Ender in Exile Page 0,15

a sign of an effort to communicate, he would have known instantly that it wasn't a game - there would have been no reason for the teachers to simulate any attempt to parley. They didn't regard that as Ender's business - they wouldn't train him for it. If some effort at communication had really happened, surely the adults would have stopped Ender at once, pretended that the "exercise" was over, and tried to deal with it on their own.

But the hive queens did not attempt to communicate. Nor did they use the obvious strategy of dispersal to save themselves. They had sat there, waiting for Ender to come. And then Ender had won, the only way he could: with devastating force.

It was how Ender always fought. To make sure that there was no further fighting. To use this victory to ensure that there was no more danger.

Even if I had known the war was real, I would have tried to do exactly what I did.

So in his mind he now asked the hive queens, over and over, though he knew they were dead and could not answer: Why?

Why did you decide to let me kill you?

His rational mind introduced all the other possibilities - including the chance that perhaps they were really quite stupid. Or perhaps they had so little experience at running a society of equals that they were unable to reach a rational decision together. Or, or, or, or, over and over he ran through possible explanations.

Ender's study now, when he wasn't pursuing the schoolwork that someone - Graff, still? Or Graff's rivals? - kept assigning him, was to read over the reports from the soldiers that he had once unknowingly commanded. On every formic colony world, humans now walked. And from every exploratory team the reports were the same: All the formics dead and rotting, with vast farms and factories now available for the taking. The soldiers-turned-explorers were always alert to the possibility of ambush, but as the months passed and there were no attacks, their reports became full of the things they were learning from the xenobiologists that had been sent with them: Not only can we breathe the air on every formic world, we can eat most of their food.

And so every formic planet became a human colony, the soldiers settling down to live among the relics of their enemies. There were not enough women among them, but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of monogamy could be restored.

But Ender took only peripheral interest in what the humans were doing on the new worlds. What he studied were the formic artifacts. The patterns of formic settlement. The warrens that had once been the hive queens' breeding grounds, full of larvae that were so hard-toothed they could gnaw through rock, creating more and more tunnels. They had to farm on the surface, but they went underground to breed, to raise their young, and the young themselves were every bit as lethal and powerful as the adults. Chewing through rock - the explorers found the larval bodies, rotting quickly but still there to be photographed, dissected, studied.

"So this is how you spend your days," said Petra. "Looking at pictures of formic tunnels. Is this a return-to-the-womb thing?"

Ender smiled and set aside the pictures he had been studying. "I thought you'd already gone home to Armenia."

"Not till I see how this stupid court martial turns out," she said. "Not until the Armenian government is ready to receive me in high style. Which means they have to decide whether they want me."

"Of course they want you."

"They don't know what they want. They're politicians. Is it good for them to have me back? Is keeping me up here worse for them than having me come home? It's so very, very hard when you have no convictions except your lust to remain in power. Aren't we glad we're not in politics?"

Ender sighed. "e. I will never hold office again. Commander of Dragon Army was too much for me, and that was just a kids' game."

"That's what I tried to assure them. I don't want anybody's job. I'm not going to endorse anybody for office. I want to live with my family