Enders In Exile

it.
    —Andrew

    There is no accounting
for the whims of children. When Alessandra was a toddler, Dorabella
merely chuckled at the strange things she tried to do. When Alessandra
was old enough to speak, her questions seemed to come from thought
processes so random that it made Dorabella half believe that her child
really
was
sent to her by fairies.
    But by school age,
children tended to become more reasonable. It was not teachers or
parents who did it to them, but the other children, who either
ridiculed or shunned a child whose actions and utterances did not
conform with their standard of ordinariness.
    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 Dora-bella'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