How It All Goes Down
Valentine
- The epigraph is Pipo saying he's discovered that the piggies are all bachelors who haven't mated, which he found out by letting slip that Libo is his son. This is in violation of the Starways rules, so he has to hide his findings from the official record, which makes him cranky.
- Meanwhile at the plot, Valentine is pregnant and thinking about how she used to travel from world to world with Ender.
- He'd be called to speak someone's death, and she'd spend a few months on the world and then write a definitive book about it under the name of Demosthenes. (It seems a little presumptuous to spend a few months on a world and then write the definitive book, but like Ender, Valentine is super-awesome.)
- She thinks about her husband, a boat captain she met when she was chartering a wilderness retreat for her students.
- She sees Ender coming with a bag, and thinks he wants to go on the retreat with her. She worries that his super-awesomeness will influence the students too much, but she still is happy to have him along.
- Then she realizes he's going to go to Lusitania without her and she is very upset.
- There is a melodramatic scene—recriminations, farewells, etc.
- Then we fast forward through Valentine's life without Ender, though it's still all about Ender, Ender, Ender. It's a little tiresome, but that's the book you've got.
- Plikt, Valentine's student, figures out that Ender was the xenocide, and Valentine tells her that he was also the Speaker for the Dead. The two end up in a lifelong collaborative intellectual relationship.
- Eventually Valentine tells her husband the whole story and they tell their kids. Ender becomes a kind of legend in the family, and Valentine's daughter Syfte vows to find Ender and help him.
- And meanwhile Ender is flying through space towards Lusitania.