Ender in Exile Page 0,13

months."

"You can't read my mind. Even if you've deluded yourself into thinking you can read my face."

"The colonization project is the only thing left out here in space that's worth doing."

"I haven't been asked to pilot anything," said Mazer. "I'm old for a pilot, you know."

"Not a pilot, a commander of a ship."

"I'm lucky they let me aim by myself when I pee," said Mazer. "They don't trust me. That's why I'm going on trial."

"When the trial's over," said Ender, "they'll have no more use for you than they have for me. They've got to send you somewhere far away so that the I.F. will be safe for the bureaucrats again."

Mazer looked away and waited, but there was an air about him that told Ender that Mazer was about to say something important.

"Ender, what about you?" Mazer finally asked. "Would you go?"

"To a colony?" Ender laughed. "I'm thirteen years old. On a colony, what would I be good for? Farming? You know what my skills are. Useless in a colony."

Mazer barked a laugh. "Oh, you'll send me, but you won't go yourself."

"I'm not sending anybody," said Ender. "Least of all myself."

"You've got to do something with your life," said Mazer.

And there it was: The tacit recognition that Ender wasn't going home. That he was never going to lead a normal life on Earth.

One by one the other kids got their orders, each saying good-bye before they left. It was increasingly awkward with each one, because Ender was more and more a stranger to them. He didn't hang out with them. If he happened to join in a conversation, he didn't stay long and never really engaged.

It wasn't a deliberate choice, he just wasn't interested in doing the things they did or talking about what they discussed. They were full of their studies, their return to Earth. What they'd do. How they'd find a way to get together again after they'd been home for a while. How much money they'd get as severance pay from the military. What they might choose as a career. How their families might have changed.

None of that applied to Ender. He couldn't pretend that it did, or that he had a future. Least of all could he talk about what really preyed on his mind. They wouldn't understand.

He didn't understand it himself. He had been able to let go of everything else, all the things he'd concentrated on so hard for so long. Military tactics? Strategy? Not even interesting to him now. Ways that he might have avoided antagonizing Bonzo or Stilson in the first place? He had strong feelings about that, but no rational ideas, so he didn't waste time trying to think it through. He let go of it, just the way he let go of his deep knowledge of everyone in his jeesh, his little army of brilliant kids whom he led through the training that turned out to be the war.

Once, knowing and understanding those kids had been part of his work, had been essential to victory. During that time he had even come to think of them as his friends. But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them. Now he had no use for them - not his choice, there simply wasn't a purpose to be served by keeping the group together. They didn't, as a group, exist. They were just a bunch of kids who had been on a long, difficult camping trip together, that's how Ender saw them now. They had pulled together to make it back to civilization, but now they'd all go home to their families. They weren't connected now. Except in memory.

So Ender had let go of them all. Even the ones who were still here. He saw how it hurt them - the ones who had wanted to be closer than mere pals - when he didn't let things change, didn't let them into his thoughts. He couldn't explain to them that he wasn't keeping them out, that there was simply no way they'd understand what it was that occupied him whenever he wasn't forced to think about something else:

The hive queens.

It made no sense, what the formics had done. They weren't stupid. Yet they had made the strategic mistake of grouping all their queens - not "their" queens, they were the queens, the