I've been studying everything I can about Virlomi and the wars she fought. What an astonishing woman! Her Battle School records show only an ordinary student (in an admittedly extraordinary group). But Battle School is about war, not revolution or national survival; nor did your tests measure anyone's propensity for becoming a demigod. If you had such a test, I wonder what you would have found out about Peter, back when he was a child and not ruler of the world.

Speaking of Peter, he and I are in conversation; perhaps you knew. We're not messaging, we're using ansible bandwidth for conversation. It's bittersweet to see him at nearly sixty years of age. Hair turning steely grey, face lined, carrying a little weight (but still fit), and the lines of responsibility etched on his face. He's not the boy I knew and hated. But the existence of this man does not erase that boy from my memory. They are simply two separate people in my mind, who happen to have the same name.

I find myself admiring the man; even loving him. He has faced choices every bit as terrible as mine ever were — and he dealt with them with his eyes open. He knew before he made his decisions that people would die from them. And yet he has more compassion than he — or I, or Valentine for that matter — ever expected of him.

He tells me that in his childhood, after I was in Battle School, he decided that the only way to succeed in his work was to deceive people into thinking he was as lovable as me. (I thought he was joking, but he was not; I don't believe my reputation in Battle School was «lovable» but Peter was dealing with the way I was remembered at home.) So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth. Peter has made himself into a good man, even if he set out on that road for reasons that were far from pure.

This gives me great hope for myself. All I have to do now is find some work to do that will lay to rest the burden that I carry. Governing a colony has been interesting and valuable work, but it does not do for me what I hoped it would. I still wake up with dead formics and dead soldiers and dead children in my head. I still wake up with memories that tell me that I am what Peter used to be. When those go away, I can be myself again.

I know that it troubles you that I have this mindset. Well, that's your burden, isn't it? Let me assure you, however, that my burden is half of my own making. You and Mazer and the rest of the officers training and using me and the other children did what you did in a righteous cause — and it worked. Toward me you have the same responsibility that commanders always have for those soldiers who survive, but maimed. The soldiers are still responsible for the lives they make for themselves after the fact; it's bitterly ironic that your true answer to them is: It's not my fault that you lived. If you had been killed you would not have to deal with all these wounds. This is the portion of life that was given back to you; it was the enemy who took from you the wholeness that you do not have. My job was to make it so that your death or injuries meant something, and I have done that.

That is what I have learned from the soldiers here. They still remember their comrades who fell; they still miss the life they left behind on Earth, the families they never saw again, the places they can revisit only in their dreams and memories. Yet they do not blame me. They're proud of what we did together. Almost every one of them has said to me, at one time or another, "It was worth it." Because we won.

So I say that to you. Whatever burden I'm carrying, it was worth it because we won.

So I appreciate your warning about this little book that's going around, The Hive Queen. Unlike you, I don't believe it's nonsense; I think this "Speaker for the Dead" has said something truthful, whether it's factual or not. Suppose the hive queens were every bit as beautiful and well-meaning as they are in this Speaker for the Dead's imagination. That does not change the fact that during the war they could not tell us that their intentions had changed and they regretted what they had done. It does not change our blamelessness (though blamelessness does not relieve us of responsibility).

I have a suspicion that I cannot verify: I think that even though the individual formics were so dependent on the hive queens that when the queens died, so did the soldiers and workers, that does not mean that they were a single organism, or that the hive queens did not have to take the deep needs, the will of the individuals, into account. And because the formics were individually so very stupid, the hive queens could not explain subtleties to them. Isn't it possible that if the hive queens had refused to fight those initial battles, letting us slaughter them like true pacifists, the survival instinct of the individual formics would have asserted itself with so much strength as to overwhelm the power of their mistresses? We would have had the battles anyway — only the formics would have fought without coherence or real intelligence. This in turn might have caused formics everywhere to rebel against their queens. Even a dictator has to respect the will of the pawns, for without their obedience, he has no power. Those are my thoughts about The Hive Queen, since you asked. And about everything else, because you need to hear my thoughts as much as I need to say them. You were my hive queen, and I was your formic, during this war. Twice I wanted to reject your overlordship; twice, Bean stepped in and put me back under the yoke. But all that I did, I did of my own free will, like any good soldier or servant or slave. The task of the tyrant is not to compel, but to persuade even the unwilling that compliance better serves their interest than resistance.

So if you wish to send this arriving ship to Ganges Colony, I will go and see what I can do to help Virlomi deal with Bean's kidnapped son and his very strange mother (though it is not her spitting on you that proves her to be strange; there are — or were — hundreds who would have stood in line for the privilege). I have a feeling that Virlomi will indeed find herself over her head, because her colony is so overwhelmingly Indian. It will make all her decisions seem unjust to the non-Indians, and if this Randall Firth is anything like as smart as his father, and if his mother has raised him to hate any who ever stood in Achilles Flandres's way, which certainly includes Virlomi, then this is the wedge that Randall will exploit to try to destroy her and gain power.

And while there are those in the I.F. and even in ColMin who believe that nothing that happens in the colonies can threaten Earth, I'm glad you recognize that this is not so. A warrior-rebel in a colony world can capture the imagination of millions on Earth. Billions, perhaps. And The Hive Queen may turn out to be part of this. A clever demagogue from the colonies can wrap himself in the mantle of the vanished hive queens, playing upon the powerful sentiment that the colony worlds were somehow «wronged» by Earth and are owed something. It is irrational, but there are precedents for even more illogical leaps of judgment.

Even if you cannot or no longer wish to send me to Ganges, however, I will be aboard that ship, so I hope our flight plan will send me somewhere interesting. Valentine has not yet decided whether to come with me, but since, because of working on her histories, she has remained completely detached from this colony, emotionally and socially, I think she'll come with me, having no incentive to remain here without me.