“So I’ll teach them Common,” said Valentine. “What do you think?”
“I think it’ll be harder than you think, but it would really help the people who took the class—if the ones who need it take it.”
“So I’ll see what language-teaching software there is in the library.”
“First, though, I hope you’ll check with Admiral Morgan.”
“Why?”
“It’s his ship. Offering a course can be done only with his permission.”
“Why would he care?”
“I don’t know that he does care. I just know that on his ship, we have to find out if he cares before we start something as formal and regular as a class.”
As it turned out, the passenger liaison officer, a colonel named Jarrko Kitunen, was already planning to organize Common classes and he accepted Valentine as an instructor the moment she volunteered. He also flirted with her shamelessly in his Finnish accent, and she found that she rather enjoyed his company. With Ender always busy talking with somebody or reading whatever he’d just received by ansible or downloaded from the library, it was good to have a pleasant way to pass the time. She could only stand to work on her history of Battle School for a few hours at a time, so it was a relief to have human company.
She had come on this voyage for Ender, but until he was willing to take her fully into his confidence, she had no obligation to mope around wishing for more of Ender’s soul than he was willing to share. And if it turned out that Ender never wished to take her into his life, to restore their old bond, then she would need to make a life for herself, wouldn’t she?
Not that Jarrko would be that life. For one thing, he was at least ten years older than she was. For another, he was crew, which meant that when the ship was loaded up with whatever artifacts and trade goods and supplies Shakespeare was able to supply them with, it would be turning around and heading back to Earth, or at least to Eros. She would not be on it. So any relationship with Jarrko was going to end. He might be fine with that, but Valentine was not.
As Father always said, “Monogamy is what works best for any society in the long run. That’s why half of us are born male and half female—so we come out even.”
So Valentine wasn’t always with Ender; she was busy, she had things to do, she had a life of her own. Which was more than Peter had ever given her, so she rather enjoyed it.
It happened, though, that Valentine was with Ender in the observation deck, working on the book, when an Italian woman and her teenage daughter walked up to Ender and stood there, saying nothing, waiting to be noticed. Valentine knew them because they were both in her Common class.
Ender noticed them at once and smiled at them. “Dorabella and Alessandra Toscano,” he said. “What a pleasure to meet you at last.”
“We were not ready,” said Dorabella in her halting Italian accent. “On till your sister could taught us English good enough.” Then she giggled. “I mean ‘Common.’”
“I wish I spoke Italian,” said Ender. “It’s a beautiful language.”
“The language of love,” said Dorabella. “Not is French, nasty language of kissy lips and spitting.”
“French is beautiful, too,” said Ender, laughing at the way she had imitated the French accent and attitude.
“To French and deaf peoples,” said Dorabella.
“Mother,” said Alessandra. She had very little Italian accent, but rather spoke like an educated Brit. “There are French speakers among the colonists, and he can’t offend any of them.”
“Why will they be any offended? They make the kissy mouth to talk, we pretend we not to notice it?”
Valentine laughed aloud. Dorabella really was quite funny, full of attitude. Sassy, that was the word. Even though she was old enough to be Ender’s mother—considering her daughter was Ender’s age—she could be seen as flirting with Ender. Maybe she was one of those women who flirted with everybody because they knew of no other way to relate to them.
“Now we are ready,” said Dorabella. “Your sister teaching us good, so we ready for our half hour with you.”
Ender blinked. “Oh, did you think—I took a half hour with all the colonists who were going to travel in stasis because that’s all the time I had before they became unavailable. But the colonists on the ship—we have a year or two, plenty of time. No need to schedule a half hour. I’m here all the time.”
“But you are very important man, saving of the whole world.”
Ender shook his head. “That was my old job. Now I’m a kid with a job that’s too big for me. So sit down, let’s talk. You’re learning English very well—Valentine has mentioned you, actually, and how hard you work—and your daughter has no accent at all, she’s fluent.”
“Very intelligent girl my Alessandra,” said Dorabella. “And pretty, too, yes? You think so? Nice figure for fourteen.”
“Mother!” Alessandra shrank down into a chair. “Am I a used car? Am I a street vendor’s sandwich?”
“Street vendors,” sighed Dorabella. “I miss them yet.”
“Already,” Valentine corrected her.
“I am already miss them,” said Dorabella, proudly correcting herself. “So small Shakespeare planet will be. No city! What you said, Alessandra? Tell him.”
Alessandra looked flustered, but her mother pressed her. “I just said that there are more characters in Shakespeare’s plays than there will be colonists on the planet named after him.”
Ender laughed. “What a thought! You’re right, we probably couldn’t put on all of his plays without having to use several colonists for more than one part. Not that I have any particular plan to put on a Shakespearean play. Though maybe we should. What do you think? Would anyone want to be ready to put on a play for the colonists who are already there?”
“We don’t know whether they like the new name,” said Valentine. She also thought: Does Ender have any idea how much work it is to put on a play?
“They know the name,” Ender assured her.
“But do they like it?” asked Valentine.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Alessandra. “Not enough women ruoli, parti—how do you say it?” She turned to Valentine helplessly.
“‘Role,’” said Valentine. “Or ‘part.’”
“Oh.” Alessandra giggled. It was not an annoying giggle, it was a rather charming one. It didn’t make her sound stupid. “The same words! Of course.”
“She’s right,” said Valentine. “The colonists are about half and half, and Shakespeare’s plays are what, five percent female parts?”
“Oh well,” said Ender. “It was a thought.”
“I wish we could put on a play,” said Alessandra. “But maybe we can read them together?”
“In theater,” said Dorabella. “The place for holografi. We all read. Me, I listen, my English is not good enough.”
“It’s a good idea,” said Ender. “Why don’t you organize it, Signora Toscano?”
“Please call me of Dorabella.”
“There’s no ‘of’ in that sentence,” said Alessandra. “There isn’t in Italian, either.”
“English has so much ‘of,’ everywhere ‘of,’ except where I put it!” As Dorabella laughed, she touched Ender’s arm. Probably Dorabella didn’t see how he suppressed his instinct to flinch—Ender didn’t like being touched by strangers, he never had. But Valentine saw it. He was still Ender.
“I’ve never seen a play,” said Ender. “I’ve read them, I’ve seen holos and vids of them, but I’ve never actually been in a room where people actually said the lines aloud. I could never put it together, but I’d love to be there and listen as it happens.”
“Then you must!” said Dorabella. “You are governor, you make it happen!”
“I can’t,” said Ender. “Truly. You do it, please.”
“No, I cannot,” said Dorabella. “My English is too bad. Il teatro is for young persons. I will watch and listen. You and Alessandra do it. You are students, you are children.
Romeo and Juliet!”
Could she possibly be any more obvious? thought Valentine.
“Mother thinks that if you and I are together a lot,” said Alessandra, “we’ll fall in love and get married.”
Valentine almost laughed aloud. So the daughter wasn’t a co-conspirator, she was a draftee.
Dorabella feigned shock. “I have no plan like such!”
“Oh, Mother, you’ve been planning it from the start. Even back in the town we came from—”
“Monopoli,” said Ender.
“She was calling you a ‘young man with prospects.’ A likely candidate for my husband. My personal opinion is that I’m very young, and so are you.”
Ender was busy mollifying the mother. “Dorabella, please, I’m not offended and of course I know you weren’t planning anything. Alessandra is teasing me. Teasing us both.”
“I’m not, but you can say whatever it takes to make Mother happy,” said Alessandra. “Our lives together are one long play. She makes me…not the star of my own autobiography. But Mother always sees the happy ending, right from the start.”
Valentine wasn’t sure what to make of the relationship between these two. The words were biting, almost hostile. Yet as she said them, Alessandra gave her mother a hug and seemed to mean it. As if the words were part of a long ritual between them, but they no longer were meant to sting.
Whatever was going on, between Ender and Alessandra, Dorabella seemed mollified. “I like the happy ending.”
“We should put on a Greek play,” said Alessandra. “Medea. The one where the mother kills her own children.”
Valentine was shocked at this—what a cruel thing to say in front of her mother. But no, from Dorabella’s reaction Alessandra wasn’t referring to her. For Dorabella laughed and nodded and said, “Yes, yes, Medea, spiteful mama!”
“Only we’ll rename her,” said Alessandra. “Isabella!”
“Isabella!” cried Dorabella at almost the same moment. The two of them laughed so hard they almost cried, and Ender joined with them.
Then, to Valentine’s surprise, while the other two were still hiccuping through the end of their laughter, Ender turned to her and explained. “Isabella is Dorabella’s mother. They had a painful parting.”
Alessandra stopped laughing and looked at Ender searchingly—but if Dorabella was surprised that Ender knew so much of their past, she didn’t show it. “We come on this colony to be free of my perfect mother. Santa Isabella, we will not pray to you!”
Then Dorabella leapt to her feet and began to do some kind of dance, a waltz perhaps, holding an imaginary full skirt in one hand, and with the other hand tracing arcane patterns in the air as she danced. “Always I have a magic land where I can be happy, and I take my daughter there with me, always happy.” Then she stopped and faced Ender. “Shakespeare Colony is our magic land now. You are king of the…folletti?” She looked to her daughter.
“Elfs,” said Alessandra.
“Elves,” said Valentine.
“Gli elfi!” cried Dorabella in delight. “Again same word! Elfo, elve!”
“Elf,” said Valentine and Alessandra together.
“King of the elves,” said Ender. “I wonder what email address I’ll get for that one. [email protected].” He turned to Valentine. “Or is that the title Peter aspires to?”
Valentine smiled. “He’s still torn between Hegemon and God,” she said.
Dorabella didn’t understand the reference to Peter. She returned to her dancing, and this time she sang a wordless but haunting tune with it. And Alessandra shook her head but still joined in the song, harmonizing with it. So she had heard it before and knew it and had sung with her mother. Their voices blended sweetly.
Valentine watched Dorabella’s dance, fascinated. At first it had seemed like a childish, rather mad thing to do. Now, though, she could see that Dorabella knew she was being silly, but still meant it from the heart. It gave the movement, and her facial expression, a sort of irony that made it easy to forgive the silliness and affectation of it, while the sincerity turned it into something quite winning.
The woman isn’t old, thought Valentine. She’s still young and quite good looking. Beautiful, even, especially now, especially in this strange fairyish dance.
The song ended. Dorabella kept dancing in the silence.
“Mother, you can stop flying now,” said Alessandra gently.
“But I can’t,” said Dorabella, and now she was openly teasing. “In this starship we fly for fifty years!”
“Forty years,” said Ender.
“Two years,” said Alessandra.
Apparently Ender liked the idea of doing a play, because he brought them all back to the topic. “Not Romeo and Juliet,” he said. “We need a comedy, not a tragedy.”
“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” said Valentine. “Lots of women’s parts.”
“The Taming of the Shrew!” cried Alessandra, and Dorabella almost collapsed with laughter. Another reference, apparently, to Isabella. And when they stopped laughing, they insisted that Shrew was the perfect play. “I will read the part of the madwoman,” said Dorabella. Valentine noticed that Alessandra seemed to be biting back some kind of comment.
So it was that the plan was conceived for a play reading in the theater three days later—days by ship’s time, though the whole concept of time seemed rather absurd to Valentine, on this voyage where forty years would pass in less than two. What would her birthday be now? Would she count her age by ship’s time or the elapsed calendar when she arrived? And what did Earth’s calendar mean on Shakespeare?
Naturally, Dorabella and Alessandra came to Ender often during the days of preparation, asking him endless questions. Even though he made it clear that all the decisions were up to them, that he was not in charge of the event, he was never impatient with them. He seemed to enjoy their company—though Valentine suspected that it was not for the reason Dorabella had hoped. Ender wasn’t falling in love with Alessandra—if he was infatuated with anyone, it was likely to be the mother. No, what Ender was falling in love with was the family-ness of them. They were close in a way that Ender and Valentine had once been close. And they were including Ender in that closeness.
Why couldn’t I have done that for him? Valentine was quite jealous, but only because of her own failure, not because she wished to deprive him of the pleasure he was getting from the Toscanos.
It was inevitable, of course, that they enlisted Ender himself to read the part of Lucentio, the handsome young suitor of Bianca—played, of course, by Alessandra. Dorabella herself read Kate the Shrew, while Valentine was relegated to the part of the Widow. Valentine didn’t even pretend not to want to read the part—this was the most interesting thing going on in the ship, and why not be at the heart of it? She was Ender’s sister; let people hear her voice, especially in the ribald, exaggerated part of the Widow.
It was entertaining for Valentine to see how the men and boys who were cast in the many other parts focused on Dorabella. The woman had an incredible laugh, rich and throaty and contagious. To earn a laugh from her in this comedy was a fine thing, and the men all vied to please her. It made Valentine wonder if getting Ender and Alessandra together was really Dorabella’s agenda? Perhaps it’s what she thought she was doing, but in fact Dorabella held the center of the stage herself, and seemed to love having all eyes on her. She flirted with them all, fell in love with them all, and yet always seemed to be in a world of her own, too.
Has Kate the Shrew ever been played like this before?
Does every woman have what this Dorabella has? Valentine searched in her heart to find that kind of ebullience. I know how to have fun, Valentine insisted to herself. I know how to be playful.
But she knew there was always irony in her wit, a kind of snottiness in her banter. Alessandra’s timidity covered everything she did—she was bold in what she said, but it was as if her own words surprised and embarrassed her after the fact. Dorabella, however, was neither iron
ic nor frightened. Here was a woman who had faced all her dragons and slain them; now she was ready for the accolades of the admiring throng. She cried out Kate’s dialogue from the heart, her rage, her passion, her petulance, her frustration, and finally her love. The final monologue, in which she submits to her husband’s will, was so beautiful it made Valentine cry a little, and she thought: I wonder what it would be like to love and trust a man so much that I’d be willing to abase myself as Kate did. Is there something in women that makes us long to be humbled? Or is it something in human beings, that when we are overmastered, we rejoice in our subjection? That would explain a lot of history.
Since everyone who was interested in the play was already in it, and attending the rehearsals, it wasn’t as if the actual performance was going to surprise anyone. Valentine almost asked the whole group, at the last rehearsal, “Why bother to put it on? We just did it, and it was wonderful.”
But there was still a kind of excitement throughout the ship about the coming performance, and Valentine realized that rehearsal was not performance, no matter how well it went. And there would be others there after all, who had not been at the last rehearsal: Dorabella was going around inviting members of the crew, many of whom promised to come. And passengers who weren’t in the play seemed excited about coming, and some were openly rueful about having declined to take part. “Next time,” they said.
When they got to the theater at the appointed time, they found Jarrko standing at the door, a stiff, formal expression on his face. No, the theater would not be opened; by order of the admiral, the play reading had been canceled.
“Ah, Governor Wiggin,” said Jarrko.
A bad sign, if the title was back, thought Valentine.
“Admiral Morgan would like to see you at once, if you please, sir.”
Ender nodded and smiled. “Of course,” he said.
So Ender had expected this? Or was he really that perfectly poised, so it seemed that nothing surprised him?
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 182
