Enders In Exile

GovAct%[email protected]
Subj: Re: Naming the colony
    Dear Ender,
    Shakespeare belongs to
everyone, but now especially to our colony. I sounded out a few
colonists and those who cared at all thought it was a good name.
    We will do our best to
stay alive until you come with more to augment our numbers. But I
remember from my own voyage leading up to the war: Your two years will
feel longer than our forty. We will be doing something. You will feel
frustrated and bored. Those who opted for stasis were happier. Yet your
argument for arriving at age fifteen instead of thirteen is a wise one.
I understand better than you do the sacrifice you will be making.
    I will send you reports
every few months—every few days to you—so that you
have some idea of who the colonists are and how the village works,
socially, agriculturally, and technologically, as well as our
achievements and the problems we will have overcome. I will do my best
to help you get to know the leading people. But I will not tell them
that I am doing this, because they would feel spied upon. When you
arrive, try not to let them know how much I have told you. It will make
you appear to be insightful. This is a good reputation to have.
    I would do the same for
Admiral Morgan, since there is a chance that he will actually be in
control—the soldiers on your ship will answer to him, not
you, and the nearest law enforcement is forty years distant if he
should choose to illegally deploy them on our planet's surface. Our
colonists will be unarmed and untrained in military action so he would
face no resistance.
    However, Admiral Morgan
persists in sending me orders without once inquiring about conditions
here, beyond what he may or may not have read in my official reports.
He is also becoming quite testy about my failure to respond in a
satisfactory way (though I have responded fully to all his legitimate
inquiries and requests). I suspect that if he is in
control when he arrives, removing me from office will be his first
priority. Fortunately, demographics suggest that I will be dead before
he gets here so that issue will be moot.
    Thirteen you may be,
but at least you understand that you cannot lead strangers, you can
only coerce or bribe them.
    —Vitaly

    Sel Menach's back and
neck ached from his hours staring at alien molds through a microscope.
If I keep this up, I'll be bent over like an old hag before I'm
thirty-five.
    But it would be the
same out in the fields, hoeing, trying to keep the vines from growing
up the maize and blocking out the sun. His back would bend there, too,
and his skin turn brown. You could hardly tell one race from another in
this savage sunlight. It was like a vision of the future: Personnel
chosen from all the races of earth to be surgeons and geologists and
xenobiologists and climatologists—and also combat pilots, so
they could kill the enemy who once owned this world—and now
that the war was over, they'd interbreed so thoroughly that in three
generations, maybe two, there would be no concept of race or national
origin here.
    And yet each colony
world would get its own look, its own accent of I.F. Common, which was
merely English with a few spelling changes. As colonists began to go
from world to world, new divisions would arise. Meanwhile, Earth itself
would keep all the old races and nationalities and many of the
languages, so that the distinction between colonist and Earthborn would
become more and more clear and important.
    Not my problem, thought
Sel. I can see the future, anyone can; but there'll be no future here
on the planet now called Shakespeare unless I can find a way to kill
this mold that infests the grain crops from Earth. How could there be a
mold that is already specific to grasses, when the grasses of Earth,
including the grains, have no genetic analogue on this world?
    Afraima came in with
more samples from the test garden in the greenhouse. It was so
ironic—all the high-tech agricultural equipment that had been
carried along with the fighters in the belly of the transport starship,
and yet when it failed there would be no parts, no replacements for
fifty years. Maybe forty, if the new stardrive
actually brought the colony ship sooner. By the time it gets here, we
might be living in the woods, digging for roots and utterly without any
working technology.
    Or I might succeed in
adjusting and adapting our crops so that they thrive in this place, and
we have huge food surpluses, enough to buy us leisure time