Sel visibly shuddered. "No! What would I do there? Here's where everyone and everything I love and care about are." Then he got that wistful look again. "No, I just can't help but think that it's just a damn shame that I didn't find this place thirty or twenty or even ten years ago. So busy, so much work right around the settlement, always meant to make this trip, and if I'd only done it back then, there'd have been more of them alive, and I'd have had more years to take part in the work. Missed opportunity, my young friend! There is no life without regret."
"But you're glad that you found them now."
"Yes I am," said Sel. "Everybody misses some things, finds others. This is something I helped to find. With not a minute to spare." Then he smiled. "One thing I noticed. I don't know if it matters, but...the larva hadn't eaten the gold bug we found, the one that was still alive. And those larvae, they're voracious."
"They only eat carrion?" asked Ender.
"No, no, they went down on the turtles just fine. Not Earth turtles, but we call them that. They like living meat. But eating the gold bugs, that was cannibalism, you understand? That was their parents' generation. Eating them because there was nothing else. But they waited until they were dead. You see?"
Ender nodded. He saw perfectly. A rudimentary sense of respect for the living. For the rights of others. Whatever these gold bugs were, they were not mere animals. They weren't formics, but maybe they would give Ender his chance to get inside the formic mind, at least at one remove.
CHAPTER 17
To: [email protected]
From: Gov%[email protected]
Subj: Let's have a very quiet revolution
Dear Hyrum,
I have been warmly received as governor here, in no small part due to your long-distance intervention, as well as the enthusiasm of the natives.
We are still bringing colonists down from the ship as quickly as housing can be constructed for them. We are branching out into four settlements--the original, Miranda; and Falstaff, Polonius, and Mercutio. There was some enthusiasm for a Caliban village, but it quickly dissipated when people contemplated a future village school and what the mascot might look like.
You do understand, don't you, that local self-government is inevitable in the colonies, and the sooner the better. Well-intentioned as you are, and vital as it is that Earth continue to pay the astronomical (pun intended) expenses of starflight in the faint hope that it will eventually pay for itself, there is no way that the I.F. can force an unwanted governor on an unwilling populace--not for long.
Far better that I.F. ships come with ambassadorial status, to promote trade and good relations and deliver colonists and supplies to compensate for the burden they place on the local economy.
In token of which good counsel, I intend to serve for two years as governor, during which time I will sponsor the writing of a constitution. We will submit it to ColMin, not for approval--if we like it, it's our constitution--but for your judgment as to whether ColMin can recommend Shakespeare as a destination for colonists. That's where your power comes from--your ability to decide whether colonists can
join an existing colony or not.
And perhaps some regulatory commission can meet by ansible, with a representative and single vote from every colony, to certify each other as worthy trading partners. In this way, a colony that sets up an intolerable government can be ostracized and cut off from trade and new colonists--but no one will commit the absurdity of trying to wage war (another word for enforcing policy) against a settlement that it takes half a lifetime to reach.
Does this letter constitute a declaration of in dependence? Not a very principled one. It's more a simple recognition that we're in dependent whether we make it official or not. These people survived for forty-one years completely on their own. They're glad to have received the supplies and the new breeding stock (plant, animal, human), but they did not have to have them.
In a way, each of these colonies is a hybrid--human by gene and cultural forebear, but formic by infrastructure. The formics built well; we don't have to clear land or search for water or process it, and their sewage systems seem to have been built for the ages. A fine monument! They still serve us by carrying away our poo. Because of what the formics prepared and what good scientists like Sel Menach accomplished in the colonies, the I.F. and ColMin don't have the clout that they might have had.
I say all this along with the sincere hope that we can eventually reach a point where every colony is visited every single year. Not in your lifetime or mine, probably, but that should be the goal.
Though if history is any guide, that ambition will seem absurdly modest within fifty years, as ships may very well come and go every six months, or every month, or every week of the year. May we both live to see it.
--Andrew
There is no accounting for the whims of children. When Alessandra was a toddler, Dorabella merely chuckled at the strange things she tried to do. When Alessandra was old enough to speak, her questions seemed to come from thought processes so random that it made Dorabella half believe that her child really was sent to her by fairies.
But by school age, children tended to become more reasonable. It was not teachers or parents who did it to them, but the other children, who either ridiculed or shunned a child whose actions and utterances did not conform with their standard of ordinariness.
Still, Alessandra never ceased to be able to come up with complete surprises, and of all times, with poor Quincy so frustrated at the way Ender had bested him in bureaucratic maneuvering, she picked this one to be completely unreasonable.
"Mother," said Alessandra, "most of the sleepers have woken now and gone down to Shakespeare, and I've been packed for days. When are we going?"
"Packed?" said Dorabella. "I thought you had been seized by a fit of tidiness. I was going to ask the doctors to test you for some odd disease."
"I'm not joking, Mother. We signed on to go to the colony. We're at the colony. Just one shuttle trip away. We have a contract."
Dorabella laughed. But the girl really wasn't going to be teased out of this. "Darling daughter of mine," said Dorabella. "I'm married now. To the admiral who captains this ship. Where the ship goes, he goes. Where he goes, I go. Where I go, you go."