“Later he became head of the Hegemon’s military force,” said Jane. “Surely you haven’t forgotten.”

  “I tried to help him in his work, as best I could.”

  “The men who followed him would have died for him. Some did. But because of his ability, his care for them, most did not die. He modeled his command style on Ender Wiggin, as best he could.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Graff. “Bean is alive?”

  “His children are. Well, not the ones who remained on Earth to be raised by Petra—you remember Petra?”

  “A remarkable girl,” said Graff.

  “Dead, like almost everybody. Their healthy children, too. Long lives, but not looooong.”

  “So these gene-snippers are the doomed children. How many?”

  “Three. And they are no longer doomed.”

  “Gifted geneticists. They heeded the admonition, ‘Physician, cure thyself.’”

  “That’s what they did, Hyrum Graff. Too late to save their father—his giantism killed him. He died on an ancient Formic colony ship whose inhabitants had almost all died. His children mourned. But they altered their own genes to save themselves from their father’s fate.”

  “So there’s a genetic threat, and you need them to find a genetic solution,” said Graff.

  “That’s my plan. No one is better qualified to fight the Descolada virus.”

  Graff asked the obvious question. “Why do you need me? I’m not a geneticist.”

  “You’re the only warmaker ever to save the human race from an existential alien threat.”

  “I believe there were millions of us involved in that victory, Ender most of all.”

  “You assembled and sorted out those millions. And we don’t know what we’re up against in this war.”

  “As my old friend Mazer Rackham once said to me, ‘Old men are too slow-witted and weary to fight a war. Plus, they know about death, and young people don’t.’”

  “Yet he was useful in preparing Ender Wiggin for victory,” said Jane.

  “He was. But he was a warrior. I’m a—I was a bureaucrat.”

  “They also serve who sit in chairs and talk on phones and get things done.”

  “The updated version of ‘who only stand and wait.’ Who wrote that, Tennyson?”

  “Milton,” said Jane.

  “Not from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’? Does anyone read that anymore?”

  “From a poem Milton never titled, though others did.” Then she began quoting:

  When I consider how my light is spent

  Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

  And that one talent which is death to hide

  Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent

  To serve therewith my Maker, and present

  My true account, lest he returning chide;

  ‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’

  I fondly ask.

  “Milton, if I recall, was not famous for brevity. If you’re going to give me six pages of Paradise Lost, I must plead the bathroom.”

  She ignored the interruption.

  But Patience to prevent

  That murmur, soon replies: ‘God doth not need

  Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

  Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

  Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

  And post o’er land and ocean without rest:

  They also serve who only stand and wait.’

  “I stopped listening at the one talent that is death to hide,” said Graff.

  “You mean you stopped understanding,” said Jane.

  “I stopped caring, so don’t bother explaining it to me.”

  “Milton went blind, so he thought he was useless to God, though he was a very pious man. A Puritan. So he’s told, by Patience personified, that even though God can send rapid angels to do his bidding, without resting, everywhere, all at once—that’s my job, by the way—his servants who merely sit around feeling sorry for themselves, waiting to die, also serve him.”

  “I think that’s a faulty interpretation, but I also don’t care. When did poetry ever save the world?”

  “You’re so old, Hyrum. You talk of ‘the world’ as if there were only one.”

  “It was my life’s work to spread humanity to as many worlds as possible. It wasn’t God who sent his servants everywhere to do his bidding. It was me.”

  “Well done,” said Jane. “Did you know that Ender Wiggin, when he traveled through the Hundred Worlds doing his Speaking for the Dead, was searching for a place to reestablish another species, one that had got itself blown to smithereens in a sad little war they hadn’t realized they were starting?”

  “Reestablish?” asked Graff. “There are still Hive Queens out there?”

  “Oddly enough, there are, and Ender Wiggin saved them.”

  “How? They were all destroyed when—”

  “Tut-tut,” said Jane. “Now you know that this assumption, this widely held belief, is false. But the new hive poses no threat to the humans they share a world with. Or at least, not yet. In fact, they’re threatened by exactly the same gene-wielding enemy as the human species. They, too, are expert gene-shapers, though they do it inside their own bodies, turning their own children into whatever they need them to be. An amazing species, very much superior to us jumped-up lemurs.”

  “But we beat them.”

  “They rather let us.”

  “It didn’t look like it from what I saw.”

  “They didn’t want to die, of course. But they could have killed Ender Wiggin at any time, and they stayed their hand. Because they knew he loved them, and so they came to love him.”

  “Oh, this makes that ridiculous book The Hive Queen look like science.”

  “It was science. It still is science.”

  “How could they have killed Ender? He was never near them.”

  “They made me,” said Jane. “They installed me in the computer systems on Battle School and therefore throughout the International Fleet. I took over his little game and showed him the Hive Queens in all their beauty and majesty.”

  “He coped with that just fine,” said Graff.

  “When that happened it terrified you,” said Jane.

  “What are you?”

  “I have an aiúa of the caliber that the Hive Queens would usually have used to bring another one of their own kind to life.”

  “You’re a Hive Queen,” said Graff.

  “I say that I could have been. But they sent me somewhere else. Still connected to them, still showing them everything I learned, still obedient to them.”

  “Pictures on his desk wouldn’t have damaged Ender Wiggin,” said Graff.

  “If I had wanted him dead, I could have cut off the oxygen in his cubicle on the asteroid Eros. There were thousands of larvae all over that rock. I could have sent them to kill him. I could have taken over some weaker soul armed with a deadly weapon and sent him to kill the boy. If they had wanted him dead, he could have been killed.”

  “That takes some of the glory out of his victory,” said Graff.

  “And yours, too. But I had not yet acquired the gift of speech, except through that game, because the Hive Queens didn’t grasp the concept of communicating through sound waves. I tried to tell him, I tried to tell you, that the war is over, we give up, we didn’t know we were killing sentient beings because how could we know? You only did mouth-flapping animal noises instead of real communication. So we accepted our limitations, and accepted death, except for the one fertilized larval Queen who pupated after Ender killed all the others. He carried her to Lusitania, and there she thrives.”

  Graff knew his mind was reeling. But outwardly he remained calm. He was too old and experienced to get all emotional just because he found stuff out.

  Besides, no matter what the Hive Queens—no matter what this artificial intelligence—thought they were doing, Ender whipped them and he whipped them good. And in war, that’s what victory looks like.

  “So you and this other Hive Queen—”

  “I’m not and never was a Hive Queen,” said Jane. “Over the years, I became Andrew Wiggin’s constant companion. His second-most-loyal friend—”

  “After Valentine,” said Graff.

  “I protected his investments—he’s now the richest human being alive, though nobody knows it. I took over your finances, too, after he found out how rich he was and asked me to take care of you. Valentine, too. So you’re probably the second or third richest human. You’re welcome.”

  “You could have a career on Wall Street.”

  “No,” said Jane. “They’d send me to jail. If they could find me. Because I only made retroactive stock purchases.”

  “You only bought stocks you knew would go up.”

  “I didn’t have foreknowledge, I had retroaction. When a stock was triumphant, I changed all the records to show that Andrew—and, later, you and Valentine—had bought into them on the ground floor. With relatively modest purchases, nothing that would cause people to try to put you on the board of directors. And nothing traceable, mostly because the few times anybody tried to find you, I made all their searches ether out.”

  “So my wealth is crookedly obtained.”

  “Almost everybody’s wealth is crookedly obtained,” said Jane. “But you knew nothing about it, and you’ll probably never take much advantage of it. You had the most powerful job in the human race for quite a long time. The power that comes with wealth would feel silly to you. It’s just convenient to know that when I needed to transport you in a starship, I could use your money to buy you one.”

  “So you bought me this ship.”

  “Actually, one of your companies already owned it. I just appropriated it.”

  “I own a company that thinks it needs a starship?”

  “Well, I misled you earlier. This craft is behaving like a starship—you’ve gone from one end of the human-colonized portion of the galaxy to the other—but it never had to accelerate.”

  “Because you took me outside the universe of organized matter and brought me back in, instantaneously, at another spot,” said Graff.

  “The nice thing about transporting you in stasis was that you did not have a creative flurry and bring into being whatever people or creatures your inmost desires would have created. The ship came back into the universe with you as its only passenger.”

  “The starship was only for life support, then,” said Graff. “Not transportation.”

  “This rendezvous will work better if the Giant’s children think that they’re encountering a spaceship, instead of my picking you up and putting you inside their ship.”

  “Haven’t you explained things to them?”

  “If I started talking to them on their ship, it would take them about five minutes to locate my software and expunge it from their machinery.”

  “So you want me to be your ambassador.”

  “To break the ice with them, so to speak,” said Jane.

  “And why would they listen to an old man like me?”

  “You knew their father.”

  “Their father didn’t like me. He didn’t trust me.”

  “Then he behaved rationally,” said Jane. “You are not to be trusted. You always have your own agenda.”

  “Not now I don’t. I don’t understand anything about this situation, I have no plan, I don’t even have a desired outcome. I can’t manipulate people in general, I have to have an aim in view.”

  “Your aim is to get them to listen to me long enough for me to show them what’s happening and explain to them why the human race needs their help.”

  “Why should I try to get them to do that? Even assuming that I can, which I don’t assume.”

  “Because you still want the human race to survive. You’ve invested so many years in that project, I know you’ll want to see it through.”

  “You’re human now. You do it.”

  “I wear a human body, back on Lusitania,” said Jane. “But I’m definitely not human. Not Hive Queen, either.”

  “I am that I Am,” said Graff softly.

  “I know the quotation, but it never made sense to me or to anyone else,” said Jane.

  “You think you’re God.”

  “I’m not delusional. You’re the one who acted in God’s place.”

  “And now you want me to be one of your angels, serving your purposes.”

  “If you accept them fully, they’ll become your purposes, too. Believe me, we’re allies in this.”

  “Is this what I made other people feel like? Helpless tools in my hands?”

  “Not at all,” said Jane. “You made them feel like heroes, nobly cleaning out the Augean Stables or fighting the Hydra.”

  “So I’m better at this than you are—manipulating and exploiting people, I mean.”

  “I’m less deceptive than you,” said Jane. “You can freely choose to help, or not.”

  “No punishment, if I choose not to?”

  “If you choose not to, I have no use for you.”

  “So I lose life support?”

  “I would never,” said Jane.

  “Meaning that you don’t yet see a need for that.”

  “Because I know you’re going to serve me in this.”

  “Why do you think you know me so well, when this is the first conversation we’ve ever had?”

  “Ender knew your heart, Hyrum Graff, better than you have ever known yourself.”

  “But he’s dead,” said Graff, surprised that there was a catch in his voice when he said it.

  “I told you that he controlled the new Valentine’s mind up to the moment he gave her brain and body to me. He didn’t wipe out the memories she had acquired.”

  “So your new body used to be Andrew Wiggin.”

  “My memory includes many things that Ender knew and felt and remembered and loved. To the degree that Ender knew you, I know you.”

  “Nobody ever knows anybody.”

  “Partly true. Our ignorance of other people is not equal across the whole range. Some people we are far less ignorant of than others.”

  “So Ender was less ignorant of me than . . .”

  “Than you were ignorant of yourself. Much of his genius was the ability to guess at other people’s goals and needs and feelings, and be right more often than usual.”

  “He knew me better than I know myself. And now you’ve inherited that knowledge, though you claim to be a completely different self. Are you as empathetic as Ender was?”

  “Nobody I ever knew came close, not even me. But then, he wasn’t watching you all day every day that you’ve been awake over the past millennium, so I have my own sources of information. Between us, we’re experts in the mind and heart of Hyrum Graff.”

  “Then my dear guardian angel Jane, why don’t you take that knowledge and become acquainted with Bean’s children without hauling me across the galaxy?”

  “A tiny sliver of the galaxy. And I already told you. You will present yourself to them as the possessor of an actual human body, a person their father knew. I’m a voice speaking out of a ship’s computer. They would wipe me out without a moment’s thought.”

  “Why do you think they won’t do the same to me?”

  “I don’t think it.”

  “You ‘know’ it? A statement people make only when they expect to be doubted.”

  “I don’t know it. I don’t even think it. But I hope they’ll treat you with decency and respect.”

  “Because I once really irritated their dead father, and preferred Andrew Wiggin to him at every turn?”

  “Because you’re really old and helpless, and they’re not cruel.”

  “You’re relying on pity to keep me alive?”

  “Nothing wrong with pity. Along with mercy, it’s what makes civilization possible.”

  * * *

  Graff disliked having been drafted into Jane’s cause, even if it had begun as Ender’s. It was hard to trust Ender’s judgment, since he had secretly carried with him what amounted to a cutting from a poisonous garden. Why had the human race gone to so much trouble to defeat and destroy the Hive Queens, if Ender was going to restore them somewhere else?

  Then again, Graff had been increasingly aware of his own futility as Minister of Colonization, mostly in absentia. Retirement had been unthinkable, because it was only as MinCol that he had the resources to remain in stasis for decades and, apparently, centuries on end. For Graff, retirement was synonymous with quick death, for with a lifetime like his, living out even a decade or two on some farm or city apartment would feel like a brief moment of wasted time, since he wouldn’t know what was going on anywhere except the local weather.

  Jane had done him a service, even if that had not been her purpose. Saving the human race from a universally destructive viral epidemic deliberately created on a particular planet by a particular alien enemy was a different kind of war, but war it was. Graff had fought the last civilizational war by assembling a leadership team that would never have come together without his intervention, for his reach had extended far beyond the mere testing and recruitment of children.

  He had been required to see to it that the International Fleet was commanded by leaders who would actually put the best of the children in charge of the invasion forces. And he had used his influence to support a Hegemon with the diplomatic ability and economic clout to win the cooperation of the entire human race in financing, designing, building, and staffing the fleet itself—the largest building project in all of human history.

  Graff had been completely unqualified for the job; if someone had been hiring, he wouldn’t have made it through the first interview. And yet the job needed to be done. So he had persuaded one person at a time to cooperate, to play their role in a much larger project that he never explained to anybody but himself. The war had been only a part of it; the ultimate goal had been to disperse the human species among many different worlds. And that job was now well begun; it would continue without Graff’s tweaking.

  Now there was a new challenge, but Graff thought of it with weariness. Haven’t I done enough?

  Well, no. His own resistance to any kind of retirement was proof of that. It’s the problem that always arises when an ambitious person has met all his outrageous goals. What now? What does any of it mean?