Enders In Exile

appropriate when applied to your degree of
military brilliance. But I have also seen the reports of the court
martial of Col. Graff and Admiral Rackham. Your reputation was savaged
and I don't want to provide an incentive for the colonists, when they
finally have the leisure for connecting to the home of humanity, to
brood about whether you are a savior or a sociopath. Not that any of
the soldiers and pilots among us has the slightest doubt that you are
the former; but there will be children born here during the fifty years
of your voyage who did not fight under your command.
    I confess to having had
to reread The Tempest upon receiving your list of names. Sycorax
indeed! And yet, obscure as the name is in the play, it is
astonishingly appropriate for our situation. The mother of Caliban, the
witch who made the unmapped island rich with magic—Sycorax
would then be the appropriate name for the hive
queen who once ruled this world but now is gone, leaving behind so many
artifacts . . . and traps.
    Our xb—a
remarkable young man, who refuses to hear of our gratitude for his
having saved our lives—says that the formic bodies were
riddled with damage from the dustworms. Apparently the individual
formics were regarded as so expendable that there was no attempt to
control or prevent the disease. The waste of life! Fortunately, Sel has
found that the dustworm life cycle has a phase that requires feeding on
a certain species of plant. He is working on a means of wiping out that
entire plant species. Ecocide, he calls it—a monstrous
biological crime. He broods with guilt. Yet the alternative is to keep
injecting ourselves forever, or to genetically alter all the children
born to us in this world so our blood is poisonous to the dust-worms.
    In short, Sel IS
Prospero. The hive queen was Sycorax. The formics, Caliban. So far, no
Ariels, though every female of reproductive age is venerated here.
We're about to have a lottery for mating purposes. I have taken myself
out of the running, lest I be accused of making sure I got one of them.
No one likes this unromantic, unfree plan—but we voted on the
method of allocating scarce reproductive resources and Sel persuaded a
majority that this was the way to go. We have no time for wooing here,
or for hurt feelings, or rejection.
    I talk to you because I
can't talk to anyone here, not even Sel. He has burdens enough without
my spilling any of mine onto his back.
    By the way, the captain
of your ship keeps writing to me as if he thought he could give me
orders about the governance of Colony I, without reference to you. I
thought you should be aware of this so you can take appropriate steps
to avoid having to deal with a would-be regent when you arrive. He
strikes me as being the kind of officer I call a "man of
peace"—a bureaucrat who thrives in the military only when
there is no war, because his true enemy is any officer who has a
position or assignment he wants. You are the thing he hates worst:
a man of war. Look behind you; that's where the man of peace always
tries to stay, dirk in hand.
    —Vitaly
Denisovitch

    To: GovAct%[email protected]
From: GovNom%[email protected]
Subj: Re: I have the name
    Dear Vitaly Denisovitch,
    I have it: Shakespeare.
As the name for both the planet and the first settlement. Then later
settlements can be named for characters in The Tempest and other plays.
    Meanwhile, we can refer
to a certain admiral as Thane of Cawdor, to remind ourselves of the
inevitable result of overweening ambition.
    Are you content with
Shakespeare as the name? It seems appropriate to me that a new world be
named for that great writer of human souls. But if you think it is too
English, too tied to a particular culture, I will start over on another
track entirely.
    I am grateful for your
confidence. I hope it will continue during the voyage, even though time
dilation will make it take weeks to send and receive each message. Of
course that means I will not be in stasis—arriving at age
fifteen will be better than at age thirteen.
    And, so you know, the
voyage will not take fifty years, but closer to
forty—refinements have been made in the eggs that power the
ships and in the in-ertial protection of the ships, so we can
accelerate and decelerate faster in-system and spend more time at
relativistic speeds. We may have gotten all our technology from the
formics, but that doesn't mean we can't improve on it.
    —Ender

    To: GovNom%[email protected]
From: