Ender in exile

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. "Touché. 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?"

"No. Because the formic anti-grav — technically, anti-inertial — was on. Powered by the egg reaction, too, of course. It's like all the molecules in space were put there to be cheap fuel for our ships and everything on them. Anyway, the anti-gravs compensated for the jump and the only problem was communicating with IFCom to tell them what happened. Without the cruiser, no communications except short-range radio."

The captain went on to tell about the clever way the men on the formic ship attracted the attention of rescuers, but Ender's concentration was on something else — something so disturbing that it made him lightheaded and a little nauseated from the shock of it.

The egg, the strong force field generator, obviously was the source of the molecular disruption device. What the captain had just described was the reaction that was in the M.D. Device, the "Little Doctor," which Ender had used to destroy the formic home planet and kill all the hive queens.

Ender thought it was a technology that humans had come up with on their own. But it was clearly based on formic technology. You just take away the controls that shape the field, and you've got a field that chews up everything in its path and spits it out as raw atoms. A field that sustains itself on the energy it generates by playing with the strong nuclear force. A planet-eater.

The formics had to recognize it when Ender used it the first time. It wasn't mysterious to them — they'd recognize it immediately as a raw, uncontrolled weaponization of the principle that powered every formic starship.

Between the time of that battle and the final one, the formics surely had the time to do the same thing — to weaponize the strong force field generator and use it against the humans before they came in range.

They absolutely knew what the weapon was. They could have made their own whenever they wanted. But they didn't do it. They just sat there waiting for Ender.

They gave us the stardrive we used to get to them, and the weapon we used to kill them. They gave us everything.

We humans are supposed to be so clever. So inventive. Yet this was completely beyond our reach. We make desks with clever holodisplays that we can play really fun games on. Plus send each other letters over vast distances. But compared to them, we didn't even know how to kill properly. While they knew how — but chose not to use the technology that way.

"Well, this part of the tour usually bores people," said the captain.

"No, I wasn't bored. Truly. I was just thinking."

"About what?"

"Stuff that's too classified to talk about using any method but telepathy," said Ender. Which was true — the existence of the M.D. Device was only on a need-to-know basis, and the secret had been well kept. Even the men who deployed and used the weapons didn't understand what they were and what they could do. The soldiers who had seen the Little Doctor consume a planet were dead, lost in the same vast chain reaction. The soldiers who had seen it used in one of the early battles just thought of it as an incredibly big bomb. Only the top brass understood it — and Ender, because Mazer Rackham had insisted that he had to be told what the weapons he carried actually were and how they worked. As Mazer told him later, "I told Graff, You don't give a man a bag of tools and not tell him what they are and what they do and how they might go wrong."

Graff again. Graff who decided Mazer was right and allowed them to tell Ender what it was and how it worked.

My slaughter of the formics — it's all here in the egg.

"You've gone off again," said the captain.

"Thinking about what a miracle starflight is. Whatever else we might think of the buggers, they did give us our road to the stars."

"I know," said the captain. "I've thought of that before. If they had just bypassed our system instead of coming in and trying to wipe Earth clean, we'd never have known they existed. And at our level of technology, we probably wouldn't have gotten out into the stars until so much later that we'd have found every nearby planet completely occupied by formics."

"Captain, this was a most excellent and productive tour."

"I know. How else would you have learned how to find the head on every deck?"

Ender laughed at the joke. Partly because it was true. He'd need to find a bathroom several times a day through the whole voyage.

"I assume you're staying awake for the flight," said the captain.

"Wouldn't want to miss any of the scenery."

"Oh, there's no scenery, because at lightspeed you — oh, a joke. Sorry, sir."

"Got to work on my sense of humor, when my jokes make other people apologize to me."

"Begging your pardon, sir, but you don't talk like a kid."

"Do I talk like an admiral?" asked Ender.

"Since you are an admiral, however you talk is like an admiral, sir," said the captain.

"Very cleverly sidestepped, sir. Tell me, are you coming on the voyage with me?"

"I have a family on Earth, sir, and my wife doesn't want to join a colony on another world. No pioneer spirit, I'm afraid."

"You have a life. A good reason for staying home."

"But you're going," said the captain.

"Have to see the formic homeland," said Ender. "Or the next best thing, considering that their home planet doesn't exist anymore."

"Which I'm damned happy about, sir," said the captain. "If you hadn't whupped them for good and all, sir, we'd be looking over our shoulder through the next ten thousand years of human history."

There was a stab of insight there. Ender caught it and then it immediately slipped away. Something about the way the hive queens thought. Their purpose in letting Ender kill them.

Well, if it's true, then I'll think of it again.

Ender hoped that optimistic thought was right.

When all of Ender's tours and training sessions were finished, he finally got an interview with the Minister of Colonization.

"Please don't call me Colonel," said Graff.

"I can't call you MinCol."

"Officially, a Hegemony minister is addressed as 'Your Excellency.»

"With a straight face?"

"Sometimes," said Graff. "But we're colleagues, Ender. I call you by your first name. You can call me by mine."

"Never in my life," said Ender. "You're Colonel Graff to me, and that will never change."

"Doesn't matter," said Graff. "I'll be dead before you get to your destination."

"Hardly seems fair. Come with us."

"I have to be here to get my own work done."

"My work is done."

"I don't know about that," said Graff. "The work we had for you is done. But you don't even know yet what your own work is going to be."

"I know it won't be governing a colony, sir."

"And yet you accepted the job."

Ender shook his head. "I accepted the title. When I get to the colony, then we'll see just how much of a governor I'll be. The Constitution you came up with is good, but the real constitution is always the same: The leader only has as much power as his followers give him."

"And yet you're going to make the voyage awake instead of in stasis."

"It's only a couple of years," said Ender. "And it'll make me fifteen when we arrive. I'm hoping I'll get taller."

"I hope you're bringing a lot of books to read."

"They stocked a few thousand titles for me in the ship's library," said Ender. "But what matters to me is that you use the ansible to give us all the information about the formics that comes out while we're in flight."

"Of course," said Graff. "That will be sent to all the ships."

Ender smiled slightly.

"All right, yes, of course I'll send them directly to you as well. What, are you suspecting that the ship's captain will try to control your access to information?"

"If you were in his place, wouldn't you do the same?"

"Ender, I would never let myself get in the position of trying to control you against your will."

"You just spent the last six years doing that."

"And got court-martialed for it, you'll notice."

"And your punishment was to get the job you've wanted all along. Let me see. Minister of Colonization doesn't go to Earth to be under the thumb of the Hegemon. He stays in space, nicely ensconced with the International Fleet. So even if they change hegemons, it won't involve you. And if they fire you —»

"They won't," said Graff.

"You're so sure of that."

"It's not a prediction, it's an intention."

"You, sir, are a piece of work," said Ender.

"Oh, speaking of pieces of work," said Graff, "did you hear that Demosthenes has retired?"

"The guy on the nets?" asked Ender.

"I don't mean the Greek author of the Philippics."

"I don't actually care," said Ender. "It's just the nets."

"The nets, and this rabble-rouser's screeds in particular, are where the battle was played out and you lost," said Graff.

"Who says I lost?" asked Ender.

"Touché," said Graff. "My point is that the person behind the online identity is actually younger than most people imagined. So the retirement isn't about age, it's about leaving home. Leaving Earth."

"Demosthenes is becoming a colonist?"

"Isn't that an odd choice," said Graff, sounding as if it weren't odd to him at all.

"Please don't tell me he's coming on my ship."

"Technically, it's Admiral Quincy Morgan's ship. You don't take over till you set foot on the ground in your colony. That's the law."

"Dodging the question as usual."

"Yes, you'll have Demosthenes on your ship. But of course no one will be using that name."

"You've been avoiding the use of the masculine pronoun — of any pronoun," said Ender. "So Demosthenes is a woman."

"And she's eager to see you."

Ender sagged in his chair. "Oh, sir, please."

"Not your normal hero-worshiper, Ender. And since she's also going to be awake through your whole voyage, I think you'll want to be prepared by seeing her in advance."

"When is she coming?"

"She's here."

"On Eros?"

"In my cozy little antechamber," said Graff.

"You're going to make me meet her now? Colonel Graff, I don't like anything she wrote. Or the result."

"Give her credit. She was warning the world about the Warsaw Pact's attempt to take over the fleet long before anybody else took the threat seriously."

"She was also crowing about how America could conquer the world once it had me."

"You can ask her about that."

"I have no such intention."

"Let me tell you one pure and simple truth. In everything she wrote about you, Ender, her only concern was to protect you from the terrible things people would have done to exploit you or destroy you if you ever set foot on Earth."

"I could have dealt with it."

"We'll never know, will we?"

"If I know you, sir, what you just told me is that you were behind this. Keeping me off Earth."

"Not really," said Graff. "I went along with it, yes."

Ender wanted to cry. From sheer moral exhaustion. "Because you know better than me what's in my best interest."

"In this case, Ender, I think you could have dealt with any challenge that came to you. Except one. Your brother, Peter, is determined to rule the world. You would have been either his tool or his enemy. Which would you have chosen?"

"Peter?" asked Ender. "Do you think he really has a chance of it?"

"He's done incredibly well so far — for a teenager."

"Isn't he twenty by now? No, I guess he'd still be seventeen. Or eighteen."

"I don't keep track of your family's birthdays," said Graff.

"If he's doing such a great job," said Ender, "why haven't I heard of him?"

"Oh, you have."

That meant Peter was using a pseudonym. Ender quickly thought through all the online personalities that might be considered close to some kind of world domination and when he got it, he sighed. "Peter is Locke."

"So, clever boy, who is Demosthenes?"

Ender rose to his feet and to his own chagrin he was crying, just like that. He didn't even know he was crying till his cheeks were wet and he couldn't see for the blur. "Valentine," he whispered.

"I'm going to leave my office now and let the two of you talk," said Graff.

When he left, the door stayed open. And then she came in.