"Only two years if you're aboard the ship."
"But if you ever came back, everybody you knew on Earth would be dead--"
"That was what I had in mind. I was hoping, though, that someone I knew on Eros might come with me."
"I don't want to go to a world we stole from the buggers. I just want to go home."
"Ender, you're never going back to Earth. I saw to that before I left." He looked at her in silence.
"I tell you that now, so that if you want to hate me, you can hate me from the beginning."
They went to Ender's tiny compartment in the ISL and she explained. Peter wanted Ender back on Earth, under the protection of the Hegemon's Council. "The way things are right now, Ender, that would put you effectively under Peter's control, since half the council now does just what Peter wants. The ones that aren't Locke's lapdogs are under his thumb in other ways."
"Do they know who he really is?"
"Yes. He isn't publicly known, but people in high places know him. It doesn't matter any more. He has too much power for them to worry about his age. He's done incredible things, Ender."
"I noticed the treaty a year ago was named for Locke."
"That was his breakthrough. He proposed it through his friends from the public policy nets, and then Demosthenes got behind it, too. It was the moment he had been waiting for, to use Demosthenes' influence with the mob and Locke's influence with the intelligentsia to accomplish something noteworthy. It forestalled a really vicious war that could have lasted for decades."
"He decided to be a statesman?"
"I think so. But in his cynical moments, of which there are many, he pointed out to me that if he had allowed the League to fall apart completely, he'd have had to conquer the world piece by piece. As long as the Hegemony existed, he could do it in one lump."
Ender nodded. "That's the Peter that I knew."
"Funny, isn't it? That Peter would save millions of lives."
"While I killed billions."
"I wasn't going to say that
."
"So he wanted to use me?"
"He had plans for you, Ender. He would publicly reveal himself when you arrived, going to meet you in front of all the videos. Ender Wiggin's older brother, who also happened to be the great Locke, the architect of peace. Standing next to you, he would look quite mature. And the physical resemblance between you is stronger than ever. It would be quite simple for him, then, to take over."
"Why did you stop him?"
"Ender, you wouldn't be happy spending the rest of your life as Peter's pawn."
"Why not? I've spent my life as someone's pawn."
"Me too. I showed Peter all the evidence that I had assembled, enough to prove in the eyes of the public that he was a psychotic killer. It included full-color pictures of tortured squirrels and some of the monitor videos of the way he treated you. It took some work to get it all together, but by the time he saw it, he was willing to give me what I wanted. What I wanted was your freedom and mine."
"It's not my idea of freedom to go live in the house of the people that I killed."
"Ender, what's done is done. Their worlds are empty now, and ours is full. And we can take with us what their worlds have never known--cities full of people who live private, individual lives, who love and hate each other for their own reasons. In all the bugger worlds, there was never more than a single story to be told; when we're there, the world will be full of stories, and we'll improvise their endings day by day. Ender, Earth belongs to Peter. And if you don't go with me now, he'll have you there, and use you up until you wish you'd never been born. Now is the only chance you'll get to get away."
Ender said nothing.
"I know what you're thinking, Ender. You're thinking that I'm trying to control you just as much as Peter or Graff or any of the others."
"It crossed my mind."
"Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore."