Enders In Exile

you.
Whatever burden I'm carrying, it was worth it because we won.
    So I appreciate your
warning about this little book that's going around, The Hive Queen.
Unlike you, I don't believe it's nonsense; I think this "Speaker for
the Dead" has said something truthful, whether it's factual or not.
Suppose the hive queens were every bit as beautiful and well-meaning as
they are in this Speaker for the Dead's imagination. That does not
change the fact that during the war they could not tell us that their
intentions had changed and they regretted what they had done. It does
not change our blamelessness (though blamelessness does not relieve us
of responsibility).
    I have a suspicion that
I cannot verify: I think that even though the individual formics were
so dependent on the hive queens that when the queens died, so did the
soldiers and workers, that does not mean that they were a single
organism, or that the hive queens did not have to take the deep needs,
the
will
of the individuals, into account. And
because the formics were individually so very stupid, the hive queens
could not explain subtleties to them. Isn't it possible that if the
hive queens had refused to fight those initial battles, letting us
slaughter them like true pacifists, the survival instinct of the
individual formics would have asserted itself with so much strength as
to overwhelm the power of their mistresses? We would have had the
battles anyway—only the formics would have fought without
coherence or real intelligence. This in turn might have caused formics
everywhere to rebel against their queens. Even a dictator has to
respect the will of the pawns, for without their obedience, he has no
power. Those are my thoughts about The Hive Queen, since you asked. And
about everything else, because you need to hear my thoughts as much as
I need to say them. You were my hive queen, and I was your formic,
during this war. Twice I wanted to reject your overlordship; twice,
Bean stepped in and put me back under the yoke. But all that I did, I
did of my own free will, like any good soldier or servant or slave. The
task of the tyrant is not to compel, but to persuade
even the unwilling that compliance better serves their interest than
resistance.
    So if you wish to send
this arriving ship to Ganges Colony, I will go and see what I can do to
help Virlomi deal with Bean's kidnapped son and his very strange mother
(though it is
not
her spitting on you that proves
her to be strange; there are—or were—hundreds who
would have stood in line for the privilege). I have a feeling that
Virlomi will indeed find herself over her head, because her colony is
so overwhelmingly Indian. It will make all her decisions seem unjust to
the non-Indians, and if this Randall Firth is anything like as smart as
his father, and if his mother has raised him to hate any who ever stood
in Achilles Flandres's way, which certainly includes Virlomi, then this
is the wedge that Randall will exploit to try to destroy her and gain
power.
    And while there are
those in the I.F. and even in ColMin who believe that nothing that
happens in the colonies can threaten Earth, I'm glad you recognize that
this is not so. A warrior-rebel in a colony world can capture the
imagination of millions on Earth. Billions, perhaps. And The Hive Queen
may turn out to be part of this. A clever demagogue from the colonies
can wrap himself in the mantle of the vanished hive queens, playing
upon the powerful sentiment that the colony worlds were somehow
"wronged" by Earth and are owed something. It is irrational, but there
are precedents for even more illogical leaps of judgment.
    Even if you cannot or
no longer wish to send me to Ganges, however, I will be aboard that
ship, so I hope our flight plan will send me somewhere interesting.
Valentine has not yet decided whether to come with me, but since,
because of working on her histories, she has remained completely
detached from this colony, emotionally and socially, I think she'll
come with me, having no incentive to remain here without me.
     
    Your lifelong worker
bee,
Ender

     
    Achilles came to the
hut where Governor Virlomi lived in her lofty poverty. She made such a
show of having the simplest of habitations—but
it was completely unnecessary to build adobe walls and a thatched roof,
with so much fine lumber nearby. Virlomi's every action was calculated
to enhance her prestige among the Indian colonists. But the whole
display filled Achilles with