Page 299 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

Ender could not speak. Jane had been right. He would have gone anyway, as Ender the Xenocide, just on the chance that Lusitania's protection status would make it the place where the hive queen could be released from her three-thousand-year captivity and undo the terrible crime committed in his childhood. And he would also have gone as the Speaker for the Dead, to understand the piggies and explain them to humankind, so they could be accepted, if they were truly raman, and not hated and feared as varelse.
But now he would go for another, deeper reason. He would go to minister to the girl Novinha, for in her brilliance, her isolation, her pain, her guilt, he saw his own stolen childhood and the seeds of the pain that lived with him still. Lusitania was twenty-two light-years away. He would travel only infinitesimally slower than the speed of light, and still he would not reach her until she was almost forty years old. If it were within his power he would go to her now with the philotic instantaneity of the ansible; but he also knew that her pain would wait. It would still be there, waiting for him, when he arrived. Hadn't his own pain survived all these years?
His weeping stopped; his emotions retreated again. "How old am I?" he asked.
"It has been 3081 years since you were born. But your subjective age is 36 years and 118 days."
"And how old will Novinha be when I get there?"
"Give or take a few weeks, depending on departure date and how close the starship comes to the speed of light, she'll be nearly thirty-nine."
"I want to leave tomorrow."
"It takes time to schedule a starship, Ender."
"Are there any orbiting Trondheim?"
"Half a dozen, of course, but only one that could be ready to go tomorrow, and it has a load of skrika for the luxury trade on Cyrillia and Armenia."
"I've never asked you how rich I am."
"I've handled your investments rather well over the years." "Buy the ship and the cargo for me."
"What will you do with skrika on Lusitania?"
"What do the Cyrillians and Annenians do with it?"
"They wear some of it and eat the rest. But they pay more for it than anybody on Lusitania can afford."