The rage was rising in Achilles again. And he welcomed it. Valentine’s coming had almost ruined everything.

  “They had nine fertilized eggs that they entrusted to a doctor who promised he could purge them of the genetic condition that you have—the giantism. But he was a fraud—as your present condition indicates. He was really working for Achilles, and he stole the embryos. Your mother gave birth to one; we found seven others that were implanted in surrogate mothers. But Hyrum Graff always suspected that they found those seven because Achilles meant them to be found, so that the searchers would think their methods were working. Knowing Achilles, Graff was sure the ninth baby would not be found by the same methods. Then your mother spat on Hyrum Graff and he began to look into her past and found out that her name wasn’t Nichelle Firth, it was Randi. And when he looked at the DNA records, he found that you had no genes in common with your supposed mother. You were not in any way her genetic child.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Achilles. “You’re saying it only to provoke me.”

  “I’m saying it because it’s true, in the hope that it will liberate you. The other children were found and returned to their parents. Five of them didn’t have your genetic disorder, your giantism, and all five of them are still alive on Earth. Bella, Andrew—named for me, I must point out—Julian the Third, Petra, and Ramon. Three of your siblings were giants, and of course they’re gone now—Ender, Cincinnatus, Carlotta. You’re the extra one, the missing one that they gave up looking for. The one they never got to name. But your last name is Delphiki. I knew your parents and I loved them dearly. You are not the child of a monster, you’re the child of two of the best people who ever lived.”

  “Julian Delphiki is the monster!” cried Achilles, and he lunged at Ender.

  To his surprise, Ender made no evasive maneuver. Achilles’ blow landed squarely and sent Ender sprawling onto the ground.

  “No!” cried Valentine.

  Ender picked himself up calmly and rose to face him again. “You know that I’m telling you the truth,” said Ender. “That’s why you’re so angry.”

  “I’m angry because you say I’m the son of the killer of my father!”

  “Achilles Flandres murdered everyone who showed him kindness. A nun who arranged for his crippled leg to be restored. The surgeon who fixed the leg. A girl who took him in when he was the least successful street bully in Rotterdam—he pretended to love her, but then he strangled her and threw her body in the Rhine. He blew up the house where your father was living, in the effort to kill him and his whole family. He kidnapped Petra and tried to seduce her but she despised him. It was Julian Delphiki that she loved. You are their child, born of their love and hope.”

  Achilles rushed at him again—but deliberately made it a clumsy move, so that Ender would have plenty of time to block him, to strike at him.

  But again Ender made no move to step away. He took the blow, this time a deep punch in the stomach, and fell to the ground, gasping, retching.

  And then rose up again. “I know you better than you know yourself,” said Ender.

  “You’re the father of lies,” said Achilles.

  “Never call yourself by that vile name again. You’re not Achilles. Your father is the hero who rid the world of that monster.”

  Again Achilles struck at him—this time walking up slowly and bringing his fist hugely into Ender’s nose, breaking it. Blood spurted from his nostrils and covered the front of his shirt almost instantly.

  Valentine cried out as Ender staggered and then fell to his knees.

  “Fight me,” hissed Achilles.

  “Don’t you get it?” said Ender. “I will never raise my hand against the son of my friends.”

  Achilles kicked him in the jaw so hard it flung him over backward. This was no staged fight like in the silly vids, where the hero and the villain delivered killing blows, yet their opponent got up to fight again. The damage to Ender’s body was deep and real. It made him clumsy and unbalanced. An easy target.

  He’s not going to kill me, thought Achilles.

  It came to him as such a relief that he laughed aloud.

  And then he thought: It’s Mother’s plan after all. Why did I ever imagine I should let him kill me? I’m the son of Achilles Flandres. His true son. I can kill the ones who need killing. I can end this pernicious life, once and for all, avenging my father and the hive queens and those two boys that Ender killed.

  Achilles kicked Ender in the ribs as he lay on his back in the grass. The ribs broke so loudly that even Valentine could hear them; she screamed.

  “Hush,” said Ender. “This is how it goes.”

  Then Ender rolled over—wincing, then crying out softly with the pain. Yet he managed, somehow, to rise to his feet.

  Whereupon he put his hands in his pockets.

  “You can destroy the vids you’re recording,” said Ender. “No one will know that you murdered me. They won’t believe Valentine. So you can claim self-defense. Everyone will believe it—you’ve made them hate me and fear me. Of course you had to kill me to save your own life.”

  Ender wanted to die? Now? At Achilles’ hand? “What’s your game?” Achilles asked.

  “Your supposed mother raised you to take vengeance for her fantasy lover, your fraudulent father. Do it—do what she raised you to do, be who she planned you to be. But I will not raise my hand against the son of my friends, no matter how deluded you are.”

  “Then you’re the fool,” said Achilles. “Because I will do it. For my father’s sake, and my mother’s, for that poor boy Stilson, and Bonzo Madrid, and the formics, and the whole human race.”

  Achilles began the beating in earnest then. Another blow to the belly. Another blow to the face. Two more kicks to the body as he lay unmoving on the ground. “Is this what you did to the Stilson boy?” he asked. “Kicking him again and again—that’s what the report said.”

  “Son,” said Ender. “Of my friends.”

  “Please,” begged Valentine. Yet she made no move to stop him. Nor did she summon help.

  “Now it’s time for you to die,” said Achilles.

  A kick to the head would do it. And if it didn’t, two kicks. The human brain could not stand being rattled around inside the skull like that. Either dead or so brain-damaged he might as well be. That was how the life of Ender the Xenocide would end.

  He approached Wiggin’s supine body. The eyes were looking up at him through the blood still pouring from his broken nose.

  But for some reason, despite the hot rage pounding in his own head, Achilles did not kick him.

  Stood there unmoving.

  “The son of Achilles would do it,” whispered Ender.

  Why am I not killing him? Am I a coward after all? Am I so unworthy of my father? Ender is right—my father would have killed him because it was necessary, without any qualms, without this hesitation.

  In that moment, he saw what all of Ender’s words really meant. Mother had been deceived. She had been told the child was Achilles Flandres’s. She had lied to him as he grew up, telling him that he was her son, but she was only a surrogate. He knew her well enough by now to recognize that her stories were shaped more by what she needed the truth to be than by what it actually was. Why hadn’t he reached the obvious conclusion—that everything she said was a lie? Because she never let up, not for an instant. She shaped his world and did not allow any contrary evidence to come to light.

  The way the teachers manipulated the children who fought the war for them.

  Achilles knew it, had always known it. Ender Wiggin won a war that he didn’t know he was fighting; he slaughtered a species that he thought was just a computer simulation. The way that I believed that Achilles Flandres was my father, that I bore his name and had a duty to fulfil his destiny or avenge his murder.

  Surround a child with lies, and he clings to them like a teddy bear, like his mother’s hand. And the worse, the darker the lie, the more deeply he has to draw it inside himself in order to bear the lie at all.

  Ender said he would rather die than raise his hand against the son of his friends. And he was not a lunatic like Achilles’ mother was.

  Achilles. He was not Achilles. That was his mother’s fantasy. It was all his mother’s fantasy. He knew she was crazy, and yet he lived inside her nightmare and shaped his life to make it come true.

  “What is my name?” he whispered.

  On the ground at his feet, Ender whispered back: “Don’t know. Delphiki. Arkanian. Their faces. In yours.”

  Valentine was beside them now. “Please,” she said. “Can this be over now?”

  “I knew,” whispered Ender. “Bean’s son. Petra’s. Could never.”

  “Could never what? He’s broken your nose. He could have killed you.”

  “I was going to,” said Achilles. And then the enormity of it washed over him. “I was going to kill him with a kick to the head.”

  “And the stupid fool would have let you,” said Valentine.

  “One chance,” said Ender. “In five. Kill me. Good odds.”

  “Please,” said Valentine. “I can’t carry him. Bring him to the doctor. Please. You’re strong enough.”

  Only when he bent down and lifted Ender up did he realize how badly he had damaged his own hands, so hard had been his blows.

  What if he dies? What if he still dies, even though I don’t want him dead now after all?

  He bore Ender with studied haste along the ragged ground and Valentine had to jog to keep up. They reached the doctor’s house long before he was due to leave for the clinic. He took one look at Ender and had him brought in at once for an emergency examination. “I can see who lost,” said the doctor. “But who won?”

  “Nobody,” said…Achilles.

  “There’s not a mark on you,” said the doctor.

  He held out his hands. “Here are the marks,” he said. “I did this.”

  “He never landed a blow on you.”

  “He never tried.”

  “And you kept on beating him? Like this? What kind of…” But then the doctor turned back to his work, stripping the clothes off Ender’s body, cursing softly at the huge bruises on his ribs and belly, feeling for the breaks. “Four ribs. And multiple breaks.” He looked up at Achilles again, this time with loathing on his face. “Get out of my house,” he said.

  Achilles started to go.

  “No,” said Valentine. “This was all according to his plan.”

  The doctor snorted. “Oh, yes, he plotted his own beating.”

  “Or his own death,” said Valentine. “Whatever happened, he was content.”

  “I planned this,” said Achilles.

  “You only thought you did,” said Valentine. “He manipulated you from the start. It’s the family talent.”

  “My mother manipulated,” said Achilles. “But I didn’t have to believe her. I did this.”

  “No, Achilles,” said Valentine. “Your mother’s training did this. The lies Achilles told her did this. What you did was…stop.”

  Achilles felt his body convulse with a sob and he sank to his knees. “I don’t know what to call myself now,” he said. “I hate the name she taught me.”

  “Randall?” asked the doctor.

  “Not…no.”

  “He calls himself Achilles. She calls him that.”

  “How can I…undo this?” he asked her.

  “Poor boy,” said Valentine. “That’s what Ender’s spent the past few years trying to figure out for himself. I think he just used you to get a partial answer. I think he just got you to give him the beating that Stilson and Bonzo Madrid both intended. The only difference is, you’re the son of Julian Delphiki and Petra Arkanian, and so there’s something deep inside you that cannot do murder—cold or hot. Or maybe it has nothing to do with your parents. It has to do with being raised by a mother who you know was mentally ill, and feeling compassion for her—such deep compassion that you could never challenge her fantasy world. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s your soul. The thing that God wrapped in a body and turned into a man. Whatever it was, you stopped.”

  “Arkanian Delphiki,” he said.

  “That would be a good name,” said Valentine. “Doctor, will my brother live?”

  “He took blows to the head,” said the doctor. “Look at his eyes. There’s serious concussion. Maybe worse. We have to get him to the clinic.”

  “I’ll carry him,” said…not Achilles…Arkanian.

  The doctor grimaced. “Letting the beater carry the beaten? But I don’t want to wait for anyone else. What a hideous time of day for you to have this…duel?”

  As they walked along the road to the clinic, a few early risers looked at them quizzically, and one even approached, but the doctor waved her off.

  “I meant for him to kill me,” said Arkanian.

  “I know,” said Valentine.

  “What he did to those other boys. I thought he’d do again.”

  “He meant for you to think he’d fight back.”

  “And then the things he said. The opposite of everything.”

  “But you believed him. Right away, you knew it was true,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Made you furious.”

  Arkanian made a sound, somewhere between a whimper and a howl. He didn’t plan it; he didn’t understand it. Like a wolf baying at the moon, he only knew that the sound was in him and had to come out.

  “But you couldn’t kill him,” she said. “Because you’re not such a fool as to think you can hide from the truth by killing the messenger.”

  “We’re here,” said the doctor. “And I can’t believe you’re reassuring the one who beat your brother like this.”

  “Oh, didn’t you know?” said Valentine. “This is Ender the Xenocide. He deserves whatever anyone does to him.”

  “Nobody deserves this,” the doctor said.

  “How can I undo this,” said Arkanian. And this time he did not mean Ender’s injuries.

  “You can’t,” said Valentine. “And it was already there, it was inherent in that book, The Hive Queen. If you hadn’t said it, somebody else would have. As soon as the human race understood that it was a tragedy to destroy the hive queens, we had to find someone to blame for it, so that the rest of us could be absolved. It would have happened without you.”

  “But it didn’t happen without me. I have to tell the truth—I have to admit what I was…”

  “No you don’t,” she said. “You have to live your life. Yours. And Ender will live his.”

  “And what about you?” asked the doctor, sounding even more cynical than before.

  “Oh, I’ll live Ender’s life, too. It’s so much more interesting than my own.”

  CHAPTER 23

  To: ADelphiki%Ganges@ColLeague.Adm, PWiggin%ret@FPE.adm

  From: EWiggin%Ganges@ColLeague.Adm/voy

  Subj: Arkanian Delphiki, behold your mother. Petra, behold your son.

  Dear Petra, Dear Arkanian,

  In so many ways too late, but in the ways that count, just in time. The last of your children, Petra; your real mother, Arkanian. I will let him tell you his story, and you can tell him yours. Graff did the genetic testing long ago, and there is no doubt. He never told you, because he could never bring you together and I think he believed it would only make you sad. He might be right, but I think you deserve to have the sadness, if that’s what it is, because it belongs to you by right. This is what life has done to the two of you. Now let’s see what YOU do for each other’s lives.

  Let me tell you this much, though, Petra. He’s a good boy. Despite the madness of his upbringing, in the crisis, he was Bean’s son, and yours. He will never know his father, except through you. But Petra, I have seen, in him, what Bean became. The giant in body. The gentle heart.

  Meanwhile, I voyage on, my friends. It’s what I already planned to do, Arkanian. I’m on another errand. You did not deflect me from my course. Except that they won’t let me go into stasis on this ship until my wounds are healed—there’s no healing in stasis.

  With love,

  Andrew Wiggin

  In his little house overlooking the wild coast of Ireland, not far from Doonalt, a feeble old man knelt in his garden, pulling up weeds. O’Connor rode up on his skimmer to deliver groceries and mail, and the old man rose slowly to his feet to receive him. “Come in,” he said. “There’s tea.”

  “Can’t stay,” said O’Connor.

  “You can never stay,” said the old man.

  “Ah, Mr. Graff,” said O’Connor, “that’s the truth. I can never stay. But it’s not for lack of will. I have a lot of houses waiting for me to bring them what I brought you.”

  “And we have nothing to say to each other,” said Graff, smiling. No, laughing silently, his frail chest heaving.

  “Sometimes you don’t need to say a thing,” said O’Connor. “And sometimes a man has no time for tea.”

  “I used to be a fat man,” said Graff. “Can you believe it?”

  “And I used to be a young man,” said O’Connor. “Nobody believes that.”

  “There,” said Graff. “We had a conversation after all.”

  O’Connor laughed—but he did not stay, once he had helped put the groceries away.

  And so Graff was alone when he opened the letter from Valentine Wiggin.

  He read the account as if he was hearing it in her own voice—that was her gift as a writer, now that she had left off being the Demosthenes that Peter made her create, and had become herself, even if she did still use that name for her histories.

  This was a history that she would never publish. Graff knew he was the only audience. And since his body was continuing to lose weight, slowly but surely, and he grew more feeble all the time, he thought it was rather a shame she had spent so much time to put memories into a brain that would hold them for so little time before letting all the memories go at once into the ground.