posted
_Ender in Exile_ takes place before _Shadows in Flight_, obviously. But does it also take place before the first chapter of SiF? Before Bean dies? And if so, does Bean ever find out what happened to that ninth child?
Also, how does Bean react to Ender being hated because of the Speaker for the Dead's book the Hive Queen? Does he ever discover that Ender and the original Speaker are the same person?
One more question, though it's not actually related to Bean. When is Starways Congress formed? _Investment Consular_ places it at 300 years after Ender leaves Earth, but _Speaker for the Dead_ seems to place it at around 1000 years. Actually, that's just the adoption of the Starways Code. Still, it is somewhat confusing.
This is what I think Bean's final chapter might look like, if some of the answers to the questions above are yes.
One thousands years, thought Bean. It has been one thousand years. That is how long I've been waiting. And they really are still loyal, even though I doubt any of them know who they are being loyal to.
Actually, it had been one thousand, one hundred and six years since Bean had made his wager against Mazer Rackham. Earth had long since been rendered insignificant - Peter Wiggin, the great Hegemon, had failed to completely eliminate interspecies competition. The ones most prone to it had simply been sent off-world, but some managed to escape. 400 years later, they had won the world elections and attempted to rule "The Earth Empire", ad they called it, by imposing heavy taxes and tariffs. While some of the newer worlds complied, the governments of the majority of the colony worlds brought back warships instead. They colony worlds and Earth had battled for over 6 centuries - the longest battle to date - and Earth was completely defeated and exhausted in the end. Humiliated, the Free People of Earth government had collapsed, allowing the colony worlds to take control of the ansible. Eventually, the leaders of the colony worlds who defeated Earth set the world of birth under a new government. It was modelled after the FPE but would have no independence from the Interstellar Confederation, the temporary alliance that would evolve to become the Hundred Worlds. The Spacefleet of the Earth, which was once known as International Fleet when it destroyed the buggers home world, was placed under its control. But somehow, through all that turmoil, the Fantasy Game has stayed alive and continued the research into finding a cure for Bean.
Mazer has done well, thought Bean.
Despite its survival, the research reports that Bean received showed that the Fleet was no closer to finding a cure for Beans condition than it was the day he had left Earth. They did find out other things, such as how Anton's Key didn't just control growth but also turned on a second Key, which caused the brain to organize itself more efficently and to produce smaller neurons. It was now possible to genetically engineer someone who was smarter than any other human being in the galaxy, with the exception of Bean and his children. The research had also shown that the molecular structurs that Anton's Key set up were complete by the end of the second trimester, and that they were irreversible and irremovable. There was to be no cure for anyone aboard Bean's ship.
Bean and his children, Ender, Carlotta, and Julian were traveling on one of the fastest ships that had ever been built by human hands. With its superior gravity generators, unchanged in even the newest models of ships, they were able to travel as close to the speed of light as the limits of human technology would let them. So for the past thousand years, or the past 2 years for Bean, they had traveled the edges of the galaxy, and sending the fleet reports about possible new worlds via the ansible. THey had done this through the program that had once been the Fantasy Game, which would find an appropriate monitor to display the anonymous report, so that no one would know about Bean and his ship. Bean had defied the expectations of the I.F.'s doctors, living 18 months past their projections for his life expectancy at Earth gravity. Bean wished that he could turn the gravity off, but he knew that his children were too long to handle weightlessness. Not too dumb, for they were every bit as smart as he was when he was two years old if not mroe so, but their bodies were still developing, and in weightless colony ships it had been shown that babies needed to spend the first 3 years in Earth gravity or they wouldn't absorb nutrients in the right places and their bobdies would die. Bean didn't think too much about it anyways, figuring that no matter how long he lived, a cure would never be found. So he stayed in his ship with his children, helping humanity expand farther into space but never letting anyone else know his cure. No other baby would ever have Anton's Key if Bean could help it.
Today Bean was going over a report from a colony world that one of his searched had turned up. He was still searching for his ninth child, which had never turned up on Earth. After a month in space he realized that the reason for that might have been because the baby wasn't born on Earth. So he expanded his search, The colony world was far away from him, in fact it was one of the original bugger worlds that had been colonized after Ender destroyed them. Ender, his leader and his friend. Ender Wiggin, who was once worshipped for saving the human race, who was now cured as the evil Xenocide because of someone called the Speaker of the Dead. Bean knew that The Speaker for the Dead's book, The Hive Queen, had to be fiction despite the fact that he had never read the book, because there was no way for any human to know what the buggers had been like, what they had thought or would think of the humans now, thought Bean. Still, now Ender was cursed by the people who had once loved him. Despite the fact that the fault was not his, even if the Speaker for the Dead had been right, Ender could not have known the Bugger's true intentions. He hadn't even known that he was fighting them until after they had been completely destroyed. He thought it was especially ironic that only Ender recieved the blame, that none of the other Battle School children had ever been attacked and criticited the way Ender was. If it was truly a crime, I have far more blame than Ender ever will, thought Bean, because he didn't know the truth and I did.
Bean's console beeped loundly, snapping Bean out of his dark thoughts. The search had turned up another report, written on a different colony world and long forgotten. But this one was different. A conflict had broken out between one of the settlers and a visitor. The settler had died shortly after the visitor left. The official cause was a heart attack by giantism. But the computer had given this report priority over all others, because it had found something that had been overlooked by the colony's doctors, as well as everyone else who had looked at the report over ansible.
"That person had Anton's Key," whispered Bean. He knew then that this person was his lost child. Tears came to his eyes, knowing that he had failed his son, knowing that one of his children had died before him. Then he read the name.
Achilles Flanders II, the report said. The name made Bean's blood boil. Even know, over a thousand years after he had died, Bean's old rivial Achilles still managed to strike against him a powerful blow. One that may never be healed.
Then he read who the visitor was, and his eyes went up. Andrew Wiggin, it said. Bean couldn't help but wonder if that Andrew Wiggin was the Ender, the one he had known back in Eros, and in the orbiting satillite that was Battle School before then. So Bean looked, and after a short while he had been able to deduce 4 things.
1) That Andrew Wiggin was indeed the Ender he had known as a child.
2) Ender had left his colony world and wandered from planet to planet in such a manner that Bean realized that he must have been looking for something. He never stayed in one place longer than 3 weeks.
3) Ender was still alive, and currently exploring a new colony world.
4) That the pattern of distribution of the Hive Queen was closely related to Ender's early flights. That suggested that the Speaker of the Dead was someone who had traveled closely to Ender, at least in the beginning.
Bean knew that he had little time left, and that there would be no point in trying to reach Ender or talk to him. Bean didn't know what it was that Ender was looking for, but he was determined to help his old friend. Since he was unlikely to live long enough to help Ender in his time of need, Bean decided on the most logical substitute. Only one thing was as long lived as either Bean or Ender, and that was the Fantasy Game. Bean would reprogram the Fantasy Game, so after it presented itself to Ender as his accountant, it would be able to help him on his search providing all the resources that the ansible network could offer.
Bean hacked into one of the ansibles which housed the Fantasy Game's current version, It took him a minute to figure out what the code was doing, and then he was amazed. The program was doing something no other program had done before. It was becoming intelligent. Not in the really-good-at-pattern-matching or problem solving kind, but it was becoming intelligent at the human level. It would be a long time before it could converse with any human, but eventually it would surpass even Bean himself. After a long while, Bean decided to speed things up by poking here and there, changing this or that. Make the change happen even faster. Bean doubted that a computer could ever be self-aware the way humans were. But it would become intelligent, smart enough to engage any person in actual conversation. And so much more. Bean figured that with his changed, the process would happen within a mere three centuries instead of the four thousand years he predicted the program would take to get there on its own. That would be only a trip or two for Ender, and then the program would be able to present itself and help him. He programmed in a directive, so that the program would be bound to Ender, perfectly loyal. Bean also made a copy of the modified Fantasy Game onto his own ship. It would be limited, not able to grow as big as the one that roamed the nets, but it too would become intelligent. That one he programmed to take care of his children, after he was gone. So now there were two, one for Ender and one for Bean. He also gave it a face and a name, so that his children would recognize her and trust her. She would personify someone that the children had met only briefly during their time on Earth, but that Bean had made sure they never forgot about.
Out of curiosity, Bean then started to look for the identity of the Speaker for the Dead, wondering if Ender was perhaps in pursuit of this person. He vowed that once he discovered the Speaker's true identity, he'd do all that he coudl to make that person pay for what he did to Ender. Thus determined, Bean traced the distribution lines of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon back to their source. After several hours, Bean was faced with one conclusion.
Ender, Bean thought, how ironic that you used the story of the Buggers to precipitate your own downfall.
Six months later, Bean had a heart attack and died. Julian, expert that he was with propulsion technology, had converted an escape pod for Bean. Together the three children held a funeral and then launched Bean in the escape pod back to Earth. It had its own gravity drive so that it would be able to slow down and land on the planet, so that someone could bury Bean in Blackstream, his old home. Then the children looked at each other, and wondered what to do next.
A face appeared on the main computer screen. This suprised the children very much, who had never seen the computer act on its own. It worried them, that the system might have been malfunctioning.
"Don't fret," said Petra. "I'll take care of you."
Posts: 31 | Registered: Oct 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
One thing I have always kinda wondered is how Ender's Jeesh would've reacted to Ender becoming the "worst" person in history. It doesn't take much of a stretch of the ol' imagination to get how they'd react to it, though.
Posts: 50 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Alas, this posting constitutes 'fan fiction' - which I cannot allow on my site (since it infringes the rights that Warner and TOR hold in license from me; and because I truly believe it stultifies a writer's creativity to waste time writing in somebody else's universe).
I know, I wrote in Asimov's universe once, and once in Bradbury's. But I had permission in advance, and I didn't tread in any storyline they had ever touched. Anyway, that's why I'm NOT going to read what you wrote once I saw that you were starting to write a chapter of a book I'M GOING TO BE WRITING. I'm locking this thread; and in a day I'll be taking it down permanently. So I hope you have retained a copy if you want one.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
| IP: Logged |
Topic Closed
Printer-friendly view of this topic
