Enders In Exile

tent. He thought about it
so long that maybe he even dreamed for a while, about Ender sitting
down and talking to the buggers—only the newcomers called
them formics—and then exchanging Christmas gifts with them.
But
maybe he only imagined it while awake, because he
was
awake when he whispered, "Is that why you spend so much time with the
gold bugs?"
    It was as if Ender had
been thinking about the same thing, because he didn't give one of those
impatient adult answers, like, What are you talking about? He knew that
Abra was still holding to the thread of their prior conversation. In
fact, Ender sounded sleepy, and Abra wondered if he had been dozing and
Abra's voice had woken him and
still
Ender knew
what he was talking about.
    "Yes," said Ender. "I
understood the hive queens well enough to defeat them. But not well
enough to understand why they let me."
    "They
let
you?"
    "No, they fought hard
against me, to prevent my victory. But they also brought themselves
together where I
could
kill them all in a single
battle. And they knew I had the weapon that could do it. A weapon they
understood better than we did, because we got it from them. We
still
don't fully understand the science of it. But they must have. And yet
they gathered together and waited for me. I don't understand it. So . .
. I try communicating with the gold bug larvae. To get some idea of how
the hive queens thought."
    "Po says nobody's
better at it than you."
    "Does he?"
    "He says everybody else
has to work and work to get a glimmer of an image into or out of the
gold bugs' heads, but you could do it the very first time."
    "I didn't realize I was
all that unusual," said Ender.
    "They talk about it
when you're not there. Po talks about it with Papa."
    "Interesting," said
Ender. He didn't sound like he felt flattered, or like he was acting
modest—Ender truly sounded like he thought of his unusual
talent for talking with the gold bugs as a simple fact.
    When he thought about
it, this made sense to Abra. You shouldn't be
proud
of being good at something, if you were born with it. That would be as
dumb as being proud of having two legs, or speaking a language, or
pooping.
    Because he was with
Ender, Abra felt free to say what he had just thought of, and Ender
laughed. "That's right, Abra. Something you work to achieve, that's one
thing. Why not be proud of it? Why not feel good about
it? But something you were born with, that's just the way you are. Do
you mind if I quote you?"
    Abra wasn't sure what
he meant by quoting. Was he going to write a scholarly paper? A letter
to somebody? "Go ahead," said Abra.
    "So . . . I'm unusually
good at talking to the gold bugs," said Ender. "I had no idea. It's not
talking, though. It's more like they show you what they remember, and
put a feeling with it. Like, here's my memory of food, and they put
hunger with it. Or the same image of food, plus a feeling of revulsion
or fear, meaning, this is poisonous or I don't like the taste or . . .
you get the idea."
    "No words," said Abra.
    "Exactly."
    "The way I see
machinery," said Abra. "I have to find words to explain it to people,
but when I see it, I just know. I don't think the machinery is talking
to me, though. No feelings."
    "It may not be
talking," said Ender, "but that doesn't mean you can't hear."
    "Exactly! Yes! That's
right!" Abra almost shouted the words, and his eyes filled with tears,
and he didn't even know why. Or . . . yes he did. No adult had ever
known what it felt like before.
    "I had a friend once,
and I think he saw battles that way. I had to think things through, the
way the forces were arranged, but Bean just
saw
.
He didn't even realize that other people took longer to
understand—or never did at all. To him it was simply obvious."
    "Bean? Is that a name?"
    "He was an orphan. It
was a street name. He didn't find out his real name until later, when
people who cared about him did enough research to find out that he had
been kidnapped as an embryo and genetically altered to make him such a
genius."
    "Oh," said Abra. "So
that's not what he really was."
    "No, Abra," said Ender.
"We really
are
what our genes make us. We really
have whatever abilities they give. It's what we start with. Just
because his genes were shaped deliberately, by a criminal scientist,
doesn't mean they're any less his than
our
genes,
which are shaped by random selection between the genes of our father
and the genes of our mother.
I
was shaped
deliberately, too. Not by illegal