Page 1193 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

young husband who doesn't want her, Peter. Her life is full of grief enough without that. Marry Wang-mu, leave this place, go on, be a new self. Be Ender's true son, have the life he might have had if the demands of others hadn't tainted it from the start."
Whether he fully accepted her advice or not, Valentine couldn't guess. He remained hidden in the house, avoiding even those visitors who might trigger memories. Olhado came, and Grego, and Ela, each in turn, to express their condolences to Valentine on the death of her brother, but Peter never came into the room. Wang-mu did, however, this sweet young girl who nevertheless had a kind of steel in her that Valentine quite liked. Wang-mu played the gracious friend of the bereaved, keeping the conversation going as each of these children of Ender's wife talked about how Ender had saved their family, blessed their lives when they had thought themselves beyond the reach of all blessing.
And in the corner of the room, Plikt sat, absorbing, listening, fueling the speech that she had lived her whole life for.
Oh, Ender, the jackals have gnawed at your life for three thousand years. And now your friends will have their turn. In the end, will the toothmarks on your bones be all that different?
Today all would come to a close. Others might divide time differently, but to Valentine the Age of Ender Wiggin had come to a close. The age that began with one xenocide attempted had now ended with other xenocides prevented or, at least, postponed. Human beings might now be able to live with other peoples in peace, working out a shared destiny on dozens of colony worlds. Valentine would write the history of this, as she had written a history on every world that she and Ender had visited together. She would write, not a kind of oracle or scripture, the way Ender had done with his three books, The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and The Life of Human; rather her book would be scholarly, with sources cited. She aspired to be, not Paul or Moses, but Thucydides. Though she wrote all under the name Demosthenes, her legacy from those childhood days when she and Peter, the first Peter, the dark and dangerous and magnificent Peter, had used their words to change the world. Demosthenes would publish a book chronicling the history of human involvement on Lusitania, and in that book would be much about Ender-- how he brought the cocoon of the Hive Queen here, how he became a part of the family most pivotal in dealings with the pequeninos. But it would not be a book about Ender. It would be a book about utlanning and framling, raman and varelse. Ender, who was a stranger in every land, belonging nowhere, serving everywhere, until he chose this world as his home, not just because there was a family that needed him, but also because in this place he did not have to be entirely a member of the human race. He could belong to the tribe of the pequenino, to the hive of the queen. He could be part of something larger than mere humanity.
And though there was no child with Ender's name as father on its birth certificate, he had become a father here. Of Novinha's children. Of Novinha herself, in a way. Of a young copy of Valentine herself. Of Jane, the first spawn of a mating between races, who now was a bright and beautiful creature who lived in mothertrees, in digital webs, in the philotic twinings of the ansibles, and in a body that had once been Ender's and which, in a way, had once been Valentine's, for she remembered looking into mirrors and seeing that face and calling it herself.