The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  Yet Abra also looked wistfully as the children his age (he couldn’t call them friends, because he spent so little time with them) headed for the swimming hole, or climbed trees in the orchard, or shot at each other with wooden weapons.

  Only his mother, Hannah, saw him. She urged him sometimes to go with the others, to leave whatever job he was doing. But it was too late. Like a baby bird that a child has handled, so it has the scent of man on it, Abra was marked by his work with adults. There was no resentment on their part. They just didn’t think of him as one of them. If he had tried to come along, it would have seemed to all of them as inappropriate as if some adult had insisted on playing their games with them. It would ruin things. Especially because Abra was secretly convinced that he would be very bad at children’s games. When he was little, and tried to build with blocks, he would weep when other children knocked down his structures. But the other children couldn’t seem to understand why he would build, if not to see things get knocked down.

  Here is what Ender’s coming meant to Abra: Ender Wiggin was the governor, and yet he was young, the same age as Po. Adults talked to Ender as if he were one of them. No, as if he were their superior. They brought problems to him for solutions. They laid their disputes before him and abided by his decisions, listening to his explanations, asking him questions, coming to accept his understanding.

  I am like him, thought Abra. Adults consult me about their machines the way they consult Ender about their other problems. They stand and listen to my explanations. They do what I tell them they should do to fix the problem. He and I live the same life—we are not really children. We have no friends.

  Well, Ender had his sister, of course, but she was a strange recluse, who would stay indoors all day, except for her morning walk in summer, her afternoon walk in winter. They said she was writing books. All the adult scientists wrote things and sent them off to the other worlds, and then read the papers and books that were sent back. But what she was writing wasn’t science at all. It was history. The past. Why would that matter, when there was so much to do and discover in the present? Ender could not possibly be interested in such things. Abra could not even imagine what they would talk about. “Today I gave Lo and Amato permission to divorce.” “Did it happen a hundred years ago?” “No.” “Then I don’t care.”

  Abra also had siblings. Po treated him well. They all did. But they did not play with him. They played with each other.

  Which was fine. Abra didn’t want to “play.” He wanted to do things that were real, things that mattered. He took as much pleasure from fixing machines and building things as they ever did from their games and mock fights and knocking-down. And now that Mother said he didn’t have to go to school anymore, so there wouldn’t be the constant humiliation of being unable to read and write, Abra spent his free time following Ender Wiggin everywhere.

  Governor Wiggin noticed him, because he spoke to Abra from time to time—explaining things sometimes; just as often asking him questions. But mostly he let Abra tag along, and if other adults who were talking about serious matters sometimes glanced at Abra as if to ask Ender why he had this child with him, Ender simply ignored their silent question and soon they all carried on as if Abra were not there.

  So when Ender left on his expedition to search for an appropriate site for the new starship to land and found another colony, no one even questioned the fact that Abra would be going with him. Father did take Abra aside and talk to him, though. “This is a heavy responsibility,” he said. “You are not to do anything dangerous. If something happens to the governor, your first responsibility is to report it to me by satfone. Your location will already be tracked and we’ll send help at once. Don’t try to deal with it yourself until we have been notified. Do you understand?”

  Of course Abra understood. To Father, Abra was merely going along as backup. Mother’s advice was a bit less pessimistic about Abra’s value. “Don’t argue with him,” she said. “Listen first, argue after.”

  “Of course, Mom.”

  “You say ‘of course,’ but you aren’t good at listening, Abra, you always think you know what people are going to say, and you have to let them say it because sometimes you’re wrong.”

  Abra nodded. “I’ll listen to Ender, Mother.”

  She rolled her eyes—even though she yelled at the other children when they did that to her. “Yes, I suppose you will. Only Ender is wise enough to know more than my Abra!”

  “I don’t think I know everything, Mom.” How could he get her to see that he only got impatient with adults when they thought they understood machinery and didn’t? The rest of the time, he didn’t speak at all. But since most of the time adults thought they knew what had gone wrong with a broken machine, and most of the time they were mistaken, most of his conversation with adults consisted of correcting them—or ignoring them. What else would they talk about except machinery, and Abra knew it better than they did. With Ender, though, it was almost never about machines. It was about everything, and Abra drank it all in.

  “I’ll try to keep Po from marrying Alessandra before you get home,” said Mom.

  “I don’t care,” said Abra. “They don’t have to wait for me. It’s not like they’ll need me for the wedding night.”

  “Sometimes your face just needs slapping, Abra,” said Mom. “But Ender puts up with you. The boy’s a saint. Santo André.”

  “San Énder,” said Abra.

  “His Christian name is Andrew,” said Mom.

  “But the name that makes him holy is Ender,” said Abra.

  “My son the theologian. And you say you don’t think you know everything!” Mother shook her heads, apparently disgusted with him.

  Abra never understood how such arguments began, or why they usually ended with adults shaking their heads and turning away from him. He took their ideas seriously (except for their ideas about machinery); why couldn’t they do the same for him?

  Ender did. And he was going to spend days—weeks, maybe—with Ender Wiggin. Just the two of them.

  They loaded the skimmer with supplies for three weeks, though Ender said he didn’t think they’d be gone that long. Po came along to see them off, Alessandra clinging to him like a fungus, and he said, “Try not to be a nuisance, Abra.”

  “You’re jealous that he’s taking me and not you,” said Abra.

  Alessandra spoke up. A talking fungus, apparently. “Po doesn’t want to go anywhere.” Meaning, of course, that he couldn’t bear to be away from her for a single second.

  Po’s face stayed blank, however, so that Abra knew perfectly well that while he might be completely imasen over the girl, he would still rather go on the trip with Ender than stay behind with her. Contrary to Mother’s opinion of him, however, Abra said nothing at all. He didn’t even wink at Po. He just kept his face exactly as blank as Po’s. It was the Mayan way of laughing at somebody right in front of them, without being rude or starting a fight.

  The journey was a strange experience for Abra. At first, of course, they simply skimmed along above the fields of home. Familiar ground. Then they followed the road to Falstaff, which was due west of Miranda; this was also familiar, since Abra’s married sister Alma lived there with her husband, that big stupid eemo Simon, who always tickled younger children until they wet themselves and then made fun of them for peeing themselves like babies. Abra was relieved that Ender only paused to greet the mayor of the village and then moved on without any further delay.

  They camped the first night in a grassy glen, sheltered from the wind that was coming up. It brought a storm in the night, but they were snug inside a tent, and without Abra even asking, Ender told him stories about Battle School and what the game was like, in the battleroom, and how it wasn’t really a game at all, it was training and testing them for command. “Some people are born to lead,” said Ender. “They just think that way, whether they want to lead or not. While others are born craving authority, but they have no ability to lead. It’s very
sad.”

  “Why would people want to do something they’re not good at?” Abra tried to imagine himself wanting to be a scholar, in spite of his reading problem. It was just absurd.

  “Leading is a strange thing,” said Ender. “People see it happening, but they don’t have a clue how it works.”

  “I know,” said Abra. “Most people are like that with machines. But they try to fix them anyway and make everything worse.”

  “So you understand exactly,” said Ender. “They don’t see what a leader does, they just see how everybody respects a good leader, and they want to have the attention and respect without understanding what you actually have to do to earn it.”

  “Everybody respects you,” said Abra.

  “And yet I do almost nothing,” said Ender. “I have to learn other people’s jobs well enough to help them at their work, because I just don’t have enough work of my own to do. Leading this colony is too easy to be a fulltime job.”

  “Easy for you,” said Abra.

  “I suppose,” said Ender. “But then, even when I’m doing other jobs, I’m still doing my job as governor. Because I’m always getting to know people. You can’t lead people you don’t know or at least understand. In war, for instance, if you don’t know what your soldiers can do, how can you lead them into battle and hope to succeed? The enemy, too. You have to know the enemy.”

  Abra thought about that as they lay there in the darkness inside the tent. He thought about it so long that maybe he even dreamed for a while, about Ender sitting down and talking to the buggers—only the newcomers called them formics—and then exchanging Christmas gifts with them. But maybe he only imagined it while awake, because he was awake when he whispered, “Is that why you spend so much time with the gold bugs?”

  It was as if Ender had been thinking about the same thing, because he didn’t give one of those impatient adult answers, like, What are you talking about? He knew that Abra was still holding to the thread of their prior conversation. In fact, Ender sounded sleepy, and Abra wondered if he had been dozing and Abra’s voice had woken him and still Ender knew what he was talking about.

  “Yes,” said Ender. “I understood the hive queens well enough to defeat them. But not well enough to understand why they let me.”

  “They let you?”

  “No, they fought hard against me, to prevent my victory. But they also brought themselves together where I could kill them all in a single battle. And they knew I had the weapon that could do it. A weapon they understood better than we did, because we got it from them. We still don’t fully understand the science of it. But they must have. And yet they gathered together and waited for me. I don’t understand it. So…I try communicating with the gold bug larvae. To get some idea of how the hive queens thought.”

  “Po says nobody’s better at it than you.”

  “Does he?”

  “He says everybody else has to work and work to get a glimmer of an image into or out of the gold bugs’ heads, but you could do it the very first time.”

  “I didn’t realize I was all that unusual,” said Ender.

  “They talk about it when you’re not there. Po talks about it with Papa.”

  “Interesting,” said Ender. He didn’t sound like he felt flattered, or like he was acting modest—Ender truly sounded like he thought of his unusual talent for talking with the gold bugs as a simple fact.

  When he thought about it, this made sense to Abra. You shouldn’t be proud of being good at something, if you were born with it. That would be as dumb as being proud of having two legs, or speaking a language, or pooping.

  Because he was with Ender, Abra felt free to say what he had just thought of, and Ender laughed. “That’s right, Abra. Something you work to achieve, that’s one thing. Why not be proud of it? Why not feel good about it? But something you were born with, that’s just the way you are. Do you mind if I quote you?”

  Abra wasn’t sure what he meant by quoting. Was he going to write a scholarly paper? A letter to somebody? “Go ahead,” said Abra.

  “So…I’m unusually good at talking to the gold bugs,” said Ender. “I had no idea. It’s not talking, though. It’s more like they show you what they remember, and put a feeling with it. Like, here’s my memory of food, and they put hunger with it. Or the same image of food, plus a feeling of revulsion or fear, meaning, this is poisonous or I don’t like the taste or…you get the idea.”

  “No words,” said Abra.

  “Exactly.”

  “The way I see machinery,” said Abra. “I have to find words to explain it to people, but when I see it, I just know. I don’t think the machinery is talking to me, though. No feelings.”

  “It may not be talking,” said Ender, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear.”

  “Exactly! Yes! That’s right!” Abra almost shouted the words, and his eyes filled with tears, and he didn’t even know why. Or…yes he did. No adult had ever known what it felt like before.

  “I had a friend once, and I think he saw battles that way. I had to think things through, the way the forces were arranged, but Bean just saw. He didn’t even realize that other people took longer to understand—or never did at all. To him it was simply obvious.”

  “Bean? Is that a name?”

  “He was an orphan. It was a street name. He didn’t find out his real name until later, when people who cared about him did enough research to find out that he had been kidnapped as an embryo and genetically altered to make him such a genius.”

  “Oh,” said Abra. “So that’s not what he really was.”

  “No, Abra,” said Ender. “We really are what our genes make us. We really have whatever abilities they give. It’s what we start with. Just because his genes were shaped deliberately, by a criminal scientist, doesn’t mean they’re any less his than our genes, which are shaped by random selection between the genes of our father and the genes of our mother. I was shaped deliberately, too. Not by illegal science, but my parents chose each other partly because they were each so brilliant, and then the International Fleet asked them to have a third child because my older brother and sister were so brilliant but still were not quite what the I.F. wanted. Does that mean that I’m not really me? Who would I be, if my parents hadn’t given birth to me?”

  Abra was having a hard time following the conversation. It made him sleepy. He yawned.

  Then Ender came up with a comparison Abra understood. “It’s like saying, What would this pump be, if it weren’t a pump?”

  “That’s just dumb. It is a pump. If it weren’t a pump, it wouldn’t be anything at all.”

  “So now you understand.”

  Abra whispered the next question. “So you’re like my father, and you don’t believe people have souls?”

  “No,” said Ender. “I don’t know about souls. I just know that while we’re alive, in these bodies, we can only do what our body can do. My parents believe in souls. I’ve known people who were absolutely sure. Smart people. Good people. So just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean I’m sure it can’t be true.”

  “That’s like what Papa says.”

  “See? He doesn’t disbelieve in souls.”

  “But Mom talks like…she says that she can look in my eyes and see into my soul.”

  “Maybe she can.”

  “Like you can look into a gold bug larva and see what it’s thinking?”

  “Maybe,” said Ender. “I can’t see what it’s thinking, though. I can only see what it pushes into my mind. I try to push thoughts into its mind, but I don’t think I’m actually pushing. I think the ability to communicate by thoughts belongs completely to the larva. It pushes things into my mind, and then takes from my mind whatever I show it. But I’m not doing anything.”

  “Then how can you be better at it than other people, if you’re not doing anything?”

  “If I’m really better—and remember, your father and Po can’t really know whether I am or not—then maybe it’s be
cause I have a mind that it’s easier for a gold bug to get inside of.”

  “Why?” asked Abra. “Why would a human being born on Earth have a brain that was easier for a gold bug to get inside of?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ender. “That’s one of the things I came to this world to find out.”

  “That’s not even true,” said Abra. “You couldn’t have come here to find out why your brain was easier for the buggers to understand because you didn’t know your brain could do that until you got here!”

  Ender laughed. “You just don’t have any tolerance for kuso, do you?”

  “What’s kuso?”

  “Mierda,” said Ender. “Bullshit.”

  “Were you lying to me?”

  “No,” said Ender. “Here’s the thing. I had dreams when I was fighting the war on Eros. I didn’t know I was fighting the war, but I was. I had one dream where a bunch of formics were vivisecting me. Only instead of cutting open my body, they were cutting up my memories and displaying them like holographs and trying to make sense of them. Why did I have that dream, Abra? After I won the war and found out that I had really been fighting the hive queens and not just a computer simulation, or my teacher, I thought back to some of my dreams and I wondered. Were they trying just as hard to understand me as I was trying to understand them? Was that dream because on some level I was aware that they were getting inside my head, and it frightened me?”

  “Wow,” said Abra. “But if they could read your mind, why couldn’t they beat you?”

  “Because my victories weren’t in my mind,” said Ender. “That’s the weird thing. I thought through the battles, yes, but I didn’t see them like Bean did. Instead, I saw the people. The soldiers under me. I knew what those kids were capable of. So I put them in a situation where their decisions would be crucial, told them what I wanted them to do, and then I trusted them to make the decisions that would achieve my objective. I didn’t actually know what they’d do. So being inside my head would never show the hive queens what I was planning, because I had no plan, not of a kind they could use against me.”