Enders In Exile

upstage him. Was the nausea
all faked, too, so that he could make this grand entrance? Well, Morgan
would wear a phony smile and then he'd make the kid pay for this later.
Maybe he wouldn't keep Wiggin as a figurehead after all.
    But Wiggin didn't go to
the place that Morgan was gesturing him to take at his side, behind the
lectern. Instead, Wiggin handed a folded piece of paper to Morgan and
then jogged on down the ramp to the ground—where he was
immediately surrounded by the crowd, their shouts of "Ender Wiggin!"
now giving way to chatter and laughter.
    Morgan looked at the
paper. On the outside, in pencil, Wiggin had written: "Your supremacy
ended when this shuttle touched ground. Your authority ends at the
bottom of this ramp." And he signed it, "Admiral
Wiggin"—reminding him that in port, Wiggin was senior to him.
    The gall of the boy.
Did he think such claims would hold up here, forty years away from any
higher authority? And when it was Morgan who commanded a contingent of
highly trained marines?
    Morgan unfolded the
paper. It was a letter. From Polemarch Bakossi Wuri and Minister of
Colonization Hyrum Graff.

    Ender recognized Ix
Tolo immediately, from Vitaly's description of him, and ran right up to
him. "Ix Tolo," he shouted as he came. "I'm glad to meet you!"
    But even before he
reached Tolo and shook his hand, Ender was looking for old men and
women. Most of them were surrounded by younger people, but Ender sought
them out and tried to recognize the younger faces he had studied and
memorized before this voyage even launched.
    Fortunately, he guessed
right about the first one, and the second one, calling them by rank and
name. He made it solemn, that first meeting with the pilots who had
actually fought in the war. "I'm proud to meet you at last," he said.
"It's been a long wait."
    At once the crowd
caught on to what he was doing, and backed away, thrusting the old
people forward so Ender could find them all. Many of them wept as they
shook Ender's hands; some of the old women insisted on hugging him.
They tried to speak to him, to tell him things, but he smiled and held
up a hand, signaling, Wait a minute, there are more to greet.
    He shook every
soldier's hand, and when he occasionally guessed at the wrong name,
they laughingly corrected him.
    Behind him, there was
still silence from the loudspeakers. Ender had no idea what Morgan
would do about the letter, but he had to keep things moving forward
here on the ground, so there was never a gap in which Morgan could
insert himself.
    The moment he had
shaken the last old man's hand, Ender raised that hand up and then
turned around, signaling for the people to gather around him. They
did—in fact, they already had, so he was now completely
surrounded by the crowd. "There are names I didn't get to call," he
said. "Men and women I didn't get to meet." Then, from memory, he spoke
the names of all those who had died in the battle. "Too many lost. If
only I had known what price was being paid for my mistakes, maybe I
could have made fewer of them."
    Oh, they wept at that,
even as some of them called out, "What mistakes!"
    And then Ender reeled
off another list of names—the colonists who had died in those
first weeks of the settlement. "By their deaths, by your heroic
efforts, this colony was established. Governor Kolmogorov told me about
how you lived, what you accomplished. I was still a twelve-year-old boy
on Eros when you were fighting the war against the diseases of this
land, and you triumphed without any help from me."
    Ender raised his hands
to face level and clapped them, loudly and solemnly. "I honor those who
died in space, and those who died here."
    They cheered.
    "I honor Vitaly
Kolmogorov, who led you for thirty-six years of war and peace!" Another
cheer. "And Sel Menach, a man so modest he could not bear to face the
attention he knew would be paid to him today!" Cheers and laughter.
"Sel Menach, who will teach me everything I need to know in order to
serve you. Because I'm here, he will now have time to get back to his
real
work." A roar of laughter, and a cheer.
    And now, from the back
of the crowd, from the loudspeakers, came the sound of Morgan's voice.
"Men and women of Shakespeare Colony, please forgive the interruption.
This was not how the program for today was supposed to go."
    The people around Ender
glanced in puzzlement toward the top of the ramp. Morgan was speaking
in a pleasant, perhaps jocular tone. But he was irrelevant to what