SPEAK FOR ME
From: PeterWiggin%[email protected]
To: ValentineWiggin%[email protected]/
AuthorsService
Re: Congratulations
Dear Valentine,
I read your seventh volume and you're not just a brilliant writer (which we always knew) but also a thorough researcher and a perceptive and honest analyst. I knew Hyrum Graff and Mazer Rackham very well before they died, and you treated them with absolute fairness. I doubt they would dispute a word of your book, even where they did not come off as perfect; they were always honest men, even when they lied their zhopas off.
The work of the Hegemon's office is pretty slight these days. The last actual military ventures that were needed took place more than a decade ago--the last gasp of tribalism, which we managed to mostly put down with a show of force. Since then I've tried to retire half a dozen times--no, wait, I'm talking to a historian--twice, but they don't believe I mean it and they keep me in office. They even ask my advice sometimes, and to return the favor I try not to reminisce about how we did things in the early days of the FPE. Only the good old USA refuses to join the FPE and I have hopes they'll get off their "don't tread on me" kick and do the right thing. Polls keep saying that Americans are sick of being the only people in the world who don't get a chance to vote in the world elections. I may see the whole world formally united before I die. And even if I don't, we've got peace on earth.
Petra says hi. Wish you could have known her, but that's star travel. Tell Ender that Petra is more beautiful than ever, he should eat his heart out, and our grandchildren are so adorable that people applaud when we take them out for walks.
Speaking of Ender. I read The Hive Queen. I heard about it before, but never read it till you included it at the end of your last volume--but before the index, or I would never have seen it.
I know who wrote it. If he can speak for the buggers, surely he can speak for me.
Peter
Not for the first time, Peter wished they made a portable ansible. Of course it would make no economic sense. Yes, they miniaturized it as much as possible to put it on starships. But the ansible only made an important difference in communication across the void of space. It saved hours for within-system communication; decades, for communication with the colonies and the ships in flight.
It just wasn't a technology designed for chatting.
There were a few privileges that came with the vestiges of power. Peter might be over seventy--and, as he often pointed out to Petra, an old seventy, an ancient seventy--but he was still Hegemon, and the title had once meant enormous power, it once meant attack choppers in flight and armies and fleets in motion; it once meant punishment for aggression, collection of taxes, enforcement of human rights laws, cleaning up political corruption.
Peter remembered when the title was such an empty joke they gave it to a teenage boy who had written cleverly on the nets.
Peter had brought power to the office. And then, because he gradually stripped away its functions and assigned them to other officials in the FPE--or "EarthGov" as people now called it as often as not--he had returned the position to a figurehead position.
But not a joke. It was no longer a joke and never would be again.
Not a joke, but not necessarily a good thing, either. There were plenty of
people left alive who remembered the Hegemon as the coercive power that shattered their dream of how Earth ought to be (though usually their dream was everyone else's nightmare). And historians and biographers had often had at him and would do it again, forever.
The thing about the historians was, they could arrange the data all neatly in rows, but they kept missing what it was for. They kept inventing the strangest motives for people. There was the biography of Virlomi, for instance, that made her an idealistic saint and blamed Suriyawong, of all people, for the slaughter that ended Virlomi's military career. Never mind that Virlomi herself repudiated that interpretation, writing by ansible from the colony on Andhra. Biographers were always irritated when their subject turned out to be alive.
But Peter hadn't bothered to answer any of them. Even the ones that attacked him quite savagely, blaming him for everything that went badly and giving others the credit for everything that went well...Petra would fume over some of them for days until he begged her not to read them anymore. But he couldn't resist reading them himself. He didn't take it personally. Most people never had biographies written about them.
Petra herself had only had a couple about her, and they were both of the "great women" or "role models for girls" variety, not serious scholarship. Which bothered Peter, because he knew what they seemed to neglect--that after all the other members of Ender's Jeesh left Earth and went out to the colonies, she stayed and ran the FPE defense ministry for almost thirty years, until the position became more of a police department than anything else and she insisted on retiring to play with the grandchildren.
She was there for everything, Peter said to her when he was griping about this. "You were Ender's and Bean's friend in Battle School--you taught Ender how to shoot, for heaven's sake. You were in his Jeesh--"
But at those points Petra would shush him. "I don't want those stories told," she said. "I wouldn't come off very well if the truth came out."
Peter didn't believe it. And you could skip all of that and start when she returned to Earth and...wasn't it Petra who, when the Jeesh was almost all kidnapped, found a way to get a message out to Bean? Wasn't she the one who knew Achilles better than anybody that he didn't succeed in killing? She was one of the great military leaders of all time, and she also married Julian Delphiki, the Giant of legend, and then Peter the Hegemon, another legend, and on top of all that raised five of the children she had with Bean and five more that she had with Peter.
And no biography. So why should he complain that there were dozens about him and every one of them got simple, obvious things wrong, things that you could actually check, let alone the more arcane things like motive and secret agreements and...
And then Valentine's book on the Bugger wars started to come out, volume by volume. One on the first invasion, two on the second--the one Mazer Rackham won. Then four volumes on the Third Invasion, the one that Ender and his Jeesh fought and won from what they thought was a training game on the asteroid Eros. One whole volume was about the development of Battle School--short biographies of dozens of children who were pivotal to the improvements in the school that eventually led to truly effective training and the legendary Battle Room games.
Peter saw what she wrote about Graff and Rackham and about the kids in Ender's Jeesh--including Petra--and even though he knew part of her insight came from having Ender right there with her in Shakespeare colony, the real source of the book's excellence was her own keen self-questioning. She did not find "themes" and impose them on the history. Things happened, and they were connected to each other, but when a motive was unknowable, she didn't pretend to know it. Yet she understood human beings.
Even the awful ones, she seemed to love.