ENDER IN EXILE

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.

Your lifelong worker bee,

Ender

Achilles came to the hut where Governor Virlomi lived in her lofty poverty. She made such a show of having the simplest of habitations—but it was completely unnecessary to build adobe walls and a thatched roof, with so much fine lumber nearby. Virlomi's every action was calculated to enhance her prestige among the Indian colonists. But the whole display filled Achilles with contempt.