Ender in Exile (Ender's Saga 1.20)

They pitched the tent and Ender fixed dinner and he and Abra walked down into the valley together and looked inside a couple of the caves. No bugs, of course, since this wasn't that kind of settlement, but there was machinery of a kind that they hadn't seen before and Abra wanted to plunge right in and figure it all out but Ender said, "I promise you'll be the first one to get a look at these machines, but not now. Not tonight. That's not our mission. We have to lay out a colony. I have to determine where the fields will be, the water source--we have to find the formic sewer system, we have to see if we can wake up their generating equipment. All the things that Sel Menach's generation did, long before you were born. But before too long, we'll have time for the formic machines. And then, believe me, they'll let you spend days and weeks on them."

Abra wanted to wheedle like a little kid, but he knew Ender was right. And so he accepted Ender's promise and stayed with him for the rest of that night's walk.

The sun had set before they got back to camp--they had only a faint light in the sky when they turned in to sleep. This time their conversation consisted of Ender asking Abra to tell stories that his parents had told him, his father's Mayan stories and his mother's Chinese stories and the Catholic stories they both had in common, and that took until Abra could hardly keep his eyes open, and then they slept.

The next day, Ender and Abra marked out fields and laid out streets, recording everything on the holomaps in Ender's field desk, which were automatically transmitted to the orbiting computer. No need even to call Papa on the satfone, because he would get all this information automatically and he could see the work they were doing.

Late in the afternoon, Ender sighed and said, "You know, this is actually kind of boring."

"Really?" said Abra sarcastically.

"Even slaves get time off now and then."

"Who?" Abra was afraid this was some school-learning thing that he didn't know because he couldn't read and stopped going to school.

"You have no idea how happy it makes me that you don't know what I'm talking about."

Well, if Ender was happy, Abra was happy.

"For the next hour, I say we do whatever we want," said Ender.

"Like what?" asked Abra.

"What, you mean I have to decide for you what you think would be fun?"

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to see if the river's good for swimming."

"That's dangerous and you shouldn't do it alone."

"If I drown, call your father to come get you."

"I could drive the skimmer home, you know."

"But you couldn't get my corpse up onto it," said Ender.

"Don't talk about dying!" Abra said. He meant to sound angry. Instead his voice shook and he sounded scared.

"I'm a good swimmer," said Ender. "I'm going to test the water to make sure it won't make me sick, and I'll only swim where there's no current, all right? And you're free to swim with me, if you want."

"I don't like to swim." He'd never really learned, not well.

"So--don't go climbing into any caves or fiddling with machinery, all right?" said Ender. "Because machinery really is scary."

"Only because you don't understand it."

"Right," said Ender. "But what if something went wrong? What if I had to take your mangled or incinerated body back to your parents?"

Abra laughed. "So I can let the governor die, but you can't let one dumb kid get killed."

"Exactly right," said Ender. "Because I'm responsible for you, but you're only responsible for reporting my death if it happens."

So Ender went back to the skimmer and got the water testing equipment. And since Abra knew perfectly well Ender was going to have to test the river anyway, he realized that Ender wasn't really taking a break, he was giving Abra a break. Well, two could play this game. Abra would use the time to scout ou

t the crest of the far ridge and see what lay on the other side. That was useful. That was a real job that would have to be done. So while Ender swam around in the river, Abra would be adding to the map.

It was a longer walk than Abra thought it would be. The far hills looked deceptively close. The higher he got, though, the easier it was to spot the place where Ender was, in fact, swimming. He wondered if Ender could also see him. He turned and waved a couple of times, but Ender didn't wave back, probably because he would look like a speck to Ender, just as Ender looked like a speck to him. Or else Ender wasn't looking, and that was fine, too. It meant Ender trusted him not to screw up and get hurt or lost.