Ender in exile

CHAPTER 6

To: GovNom%Colony1@colmin.gov

From: GovAct%Colony1@colmin.gov

Subj: Naming the colony

I agree that calling this place Colony I is going to get tiresome. I agree that naming it now instead of REnaming it when you and your colony ship get here in fifty years will be much better.

But your suggestion of «Prospero» would not play well here right now. We're burying former fighter pilots at the rate of one every other day while our xenobiologist struggles to find drugs or treatments that will control or eliminate the airborne worms that we inhale and that burrow through our veins until they're so perforated we bleed out internally.

Sel (the XB) assures me that the drug he just gave us will slow them down and buy us time. So there's a chance there'll actually be a colony here when you arrive. If you have questions about the dustworm itself, you'll have to ask him at SMenach%Colony1@colmin.gov\xbdiv.

My address is my job title but my name is Vitaly Kolmogorov and my permanent title is Admiral. Do you have a name? Whom am I writing to?

To: GovAct%Colony1@colmin.gov

From: GovNom%Colony1@colmin.gov

Subj: Re: Naming the colony

Dear Admiral Kolmogorov,

I have read with great relief the recent report that the dustworm has been completely controlled by the drug cocktail your xb Sel Menach developed. The worm is being named for him, but the actual name will be held up while committees argue endlessly about whether Latin should be used for naming xenospecies. Some are arguing for a different language for each colony world; others for standardization across all the colonies; others for linguistic differentiation between species native to each planet and the species from the formic home world that were transplanted to all the colony worlds. Thus the Earthbound keep themselves busy while you do the real work of trying to establish a bridgehead in an alien ecosphere.

I am part of the problem, with my fussing about the colony's name. Please forgive my wasting your time on this; yet it must be done, and you have already prevented me from a faux pas that would have hurt the relations between your colonists and the Ministry and its minions (including me). You were right that Prospero doesn't work, but for some reason I am quite drawn to using a name from The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Perhaps Tempest itself, or Miranda, or Ariel. I suspect Caliban would not be a good choice. Gonzalo? Sycorax?

As to my name, there is debate about whether to inform your colonists of who I am. I am strictly forbidden to tell even you, the «acting» governor. Meanwhile, my name is being bandied about on the nets, with no great secret made of the fact that I am appointed governor of Colony I. The information will simply not be transmitted to you by ansible. So easy to deceive you or leave you ignorant — something that I will keep in mind when I receive information from ColMin as governor 40 years from now. Unless I can get them to change this foolish practice before I depart.

I believe that the powers-that-be think that having a child of thirteen appointed as governor of your colony might hurt morale among your colonists, though it will be forty years before I arrive. At the same time, others think that having the victorious commander as governor will help morale. While they decide, I trust both your powers of deduction and your discretion.

To: GovNom%Colony1@colmin.gov

From: GovAct%Colony1@colmin.gov

Subj: Re: Naming the colony

Dear Governor-Nominate Wiggin,

I am impressed with the alacrity with which ColMin acted on your petition for ansible bandwidth to be made available for unrestricted access to the nets by colonists, at the discretion of the governors.

My first thought was to inform everyone in the colony about the identity of their governor-in-transit. The name of Ender Wiggin is revered here. After our own victory, we studied your battles and debated about just which superlative was most appropriate when applied to your degree of military brilliance. But I have also seen the reports of the court martial of Col. Graff and Admiral Rackham. Your reputation was savaged and I don't want to provide an incentive for the colonists, when they finally have the leisure for connecting to the home of humanity, to brood about whether you are a savior or a sociopath. Not that any of the soldiers and pilots among us has the slightest doubt that you are the former; but there will be children born here during the fifty years of your voyage who did not fight under your command.

I confess to having had to reread The Tempest upon receiving your list of names. Sycorax indeed! And yet, obscure as the name is in the play, it is astonishingly appropriate for our situation. The mother of Caliban, the witch who made the unmapped island rich with magic — Sycorax would then be the appropriate name for the hive queen who once ruled this world but now is gone, leaving behind so many artifacts. and traps.

Our xb — a remarkable young man, who refuses to hear of our gratitude for his having saved our lives — says that the formic bodies were riddled with damage from the dustworms. Apparently the individual formics were regarded as so expendable that there was no attempt to control or prevent the disease. The waste of life! Fortunately, Sel has found that the dustworm life cycle has a phase that requires feeding on a certain species of plant. He is working on a means of wiping out that entire plant species. Ecocide, he calls it — a monstrous biological crime. He broods with guilt. Yet the alternative is to keep injecting ourselves forever, or to genetically alter all the children born to us in this world so our blood is poisonous to the dust-worms.

In short, Sel IS Prospero. The hive queen was Sycorax. The formics, Caliban. So far, no Ariels, though every female of reproductive age is venerated here. We're about to have a lottery for mating purposes. I have taken myself out of the running, lest I be accused of making sure I got one of them. No one likes this unromantic, unfree plan — but we voted on the method of allocating scarce reproductive resources and Sel persuaded a majority that this was the way to go. We have no time for wooing here, or for hurt feelings, or rejection.

I talk to you because I can't talk to anyone here, not even Sel. He has burdens enough without my spilling any of mine onto his back.

By the way, the captain of your ship keeps writing to me as if he thought he could give me orders about the governance of Colony I, without reference to you. I thought you should be aware of this so you can take appropriate steps to avoid having to deal with a would-be regent when you arrive. He strikes me as being the kind of officer I call a "man of peace" — a bureaucrat who thrives in the military only when there is no war, because his true enemy is any officer who has a position or assignment he wants. You are the thing he hates worst: a man of war. Look behind you; that's where the man of peace always tries to stay, dirk in hand.

— Vitaly Denisovitch

To: GovAct%Colony1@colmin.gov

From: GovNom%Colony1@colmin.gov

Subj: Re: I have the name

Dear Vitaly Denisovitch,

I have it: Shakespeare. As the name for both the planet and the first settlement. Then later settlements can be named for characters in The Tempest and other plays.

Meanwhile, we can refer to a certain admiral as Thane of Cawdor, to remind ourselves of the inevitable result of overweening ambition.

Are you content with Shakespeare as the name? It seems appropriate to me that a new world be named for that great writer of human souls. But if you think it is too English, too tied to a particular culture, I will start over on another track entirely.

I am grateful for your confidence. I hope it will continue during the voyage, even though time dilation will make it take weeks to send and receive each message. Of course that means I will not be in stasis — arriving at age fifteen will be better than at age thirteen.

And, so you know, the voyage will not take fifty years, but closer to forty — refinements have been made in the eggs that power the ships and in the in-ertial protection of the ships, so we can accelerate and decelerate faster in-system and spend more time at relativistic speeds. We may have gotten all our technology from the formics, but that doesn't mean we can't improve on it.

— Ender

To: GovNom%Colony1@colmin.gov

From: GovAct%Colony1@colmin.gov

Subj: Re: Naming the colony

Dear Ender,

Shakespeare belongs to everyone, but now especially to our colony. I sounded out a few colonists and those who cared at all thought it was a good name.

We will do our best to stay alive until you come with more to augment our numbers. But I remember from my own voyage leading up to the war: Your two years will feel longer than our forty. We will be doing something. You will feel frustrated and bored. Those who opted for stasis were happier. Yet your argument for arriving at age fifteen instead of thirteen is a wise one. I understand better than you do the sacrifice you will be making.

I will send you reports every few months — every few days to you — so that you have some idea of who the colonists are and how the village works, socially, agriculturally, and technologically, as well as our achievements and the problems we will have overcome. I will do my best to help you get to know the leading people. But I will not tell them that I am doing this, because they would feel spied upon. When you arrive, try not to let them know how much I have told you. It will make you appear to be insightful. This is a good reputation to have.

I would do the same for Admiral Morgan, since there is a chance that he will actually be in control — the soldiers on your ship will answer to him, not you, and the nearest law enforcement is forty years distant if he should choose to illegally deploy them on our planet's surface. Our colonists will be unarmed and untrained in military action so he would face no resistance.

However, Admiral Morgan persists in sending me orders without once inquiring about conditions here, beyond what he may or may not have read in my official reports. He is also becoming quite testy about my failure to respond in a satisfactory way (though I have responded fully to all his legitimate inquiries and requests). I suspect that if he is in control when he arrives, removing me from office will be his first priority. Fortunately, demographics suggest that I will be dead before he gets here so that issue will be moot.

Thirteen you may be, but at least you understand that you cannot lead strangers, you can only coerce or bribe them.

— Vitaly

Sel Menach's back and neck ached from his hours staring at alien molds through a microscope. If I keep this up, I'll be bent over like an old hag before I'm thirty-five.

But it would be the same out in the fields, hoeing, trying to keep the vines from growing up the maize and blocking out the sun. His back would bend there, too, and his skin turn brown. You could hardly tell one race from another in this savage sunlight. It was like a vision of the future: Personnel chosen from all the races of earth to be surgeons and geologists and xenobiologists and climatologists — and also combat pilots, so they could kill the enemy who once owned this world — and now that the war was over, they'd interbreed so thoroughly that in three generations, maybe two, there would be no concept of race or national origin here.

And yet each colony world would get its own look, its own accent of I.F. Common, which was merely English with a few spelling changes. As colonists began to go from world to world, new divisions would arise. Meanwhile, Earth itself would keep all the old races and nationalities and many of the languages, so that the distinction between colonist and Earthborn would become more and more clear and important.

Not my problem, thought Sel. I can see the future, anyone can; but there'll be no future here on the planet now called Shakespeare unless I can find a way to kill this mold that infests the grain crops from Earth. How could there be a mold that is already specific to grasses, when the grasses of Earth, including the grains, have no genetic analogue on this world?

Afraima came in with more samples from the test garden in the greenhouse. It was so ironic — all the high-tech agricultural equipment that had been carried along with the fighters in the belly of the transport starship, and yet when it failed there would be no parts, no replacements for fifty years. Maybe forty, if the new stardrive actually brought the colony ship sooner. By the time it gets here, we might be living in the woods, digging for roots and utterly without any working technology.

Or I might succeed in adjusting and adapting our crops so that they thrive in this place, and we have huge food surpluses, enough to buy us leisure time for the development of a technological infrastructure.

We arrive at an extremely high level of technology — but with nothing under it to hold it up. If we crash, we crash all the way down.

"Look at this," said Afraima.

Dutifully, Sel stood up from his microscope and walked over to hers. "Yes, what am I looking at here?"

"What do you see?" she asked.

"Don't play games with me."

"I'm asking for independent verification. I can't tell you anything."

So this was something that mattered. He looked closely. "This is a section of maize leaf. From the sterile section, so it's completely clean."

"But it's not," she said. "It's from D-4."

Sel was so relieved he almost wept; yet at the same moment, he was angry. Anger won, in the moment. "No it's not," he said sharply. "You've mixed up the samples."

"That's what I thought," she said. "So I went back and got a new selection from D-4. And then again. You're looking at my triple check."

"And D-4 is easy to make out of local materials. Afraima, we did it!"

"I haven't even checked to see if it works on the amaranth."

"That would be too lucky."

"Or blessed. Did you ever think God might want us to succeed here?"

"He could have killed this mold before we got here," said Sel.

"That's right, sound impatient with his gift and piss God off."

It was banter, but there was truth behind it. Afraima was a serious Jew — she had renamed herself in Hebrew to a word meaning «fertile» when they held the vote on mating, in hopes that it would somehow induce God to let her have a Jewish husband. Instead, the governor simply assigned her to work for the only orthodox Jew among the colonists. Governor Kolmogorov had respect for religion. So did Sel.

He just wasn't sure that God knew this place. What if the Bible was exactly right about the creation of that particular sun, moon, and earth — only that was the whole of God's creation, and worlds like this one were the creation of alien gods with six limbs, or trilateral symmetry or something, like some of the life forms here — the ones that seemed to Sel to be the native species.

Soon they were back in the lab, with the amaranth samples that had been treated the same way. "So that's it — good enough for starters, anyway."

"But it takes so long to make it," said Afraima.

"Not our problem. The chems can figure out how to make it faster and in larger quantities, now that we know which one works. It doesn't seem to have damaged either plant, does it?"

"You are a genius, Dr. Menach."

"No Ph.D."

"I define the word 'doctor' as 'person who knows enough to make species-saving discoveries.»

"I'll put it on my resume."

"No," she said.

"No?"

Her hand touched his arm. "I'm just coming into my fertile period, doctor. I want your seed in this field."

He tried to make a joke of it. "Next thing you'll be quoting from the Song of Solomon."

"I'm not proposing romance, Dr. Menach. We have to work together, after all. And I'm married to Evenezer. He won't have to know the baby isn't his."

This sounded like she had really thought things through. Now he was genuinely embarrassed. And chagrined. "We have to work together, Afraima."

"I want the best possible genes for my baby."

"All right," he said. "You stay here and head up the adaptation studies. I'll go work in the fields."

"What do you mean? There are plenty of people who can do that."

"It's either fire you or fire me. We're not working together anymore after this."

"But no one had to know!"

"Thou shalt not commit adultery," said Sel. "You're supposed to be the believer."

"But the daughters of Midian —»

"Slept with their own father because it was more important to have babies than to practice exogamy." Sel sighed. "It's also important to respect the rules of monogamy absolutely, so we don't see the colony torn up with conflict over women."

"All right, forget I said anything," said Afraima.

"I can't forget it," said Sel.

"Then why don't you —»

"I lost the lottery, Afraima. It's now illegal for me to have offspring. Especially by poaching another man's mate. But I also can't take the libido suppressants because I need to be sharp and energetic in order to conduct my study of the life forms on this world. I can't have you in here, now that you've offered yourself to me."

"It was just an idea," she said. "You need me to work with you."

"I need someone," said Sel. "Doesn't have to be you."

"But people will wonder why you fired me. Evenezer will guess that there was something between us."

"That's your problem."

"What if I tell them that you got me pregnant?"

"You're definitely fired. Right now. Irrevocably."

"I was kidding!"

"Get your brain back inside your head. There'll be a paternity test. DNA. Meanwhile, your husband will be made a figure of ridicule, and every other man will look at his wife, wondering if she's offering herself to someone else to put a cuckoo in the nest. So you're out. For the sake of everyone."

"If you make it that obvious, then it'll do the same damage to people's trust in marriage as if we'd actually done it!"

Sel sat down on the greenhouse floor and buried his face in his hands.

"I'm sorry," said Afraima. "I only half meant it."

"You mean that if I had said yes, you'd have told me you were just kidding and left me humiliated for having agreed to adultery?"

"No," she said. "I'd do it. Sel, you're the smartest, everyone knows it. And you shouldn't be cut off without having children. It's not right. We need your genes in the pool."

"That's the genetic argument," said Sel. "Then there's the social argument. Monogamy has been proven, over and over, to be the optimum social arrangement. It's not about genes, it's about children — they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain. We voted on this."

"And I vote to carry one baby of yours. Just one."

"Please leave," said Sel.

"I'm the logical one, since I'm Jewish and so are you."

"Please go. Close the door behind you. I have work to do."

"You can't turn me away," she said. "It would hurt the colony."

"So would killing you," said Sel, "but you're making that more and more tempting the longer you stay here to torture me."

"It's only torture because you want me."

"My body is human and male," said Sel, "and so of course I want to engage in mating behavior regardless of consequences. My logical functions are being suppressed already so it's a good thing I made the decision irrevocably. Don't make me turn my decision into a painful reality by cutting the little suckers off."

"So that's it? You castrate yourself, one way or the other. Well, I'm a human female, and I hunger for the mate that will give me the best offspring."

"Then look for somebody big and strong and healthy if you want to commit adultery, and don't let me catch you because I'll turn you in."

"Brain. I want your brain."

"Well, the kid would probably have your brain and my face. Now go and get the reports on the D-4 treatment and take it over to chem."

"I'm not fired?"

"No," said Sel. "I'm resigning. I'm going out into the fields and leaving you here."

"I'm just the backup XB. I can't do the work."

"You should have thought of that before you made it impossible for us to work together."

"Who ever heard of a man who didn't want a little roll in the hay on the side?"

"This colony is my life now, Afraima. Yours too. You don't shit in your own soup. Can I put it any plainer than that?"

She began to cry.

"What have I done that God would punish me like this?" said Sel. "What comes next? Interpreting dreams for Pharaoh's baker and butler?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "You have to stay on as the XB, you really are a genius at it. I wouldn't even know where to start. Now I've ruined everything."

"Yes, you have indeed," said Sel. "But you're right about all my solutions, too. They'd be almost as damaging as your original idea. So here's what we'll do."

She waited, the tears still coming out of her eyes.

"Nothing," he said. "You will never mention this again. Never. You won't touch me. You'll dress with perfect modesty around me. Your communication with me will be work only. Scientific language, as formal as possible. People will think you and I detest each other. Because I can't afford to drug down my libido and still try to do this work. Get it?"

"Yes."

"Forty years till the colony ship arrives with a new XB and I can quit this lousy job."

"I didn't mean to make you miserable. I thought you'd be happy."

"My hormones were thrilled. They thought it was the best idea they'd ever heard."

"Well, then I feel better," she said.

"You feel better because I'm going to be going through hell for the next forty years?"

"Don't be stupid," she said. "As soon as I'm having babies, I'll get fat and unattractive and way too busy to come here to help. Child production is everything, right? And soon the next generation will provide you with an apprentice to train. The most it will bother you is a few months. Maybe a year."

"Easy for you to say."

"Dr. Menach, I'm truly sorry. We're scientists, I start to think of human reproduction just like the animals. I didn't mean to be disloyal to Evenezer, I didn't mean to make you miserable. I just felt a wave of desire. I just knew that if I was going to have a baby, it should be yours, it should be the baby most worth having. But I'm still a rational person. A scientist. I will do exactly as you said — all business. As if we disliked each other and neither could ever desire the other. Let me stay until I need to quit this work to have babies."

"All right. Get up, take the formula to chem, and leave me alone to work on the next problem."

"And what is that? After the dustworm and the corn and amaranth mold, what are we working on?"

"The next problem I'm working on," said Sel, "is burying myself in whatever tedious task I can find that does not involve you in any way. Will you please go away now?"

She went.

Sel wrote his report and sent it to the governor's machine so it could be queued up for ansible transmission. If it turned out that the mold was something that cropped up on other worlds, his solution might work there, too. Besides, that's what science was — the sharing of information, the pooling of knowledge.

That's my gene pool, Afraima, he thought. The meme pool, the collective knowledge of science. What I discover here, what I learn, the problems I solve — those will be my children. They will be part of every generation that lives on this planet.

When the report was done, Afraima was still not back. Good, thought Sel. Let her spend all day with chem.

Sel walked through the village and out into the communal fields. Fernão McPhee was foreman on duty. "Give me a job," Sel said to him.

"I thought you were working on the mold problem."

"I think it's solved. It's up to chem now to figure out how to deliver it to the plants."

"I've already got all the crews working on all the jobs. Your time is too valuable to waste on manual labor."

"Everybody does manual labor. The governor does manual laborer."

"The crews are full. You don't know the jobs, you know your job, which is much more important. Go do your job, don't bother me!"

He said it jokingly, but he meant it. And what could Sel answer? I need you to give me a hot, sweaty job so I can work off the steam from my beautiful assistant having offered me her body to put babies into!

"You're no help to me at all," said Sel to Fernão.

"Then we're even."

So Sel went on a long walk. Out beyond the fields, into the woods, gathering samples. When you don't have an emergency to deal with, you do science. You collect, classify, analyze, observe. Always work to do.

No fantasizing about her, about what might have happened. Sexual fantasies are scripts for future behavior. What good will it do to say no today, and yes six months from now, after rehearsing the adultery over and over in my mind?

It would be so much easier if I weren't determined to do what's best for everybody. Whoever said virtue was its own reward was full of crap.