Enders In Exile

that a difference
or a similarity?" asked Sel. "Smallpox and other diseases raced ahead
of the conquistadores."
    "If only we could have
talked to them," said Po. "I read about the conquistadores—we
Mayans have good reason to try to understand them. Columbus wrote that
the natives he found 'had no language,' merely because they didn't
understand any of the languages his interpreters knew."
    "But the formics had no
language at all."
    "Or so we think."
    "No communication
devices in their ships. Nothing to transmit voice or images. Because
there was no need of them. Exchange of memory. Direct transfer of the
senses. Whatever their mechanism was, it was better than language, but
worse, because they had no way to talk to us."
    "So who were the
mutes?" asked Po. "Us, or them?"
    "Both of us mutes,"
said Sel, "and all of us deaf."
    "What I wouldn't give
to have just one of them alive."
    "But there couldn't be
just one," said Sel. "They hived. They needed hundreds, perhaps
thousands to reach the critical mass to achieve intelligence."
    "Or not," said Po. "It
could also be that only the queen was sentient. Why else would they all
have died when the queens died?"
    "Unless the queen was
the nexus, the center of a neural network, so they all collapsed when
she did. But until then, all of them individuals."
    "As I said, I wish we
had one alive," said Po, "so we could know something instead of
guessing from a few desiccated corpses."
    Sel silently rejoiced
that yet another generation of this colony had produced at least one
who thought like a scientist. "We have more of them preserved than any
of the other colonies. Here, there are so few scavengers that can eat
them, the corpses lasted long enough for us to get to the
planet's surface and freeze some of them. We actually got to study
structure."
    "But no queens."
    "The sorrow of my
life," said Sel.
    "Really? That's your
greatest regret?"
    Sel fell silent.
    "Sorry," said Po.
    "It's all right. I was
just considering your question. My greatest regret. What a question.
How can I regret leaving everything behind on Earth, when I left it in
order to help save it? And coming here allowed me to do things that
other scientists could only dream of. I have been able to name more
than five thousand species already and come up with a rudimentary
classification system for an entire native biota. More than on any of
the other formic worlds."
    "Why?"
    "Because the formics
stripped those worlds and then established only a limited subset of
their own flora and fauna. This is the only world where most of the
species evolved here. The only place that's messy. The formics brought
fewer than a thousand species to their colonies. And their home world,
which might have had vastly more diversity, is gone."
    "So you don't regret
coming here?"
    "Of course I do," said
Sel. "And I'm also glad to be here. I regret being an old wreck of a
man. I'm glad I'm not dead. It seems to me that all my regrets are
balanced by something I'm glad of. On average, then, I have no regrets
at all. But I'm also not a bit happy. Perfect balance. On average, I
don't feel anything at all. I think I don't exist."
    "Father says that if
you get absurd results, you're not a scientist, you're a philosopher."
    "But my results are not
absurd."
    "You
do
exist. I can see you and hear you."
    "Genetically speaking,
Po, I do not exist. I am off the web of life."
    "So you choose to
measure by the only standard that allows your life to be meaningless?"
    Sel laughed. "You are
your mother's son."
    "Not father's?"
    "Both, of course. But
it's your mother who won't put up with any bullshit."
    "Speaking of which, I
can hardly wait to see a bull."

    Now that the ship was
rapidly decelerating as they approached Shakespeare, the crew were far
busier than usual. The first order of business would be docking with
the transport ship that had brought the war fleet here to this world
forty years before. Without supplies for a return journey, the ship was
left as a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit directly over the
colony site. Solar power was enough to keep its computers and
communications running for these past decades.
    The original crew,
colonists now, had used their fighters as landing vehicles; their
supplies and equipment for the first years of the colony had been
designed to fit in or on the fighters. And all of them were equipped
with ansibles. But the fighters were land-once vehicles, and had no
ability to leave the surface of the