He held a finger to his lips. He walked over to the farthest crib. "Ramon," he whispered.
She came and stood over the crib.
Peter reached down and flipped something. A paper.
"What is it?" she asked. In a whisper.
He shrugged.
If he didn't know what it was, why had he pointed it out to her?
She pulled it out from under Ramon. It was an envelope, but it didn't contain much.
Peter took her gently by the elbow and guided her out the door. Once they were in the hall, he said softly, "You can't read in that light. And when Ramon wakes up, he's going to look for it and be very upset if it isn't there."
"What is it?"
"Ramon's paper," said Peter. "Petra, Bean put it there before he left. I mean, not there. It was in Rotterdam. But he tucked it under Ramon's diaper as he was lying asleep in bed. He meant you to find it there. So it's been there every night of his life. It's only been peed on twice."
"From Bean."
The emotion she could deal with best was anger. "You knew he had written this and--"
Peter kept the both of them moving out of the hall and into the parlor. "He didn't give it to me or anyone else to deliver. Unless you count Ramon. He gave it to Ramon's butt."
"But to make me wait a year before--"
"Nobody thought it would be a year, Petra." He said it very gently, but the truth of it stung. He always had the power to sting her, and yet he never shrank from doing it.
"I'll leave you alone to read it," he said.
"You mean you didn't come here for my homecoming so you could find out what was in it?"
"Petra." Mrs. Delphiki stood in the doorway to the parlor. She looked mildly shocked. "Peter didn't come here for you. He's here all the time."
Petra looked at Peter and then back and Mrs. Delphiki. "Why?"
"They climb all over him. And he puts them down for their nap. They obey him a lot better than me."
The thought of the Hegemon of Earth coming over to play with her children seemed freakish to her. And then it seemed worse than freakish. It seemed completely unfair. She pushed him. "You came to my house and played with my children?"
He didn't show any reaction; he also stood his ground. "They're great kids."
"Let me find that out, will you? Let me find it out for myself!"
"Nobody's stopping you."
"You were stopping me! I was doing your work in Moscow, and you were here playing with my kids!"
"I offered to bring them to you."
"I didn't want them in Moscow, I was busy."
"I offered you leave to come home. Time after time."
"And let the work fall apart?"
"Petra," said Mrs. Delphiki. "Peter has been very good to your children. And to me. And you're behaving very badly."
"No, Mrs. Delphiki," said Peter. "This is only slightly badly. Petra's a trained soldier and the fact that I'm still standing--"
"Don't tease me out of this." Petra burst into tears. "I've lost a year of my babies' lives and it was my own fault, do you think I don't know that?"
There was a crying sound from one of the bedrooms.
Mrs. Delphiki rolled her eyes and went down the hall to rescue whoever it was that needed rescuing.
"You did what you had to do," said Peter. "Nobody's criticizing you."
"But you could take time for my children."
"I don't have any of my own," said Peter.
"Is that my fault?"
"I'm just saying I had time. And...I owed it to Bean."
"You owe more than that."
"But this is what I can do."
She didn't want Peter Wiggin to be the father figure in her children's lives.
"Petra, I'll stop if you want. They'll wonder why I don't come, and then they'll forget. If you don't want me here, I'll understand. This is yours and Bean's, and I don't want to intrude. And yes, I did want to be here when you opened that."
"What's in it?"
"I don't know."
"Didn't have one of your guys steam it open for you?"
Peter just looked a little irritated.
Mrs. Delphiki came into the room carrying Ramon, who was whimpering and saying, "My paper."
"I should have known," said Peter.
Petra held up the envelope. "Here it is," she said.
Ramon reached for it insistently. Petra handed it to him.
"You're spoiling him," said Peter.
"This is your mama, Ramon," said Mrs. Delphiki. "She nursed you when you were little."
"He was the only one that wasn't biting me by the time..." She couldn't think of a way to finish the sentence that wouldn't involve speaking of Bean or the other two children, the ones that had to go on solid food because they got teeth so incredibly young.
Mrs. Delphiki wasn't giving up. "Let your mama see the paper, Ramon."
Ramon clutched it tighter. Sharing was not yet on his agenda.
Peter reached out, snagged the envelope, and held it out to Petra. Ramon immediately began to wail.
"Give it back to him," said Petra. "I've waited this long."
Peter got his finger under the corner, tore it open, and extracted a single sheet of paper. "If you let them get their way just because they cry, you'll raise a bunch of whiny brats that nobody can stand." He handed her the paper, and gave the envelope back to Ramon, who immediately quieted down and started examining the transformed object.
Petra held the paper and was surprised to see that it was shaking. Which meant her hand was shaking. She didn't feel like she was trembling.
And then suddenly Peter was holding her by her upper arms and helping her to the sofa and her legs weren't working very well. "Come on, sit here, it's a shock, that's all."
"I've got your snack all ready," said Mrs. Delphiki to Ramon, who was trying to get his whole forearm inside the envelope.
"Are you all right?" Peter asked.
Petra nodded.
"Want me to go now so you can read this?"
She nodded again.
Peter was in the kitchen saying good-bye to Ramon and Mrs. Delphiki as Andrew padded down the hall. He stopped in the archway of the parlor and said, "Time."
"Yes, it's time, Andrew," said Petra.
She watched him toddle on toward the kitchen. And then a moment later she heard his voice. "Mama," he announced.
"That's right," said Mrs. Delphiki. "Mama's home."
"Bye, Mrs. Delphiki," Peter said. A moment later, Petra heard the door open.
"Wait a minute, Peter!" she called.
He came back inside. He closed the door. As he came back into the parlor she held the paper out to him. "I can't read it."
Peter didn't ask why. Any fool could see the tears in her eyes. "You want me to read it to you?"
"Maybe I can get through it if it isn't his voice I hear," she said.
Peter opened it. "It isn't long."
"I know."
He started reading aloud, softly so only she could hear.
"I love you," he said. "There's one thing we forgot to decide. We can't have two pairs of children with the same name. So I've decided that I'm going to call the Andrew that's with me 'Ender,' because that's the name we called him when he was born. And I'll think of the Andrew that's with you as 'Andrew.'"
The tears were streaming down Petra's face now and she could hardly keep herself from sobbing. For some reason it tore her apart to realize that Bean was thinking about such things before he left.
"Want me to go on?" asked Peter.
She nodded.
"And the Bella that's with you, we'll call Bella. Because the one that's with me, I've decided to call her 'Carlotta.'"
She lost it. Feelings she'd had pent up inside her for a year, feelings that her underlings had begun to think she didn't have, burst out of her now.
But only for a minute. She got control of herself, and then waved to him to continue.
"And even though she isn't with me,
the little girl we named after you, when I tell the kids about her, I'm going to call her 'Poke' so they don't get her confused with you. You don't have to call her that, but it's because you're the only Petra I actually know, and Poke ought to have somebody named after her."
Petra broke down. She clung to Peter and he held her like a friend, like a father.
Peter didn't say anything. No "It's all right" or "I understand," maybe because it wasn't all right and he was smart enough to know he couldn't understand.
When he did speak, it was after she was much calmer and quieter and another of the children had walked past the archway and loudly proclaimed, "Lady crying."
Petra sat up and patted Peter's arm and said, "Thank you. I'm sorry."
"I wish his letter had been longer," said Peter. "It was obviously just a last-minute thought."
"It was perfect," said Petra.
"He didn't even sign it."
"Doesn't matter."
"But he was thinking of you and the children. Making sure you and he would think of all the children by the same names."
She nodded, afraid of starting again.
"I'm going to go now," said Peter. "I won't come back till you invite me."
"Come back when you usually do," she said. "I don't want my homecoming to cost the children somebody they love."
"Thanks," he said.
She nodded. She wanted to thank him for reading it to her and being so decent about her crying all over his shirt, but she didn't trust herself to speak so she just sort of waved.
It was a good thing she had cried herself out. When she went into the kitchen and washed her face and listened to little Petra--to Poke--say, "Lady crying" again, she was able to be very calm and say, "I was crying because I'm so happy to see you. I've missed you. You don't remember me, but I'm your mama."
"We show them your picture every morning and night," said Mrs. Delphiki, "and they kiss the picture."
"Thank you."
"The nurses started it before I came," she said.
"Now I get to kiss my boys and girls myself," she said. "Will that be all right? No more kissing the picture?"
It was too much for them to understand. And if they wanted to keep kissing the picture for a while, that would be fine with her, too. Just like Ramon's envelope. No reason to take away from them something that they valued.
By your father's age, Petra said silently, he was on his own, trying not to starve to death in Rotterdam.
But you're all going to catch up with him and pass him by. When you're in your twenties and out of college and getting married, he'll still be sixteen years old, crawling through time as his starship races through space. When you bury me, he'll not have turned seventeen yet. And your brothers and sister will still be babies. Not as old as you are. It will be as if they never change.
Which means it's exactly as if they had died. Loved ones who die never change, either. They're always the same age in memory.
So what I'm going through isn't something so different. How many women became widows in the war? How many mothers have buried babies that they hardly had time to hold? I'm just part of the same sentimental comedy as everyone else, the sad parts always followed by laughter, the laughter always by tears.
It wasn't until later, when she was alone in her bed, the children asleep for the night, Mrs. Delphiki gone next door--or, rather, to the other wing of the same house--that she was able to bring herself to read Bean's note again. It was in his handwriting. He had done it in a hurry and in spots it was barely legible. And the paper was stained--Peter hadn't been joking about Ramon peeing on the envelope a couple of times.
She turned the light out and meant to go to sleep.
And then something occurred to her and she switched on the light again and fumbled for the paper and her eyes were so bleary she could hardly read, so maybe she had actually fallen asleep, and this thought had woken her out of a sound slumber.
The letter began, "There's one thing we forgot to decide."
But when Peter read it, he had started with "I love you."
He must have scanned over the letter and realized that Bean never said it. That it was just a note that Bean had jotted at the last moment, and Peter worried that she might be hurt by the omission.
He couldn't have known that Bean just didn't put that kind of thing in writing. Except obliquely. Because the whole note said "I love you," didn't it?
She turned the light off again, but still held the letter. Bean's last message to her.
As she drifted off again, the thought passed briefly through her mind: When Peter said it, he wasn't reading at all.
26
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...