Shadow of the giant

will
be profitable enough to make interstellar travel economically feasible. That's
all we care about. But to accomplish it, we have to get recruits from Earth,
and we have to pay for the ships—again, from Earth. And we have to do it
without any hope of financial return for a hundred years at the best.
Capitalism is not good at thinking a hundred years ahead. So we need government
funding."
    "Which you've managed to get even when I couldn't raise
a dime."
    "No, Peter," said Rackham. "Don't you
understand? Everybody except the United States and Britain and a handful of
smaller countries has stopped paying their assessments. We're living off our
huge cash reserves. It's been enough to outfit two ships, to build a new class
of gravity-controlled messenger ships, a few projects like that. But we're
running out of money. We have no way to finance even the ships we already have
under construction."
    "You want me to win so I'll pay for your fleet."
    "We want you to win so that the human race can stop
spending its vast surpluses on ways to kill each other, and can instead send
all the people that would have been killed in war out into space. And all the
money that would have been spent on weapons can be spent on colony ships, and
on trading ships, eventually. The human race has always produced a vast surplus
of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on
stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We
want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop."
    Peter laughed. "You are such dreamers. Such
idealists!"
    "We were warriors and we studied our enemy. The Hive
Queens. They failed because they were too unified. Human beings are a better
design for a sentient species. Once we get over this war thing. What the Hive
Queens tried, we can do. Spread out the species so it can develop truly new
cultures."
    "New cultures? When you insist that each colony be made
up entirely of people from one nation, one language group?"
    "We're not absolutely rigid on that, but yes. There are
two ways of looking at species diversity. One is that every colony should
contain a complete copy of the whole human race—every culture, every language,
every race. But what's the point of that? Earth already has that! And look how
well it's worked.

"No, the great colonies of the past have succeeded
precisely because they were internally unified. People who knew each other,
trusted each other, shared the same purposes, embraced the same laws. Each one
monochromatic to begin with. But when we send out fifty monochromatic colony
ships, but all different colors, so to speak—fifty different colonies, each
with a separate cultural and linguistic root—then the human race can perform
fifty different experiments. Real species diversity."
    "I don't care what you say," said Peter, "I'm
not going."
    Rackham smiled. "We don't want you to."
    "The two colony ships you've launched. One of them was
Ender's."
    "That's right."
    "Who's the commander of the second ship?"
    "Well, the ship is commanded by—"
    "Who's going to rule the colony," said Peter.
    "Dink Meeker."
    So that was the plan. They meant to take Ender's Jeesh and
anybody else who was dangerously talented in a military way and send them off
into space. "So to you," said Peter, "this war between Han Tzu
and Alai is your worst nightmare."
    Rackham nodded.
    "Don't worry," said Peter.
    "Don't worry?"
    "All right," said Peter. "Worry if you want.
But your offer to Ender's Jeesh, to take them all off planet, to give them
colonies—now I understand what it's about. You care about these kids whose
lives you coopted. You want to get them off to worlds where there's no rival.
They can use their talents to help a community triumph over a new world."
    "Yes."
    "But the most important thing is, they won't be on
Earth."
    Rackham shrugged.
    "You knew that nobody could ever unite the world as you
need it to be united while those highly trained, highly aggressive, publicly
certified geniuses are still in it."
    "We didn't see a way it could happen."
    "Well, that's a lie," said Peter. "You saw
the way it would happen, because it's obvious. One of them would be the ruler
of Earth, and all the others would be dead."
    "Yes, we saw that, but it wasn't an option."
    "Why not? It's the human way of settling things."
    "We love these kids, Peter."
    "But love them or not, they'll all die eventually. No,
I think you would have been content to let them work it out,