He answered breathlessly, his words tumbling over each other in his hurry; he was racing to finish his speech before emotion stopped him. “No, you're right, I wanted to hurry because I have a work to do there, and every day here is marking time, and because it hurts me every time I see you and Jakt growing closer and you and me growing more distant, even though I know that it's exactly as it should be, so when I decided to go, I thought that going quickly was better, and I was right; you know I'm right. I never thought you'd hate me for it.”

Now emotion stopped him, and he wept; so did she. “I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart tom out and carried away–”

And that was the end of speech.

Rav's first mate took Ender out to the mareld, the great platform on the equatorial sea, where shuttles were launched into space to rendezvous with orbiting starships. They agreed silently that Valentine wouldn't go with him. Instead, she went home with her husband and clung to him through the night. The next day she went on sўndring with her students, and cried for Ender only at night, when she thought no one could see.

But her students saw, and the stories circulated about Professor Wiggin's great grief for the departure of her brother, the itinerant Speaker. They made of this what students always do– both more and less than reality. But one student, a girl named Plikt, realized that there was more to the story of Valentine and Andrew Wiggin than anyone had guessed.

So she began to try to research their story, to trace backward their voyages together among the stars. When Valentine's daughter Syfte was four years old, and her son Ren was two, Plikt came to her. She was a young professor at the university by then, and she showed Valentine her published story. She had cast it as fiction, but it was true, of course, the story of the brother and sister who were the oldest people in the universe, born on Earth before any colonies had been planted on other worlds, and who then wandered from world to world, rootless, searching.

To Valentine's relief– and, strangely, disappointment– Plikt had not uncovered the fact that Ender was the original Speaker for the Dead, and Valentine was Demosthenes. But she knew enough of their story to write the tale of their good-bye when she decided to stay with her husband, and he to go on. The scene was much tenderer and more affecting than it had really been; Plikt had written what should have happened, if Ender and Valentine had had more sense of theatre.

“Why did you write this?” Valentine asked her.

“Isn't it good enough for it to be its own reason for writing?”

The twisted answer amused Valentine, but it did not put her off. “What was my brother Andrew to you, that you've done the research to create this?”

“That's still the wrong question,” said Plikt.

“I seem to be failing some kind of test. Can you give me a hint what question I should ask?”

“Don't be angry. You should be asking me why I wrote it as fiction instead of biography.”

“Why, then?”

“Because I discovered that Andrew Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead, is Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide.”

Even though Ender was four years gone, he was still eighteen years from his destination. Valentine felt sick with dread, thinking of what his life would be like if he was welcomed on Lusitania as the most shameworthy man in human history.

“You don't need to be afraid, Professor Wiggin. If I meant to tell, I could have. When I found it out, I realized that he had repented what he did. And such a magnificent penance. It was the Speaker for the Dead who revealed his act as an unspeakable crime– and so he took the title Speaker, like so many hundreds of others, and acted out the role of his own accuser on twenty worlds.”

“You have found so much, Plikt, and understood so little.”

“I understand everything! Read what I wrote– that was understanding!”

Valentine told herself that since Plikt knew so much, she might as well know more. But it was rage, not reason, that drove Valentine to tell what she had never told anyone before. “Plikt, my brother didn't imitate the original Speaker for the Dead. He wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon.”

When Plikt realized that Valentine was telling the truth, it overwhelmed her. For all these years she had regarded Andrew Wiggin as her subject matter, and the original Speaker for the Dead as her inspiration. To find that they were the same person struck her dumb for half an hour.

Then she and Valentine talked and confided and came to trust each other until Valentine invited Plikt to be the tutor of her children and her collaborator in writing and teaching. Jakt was surprised at the new addition to the household, but in time Valentine told him the secrets Plikt had uncovered through research or provoked out of her. It became the family legend, and the children grew up hearing marvelous stories of their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was thought in every world to be a monster, but in reality was something of a savior, or a prophet, or at least a martyr.

The years passed, the family prospered, and Valentine's pain at Ender's loss became pride in him and finally a powerful anticipation. She was eager for him to arrive on Lusitania, to solve the dilemma of the piggies, to fulfil his apparent destiny as the apostle to the ramen. It was Plikt, the good Lutheran, who taught Valentine to conceive of Ender's life in religious terms; the powerful stability of her family life and the miracle of each of her five children combined to instill in her the emotions, if not the doctrines, of faith.

It was bound to affect the children, too. The tale of Uncle Ender, because they could never mention it to outsiders, took on supernatural overtones. Syfte, the eldest daughter, was particularly intrigued, and even when she turned twenty, and rationality overpowered the primitive, childish adoration of Uncle Ender, she was still obsessed with him. He was a creature out of legend, and yet he still lived, and on a world not impossibly far away.

She did not tell her mother and father, but she did confide in her former tutor. “Someday, Plikt, I'll meet him. I'll meet him and help him in his work.”

“What makes you think he'll need help? Your help, anyway?” Plikt was always a skeptic until her student had earned her belief.

“He didn't do it alone the first time, either, did he?” And Syfte's dreams turned outward, away from the ice of Trondheim, to the distant planet where Ender Wiggin had not yet set foot. People of Lusitania, you little know what a great man will walk on your earth and take up your burden. And I will join him, in due time, even though it will be a generation late– be ready for me, too, Lusitania.

On his starship, Ender Wiggin had no notion of the freight of other people's dreams he carried with him. It had been only days since he left Valentine weeping on the dock. To him, Syfte had no name; she was a swelling in Valentine's belly, and nothing more. He was only beginning to feel the pain of losing Valentine– a pain she had long since got over. And his thoughts were far from his unknown nieces and nephews on a world of ice.

It was a lonely, tortured young girl named Novinha that he thought of, wondering what the twenty-two years of his voyage were doing to her, and whom she would have become by the time they met. For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.