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"And run away, if you had any brains"

"No, Val," said Ender sadly "I wanted to get up and kill hiht I deserved, or how I thought it would bring me peace, or at least oblivion None of that was in my head by then It was just: Live Live, whatever it takes Even if you have to kill to do it"

"Wow," said Valentine "You've just discovered the survival instinct Everybody else has known about it for years"

"There are people who don't have that instinct, not the sa the house to save a baby Posthumously, mind you But all sorts of honors"

"They have the instinct," said Valentine "They just care about so else more"

"I don't," said Ender "Care about anything more"

"You let hiht him," said Valentine "Only when you knew you couldn't hurt hiive me any more of this crap about how you're still the same evil person who killed those other boys You proved that you could win by deliberately losing Done Enough Please don't pick a fight with anybody again unless you intend to win it All right? Promise?"

"No proet killed I still have things to do"

AFTERWORD

I never o this way I was supposed to spend a few chapters getting Ender froes But I found that all the real story setting up the confrontation on Ganges took place earlier, and to my own consternation, I ended up with a novel which mostly takes place between chapters 14 and 15 of Ender's Game

But as I wrote it, I knew this was the true story, and one that had beenThe war ends You cos that happened in the war Only Ender doesn't get to come home He has to deal with that, too

Yet none of this inal novel, anyfrom the novelette version before the novel ritten If, at the end of chapter 14, we had then had Ender in Exile, neither story would have worked For one thing, Exile is partly a sequel to Shadow of the Giant--that's where Virlomi's, Randi's, and Achilles/Randall/Arkanian's stories are left hanging, in need of this resolution For another, Ender's Game ends as it should The story you've just read works better as it is here--in a separate book The book of the soldier after the war

Except for one tiny problem When I wrote the novel Ender's Game back in 1984, my focus in the last chapter, chapter 15, was entirely on setting up Speaker for the Dead I had no notion of any sequel between those two books So I was rather careless and cavalier with my account of Ender's tiot that on all but the last formic planet, there would have been huo? Of course they would begin colonizing the formic worlds And those who sent the people trained to do whatever jobs they anticipated would be necessary

So while the ht, the details and timeline are not They aren't what they should have been then, and they certainly aren't what they need to be now Since writing that chapter, I have written stories like "Invests), where Ender ally coe on a planet called Sorelledolce; but this contradicted the timeline stated in Ender's Ga, not the later stories, which took more details into account and developed the story in a superior way

Why should I be stuck noith decisions carelessly ht; those contradictory but uni