Chapter 5 - Valentine

Today I slipped out and said that Lipo is my son. Only bark (note: bark has two meanings, bark and bark. Considering the ecology of the pig family and all the words that appear below in this article refer to the bark of the tree, it is believed that it also refers to the bark. Hear me say it, but within an hour it became a well-known thing. They gathered around me and asked me if it was true, that I was really a father, and then the brute put Lipo's hand together with mine, and I gave Lipo a hug on impulse, and they made a clamor of astonishment, amazement and, I think, awe. I could see that my reputation among them had risen considerably at the moment.

The conclusion is inevitable. All the Pickniños we know so far (Note: Pigs were used in this quotation in earlier versions, but changed to this in later versions.) Considering Pippo's attitude towards the pig clan and his identity, it is clear that this is more appropriate. It's not a whole community, and it's not even a typical male surname. They are either roommen or old widowers. None of them ever became fathers. According to our speculation, there was not even a mating.

I haven't heard of any primitive society (Note: The early version here is a human society, and the new version is a primitive society. Celibate people gather like this as pure expelles, without power, without prestige. No wonder they talk about female surnames with such a strange mixture of admiration and contempt, that they dare not make any decision without their consent, and then they tell us that women are stupid, they don't understand anything, that they are aliens. I had taken these statements literally until then, and as a result, I had in my mind the female surname as an irrational herd of sows, on all fours. I thought that the male surnames might have questioned them in the same way that they asked the trees, using their humming as some kind of oracle, like rolling dice or guttal divination.

Now, however, I realize that the female surname is likely to be as smart as the male in every way, and is not xenogenetic at all. Men's derogatory remarks about surnames are the result of their resentment that they are singles and are excluded from the reproductive process and the power structure of the clan. The Picnino people were just as careful with us as we were - they never let us meet their female surnames or men who really had any power. We thought we were exploring the heart of Pickniño society. Actually, let's say we're in the genetic sewers, among the male surnames whose genes have been judged to be not good for the community.

But I don't believe that. The Picniños I know are all smart and sharp learners. Learning so quickly that I taught them more about human society, unintentionally, than I had learned about their society after years of hard work. If these are the people they have forsaken, I hope that one day they will think that I am qualified to meet "wives" and "fathers".

I can't report any part of this at this time, because I have clearly violated the rules, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Although probably no one can stop the pigs from learning anything about us. Although the rules are stupid and anti-construction. I broke the rules, and if they found out they would cut me off contact with the pigs, it would be worse than the restricted contact we have now. So I was forced to use deceptive and frivolous tricks, such as keeping these notes in Lipo's personal confidential folder, where even my dear wife would not have thought to look for them. This information is extremely important: all the pigs we study have single male surnames, and I dare not reveal anything about them to foreign alien scientists because of the existence of rules. olhabem, gente, aquiester: aciência, obichoquesedevoraasimesma!

――――

Jo?ofigueiraalvarez, Secret Notes, quoted in Demosthenes, The Proper Surname of the Rebellion: Lusitania's Alien Anthropologist, Outlook on Reykjavik History, 1990:4:1

Valentine's big belly was tight, and the daughter inside was still a month away from her due date. It was so bloated and clumsy that it was painful for her. In the past, every time she was preparing to lead the history team on a field expedition, she unloaded a lot of cargo from the ship by herself. Now she had to rely entirely on her husband's sailors to do the work, and she couldn't even get on and off the docks and cabins herself—the captain was directing the loads to keep the hull balanced. He's done a great job, of course—wasn't she taught to her by Captain Ray when she first came here?—but Valentine doesn't like to be forced to be a quiet bystander.

This was her fifth field trip, and it was on this first expedition that she met Jacques at a time when she had no idea of getting married. Trondheim was just one of the other twenty worlds she and her wandering brother had visited. She will learn from others and teach others. In four or five months she would write a new historical essay and publish it under the pseudonym of Demosthenes, and then take pleasure before Ender accepted a request to speak elsewhere. Their work is often perfectly intertwined—he is called in to tell about the death of an important person, and then the story of the deceased becomes the focus of her essays. It's a game of theirs, they pretend they're professors on the move, when in fact they're setting their hearts on the world, because Demosthenes' writings are always used as the spiritual cornerstone of the world.

For a moment she thought that someone must have realized that the writing of the Demosthenes series of essays had suspiciously accompanied her journey, and thus sought out her. But she soon discovered that, in a similar way to the situation of the speakers, albeit to a lesser extent, a myth had developed around Demosthenes. It is believed that Demosthenes was not a person. Instead, each of Demosthenes' essays is the work of a genius who would then try to publish the work under Demosthenes' name, and the computer would automatically submit the work to an anonymous committee of authoritative historians of the day who would decide whether it was worthy of the name. Although no one has ever heard of a scholar receiving such a request for review. Hundreds of articles are submitted each year, computers automatically reject any manuscript that was not written by the real Demosthenes, and people are increasingly clinging to the belief that a person like Valentine could not really exist. After all, Demosthenes began fanning the flames on the Internet three thousand years ago when the Earth was still fighting the Zerg War. Now it is impossible to be the same person behind the name.

Not really, Valentine thought. From book to book, indeed, I am no longer the same person, because each world transforms the person I am, at the same time as I write its story. And this world is especially so.

She had always hated the Protestant way of thinking that prevailed (note: Lutheranism in the original text). But in context, this is a reference to Protestantism as a whole. Calvinists, in particular, seem to have ready-made answers to every question before it is asked. So she came up with the idea of selecting a group of graduate students and taking them out of Reykjavík to one of the islands in the Xia Yue archipelago. This archipelago is part of the equatorial island chain, where the sklicka fish come in the spring to spawn, and schools of fish are driven crazy by the urge to reproduce. She wanted to break the pattern that stinks intellectually stale that exists in all universities, without exception. The students were not allowed to eat anything but the wild oats in the gloomy valley and the fish they had caught with their own courage and wisdom. In the assumption that they have to work hard to obtain food every day, their understanding of what is historically important and what is not will change.

The school reluctantly approved the plan, and she paid out of her own pocket to charter a boat from Jacquet, who had just become the head of one of many families that caught Scricka fish. He had a fisherman-like contempt for the people at the university, calling them tailors to their faces—and the words behind him were even worse. He told Valentine that he would have to come back in a week to help her starving students. Yet she and her others, in their own muttering terms, were the outcasts, who had persevered, and had done well, and had succeeded in establishing a village of modest size, enjoying an unfettered explosion of the idea of the creation caste, the result of which was a remarkable blowout of excellent and profound articles after their return.

In Reykjavík, the most well-known consequence of this event was that Valentine's "hikes" for the next three summers always received hundreds of applications from twenty places. But for her, more important is Jacquet. He didn't have much education, but he knew everything about Trondheim. He could sail half a circle around the equator without even looking at charts. He knows where the iceberg flows, how thick the ice floe is. He seemed to know where the sklicka fish would gather and dance, and how to arrange for his catchers to catch them as they flopped awkwardly from the sea to land unsuspectingly (note: if you don't understand what that is going on, see the salmon migration). The weather never seemed to surprise him, and Valentine didn't think there was anything he wasn't prepared for.

She was the only exception. When the pastor—not a Calvinist but a Lutheran—officiated at their wedding, the couple still seemed more surprised than happy. But they are happy. And, for the first time since leaving Earth, she felt full, in peace, at home. That's why the child grows in her womb. The wandering is over. She was glad that Ender understood this, and that it didn't take him to talk to him that Trondheim was the focus of their three-thousand-mile wandering, the end of Demosthenes' career, and that she had found a way to do it like the Ice Witch. Swedish words. Probably a reference to the antagonist of the first part of the Narnia saga, the White Witch, who draws more power from the ice and snow that lacks life and vitality. Rooted in the frozen soil of this world, absorbing nutrients from the soil elsewhere cannot provide.

The baby was kicking hard, waking her up from her memories. She looked around and saw Ander walking towards her along the docks, his bag slung over his shoulder. She immediately guessed why he was carrying his bags: he was going to camp. She doubted that she would be happy about it. Ender is a man of few words, but he cannot hide his remarkable understanding of people's surnames. The average student would look down on him, but the good ones, the ones she expected to come up with creative ideas, would inevitably follow the obscure but powerful threads he inevitably left behind. The results would be extraordinary, she was sure - after all, she had also had a lot of insight over the years - but it was Ender's brainchild, not a student. In a sense, this would make the original purpose of camping fail.

But when he was coming, she wouldn't say no to him. To be honest, she was very happy to be with him. She misses the kind of intimacy she had always had with Ender before her marriage as much as she loved Jacquet. It would probably be many years before Jacquet and her were as close to her brother as she was with her brother. Jacot knew this, too, and it made him a little uncomfortable, for a husband should not have to compete with his brother-in-law for his wife's love.

"Hey, Valentine's nickname," Ender said.

"Hi Ender. "Alone on the docks, where no one else would hear her, she was free to call him by her nickname, ignoring the fact that the others had turned it into a curse.

"What are you going to do if this little bunny decides to pop out during the camping?"

She smiled. "Her dad would wrap her up in a skrikapi, I would sing her goofy Nordic tunes, and the students would suddenly have a deep understanding of the impact of reproductive behavior on history. ”

They laughed together for a while, and suddenly, Valentine, though she didn't know how she understood, understood that Ander was not here for camping, that he was packing up to leave Trondheim, and that he had not come to invite her along, but to say goodbye to her. The tears in her eyes came uninvited, and she only felt a burst of physical and mental distress. He stepped forward to hug her, as he had done so many times before, but this time, her big belly was between them, and the hug looked clumsy and cringe.

"I thought you'd stay," she whispered, "and you turned down the calls. ”

"Here comes a one I can't refuse. ”

"I could have this baby in camp, but not on another planet. ”

As she expected, Ander didn't want her to go. "A little baby will have dazzling blonde hair," says Ender, "and she will look hopelessly out of place in Lusitania." It was mostly dark-skinned Brazilians. ”

So say Lusitania.

Valentine immediately understood why he was going - the killing of the Pig Clan by the Alien Racist was now a well-known affair and became gossip at the dinner table in Reykjavík. "You're crazy. ”

"It's not really crazy. ”

"Have you ever thought what would happen if people knew that Ender had come to the world of pigs?

"Actually, if no one knew who I was but you, they would have crucified me here. Promise me not to say it. ”

"What are you going to do there? By the time you get there, he's been dead for decades. ”

"When I arrived, the clients I was going to speak for were generally cold. This is the main disadvantage of mobile services. ”

"I never expected to lose you again. ”

"But I believe that when you fall in love with Jacquet, we have already lost each other. ”

"Then you should have told me earlier! I wouldn't have fallen in love with him!"

"That's why I didn't tell you. But that's not the case, Var. You'll do that anyway. And I want you to do that. You've never been happier than ever. He let his hand wrap around her waist. "The genes of the Wiggin family are crying out for survival. I hope you'll give birth to a dozen or more. ”

"To give birth to five is rudeness, six is greed, and beyond that is barbarism. Even in the midst of a joke, she was wondering what best way to handle the camp—let her graduate assistants lead the group, or cancel it, or postpone it until after Ender's departure?

But Ender makes the question pointless. "Do you think your husband can send a ship to take me to port overnight, so I can fly to my spaceship in the morning?"

His haste was brutal. "If you didn't need one of Jacquet's ships, would you leave me a note on your computer?"

"I made that decision five minutes ago, and then I came straight to you. ”

"But you've already booked your tickets - that has to be planned!"

"If you buy a spaceship, you don't need it. ”

"Why are you in such a hurry?

"Twenty-two years. ”

"Twenty-two years! What does it make if it's a few days later or a few days sooner? You can't wait a month until you see my baby born?"

"Var, in a month's time, I may not have the courage to leave you. ”

"Then don't leave! What are those pigs to you? It's enough for a man to run into the Zerg for the rest of his life. Stay, marry like me, you are the one who opened the stars to the colony, Ander, and now stay here and taste the fruits of your career!"

"You've got Jacot. There are only a few annoying students on my side, who are constantly trying to convert me to Calvinism. My career is not over, and Trondheim is not my home. ”

Valentine felt that his words were like an accusation: You yourself have put down roots here, but you have not thought about whether I can survive in this soil. But it wasn't my fault, she wanted to answer - it was you, not me, who was leaving. "Remember what it was like?" she said, "and we left Peter on Earth and began our journey of decades to our first colony, the planet you ruled, and it would be like he died." He was very old before we even got there, but we were still young, and by the time we talked to Ansebo, he had become an old uncle, a master of power, a legendary Loki, a good man of all things, but no longer our brother. ”

"In my memory, it was a kind of growth. Ander tried to make things lighter.

But Valentine misinterpreted his words. "Do you think I'll grow up too, twenty years from now?"

"I think I'm going to grieve for you, more than if you died. ”

"No, Ender, it's like I'm dead, and you'll know you're the one who killed me. ”

He winced. "You're not serious, are you? ”

"I'm not going to write to you. Why am I writing? It's only going to be a week or two for you. You'll arrive in Lusitania and there's a computer with letters you've been giving you 20 years ago from someone who left just a week ago. The first five years were sad, and I regretted the loss of you, and I was alone without you talking to me—"

"Your husband is Jacquet, not me. ”

"And then what do I write? Funny little news about the baby? She will grow up to be five, six, ten, twenty, and get married, and you don't even know her, or even care about her. ”

"I'll care. ”

"You don't have that chance. I won't write to you, Ender, until I'm very old. Until you've been to Lusitania and then somewhere else, swallowing decades of time. Then I will pass on my autobiography to you. I will dedicate it to you. To Andrew, my dear brother. I'm happy to follow you all over the world, but I beg you to stay two more weeks and you won't do it. ”

"Listen to yourself, Var, so you can see why I have to leave now, before you tear me to shreds. ”

"A sophistry that even your students can't fool, Ander! How would I have said these things if you hadn't slipped away like a thief caught red-handed!

He spat out his answer, words rolling out one after another in a hurry, he was racing against his emotions to finish before it could stop him. "Yes, you're right, I want to hurry because there's work to be done there, and here every day is just doing nothing, and because it makes me sad to see you and Jacquet more intimate and more distant from me, even though I know that's how it's supposed to be, so when I decided to go I thought the sooner the better, and I was right about that; I never thought you'd hate me for that. ”

Now the emotions stopped him, and he began to cry, and she cried. "I don't hate you, I love you, you're a part of me, you're my heart, and when you left, my heart was torn apart—"

That's the final conversation.

Ray's first mate sent Ander to the large blue platform above the equatorial sea, from where the space shuttle took off to rendezvous with the ship in orbit. They agreed in silence that Valentine should not go. Instead, she came home to be with her husband and stuck to his arms all night. The next day she continued her camping work with her students, and only cried for Ender at night when she felt no one would see her.

But her students saw it, and the story of Professor Wiggin's heartbroken loss of her brother's travelling speaker spread. The stories they make up are the ones that students often make up - exaggerated and underestimated compared to the facts. But one student, a girl named Prikte, realizes that there must be something else about Valentine and Andrew Wiggin that no one has guessed.

So she began to try to explore their experiences, tracing their trajectories through the stars. When Valentine's daughter Shift was four years old and her son Lun was two years old, Prikte went to visit her. By this time, she was already a young professor at the university and showed Valentine the story of her publication. She published the story as a novel, but of course, it was true, the story of the oldest sibling in the universe, who were born on Earth before any alien colonies were established, and who then wandered and searched from one world to another, rootlessly.

To Valentine's relief—but, strangely, somewhat disappointed—Pricta did not reveal that Ander was the original speaker of the dead, and that Valentine was the business of Demosthenes. But she knew so much about their experiences that she was separated, she stayed with her husband, and the story of his departure was written. The scene was written more heartwarming and touching than it was, and Prikte wrote about what would have happened if Ender and Valentine had had had more theatrical talent.

"Why are you writing this?" asked Valentine.

"Isn't the story itself a good enough reason?"

Valentine liked the question-and-answer reply, but it didn't distract her. "What is my brother Andrew to you to make you study such things to write this book?"

"This is still not the right question. Prikte said.

"Looks like I didn't pass some kind of test. Can you give me a hint as to what questions I should ask?"

"Don't be angry. You should ask me why I wrote this story as a novel and not as a biography. ”

"So, why?"

"Because I found out that Andrew Wiggin, the man who spoke of the deceased, was Ander Vigin, the xenocidaire. ”

Although Ender left four years ago, he is eighteen years away from his destination. Valentine shuddered at the thought of what his life would be like when he arrived in Lusitania as the most notorious man in human history.

"You don't have to be afraid, Professor Wiggin. If I want to say it, I'll say it a long time ago. When I found out about this, I understood that he was atoning for his past actions. And it's such a grand atonement. It was the deceased who exposed what he had done as an unspeakable crime—and so he played the role of indictment of himself in twenty worlds, as hundreds of other companions. ”

"You've found so much, Prikte, so little to understand. ”

"I understand it all! Read what I wrote -- that's understanding!"

Valentine said to herself, since Prikte already knew so much, it would not be bad to know more. But what drove her to confide in her was anger rather than reason. "Prikte, my brother did not imitate the original speech of the deceased. He wrote about the queen and the overlord. ”

When Prikte realized that Valentine was telling the truth, she was completely intimidated. She has been the subject of her research for many years, and the original speakers of the dead are the driving force behind her research. When she found out that they were the same person, she was so shocked that she couldn't speak for half an hour.

Then she and Valentine talked heartily and said nothing. Finally, Valentine invited Prikte to be her child's teacher and her collaborator in writing and teaching. Jacques is surprised by the addition of this new member to the family, but Valentine eventually tells him the secrets that Prikte has discovered through her research, or that she has sparked from her. It became a family legend, and when the children were old enough to keep it a secret, they would hear the wonderful story of their long-lost Uncle Ender, who was a savior, or at least a martyr.

Time flies, the family prospers, and Valentine's pain of losing Ander has turned into pride in him, and finally into incomparable confidence. She was anxious to see him arrive in Lusitania to solve the pig-people's puzzles and complete his mission destined to become a xenomorph prophet. It was Prikte, the good Lutheran, who taught Valentine to conceive of Ender's life in a religious way, the stability of her family life, and the miracles that each of her five children were, (the child is the miracle of the life of her parents :p), which together built up, if not a creed, faith in her sensual name.

Of course, this also affects the children. Because they can't tell it to outsiders, Uncle Ender's story has some kind of supernatural aura. (Note: Religiously, supernatural mystical experiences are often accompanied by commandments that they must not be divulged and can only be transmitted within converts.) Ender's story is the same in this respect. The eldest daughter, Sift, was particularly enamored by him until she was 20 years old, when her surname overpowered her naïve childhood adoration of Uncle Ender. He's a legendary figure, but he's still alive, in a world that isn't out of reach.

She didn't tell her mother and father, but she did it to her former mentor. "Someday, Prikte, I will see him. I will meet him and help him. ”

"Why do you think he's going to need help, at least, why do you need your help?" Prikte was always a skeptic, unless her students could convince her.

"He wasn't alone when he first did this job, was he?" Shiffert's dream had flown away, away from the snow of Trondheim, to the distant planet where Drew Viggin had not yet set foot. O Lusitanians, you have no idea what a great man will walk on your land and yoke you. (Note: The image of "yoke" here is often used to describe Christ.) as Matthew 11:27-30) and I, at the appointed moment, will join Him in his work, even though it will be a generation later. Get ready for me, Lucitania.

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――

On his ship, Ander Viggin had no idea of the dreams that others were placing on him. It had only been a few days since he had left Valentine, who was crying on the pier. To him, Shift didn't even have a name, she was in Valentine's big belly, nothing more. He was just beginning to feel the pain of losing Valentine—a pain she had already overcome. He was thinking about things that were far from those of his nieces and nephews who had never met in the ice world.

He thought only of a young girl, who was lonely, who suffered, whose name was Nuo Wanhua, and who he wondered what she would do during his twenty-two years of voyage, and what she would become when they met. Because he loves her, just as one can only love someone who can be an echo of yourself when you are in your deepest sorrows. Refers to being able to give comfort. ）。