Ender in Exile (Ender's Saga 1.20)

"I believe you're thinking of you."

"Ender is better at this than I am."

"I doubt it," said Mazer. "Peacetime bureaucratic maneuvering? Nobody does it better than you."

"I wish I were going with them."

"Then go," said Mazer, laughing. "But you wish nothing of the kind."

"Why not?" said Graff. "I can run ColMin by ansible. I can see first-hand what our colonists have accomplished during the years they've been waiting for relief. And the advantages of relativistic travel will keep me alive to see the end of my great project."

"Advantages?"

"To you, a horrible sacrifice. But you'll notice that I did not marry, Mazer. I had no secret reproductive dysfunction. My libido and my desire for a family are as strong as any man's. But I decided years ago to marry Mother Eve posthumously and adopt all her children as my own. They were all living in the same crowded house, where one bad fire would kill the whole bunch of them. My job was to move them out into widely dispersed houses so they'd go on living forever. Collectively, that is. So no matter where I go, no matter whom I'm with, I am surrounded by my adopted children."

"You really are playing God."

"I most certainly am not playing."

"You old actor--you think there were auditions and you got the part."

"Maybe I'm an understudy. When he forgets a bit of business, I fill in."

"So what are you going to do about getting a picture with Ender?"

"Simple enough. I'm the man who decides when the ship will go. There will be a technical malfunction at the last minute. Ender, having done his duty, will be encouraged to take a nap. When he wakes up, we'll take some pictures, and then the technical problems will be miraculously resolved and the ship will sail."

"Without you on board," said Mazer.

"I have to be here to keep fighting for the project," said Graff. "If I weren't here to stymie my enemies at every step, the project would be killed within months. There are so many powerful people in this world who refuse to see any vision they didn't think of."

Valentine enjoyed watching the way Graff and Rackham treated Ender. Graff was one of the most powerful men in the world; Rackham was still regarded as a legendary hero. Yet both of them quietly deferred to Ender. They never ordered him to do anything. It was always, "Will it be all right for you to stand here for the picture?" "Would 0800 be a good time for you?" "Whatever you're wearing will be fine, Admiral Wiggin."

Of course Valentine knew that calling him "Admiral Wiggin" was for the benefit of the admirals and generals and political brass who were watching, most of them seething because they weren't in the picture. But as she watched, she saw many instances of Ender expressing an opinion--or just seeming to be hesitant about something. Graff usually deferred to Ender. And when he didn't, Rackham smilingly made Ender's point for him, and insisted on it.

They were taking care of him.

It was genuine love and respect. They might have created him like a tool in a forge, they might have hammered him and ground him into the shape they wanted, and then plunged him into the heart of the enemy. But now they truly loved this weapon they had made, they cared about him.

They thought he was damaged. Dented from all he had been through. They thought his passivity was a reaction to trauma, to finding out what he had really done--the deaths of the children, of the formics, of the thousands of human soldiers who had perished during that last campaign when Ender thought he was playing a game.

They just don't know him the way I do, thought Valentine.

Oh, she knew the danger of such a thought. She was constantly on the alert, lest she entrap herself in a web of her own conceit. She had not assumed she knew Ender. She had approached him like a stranger, watching everything to see what he did, what he said, and what he seemed to mean by all he did and said.

Gradually, though, she learned to recognize the child behind the young man. She had seen him obeying his parents--immediately, without question, though he surely could have argued or pleaded his way out of onerous tasks. Ender accepted responsibility and accepted also the idea that he would not always get to decide which responsibilities were his, or when they needed to be carried out. So he obeyed his parents with few hesitations.

But it was more than that. Ender really was damaged, they were right. Because his obedience was more than that of the happy child springing up at his parents' request. It had strong overtones of the kind of obedience Ender had given to Peter--compliance in order to avoid conflict.

Somewhere between the two attitudes: eagerness versus resignation mixed with dread.

Ender was eager for the voyage, for the work he would do. But he understood that being governor was the price he was paying for his ticket. So he was acting the part, performing all his duties, including the pictures, including the formal good-byes, the speeches from the very commanders who had allowed his name to be so badly tarnished during the court martial of Graff and Rackham.

Ender stood there smiling--a real smile, as if he liked the man--while Admiral Chamrajnagar bestowed on him the highest medal the International Fleet could offer. Valentine watched the whole thing sourly. Why wasn't that medal given during the court martial, when it would have been an open repudiation of the terrible things being said about Ender? Why had the court martial been opened to the public, when Chamrajnagar had the complete power to suppress it all? Why was there even a court martial? No law required it. Chamrajnagar had never, for a moment, been Ender's friend--though Ender gave him the victory that he could not otherwise have achieved.

Unlike Graff and Rackham, Chamrajnagar showed no sign of real respect for Ender. Oh, he called him Admiral, too, with only a couple of instances of "my boy"--both immediately corrected by Rackham, to Chamrajnagar's visible annoyance. Of course, Chamrajnagar could do nothing about Rackham, either--except make sure he was in all the pictures, too, since having two heroes associated with the great Polemarch would be an even more memorable picture.

What was plain to Valentine was that Chamrajnagar was very happy, and the happiness clearly came from the prospect of having Ender get on that starship and go away. Things could not go quickly enough for Chamrajnagar.