The Authorized Ender Companion Page 31

Alai set up a new Caliphate compound in India, where he ruled the Muslim world. Virlomi also set up her new residence in a hut just outside the compound. Her presence kept the Muslim soldiers and Alai from provoking the Hindus, while the Indian people did not provoke the Muslims.

  Virlomi saw and spoke with many of her followers from her hut. She continued to have tremendous influence over all of India. When China released its prisoners from their time occupying India, Virlomi told her people to ignore the former prime minister on his return. No one paid him any heed, and though he sought reinstatement of his political power, he was exiled to the Netherlands solely because Virlomi had commanded he be ignored.

  All was not perfect in Virlomi’s own soul. She dreamed of her dead friend Sayagi who, in the vision, chastised her for becoming someone she truly wasn’t by leaving behind her humble virtues and seeking so much power.

  A short time later, Han Tzu, the emperor of China, visited Virlomi in her hut, and proposed marriage to unify China and India. Virlomi refused. Han Tzu left, hoping that the two Battle School graduates could be friends. Virlomi said that might possible, someday.

  She decided that the husband she wanted was Peter Wiggin, but he refused her offer of marriage, and she refused his offer to bring India into his worldwide confederation of nations, the Free People of Earth. She was too power hungry to relinquish control of her people to him.

  At the meeting with Peter she was also approached by Hyrum Graff and Mazer Rackham who made her the same offer they’d made many other Battle School graduates—leave Earth and go into space as the governor of a human colony.

  Rejected by Peter, Virlomi set her sights on Alai the Muslim Caliph. She convinced Alai to marry her, uniting the Muslim and Hindu worlds. But she viewed even her relationship with Alai as a stepping stone to more power, and not as a true marriage. While Alai had hoped the union would bring peace, Virlomi wanted to use the combined forces to attack China.

  Alai tried to dissuade Virlomi from launching the attack against the Chinese, but with little success. Though he thought he loved her when they got married, he realized now he didn’t. But he could not tell her that; she was dangerous, believing herself to be a goddess of India.

  She used the combined Hindu and Muslim armies at her disposal to attack China. Russia also attacked China and India hoping to capitalize on their weakened state. China called on Peter’s Free People of Earth and received military support from much of the world. Virlomi was soundly defeated.

  Humiliated at the military defeat, Virlomi realized that she had, in her arrogance, caused the deaths of thousands of Indians. She was captured on the battlefield by Suriyawong, and convinced that she should encourage her people to join the Free People of Earth.

  Heartbroken over her self-delusion, she admitted her humanity and sought to forget the evil she’d done, thinking she was a god. She was sent into space and given a planet in the Hundred Worlds to govern.

  Assigned to the planet Ganges, which would be the first human settlement on a planet that was not originally a Formic world, Virlomi viewed her governorship as a penance for the wrongs she’d done on Earth. She found herself agreeing with the Hegemony that she should have been stopped, and didn’t want to be compared to Achilles Flandres.

  While awaiting her transport ship, Virlomi noticed one of her settlers, Nichelle Firth, who seemed obsessed with the name Achilles Flandres. Virlomi assumed that Nichelle’s son was fathered by Achilles. Throughout the voyage, Virlomi paid close attention to Nichelle and her son, determined to keep tabs on them on Ganges.

  More than a decade after they had all arrived at Ganges, Virlomi demanded to see Achilles II. She told the then-sixteen-year-old boy that his father was a monster. Achilles II reacted by calling Virlomi a dictator who manipulated elections to stay in power. The war of words became physical when Achilles II struck Virlomi in the face. She had Achilles II arrested, and sentenced him to be exiled off her planet.

  When Ender Wiggin arrived a few weeks later, Virlomi allowed him to meet with Achilles II. Ender told Achilles II that his real parents were Bean Delphiki and Petra Arkanian. This revelation caused a great change in Achilles II, who changed his name to Arkanian Delphiki. Virlomi commuted his sentence and remained as the governor of Ganges when Ender left the planet.

  Volescu, Doctor (ES, [SH] SP, SG)

  Doctor Volescu was a scientist who took Anton’s banned research and furthered it into practice. He created twenty-four genetically altered fertilized embryos, turning Anton’s Key, and causing them to develop mentally and physically faster than normal. When his work was discovered, twenty-three of the twenty-four babies were destroyed. One escaped—Bean.

  Years later, Sister Carlotta confronted Volescu, desperately trying to discover information about Bean’s past. Volescu told her some details about what he’d done to the embryos, but didn’t know for certain that Bean had survived. It was through his conversation with the nun that he learned that the one remaining embryo had, in fact, lived.

  Sister Carlotta hated him, saying that he didn’t deserve to have a son like Bean. She soon discovered that he was not Bean’s genetic father. Volescu’s half-brother Julian Delphiki was. Volescu’s mother had an affair with the older Delphiki. Volescu and Julian knew of one another, but how much contact they’d shared is unknown.

  Nearly a decade after Ender’s victory over the Formics, Volescu was released from his prison and opened a fertility clinic in Rotterdam. Achilles Flandres, a serial killer and Battle School dropout with world-dominating aspirations, had pulled strings to get Volescu released.

  Petra Arkanian and Bean were married and went to Rotterdam to learn if Volescu could determine if their embryos would be free of the genetic mutation he’d given Bean. Volescu lied and said he had a test for this. In reality he didn’t, but he helped create the embryos for Bean and Petra anyway. He secretly saved several embryos—which Bean thought were destroyed—to give to Achilles in exchange for getting Volescu out of prison. He also facilitated an unsuccessful kidnapping attempt on Bean and Petra at the women’s clinic where Petra had undergone the implantation procedure.

  Volescu spread the stolen embryos to different surrogates around the world and hid in a safe house Achilles provided for him. When Achilles was killed, Hyrum Graff and Mazer Rackham tracked Volescu’s movements and passed on the information to Bean, who sought to regain the embryos that belonged to him.

  Bean and Petra, along with a great security detail from the Hegemony, traveled to Rwanda to Volescu’s safe house. Bean nearly killed the doctor for spreading the embryos to surrogates throughout the world. It seemed impossible to find the embryos, and—in Bean’s opinion—Volescu’s death would have made up for it. Petra stopped him from killing Volescu, however.

  The group from the Hegemony learned that Volescu had created a virus that would turn Anton’s Key in all future generations of humanity. Volescu fashioned himself to be God, controlling the evolution of the species.

  He was imprisoned in a Hegemony detention center and refused to cooperate with interrogators. Bean, Petra, and the rest of Peter Wiggin’s staff would have to do much research on their own to learn the location of the embryos and how far the Volescu virus may have spread.

  Bean confronted Volescu one last time with similar negative results. It was clear the doctor would not live much longer in captivity, and there was talk of sending him to space. Regardless, he maintained that he did not know where Bean’s embryos were.

  The International Fleet, who held Volescu, had found him guilty of many crimes and sentenced him to death. The punishment would not be carried out for years, though, as the I.F. ordered him to try to find a cure for Anton’s Key. As long as he worked on it, he would be kept alive. Once the cure was found, the I.F. promised, he would be taken into space and allowed to live in a new colony on a distant planet.

  von Hesse, Ivanova Santa Catarina “Novinha” (SG, SD, XN)

  Novinha was the daughter of prominent xenobiologists on the plane
t Lusitania. The child of Brazilian settlers, Novinha was well known in the colony. Her parents were killed finding a cure for the deadly virus known as the Descolada. Their deaths, though devastating to Novinha, were celebrated in the colony, as they had discovered the cure and were the final funerals from the Descolada.

  Novinha was ostracized from the community because of the different reaction to her parents’ deaths that she felt. She was thought to have one friend—a boy named Marcão—though “friend” was perhaps a bit of an exaggeration.

  She was angry that the pope, on Earth, beatified her parents, and it led to her distancing herself from the church. By age thirteen (eight years after her parents’ deaths) she wanted to take the xenobiologist certification test. It was years before the usual age, but thanks to help from the colony xenologist, Pipo, she got permission.

  It was her goal to study the planet’s native life, the pequeninos, or piggies as they were known, to the level that the “Speaker for the Dead” had more than three thousand years earlier. She admired the Speaker, particularly as he had helped humanity understand the only other “alien” race it had encountered—the Formics. The Speaker had transformed human prejudice and shown Ender Wiggin’s annihilation of an entire species to be evil. She wanted to be the Speaker for the piggies in the same fashion.

  Novinha was consistently standoffish, but warmed up to Pipo and his son Libo. They worked closely together, forming a tight bond. She was particularly close to Libo. The two slowly fell in love.

  Pipo raced to confirm a finding—that he didn’t share with Novinha—with the piggies. It was Novinha, alongside Libo, who discovered his dead body a few hours later. He’d been killed by the piggies, and Novinha lost another parental figure, which was crushing to her.

  She was not comforted by any of the colonists or priests in the aftermath of Pipo’s death, and decided to call for a Speaker—something contrary to the Catholic culture in which she lived—to Speak Pipo’s death. Little did she know that the Speaker she’d contacted was Ender Wiggin, the xenocide who had killed the entire Formic species three thousand years before.

  As she waited for the Speaker to arrive, Novinha realized how much she loved Libo. She wanted to marry him and would not share her research with him because she didn’t want him to die, too. She carried a great deal of guilt over Pipo’s death, feeling that it had been her research on the Descolada that had caused him to be murdered by the piggies.

  Five days after calling for the Speaker, Novinha canceled the request. As the years passed, she married not Libo, but rather Marcão, a boy she’d been nice to at school. He was abusive to her and her children. She’d conceived the children with Libo, but Marcão raised them as his own.

  Libo was killed by the piggies, just as Pipo had been, and again Novinha lost someone she loved—this time, the love of her life. Marcão died shortly after that, too. Two of Novinha’s children—Ela and Miro—also called for a Speaker to Speak Marcão’s death. As Ender was already on his way to Speak Pipo’s death, he continued to Lusitania to Speak about Novinha’s husband.

  Novinha had become a successful scientist, burying herself in her work. She would go to her lab before her children were awake and return home after the youngest ones had gone to bed. She was working hard to figure out how to clone a potato for the people of Lusitania to have more variety in their diet.

  When she first met Ender, who had arrived at her house early one evening, she hated him. She tried to throw him out of her home, but her children defended him, showing his good virtues to her. Although Ender said things to her about Marcão that were hard to hear, she knew they were true. That night as she fell asleep, she dreamed that Ender was actually Libo, her dead lover come to save her.

  Ender broke into Novinha’s computer files, trying to learn about Pipo’s death. When she confronted him about it, he didn’t deny it. He also revealed that he knew that Libo was the father of her children. Novinha found this hard to bear as—in two days—Ender had already learned all of her secrets.

  She attended the Speaking for Marcão and was exposed there as an adulteress. The entire planet now knew that she had an affair with Libo. Some of her own children turned against her, including Quim, who called her a whore in the middle of the ceremony.

  Following the Speaking, Ender sent Ela to Novinha for help. The Star-ways Congress had revoked the planet’s charter because of illegal activity Miro had done with the pequeninos. Ender needed the information on the Descolada Novinha had kept secret for so long in order to save Miro’s life.

  Novinha agreed to reveal the information on the Descolada, and did so in the meeting of colony leaders. The entire population of Lusitania, she revealed, were carriers of the Descolada. By leaving the planet, any one person, plant, or animal would destroy the biosphere of whatever other planet they visited. In order to protect the other planets, and to save their own lives, the leaders of Lusitania used this information to rebel against the Starways Congress.

  Minutes later, Novinha learned that her son Miro had been critically injured trying to climb the electrified fence that protected the pequeninos. She, along with the leaders of the planet, raced to his side.

  She took Miro home to allow him to convalesce in privacy. There she discovered that he was paralyzed, but had limited movement of his hands and could move his jaw slightly. With her other children’s help, Novinha was able to establish a pattern of communication with Miro. He wanted her to deliver a message to the piggies.

  With Olhado and Quim, Novinha went into the forest and found Ender, Ouanda, and Ela, who were creating the treaty with the piggies. She told Ender that Miro was alive and that the piggies were planning to make war with the other tribes. The pequeninos confirmed it, and not doing so was added to the treaty.

  Novinha was shocked to learn that the Speaker for the Dead who had exposed her adultery was actually Ender the Xenocide. She found comfort in this fact, and realized that Ender hadn’t condemned her because he’d committed an act much more severe than she had.

  Novinha and Ender grew close emotionally and attended mass together. Though she had initially hated him, Novinha found she was falling in love with Ender Wiggin. He was to be the father her children never had. They were married by Bishop Peregrino a few short months later. Novinha was by Ender’s side when he released the Hive Queen near the pequenino land, giving the sole survivor of his xenocide the opportunity for new life.

  As the years passed, Novinha and her daughter Ela realized that the Descolada virus had evolved and was again a deadly threat to all life on Lusitania—except for the pequeninos who needed it to live. She and Ela worked tirelessly, hoping to find a way to control the disease and save their world.

  Thirty years later, now an old woman, Novinha continued her work with Ela on discovering a way to create strains of potatoes that could survive the Descolada. Two of her other children, Quara and Grego, had also become scientists and worked diligently on understanding the deadly disease. Quara and Grego had differing perspectives on the Descolada. Quara thought the disease was a sentient creature while Grego felt it needed to be wiped out entirely regardless of consequence to the native life that depended on it for life and reproduction.

  Novinha listened to the arguments each made, as well as Ela’s views, and with her husband Ender decided that each child should pursue their research, and when more was known, the proper path of action would be known.

  She, along with her other children and Ender, greeted Miro’s spaceship when it returned from its journey to pick up Valentine Wiggin and bring her with him to Lusitania. Miro hadn’t aged during the nearly three decades he was gone because of the effects of relativistic space flight. This caused some awkwardness among Novinha and her family when they first saw Miro.

  There were times that Novinha could hear Ender talking to the sentient computer program Jane at night. It was as though Novinha found Ender in bed with another woman. It was difficult for her to bear. Jane wished that Ender’s wife could see her
as Ender’s daughter, but it was not to be. Slowly, hatred for Jane built in Novinha’s heart.

  When she learned that her son, Quim, was setting off on a dangerous religious mission to the piggies, Novinha became surly. She reacted with hatred to Ender, hurting for fear that her son would die like Pipo and Libo had. She banned Ela from speaking about matters of science with Ender, and screamed her angry, hateful rhetoric about Jane at her husband. She even accused Ender of never loving her.

  The fight was a difficult issue for Ender. He knew that she meant all the things she said and that the anger in her heart would not be easily pacified. He decided it would be best if he was not the one to tell her that she was correct: Quim had been killed by the piggies.

  When Novinha learned from Miro that Quim had indeed been killed, she spiraled into a mournful rage. She slapped Miro and banned him from her house. The rest of her children left her, angry that she had made their family so divisive. All of her children spoke mean, hateful words to her as they left.

  Heartbroken, Novinha left her home before reconciling with anyone in her family. She joined the abbey known as the Children of the Mind of Christ. Although the order was primarily for married couples who sought to serve Christ together, Novinha joined without Ender.

  A few days later, Ender found Novinha at the abbey and attempted to reconcile with her. She refused him, citing his relationship with Jane as the biggest burden to their relationship. She also held him accountable for Quim’s death, saying he had not done enough to prevent her son from pursuing the course of action that ultimately took his life.

  She threw her whole self into the service at the abbey and was converted to their practices.

  Meanwhile, Miro created a new, whole body for himself in Outspace. Novinha saw this as a miracle. She was so touched that she agreed to see Ender at the abbey when he came to visit.

  She pleaded with him to join the Children of the Mind of Christ, but he refused, stating that he wanted to be with her, but not in a celibate marriage. They agreed to visit each other once a month, both hoping the other would commit to stay.