"They have to do something with this huge fleet and all its personnel. The ships have to go somewhere. And there are those surviving I.F. soldiers on all the conquered worlds. I think Graff's going to get his colonies--we won't send ships to bring them home, we'll send new colonists to join them."
"I see you've mastered all of Graff's arguments."
"So have you," said Ender. "And I bet you'll go with them."
"Me? I'm too old to be a colonist."
"You'd pilot a ship," said Ender. "A colony ship. You'd go away again. Because you've already done it once. Why not go again? Lightspeed travel, taking the ship to one of the old formic planets."
"Maybe."
"After you've lost everybody, what's left to lose?" asked Ender. "And you believe in what Graff is doing. It's his real plan all along, isn't it? To spread the human race out of the solar system so we aren't held as hostages to the fate of a single planet. To spread ourselves out among star systems as far as we can go, so that we're unkillable as a species. It's Graff's great cause. And you also think that's worth doing."
"I've never spoken a word on the subject."
"Whenever it's discussed, you don't make that little lemon-sucking face when Graff's arguments are presented."
"Oh, now you think you can read my face. I'm Maori, I don't show anything."
"You're half-Maori, and I've studied you for months."
"You can't read my mind. Even if you've deluded yourself into thinking you can read my face."
"The colonization project is the only thing left out here in space that's worth doing."
"I haven't been asked to pilot anything," said Mazer. "I'm old for a pilot, you know."
"Not a pilot, a commander of a ship."
"I'm lucky they let me aim by myself when I pee," said Mazer. "They don't trust me. That's why I'm going on trial."
"When the trial's over," said Ender, "they'll have no more use for you than they have for me. They've got to send you somewhere far away so that the I.F. will be safe for the bureaucrats again."
Mazer looked away and waited, but there was an air about him that told Ender that Mazer was about to say something important.
"Ender, what about you?" Mazer finally asked. "Would you go?"
"To a colony?" Ender laughed. "I'm thirteen years old. On a colony, what would I be good for? Farming? You know what my skills are. Useless in a colony."
Mazer barked a laugh. "Oh, you'll send me, but you won't go yourself."
"I'm not sending anybody," said Ender. "Least of all myself."
"You've got to do something with your life," said Mazer.
And there it was: The tacit recognition that Ender wasn't going home. That he was never going to lead a normal life on Earth.
One by one the other kids got their orders, each saying good-bye before they left. It was increasingly awkward with each one, because Ender was more and more a stranger to them. He didn't hang out with them. If he happened to join in a conversation, he didn't stay long and never really engaged.
It wasn't a deliberate choice, he just wasn't interested in doing the things they did or talking about what they discussed. They were full of their studies, their return to Earth. What they'd do. How they'd find a way to get together again after they'd been home for a while. How much money they'd get as severance pay from the military. What they might choose as a career. How their families might have changed.
None of that applied to Ender. He couldn't pretend that it did, or that he had a future. Least of all could he talk about what really preyed on his mind. They wouldn't understand.
He didn't understand it himself. He had been able to let go of everything else, all the things he'd concentrated on so hard for so long. Military tactics? Strategy? Not even interesting to him now. Ways that he might have avoided antagonizing Bonzo or Stilson in the first place? He had strong feelings about that, but no rational ideas, so he didn't waste time trying to think it through. He let go of it, just the way he let go of his deep knowledge of everyone in his jeesh, his little army of brilliant kids whom he led through the training that turned out to be the war.
Once, knowing and understanding those kids had been part of his work, had been essential to victory. During that time he had even come to think of them as his friends. But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them. Now he had no use for them--not his choice, there simply wasn't a purpose to be served by keeping the group together. They didn't, as a group, exist. They were just a bunch of kids who had been on a long, difficult camping trip together, that's how Ender saw them now. They had pulled together to make it back to civilization, but now they'd all go home to their families. They weren't connected now. Except in memory.
So Ender had let go of them all. Even the ones who were still here. He saw how it hurt them--the ones who had wanted to be closer than mere pals--when he didn't let things change, didn't let them into his thoughts. He couldn't explain to them that he wasn't keeping them out, that there was simply no way they'd understand what it was that occupied him whenever he wasn't forced to think about something else:
The hive queens.
It made no sense, what the formics had done. They weren't stupid. Yet they had made the strategic mistake of grouping all their queens--not "their" queens, they were the queens, the queens were the formics--they had all gathered on their home planet, where Ender's use of the M.D. Device could--and did--destroy them utterly, all at once.
Mazer had explained that the hive queens must have gathered on their home planet years before they could have known that the human fleet had the M.D. Device. They knew--from the way Mazer had defeated their main expedition to Earth's star system--that their greatest weakness was that if you found the hive queen and killed her, you had killed the whole army. So they withdrew from all their forward positions, put the hive queens together on their home world, and then protected that world with everything they had.
Yes, yes, Ender understood that.
But Ender had used the M.D. Device early on in the invasion of the formic worlds, to destroy a formation of ships. The hive queens had instantly understood the capabilities of the weapon and never allowed their ships to get close enough together for the M.D. Device to be able to set up a self-sustaining reaction.
So: Once they knew that the weapon existed, and that humans were willing to use it, why did they stay on that single planet? They must have known that the human fleet was coming. As Ender won battle after battle, they must have known that the possibility of their defeat existed. It would have been easy for them to get onto starships and disperse from their home planet. Before that last battle began, they could all have been out of range of the M.D. Device.
Then we would have had to hunt them down, ship by ship, queen by queen. Their planets would still be inhabited by the formics, and so they could have fought us in bloody confrontations on every world, meanwhile building new ships, launching new fleets against us.
But they had stayed. And died.
Was it fear? Maybe. But Ender didn't think so. The hive queens had bred themselves for war. All the speculations of the scientists who had studied the anatomy and molecular structure of the formic corpses left over from the Second Formic War led to that conclusion: The formics were created, first and foremost, to fight and kill. That implied that they had evolved in a world where such fighting was necessary.
The best guess--at least the one that made the most sense to Ender--was that they weren't fighting some predatory species on their home world. Like humans, they would surely have wiped out any really threatening predator early on. No, they had evolved to fight each other. Queens fighting queens, spawning vast armies of formics and developing tools and weapons for them, each of them vying to be the dominant--or sole surviving--queen.
Yet somehow they had gotten over it. They had stopped fighting each other.
Was it before they had developed spaceflight and co
lonized other worlds? Or was it one particular queen who developed near-lightspeed ships and created colonies and then used the power that she had developed to crush the others?
It wouldn't have mattered. Her own daughters would surely have rebelled against her--it would go on and on, each new generation trying to destroy the one before. That was how hives on Earth worked, anyway--the rival queen must be driven off or killed. Only the non-reproducing workers could be allowed to stay, because they weren't rivals, they were servants.
It was like the immune system of an organism. Each hive queen had to make sure that any food their workers grew was used only to nurture her workers, her children, her mates, and herself. So any formic--queen or worker--that tried to infiltrate her territory and use her resources had to be driven off or killed.
Yet they had stopped fighting with each other and now cooperated.
If they could do that with each other, the implacable enemies that had driven each other's evolution long enough to become the brilliant sentient beings they were, then why couldn't they have done it with us? With the humans? Why couldn't they have tried to communicate with us? Made some sort of settlement with us, just as they had done with each other? Divided the galaxy between us? Live and let live?
In any of these battles, Ender knew that if he had seen a sign of an effort to communicate, he would have known instantly that it wasn't a game--there would have been no reason for the teachers to simulate any attempt to parley. They didn't regard that as Ender's business--they wouldn't train him for it. If some effort at communication had really happened, surely the adults would have stopped Ender at once, pretended that the "exercise" was over, and tried to deal with it on their own.
But the hive queens did not attempt to communicate. Nor did they use the obvious strategy of dispersal to save themselves. They had sat there, waiting for Ender to come. And then Ender had won, the only way he could: with devastating force.
It was how Ender always fought. To make sure that there was no further fighting. To use this victory to ensure that there was no more danger.
Even if I had known the war was real, I would have tried to do exactly what I did.
So in his mind he now asked the hive queens, over and over, though he knew they were dead and could not answer: Why?
Why did you decide to let me kill you?
His rational mind introduced all the other possibilities--including the chance that perhaps they were really quite stupid. Or perhaps they had so little experience at running a society of equals that they were unable to reach a rational decision together. Or, or, or, or, over and over he ran through possible explanations.
Ender's study now, when he wasn't pursuing the schoolwork that someone--Graff, still? Or Graff's rivals?--kept assigning him, was to read over the reports from the soldiers that he had once unknowingly commanded. On every formic colony world, humans now walked. And from every exploratory team the reports were the same: All the formics dead and rotting, with vast farms and factories now available for the taking. The soldiers-turned-explorers were always alert to the possibility of ambush, but as the months passed and there were no attacks, their reports became full of the things they were learning from the xenobiologists that had been sent with them: Not only can we breathe the air on every formic world, we can eat most of their food.
And so every formic planet became a human colony, the soldiers settling down to live among the relics of their enemies. There were not enough women among them, but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of monogamy could be restored.
But Ender took only peripheral interest in what the humans were doing on the new worlds. What he studied were the formic artifacts. The patterns of formic settlement. The warrens that had once been the hive queens' breeding grounds, full of larvae that were so hard-toothed they could gnaw through rock, creating more and more tunnels. They had to farm on the surface, but they went underground to breed, to raise their young, and the young themselves were every bit as lethal and powerful as the adults. Chewing through rock--the explorers found the larval bodies, rotting quickly but still there to be photographed, dissected, studied.
"So this is how you spend your days," said Petra. "Looking at pictures of formic tunnels. Is this a return-to-the-womb thing?"
Ender smiled and set aside the pictures he had been studying. "I thought you'd already gone home to Armenia."
"Not till I see how this stupid court martial turns out," she said. "Not until the Armenian government is ready to receive me in high style. Which means they have to decide whether they want me."
"Of course they want you."
"They don't know what they want. They're politicians. Is it good for them to have me back? Is keeping me up here worse for them than having me come home? It's so very, very hard when you have no convictions except your lust to remain in power. Aren't we glad we're not in politics?"
Ender sighed. "E. I will never hold office again. Commander of Dragon Army was too much for me, and that was just a kids' game."
"That's what I tried to assure them. I don't want anybody's job. I'm not going to endorse anybody for office. I want to live with my family and see if they remember who I am. And vice versa."
"They'll love you," said Ender.
"And you know this because...?"
"Because I love you."
She looked at him in consternation. "How can I possibly answer a comment like that?"
"Oh. What was I supposed to say?"
"I don't know. Am I supposed to write scripts for you now?"
"OK," said Ender. "Should it have been banter? 'They'll love you because somebody has to, and it sure isn't anybody up here.' Or maybe the ethnic slur: 'They'll love you because hey, they're Armenian and you're a female.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I got that from an Azeri I talked to during that whole flap about Sinterklaas Day back in Battle School. Apparently the idea is that Armenians know that the only people who think Armenian women are...I don't have to explain ethnic insults, Petra. They're infinitely transferable."
"When are they letting you go home?" asked Petra.
Instead of sidestepping the question or giving it a lazy answer, Ender answered truthfully for once. "I'm thinking maybe it won't happen."
"What do you mean? You think this stupid court martial is going to end up convicting you?"
"I'm the one on trial, aren't I?"
"Definitely not."
"Only because I'm a child and therefore not responsible. But it's all about what an evil little monster I am."
"It is not."
"I've seen the highlights on the nets, Petra. What the world is seeing is that the savior of the world has a little problem--he kills children."
"You defended yourself from bullies. Everybody understands that."
"Except the people who post comments about how I'm a worse war criminal than Hitler or Pol Pot. A mass murderer. What makes you think I want to go home and deal with all that?"
Petra wasn't playing now. She sat down next to him and took his hands. "Ender, you have a family."
"Had."
"Oh, don't say that! You have a family. Families still love their children even if they've been away for eight years."
"I've only been away for seven. Almost. Yes, I know they love me. Some of them at least. They love who I was. A cute little six-year-old. I must have been so huggable. Between killing other children, that is."
"So is that what this obsession with formic porn is?"
"Porn?"
"The way you study it. Classic addiction. Got to have more and more of it. Explicit photos of rotting larva bodies. Autopsy shots. Slides of their molecular structure. Ender, they're gone, and you didn't kill them. Or if you did, then we did. But we didn't. We played a game! We were training for war, that's all it w
as."
"And if it had really been just a game?" asked Ender. "And then they assigned us to the fleet after we graduated, and we actually piloted those ships or commanded those squadrons? Wouldn't we have done it for real?"
"Yes," said Petra. "But we didn't. It didn't happen."
"It happened. They're gone."
"Well, studying the structure of their bodies and the biochemistry of their cells is not going to bring them back."
"I'm not trying to bring them back," said Ender. "What a nightmare that would be."
"No, you're trying to persuade yourself that you deserve the merdicious things they're saying about you in the court martial, because if that's true, then you don't deserve to go back to Earth."
Ender shook his head. "I want to go home, Petra, even if I can't stay. And I'm not conflicted about the war. I'm glad we fought and I'm glad we won and I'm glad it's over."
"But you keep your distance from everybody. We understood, or sympathized, or pretended we did. But you've kept us all at arm's length. You make this show of dropping everything whenever one of us comes around to chat, but it's an act of hostility."
What an outrageous thing to say. "It's common courtesy!"
"You never even say, 'Just a sec,' you just drop everything. It's so...obvious. The message is: 'I'm really busy but I still think you're my responsibility so I'll drop whatever I'm doing because you need my time.'"
"Wow," said Ender. "You sure understand a lot of things about me. You're so smart, Petra. A girl like you--they could really make something out of you in Battle School."
"Now that's a real answer."
"Not as real as what I said before."
"That you love me? You're not my therapist, Ender. Or my priest. Don't coddle me, don't tell me what you think I need to hear."
"You're right," said Ender. "I shouldn't drop everything when one of my friends drops by." He picked his papers back up again.
"Put those down."
"Oh, now it's OK because you asked me so rudely."
"Ender," Petra said, "we all came back from the war. You didn't. You're still in it. Still fighting...something. We talk about you all the time. Wondering why you won't turn to us. Hoping there's somebody you talk to."
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