Peter's Office, the Hegemony Compound, Late Night Monday
To say that the day had not gone the way Peter would've liked it - even if he'd seen this one coming a century ago, albeit in a completely different, less ridiculous form - would be an understatement. He'd been prepared; even practically, with at least one aide who'd been shadowing much of the work Envy had been doing while she was here and who was ready to take over her most vital tasks at any moment.
It still hurt.
And he didn't have time for that right now.
In between email exchanges with the Russians, Graff, several informants in China and Syria, and one terse email to Bean, he found himself flicking back to the large data package he'd been compiling for Valentine for a while now; he'd been sending it over in chunks over the past few days. Somewhere along the line, flicking became writing, and by the time the night officially hit too late to actually be up working, he'd written a comprehensive letter to his sister to go along with the comprehensive history archive.
He might have exchanged one or two letters to Valentine in the time since she'd left. Cordial. Short. Technical.
He'd been trying to avoid admitting that he missed his sister.
That was something he could change, at least: a way to pour his sudden onslaught of sentimentality of late into something useful.
To: demosthenes@LastBestHopeOfEarth.pol
From: PeterWiggin@hegemony.gov/hegemon
Re: While you were out
I had one of my staff run a set of calculations about how long it has been for you since you began your relativistic voyage into the future. At best he could give me only a range of possible subjective durations - a few weeks, anyway. For me, a couple of years. So I am fairly safe in saying that I miss you a great deal more than you miss me. At present you probably still think that you will never miss me at all.
I am at war. My force is tiny but growing, commanded by - of all people - Ender's old friend Bean. The other children from Ender's jeesh - Battle School slang for "army," but it's caught on here and that's what they're called - spent some time kidnapped by the Russians, inspired by a conniving little bastard named Achilles, who was kicked out of Battle School. Then after that, they fanned out, and now they're all trying to kill each other. Thus, my crisis at present.
Luckily, they're a little more scattershot than my previous nemesis. Achilles was Hitler with stealth, Stalin with brains, Mao with energy, Pol Pot with subtlety - name your monster, and Achilles had all the inconvenient virtues to make him very hard to stop and even harder to kill. Bean did it, eventually, but not before I did a few things that were truly stupid.
I'm sure you're not surprised.
I'm doing better now. I'm slowly but surely working the rest of the world into my pocket.
I wish you were here.
I wish Ender was here, too. The trouble is that these Battle School kids are all so cynical. They don't believe in anything. Certainly they don't believe in ME. Just because Achilles tried to kill them and now they're all trying to kill each other, and that has everyone terrified, they think they don't owe Ender Wiggin's big brother their lifelong personal service. (That was a joke. They owe me nothing.)
Wars here and there around the world, shifting alliances - it's what I predicted would happen after the Battle School kids came home. They're such excellent weapons - potentially devastating, but no fallout, no mushroom clouds. Somehow, though, I always saw myself riding the crest of the wave. Now I find myself sucked down to the bottom of the wave so I can barely tell which way is up and I'm constantly running out of air. I get to the top, gasp, and then a new wave crashes me back down.
A few privileges inhere to this office dating back to its Stone Age origins. Minister of Colonization Graff tells me I have unlimited access to the ansible - I can talk to you whenever I want. Congratulate me for not abusing it. I know you're writing a history of Battle School, and I thought you could use some information about the careers of the more prominent Battle School grads, for an epilogue, perhaps. Ender's jeesh fought the formics and won; but all the others are now involved, one way or another, as captives or servants or leaders or figureheads or victims, in the military planning and action of every nation lucky enough to have a single graduate and strong enough to hold on to him.
So steel yourself for reams of information. Graff tells me that it will take weeks to send it all from his office (in the old Battle School station now), but that at your end it will seem to arrive all at once. I hope it doesn't annoy your ship's captain too much - I understand it's a nobody, not Mazer Rackham after all - but what I'm sending goes with hegemony priority, which means he won't be able to read any of this and any messages HE'S expecting will have to wait. Give him my apologies. Or not, as you see fit.
Do you remember Natalie? I might have mentioned her once or twice. She goes by Envy now, and up until today, she was my Chief of Staff and the most loyal of my friends. She's ruthless and ambitious, but she has this heart-- and now I can hear you saying, Peter, what do you know about hearts, so I'm going to stop it right there.
Instead, I'll tell you the truth: I have never been so alone in my life. I wish for you every day. Fortunately, Father and Mother have turned out to be surprisingly useful. No, I should have said "helpful." But I'll leave the "useful" there so you can say, "He hasn't changed." They also miss you, and among the information you're getting are letters from both Father and Mother. Also letters from them to Ender. I hope the boy gets over the snit he's in and writes back to them. Missing you has given me some idea of how they feel about Ender (and now you): If he wrote to them it would mean the world. And what would it cost him?
No, I'm not going to write to him myself. I have no stock in that company. Mom and Dad are miserable, having only me as visible proof that they reproduced. Brighten their lives, both of you. What ELSE do you have to do? I picture you gliding along at lightspeed, with servants bringing you juleps and the fawning colonists begging Ender to tell them once again about how the formic home world went boom.
Writing this sometimes feels as if I'm talking to you like old times. But at this moment it's a painful reminder that it's nothing like talking to you at all.
As the official monster of the family, I hope you will compare me to a real monster like Achilles and give me some points for not being as awful as it is possible to be. I also have to tell you that I've learned that when no one else can be trusted - and I mean no one - there is family, and maybe, just maybe, there are friends as close as family.
And yet somehow I managed to be complicit in driving away three of the five people I could trust. Clumsy of me, n'est-ce pas?
I love you, Valentine. I wish I had treated you better from childhood on up. Ender too. Now, happy reading. The world is such a mess, you're glad you aren't here. But I promise you this: I will do all I can to put things back in order and bring peace. Without, I hope, waging too much war along the way.
With all my heart, your bratty brother,
Peter
It was four in the morning by the time he pressed send. With that out of his system, he could finally crawl out of his chair and make the long journey back to his apartment for a few hours of sleep.
[[ can be open for phone calls, messages, etc. letter under the cut taken and adapted from ender in exile. ]]
It still hurt.
And he didn't have time for that right now.
In between email exchanges with the Russians, Graff, several informants in China and Syria, and one terse email to Bean, he found himself flicking back to the large data package he'd been compiling for Valentine for a while now; he'd been sending it over in chunks over the past few days. Somewhere along the line, flicking became writing, and by the time the night officially hit too late to actually be up working, he'd written a comprehensive letter to his sister to go along with the comprehensive history archive.
He might have exchanged one or two letters to Valentine in the time since she'd left. Cordial. Short. Technical.
He'd been trying to avoid admitting that he missed his sister.
That was something he could change, at least: a way to pour his sudden onslaught of sentimentality of late into something useful.
To: demosthenes@LastBestHopeOfEarth.pol
From: PeterWiggin@hegemony.gov/hegemon
Re: While you were out
I had one of my staff run a set of calculations about how long it has been for you since you began your relativistic voyage into the future. At best he could give me only a range of possible subjective durations - a few weeks, anyway. For me, a couple of years. So I am fairly safe in saying that I miss you a great deal more than you miss me. At present you probably still think that you will never miss me at all.
I am at war. My force is tiny but growing, commanded by - of all people - Ender's old friend Bean. The other children from Ender's jeesh - Battle School slang for "army," but it's caught on here and that's what they're called - spent some time kidnapped by the Russians, inspired by a conniving little bastard named Achilles, who was kicked out of Battle School. Then after that, they fanned out, and now they're all trying to kill each other. Thus, my crisis at present.
Luckily, they're a little more scattershot than my previous nemesis. Achilles was Hitler with stealth, Stalin with brains, Mao with energy, Pol Pot with subtlety - name your monster, and Achilles had all the inconvenient virtues to make him very hard to stop and even harder to kill. Bean did it, eventually, but not before I did a few things that were truly stupid.
I'm sure you're not surprised.
I'm doing better now. I'm slowly but surely working the rest of the world into my pocket.
I wish you were here.
I wish Ender was here, too. The trouble is that these Battle School kids are all so cynical. They don't believe in anything. Certainly they don't believe in ME. Just because Achilles tried to kill them and now they're all trying to kill each other, and that has everyone terrified, they think they don't owe Ender Wiggin's big brother their lifelong personal service. (That was a joke. They owe me nothing.)
Wars here and there around the world, shifting alliances - it's what I predicted would happen after the Battle School kids came home. They're such excellent weapons - potentially devastating, but no fallout, no mushroom clouds. Somehow, though, I always saw myself riding the crest of the wave. Now I find myself sucked down to the bottom of the wave so I can barely tell which way is up and I'm constantly running out of air. I get to the top, gasp, and then a new wave crashes me back down.
A few privileges inhere to this office dating back to its Stone Age origins. Minister of Colonization Graff tells me I have unlimited access to the ansible - I can talk to you whenever I want. Congratulate me for not abusing it. I know you're writing a history of Battle School, and I thought you could use some information about the careers of the more prominent Battle School grads, for an epilogue, perhaps. Ender's jeesh fought the formics and won; but all the others are now involved, one way or another, as captives or servants or leaders or figureheads or victims, in the military planning and action of every nation lucky enough to have a single graduate and strong enough to hold on to him.
So steel yourself for reams of information. Graff tells me that it will take weeks to send it all from his office (in the old Battle School station now), but that at your end it will seem to arrive all at once. I hope it doesn't annoy your ship's captain too much - I understand it's a nobody, not Mazer Rackham after all - but what I'm sending goes with hegemony priority, which means he won't be able to read any of this and any messages HE'S expecting will have to wait. Give him my apologies. Or not, as you see fit.
Do you remember Natalie? I might have mentioned her once or twice. She goes by Envy now, and up until today, she was my Chief of Staff and the most loyal of my friends. She's ruthless and ambitious, but she has this heart-- and now I can hear you saying, Peter, what do you know about hearts, so I'm going to stop it right there.
Instead, I'll tell you the truth: I have never been so alone in my life. I wish for you every day. Fortunately, Father and Mother have turned out to be surprisingly useful. No, I should have said "helpful." But I'll leave the "useful" there so you can say, "He hasn't changed." They also miss you, and among the information you're getting are letters from both Father and Mother. Also letters from them to Ender. I hope the boy gets over the snit he's in and writes back to them. Missing you has given me some idea of how they feel about Ender (and now you): If he wrote to them it would mean the world. And what would it cost him?
No, I'm not going to write to him myself. I have no stock in that company. Mom and Dad are miserable, having only me as visible proof that they reproduced. Brighten their lives, both of you. What ELSE do you have to do? I picture you gliding along at lightspeed, with servants bringing you juleps and the fawning colonists begging Ender to tell them once again about how the formic home world went boom.
Writing this sometimes feels as if I'm talking to you like old times. But at this moment it's a painful reminder that it's nothing like talking to you at all.
As the official monster of the family, I hope you will compare me to a real monster like Achilles and give me some points for not being as awful as it is possible to be. I also have to tell you that I've learned that when no one else can be trusted - and I mean no one - there is family, and maybe, just maybe, there are friends as close as family.
And yet somehow I managed to be complicit in driving away three of the five people I could trust. Clumsy of me, n'est-ce pas?
I love you, Valentine. I wish I had treated you better from childhood on up. Ender too. Now, happy reading. The world is such a mess, you're glad you aren't here. But I promise you this: I will do all I can to put things back in order and bring peace. Without, I hope, waging too much war along the way.
With all my heart, your bratty brother,
Peter
It was four in the morning by the time he pressed send. With that out of his system, he could finally crawl out of his chair and make the long journey back to his apartment for a few hours of sleep.
[[ can be open for phone calls, messages, etc. letter under the cut taken and adapted from ender in exile. ]]