Ender in Exile

by Orson Scott Card

  Finally the paper fluttered close enough for Alessandra to snatch it out of Mother's hands. She read it, with Mother bending down to hover just behind the paper, smiling her fairy smile. It was real. Dorabella Toscano (29) and daughter Alessandra Toscano (14), accepted into Colony I.

  "Obviously there's no sort of psychological screening after all," said Alessandra.

  "You try to hurt me but I will not be hurt. Mother knows what is best for you. You shall not make the mistakes that I have made."

  "No, but I'll pay for them," said Alessandra.

  "Think, my darling, beautiful, brilliant, graceful, kind, generous, and poutful girl, think of this: What do you have to look forward to here in Monopoli, Italia, living in a flat in the unfashionable end of Via Luigi Indelli?"

  "There is no fashionable end of Luigi Indelli."

  "You make my point for me."

  "Mother, I don't dream of marrying a prince and riding off into the sunset."

  "That's a good thing, my darling, because there are no princes--only men and animals who pretend to be men. I married one of the latter but he at least provided you with the genes for those amazing cheekbones, that dazzling smile. Your father had very good teeth."

  "If only he had been a more attentive bicyclist."

  "It was not his fault, dear."

  "The streetcars run on tracks, Mother. You don't get hit if you stay out from between the tracks."

  "Your father was not a genius but fortunately I am, and therefore you have the blood of the fairies in you."

  "Who knew that fairies sweat so much?" Alessandra pulled one of Mother's dripping locks of hair away from her face. "Oh, Mother, we won't do well in a colony. Please don't do this."

  "The voyage takes forty years--I went next door and looked it up on the net."

  "Did you ask them this time?"

  "Of course I did, they lock their windows now. They were thrilled to hear we were going to be colonists."

  "I have no doubt they were."

  "But because of magic, to us it will be only two years."

  "Because of the relativistic effects of near-lightspeed travel."

  "Such a genius, my daughter is. And even those two years we can sleep through, so we won't even age."

  "Much."

  "It will be as if our bodies slept a week, and we wake up forty years away."

  "And everyone we know on Earth will be forty years older than we are."

  "And mostly dead," sang Mother. "Including my hideous hag of a mother, who disowned me when I married the man I loved, and who therefore will never get her hands on my darling daughter." The melody to this refrain was always cheery-sounding. Alessandra had never met her grandmother. Now, though, it occurred to her that maybe a grandmother could get her out of joining a colony.

  "I'm not going, Mother."

  "You are a minor child and you will go where I go, tra-la."

  "You are a madwoman and I will sue for emancipation rather than go, tra-lee."

  "You will think about it first because I am going whether you go or not and if you think your life with me is hard you should see what it's like without me."

  "Yes, I should," said Alessandra. "Let me meet my grandmother."

  Mother's glare was immediate, but Alessandra plowed ahead. "Let me live with her. You go with the colony."

  "But there's no reason for me to go with the colony, my darling. I'm doing this for you. So without you, I will not go."

  "Then we're not going. Tell them."

  "We are going, and we are thrilled about it."

  Might as well get off the merry-go-round; Mother didn't mind endlessly repeating circular arguments, but Alessandra got bored with it. "What lies did you have to tell, to get accepted?"

  "I told no lies," said Mother, pretending to be shocked at the accusation. "I only proved my identity. They do all the research, so if they have false information it's their own fault. Do you know why they want us?"

  "Do you?" asked Alessandra. "Did they actually tell you?"

  "It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, or even a fairy," said Mother "They want us because we are both of childbearing age."

  Alessandra groaned in disgust, but Mother was preening in front of an imaginary full-length mirror.

  "I am still young," said Mother, "and you are just flowering into womanhood. They have men from the fleet there, young men who have never married. They will be waiting eagerly for us to arrive. So I will mate with a very eager old man of sixty and bear him babies and then he will die. I'm used to that. But you--you will be a prize for a young man to marry. You will be a treasure."

  "My uterus will, you mean," said Alessandra. "You're right, that's exactly what they're thinking. I bet they took practically any healthy female who applied."

  "We fairies are always healthy."

  It was true enough--Alessandra had no memory of ever being sick, except for food poisoning that time when Mother insisted they would eat supper from a street vendor's cart at the end of a very hot day.

  "So they're sending a herd of women, like cows."

  "You're only a cow if you choose to be," said Mother. "The only question I have to decide now is whether we want to sleep through the voyage and wake up just before landing, or stay awake for the two years, receiving training and acquiring skills so we're ready to be productive in the first wave of colonists."

  Alessandra was impressed. "You actually read the documentation?"

  "This is the most important decision of our lives, my darling Alessa. I am being extraordinarily careful."

  "If only you had read the bills from the power company."

  "They were not interesting. They only spoke of our poverty. Now I see that God was preparing us for a world without air-conditioning and vids and nets. A world of nature. We were born for nature, we elvish folk. You will come to the dance and with your fairy grace you will charm the son of the king, and the king's son will dance with you until he is so in love his heart will break for you. Then it will be for you to decide if he's the one for you."

  "I doubt there'll be a king."

  "But there'll be a governor. And other high officials. And young men with prospects. I will help you choose."

  "You will certainly not help me choose."

  "It's as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one."

  "As if you'd know."

  "I know better than you, having done it badly once. The rush of hot blood into the heart is the darkest magic, and it must be tamed. You must not let it happen until you have chosen a man worthy of your love. I will help you choose."

  No point in arguing. Alessandra had long since learned that fighting with Mother accomplished nothing, whereas ignoring her worked very well.

  Except for this. A colony. It was definitely time to look up Grandmother. She lived in Polignano a Mare, the next city of any size up the Adriatic coast, that's all that she knew of her. And Mother's mother would not be named Toscano. Alessandra would have to do some serious research.

  A week later, Mother was still going back and forth about whether they should sleep through the voyage or not, while Alessandra was discovering that there's a lot of information that they won't let children get at. Snooping in the house, she found her own birth certificate, but that wasn't helpful, it only listed her own parents. She needed Mother's certificate, and that was not findable in the apartment.

  The government people barely acknowledged she existed and when they heard her errand sent her away. It was only when she finally thought of the Catholic Church that she made any headway. They hadn't actually attended Mass since Alessandra was little, but at the parish, the priest on duty helped her search back to find her own baptism. They had a record of baby Alessandra Toscano's godparents as well as her parents, and Alessandra figured that either the godparents were her grandparents, or they would know who her grandparents were.

  At school she searched the net and found that Leopoldo and Isabella Santangelo lived in Polignano a Mare, which was a g
ood sign, since that was the town where Grandmother lived.

  Instead of going home, she used her student pass and hopped the train to Polignano and then spent forty-five minutes walking around the town searching for the address. To her disgust, it ended up being on a stub of a street just off Via Antonio Ardito, a trashy-looking apartment building backing on the train tracks. There was no buzzer. Alessandra trudged up to the fourth floor and knocked.

  "You want to knock something, knock your own head!" shouted a woman from inside.

  "Are you Isabella Santangelo?"

  "I'm the Holy Virgin and I'm busy answering prayers. Go away!"

  Alessandra's first thought was: So Mother lied about being a child of the fairies. She's really Jesus' younger sister.

  But she decided that flippancy wasn't a good approach today. She was already going to be in trouble for leaving Monopoli without permission, and she needed to find out from the Holy Virgin here whether or not she was her grandmother.

  "I'm so sorry to trouble you, but I'm the daughter of Dorabella Toscano and I--"

  The woman must have been standing right at the door, waiting, because it flew open before Alessandra could finish her sentence.

  "Dorabella Toscano is a dead woman! How can a dead woman have daughters!"

  "My mother isn't dead," said Alessandra, stunned. "You were signed as my godmother on the parish register."

  "That was the worst mistake of my life. She marries this pig boy, this bike messenger, when she's barely fifteen, and why? Because her belly's getting fat with you, that's why! She thinks a wedding makes it all clean and pure! And then her idiot husband gets himself killed. I told her, this proves there is a God! Now go to hell!"

  The door slammed in Alessandra's face.

  She had come so far. Her grandmother couldn't really mean to send her away like this. They hadn't even had time to do more than glance at each other.

  "But I'm your granddaughter," said Alessandra.

  "How can I have a granddaughter when I have no daughter? You tell your mother that before she sends her little quasi-bastard begging at my door, she'd better come to me herself with some serious apologizing."

  "She's going away to a colony," said Alessandra.

  The door was yanked open again. "She's even more insane than ever," said Grandmother. "Come in. Sit down. Tell me what stupid thing she's done."

  The apartment was absolutely neat. Everything in it was unbelievably cheap, the lowest possible quality, but there was a lot of it--ceramics, tiny framed art pieces--and everything had been dusted and polished. The sofa and chairs were so piled with quilts and throws and twee little embroidered pillows that there was nowhere to sit. Grandmother Isabella moved nothing, and finally Alessandra sat on top of one of the pillow piles.

  Feeling suddenly quite disloyal and childish herself, telling on Mother like a schoolyard tattletale, Alessandra now tried to softpedal the outrage. "She has her reasons, I know it, and I think she truly believes she's doing it for me--"

  "What what what is she doing for you that you don't want her to do! I don't have all day!"

  The woman who embroidered all of these pillows has all day every day. But Alessandra kept her sassy remark to herself. "She has signed us up for a colony ship, and they accepted us."

  "A colony ship? There aren't any colonies. All those places are countries of their own now. Not that Italy ever did have any real colonies, not since the Roman Empire. Lost their balls after that, the men did. Italian men have been worthless ever since. Your grandfather, God keep him buried, was worthless enough, never stood up for himself, let everybody push him around, but at least he worked hard and provided for me until my ungrateful daughter spat in my face and married that bike boy. Not like that worthless father of yours, never made a dime."

  "Well, not since he died, anyway," said Alessandra, feeling more than a little outraged.

  "I'm talking about when he was alive! He only worked the fewest hours he could get by with. I think he was on drugs. You were probably a cocaine baby."

  "I don't think so."

  "How would you know anything?" said Grandmother. "You couldn't even talk then!"

  Alessandra sat and waited.

  "Well? Tell me."

  "I did but you wouldn't believe me."

  "What was it you said?"

  "A colony ship. A starship to one of the formic planets, to farm and explore."

  "Won't the formics complain?"

  "There aren't any more formics, Grandmother. They were all killed."

  "A nasty piece of business but it needed doing. If that Ender Wiggin boy is available, I've got a list of other people that need some good serious destruction. What do you want, anyway?"

  "I don't want to go into space. With Mother. But I'm still a minor. If you would sign as my guardian, I could get emancipated and stay home. It's in the law."

  "As your guardian?"

  "Yes. To supervise me and provide for me. I'd live here."

  "Get out."

  "What?"

  "Stand up and get out. You think this is a hotel? Where exactly do you think you'd sleep? On the floor, where I'd trip on you in the night and break my hip? There's no room for you here. I should have known you'd be making demands. Out!"

  There was no room for argument. In moments Alessandra found herself charging down the stairs, furious and humiliated. This woman was even crazier than Mother.

  I have nowhere to go, thought Alessandra. Surely the law doesn't allow my mother to force me to go into space, does it? I'm not a baby, I'm not a child, I'm fourteen, I can read and write and make rational choices.

  When the train got back to Monopoli, Alessandra did not go directly home. She had to think up a good lie about where she'd been, so she might as well come up with one that covered a longer time. Maybe the Dispersal Project office was still open.

  But it wasn't. She couldn't even get a brochure. And what was the point? Anything interesting would be on the net. She could have stayed after school and found out all she wanted to know. Instead she went to visit her grandmother.

  That's proving what good decisions I make.

  Mother was sitting at the table, a cup of chocolate in front of her. She looked up and watched Alessandra shut the door and set down her book bag, but she said nothing.

  "Mother, I'm sorry, I--"

  "Before you lie," said Mother softly, "the witch called me and screamed at me for sending you. I hung up on her, which is what I usually end up doing, and then I unplugged the phone from the wall."

  "I'm sorry," said Alessandra.

  "You didn't think I had a reason for keeping her out of your life?"

  For some reason, that pulled the trigger on something inside Alessandra and instead of trying to retreat, she erupted. "It doesn't matter whether you had a reason," she said. "You could have ten million reasons, but you didn't tell any of them to me! You expected me to obey you blindly. But you don't obey your mother blindly."

  "Your mother isn't a monster," said Mother.

  "There are many kinds of monsters," said Alessandra. "You're the kind that flits around like a butterfly but never lands near me long enough to even know who I am."

  "Everything I do is for you!"

  "Nothing is for me. Everything is for the child you imagine you had, the one that doesn't exist, the perfect, happy child that was bound to result from your being the exact opposite of your mother in every way. Well, I'm not that child. And in your mother's house, the electricity is on!"

  "Then go live there!"

  "She won't let me!"

  "You would hate it. Never able to touch anything. Always having to do things her way."

  "Like going off on a colony ship?"

  "I signed up for the colony ship for you."

  "Which is like buying me a supersized bra. Why don't you look at who I am before you decide what I need?"

  "I'll tell you what you are. You're a girl who's too young and inexperienced to know what a woman needs. I'm ten kilomete
rs ahead of you on that road, I know what's coming, I'm trying to get you what you'll need to make that road easy and smooth, and you know what? In spite of you, I've done it. You've fought me every step of the way, but I've done a great job with you. You don't even know how good a job I've done because you don't know what you could have been."

  "What could I have been, Mother? You?"

  "You were never going to be me," said Mother.

  "What are you saying? That I would have been her?"

  "We'll never know what you would have been, will we? Because you already are what I made you."

  "Wrong. I look like whatever I have to look like in order to stay alive in your home. Down inside, what I really am is a complete stranger to you. A stranger that you intend to drag off into space without even asking me if I wanted to go. They used to have a word for people you treated like that. They called them slaves."

  Alessandra wanted more than ever before in her life to run to her bedroom and slam the door. But she didn't have a bedroom. She slept on the sofa in the same room with the kitchen and the kitchen table.

  "I understand," said Mother. "I'll go into my bedroom and you can slam the door on me."

  The fact that Mother really did know what she was thinking was the most infuriating thing of all. But Alessandra did not scream and did not scratch at her mother and did not fall on the floor and throw a tantrum and did not even dive onto the sofa and bury her face in the pillow. Instead she sat down at the table directly across from her mother and said, "What's for dinner?"

  "So. Just like that, the discussion is over?"

  "Discuss while we cook. I'm hungry."

  "There's nothing to eat, because I haven't turned in our final acceptance because I haven't decided yet whether we should sleep or stay awake through the voyage, and so we haven't got the signing bonus, and so there's no money to buy food."

  "So what are we going to do about dinner?"

  Mother just looked away from her.

  "I know," said Alessandra excitedly. "Let's go over to Grandma's!"

  Mother turned back and glared at her.

  "Mother," said Alessandra, "how can we run out of money when we're living on the dole? Other people on the dole manage to buy enough food and pay their electric bills."

  "What do you think?" said Mother. "Look around you. What have I spent all the government's money on? Where's all the extravagance? Look in my closet, count the outfits I own."

  Alessandra thought for a moment. "I never thought about that. Do you owe money to the mafia? Did Father, before he died?"