Ender in Exile

by Orson Scott Card

  "Brain. I want your brain."

  "Well, the kid would probably have your brain and my face. Now go and get the reports on the D-4 treatment and take it over to chem."

  "I'm not fired?"

  "No," said Sel. "I'm resigning. I'm going out into the fields and leaving you here."

  "I'm just the backup XB. I can't do the work."

  "You should have thought of that before you made it impossible for us to work together."

  "Who ever heard of a man who didn't want a little roll in the hay on the side?"

  "This colony is my life now, Afraima. Yours too. You don't shit in your own soup. Can I put it any plainer than that?"

  She began to cry.

  "What have I done that God would punish me like this?" said Sel. "What comes next? Interpreting dreams for Pharaoh's baker and butler?"

  "I'm sorry," she said. "You have to stay on as the XB, you really are a genius at it. I wouldn't even know where to start. Now I've ruined everything."

  "Yes, you have indeed," said Sel. "But you're right about all my solutions, too. They'd be almost as damaging as your original idea. So here's what we'll do."

  She waited, the tears still coming out of her eyes.

  "Nothing," he said. "You will never mention this again. Never. You won't touch me. You'll dress with perfect modesty around me. Your communication with me will be work only. Scientific language, as formal as possible. People will think you and I detest each other. Because I can't afford to drug down my libido and still try to do this work. Get it?"

  "Yes."

  "Forty years till the colony ship arrives with a new XB and I can quit this lousy job."

  "I didn't mean to make you miserable. I thought you'd be happy."

  "My hormones were thrilled. They thought it was the best idea they'd ever heard."

  "Well, then I feel better," she said.

  "You feel better because I'm going to be going through hell for the next forty years?"

  "Don't be stupid," she said. "As soon as I'm having babies, I'll get fat and unattractive and way too busy to come here to help. Child production is everything, right? And soon the next generation will provide you with an apprentice to train. The most it will bother you is a few months. Maybe a year."

  "Easy for you to say."

  "Dr. Menach, I'm truly sorry. We're scientists, I start to think of human reproduction just like the animals. I didn't mean to be disloyal to Evenezer, I didn't mean to make you miserable. I just felt a wave of desire. I just knew that if I was going to have a baby, it should be yours, it should be the baby most worth having. But I'm still a rational person. A scientist. I will do exactly as you said--all business. As if we disliked each other and neither could ever desire the other. Let me stay until I need to quit this work to have babies."

  "All right. Get up, take the formula to chem, and leave me alone to work on the next problem."

  "And what is that? After the dustworm and the corn and amaranth mold, what are we working on?"

  "The next problem I'm working on," said Sel, "is burying myself in whatever tedious task I can find that does not involve you in any way. Will you please go away now?"

  She went.

  Sel wrote his report and sent it to the governor's machine so it could be queued up for ansible transmission. If it turned out that the mold was something that cropped up on other worlds, his solution might work there, too. Besides, that's what science was--the sharing of information, the pooling of knowledge.

  That's my gene pool, Afraima, he thought. The meme pool, the collective knowledge of science. What I discover here, what I learn, the problems I solve--those will be my children. They will be part of every generation that lives on this planet.

  When the report was done, Afraima was still not back. Good, thought Sel. Let her spend all day with chem.

  Sel walked through the village and out into the communal fields. Fernao McPhee was foreman on duty. "Give me a job," Sel said to him.

  "I thought you were working on the mold problem."

  "I think it's solved. It's up to chem now to figure out how to deliver it to the plants."

  "I've already got all the crews working on all the jobs. Your time is too valuable to waste on manual labor."

  "Everybody does manual labor. The governor does manual laborer."

  "The crews are full. You don't know the jobs, you know your job, which is much more important. Go do your job, don't bother me!"

  He said it jokingly, but he meant it. And what could Sel answer? I need you to give me a hot, sweaty job so I can work off the steam from my beautiful assistant having offered me her body to put babies into!

  "You're no help to me at all," said Sel to Fernao.

  "Then we're even."

  So Sel went on a long walk. Out beyond the fields, into the woods, gathering samples. When you don't have an emergency to deal with, you do science. You collect, classify, analyze, observe. Always work to do.

  No fantasizing about her, about what might have happened. Sexual fantasies are scripts for future behavior. What good will it do to say no today, and yes six months from now, after rehearsing the adultery over and over in my mind?

  It would be so much easier if I weren't determined to do what's best for everybody. Whoever said virtue was its own reward was full of crap.

  CHAPTER 7

  To: jpwiggin@gso.nc.pub, twiggin@uncg.edu

  From: vwiggin%Colony1@colmin.gov/citizen

  Subj: Ender is fine

  By "fine" I mean of course that his body and mind seem to be functioning normally. He was happy to see me. We talked easily. He seems at peace about everything. No hostility toward anyone. He spoke of both of you with real affection. We shared lots of childhood memories.

  But as soon as that conversation ended, I saw him almost visibly crawl inside a shell. He is obsessed with the formics. I think he's burdened with guilt over having destroyed them. He knows that this is not appropriate--that he did not know what he was doing, they were trying to destroy us so it was self-defense anyway--but the ways of conscience are mysterious. We evolved consciences so that we would internalize community values and police ourselves. But what happens when you have a hyperactive conscience and make up rules that nobody else knows about, just so you can punish yourself for breaking them?

  Nominally, he is governor, but I have been warned by two different people that Admiral Quincy Morgan has no intention of letting Ender govern anything. If Peter were in such a position, he would already be conspiring to have Morgan removed before the voyage began. But Ender just chuckles and says, "Imagine that." When I pressed him, he said, "He can't have a contest if I won't play." And when I pressed him harder, he got irritable and said, "I was born for one war. I won it and I'm done."

  So now I'm torn. Do I try to maneuver for him? Or do what he asks and ignore the whole situation? He thinks I should spend my time on the voyage either in stasis, so we'd be the same age when we arrived, both fifteen--or, if I'm awake, then I should write a history of Battle School. Graff has promised to give me all the documents about Battle School--though I can get those from the public records, since they all came out in the court martial.

  Here's my philosophical question: What is love? Does my love for Ender mean that I do what I think is good for him, even if he asks me not to? Or does love mean I do what he asks, even though I think he would find being a figurehead governor a hellish experience?

  It's like piano lessons, dear parents. So many adults complain about the hideous experience of being forced to practice and practice. And yet there are others who say to their parents, "Why didn't you MAKE me practice so today I'd be able to play well?"

  Love, Valentine

  To: vwiggin%Colony1@colmin.gov/citizen

  From: Twiggin@uncg.edu

  Subj: re: Ender is fine

  Dear Valentine,

  Your father says that you will be irritated if I say how shocking it is to discover that one of my children does not know everything, and admits it,
and even asks her parents for advice. For the past five years, you and Peter have been as closed off as twins with a private language. Now, only a few weeks out from under Peter's influence, you have discovered parents again. I find this gratifying. I hereby declare you to be my favorite child.

  We continue to be devastated--a slow, corrosive kind of devastation--that Ender chooses not to write to us. You say nothing of anger toward us. We do not understand. Doesn't he realize we were forbidden to write to him? Why doesn't he read our letters now? Or does he read them and then choose not to poke the reply box and say even as little as "Got your letters"?

  As to your questions, the answers are easy. You are not his mother or father. We are the ones with the right to meddle and do what's good for him whether he likes it or not. You are his sister. Think of yourself as companion, friend, confidante. Your responsibility is to receive what he gives, and to give him what he asks only if you think it's good. You do not have either the right or the responsibility to give him what he specifically asks you not to give. That would be no gift; that is neither friend nor sister.

  Parents are a special case. He has built a wall exactly in the place where Battle School first built it. It keeps us out. He thinks he does not need us. He is mistaken. I suspect we are exactly what he is hungry for. It is a mother who can provide the ineffable comfort to a wounded soul. It is a father who can say, "Ego te absolvo" and "well done, thou good and faithful servant" and be believed by the inmost soul.

  If you were better educated and hadn't lived in an atheistic establishment, you would understand those references. When you look them up, please remember that I did not have to.

  Love,

  Your sarcastic, overly analytical,

  deeply wounded yet quite satisfied,

  Mother

  To: jpwiggin@gso.nc.pub, twiggin@uncg.edu

  From: vwiggin%Colony1@colmin.gov/citizen

  Subj: Ender is fine

  I know all about Father's confessionals and your King James Version and I did not have to look anything up either. Do you think your and Father's religions were a secret from your children? Even Ender knew, and he left home when he was six.

  I am taking your advice because it is wise and because I have no better ideas. And I'm going to follow Ender's and Graff's advice, too, and write a history of Battle School. My goal is a simple one: to get it published as quickly as possible so it can be part of the task of erasing the vile slanders of the court martial, rehabilitating the reputations of the children who won this war and the adults who trained and aimed them. Not that I don't still hate them for taking Ender from us. But I find it quite possible to hate someone and still see their side of the argument between us. This is perhaps the only worthwhile gift Peter ever gave me.

  Peter has not written to me, nor I to him. If he asks, tell him that I think about him often, I notice that I don't see him anymore, and if that counts as "missing him," then he is missed.

  Meanwhile, I had a chance to meet Petra Arkanian in transit and I have spoken--well, literally WRITTEN--to "Bean," Dink Meeker, Han Tzu, and have letters out to several others. The better I understand from them what Ender went through (since Ender's not telling), the better I will know what I should be doing but am not because, as you point out, I am not his mother and he has asked me not to do it. Meanwhile, I am pretending that it's only about writing the book.

  I am an astonishingly fast writer. Are you sure we have no genes of Winston Churchill in us? Some dalliance of his, for instance, with a Pole-in-exile during World War II? I feel him to be a kindred spirit of mine, except for the political ambitions, the constant blood alcohol level, and walking around the house naked. He did those things, by the way, not me.

  Love,

  Your equally sarcastic, just-analytical-enough,

  not-yet-wounded-nor-satisfied daughter,

  Valentine

  Graff had disappeared from Eros soon after the court martial, but now he was back. It seems that as Minister of Colonization, he could not miss the opportunity for publicity that the departure of the first colony ship would offer.

  "Publicity is good for the Dispersal Project," said Graff when Mazer laughed at him.

  "And you don't love the camera?"

  "Look at me," said Graff. "I've lost twenty-five kilos. I'm a mere shadow of myself."

  "All through the war, you gain weight, bit by bit. You balloon during the court martial. And now you lose weight. Was it Earth gravity?"

  "I didn't go to Earth," said Graff. "I was busy turning Battle School into the assembly point for the colonists. No one understood why I insisted that all the beds be adult-sized. Now they talk about my foresight."

  "Why are you lying to me? You weren't in charge when Battle School was built."

  Graff shook his head. "Mazer, I wasn't in charge of anything when I talked you into coming home, was I?"

  "You were in charge of the get-Rackham-home-to-help-train-Ender-Wiggin project."

  "But no one knew there was such a project."

  "Except you."

  "So I was also in charge of the make-sure-Battle-School-is-fitted-out for-the-Human-Genome-Dispersal-Project project."

  "And that's why you're losing weight," said Mazer. "Because you finally got the funding and authority to carry out the real project that you've had in mind all along."

  "Winning the war was the most important thing. I had my mind on my job of training children! Who knew we'd win it in circumstances that gave us all these uninhabited already-terraformed completely habitable planets? I expected Ender to win, or Bean if Ender failed, but I thought we'd then be battling the buggers world to world, and racing to found new colonies in the opposite direction, so we wouldn't be vulnerable to their counterattack."

  "So you're here to have your picture taken with the colonists."

  "I'm here to have my smiling picture taken with you and Ender and the colonists."

  "Ah," said Mazer. "The court martial crowd."

  "The cruelest thing about that court martial was the way they savaged Ender's reputation. Fortunately, most people remember the victory, not the evidence from the court martial. Now we place another image in their minds."

  "So you actually care about Ender."

  Graff looked hurt. "I have always loved that boy. It would take a moral idiot not to. I know deep goodness when I see it. I hate having his name tied to the murder of children."

  "He did kill them."

  "He didn't know that he did."

  "Those weren't like winning the war while thinking it was a game, Hyrum," said Mazer. "He knew he was in a real fight for his life, and he knew that he had to win decisively. He had to know that the death of his opponent was always a possibility."

  "So you're saying he's as guilty as our enemies said he was?"

  "I'm saying that he killed them and he knew what he was doing. Not the exact outcome, but that he was taking actions that could cause real and permanent damage to those boys."

  "They were going to kill him!"

  "Bonzo was," said Mazer. "Stilson was a petty bully."

  "But Ender was so untrained he had no idea of the damage he was doing, or that his shoes had steel toes. Weren't we clever to keep him safe by insisting he wear shoes like that."

  "Hyrum, I think Ender's actions were perfectly justified. He didn't choose to fight those boys, so the only choice he had was how thoroughly to win."

  "Or lose."

  "Ender never has the choice to lose, Hyrum. It's not in him, even when he thinks it is."

  "All I know is that he promised to try to work a picture with me and you into his schedule."

  Mazer nodded. "And you think that meant that he'd do it."

  "He doesn't have a schedule. I thought he was being ironic. Except for hanging with Valentine, what does he have to do?"

  Mazer laughed. "What he's been doing for more than a year--studying the formics so obsessively that we all worried about his mental health. Only I have to say that with the colonists' ar
rival, he's been preparing to be governor in more than just name."

  "Admiral Morgan will be disappointed."

  "Admiral Morgan expects to get his way," said Mazer, "because he doesn't realize Ender is serious about governing the colony. What Ender was doing was memorizing the dossiers of all the colonists--their test results, family relationships with other colonists and with family members who were left home, their towns and countries of origin and what those places look like and what's been going on there in the past year, during the time they were signing up."

  "And Admiral Morgan doesn't get the point?"

  "Admiral Morgan is a leader," said Mazer. "He gives orders and they're passed down the chain. Knowing the grunts is the job of the petty officers."

  Graff laughed. "And people wonder why we used children to command the final campaign."

  "Every officer learns how to function within the system that promoted him," said Mazer. "The system is still sick--it always has been and always will be. But Ender learned how real leadering is done."

  "Or was born knowing it."

  "So he's greeting every colonist by name and making a point of conversing with them all for at least a half hour."

  "Can't he do that on the ship after they take off?"

  "He's meeting the ones who are going into stasis. The ones who are staying awake he'll meet after launch. So when he says he'll try to fit you into his schedule, he was not being ironic. Most of the colonists are sleepers and he barely has time for a real conversation with all of them."

  Graff sighed. "Isn't he even sleeping?"

  "I think he figures he'll have time to sleep after launch--when Admiral Morgan is commanding his vessel and Ender will have no official duties that he doesn't assign to himself. At least that's how Valentine and I decode his behavior."

  "He doesn't talk to her?"

  "Of course he does. He just doesn't admit to having any plans or any reasons for the things he does."

  "Why would he keep secrets from her?"

  "I'm not sure they're secrets," said Mazer. "I think he might not know that he has plans of any kind. I think he's greeting the colonists because that's what they need and expect. It's a duty because it means a lot to them, so he does it."