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But Valentine knew. Ender stood before the door, young Val beside him, Peter emerging just behind, and Valentine knew them both. She stepped forward, away from Jakt, until she stood before Ender face to face.
“Ender,” she said. “Dear sweet tormented boy, was this what you create, when you go to a place where you can make anything you want?” She reached out her hand and touched the young copy of herself upon the cheek. “So beautiful,” she said. “I was never this beautiful, Ender. She's perfect. She's all I wanted to be but never was.”
“Aren't you glad to see me, Val, my dearest sweetheart Demosthenes?” Peter pushed his way between Ender and young Val. “Don't you have tender memories of me, as well? Am I not more beautiful than you remembered? I'm certainly glad to see you. You've done so well with the persona I created for you. Demosthenes. I made you, and you don't even thank me for it.”
“Thank you, Peter,” whispered Valentine. She looked again at young Val. “What will you do with them?”
“Do with us?” said Peter. “We're not his to do anything with. He may have brought me back, but I'm my own man now, as I always was.”
Valentine turned back to the crowd, still awestruck at the strangeness of events. After all, they had seen three people board the ship, had seen it disappear, then reappear on the exact spot no more than seven minutes later– and instead of three people emerging, there were five, two of them strangers. Of course they had stayed to gawk.
But there'd be no answers for anyone today. Except on the most important question of all. “Has Ela taken the vials to the lab?” she asked. “Let's break it up here, and go see what Ela's made for us in outspace.”
Chapter 17 – ENDER'S CHILDREN
It was the last day of the test of the recolada. Word of its success– so far– had already spread through the human colony– and, Ender assumed, among all the pequeninos as well. Ela's assistant named Glass had volunteered to be the experimental subject. He had lived now for three days in the same isolation chamber where Planter had sacrificed himself. This time, though, the descolada had been killed within him by the viricide bacterium he had helped Ela devise. And this time, performing the functions that the descolada had once fulfilled, was Ela's new recolada virus. It had worked perfectly. He was not even slightly ill. Only one last step remained before the recolada could be pronounced a full success.
An hour before that final test, Ender, with his absurd entourage of Peter and young Val, was meeting with Quara and Grego in Grego's cell.
“The pequeninos have accepted it,” Ender explained to Quara. “They're willing to take the risk of killing the descolada and replacing it with the recolada, after testing it with Glass alone.”
“I'm not surprised,” said Quara.
“I am,” said Peter. “The piggies obviously have a deathwish as a species.”
Ender sighed. Though he was no longer a frightened little boy, and Peter was no longer older and larger and stronger than he, there was still no love in Ender's heart for this simulacrum of his brother that he had somehow created Outside. He was everything Ender had feared and hated in his childhood, and it was infuriating and frightening to have him back again.
“What do you mean?” said Grego. “If the pequeninos didn't consent to it, then the descolada would make them too dangerous for humankind to allow them to survive.”
“Of course,” said Peter, smiling. “The physicist is an expert on strategy.”
“What Peter is saying,” said Ender, “is that if he were in charge of the pequeninos– which he no doubt would like to be– he would never willingly give up the descolada until he had won something from humanity in exchange for it.”
“To the surprise of all, the aging boy wonder still has a tiny spark of wit,” said Peter. “Why should they kill off their only weapon that humanity has any reason to fear? The Lusitania Fleet is still coming, and it still has the M.D. Device aboard. Why don't they make Andrew here get on that magic flying football of his and go meet the fleet and lay down the law?”
“Because they'd shoot me down like a dog,” said Ender. “The pequeninos are doing this because it's right and fair and decent. Words that I'll define for you later.”
“I know the words,” said Peter. “I also know what they mean.”
“You do?” asked young Val. Her voice, as always, was a surprise– soft, mild, and yet able to pierce the conversation. Ender remembered that Valentine's voice had always been that way. Impossible not to listen to, though she so rarely raised her voice.
“Right. Fair. Decent,” said Peter. The words sounded filthy in his mouth. “Either the person saying them believes in those concepts or not. If not, then those words mean that he's got somebody standing behind me with a knife in his hand. And if he does believe them, then those words mean that I'm going to win.”
“I'll tell you what they mean,” said Quara. “They mean that we're going to congratulate the pequeninos– and ourselves– for wiping out a sentient species that may exist nowhere else in the universe.”
“Don't kid yourself,” said Peter.
“Everybody's so sure that the descolada is a designed virus,” said Quara, “but nobody's considered the alternative– that a much more primitive, vulnerable version of the descolada evolved naturally, and then changed itself to its present form. It might be a designed virus, yes, but who did the designing? And now we're killing it without attempting conversation.”
Peter gri
Ender ignored him and attempted to answer Quara. “We are killing it. Because we can't wait any longer. The descolada is trying to destroy us, and there's no time to dither. If we could, we would.”
“I understand all that,” said Quara. “I cooperated, didn't I? It just makes me sick to hear you talking as if the pequeninos were somehow brave about collaborating in an act of xenocide in order to save their own skin.”
“Us or them, kid,” said Peter. “Us or them.”
“You can't possibly understand,” said Ender, “how ashamed I am to hear my own arguments on his lips.”
Peter laughed. “Andrew pretends not to like me,” he said. “But the kid's a fraud. He admires me. He worships me. He always has. Just like his pretty little angel here.”
Peter poked at young Val. She didn't shy away. She acted instead as if she hadn't even felt his finger in the flesh of her upper arm.
“He worships us both. In his twisted little mind, she's the moral perfection that he can never achieve. And I am the power and genius that was always just out of poor little Andrew's reach. It was really quite modest of him, don't you think? For all these years, he's carried his betters with him inside his mind.”