It was all said with Mother’s trademark glow, her light-and-happy air. What had become so annoying to Alessandra that there were times she wanted to scream in rage when she heard it now seemed absolutely charming, and her little speech was answered by the rest of the colonists and crew with chuckles and some applause. And the actor playing Petruchio—who had an obvious crush on Mother, despite his having brought along a wife and four children—even said, “Brava! Brava!”
The play thus began with all eyes on Mother, even though she didn’t enter until the second act. Through sidelong glances, Alessandra could see that Mother was in a perfect trance of self-absorption during the scenes in which the men did all the exposition and made their bargain with Petruchio. As the other actors repeatedly mentioned beautiful Bianca and monstrous Katharina, Alessandra could see how Mother’s pose was working—as her reputation grew, the audience would keep glancing at her and would find perfect stillness.
But that would not be right for Bianca, thought Alessandra. She remembered something Ender had said during their last rehearsal. “Bianca is perfectly aware of the effect she has on men.” So where Katharina should be as still as Mother made her, Bianca’s job was to be bright, happy, desirable. So Alessandra smiled and glanced away as the men spoke of beautiful Bianca, as if she were blushing and shy. It did not matter that Alessandra was not beautiful—as Mother always taught her, the plainest of women became movie stars because of how they presented themselves, unashamed of their worst features. What Alessandra could never do in real life—greet the world with an open smile—she could do as Bianca.
Then it dawned on her for the first time. Mother is not able to change her mood by simply deciding to be happy. No, she’s an actress. She has always been an actress. She merely acts happy for the audience. I have been her audience all my life. And even when I didn’t applaud her show, she put it on for me all the same; and now I see why. Because Mother knew that when she was in her fairy-dancing mode, it was impossible to look at or think about anything else but her.
Now, though, the fairy queen was gone, and in her place just the queen: Mother, regal and still, letting the peons and courtiers talk, for she knew that when she wanted to, she could blow them all off the stage with a breath.
And so it was. It came time for act II, scene i, when Katharina is supposedly dragging Bianca about, her hands tied. Alessandra made herself melting and sweet, pleading with her mother to let her go, swearing that she loved no one, while Mother railed at her, so on fire with inner rage that it really frightened Alessandra, for a moment at least. Even in rehearsal Mother had not been so vehement. Alessandra doubted that Mother had been holding back before—Mother was not skilled at holding back. No, the special fire came because of the audience.
But not the whole audience, it became apparent as the scenes progressed. All of Katharina’s lines about the unfairness of her father and the stupidity of men were invariably shot directly at Admiral Morgan! It wasn’t just Alessandra’s imagination. Everybody could see it, and the audience at first tittered, then laughed outright as barb after barb was directed, not just at the characters in the play, but also at the man sitting in the middle of the second row.
Only Morgan himself seemed oblivious; apparently, with Mother’s eyes directly upon him, he merely thought that the performance, not the meaning of the words, was aimed at him.
The play went well. Oh, the Lucentio scenes were as boring as ever—not Ender’s fault, really, Lucentio was simply not one of the funny roles. It was a fate that Bianca shared, so Alessandra and Ender were designed only to be a “sweet couple” while the focus of attention—of laughter and of romance—was entirely on Katharina and Petruchio. Which meant, despite the best efforts of a pretty good Petruchio, that all eyes were on Mother. He would be shouting, but it was her face, her reactions that got the laughs. Her hunger, her sleepiness, her despair, and finally her playful acquiescence when Katharina finally understands and begins to play along with Petruchio’s mad game, all were fully communicated by Mother’s face, her posture, her tone when she spoke.
Mother is brilliant, Alessandra realized. Absolutely brilliant. And she knows it. No wonder she suggested a play reading!
And then another thought: If Mother could do this, why wasn’t she an actress? Why didn’t she become a star of stage or screen and let us live in wealth?
The answer, she realized, was simple: It was Alessandra’s birth when Mother was only fifteen.
Mother conceived me when she was exactly the age I am now, Alessandra realized. She fell in love and gave herself to a man—a boy—and produced a child. It was unbelievable to Alessandra, since she herself had never felt any kind of passion for any of the boys at school.
Father must have been remarkable.
Or Mother must have been desperate to get away from Grandmother. Which was far more likely to be the truth. Instead of waiting a few more years and becoming a great actress, Mother married and set up house-keeping and had this baby—not in that order—and because she had me, she was never able to use this talent to make her way in the world.
We could have been rich!
And now what? Off to a colony, a place of farmers and weavers and builders and scientists, with no time for art. There’ll be no leisure in the colony, the way there is on the ship during the voyage. When will Mother ever have a chance to show what she can do?
The play neared the end. Valentine played the widow with surprising wit and verve—she absolutely understood the part, and not for the first time Alessandra wished she could be a genius and a beauty like Valentine. Yet something else overshadowed that wish—for the first time in Alessandra’s life, she actually envied her mother, and wished she could be more like her. Unthinkable, yet true.
Mother stepped away from her stool and delivered her soliloquy straight to the front—straight to Admiral Morgan—speaking of the duty a woman owes to a man. Just as all her barbs had been aimed at Morgan, now this speech—this sweet, submissive, graceful, heartfelt, love-filled homily—was spoken straight into Morgan’s eyes.
And Morgan was riveted. His mouth was slightly open, his eyes never wavered from full attention on Mother. And when she knelt and said “my hand is ready, may it do him ease,” there were tears in Morgan’s eyes. Tears!
Petruchio roared his line: “Why there’s a wench! Come on and kiss me, Kate!”
Mother rose gracefully to her feet, not attempting to pantomime a kiss, but rather showing the face that a woman shows to her lover when she is about to kiss him—and her eyes, yet again, were directly on Morgan’s.
Now Alessandra understood Mother’s game. She was making Morgan fall in love with her!
And it worked. When the last lines were spoken and the audience stood and cheered for them all as the readers bowed and curtseyed, Morgan literally stepped onto the first row of seats so that as the applause continued, he walked onto the stage and shook Mother’s hand. Shook it? No, seized it and simply would not let it go, while talking to her about how wonderful she was.
Mother’s aloofness, her snub of him at the beginning, was all part of the plan. She was the shrew, punishing him for his presumption in canceling their reading; but by the end, she was tamed; she belonged to him completely.
All that evening, as Morgan invited everyone to the officers’ mess—where previously he had absolutely forbidden the colonists to go—he hovered around Mother. It was so obvious he was smitten that several of the officers mentioned it, obliquely, to Alessandra. “Your mother seems to have melted the great stone heart,” said one. And she overheard two officers speaking to each other, when one of them said, “Am I mistaken, or are his pants already coming off?”
If they thought that would happen, they didn’t know Mother. Alessandra had lived through years of Mother’s advice about men. Don’t let them this, don’t let them that—tease, hint, promise, but they get nothing at all until they have made their vows. Mother had done it the other way in her youth, and paid for it the past fifteen
years. Now she would surely follow her own sadder-but-wiser advice and seduce this man with words and smiles only. She wanted him besotted, not satisfied.
Oh, Mother, what a game you’re playing.
Do you really…is it possible…are you really attracted to him? He’s a good-looking man, in military trim. And around you he is not cold at all, not aloof; or if he is, he includes you in his lofty place.
One telling moment: As he was talking to someone else—one of the few officers who had brought a wife along—Morgan’s hand came to rest on Mother’s shoulder, a light embrace. But Mother instantly reached up, removed the hand, but then turned at the same moment to speak to Morgan with a warm smile, making a little joke of some kind, because everyone laughed. The message was mixed, yet clear: Touch me not, thou mortal, but yes, I will bestow this smile on you.
You are mine, but I am not yet yours.
This is what Mother meant for me to do with Ender Wiggin, my supposed “young man with prospects.” But I could no more come to own a man that way than I could fly. I will always be the supplicant, never the seducer; always grateful, never gracious.
Ender came up to her. “Your mother was brilliant tonight,” he said.
Of course that’s what he said. That’s whateveryone was saying.
“But I know something they don’t know,” he said.
“What’s that?” asked Alessandra.
“I know that the only reason my performance was good at all was because of you. All of us who played the suitors of Bianca, all that comedy, everything rested on the audience believing that we would yearn for you. And you were so lovely, no one doubted it for a moment.”
He smiled at her and then walked away to rejoin his sister.
Leaving Alessandra gasping.
CHAPTER 11
To: vwiggin%[email protected]/voy ==PosIDreq
From: GovDes%[email protected]/voy
Subj: How clean is your desk?
My desk is completely tamper-proof—though the ship’s computer tries to install snoops many times a day. Also, I’m assuming every room, corridor, toilet, and cupboard on this ship is wired at least for sound. On a voyage like this, with no outsider force to buttress the captain’s authority, the danger of mutiny is ever present, and it is not paranoia for Morgan to monitor all conversations of people he thinks pose a danger to the ship’s internal security.
It is unfortunate but predictable that he would regard me as such a danger. I have authority that does not depend in any way on him or his good wishes. His threat to have me put in stasis and returned to Eros—eighty years from now—is one that he can, in fact, carry out, and even though he might be censured it would not be regarded as a criminal act. There is a strong presumption that the captain of a ship is always to be believed when he makes a charge of mutiny or conspiracy. It is dangerous for me even to encrypt this message. However, there is no other safe way for us to talk. (You’ll notice that unlike Peter, I required proof that you be alive, not just your finger inserted into holospace.)
I am doing things that are certainly driving Quincy crazy. I get almost daily (monthly) messages from Acting Governor Kolmogorov, keeping me abreast of events in Shakespeare Colony as they transpire. Morgan has no idea what we say to each other; he simply has to pass along the encrypted notes when they come through the ansible.
I also get all the scientific papers and reports filed by the chem and bio teams. XB Sel Menach is the Linnaeus and Darwin of this planet. He is facing the ONLY non-formic-homeworld biota yet discovered (besides Earth’s, of course), and he has done a brilliant job of making the genetic adaptations that create human-edible varieties of native plants and animals, and varieties of Earth species that can thrive on this world. Without him, we would probably be coming to a ragged and destitute colony; instead, they generate surpluses of food and will be able to resupply this ship for immediate departure (inshallah).
All of this scientific information is available to Admiral Morgan, if he’s interested. He seems not to be. I am the only person who is accessing the Shakespeare Colony XB papers on this ship, since our XBs are in stasis and won’t wake up until we drop from relativistic speeds.
You can see why I chose not to go into stasis—I had visions of Admiral Morgan not bothering to rouse me until he was firmly in control of the colony, say six months after arrival. It wouldn’t have been within his rights, but it would certainly have been in his power. And who is to contradict him, with his forty marines whose sole duty is to make sure his will is uncontested, and a crew whose survival and freedom are tied to his pleasure?
Now, though, anything I do is a potential provocation—that’s what he made very clear with his actions and threats. I don’t think that was his purpose—I think he really believed he was facing some kind of attack. But he was too hasty to leap to the conclusion that I was responsible for it, and he was paranoid enough to try to resolve it as if it were an attack on his authority, rather than on the ship itself. We are on notice, and not a word can pass between us that mocks him, denigrates him, or questions his decisions.
Nor can we trust anyone else. While Governor Kolmogorov is completely in my confidence (and vice versa), no one else on the planet can be trusted to agree that having a fifteen-year-old boy as their governor is a good idea. Therefore I can take no preemptive actions using my future authority as governor. So my only alternative is to appear as if I really look up to Quincy in a fatherly way, and intend to be guided by him in every way. When you see me sucking up shamelessly, it is the moral equivalent of war. I am passing an army under his nose, masquerading as a bunch of simple farmers. That you and I are the entire army is not a problem for me—as long as you’re willing to pretend to be all innocence. You and Peter were doing that for years, weren’t you?
This letter is not going to be followed by many others—only in a real emergency. I don’t want him wondering what we’re saying to each other. He has the right to seize our desks and force us to disclose all contents. Therefore, you will eradicate this message, as will I. Of course, I AM taking the precaution of copying it, fully secure, to Graff. In case there is someday a court martial determining whether Morgan was right to put me in stasis and take me back to Eros, I want this to be available as evidence of my state of mind after our little incident over Peter’s message.
There is always the chance, however, that Morgan’s plan is even more dire—that he plans to send the ship back rather than taking it, while he remains on Shakespeare as governor-for-life. By the time anyone from Eros can be sent to put down his rebellion, he will have finished out his lifespan or be so old as to be not worth prosecuting.
However, I do not believe that is in his character. He is a creature of bureaucracy—he wants supremacy, not autonomy. Also, my judgment of him so far is that he can only do perfidious acts that he can morally justify in his own mind. Thus he must work himself into a frenzy over my supposed sabotage of ansible communications in order to justify what would have amounted to a coup d’etat against me as governor.
This only refers to what he consciously plans, not what he unconsciously desires. That is, he will think that he is responding to events as they unfold, but in fact he will be interpreting events to justify actions that he wants to take—even though he does not know he wants to take them. Thus when we arrive on Shakespeare, there is always the chance that he will find there’s an “emergency” that requires him to stay longer than the ship can stay, “forcing” him to send it back and remain behind.
The need to understand Quincy is why I am remaining so close to the Toscanos. The mother is clearly betting on Quincy rather than me as the future power, though in her mind she is no doubt merely hedging her bets, to make sure that no matter who governs, either she or her daughter will be married to the powerful figure.
But the mother has no intention of letting her daughter out from under her thumb, as she would be if we married and I actually become governor in fact as well as name. So, deliberately or no
t, the mother will be my enemy in this; however, at present she is my best guide to Quincy’s state of mind, since she is with him as often as possible. I must get to know this man. Our future depends on knowing what he is going to do before he does it.
Meanwhile, you have no idea what a relief it is to me that there is someone who shares this with me. In all my years in Battle School, the closest I came to having a confidant was Bean. Yet I could only burden him up to a certain point; this letter is my first exercise in genuine candor since I talked to you on the lake in North Carolina so long ago.
Oh, wait. It was only three years. Less? Time is so confusing. Thank you for being with me, Valentine. I only hope that I can keep it from being a meaningless exercise that takes us back to Eros in stasis, with eighty years of human history gone and absolutely nothing accomplished except my being defeated by a bureaucrat.
Ender
What Virlomi hadn’t counted on was the way it would affect her, returning to Battle School after all that she had been through, all that she had done.
She turned herself over to her enemies when she could see there was nothing left to the war but slaughter. She knew with a sinking desperation in her heart that it was all her fault. She had been warned, by friends and would-be friends: This is too much. It was enough to drive the Chinese out of India and liberate your homeland. Don’t seek to punish them.
She had been the same kind of fool that Napoleon and Hitler and Xerxes and Hannibal had been: She thought that because she had never been defeated, she could not be. She had bested enemies with far greater strength than hers; she thought she always would.
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 185
