Ender in Exile

by Orson Scott Card

  Ender raised his hands to face level and clapped them, loudly and solemnly. "I honor those who died in space, and those who died here."

  They cheered.

  "I honor Vitaly Kolmogorov, who led you for thirty-six years of war and peace!" Another cheer. "And Sel Menach, a man so modest he could not bear to face the attention he knew would be paid to him today!" Cheers and laughter. "Sel Menach, who will teach me everything I need to know in order to serve you. Because I'm here, he will now have time to get back to his real work." A roar of laughter, and a cheer.

  And now, from the back of the crowd, from the loudspeakers, came the sound of Morgan's voice. "Men and women of Shakespeare Colony, please forgive the interruption. This was not how the program for today was supposed to go."

  The people around Ender glanced in puzzlement toward the top of the ramp. Morgan was speaking in a pleasant, perhaps jocular tone. But he was irrelevant to what had just been happening. He was an intruder in this ceremony. Didn't he see that Ender Wiggin was a victorious commander meeting with his veterans? What did Quincy Morgan have to do with that?

  Hadn't he read the letter?

  Morgan could only spare half his attention for the letter, he was so furious at Wiggin for heading straight into the crowd. What was he doing? Did he actually know these people's names?

  But then the letter began to register with him and he read it with his full attention.

  Dear Rear Admiral Morgan,

  Former Polemarch Chamrajnagar, before his retirement, warned us that there was some risk that you would misunderstand the limited nature of your responsibilities upon reaching Shakespeare Colony. He takes full responsibility for any such misunderstanding, and if he was mistaken, we apologize for the actions we have taken. But you must understand that we were compelled to take preventive measures in case you had been misled into thinking that you were to exercise even momentary authority on the surface of the planet. We have been careful to make sure that if you behave with exact correctness, no one but you and Vice-Admiral Andrew Wiggin will ever know how we were prepared to deal with the situation if you acted inappropriately.

  Correct action is this: You will recognize that upon setting foot on Shakespeare, Vice-Admiral Wiggin becomes Governor Wiggin, with absolute authority over all matters concerning the colony and all transfers of persons and material to and from the colony. He retains his rank of Vice-Admiral, so that outside your actual ship, he is your superior officer and you are subject to his authority.

  You will return to your ship without setting foot on the planet. You will not meet with any persons from the colony. You will provide a full and orderly transfer of all cargos and persons from your ship to the colony, exactly as Governor Wiggin specifies. You will make all your actions transparent to IFCom and ColMin by reporting hourly by ansible on all actions taken in compliance with Governor Wiggin's orders.

  We assume that this is what you intended to do all along. However, because of Polemarch Chamrajnagar's warning, we anticipate the possibility that you had different plans, and that you might consider acting on them. The forty-year voyage between us and you made it necessary for us to take actions which we can and will reverse upon your successful completion of this mission and your return to lightspeed.

  Every twelve hours, Governor Wiggin will report to us by holographic ansible, assuring us of your compliance. If he fails to report, or seems to us to be under duress of any kind, we will activate a program now embedded in your ship's computer. The program will also be activated by any attempt to rewrite the program itself or restore an earlier state of the software.

  This program will consist of the vocal and holographic transmission to the ansibles aboard your ship and shuttles, through every speaker and computer display on your ship and shuttles, and to every ansible in Shakespeare Colony, stating that you are charged with mutiny, ordering that no one obey you, and that you be arrested and placed in stasis for the return voyage to Eros, where you will be tried for mutiny.

  We regret that the existence of this message will certainly cause offense to you if you did not plan to behave any way other than correctly. But in that case, your correct actions will ensure that no one sees this message, and when you have returned to lightspeed flight after successfully carrying out your mission, the message will be eliminated from your ship's computer and there will be no record whatsoever of this action. You will return with full honors and your career will continue without blemish.

  A copy of this letter has been sent to your executive officer, Commodore Vlad das Lagrimas, but he cannot open it as long as Governor Wiggin continues to certify to us that you are taking correct actions.

  Since yours is the first colony ship to arrive at its destination, your actions will establish the precedent for the entire I.F. We look forward to reporting on your excellent actions to the entire fleet.

  Sincerely,

  Polemarch Bakossi Wuri

  Minister of Colonization Hyrum Graff

  Morgan read the letter, filled with rage and dread at first, but gradually taking a very different attitude. How could they imagine that he planned anything other than to oversee Wiggin's orderly assumption of power? How dare Chamrajnagar tell them anything that would lead them to think he intended anything else?

  He would have to send them a very stiff letter informing them of his disappointment that they would treat him in this high-handed and completely unnecessary way.

  No, if he sent a letter it would go into the record. He had to keep his record clean. And they were going to make a lot of hoopla about his being the first captain of a colony ship to complete his mission--that would be a huge plus for his career.

  He had to act as if this letter didn't exist.

  The crowd was cheering. They had been cheering and clapping over and over again while Morgan read the letter. He looked out to see that they were now completely surrounding Wiggin, none of them even glancing at the shuttle, at the ramp, at Admiral Morgan. Now that he was looking at them, he could see that everyone was gazing intently at Ender Wiggin, devotedly, eagerly. Every word he said, they cheered at, or laughed, or wept.

  Incredibly, they loved him.

  Even without this letter, even without any intervention from IFCom or ColMin, Morgan lost this power struggle from the moment Ender Wiggin appeared in full uniform and called the veterans by name and invoked their memories of the dead. Wiggin knew how to win their hearts, and he did it without deception or coercion. All he did was care enough to learn their names and faces and remember them. All he did was lead them in victory forty-one years ago. When Morgan was in charge of a supply operation in the asteroid belt.

  For all I know, this letter is a complete bluff. Wiggin wrote it himself. Just to keep me distracted while he carried out his public relations coup. If I decided to be obstructive, if I decided to work behind his back to undermine their confidence in him, to destroy him as governor so that I would have to step in and...

  The people cheered again, as Wiggin invoked the name of the acting governor.

  No, Morgan would never be able to undermine their confidence in Wiggin. They wanted him to be their governor. While to them, Morgan was nothing. A stranger. An interloper. They weren't in the I.F. anymore. They didn't care about authority or rank. They were citizens of this colony now, but they had the legend of how they were founded. The great Ender Wiggin, by his victory, slew all the formics on the surface of this world, opening the land to these humans so they could come and dwell here. And now Wiggin had come among them in person. It was like the second coming of Christ. Morgan had zero chance now.

  His aides were watching him intently. They had no idea what was in the letter, but he was afraid that his face might not have been as impassive as he'd meant, while he was reading it; in fact, his impassivity would be a strong message in itself. So now Morgan smiled at them. "Well, so much for our script. It seems Governor Wiggin had his own plans for how this day would go. It would have been nice of him to inform us, but...there's
no accounting for the pranks that boys will play."

  His aides chuckled, because they knew he expected them to. Morgan knew perfectly well that they understood exactly what had happened here. Not the threats in the letter, but Wiggin's complete triumph. Nevertheless, Morgan would act as if this was exactly how things were always meant to turn out, and they would join him in acting that way, and ship's discipline would be maintained.

  Morgan turned to the microphone. In a lull in the cheering and shouting of the crowd, he spoke, taking a friendly, joking tone. "Men and women of Shakespeare Colony, please forgive the interruption. This was not how the program for today was supposed to go."

  The crowd turned toward him, distractedly, even annoyed. They immediately turned back to Wiggin, who faced Morgan, not with the jaunty smile of victory, but with the same solemn face that he always presented on the ship. The little bastard. He'd been plotting this the whole time, and never showed a sign of it. Even when Morgan looked over the vids of him in his quarters, even when he watched Wiggin with Dorabella's daughter, the boy never let his pretense lapse, not for a second.

  Thank the stars he'll be staying on this world, and not returning to be my rival for preeminence in the I.F.

  "I won't take but a moment more of your time," said Morgan. "My men will immediately unload all the equipment we brought with us, and the marines will stay behind to assist Governor Wiggin however he might desire. I will return to the ship and will follow Governor Wiggin's instructions as to the order and timing of the transfer of materials and persons from the ship to the ground. My work here is done. I commend you for your achievements here, and thank you for your attention."

  There was scattered applause, but he knew that most of them had tuned him out and were merely waiting for him to be done in order to get back to lionizing Andrew Wiggin.

  Ah well. When he got back to the ship, Dorabella would be there. It was the best thing he had ever done, marrying that woman.

  Of course, he had no idea how she would take the news that she and her daughter would not be colonists after all--that they would be staying with him on his voyage back to Earth. But how could they complain? Life in this colony would be primitive and hard. Life as the wife of an admiral--the very admiral who was first to bring new settlers and supplies to a colony world--would be a pleasant one, and Dorabella would thrive in such social settings; the woman really was brilliant at it. And the daughter--well, she could go to university and have a normal life. No, not normal, exceptional--because Morgan's position would be such that he could guarantee her the finest opportunities.

  Morgan had already turned to go back inside the shuttle when he heard Wiggin's voice calling to him. "Admiral Morgan! I don't think the people here have understood what you have done for us all, and they need to hear it."

  Since Morgan had the words of Graff's and Wuri's letter fresh in his mind, he could not help but hear irony and bad intent in Wiggin's words. He almost decided to keep moving back into the shuttle, as if he hadn't heard the boy.

  But the boy was the governor, and Morgan had his own command to think about. If he ignored the boy now, it would look to his own men like an acknowledgment of defeat--and a rather cowardly one at that. So, to preserve his own position of respect, he turned to hear what the boy had to say.

  "Thank you, sir, for bringing us all safely here. Not just me, but the colonists who will join with the original settlers and native-born of this world. You have retied the links between the home of the human race and these far-flung children of the species."

  Then Wiggin turned back to the colonists. "Admiral Morgan and his crew and these marines you see here did not come to fight a war and save the human race, and none of them will die at the hands of our enemies. But they made one great sacrifice that is identical to one made by the original settlers here. They cut themselves loose from all that they knew and all that they loved and cast themselves out into space and time to find a new life among the stars. And every new colonist on that ship has given up everything they had, betting on their new life here among you."

  The colonists spontaneously began applauding, a few at first, but soon all of them, and then cheering--for Admiral Morgan, for the marines, for the unmet colonists still on the ship.

  And the Wiggin boy, damn him, was saluting. Morgan had no choice but to return the salute and accept the gratitude and respect of the colonists as a gift from him.

  Then Wiggin strode toward the shuttle--but not to say anything more to Morgan. Instead, he walked toward the commander of the marine squad and called out to him by name. Had the boy learned the names of all of Morgan's crew and marines as well?

  "I want you to meet your counterpart," Wiggin said loudly. "The man who commanded the marines with the original expedition." He led him to an old man, and they saluted each other, and in a few moments the whole place was chaotic with marines being swarmed by old men and women and young ones as well.

  Morgan knew now that little of what Wiggin had done was really about him. Yes, he had to make sure Morgan knew his place. He accomplished that in the first minute, when he distracted Morgan with the letter while he showed that he knew all the original settlers by name, and acted--with justification--as the commander of veterans meeting with them forty-one years after their great victory.

  But Wiggin's main purpose was to shape the attitude that this community would have toward Morgan, toward the marines, toward the starship's crew, and, most important, toward the new colonists. He brought them together with a knowledge of their common sacrifice.

  And the kid claimed that he didn't like making speeches. What a liar. He said exactly what needed saying. Next to him, Morgan was a novice. No, a fumbling incompetent.

  Morgan made his way back inside the shuttle, pausing only to tell the waiting officers that Governor Wiggin would be giving them their orders about unloading the cargo.

  Then he went to the bathroom, tore the letter into tiny pieces, chewed them into pulp, and spat the wad into the toilet. The taste of paper and ink nauseated him, and he retched a couple of times before he got control of himself.

  Then he went into his communications center and had lunch. He was still eating it when a lieutenant commander supervised a couple of the natives in bringing in a fine mess of fresh fruits and vegetables, just as Wiggin had predicted. It was delicious, and afterward, Morgan napped until one of his aides woke him to tell him the unloading was finished, they had taken aboard a vast supply of excellent foodstuffs and fresh water, and they were about to take off to return to the ship.

  "The Wiggin boy will make a fine governor, don't you think?" Morgan said.

  "Yes, sir, I believe so, sir," said the aide.

  "And to think I imagined that he might need help from me to get started." Morgan laughed. "Well, I have a ship to run. Let's get back to it!"

  Sel watched warily as the larva made its way back into the cavern. Was it heading for him, or just returning the way he came? He might test it by moving, but then his very motion might draw its attention to him.

  "Nice larva," whispered Sel. "How about some nice dried dog?"

  When he reached for his pack, to extract the food, it wasn't there. Po had his pack.

  But Sel had the little bag at his waist where he carried his own food for each day's hike. He opened it, took out the dried dog meat and the vegetables that he carried there, and tossed them toward the larva.

  It stopped. It nudged the food lying on the ground. Just in case sending mental images had actually worked, Sel created a mental image of the food as being part of the belly of a dying gold bug. This is magical thinking, he told himself, to believe that what I form in my mind will affect the behavior of this beast. But at least it occupied his mind while he waited to see whether the larva liked its food in small batches, or large and on the hoof.

  The larva rose up and plunged its gaping mouth down on the food like a remora attaching itself to a shark.

  Sel could imagine a smaller version of the larva being exac
tly that--a remora, attaching itself to larger creatures to suck the blood out of them. Or to burrow into them?

  He remembered the tiny parasites that had killed people when the colony was first formed. The ones Sel had invented blood additives to repel.

  This creature is a hybrid. Half native to this world. Half derived from organisms of the formic world.

  No, not "organisms." Derived from the formics themselves. The body structure was basically formicoid. It would take very creative and knowledgeable gene-splicing to construct a viable creature that combined attributes of two species growing out of such disparate genetic heritages. The result would be a species that was half formic, so that perhaps the hive queens could communicate with them mentally, control them like any other formics. Only they were still different enough that they didn't completely bond with the queen--so when this world's hive queen died, the gold bugs didn't.

  Or maybe they already had a species they used for menial tasks, one that had a weak mental bond with the hive queens, and that's what they interbred with the parasitic worms. Those incredible teeth that could burrow right through leather, cloth, skin, and bone. But sentient, or nearly so. It could still be ruled by the hive queen's mind.

  Or my mind. Did it come back at my summoning? Or was it simply taking the easy food first?

  By now the larva had plunged down onto each of the bits of food and devoured them--along with a thin layer of the stone floor at each spot. The thing was hungry.

  Sel formed a picture in his mind--a complicated one now. A picture of Sel and Po bringing food into the tunnel. Feeding the larva. He pictured himself and Po going in and out of the cave, bringing food. Lots of food. Leaves. Grain. Fruit. Small animals.

  The larva came toward him, but then circled around him. Writhed around his legs. Like a constrictor? Did it have that snakelike pattern, too?

  No. It didn't get tighter. It was more like a cat.