Enders In Exile

though, she could see that Dorabella knew
she was being silly, but still meant it from the heart. It gave the
movement, and her facial expression, a sort of irony that made it easy
to forgive the silliness and affectation of it, while the sincerity
turned it into something quite winning.
    The woman isn't old,
thought Valentine. She's still young and quite good looking. Beautiful,
even, especially now, especially in this strange fairyish dance.
    The song ended.
Dorabella kept dancing in the silence.
    "Mother, you can stop
flying now," said Alessandra gently.
    "But I can't," said
Dorabella, and now she was openly teasing. "In this starship we fly for
fifty years!"
    "Forty years," said
Ender.
    "Two years," said
Alessandra.
    Apparently Ender liked
the idea of doing a play, because he brought them all back to the
topic. "Not
Romeo and Juliet,
" he said. "We need
a comedy, not a tragedy."
    "The Merry
Wives of Windsor,"
said Valentine. "Lots of women's parts."
    "The Taming
of the Shrew!"
cried Alessandra, and Dorabella almost
collapsed with laughter. Another reference, apparently, to Isabella.
And when they stopped laughing, they insisted that
Shrew
was the perfect play. "I will read the part of the madwoman," said
Dorabella. Valentine noticed that Alessandra seemed to be biting back
some kind of comment.
    So it was that the plan
was conceived for a play reading in the theater three days
later—days by ship's time, though the whole concept of time
seemed rather absurd to Valentine, on this voyage where forty years
would pass in less than two. What would her birthday be
now
?
Would she count her age by ship's time or the elapsed calendar when she
arrived? And what did Earth's calendar mean on Shakespeare?
    Naturally, Dorabella
and Alessandra came to Ender often during the days of preparation,
asking him endless questions. Even though he made it clear that all the
decisions were up to them, that he was not in charge of the event, he
was never impatient with them. He seemed to enjoy their
company—though Valentine suspected that it was not for the
reason Dorabella had hoped. Ender wasn't falling in love with
Alessandra—if he was infatuated with anyone, it was likely to
be the mother. No, what Ender was falling in love with was the
family-ness of them. They were close in a way that Ender and Valentine
had once been close. And they were including Ender in that closeness.
    Why couldn't I have
done that for him? Valentine was quite jealous, but only because of her
own failure, not because she wished to deprive him of the pleasure he
was getting from the Toscanos.
    It was inevitable, of
course, that they enlisted Ender himself to read the part of Lucentio,
the handsome young suitor of Bianca—played, of course, by
Alessandra. Dorabella herself read Kate the Shrew, while Valentine was
relegated to the part of the Widow. Valentine didn't even pretend not
to want to read the part—this was the most interesting thing
going on in the ship, and why not be at the heart of it? She was
Ender's sister; let people hear her voice, especially in the ribald,
exaggerated part of the Widow.
    It was entertaining for
Valentine to see how the men and boys who were cast in the many other
parts focused on Dorabella. The woman had an
incredible laugh, rich and throaty and contagious. To earn a laugh from
her in this comedy was a fine thing, and the men all vied to please
her. It made Valentine wonder if getting Ender and Alessandra together
was really Dorabella's agenda? Perhaps it's what she
thought
she was doing, but in fact Dorabella held the center of the stage
herself, and seemed to love having all eyes on her. She flirted with
them all, fell in love with them all, and yet always seemed to be in a
world of her own, too.
    Has Kate the Shrew ever
been played like this before?
    Does every woman have
what this Dorabella has? Valentine searched in her heart to find that
kind of ebullience. I know how to have fun, Valentine insisted to
herself. I know how to be playful.
    But she knew there was
always irony in her wit, a kind of snottiness in her banter.
Alessandra's timidity covered everything she did—she was bold
in what she said, but it was as if her own words surprised and
embarrassed her after the fact. Dorabella, however, was neither ironic
nor frightened. Here was a woman who had faced all her dragons and
slain them; now she was ready for the accolades of the admiring throng.
She cried out Kate's dialogue from the heart, her rage, her