The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  Still, Alessandra never ceased to be able to come up with complete surprises, and of all times, with poor Quincy so frustrated at the way Ender had bested him in bureaucratic maneuvering, she picked this one to be completely unreasonable.

  “Mother,” said Alessandra, “most of the sleepers have woken now and gone down to Shakespeare, and I’ve been packed for days. When are we going?”

  “Packed?” said Dorabella. “I thought you had been seized by a fit of tidiness. I was going to ask the doctors to test you for some odd disease.”

  “I’m not joking, Mother. We signed on to go to the colony. We’re at the colony. Just one shuttle trip away. We have a contract.”

  Dorabella laughed. But the girl really wasn’t going to be teased out of this. “Darling daughter of mine,” said Dorabella. “I’m married now. To the admiral who captains this ship. Where the ship goes, he goes. Where he goes, I go. Where I go, you go.”

  Alessandra stood there in utter silence. She seemed poised to argue.

  And then she didn’t argue at all. “All right, Mother. So it’s clean indoor living for another few years.”

  “My dear Quincy tells me that our next destination is another colony, nowhere near so far from us as Earth. Only a few months of flying time.”

  “But very tedious for me,” said Alessandra. “With all the interesting people gone.”

  “Meaning Ender Wiggin, of course,” said Dorabella. “I did so hope that you might manage to attract that fine young man with prospects. But he seems to have chosen to cast us aside.”

  Alessandra looked puzzled. “Us?” she said.

  “He’s a very smart boy. He knew that by forcing my dear Quincy to leave Shakespeare, he was sending you and me away, too.”

  “I never thought of that,” said Alessandra. “Why, I’m very cross with him, then.”

  Dorabella felt a sudden tingling of awareness. Alessandra was taking things too well. This was not like her. And this hint of childish petulance directed against Ender Wiggin seemed to be almost a parody of Dorabella’s deliberately childish fairy talk.

  “What are you planning?” asked Dorabella.

  “Planning? How can I plan anything when the crew are all so busy and the marines are down on the planet?”

  “You’re planning to sneak onto the shuttle without permission and go down to the planet’s surface without my knowing it.”

  Alessandra looked at Dorabella as if she were crazy. But since that was her normal expression, Dorabella fully expected to be lied to, and her daughter did not disappoint. “Of course I wasn’t,” said Alessandra. “I fully expect to have your permission.”

  “Well, you don’t.”

  “We came all this way, Mother.” Now she sounded like her petulant self, so that her arguments might be sincere. “I at least want to visit. I want to say good-bye to all our friends from the voyage. I want to see the sky. I haven’t seen sky for two years!”

  “You’ve been in the sky,” said Dorabella.

  “Oh, that was a smart answer,” said Alessandra. “That makes my longing to be outdoors go away…just. Like. That.”

  Now that Alessandra mentioned it, Dorabella realized that she, too, longed for a bit of a walk outdoors. The gym on the ship was always full of marines and crew members, and even though they were required to walk for a certain number of minutes a day on the treadmill, it was not as if that ever felt like you had truly gone somewhere.

  “That’s not unreasonable,” said Dorabella.

  “You’re joking,” said Alessandra.

  “What, do you think it is unreasonable?”

  “I didn’t think you would ever think it was reasonable.”

  “I’m hurt,” said Dorabella. “I’m a human being, too. I long for the sight of clouds in the sky. They do have clouds here, don’t they?”

  “How would I know, Mother?”

  “We’ll go together,” said Dorabella. “Mother and daughter, saying good-bye to our friends. We never got to do that when we left Monopoli.”

  “We didn’t have any friends,” said Alessandra.

  “We certainly did too, and they must have thought we were so rude to leave without them.”

  “I bet they brood about it every day. ‘Whatever happened to that rude girl Alessandra, who left us without saying good-bye—forty years ago.’”

  Dorabella laughed. Alessandra did have such biting wit. “That’s my smart little fairy daughter. Titania had nothing on you when it came to bitchiness.”

  “I wish you had stopped reading Shakespeare with Taming of the Shrew.”

  “I’ve been living inside A Midsummer Night’s Dream my whole life and I never knew it,” said Dorabella. “That was what felt like coming home to me, not reaching some strange planet.”

  “Well, I live inside The Tempest,” said Alessandra. “Trapped on an island and desperate to get off.”

  Dorabella laughed again. “I’ll ask your father to let us ride down with one of the shuttles and come back up with another. How’s that?”

  “Excellent. Thank you, Mother.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Dorabella.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You agreed too quickly. What are you planning? Do you think you can sneak away into the woods and hide till I go off and leave without you? That will never happen, my dear. I will not go without you, and Quincy will not go without me. If you try to run away, marines will track you down and find you and drag you back to me. Do you understand?”

  “Mother,” said Alessandra, “the last time I ran away was when I was six.”

  “My dear, you ran away only a few weeks before we left Monopoli. When you skipped school and went to visit your grandmother.”

  “That wasn’t running away,” said Alessandra. “I came back.”

  “Only after you found out that your grandmother was Satan’s widow.”

  “I didn’t know the devil was dead.”

  “Married to her, can you imagine he wouldn’t kill himself?”

  Alessandra laughed. That’s how it was done—you lay down the law, but then you make them laugh and be happy about obeying you.

  “We’ll visit Shakespeare, and then we’ll come back home to the ship. The ship is home now. Don’t forget that.”

  “Of course not,” said Alessandra. “But Mama.”

  “Yes, darling fairy girl?”

  “He’s not my father.”

  Dorabella took a moment to figure out what she was talking about. “Who’s not your what?”

  “Admiral Morgan,” said Alessandra. “Not my father.”

  “I’m your mother. He’s my husband. What do you think that makes him, your nephew?”

  “Not. My. Father.”

  “Oh, I’m so sad,” said Dorabella. “Here I thought you were happy for me.”

  “I’m very happy for you,” said Alessandra. “But my father was a real man, not the king of the fairies, and he didn’t prance off into the woods, he died. Anyone you marry now will be your husband, but not my father.”

  “I didn’t marry anyone, I married a wonderful man with whom I am bound to have more children, so that if you reject him as your father, he will have no shortage of other heirs on whom to bestow his estate.”

  “I don’t want his estate.”

  “Then you’d better marry well,” said Dorabella, “because you don’t want to raise your own children in poverty the way I did.”

  “Just don’t call him my father,” said Alessandra.

  “You have to call him something, and so do I. Be reasonable, darling.”

  “Then I’ll call him Prospero,” said Alessandra, “because that’s what he is.”

  “What? Why?”

  “A powerful stranger who has us completely under his control. You’re Ariel, the sweet one who loves your master. I’m Caliban. I just want to be set free.”

  “You’re a teenager. You’ll grow out of it.”

  “Never.”

  “There is no such thing as
freedom,” said Dorabella, getting impatient. “Sometimes, though, there’s a chance to choose your master.”

  “Very well, Mother. You chose your master. But I haven’t chosen mine.”

  “You still think the Wiggin boy even notices you.”

  “I know that he does, but I’m not pinning my hopes on him.”

  “You offered yourself to him, my dear, and he turned you down flat. It was quite humiliating, even if you didn’t realize it.”

  Alessandra’s face turned a bit red and she stalked to the door of their quarters. Then she whirled around, real pain and fury on her face. “You watched,” she said. “Quincy recorded it and you watched!”

  “Of course I did,” said Dorabella. “If I hadn’t, he or some crewman would have watched. Do you think I wanted them ogling your body?”

  “You sent me to Ender expecting me to get naked with him, and you knew they were recording it, and you watched it. You watched me.”

  “You didn’t get naked, did you? And so what if you had? I saw your naked body from angles you’ve never even thought of during the butt-wiping years.”

  “I hate you, Mother.”

  “You love me, because I always watch out for you.”

  “And Ender didn’t humiliate me. Or reject me. He rejected you. He rejected the way you made me act!”

  “What happened to, ‘Oh thank you, Mother! Now I shall have the man I love’?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You thanked me and giggled and thanked me again. You stood there and let me make you up like a whore to entice him. At what point did I force you to do something against your will?”

  “You told me what I had to do if I wanted Ender to love me. Only a man like Ender doesn’t fall for tricks like yours!”

  “A man? A boy is what you mean. The only reason he didn’t fall for that ‘trick’ was because he probably hasn’t reached sexual maturity. If he’s even a heterosexual.”

  “Listen to yourself, Mother,” said Alessandra. “One minute Ender is the beginning and end of the world, the best chance for a great man that I’ll ever have a chance to find. The next minute, he’s a gay little boy who shamed me. You judge him according to whether he’s useful to you.”

  “No, my pet. Whether he’s useful to my little girl.”

  “Well, he isn’t,” said Alessandra.

  “That was my point,” said Dorabella. “And yet you gave me a tongue-lashing for saying so. Do make up your mind, my little Caliban.” Then Dorabella burst into laughter, and, completely against her will, so did Alessandra. The girl was so angry at herself for laughing, or at Dorabella for making her laugh, that she fled from the room, slamming the door behind her. Or trying to—the pneumatics caught it and it closed quite gently.

  Poor Alessandra. Nothing went the way she wanted.

  Welcome to the real world, my child. Someday you’ll see that my getting dear Quincy to fall in love with me was the best thing I ever did for you. Because I do everything for you. And all I ask in return is that you hold up your end and take the opportunities I get for you.

  Valentine tried to walk normally into the room, to remain perfectly calm. But she was so disgusted with Ender that she could hardly contain herself. The boy was so busy making himself “available” to all the new colonists and old settlers, answering questions, chatting about things that he could not possibly remember from half-hour interviews two years ago, when he was so tired he could hardly speak. Yet when someone with whom he had a genuine personal relationship was looking for him, he was nowhere to be found.

  It was just like the way he had refused to write to their parents. Well, he hadn’t refused. He had always promised to do it. Then he simply never did.

  For the past two years, he had promised—by implication, if not by word—that if the poor Toscano girl fell in love with him, it would not be unwelcome. Now she and her mother had come down to the planet’s surface, to do some “sightseeing.” The girl was obviously looking for only one sight: Ender Wiggin. And he was nowhere.

  Valentine was fed up. The boy could be bold and brave indeed, except when there was something emotionally demanding that he didn’t actually have to do. He could evade this girl, and maybe he thought that was some kind of clear message, but he owed her words. He owed her at least a good-bye. It didn’t have to be a fond one, it just had to happen.

  She finally found him in the XB’s ansible room, writing something—probably a letter to Graff or someone equally irrelevant to their life on this new world.

  “The fact that you’re here,” said Valentine, “leaves you without any excuse at all.”

  Ender looked up at her, seeming to be genuinely puzzled. Well, he probably wasn’t faking it—he probably blocked the girl out of his mind so thoroughly that he had no clue what Valentine was talking about.

  “You’re looking through your mail. That means you got the passenger log for this shuttle trip.”

  “I already met the new colonists.”

  “Except one.”

  Ender raised an eyebrow. “Alessandra isn’t a colonist anymore.”

  “She’s looking for you.”

  “She could ask anybody where I am and they’ll tell her. It’s no secret.”

  “She can’t ask.”

  “Well, then, how does she expect to find me?”

  “Don’t put on this stupid act. I’m not so stupid as to believe you’re stupid, even if you’re acting as stupid as can be.”

  “OK, I’ve got the stupid part. Can you be more specific?”

  “Extremely stupid.”

  “Not the degree, dear sister.”

  “Emotionally insensitive.”

  “Valentine,” said Ender, “doesn’t it occur to you that I actually know what I’m doing? Can’t you have a little faith in me?”

  “I think you’re evading an emotionally difficult confrontation.”

  “Then why don’t I hide from you?”

  She wasn’t sure whether to be even more annoyed at him for turning the tables on her, or to be a bit relieved that he considered a confrontation with her to be emotional. She wasn’t actually sure she had enough of a hold on him for their confrontations to be emotional—on his side, anyway.

  Ender glanced at the time in the computer display and sighed. “Well, your timing, as usual, is impeccable, even if you don’t have a clue.”

  “I’d have a clue if you gave me one,” said Valentine.

  Ender was standing now, and to her surprise, he really was taller than her. She had noticed he was getting tall, but hadn’t realized that he had passed her. And it wasn’t thick shoes—he wasn’t wearing any.

  “Val,” he said softly. “If you looked at what I say and do, it would be obvious to you what’s going on. But you don’t analyze. You see something that doesn’t look right, and you leap past all the thinking part and go straight to ‘Ender is doing something wrong and I must put a stop to it.’”

  “I think! I analyze!”

  “You analyze everything and everybody. That’s what makes your history of Battle School so wonderful and truthful.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “You gave it to me three days ago. Of course I’ve read it.”

  “You didn’t say anything.”

  “This is the first time I’ve seen you since I finished it. Val, think, please.”

  “Don’t patronize me!”

  “Feeling patronized isn’t thinking,” he said, sounding irritated at last. That made her feel a little better. “Don’t judge me until you understand me. You can’t understand me if you’ve already judged me. You think I’ve treated Alessandra badly, but I haven’t. I’ve treated her extremely well. I’m about to save her life. But you can’t trust me to do the right thing. You don’t even bother to think what the right thing is before you decide that I’m not doing it.”

  “What is it that I think you’re not doing that you are doing? That girl is pining for you—”

  “Her feelings. Not her needs
. Not what’s actually good for her. You think the worst danger she faces is having her feelings hurt.”

  Valentine felt the righteous anger bleed out of her. What danger was he talking about? What need did Alessandra have, beyond her need for Ender? What was Valentine missing?

  Ender put his arms around her, hugged her, and then moved past her, out of the room, then out of the building. Valentine had no choice but to follow.

  He moved briskly across the grassy square in the middle of the science complex—really, just four one-story structures where the handful of scientists worked on the biology and technology that kept the colonists and the colony running. Now, though, with the newcomers from the ship, the houses were teeming with people, and Ender had already asked the fore-men of the crews to shift their priorities and get additional science buildings. The noise of building wasn’t deafening, because there were few power tools. But the calling out of instructions, the shouted warnings, the pounding of axes and hammers, it was a vigorous sound, taken all together. The sound of deliberate, welcome change.

  Did Ender really know exactly where the Toscanos would be? He certainly walked straight toward the place. And now that Valentine thought about it—analyzed, yes, Ender—she realized that Ender must have been waiting till the end of their visit, until the shuttle was loading up for the return trip. Not quite the last one, but the last that wouldn’t be full of marines and crew. The last shuttle with room for nonessential passengers.

  He cut it rather close, even so. Alessandra was standing forlorn at the bottom of the ramp, with her mother tugging at her sleeve, urging her to move on into the shuttle. Then she saw Ender coming toward her and broke away from her mother, running to Ender. Could the poor girl be any more obvious?

  She flung her arms around Ender, and to his credit, he embraced her willingly. In fact, Valentine was surprised at the way he held her, nuzzling her shoulder with real affection. What did he mean by that? What was the girl going to think he meant? Ender, are you really that insensitive?

  When she practically jumped into his arms, Ender took a step back to bear the sudden momentum; but he made sure to get his face down close to her ear.