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Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.
Even though Ender's aiúa lives on, as all aiúas live on undying, the man we knew is gone from us. His body is gone, and whatever parts of his life and works we take with us, they aren't him any longer, they are ourselves, they are the Ender-within-us just as we also have other friends and teachers, fathers and mothers, lovers and children and siblings and even strangers within us, looking out at the world through our eyes and helping us determine what it all might mean. I see Ender in you looking out at me. You see Ender in me looking out at you. And yet not one of us is truly him; we are each our own self, all of us strangers on our own road. We walked awhile on that road with Ender Wiggin. He showed us things we might not otherwise have seen. But the road goes on without him now. In the end, he was no more than any other man. But no less, either.
I discussed the matter with professor Fruhestadt. Within a month, at a 100 dollars a piece, he would provide me with the collection I wanted. I have done it: three hundred pigs were slaughtered —and naturally sold at regular prices— and now I have here, in a luminous gallery at the Concord cottage, one of the most original collections of the world.
At both sides, on pine shelfs, a hundred glass jugs are lined up; within them, a hundred hearts of the darkest red are beating. Immersed in the solution that mantains their muscular activity —and which the assistant renews daily— the hundred hearts contract at a tired and irregular, but continous, rhythm. A hundred meat engines working in vain, separated from the machines they once animated.
That eternal heartbeat without purpose nor sense attracts me strongly and suggests strange thoughts. It gives me great pleasure to imagine, seduced by the resemblance, that I possess a hundred human hearts, of bodies once alive and warm; a hundred hearts that suffered, that revelled, that knew the paralysis of fear and the acceleration of love. They are only a pretense of life now: they are free of the creature they once served; they throb worthlessly, for nothing, for no one. Just to amuse myself, for I have never been able to stand the trances of poets and novelists for the “heart”.
This ideal symbol of all the sentimental babble, of all the patetic ejaculations, is here reduced to its mechanic materiality, inside those great jugs. The bodies to which this hearts belonged are dead, the souls have vanished, and this blackened pear-shaped muscle keeps throbbing stupidly behind the glass, as if something beautiful and noble still corresponded to its heartbeats.