Enders In Exile

he had a long
collaborative relationship. Perhaps he seeks her counsel. But it has
nothing to do with me. You know that I haven't seen my brother or
communicated with him in any way since I first entered Battle School at
the age of six. And I only entered into communication with my sister
for a few weeks before our ship was launched. I'm sorry that it tied up
your communications, but as I said, I don't know anything about it, and
it has nothing to do with me."
    Morgan walked back and
sat down behind his desk. "I am astonished," said Morgan.
    Ender waited.
    "I am embarrassed,"
said Morgan. "It seemed to me that my ship's communications were under
attack, and that the agent of this attack was Admiral Wiggin. In that
light, your repeated meetings with a subset of the colonists, to which
you have been inviting members of my crew, looked suspiciously like
mutiny. So I treated it as mutiny. Now I find that my fundamental
premise was incorrect."
    "Mutiny is a serious
business," said Ender. "Of course you were alarmed."
    "It happens that your
brother
is
Hegemon. Word came to me a week ago.
Two weeks ago. A year ago Earth time, anyway."
    "It's perfectly all
right that you didn't tell me," said Ender. "I'm sure you thought I
would have found out by other means."
    "It did not cross my
mind that this communication might be from him, and
not
to you."
    "It's easy to overlook
Valentine. She keeps to the background. It's just the way she is."
    Morgan looked at Ender
gratefully. "So you understand."
    I understand you're a
paranoid, power-hungry idiot, said Ender silently. "Of course I do,"
said Ender.
    "Do you mind if I send
for your sister?"
    Suddenly it was "do you
mind"—but Ender had no interest in making Morgan squirm.
"Please do. I'm as curious about this message as you are."
    Morgan sent an ensign
to bring her, and then sat down and tried to make small talk while they
waited. He told two ostensibly amusing stories from his own training
days—he was never Battle School material, he came up "the
hard way, through the ranks." It was clear that he resented Battle
School and the implied inferiority of anyone who wasn't invited to
attend.
    Is that all this is?
Ender wondered. The traditional rivalry between graduates of a service
academy and those who didn't have such a head start?
    Valentine came in to
find Ender laughing at Morgan's story. "Val," said Ender, still
chuckling. "We need you to help us with something." In a few moments he
explained about the message that had preempted hours of ansible time,
shutting everything else out. "It caused a lot of consternation, and
naturally, Admiral Morgan has been concerned. It'll put our minds at
ease if you can open the message right here and give us some idea of
what it's about."
    "I'll need to watch you
open it," said Morgan.
    "No you won't," said
Valentine.
    They looked at each
other for a long moment.
    "What Valentine meant
to say," said Ender, "is that she doesn't want you to see her actual
security procedures—on a message from the Hegemon, you can
understand her caution. But I'm sure that she'll let us know the
contents of the message in some readily verifiable way." Ender looked
at Valentine and gave her a mockingly cute smile and shrug. "For me,
Val?"
    He knew she would
recognize this as a mockery of their relationship, put
on entirely for Morgan's benefit; of course she played along. "For you,
Mr. Potato Head. Where's the access?"
    In moments, Valentine
was sitting at the end of the desk, poking her way through the
holodisplay. "Oh, this is only semi-secure," she said. "Just a
fingerprint. Anybody could have gotten into it just by cutting off my
finger. I'll have to tell Peter to use full security—retina,
DNA, heartbeat—so that they have to keep me alive in order to
get in. He just doesn't value me highly enough."
    She sat there reading
for a little while, then sighed. "I can't believe what an idiot Peter
is.
And
Graff, for that matter. There's nothing
in here that couldn't have been sent unsecured, and there's no reason
why it couldn't have been sent piecemeal instead of in a single
uninterruptible top-priority flow. It's just a bunch of articles and
summaries and so on about events on Earth for the past couple of years.
It seems that there are wars and rumors of wars." She glanced at Ender.
    He got the King James
Version reference—he had memorized long passages of it as
part of his strategy for dealing with a minor crisis in Battle School
several years back. "Well,