So he thought: Too bad she isn't here to write a biography of Petra.
Though of course that was silly--she didn't have to be there, she had access to any documents she wanted through the ansible, since one of the key provisions of Graff's ColMin was the absolute assurance that every colony had complete access to every library and repository of records in all the human worlds.
It wasn't until the seventh volume came out and Peter read The Hive Queen that he found the biographer that made him think: I want him to write about me.
The Hive Queen wasn't long. And while it was well written, it wasn't particularly poetic. It was very simple. But it painted a picture of the Hive Queens that was as they might have written it themselves. The monsters that had frightened children for more than a century--and continued to do so even though all were now dead--suddenly became beautiful and tragic.
But it wasn't a propaganda job. The terrible things they did were recognized, not dismissed.
And then it dawned on him who wrote it. Not Valentine, who rooted things in fact. It was written by someone who could understand an enemy so well that he loved him. How often had he heard Petra quote what Ender said about that? She--or Bean, or somebody--had written it down. "I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."
That's what the writer of The Hive Queen, who called himself Speaker for the Dead, had done for the aliens who once haunted our nightmares.
And the more people read that book, the more they wished they had understood their enemy, that the language barrier had not been insuperable, that the Hive Queens had not all been destroyed.
The Speaker for the Dead had made humans love their ancient enemy.
Fine, it's easy to love your enemies after they're safely dead. But still. Humans give up their villains only reluctantly.
It had to be Ender. And so Peter had written to Valentine, congratulating her, but also asking her to invite Ender to write about him. There was some back and forth, with Peter insisting that he didn't want approval of anything. He wanted to talk to his brother. If a book emerged from it, fine. If the book painted him to be a monster, if that's what Speaker for the Dead saw in him, so be it. "Because I know that whatever he writes, it'll be a lot closer than most of the kuso that gets published here."
Valentine scoffed at his use of words like kuso. "What are you doing using Battle School slang?"
"It's just part of the language now," Peter told her in an answering email.
And then she wrote, "He won't email you. He doesn't know you anymore, he says. The last he saw of you, he was five years old and you were the worst older brother in the world. He has to talk to you."
"That's expensive," Peter wrote back, but in fact he knew the FPE could afford it and would not refuse him. What really held him back was fear. He had forgotten that Ender had only known him as a bully. Had never seen him struggle to build a world government, not by conquest, but by free choice of the people voting nation by nation. He doesn't know me.
But then Peter told himself, Yes he does. The Peter that he knew is part of the Peter who became Hegemon. The Peter that Petra agreed to marry and permitted to raise children with her, that Peter was the same one that had terrorized Ender and Valentine and was filled with venom and resentment at having been deemed unworthy by the judges who chose which children would grow up to save the world.
How much of my achievement was the acting out of that resentment?
"He should interview Mother," Peter wrote back. "She's still lucid and she likes me better than she used to."
"He writes to her," said Valentine. "When he has time to write to anyone. He takes his duties here very seriously. It's a small world, but he governs it as carefully as if it were Earth."
Finally Peter swallowed his fears and set a date and time and now he sat down at vocal interface of the ansible in the Blackstream Interstellar Communication Center. Of course, BICC didn't communicate directly with any ansible except ColMin's Stationary Ansible Array, which relayed everything to the appropriate colony or starship.
Audio and video were so wasteful of bandwidth that they were routinely compressed and then reinflated at the other end, so despite the instantaneity of ansible communications, there was a noticeable timelag between sides of the conversation.
No picture. Peter had to draw the line somewhere. And Ender hadn't insisted. It would be too painful for both of them--for Ender to see how much time had passed during his relativistic voyage out to Shakespeare, and for Peter to be forced to see how young Ender still was, how much life he still had ahead of him while Peter was looking coolly at his own old age and approaching death.
"I'm here, Ender."
"It's good to hear your voice, Peter."
And then silence.
"No small talk, is there?" said Peter. "It's been too long a time for me, too brief a time for you. Ender, I know I was a slumbitch to you as a kid. No excuses. I was full of rage and shame and I took it out on you and Valentine but mostly on you. I don't think I ever said a kind thing to you, not when you were awake anyway. I can talk about that if you want."
"Later maybe," said Ender. "This isn't a family therapy session. I just want to know what you did and why."
"Which things I did?"
"The ones that matter to you," said Ender. "What you choose to tell me is as important as what you say about those events."
"There's a lot. My mind is still clear. I remember a lot."