Enders In Exile

knew it better than they did. With Ender, though, it was almost
never about machines. It was about
everything,
and Abra drank it all in.
    "I'll try to keep Po
from marrying Alessandra before you get home," said Mom.
    "I don't care," said
Abra. "They don't have to wait for me. It's not like they'll need me
for the wedding night."
    "Sometimes your face
just needs slapping, Abra," said Mom. "But Ender puts up with you. The
boy's a saint. Santo André."
    "San Énder,"
said Abra.
    "His Christian name is
Andrew," said Mom.
    "But the name that
makes him holy is Ender," said Abra.
    "My son the theologian.
And you say you don't think you know everything!" Mother shook her
heads, apparently disgusted with him.
    Abra never understood
how such arguments began, or why they usually ended with adults shaking
their heads and turning away from him. He took
their
ideas seriously (except for their ideas about machinery); why couldn't
they do the same for him?
    Ender did. And he was
going to spend days—weeks, maybe—with Ender Wiggin.
Just the two of them.
    They loaded the skimmer
with supplies for three weeks, though Ender said he didn't think they'd
be gone that long. Po came along to see them off, Alessandra clinging
to him like a fungus, and he said, "Try not to be a nuisance, Abra."
    "You're jealous that
he's taking me and not you," said Abra.
    Alessandra spoke up. A
talking fungus, apparently. "Po doesn't want to go anywhere." Meaning,
of course, that he couldn't bear to be away from her for a single
second.
    Po's face stayed blank,
however, so that Abra knew perfectly well that while he might be
completely imasen over the girl, he would still rather go on the trip
with Ender than stay behind with her. Contrary to Mother's opinion of
him, however, Abra said nothing at all. He didn't even
wink
at Po. He just kept his face exactly as blank as Po's. It was the Mayan
way of laughing at somebody right in front of them, without being rude
or starting a fight.
    The journey was a
strange experience for Abra. At first, of course, they simply skimmed
along above the fields of home. Familiar ground. Then they followed the
road to Falstaff, which was due west of Miranda; this was also
familiar, since Abra's married sister Alma lived there with her
husband, that big stupid eemo Simon, who always tickled younger
children until they wet themselves and then made fun of them for peeing
themselves like babies. Abra was relieved that Ender only paused to
greet the mayor of the village and then moved on without any further
delay.
    They camped the first
night in a grassy glen, sheltered from the wind that was coming up. It
brought a storm in the night, but they were snug inside a tent, and
without Abra even asking, Ender told him stories about Battle School
and what the game was like, in the battleroom, and how it wasn't really
a game at all, it was training and testing them for command. "Some
people are born to lead," said Ender. "They just think that way,
whether they want to lead or not. While others are born craving
authority, but they have no ability to lead. It's very sad."
    "Why would people want
to do something they're not good at?" Abra tried to imagine himself
wanting to be a scholar, in spite of his reading problem. It was just
absurd.
    "Leading is a strange
thing," said Ender. "People see it happening, but they don't have a
clue how it works."
    "I know," said Abra.
"Most people are like that with machines. But they try to fix them
anyway and make everything worse."
    "So you understand
exactly," said Ender. "They don't see what a leader
does,
they just see how everybody respects a good leader, and they want to
have the attention and respect without understanding what you actually
have to do to earn it."
    "Everybody respects
you,
"
said Abra.
    "And yet I do almost
nothing," said Ender. "I have to learn other people's jobs well enough
to help them at their work, because I just don't have enough work of my
own to do. Leading this colony is too easy to be a fulltime job."
    "Easy for you," said
Abra.
    "I suppose," said
Ender. "But then, even when I'm doing other jobs, I'm still doing my
job as governor. Because I'm always getting to know people. You can't
lead people you don't know or at least understand. In war, for
instance, if you don't know what your soldiers can do, how can you lead
them into battle and hope to succeed? The enemy, too. You have to know
the enemy."
    Abra thought about that
as they lay there in the darkness inside the