I talk to you because I can't talk to anyone here, not even Sel. He has burdens enough without my spilling any of mine onto his back.
By the way, the captain of your ship keeps writing to me as if he thought he could give me orders about the governance of Colony I, without reference to you. I thought you should be aware of this so you can take appropriate steps to avoid having to deal with a would-be regent when you arrive. He strikes me as being the kind of officer I call a "man of peace"—a bureaucrat who thrives in the military only when there is no war, because his true enemy is any officer who has a position or assignment he wants. You are the thing he hates worst: a man of war. Look behind you; that's where the man of peace always tries to stay, dirk in hand.
—Vitaly Denisovitch
To: GovAct%Colony1@colmin.gov
From: GovNom%Colony1@colmin.gov
Subj: Re: I have the name
Dear Vitaly Denisovitch,
I have it: Shakespeare. As the name for both the planet and the first settlement. Then later settlements can be named for characters in The Tempest and other plays.
Meanwhile, we can refer to a certain admiral as Thane of Cawdor, to remind ourselves of the inevitable result of overweening ambition.
Are you content with Shakespeare as the name? It seems appropriate to me that a new world be named for that great writer of human souls. But if you think it is too English, too tied to a particular culture, I will start over on another track entirely.
I am grateful for your confidence. I hope it will continue during the voyage, even though time dilation will make it take weeks to send and receive each message. Of course that means I will not be in stasis—arriving at age fifteen will be better than at age thirteen.
And, so you know, the voyage will not take fifty years, but closer to forty—refinements have been made in the eggs that power the ships and in the in-ertial protection of the ships, so we can accelerate and decelerate faster in-system and spend more time at relativistic speeds. We may have gotten all our technology from the formics, but that doesn't mean we can't improve on it.
—Ender
To: GovNom%Colony1@colmin.gov
From: GovAct%Colony1@colmin.gov
Subj: Re: Naming the colony
Dear Ender,
Shakespeare belongs to everyone, but now especially to our colony. I sounded out a few colonists and those who cared at all thought it was a good name.
We will do our best to stay alive until you come with more to augment our numbers. But I remember from my own voyage leading up to the war: Your two years will feel longer than our forty. We will be doing something. You will feel frustrated and bored. Those who opted for stasis were happier. Yet your argument for arriving at age fifteen instead of thirteen is a wise one. I understand better than you do the sacrifice you will be making.
I will send you reports every few months—every few days to you—so that you have some idea of who the colonists are and how the village works, socially, agriculturally, and technologically, as well as our achievements and the problems we will have overcome. I will do my best to help you get to know the leading people. But I will not tell them that I am doing this, because they would feel spied upon. When you arrive, try not to let them know how much I have told you. It will make you appear to be insightful. This is a good reputation to have.
I would do the same for Admiral Morgan, since there is a chance that he will actually be in control—the soldiers on your ship will answer to him, not you, and the nearest law enforcement is forty years distant if he should choose to illegally deploy them on our planet's surface. Our colonists will be unarmed and untrained in military action so he would face no resistance.
However, Admiral Morgan persists in sending me orders without once inquiring about conditions here, beyond what he may or may not have read in my official reports. He is also becoming quite testy about my failure to respond in a satisfactory way (though I have responded fully to all his legitimate inquiries and requests). I suspect that if he is in control when he arrives, removing me from office will be his first priority. Fortunately, demographics suggest that I will be dead before he gets here so that issue will be moot.
Thirteen you may be, but at least you understand that you cannot lead strangers, you can only coerce or bribe them.
—Vitaly
Sel Menach's back and neck ached from his hours staring at alien molds through a microscope. If I keep this up, I'll be bent over like an old hag before I'm thirty-five.
But it would be the same out in the fields, hoeing, trying to keep the vines from growing up the maize and blocking out the sun. His back would bend there, too, and his skin turn brown. You could hardly tell one race from another in this savage sunlight. It was like a vision of the future: Personnel chosen from all the races of earth to be surgeons and geologists and xenobiologists and climatologists—and also combat pilots, so they could kill the enemy who once owned this world—and now that the war was over, they'd interbreed so thoroughly that in three generations, maybe two, there would be no concept of race or national origin here.
And yet each colony world would get its own look, its own accent of I.F. Common, which was merely English with a few spelling changes. As colonists began to go from world to world, new divisions would arise. Meanwhile, Earth itself would keep all the old races and nationalities and many of the languages, so that the distinction between colonist and Earthborn would become more and more clear and important.
Not my problem, thought Sel. I can see the future, anyone can; but there'll be no future here on the planet now called Shakespeare unless I can find a way to kill this mold that infests the grain crops from Earth. How could there be a mold that is already specific to grasses, when the grasses of Earth, including the grains, have no genetic analogue on this world?
Afraima came in with more samples from the test garden in the greenhouse. It was so ironic—all the high-tech agricultural equipment that had been carried along with the fighters in the belly of the transport starship, and yet when it failed there would be no parts, no replacements for fifty years. Maybe forty, if the new stardrive actually brought the colony ship sooner. By the time it gets here, we might be living in the woods, digging for roots and utterly without any working technology.
Or I might succeed in adjusting and adapting our crops so that they thrive in this place, and we have huge food surpluses, enough to buy us leisure time for the development of a technological infrastructure.