They got home late on their last night in Monopoli, and when they reached the flat, there was Grandmother on the front stoop of the building. She rose to her feet the moment she saw them and began screaming, even before they were near enough to hear what she was saying.
“Let’s not go back,” said Alessandra. “There’s nothing there that we need.”
“We need clothing for the journey to Kenya,” said Mother. “And besides, I’m not afraid of her.”
So they trudged on up the street, as neighbors looked out to see what was going on. Grandmother’s voice became clearer and clearer. “Ungrateful daughter! You plan to steal away my beloved granddaughter and take her into space! I’ll never see her again, and you didn’t even tell me so I could say good-bye! What kind of monster does that! You never cared for me! You leave me alone in my old age—what kind of duty is that? You in this neighborhood, what do you think of a daughter like that? What a monster has been living among you, a monster of ingratitude!” And on and on.
But Alessandra felt no shame. Tomorrow these would not be her neighbors. She did not have to care. Besides, any of them with sense would realize: No wonder Dorabella Toscano is taking her daughter away from this vile witch. Space is barely far enough to get away from this hag.
Grandmother got directly in front of Mother and screamed into her face. Mother did not speak, merely sidestepped around her and went to the door of the building. But she did not open the door. She turned around and held out her hand to stop Grandmother from speaking.
Grandmother did not stop.
But Mother simply continued to hold up her hand. Finally Grandmother wound up her rant by saying, “So now she wants to speak to me! She didn’t want to speak to me for all these weeks that she’s been planning to go into space, only when I come here with my broken heart and my bruised face will she bother to speak to me, only now! So speak already! What are you waiting for! Speak! I’m listening! Who’s stopping you?”
Finally Alessandra stepped between them and screamed into Grandmother’s face, “Nobody can speak till you shut up!”
Grandmother slapped Alessandra’s face. It was a hard slap, and it knocked Alessandra a step to the side.
Then Mother held out an envelope to Grandmother. “Here is all the money that’s left from our signing bonus. Everything I have in all the world except the clothes we take to Kenya. I give it to you. And now I’m done with you. You’ve taken the last thing you will ever get from me. Except this.”
She slapped Grandmother hard across the face.
Grandmother staggered, and was about to start screaming when Mother, lighthearted fairy-born Dorabella Toscano, put her face into Grandmother’s and screamed, “Nobody ever, ever, ever hits my little girl!” Then she jammed the envelope with the check in it into Grandmother’s blouse, took her by the shoulders, turned her around, and gave her a shove down the street.
Alessandra threw her arms around her mother and sobbed. “Mama, I never understood till now, I never knew.”
Mother held her tight and looked over her shoulder at the neighbors who were watching, awestruck. “Yes,” she said, “I am a terrible daughter. But I am a very, very good mother!”
Several of the neighbors applauded and laughed, though others clucked their tongues and turned away. Alessandra did not care.
“Let me look at you,” said Mother.
Alessandra stepped back. Mother inspected her face. “A bruise, I think, but not too bad. It will heal quickly. I think there won’t be a trace of it left by the time you meet that fine young man with prospects.”
CHAPTER 6
To: GovNom%[email protected]
From: GovAct%[email protected]
Subj: Naming the colony
I agree that calling this place Colony I is going to get tiresome. I agree that naming it now instead of REnaming it when you and your colony ship get here in fifty years will be much better.
But your suggestion of “Prospero” would not play well here right now. We’re burying former fighter pilots at the rate of one every other day while our xenobiologist struggles to find drugs or treatments that will control or eliminate the airborne worms that we inhale and that burrow through our veins until they’re so perforated we bleed out internally.
Sel (the XB) assures me that the drug he just gave us will slow them down and buy us time. So there’s a chance there’ll actually be a colony here when you arrive. If you have questions about the dustworm itself, you’ll have to ask him at SMenach%[email protected].
My address is my job title but my name is Vitaly Kolmogorov and my permanent title is Admiral. Do you have a name? Whom am I writing to?
To: GovAct%[email protected]
From: GovNom%[email protected]
Subj: Re: Naming the colony
Dear Admiral Kolmogorov,
I have read with great relief the recent report that the dustworm has been completely controlled by the drug cocktail your xb Sel Menach developed. The worm is being named for him, but the actual name will be held up while committees argue endlessly about whether Latin should be used for naming xenospecies. Some are arguing for a different language for each colony world; others for standardization across all the colonies; others for linguistic differentiation between species native to each planet and the species from the formic home world that were transplanted to all the colony worlds. Thus the Earthbound keep themselves busy while you do the real work of trying to establish a bridgehead in an alien ecosphere.
I am part of the problem, with my fussing about the colony’s name. Please forgive my wasting your time on this; yet it must be done, and you have already prevented me from a faux pas that would have hurt the relations between your colonists and the Ministry and its minions (including me). You were right that Prospero doesn’t work, but for some reason I am quite drawn to using a name from The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Perhaps Tempest itself, or Miranda, or Ariel. I suspect Caliban would not be a good choice. Gonzalo? Sycorax?
As to my name, there is debate about whether to inform your colonists of who I am. I am strictly forbidden to tell even you, the “acting” governor. Meanwhile, my name is being bandied about on the nets, with no great secret made of the fact that I am appointed governor of Colony I. The information will simply not be transmitted to you by ansible. So easy to deceive you or leave you ignorant—something that I will keep in mind when I receive information from ColMin as governor 40 years from now. Unless I can get them to change this foolish practice before I depart.
I believe that the powers-that-be think that having a child of thirteen appointed as governor of your colony might hurt morale among your colonists, though it will be forty years before I arrive. At the same time, others think that having the victorious commander as governor will help morale. While they decide, I trust both your powers of deduction and your discretion.
To: GovNom%[email protected]
From: GovAct%[email protected]
Subj: Re: Naming the colony
Dear Governor-Nominate Wiggin,
I am impressed with the alacrity with which ColMin acted on your petition for ansible bandwidth to be made available for unrestricted access to the nets by colonists, at the discretion of the governors.
My first thought was to inform everyone in the colony about the identity of their governor-in-transit. The name of Ender Wiggin is revered here. After our own victory, we studied your battles and debated about just which superlative was most appropriate when applied to your degree of military brilliance. But I have also seen the reports of the court martial of Col. Graff and Admiral Rackham. Your reputation was savaged and I don’t want to provide an incentive for the colonists, when they finally have the leisure for connecting to the home of humanity, to brood about whether you are a savior or a sociopath. Not that any of the soldiers and pilots among us has the slightest doubt that you are the former; but there will be children born here during the fifty years of your voyage who did not fight under your command.
I confess to having had to reread The Tempest upon receiving your list of names. Sycorax indeed! And yet, obscure as the name is in the play, it is astonishingly appropriate for our situation. The mother of Caliban, the witch who made the unmapped island rich with magic—Sycorax would then be the appropriate name for the hive queen who once ruled this world but now is gone, leaving behind so many artifacts…and traps.
Our xb—a remarkable young man, who refuses to hear of our gratitude for his having saved our lives—says that the formic bodies were riddled with damage from the dustworms. Apparently the individual formics were regarded as so expendable that there was no attempt to control or prevent the disease. The waste of life! Fortunately, Sel has found that the dustworm life cycle has a phase that requires feeding on a certain species of plant. He is working on a means of wiping out that entire plant species. Ecocide, he calls it—a monstrous biological crime. He broods with guilt. Yet the alternative is to keep injecting ourselves forever, or to genetically alter all the children born to us in this world so our blood is poisonous to the dustworms.
In short, Sel IS Prospero. The hive queen was Sycorax. The formics, Caliban. So far, no Ariels, though every female of reproductive age is venerated here. We’re about to have a lottery for mating purposes. I have taken myself out of the running, lest I be accused of making sure I got one of them. No one likes this unromantic, unfree plan—but we voted on the method of allocating scarce reproductive resources and Sel persuaded a majority that this was the way to go. We have no time for wooing here, or for hurt feelings, or rejection.
I talk to you because I can’t talk to anyone here, not even Sel. He has burdens enough without my spilling any of mine onto his back.
By the way, the captain of your ship keeps writing to me as if he thought he could give me orders about the governance of Colony I, without reference to you. I thought you should be aware of this so you can take appropriate steps to avoid having to deal with a would-be regent when you arrive. He strikes me as being the kind of officer I call a “man of peace”—a bureaucrat who thrives in the military only when there is no war, because his true enemy is any officer who has a position or assignment he wants. You are the thing he hates worst: a man of war. Look behind you; that’s where the man of peace always tries to stay, dirk in hand.
—Vitaly Denisovitch
To: GovAct%[email protected]
From: GovNom%[email protected]
Subj: Re: I have the name
Dear Vitaly Denisovitch,
I have it: Shakespeare. As the name for both the planet and the first settlement. Then later settlements can be named for characters in The Tempest and other plays.
Meanwhile, we can refer to a certain admiral as Thane of Cawdor, to remind ourselves of the inevitable result of overweening ambition.
Are you content with Shakespeare as the name? It seems appropriate to me that a new world be named for that great writer of human souls. But if you think it is too English, too tied to a particular culture, I will start over on another track entirely.
I am grateful for your confidence. I hope it will continue during the voyage, even though time dilation will make it take weeks to send and receive each message. Of course that means I will not be in stasis—arriving at age fifteen will be better than at age thirteen.
And, so you know, the voyage will not take fifty years, but closer to forty—refinements have been made in the eggs that power the ships and in the inertial protection of the ships, so we can accelerate and decelerate faster in-system and spend more time at relativistic speeds. We may have gotten all our technology from the formics, but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve on it.
—Ender
To: GovNom%[email protected]
From: GovAct%[email protected]
Subj: Re: Naming the colony
Dear Ender,
Shakespeare belongs to everyone, but now especially to our colony. I sounded out a few colonists and those who cared at all thought it was a good name.
We will do our best to stay alive until you come with more to augment our numbers. But I remember from my own voyage leading up to the war: Your two years will feel longer than our forty. We will be doing something. You will feel frustrated and bored. Those who opted for stasis were happier. Yet your argument for arriving at age fifteen instead of thirteen is a wise one. I understand better than you do the sacrifice you will be making.
I will send you reports every few months—every few days to you—so that you have some idea of who the colonists are and how the village works, socially, agriculturally, and technologically, as well as our achievements and the problems we will have overcome. I will do my best to help you get to know the leading people. But I will not tell them that I am doing this, because they would feel spied upon. When you arrive, try not to let them know how much I have told you. It will make you appear to be insightful. This is a good reputation to have.
I would do the same for Admiral Morgan, since there is a chance that he will actually be in control—the soldiers on your ship will answer to him, not you, and the nearest law enforcement is forty years distant if he should choose to illegally deploy them on our planet’s surface. Our colonists will be unarmed and untrained in military action so he would face no resistance.
However, Admiral Morgan persists in sending me orders without once inquiring about conditions here, beyond what he may or may not have read in my official reports. He is also becoming quite testy about my failure to respond in a satisfactory way (though I have responded fully to all his legitimate inquiries and requests). I suspect that if he is in control when he arrives, removing me from office will be his first priority. Fortunately, demographics suggest that I will be dead before he gets here so that issue will be moot.
Thirteen you may be, but at least you understand that you cannot lead strangers, you can only coerce or bribe them.
—Vitaly
Sel Menach’s back and neck ached from his hours staring at alien molds through a microscope. If I keep this up, I’ll be bent over like an old hag before I’m thirty-five.
But it would be the same out in the fields, hoeing, trying to keep the vines from growing up the maize and blocking out the sun. His back would bend there, too, and his skin turn brown. You could hardly tell one race from another in this savage sunlight. It was like a vision of the future: Personnel chosen from all the races of earth to be surgeons and geologists and xenobiologists and climatologists—and also combat pilots, so they could kill the enemy who once owned this world—and now that the war was over, they’d interbreed so thoroughly that in three generations, maybe two, there would be no concept of race or national origin here.
And yet each colony world would get its own look, its own accent of I.F. Common, which was merely English with a few spelling changes. As colonists began to go from world to world, new divisions would arise. Meanwhile, Earth itself would keep all the old races and nationalities and many of the languages, so that the distinction between colonist and Earthborn would become more and more clear and important.
Not my problem, thought Sel. I can see the future, anyone can; but there’ll be no future here on the planet now called Shakespeare unless I can find a way to kill this mold that infests the grain crops from Earth. How could there be a mold that is already specific to grasses, when the grasses of Earth, including the grains, have no genetic analogue on this world?
Afraima came in with more samples from the test garden in the greenhouse. It was so ironic—all the high-tech agricultural equipment that had been carried along with the fighters in the belly of the transport starship, and yet when it failed there would be no parts, no replacements for fifty years. Maybe forty, if the new stardrive actually brought the colony ship sooner. By the time it gets here, we might be living in the woods, digging for roots and utterly without any working technology.
Or I might succeed in adjusting and adapting our crops so that they thrive in this place, and we have huge food surpluses, enough to buy us leisure ti
me for the development of a technological infrastructure.
We arrive at an extremely high level of technology—but with nothing under it to hold it up. If we crash, we crash all the way down.
“Look at this,” said Afraima.
Dutifully, Sel stood up from his microscope and walked over to hers. “Yes, what am I looking at here?”
“What do you see?” she asked.
“Don’t play games with me.”
“I’m asking for independent verification. I can’t tell you anything.”
So this was something that mattered. He looked closely. “This is a section of maize leaf. From the sterile section, so it’s completely clean.”
“But it’s not,” she said. “It’s from D-4.”
Sel was so relieved he almost wept; yet at the same moment, he was angry. Anger won, in the moment. “No it’s not,” he said sharply. “You’ve mixed up the samples.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “So I went back and got a new selection from D-4. And then again. You’re looking at my triple check.”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 178
