First meetings in the Enderverse

voyages, Benedetto had traced them back three hundred years, to the very dawn of the colonizing age, and for the first time it occurred to him that it wasn’t inconceivable that this Andrew Wiggin might be the very…
    No, no. He could not let himself believe it yet. But if it were true, if this were really the war criminal who…
    The blackmail possibilities were astounding.
    How was it possible that no one else had done this obvious research on Andrew and Valentine Wiggin? Or were they already paying blackmailers on several worlds?
    Or were the blackmailers all dead? Benedetto would have to be careful. People with this much money invariably had powerful friends. Benedetto would have to find friends of his own to protect him as he moved forward with his new plan.

    ***

    Valentine showed it to Andrew as an oddity. “I’ve heard of this before, but this is the first time we’ve ever been close enough to attend one.” It was a local newsnet announcement of a “speaking” for a dead man.
    Andrew had never been comfortable with the way his pseudonym, “Speaker for the Dead,” had been picked up by others and turned into the title of a quasi-clergyman of a new truth-speaking ur-religion. There was no doctrine, so people of almost any faith could invite a speaker for the dead to take part in the regular funeral services, or to hold a separate speaking after-sometimes long after-the body was buried or burned.
    These speakings for the dead did not arise from his book The Hive Queen, however. It was Andrew’s second book, The Hegemon, that brought this new funerary custom into being. Andrew and Valentine’s brother, Peter, had become hegemon after the civil wars and by a mix of deft diplomacy and brutal force and had united all of Earth under a single powerful government. He proved to be an enlightened despot, and set up institutions that would share authority in future; and it was under Peter’s rule that the serious business of colonization of other planets got under way. Yet from childhood on, Peter had been cruel and uncompassionate, and Andrew and Valentine feared him. Indeed, it was Peter who arranged things so Andrew could not return to Earth after his victory in the Third Bugger War. So it was hard for Andrew not to hate him.
    That was why he researched and wrote The Hegemon-to try to find the truth of the man behind the manipulations and the massacres and the awful childhood memories. The result was a relentlessly fair biography that measured the man and hid nothing. Since the book was signed with the same name as The Hive Queen, which had already transformed attitudes toward the Buggers, it earned a great deal of attention and eventually gave rise to these speakers for the dead, going about trying to bring the same level of truthfulness to the funerals of other dead people, some prominent, some obscure. They spoke the deaths of heroes and powerful people, clearly showing the price that they and others paid for their success; of alcoholics or abusers who had ruined their families’ lives, trying to show the human being behind the addiction, but never sparing the truth of the damage that weakness caused. Andrew had got used to the idea that these things were done in the name of the Speaker for the Dead, but he had never attended one, and as Valentine expected, he jumped at the chance to do so now, even though he did not have time.
    They knew nothing about the dead man, though the fact that the speaking received only small public notice suggested he was not well known. Sure enough, the venue for the speaking was a smallish public room in a hotel, and only a couple of dozen people were in attendance. There was no body present-the deceased had apparently already been disposed of. Andrew tried to guess at the identities of the other people in the room. Was this one the widow? That one a daughter? Or was the older one the mother, the younger the widow? Were those sons? Friends? Business partners?
    The speaker dressed simply and put on no airs. He went to the front of the room and started to talk, telling the life of the man simply. It wasn’t a biography-there was no time for such a level of detail. Rather it was more like a saga, telling the important deeds the man did-but judging which were important, not by the degree to which such deeds would have been newsworthy, but by the depth and breadth of their effects in the lives of others. Thus his decision to build a house that he could not afford in a