Enders In Exile

lots of
things I want that aren't right for me to have."
    "You sound as if your
mother taught you to say that."
    "If I'd been raised by
my mother, maybe she would have," said Ender. "But as it is, I learned
that when I decided to go to Battle School, when I decided to live by
the rules of that place. There are rules to everything, even if nobody
made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to
work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if
you're playing a different game and following
those
rules."
    "Do you think that made
sense of some kind?"
    "To me it did," said
Ender. "I want you. You wanted me. That's a nice thing to know. I had
my first kiss."
    "It wasn't bad, was it?
I wasn't awful?"
    "Let's put it this
way," said Ender. "I haven't ruled out doing it again. Sometime in the
future."
    She giggled. The crying
had stopped.
    "I really do have work
to do," said Ender. "And believe me, you woke me right up. Not sleepy
at all. Very helpful."
    She laughed. "I get it.
Time for me to go."
    "I think so," he said.
"But I'll see you later. As we always do."
    "Yes," said Alessandra.
"I'll try not to act too giggly and strange."
    "Act like yourself,"
said Ender. "You can't be happy if you're pretending all the time."
    "Mother is."
    "Which? Pretending? Or
happy?"
    "Pretending to be
happy."
    "So maybe you can grow
up to be happy without having to pretend."
    "Maybe," she said. And
then she was gone.
    Ender closed the door
and sat down. He wanted to scream in frustration at thwarted desire, in
rage at a mother who would send her daughter on such an errand, at
Admiral Morgan for making all this necessary, at himself for being such
a liar. "You can't be happy if you're pretending all the time." Well,
his life certainly didn't contradict that statement. He was pretending
all the time, and he certainly was not happy.

CHAPTER
15

    To: GovDes%[email protected]/voy
From: vwiggin%[email protected]/voy
Subj: relax about it, kid
    E:
    Nothing about your
behavior with A should either surprise or embarrass you. If desire did
not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.
    -V

    By the time Sel and Po
had been a fortnight gone, with almost two hundred kilometers behind
them, they had talked about every conceivable subject at least twice,
and finally walked along in companionable silence most of the time,
except when the exigencies of their journey forced them to speak.
    One-sentence warnings:
"Don't grab that vine, it's not secure."
    Scientific
speculations: "I wonder if that bright-colored froglike thing is
venomous?"
    "I doubt it,
considering that it's a rock."
    "Oh. It was so vivid I
thought—"
    "A good guess. And
you're not a geologist, so how could you be expected to recognize a
rock?"
    Mostly there was
nothing but their breathing, their footfalls, and the sounds and smells
and sights of a new world revealing itself to the first of the human
species to pass through this portion of it.
    At two hundred clicks,
though, it was time to stop. They had rationed carefully, but their
food was half gone. They pitched a more permanent camp by a clear water
source, chose a safe spot and dug a latrine, and pitched the tent with
the stakes deeper and the ground more padded under the floor of it.
They would be here for a week.
    A week, because that's
about how long they expected to be able to live on the meat of the two
dogs they slaughtered that afternoon.
    Sel was sorry that only
two of the dogs were smart enough to extrapolate from the skins and
carcasses that their human masters were no longer reliable companions.
Those two left—they had to drive the other pair away with
stones.
    By now, like everyone
else in the colony, both Sel and Po knew how to preserve meat by
smoking it; they cooked only a little of the meat fresh, but kept the
fire going to smoke the rest as it hung from the bending limbs of a
fernlike tree . . . or treelike fern.
    They marked out a rough
circle on the satellite map they carried with them and each morning
they set out in a different direction to see what they might find. Now
they collected samples in earnest, and took photographs that they
bounced to the orbiting transport ship for storage on the big computer
there. The pictures they sent up, the test results, those were
secure—they would not be lost, no matter what happened to Sel
and Po.
    The physical samples,
though, were by far the most valuable items. Once they brought them
back, they could