Enders In Exile

kind of
intimacy, isn't it? A sort of Grant-and-Lee thing?"
    "I suppose Graff had to
warn her that I was coming."
    "Your name was also on
the manifest, and it included the fact that you were governor of
Shakespeare until your two-year term ended. That narrows you down among
all the possible Andrew Wiggins in the human race."
    "Have you been down to
the surface?"
    "No one has. I asked
the captain to let me wake you so you could be on the first shuttle. Of
course he was pleased to do anything for the great Ender Wiggin. He's
of that generation—he was on Eros when you won that final
victory. He says he saw you in the corridors there, more than once."
    Ender thought back to
his brief meeting with the captain before going into stasis. "I didn't
recognize him."
    "He didn't expect you
to. He really is a nice man. Much better at his job than old
what's-his-name."
    "Quincy Morgan."
    "I remembered his name,
Ender, I just didn't want to say it or hear it."
    Ender cleaned himself
up. Stasis left him with a sort of scum all over his body; his skin
seemed to crackle just a little when he moved. This can't be good for
you, he thought as he scrubbed it off and the skin protested by giving
him little stabbing pains. But Graff does stasis ten months of the year
and he's still going strong.
    And he got me a
pension. Isn't that nice. I can't imagine Ganges is using Hegemony
money any more than Shakespeare was, but once interstellar trade starts
up, maybe there'll start being some buying power in the FPE dollar.
    Dried and dressed,
Ender got his luggage out of storage and, in the privacy of Valentine's
locked stateroom, from which she had discreetly absented herself, Ender
opened the case containing the cocoon of the last hive queen in the
universe.
    He was afraid, for a
moment, that she had died during the voyage. But no. After he had held
the cocoon in his bare hands for a few minutes, an image flickered into
his mind. Or rather a rapid series of images—the faces of
hundreds of hive queens, a thousand of them, in such rapid succession
that he couldn't register any of them. It was as if, upon
waking—upon rebooting—all the ancestors in this
hive queen's memory had to make an appearance in her mind before
settling back and letting her have control of her own brain.
    What ensued was not a
conversation—it could not be. But when Ender thought back on
it, it seemed to him like a conversation, complete with dialogue. It
was as if his brain was not designed to remember what had passed
between them—the direct transfer of shaped memory. Instead,
it translated the exchange into the normal human mode of
interresponsive language.
    "Is this my new home?
Will you let me come out?" she asked him—or rather, she
showed herself emerging from the cocoon into the cool air of a cave,
and the feeling of a question—or a demand?—came
along with the image.
    "Too soon," he
said—and in his mind there really were words, or at least
ideas shapable into language. "Nobody's forgotten anything yet. They
would be terrified. They'd kill you as soon as they discovered you or
any of your children."
    "More waiting," she
said. "Wait forever."
    "Yes," he said. "I will
voyage as often as I can, as far as I can. Five hundred years. A
thousand years. I don't know how long it will be before I can safely
bring you out, or where we'll be."
    She reminded him that
she was not affected by the relativistic effects of time travel. "Our
minds work on the principle of your ansible. We are always connected to
the real time of the universe." For this she used images of clocks that
she drew from his own memory. Her own metaphor for time was the sweep
of sun across sky for days, and its drift northward and south again to
show years. Hive queens never needed to subdivide time into hours and
minutes and seconds, because with her own children—the
formics—everything was infinitely
now.
    "I'm sorry that you
have to experience all the time of the voyage," said Ender. "But you
want me in stasis during the voyage, so I'll stay young long enough to
find you a home."
    Stasis—she
compared his hibernation with her own pupation. "But you come out the
same. No change."
    "We humans don't change
in cocoons. We stay awake through our maturation process."
    "So for you, this sleep
isn't birth."
    "No," said Ender. "It's
temporary death. Extinguishment, but with a spark left glowing in the
ash. I didn't even dream."
    "All I do is dream,"
she said. "I dream the whole history of my people.