Hyrum Graff

I.F. Col. Ret.

Ender was shocked at the difference in Valentine when he emerged from stasis at the end of the voyage. "I told you I wasn't going into stasis until my book was finished," she said when she saw his expression.

"You didn't stay awake for the whole voyage."

"I did," she said. "This wasn't a forty-year voyage in two years like our first one, it was only an eighteen-year voyage in a bit over fourteen months." Ender did the arithmetic quickly and saw that she was right. Acceleration and deceleration always took about the same amount of time, while the length of the voyage in between determined the difference in subjective time.

"Still," he said. "You're a woman."

"How flattering that you noticed. I was disappointed that I didn't have any ship's captains falling in love with me."

"Perhaps the fact that Captain Hong brought his wife and family with him had an effect on that."

"Bit by bit, they're learning that you don't have to sacrifice everything to be a star voyager," said Valentine.

"Arithmetic — I'm still seventeen, and you're nearly twenty-one."

"I am twenty-one," she said. "Think of me as your Auntie Val."

"I will not," he said. "You finished your book?"

"I wrote a history of Shakespeare Colony, up to the time of your arrival. I couldn't have done it if you had been awake."

"Because I would have insisted on accuracy?"

"Because you wouldn't have let me have complete access to your correspondence with Kolmogorov."

"My correspondence is double-password encrypted."

"Oh, Ender, you're talking to me," said Valentine. "Do you think I wouldn't be able to guess 'Stilson' and 'Bonzo'?"

"I didn't use their names just like that, naked."

"To me they were naked, Ender. You think nobody really understands you, but I can guess your passwords. That makes me your password buddy."

"That makes you a snoop," said Ender. "I can't wait to read the book."

"Don't worry. I didn't mention your name. His emails are cited as 'letter to a friend' with the date."

"Aren't you considerate."

"Don't be testy. I haven't seen you in fourteen months and I missed you. Don't make me change my mind."

"I saw you yesterday, and you've snooped my files since then. Don't expect me to ignore that. What else did you snoop?"

"Nothing," said Valentine. "You have your luggage locked. I'm not a yegg."

"When can I read the book?"

"When you buy it and download it. You can afford to pay."

"I don't have any money."

"You haven't read Hyrum Graff's letter yet," said Valentine. "He got you a nice pension and you can draw on it without paying any taxes until you come of age."

"So you didn't confine yourself to your research topic."

"I can never know whether a letter contains useful data until I read it, can I?"

"So you read all the letters ever written in the history of the human race, in order to write this book?"

"Only the ones written since the founding of Colony One after the Third Formic War." She kissed his cheek. "Good morning, Ender. Welcome back to the world."

Ender shook his head. "Not Ender," he said. "Not here. I'm Andrew."

"Ah," she said. "Why not 'Andy, then? Or 'Drew'?"

"Andrew," Ender repeated.

"Well, you should have told the governor that, because her letter of invitation is addressed to 'Ender Wiggin.»

Ender frowned. "We never knew each other in Battle School."

"I imagine she thinks she knows you, having been so intimately involved with half your jeesh."

"Having had her army beaten into the ground by them," said Ender.

"That's a kind of intimacy, isn't it? A sort of Grant-and-Lee thing?"

"I suppose Graff had to warn her that I was coming."

"Your name was also on the manifest, and it included the fact that you were governor of Shakespeare until your two-year term ended. That narrows you down among all the possible Andrew Wiggins in the human race."

"Have you been down to the surface?"

"No one has. I asked the captain to let me wake you so you could be on the first shuttle. Of course he was pleased to do anything for the great Ender Wiggin. He's of that generation — he was on Eros when you won that final victory. He says he saw you in the corridors there, more than once."

Ender thought back to his brief meeting with the captain before going into stasis. "I didn't recognize him."

"He didn't expect you to. He really is a nice man. Much better at his job than old what's-his-name."

"Quincy Morgan."

"I remembered his name, Ender, I just didn't want to say it or hear it."

Ender cleaned himself up. Stasis left him with a sort of scum all over his body; his skin seemed to crackle just a little when he moved. This can't be good for you, he thought as he scrubbed it off and the skin protested by giving him little stabbing pains. But Graff does stasis ten months of the year and he's still going strong.

And he got me a pension. Isn't that nice. I can't imagine Ganges is using Hegemony money any more than Shakespeare was, but once interstellar trade starts up, maybe there'll start being some buying power in the FPE dollar.

Dried and dressed, Ender got his luggage out of storage and, in the privacy of Valentine's locked stateroom, from which she had discreetly absented herself, Ender opened the case containing the cocoon of the last hive queen in the universe.

He was afraid, for a moment, that she had died during the voyage. But no. After he had held the cocoon in his bare hands for a few minutes, an image flickered into his mind. Or rather a rapid series of images — the faces of hundreds of hive queens, a thousand of them, in such rapid succession that he couldn't register any of them. It was as if, upon waking — upon rebooting — all the ancestors in this hive queen's memory had to make an appearance in her mind before settling back and letting her have control of her own brain.

What ensued was not a conversation — it could not be. But when Ender thought back on it, it seemed to him like a conversation, complete with dialogue. It was as if his brain was not designed to remember what had passed between them — the direct transfer of shaped memory. Instead, it translated the exchange into the normal human mode of interresponsive language.

"Is this my new home? Will you let me come out?" she asked him — or rather, she showed herself emerging from the cocoon into the cool air of a cave, and the feeling of a question — or a demand? — came along with the image.

"Too soon," he said — and in his mind there really were words, or at least ideas shapable into language. "Nobody's forgotten anything yet. They would be terrified. They'd kill you as soon as they discovered you or any of your children."

"More waiting," she said. "Wait forever."

"Yes," he said. "I will voyage as often as I can, as far as I can. Five hundred years. A thousand years. I don't know how long it will be before I can safely bring you out, or where we'll be."

She reminded him that she was not affected by the relativistic effects of time travel. "Our minds work on the principle of your ansible. We are always connected to the real time of the universe." For this she used images of clocks that she drew from his own memory. Her own metaphor for time was the sweep of sun across sky for days, and its drift northward and south again to show years. Hive queens never needed to subdivide time into hours and minutes and seconds, because with her own children — the formics — everything was infinitely now.

"I'm sorry that you have to experience all the time of the voyage," said Ender. "But you want me in stasis during the voyage, so I'll stay young long enough to find you a home."

Stasis — she compared his hibernation with her own pupation. "But you come out the same. No change."