Which brings me to my second purpose. I am an old man who thought he could manipulate time and live to see all his plans come to fruition. In a way, I suppose I have. I have pulled many strings, and most of my puppets have finished their dance. I have outlived most of the people I knew, and all of my friends.

Unless you are my friend. I have come to think of you that way; I hope that I do not overstep my bounds, because what I offer you now is a friend's advice.

In rereading the message in which you asked me to send you to Ganges, I have seen in the phrase "reasons of my own" the possibility that you are using starflight the way I was using stasis — as a way to live longer. In your case, though, you are not seeking to see all your plans to fruition — I'm not sure you even have plans. I think instead that you are seeking to put decades, perhaps centuries, between you and your past.

I think the plan is rather clever, if you mean to outlast your fame and live in quiet anonymity somewhere, to marry and have children and rejoin the human race, but among people who cannot even conceive of the idea that their neighbor, Andrew Wiggin, could possibly have anything to do with the great Ender Wiggin who saved the world.

But I fear that you are trying to distance yourself from something else. I fear that you think you can hide from what you (all unwittingly) did, the matters that were exploited in my unfortunate court martial. I fear that you are trying to outrun the deaths of Stilson, of Bonzo Madrid, of thousands of humans and billions of formics in the war you so brilliantly and impossibly won for us all.

You cannot do it, Ender. You carry them with you. They will be freshly in your mind long after all the rest of the world has forgotten. You defended yourself against children who meant to destroy you, and you did it effectively; if you had not done so, would you have been capable of your great victories? You defended the human race against a nonverbal enemy who destroyed human lives carelessly in the process of taking what it wanted — our world, our home, our achievements, the future of planet Earth. What you blame yourself for, I honor you for. Please hear my voice in your head, as well as your own self-condemnation. Try to balance them.

You are the man you have always been: one who takes responsibility, one who foresees consequences and acts to protect others and, yes, yourself. That man will not easily surrender a burden.

But do not use starflight like a drug, using it to seek oblivion. I can tell you from experience that a life lived in short visits to the human race is not a life. We are only human when we are part of a community. When you first came to Battle School, I tried to isolate you, but it could not be done. I surrounded you with hostility; you took most of your enemies and rivals and made friends of them. You freely taught everything you knew, and nurtured students that we teachers had, frankly, given up on; some of them ended up finding greatness in themselves, and achieved much. You were a part of them; they carried you inside them all their lives. You were better at our job than we were.

Your jeesh loved you, Ender, with a devotion I could only envy — I have had many friends, but never the kind of passion that those children had for you. They would have died for you, every one of them. Because they knew you would have died for them. And the reports I had from Shakespeare Colony — from Sel Menach, from Ix Tolo and his sons Po and Abra, and from the colonists who never even knew you, but found the place you had prepared for them — I can tell you that you were universally loved and respected, and all of them regarded you as the best member of their communities, their benefactor and friend.

I tell you this because I fear that the lesson I taught you first was the one you learned the best: that you are always alone, that no one will ever help you, that whatever must be done, only you can do. I cannot speak to the deep recesses of your mind, but only to the uppermost part, the conscious mind that has spoken and written to me so eloquently all these years. So I hope you can hear my message and pass it along to the part of you that will not at first believe it:

You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not. The meetingplace of all these communities you formed was your own heart; they knew you held them there, and it made them one with each other. Yet the gift you gave them, none was able to give you, and I fear this is because I did my evil work too well, and built a wall in your mind that cannot let you receive the knowledge of what and who you are.

It galls me to see how this "Speaker for the Dead" with his silly little books has achieved the influence that YOU deserved. People are actually turning it into a religion — there are self-styled "speakers for the dead" who presume to talk at funerals and tell "the truth" about the dead person, an appalling desecration — who can know the truth about anyone? I have left instructions in my will that none of these poseurs is to be allowed anywhere near my funeral, if anyone even bothers to have one. You saved the world and were never allowed to come home. This mountebank makes up a fake history of the formics and then writes an apologia for your brother Peter and people make a religion out of it. There's no accounting for the human race.

You have Valentine with you. Show her this letter, and see if she does not affirm that every word I've said about you is true. I may not be alive when you read this, but many who knew you as students in Battle School are still alive, including most of your jeesh. They are old, but not one of them has forgotten you. (I still write to Petra now and then; she has been widowed twice, and yet remains an astonishingly happy and optimistic soul. She keeps in touch with all the others.) They and I and Valentine can all attest to the fact that you have belonged to the human race more deeply and fully than most people could even imagine.

Find a way to believe that, and don't hide from life in the unfathomable, lightless depths of relativistic space.

I have achieved much in my life, but the greatest of my achievements was finding you, recognizing what you were, and somehow managing not to ruin you before you could save the world. I only wish I could then have healed you. But that will have to be your own achievement — or perhaps Valentine's. Or perhaps it will come from the children that you must, you must have someday.

For that is my greatest personal regret. I never married and had children of my own. Instead I stole other people's children and trained them — not raised them. It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into his heart.

I had no such moments, because I did not treat my kidnapped Battle School children that way. I was no one's father, by birth or adoption. Marry, Ender. Have children, or adopt them, or borrow them — whatever it takes. But do not live a life like mine.

I have done great things, but now, in the end, I am not happy. I wish I had let the future take care of itself, and instead of skipping forward through time, had stopped, made a family, and died in my proper time, surrounded by children.

See how I pour out my heart to you? Somehow, you took me into your jeesh as well.

Forgive the maudlinness of old men; when you are my age, you will understand.

I never treated you like a son when I had you in my power, but I have loved you like a son; and in this letter I have spoken to you as I'd like to think I might have spoken to the sons I never had. I say to you: Well done, Ender. Now be happy.