer would have twenty years of letters for you from a person you left only the week before. The first five years would be grief, the pain of losing you, the loneliness of not having you to talk to–”

“Jakt is your husband, not me.”

"And then what would I write? Clever, newsy little letters about the baby? She'd be five years old, six, ten, twenty and married, and you wouldn't even know her, wouldn't even care. "

“I'll care.”

“You won't have the chance. I won't write to you until I'm very old, Ender. Until you've gone to Lusitania and then to another place, swallowing the decades in vast gulps. Then I'll send you my memoir. I'll dedicate it to you. To Andrew, my beloved brother. I followed you gladly to two dozen worlds, but you wouldn't stay even two weeks when I asked you.”

“Listen to yourself, Val, and then see why I have to leave now, before you tear me to pieces.”

“That's a sophistry you wouldn't tolerate in your students, Ender! I wouldn't have said these things if you weren't leaving like a burglar who was caught in the act! Don't turn the cause around and blame it on me!”