Shadow of the giant

choppers in flight and armies
and fleets in motion; it once meant punishment for aggression, collection of
taxes, enforcement of human rights laws, cleaning up political corruption.
    Peter remembered when the title was such an empty joke they
gave it to a teenage boy who had written cleverly on the nets.
    Peter had brought power to the office. And then, because he
gradually stripped away its functions and assigned them to other officials in
the FPE—or "EarthGov" as people now called it as often as not—he had
returned the position to a figurehead position.
    But not a joke. It was no longer a joke and never would be
again.
    Not a joke, but not necessarily a good thing, either. There
were plenty of people left alive who remembered the Hegemon as the coercive
power that shattered their dream of how Earth ought to be (though usually their
dream was everyone else's nightmare). And historians and biographers had often
had at him and would do it again, forever.
    The thing about the historians was, they could arrange the
data all neatly in rows, but they kept missing what it was for. They kept
inventing the strangest motives for people. There was the biography of Virlomi,
for instance, that made her an idealistic saint and blamed Suriyawong, of all
people, for the slaughter that ended Virlomi's military career. Never mind that
Virlomi herself repudiated that interpretation, writing by ansible from the
colony on Andhra. Biographers were always irritated when their subject turned
out to be alive.
    But Peter hadn't bothered to answer any of them. Even the
ones that attacked him quite savagely, blaming him for everything that went
badly and giving others the credit for everything that went well... Petra would
fume over some of them for days until he begged her not to read them anymore. But
he couldn't resist reading them himself. He didn't take it personally. Most
people never had biographies written about them.
    Petra herself had only had a couple about her, and they were
both of the "great women" or "role models for girls"
variety, not serious scholarship. Which bothered Peter, because he knew what
they seemed to neglect—that after all the other members of Ender's Jeesh left
Earth and went out to the colonies, she stayed and ran the FPE defense ministry
for almost thirty years, until the position became more of a police department
than anything else and she insisted on retiring to play with the grandchildren.
    She was there for everything, Peter said to her when he was
griping about this. "You were Ender's and Bean's friend in Battle School—
you taught Ender how to shoot, for heaven's sake. You were in his Jeesh—"
    But at those points Petra would shush him. "I don't
want those stories told," she said. "I wouldn't come off very well if
the truth came out."
    Peter didn't believe it. And you could skip all of that and
start when she returned to Earth and ... wasn't it Petra who, when the Jeesh
was almost all kidnapped, found a way to get a message out to Bean? Wasn't she
the one who knew Achilles better than anybody that he didn't succeed in
killing? She was one of the great military leaders of all time, and she also
married Julian Delphiki, the Giant of legend, and then Peter the Hegemon,
another legend, and on top of all that raised five of the children she had with
Bean and five more that she had with Peter.
    And no biography. So why should he complain that there were
dozens about him and every one of them got simple, obvious things wrong, things
that you could actually check, let alone the more arcane things like motive and
secret agreements and...
    And then Valentine's book on the Bugger wars started to come
out, volume by volume. One on the first invasion, two on the second—the one
Mazer Rackham won. Then four volumes on the Third Invasion, the one that Ender and
his Jeesh fought and won from what they thought was a training game on the
asteroid Eros. One whole volume was about the development of Battle
School—short biographies of dozens of children who were pivotal to the
improvements in the school that eventually led to truly effective training and
the legendary Battle Room games.
    Peter saw what she wrote about Graff and Rackham and about
the kids in Ender's Jeesh—including Petra—and even though he knew part of her
insight came from having Ender right there with her in Shakespeare colony, the
real source of the book's excellence was her own keen self-questioning. She did
not find "themes" and impose them