Ender in Exile Page 6

  "What do the colonies have to do with anything? Ender's not going to be a colonist."

  "What else will they do with him? It's the only task remaining for the I.F., and he's their responsibility. That's why I'm making arrangements to get assigned to the same colony as him."

  "Where did you get these imasen ideas?" If she didn't understand Battle School slang, too bad. "Colonies, voluntary exile, it's just crazy. The future is here on Earth, not out at the far reaches of the galaxy."

  "The formics' worlds were all in the same arm of the galaxy as us, and not all that far away, as galaxies go," said Valentine primly, to goad him. "And Peter, just because your future is all tied up with trying to become the ruler of the world doesn't mean that I want to spend my whole future as your sidekick. You've had my youth, you've used me up, but I will spend my declining years without you, my love."

  "It's sickening when you talk as if we were married."

  "I'm talking as if we were in an old movie," said Valentine.

  "I don't watch movies," said Peter, "so I wouldn't know."

  "There's so much you 'wouldn't know,'" said Valentine. For a moment she was tempted to tell him all about Ender's visit to Earth, when Graff tried to use Valentine to persuade a burnt-out Ender to get back to work. And to tell Peter that Graff knew all about their secret identities on the nets. That would take the smirk off his face.

  But what would that accomplish? It was better for everyone to leave Peter in blissful ignorance.

  While they were talking, Peter had been doing some desultory pointing and typing on his desk. Now he was seeing something in his holo that made him as angry as she had ever seen him. "What?" she asked, assuming it was some dreadful world news.

  "You shut down my back doors!"

  It took her a moment to understand what he meant. Then she realized--he had apparently thought she wouldn't notice that he had secret access points to all of Demosthenes' vital sites and identities. What an idiot. When he made a big deal about how he had created all these wonderful identities and accounts for her, of course she assumed that he had created back doors to all of them so he could always come in and change what she did. Why would he imagine she'd leave things that way? She found them all within a few weeks; anything he could do with Demosthenes on the nets, she could undo. So when she changed all the passwords and access codes, of course she closed the back doors, too. What did he think?

  "Peter," she said, "they wouldn't be locked if I let you have a key, now, would they?"

  Peter rose to his feet, his face turning red, his fists clenched. "You ungrateful little bitch."

  "What are you going to do, Peter? Hit me? I'm ready. I think I can take you down."

  Peter sat back down. "Go," he said. "Go into space. Shut down Demosthenes. I don't need you. I don't need anybody."

  "That's why you're such a loser," said Valentine. "You'll never rule the world until you figure out that you can't do it without everybody's cooperation. You can't fool them, you can't force them. They have to want to follow you. Like Alexander's soldiers wanted to follow him and fight for him. And the moment they stopped wanting to, his power evaporated. You need everybody but you're too narcissistic to know it."

  "I need the willing cooperation of key people here on Earth," said Peter, "but you won't be one of them, will you? So go, tell Mom and Dad what you're doing. Break their hearts. What do you care? You're going off to see your precious Ender."

  "You still hate him," said Valentine.

  "I never hated him," said Peter. "But at this moment, I certainly do hate you. Not a lot, but enough to make me want to piss on your bed."

  It was a standing joke between them. She couldn't help it. It made her laugh. "Oh, Peter, you're such a boy."

  Mother and Father took her decision surprisingly well. But they refused to come with her. "Val," Father said, "I think you're right--Ender won't be coming home. It broke our hearts to realize it. And it's wonderful of you to want to join him, even if neither of you ends up going with a colony. Even if it's just a few months in space. Even a few years. It's a good thing for him to be with you again."

  "It would be better to have the two of you out there, too."

  Father shook his head. Mother pressed a finger to each eye--her gesture that said, I'm not going to cry.

  "We can't go," said Father. "Our work is here."

  "They could spare you for a year or two."

  "That's easy for you to say," said Father. "You're young. What's a couple of years to you? But we're older. Not old, but older than you. Time means something different to us. We love Ender, but we can't spend months or years just going out to visit him. We don't have that much time left."

  "That's exactly the point," said Valentine. "You don't have much time--and still less time to get a chance to see Ender again."

  "Val," said Mother, her voice quavering. "Nothing we do now will give us back the years we've lost."

  She was right, and Valentine knew it. But she didn't see the relevance. "So you're going to treat him as if he's dead?"

  "Val," said Father. "We know he's not dead. But we also know he doesn't want us. We've written to him--since the war ended. Graff--the one who's on trial--he wrote back. Ender doesn't want to write letters to us. He reads them, but he told Graff that he had nothing to say."

  "Graff's a liar," said Valentine. "He probably hasn't shown Ender anything."

  "That's possible," said Father. "But Ender doesn't need us. He's thirteen. He's becoming a man. He's done brilliantly since he left us, but he also went through terrible things, and we weren't there. I'm not sure he'll ever forgive us for letting him go."

  "You had no choice," said Valentine. "They would have taken him to Battle School whether you liked it or not."

  "I'm sure he knows that in his head," said Mother. "But in his heart?"

  "So I'm going without you," she said. It had never crossed her mind that they wouldn't even want to go.

  "You're going to leave us behind," said Father. "It's what children do. They live at home until they leave. Then they're gone. Even if they visit, even if they move back, it's never the same. You think it will be, but it won't. It happened with Ender, and it'll happen with you."

  "The good thing," said Mother, who was crying a little now, "is that you won't be with Peter anymore."

  Valentine couldn't believe her mother was saying such a thing.

  "You've spent too much time with him," said Mother. "He's a bad influence on you. He makes you unhappy. He sucks you into his life so you can't have one of your own."

  "That'll be our job now," said Father.

  "Good luck," was all Valentine could say. Was it possible that her parents really did understand Peter? But if they did, why had they let him have his way for all these years?

  "You see, Val," said Father, "if we went to Ender now, we'd want to be his parents, but we don't have any authority over him. Nor anything to offer him. He doesn't need parents anymore."

  "A sister, now," said Mother. "A sister, he can use." She took Valentine's hand. She was asking for something.

  So Valentine gave her the only thing she could think of that she might want. A promise. "I'll stick with him," said Valentine, "as long as he needs me."

  "We would expect nothing less of you, dear," said Mother. She squeezed Valentine's hand and let go. Apparently that was what she had wanted.

  "It's a kind and loving thing," said Father. "It's always been your nature. And Ender was always your darling baby brother."

  Valentine winced at the old phrase from childhood. Darling baby brother. Ick. "I'll make sure to call him that."

  "Do," said Mother. "Ender likes to be reminded of good things."

  Did Mother really imagine that anything she knew about Ender at age six would still apply to him now, at age thirteen?

  As if she had read Valentine's mind, Mother answered her. "People don't change, Val. Not their fundamental character. Whatever you're going to be as an adult is already visible to som
eone who really knows you from your birth onward."

  Valentine laughed. "So...why did you let Peter live?"

  They laughed, but uncomfortably. "Val," said Father, "we don't expect you to understand this, but some of the things that make Peter...difficult...are the very things that might also make him great someday."

  "What about me?" asked Valentine. "As long as you're telling fortunes."

  "Oh, Val," said Father. "All you have to do is live your life, and everyone around you will be happier."

  "No greatness, then."

  "Val," said Mother, "goodness trumps greatness any day."

  "Not in the history books," said Valentine.

  "Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?" said Father.

  CHAPTER 4

  To: qmorgan%rearadmiral@ifcom.gov/fleetcom

  From: chamrajnagar%polemarch@ifcom.gov/centcom

  {self-shred protocol}

  Subj: In or out?

  My dear Quince, I'm quite aware of the difference between combat command and flying a colony ship for a few dozen lightyears. If you feel your usefulness in space is over, then by all means, retire with full benefits. But if you stay in, and remain in near space, I can't promise you promotion within the I.F.

  We suddenly find ourselves afflicted with peace, you see. Always a disaster for those whose careers have not reached their natural apex.

  The colony ship I have offered you is not, contrary to your too-often-stated opinion (try discretion now and then, Quince, and see if it might not work better), a way to send you to oblivion. Retirement is oblivion, my friend. A forty-or fifty-year voyage means that you will outlive all of us who remain behind. All your friends will be dead. But you'll be alive to make new friends. And you'll be in command of a ship. A nice, big, fast one.

  This is what the whole fleet faces. We have heroes out there who fought this war that The Boy is credited with winning. Have we forgotten them? ALL our most significant missions will involve decades of flight. Yet we must send our best officers to command them. So at any given moment, most of our best officers will be strangers to everyone at CentCom because they've been in flight for half a lifetime.

  Eventually, ALL the central staff will be star voyagers. They will look down their noses at anyone who has NOT taken decades-long flights between stars. They will have cut themselves loose from Earth's timeline. They will know each other by their logs, transmitted by ansible.

  What I'm offering you is the only possible source of career-making voyages: colony ships.

  And not only a colony ship, but one whose governor is a thirteen-year-old boy. Are you seriously going to tell me that you don't understand that you are not his "nanny," you are being entrusted with the highly responsible position of making sure that The Boy stays as far from Earth as possible, while also making sure that he is a complete success in his new assignment so that later generations cannot judge that he was not treated well.

  Naturally, I did not send you this letter, and you did not read it. Nothing in this is to be construed as a secret order. It is merely my personal observation about the opportunity that you have been offered by a polemarch who believes in your potential to be one of the great admirals of the I.F.

  Are you in? Or out? I need to draw up the papers one way or the other within the week.

  Your friend, Cham

  Ender knew that making him the nominal governor of the colony was a joke. When he got there, the colony would already be a going concern, with its own elected leaders. He would be a thirteen-year-old--well, by then a fifteen-year-old--whose only claim to authority was that forty years before he commanded the grandparents of the colonists, or at least their parents, in a war that was ancient history by then.

  They would have bonded together into a closed community, and it would be outrageous for the I.F. to send them any governor at all, let alone a teenager.

  But they'd soon find out that if nobody wanted him to govern, Ender would go along quite happily. All he cared about was getting to a formic planet to see what they had left behind.

  The bodies that had so recently been dissected would have long since rotted away; but there's no way the colonists could have settled or even explored more than a tiny fraction of the formic civilization's buildings and artifacts. Governing the colony would be an annoyance--all Ender wanted was to see if there was some way to understand the enemy he had loved and vanquished.

  Still, he had to go through the motions of preparing to be governor. For instance, training sessions with legal experts who had drafted the constitution that was being imposed on all the colonies. And even though Ender didn't actually care, he could see that an honest effort had been made to reflect what had been reported by all the soldiers-turned-colonists so far. He should have expected that. Anything Graff did, or caused to be done, was done well.

  And then there were the even-less-relevant lessons on the workings of starships. What did Ender care? He was never going to be regular fleet. He had no interest in captaining any vessel of any size.

  On the third day of his walk-through of the ship that would carry him and his colonists, Ender was so tired of phony nautical terminology transferred to starships that he found himself making sarcastic remarks. Fortunately, he didn't actually say them, he only thought them. Do we swab the decks, matey? Will the bosun pipe us aboard? How many degrees will she tack into the wind, sir?

  "You know," said the captain who had Ender duty today, "the real barrier to interstellar flight wasn't just getting up to lightspeed. It was overcoming the collision problem."

  "You mean with all of space to work in..." Then, from the captain's smirk, Ender realized he had fallen into a little trap. "Ah. You mean collisions with space debris."

  "All those old vids showing spaceships dodging through asteroid clusters--they weren't actually far off. Because when you hit a molecule of hydrogen when you're near lightspeed, it releases a huge amount of energy. Like hitting a huge rock at a much slower speed. Tears you up. Any shielding scheme our ancestors came up with involved so much additional mass, or cost so much energy and therefore fuel, that it simply wasn't practical. You had so much mass that you couldn't carry enough fuel to get anywhere."

  "So how did we finally solve it?" asked Ender.

  "Well of course we didn't," said the captain.

  Again, Ender could see that this was an old prank to play on novices, and so he gave the man the pleasure of showing off his superior knowledge. "Then how are we getting from star to star?" asked Ender. Instead of saying, Ah, so it's formic technology.

  "The formics did it for us," said the captain with delight. "When they got here, yes, they devastated parts of China and damn near whupped us in the first two wars. But they also taught us. The very fact that they got here told us that it could be done. And then they thoughtfully left behind dozens of working starships for us to study."

  The captain had by now led Ender to the very front of the ship, through several doors that required the highest security clearance to enter. "Not everybody gets to see this, but I was told that you were to see everything."

  It was crystalline in substance and ovoid in shape, except that it came to a sharp point at the back. "Please don't tell me it's an egg," said Ender.

  The captain chuckled. "Don't tell anybody, but the engines of this ship, and all that fuel--they're just for maneuvering near planets and moons and such. And getting the ship going. Once we get up to one percent of lightspeed, we switch on this baby, and from then on, it's just a matter of controlling the intensity and direction."

  "Of what?"

  "Of the drive field," said the captain. "It was such an elegant solution, but we hadn't even discovered the area of science that would have gotten us to this."

  "And what area is that?"

  "Strong force field dynamics," said the captain. "When people speak of it, they almost always say that the strong force field breaks apart molecules, but that's not the real story. What it really does is change the direction of
the strong force. Molecules simply can't hold together when the nuclei of all the constituent atoms start to prefer a particular direction of movement at lightspeed."

  Ender knew he was pouring on technical terms, but he was tired of the game. "What you're saying is that the field generated by this device takes all the molecules and objects it runs into in the direction of movement and uses the nuclear strong force to make them move in a uniform direction at lightspeed."

  The captain grinned. "Touche. But you're an admiral, sir, and so I was giving you the show I give all the admirals." He winked. "Most of them don't have a clue what I'm saying, and they're too stuffed to admit it and ask me to translate."

  "What happens to the energy from the breaking of the molecules into their constituent atoms?" asked Ender.

  "That, sir, is what powers the ship. No, I'll be more specific. That's what actually moves the ship. It's so beautiful. We move forward under rockets, and then we switch off the engines--can't be generating molecules of our own!--and turn on the egg--yeah, we call it the egg. The field goes up--it's shaped exactly like the crystal ball here--and the leading edges start colliding with molecules and tearing them up. The atoms are channeled along the field and they all emerge at the trailing point. Giving us an incredible amount of thrust. I've talked to physicists who still don't get it. They say there isn't enough energy stored in the molecular bonds to produce the thrust--they've come up with all kinds of theories about where the extra energy is coming from."

  "And we got this from the formics."

  "There was one terrible accident the first time we turned on one of these. Of course they weren't using them in-system. But we had one of our cruisers simply disappear because it was docked right up against a formic ship when the egg got turned on. Poof. Every molecule in the cruiser--including the unluckiest crew in history--got incorporated into the field, then got spit out the back, and made the formic ship itself jump like a bullet halfway across the solar system."

  "Didn't that kill the people on the formic ship, too? To jump that fast?"