“I thought my father told you—if you actually die, I’m supposed to call for help and observe your decomposition process.”
“That’s right. You only carry me if I’m breathing.”
“Or do you want me to start now? Hoist you onto my shoulders so you can’t discover another whole family of plants every fifty meters?”
“For a respectful, obedient young man, you can be very sarcastic.”
“I was only slightly sarcastic. I can do better if you want.”
“This is good. I’ve been so busy arguing with you, we’ve gone this far without my noticing anything.”
“Except the dogs have found something.”
It turned out to be a small family of the horned reptile that seemed to fill the bunny rabbit niche—a big-toothed leaf-eater that hopped, and would only fight if cornered. The horns did not seem to Sel to be weapons—too blunt—and when he imagined a mating ritual in which these creatures leapt into the air to butt their heads together, he could not see how it could help but scramble their brains, since their skulls were so light.
“Probably for a display of health,” said Sel.
“The antlers?”
“Horns,” said Sel.
“I think they’re shed and then regrown,” said Po. “Don’t these animals look like skin-shedders?”
“No.”
“I’ll look for a shed skin somewhere.”
“You’ll have a long look,” said Sel.
“Why, because they eat the skins?”
“Because they don’t shed.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m not sure,” said Sel. “But this is not a formic import, it’s a native species, and we haven’t seen any skin shedding from natives.”
So went the conversation as they traveled—but they did cover the ground. They took pictures, yes. And now and then, when it was something really new, they stopped and took samples. But always they walked. Sel might be old and need to lean on his walking stick now and then, but he could still keep up a steady pace. Po was likely to move ahead of him more often than not, but it was Po who groaned when Sel said it was time to move on after a brief rest.
“I don’t know why you have that stick,” said Po.
“To lean on when I rest.”
“But you have to carry it the whole time you’re walking.”
“It’s not that heavy.”
“It looks heavy.”
“It’s from the balsa tree—well, the one I call ‘balsa,’ since the wood is so light.”
Po tried it. Only about a pound, though it was thick and gnarled and widened out at the top like a pitcher. “I’d still get tired of carrying it.”
“Only because you put more weight in your backpack than I did.”
Po didn’t bother arguing the point.
“The first human voyagers to Earth’s moon and the other planets had an easy time of it,” said Po, as they crested a high ridge. “Nothing but empty space between them and their destination. No temptation to stop and explore.”
“Like the first sea voyagers. Going from land to land, ignoring the sea because they had no tools that would let them explore to any depth.”
“We’re the conquistadores,” said Po. “Only we killed them all before we ever set foot on land.”
“Is that a difference or a similarity?” asked Sel. “Smallpox and other diseases raced ahead of the conquistadores.”
“If only we could have talked to them,” said Po. “I read about the conquistadores—we Mayans have good reason to try to understand them. Columbus wrote that the natives he found ‘had no language,’ merely because they didn’t understand any of the languages his interpreters knew.”
“But the formics had no language at all.”
“Or so we think.”
“No communication devices in their ships. Nothing to transmit voice or images. Because there was no need of them. Exchange of memory. Direct transfer of the senses. Whatever their mechanism was, it was better than language, but worse, because they had no way to talk to us.”
“So who were the mutes?” asked Po. “Us, or them?”
“Both of us mutes,” said Sel, “and all of us deaf.”
“What I wouldn’t give to have just one of them alive.”
“But there couldn’t be just one,” said Sel. “They hived. They needed hundreds, perhaps thousands to reach the critical mass to achieve intelligence.”
“Or not,” said Po. “It could also be that only the queen was sentient. Why else would they all have died when the queens died?”
“Unless the queen was the nexus, the center of a neural network, so they all collapsed when she did. But until then, all of them individuals.”
“As I said, I wish we had one alive,” said Po, “so we could know something instead of guessing from a few desiccated corpses.”
Sel silently rejoiced that yet another generation of this colony had produced at least one who thought like a scientist. “We have more of them preserved than any of the other colonies. Here, there are so few scavengers that can eat them, the corpses lasted long enough for us to get to the planet’s surface and freeze some of them. We actually got to study structure.”
“But no queens.”
“The sorrow of my life,” said Sel.
“Really? That’s your greatest regret?”
Sel fell silent.
“Sorry,” said Po.
“It’s all right. I was just considering your question. My greatest regret. What a question. How can I regret leaving everything behind on Earth, when I left it in order to help save it? And coming here allowed me to do things that other scientists could only dream of. I have been able to name more than five thousand species already and come up with a rudimentary classification system for an entire native biota. More than on any of the other formic worlds.”
“Why?”
“Because the formics stripped those worlds and then established only a limited subset of their own flora and fauna. This is the only world where most of the species evolved here. The only place that’s messy. The formics brought fewer than a thousand species to their colonies. And their home world, which might have had vastly more diversity, is gone.”
“So you don’t regret coming here?”
“Of course I do,” said Sel. “And I’m also glad to be here. I regret being an old wreck of a man. I’m glad I’m not dead. It seems to me that all my regrets are balanced by something I’m glad of. On average, then, I have no regrets at all. But I’m also not a bit happy. Perfect balance. On average, I don’t feel anything at all. I think I don’t exist.”
“Father says that if you get absurd results, you’re not a scientist, you’re a philosopher.”
“But my results are not absurd.”
“You do exist. I can see you and hear you.”
“Genetically speaking, Po, I do not exist. I am off the web of life.”
“So you choose to measure by the only standard that allows your life to be meaningless?”
Sel laughed. “You are your mother’s son.”
“Not father’s?”
“Both, of course. But it’s your mother who won’t put up with any bullshit.”
“Speaking of which, I can hardly wait to see a bull.”
Now that the ship was rapidly decelerating as they approached Shakespeare, the crew were far busier than usual. The first order of business would be docking with the transport ship that had brought the war fleet here to this world forty years before. Without supplies for a return journey, the ship was left as a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit directly over the colony site. Solar power was enough to keep its computers and communications running for these past decades.
The original crew, colonists now, had used their fighters as landing vehicles; their supplies and equipment for the first years of the colony had been designed to fit in or on the fighters. And all of them were equipped with ansibles. But the fighters were land-once vehicles, and had no ability to lea
ve the surface of the planet.
Admiral Morgan’s crew would service and refit the transport. They had brought new communications and weather satellites with them, which they would place in geosync at intervals all the way around the planet. Then the old transport would be given a captain and crew, and would voyage, not back to Eros, but on to another colony.
Despite all this business, Ender had no illusion that Admiral Morgan himself was at all distracted from watching over Ender’s activities. The man was a planner, a plotter, and while a “man of peace” like him might seem to plod along, never doing much, he was always poised to strike.
So as they approached the key moment—the arrival on Shakespeare—Ender had to give Morgan no reason at all for suspecting that Ender was plotting anything. Morgan expected Ender to be a bright, eager boy of fifteen, and those expectations had to be fulfilled; yet Morgan was also wary of Ender’s unassailable claim to the governorship. He had to be confident that Ender was content to let him be the power behind the throne.
That’s why Ender went to Morgan for permission to use the ansible to communicate with the Shakespeare xenobiologists. “You know I’ve been studying the formics’ biological systems, and now I can communicate with them in real time. I have a lot of questions.”
“I don’t want you bothering them,” said Morgan. “There’s too much to do already, working out the landing.”
Ender knew that there was nothing whatsoever for the landside colony to do except stand out of the way. Morgan would land and then decide what supplies to requisition for the return trip. Whether Morgan was on it or not, the ship would return to Earth.
“Sir, the XBs need to know what grazing species we have so they can prepare to adapt them to use the alien proteins. It’s a massive project, and until we have a new generation of adapted animals, there’ll be no meat. You have no idea how eager they are. And I’m fully up to speed, since I worked on the manifest when we left Eros.”
“I’ve already sent them the manifest.”
Actually, Ender had sent the manifest before the ship departed. But why quibble? “The list says things like ‘cows’ and ‘pigs.’ They need way more information than that. I have it; I can send it; and nobody’s using the ansible, sir. This is really important.” Ender almost said “really really really” but decided that would be too over-the-top boyish and Morgan might suspect something.
Morgan sighed. “This is why children should not be given adult assignments. You don’t respect priorities the way adults do. But…as long as you drop whatever you’re doing whenever the crew needs to use the ansible, go ahead. Now, if you don’t mind, I have real work to do.”
Ender knew that Morgan’s “real” work had more to do with preparing to have a shipboard wedding than anything to do with the landing. Dorabella Toscano had him so frantic with lust—no, it was affection, the deep bonds of permanent companionship—that he had agreed that she would arrive on Shakespeare as the admiral’s wife, not just as an ordinary colonist.
And that was fine with Ender. He would not interfere with that in any way.
Ender went to the ansible room to send his messages directly. If he had linked from his desk, the message would certainly have been intercepted and stored, to be puzzled over at leisure. Ender toyed with the idea of switching off the observation system so that nothing he said to Sel Menach could be overheard, but decided against it. Though the security was I.F. standard, which meant that a significant number of kids in Battle School had been able to tweak it or hack it or, like Ender, get inside it and spoof it completely, he still couldn’t risk having Morgan ask to see the vid of Ender in the ansible room and have the report come back that there was no vid for that timeframe.
Apart from that, he had only one short message to send to Graff, asking for a bit of help with his present situation, and then he could have a few moments of blissful privacy before doing the work he had told Morgan he was coming here to do.
He did what he always did when he had a chance to be completely alone. He rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes, hoping for a few moments of sleep to refresh his mind.
He awoke because somebody was gently rubbing his shoulders. “You poor thing,” said Alessandra. “Fell asleep in the middle of your work.”
Ender sat up, as she kept kneading the muscles of his shoulders and back and neck. They really were tight, and what she was doing felt good. If she had asked him, he would have refused—he didn’t want physical contact between them—and if she had come upon him when he was awake and simply started doing it, he would have recoiled because he hated it when anyone thought they had the right to touch him without his consent.
But waking up to it, it felt too good to stop. “I’m not doing much,” he said. “Busywork, mostly. Let the adults do the hard stuff. I’ve put in my time.” By now, he lied to Alessandra by reflex.
“You don’t fool me,” she said. “I’m not as dumb as you think.”
“I don’t think you’re dumb,” said Ender. And he didn’t. She wasn’t Battle School material, but she wasn’t stupid, either.
“I know you don’t like it that Mother and Admiral Morgan are getting married.”
Why would I care about that? “No, it’s fine,” said Ender. “I suppose you take love where you find it, and your mother’s still young. And beautiful.”
“She is, isn’t she,” said Alessandra. “I hope my body turns out like hers. The women in my father’s family were all scrawny. No curves.”
Ender knew at once what she was there for. Talking about “curves” while she massaged him was too obvious to miss. But he wanted to see where this was heading, and why. More specifically, why now.
“Scrawny or curvy, everybody’s attractive under the right circumstances.”
“What are those circumstances for you, Ender? When will anyone be attractive to you?”
He knew what was expected. “You’re attractive, Alessandra. But you’re too young.”
“I’m the same age as you.”
“I’m too young, too,” said Ender. They had had this discussion before—but in the abstract. As they congratulated each other on being such good friends without any kind of sexual interest in each other. Clearly, there had been a change of program.
“I don’t know,” said Alessandra. “Back on Earth, people married later and later. And had sex earlier and earlier. It was wrong to divide them, I know, but who can say which direction was wrong? Maybe the biology of our bodies is wiser than all the reasons for waiting to marry. Maybe our bodies want to raise children when we’re still young enough to keep up with them.”
Ender wondered how much of this had been scripted by her mother. Probably not much. Alessandra really did think about things like this—they’d had enough conversations on socio-political topics that this didn’t seem out of line for her.
The problem was that even though Ender understood perfectly well what was going on, he was enjoying it. He didn’t want it to stop.
But it had to stop. Stop or change. The back-rubbing thing couldn’t go on forever.
And he couldn’t stop it abruptly. He had a role to play. Morgan had to believe that Ender was devoted to Alessandra, so that by marrying Dorabella, he would become Ender’s future father-in-law. One more set of levers to control him by. Ender had planned to do it platonically. The time he spent with Alessandra, the attention he devoted to her, that would do the job.
Until now. Now they were pushing him. Through Alessandra—for Ender did not believe she had thought of this little encounter herself. “Thinking about your mother and Admiral Morgan?” said Ender. “Getting jealous?”
That got her to pull her hands away. “No,” she said. “Not at all. What does rubbing your shoulders have to do with them getting married?”
Now, with her no longer touching him, Ender could swivel the chair around to face her. She was dressed…differently. Nothing obvious, not like the vids he’d seen of supposedly sexy fashions on Earth. She was wearing clothing he�
��d seen before. But a button less was fastened. Was that the only difference? Perhaps, because she had been touching him until a moment before, he was seeing her through new eyes.
“Alessandra,” he said, “let’s not pretend we don’t know what’s happening here.”
“What do you think is happening?” she said.
“I was asleep, and you did what you’ve never done before.”
“I never felt like that before,” she said. “I saw how heavy a weight you carry. Not just the governorship and all that, I mean…all that came before. The weight of being Ender Wiggin. I know you don’t like to be touched, but that doesn’t mean other people can’t want to touch you.”
Ender reached out and touched her hand, hooked it lightly in his fingers. He knew even as he did it that he shouldn’t. Yet the desire to do it was almost overwhelming, and a part of him said, There’s no danger in this. Touching hands? People do it all the time.
Yes, and they do other things all the time, another part of his mind said.
Shut up, said the part that liked touching Alessandra.
What if this did go according to Alessandra’s script—or her mother’s. Were there worse fates? He was coming to a colony world. Colonies were all about reproduction. He liked this girl. There wasn’t going to be a huge pool of girls to choose from in the colony; there were few his age among the passengers in stasis, so it would be mostly the girls born on Shakespeare that he would have to choose from, and they would be—not from Earth.
While he argued with himself, she held his hand more tightly and moved closer to him. Beside him. Now he could feel her warmth—or imagined he could. Now her body touched his upper arm; now her other hand, the one he was not holding, stroked his hair. Now she brought his hand up to her chest. Pressed the back of his hand, not to her breast—that would be too obvious—but to her chest, where her heart was beating. Or was that his own pulse he felt pounding in his hand?
“On this voyage I’ve come to know you,” she whispered. “Not the famous boy who saved the world, but this teenager, this young man of about my own age, so careful, so thoughtful of other people, so patient with them. With me, with my mother. You think I haven’t seen that? Never wanting to hurt anyone, never wanting to offend, but never letting anyone come close, either, except your sister. Is that your future, Ender? You and your sister, in a circle that lets no one else inside?”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 190
