Enders In Exile

Val," said Father.
"All you have to do is live your life, and everyone around you will be
happier."
    "No greatness, then."
    "Val," said Mother,
"goodness trumps greatness any day."
    "Not in the history
books," said Valentine.
    "Then the wrong people
are writing history, aren't they?" said Father.

CHAPTER
4

    To: qmorgan%[email protected]/fleetcom
From: chamrajnagar%[email protected]/centcom
{self-shred protocol}
Subj: In or out?
    My dear Quince, I'm
quite aware of the difference between combat command and flying a
colony ship for a few dozen lightyears. If you feel your usefulness in
space is over, then by all means, retire with full benefits. But if you
stay in, and remain in near space, I can't promise you promotion within
the I.F.
    We suddenly find
ourselves afflicted with peace, you see. Always a disaster for those
whose careers have not reached their natural apex.
    The colony ship I have
offered you is not, contrary to your too-often-stated opinion (try
discretion now and then, Quince, and see if it might not work better),
a way to send you to oblivion. Retirement is oblivion, my friend. A
forty-or fifty-year voyage means that you will outlive all of us who
remain behind. All your friends will be dead. But you'll be alive to
make new friends. And you'll be in command of a ship. A nice, big, fast
one.
    This is what the whole
fleet faces. We have heroes out there who fought this war that The Boy
is credited with winning. Have we forgotten them? ALL our most
significant missions will involve decades of flight. Yet we must send
our best officers to command them. So at any given moment, most of our
best officers will be strangers to everyone at CentCom because they've
been in flight for half a lifetime.
    Eventually, ALL the
central staff will be star voyagers. They will look down their noses at
anyone who has NOT taken decades-long flights between stars. They will
have cut themselves loose from Earth's timeline. They will know each
other by their logs, transmitted by ansible.
    What I'm offering you
is the only possible source of career-making voyages: colony ships.
    And not only a colony
ship, but one whose governor is a thirteen-year-old boy. Are you
seriously going to tell me that you don't understand that you are not
his "nanny," you are being entrusted with the highly responsible
position of making sure that The Boy stays as far from Earth as
possible, while also making sure that he is a complete success in his
new assignment so that later generations cannot judge that he was not
treated well.
    Naturally, I did not
send you this letter, and you did not read it. Nothing in this is to be
construed as a secret order. It is merely my personal observation about
the opportunity that you have been offered by a polemarch who believes
in your potential to be one of the great admirals of the I.F.
    Are you in? Or out? I
need to draw up the papers one way or the other within the week.
    Your friend, Cham

    Ender knew that making
him the nominal governor of the colony was a joke. When he got there,
the colony would already be a going concern, with its own elected
leaders. He would be a thirteen-year-old—well, by then a
fifteen-year-old—whose only claim to authority was that forty
years before he commanded the
grandparents
of the colonists, or at least their parents, in a war that was ancient
history by then.
    They would have bonded
together into a closed community, and it would be outrageous for the
I.F. to send them any governor at all, let alone a teenager.
    But they'd soon find
out that if nobody wanted him to govern, Ender would go along quite
happily. All he cared about was getting to a formic planet to see what
they had left behind.
    The bodies that had so
recently been dissected would have long since rotted away; but there's
no way the colonists could have settled or even explored more than a
tiny fraction of the formic civilization's buildings and artifacts.
Governing the colony would be an annoyance—all Ender wanted
was to see if there was some way to understand the enemy he had loved
and vanquished.
    Still, he had to go
through the motions of preparing to be governor. For instance, training
sessions with legal experts who had drafted the constitution that was
being imposed on all the colonies. And even though Ender didn't
actually care, he could see that an honest effort had been made to
reflect what had been reported by all the soldiers-turned-colonists so
far. He should have expected that. Anything