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company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I loved, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore."
"It's already too late for that."
"You're wrong, Ender. You think you're grown up and tired and jaded with everything, but in your heart you're just as much a kid as I am. We can keep it secret from everybody else. While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, they'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillowfights."
Ender laughed, but he had noticed some things she dropped too casually for them to be accidental. "Governing?"
"I'm Demosthenes, Ender, I went out with a bang. A public announcement that I believed so much in the colonization movement that I was going in the first ship myself. At the same time, the Minister of Colonization, a former colonel named Graff, announced that the pilot of the colony ship would be the great Mazer Rackham, and the governor of the colony would be Ender Wiggin."
"They might have asked me."
"I wanted to ask you myself."
"But it's already announced."
"No. They'll be announcing it tomorrow, if you accept. Mazer accepted a few hours ago, back in Eros."
"You're telling everyone that you're Demosthenes? A fourteen-year-old girl?"
"We're only telling them that Demosthenes is going with the colony. Let them spend the next fifty years poring over the passenger list, trying to figure out which one of them is the great demagogue of the Age of Locke."
Ender laughed and shook his head. "You're actually having fun, Val."
"I can't think why I shouldn't."
"All right," said Ender. "I'll go. Maybe even as governor, as long as you and Mazer are there to help me. My abilities are a little underused at present."
She squealed and hugged him, for all the world like a typical teenage girl who just got the present that she wanted from her little brother.