Enders In Exile

don't know. Maybe it didn't happen at all. Maybe I only
dreamed about them because I kept thinking about them. What will I do
when I face
real
hive queens? If this simulation
were a real battle, how would a hive queen think? That sort of thing."
    "What does Papa think?"
asked Abra. "He's really smart and he knows more than anybody about the
gold bugs now."
    "I haven't discussed
this with your father."
    "Oh." Abra digested
that thought in silence.
    "Abra," said Ender. "I
haven't talked about this with
anybody.
"
    "Oh." Abra felt
overwhelmed by Ender's trust. He could not speak.
    "Let's go to sleep,"
said Ender. "I want us to be wide awake and on our way at first light.
This new colony needs to be several days' journey away, even by
skimmer. And once we find the general area, I have to mark out specific
places for buildings and fields and a landing strip for the shuttle and
all that."
    "Maybe we'll find
another gold bug cave."
    "Maybe," said Ender.
"Or some other metal. Like the bauxite cave you found."
    "Just because the
aluminum bugs were all dead doesn't mean we won't find another cave
that has living bugs, right?" said Abra.
    "We might have found
the only survivors," said Ender.
    "But Papa says the odds
are against that. He says it would be too co-incidental if the
longest-surviving gold bugs just
happened
to be
the ones that Uncle Sel and Po
happened
to
discover."
    "Your father's not a
mathematician," said Ender. "He doesn't understand probability."
    "What do you mean?"
    "Sel and Po
did
find the cave with living gold bug larvae in it. Therefore the chance
of their finding it, in this causal universe, is one hundred percent.
Because it happened."
    "Oh."
    "But since we don't
know how many other bug caves there are, or where they're situated, any
guess at how likely we are to find one isn't about
probability—it's just a guess. There's not enough data for
mathematical probabilities."
    "We know there was a
second one," said Abra. "So it's not like we know
nothing
."
    "But from the data we
actually have, one cave with living gold bugs and one with dead
aluminum ones, what would you conclude?"
    "That we have as much
chance of finding live ones as dead. That's what Father says."
    "But that isn't really
true," said Ender. "Because in the cave Sel and Po found, the bugs
weren't thriving. They had
almost
died out. And
in the other cave, they
had
died out. So now what
are the odds?"
    Abra thought hard about
it. "I don't know," he said. "It depends on how big each colony was,
and whether they would think of eating their own parents' bodies like
these bugs did, and maybe other stuff I don't even know about."
    "Now you're thinking
like a scientist," said Ender. "Now, please think like a sleeping
person. We have a long day tomorrow."

    * * * * *
    They traveled all day
the next day, and it all began to look the same to Abra. "What's wrong
with any of these places?" said Abra. "The . . . formics farmed there,
and they did fine. And a landing strip could go
there
."
    "Too close," said
Ender. "Not enough room for the newcomers to develop their own culture.
So close that if they became envious of Falstaff village, they might
try to take it over."
    "Why would they do
that?"
    "Because they're
human," said Ender. "And, specifically, because then they'd have people
who knew everything that we know and can do everything we do."
    "But they'd still be
our
people," said Abra.
    "Not for long," said
Ender. "Now that the villages are separate, the Falstaffians will start
thinking about what's good for Falstaff. They might resent Miranda for
thinking we should be their boss, and maybe they'd want to join these
new people voluntarily."
    Abra thought about that
for about ten clicks. "What would be wrong with that?" he said.
    This time it took Ender
a moment of thought before he was able to answer. "Ah, Falstaff joining
the new people voluntarily. Well, I don't know if anything would be
wrong with it. I just know that what I
want
to
happen is for all the villages—including the new
one—to be separate enough to develop their own traditions and
cultures, and far enough apart that they won't fight over the same
resources, yet close enough to intermarry and trade. I'm hoping that
there's some perfect distance apart that will make it so they don't
start fighting each other, or at least not for a long time."
    "As long as we have you
as governor, we'll just win anyway," said Abra.
    "I don't care who
wins," said Ender. "It's having a war at all that