Enders In Exile

go. I won't
need to eat till noon."

    You take a step, then
another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is
not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind. You see things
that you never saw before. Things never seen by the eyes of human
beings. And you see with your particular eyes, which were trained to
see not just a plant, but
this
plant, filling
this
ecological niche, but with this and that difference.
    And when your eyes have
been trained for forty years to be familiar with the patterns of a new
world, then you are Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who first saw the world of
animalcules through a microscope; you are Carl Linnaeus, first sorting
creatures into families, genera, species; you are Darwin, sorting lines
of evolutionary passage from one species to another.
    So it was not a rapid
journey. Sel had to force himself to move with any kind of haste.
    "Don't let me linger so
long over every new thing I see," he told Po. "It would be too
humiliating for my great expedition to take me only ten kilometers
south of the colony. I must cross the first range of mountains, at
least."
    "And how will I keep
you from lingering, when you have me photographing and sampling and
storing and recording notes?"
    "Refuse to do it. Tell
me to get my bony knees up off the ground and start walking."
    "All my life I'm taught
to obey my elders and watch and learn. I'm your assistant. Your
apprentice."
    "You're just hoping we
don't travel very far so when I die you don't have so long to carry the
corpse."
    "I thought my father
told you—if you actually die, I'm supposed to call for help
and observe your decomposition process."
    "That's right. You only
carry me if I'm breathing."
    "Or do you want me to
start now? Hoist you onto my shoulders so you can't discover another
whole family of plants every fifty meters?"
    "For a respectful,
obedient young man, you can be very sarcastic."
    "I was only slightly
sarcastic. I can do better if you want."
    "This is good. I've
been so busy arguing with you, we've gone this far without my noticing
anything."
    "Except the dogs have
found something."
    It turned out to be a
small family of the horned reptile that seemed to fill the bunny rabbit
niche—a big-toothed leaf-eater that hopped, and would only
fight if cornered. The horns did not seem to Sel to be
weapons—too
blunt—and when he imagined a mating ritual in which these
creatures leapt into the air to butt their heads together, he could not
see how it could help but scramble their brains, since their skulls
were so light.
    "Probably for a display
of health," said Sel.
    "The antlers?"
    "Horns," said Sel.
    "I think they're shed
and then regrown," said Po. "Don't these animals look like
skin-shedders?"
    "No."
    "I'll look for a shed
skin somewhere."
    "You'll have a long
look," said Sel.
    "Why, because they eat
the skins?"
    "Because they don't
shed."
    "How can you be sure?"
    "I'm not sure," said
Sel. "But this is not a formic import, it's a native species, and we
haven't seen any skin shedding from natives."
    So went the
conversation as they traveled—but they did cover the ground.
They took pictures, yes. And now and then, when it was something really
new, they stopped and took samples. But always they walked. Sel might
be old and need to lean on his walking stick now and then, but he could
still keep up a steady pace. Po was likely to move ahead of him more
often than not, but it was Po who groaned when Sel said it was time to
move on after a brief rest.
    "I don't know why you
have that stick," said Po.
    "To lean on when I
rest."
    "But you have to carry
it the whole time you're walking."
    "It's not that heavy."
"It
looks
heavy."
    "It's from the balsa
tree—well, the one I
call
'balsa,'
since the wood is so light."
    Po tried it. Only about
a pound, though it was thick and gnarled and widened out at the top
like a pitcher. "I'd
still
get tired of carrying
it."
    "Only because you put
more weight in your backpack than I did."
    Po didn't bother
arguing the point.
    "The first human
voyagers to Earth's moon and the other planets had an
easy time of it," said Po, as they crested a high ridge. "Nothing but
empty space between them and their destination. No temptation to stop
and explore."
    "Like the first sea
voyagers. Going from land to land, ignoring the sea because they had no
tools that would let them explore to any depth."
    "We're the
conquistadores," said Po. "Only we killed them all before we ever set
foot on land."
    "Is