usually buttoned it. 'You saw through me,' she said.
'No,' said Ender. 'I saw you. Maybe your mother doesn't.'
'I know she doesn't,' said Alessandra. 'I know it. I'm just — it's just — Admiral Morgan, that's what it is, she said she was bringing me here to find a young man with prospects, but she found an old man with even better prospects, that's what it is, and I just fit into her plans, that's all, I —»
'Don't do this,' said Ender. 'Your mother loves you, this wasn't cynical, she thought she was helping you get what you wanted.'
'Maybe,' said Alessandra. Then she laughed bitterly. 'Or is this just your version of fairyland? Everybody wants me to be happy, so they construct a fake reality around me. Yes, I want to be happy, but not with a lie!'
'I'm not lying to you,' said Ender.
She looked at him fiercely. 'Did you desire me? At all?'
Ender closed his eyes and nodded.
'Look at me and say it.'
'I wanted you,' said Ender.
'And now?'
'There are lots of things I want that aren't right for me to have.'
'You sound as if your mother taught you to say that.'
'If I'd been raised by my mother, maybe she would have,' said Ender. 'But as it is, I learned that when I decided to go to Battle School, when I decided to live by the rules of that place. There are rules to everything, even if nobody made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if you're playing a different game and following those rules.'
'Do you think that made sense of some kind?'
'To me it did,' said Ender. 'I want you. You wanted me. That's a nice thing to know. I had my first kiss.'
'It wasn't bad, was it? I wasn't awful?'
'Let's put it this way,' said Ender. 'I haven't ruled out doing it again. Sometime in the future.'
She giggled. The crying had stopped.
'I really do have work to do,' said Ender. 'And believe me, you woke me right up. Not sleepy at all. Very helpful.'
She laughed. 'I get it. Time for me to go.'
'I think so,' he said. 'But I'll see you later. As we always do.'
'Yes,' said Alessandra. 'I'll try not to act too giggly and strange.'
'Act like yourself,' said Ender. 'You can't be happy if you're pretending all the time.'
'Mother is.'
'Which? Pretending? Or happy?'
'Pretending to be happy.'
'So maybe you can grow up to be happy without having to pretend.'
'Maybe,' she said. And then she was gone.
Ender closed the door and sat down. He wanted to scream in frustration at thwarted desire, in rage at a mother who would send her daughter on such an errand, at Admiral Morgan for making all this necessary, at himself for being such a liar. 'You can't be happy if you're pretending all the time.' Well, his life certainly didn't contradict that statement. He was pretending all the time, and he certainly was not happy.
CHAPTER 15
To: GovDes%[email protected]/voy
From: vwiggin%[email protected]/voy
Subj: relax about it, kid
E:
Nothing about your behavior with A should either surprise or embarrass you. If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.
— V
By the time Sel and Po had been a fortnight gone, with almost two hundred kilometers behind them, they had talked about every conceivable subject at least twice, and finally walked along in companionable silence most of the time, except when the exigencies of their journey forced them to speak.
One-sentence warnings: 'Don't grab that vine, it's not secure.'
Scientific speculations: 'I wonder if that bright-colored froglike thing is venomous?'
'I doubt it, considering that it's a rock.'
'Oh. It was so vivid I thought —»
'A good guess. And you're not a geologist, so how could you be expected to recognize a rock?'
Mostly there was nothing but their breathing, their footfalls, and the sounds and smells and sights of a new world revealing itself to the first of the human species to pass through this portion of it.
At two hundred clicks, though, it was time to stop. They had rationed carefully, but their food was half gone. They pitched a more permanent camp by a clear water source, chose a safe spot and dug a latrine, and pitched the tent with the stakes deeper and the ground more padded under the floor of it. They would be here for a week.
A week, because that's about how long they expected to be able to live on the meat of the two dogs they slaughtered that afternoon.
Sel was sorry that only two of the dogs were smart enough to extrapolate from the skins and carcasses that their human masters were no longer reliable companions. Those two left — they had to drive the other pair away with stones.
By now, like everyone else in the colony, both Sel and Po knew how to preserve meat by smoking it; they cooked only a little of the meat fresh, but kept the fire going to smoke the rest as it hung from the bending limbs of a fernlike tree. or treelike fern.
They marked out a rough circle on the satellite map they carried with them and each morning they set out in a different direction to see what they might find. Now they collected samples in earnest, and took photographs that they bounced to the orbiting transport ship for storage on the big computer there. The pictures they sent up, the test results, those were secure — they would not be lost, no matter what happened to Sel and Po.
The physical samples, though, were by far the most valuable items. Once they brought them back, they could be studied at great length using far more sophisticated equipment — the new equipment the xenos on the new colony ship would bring.
At night, Sel lay awake for long hours, thinking of what he and Po had seen, classifying it in his mind, trying to make sense of the biology of this world.
But when he woke up, he could not remember having had any great insights the night before, and certainly had none by morning light. No great breakthroughs; just a continuation of the work he had already done.
I should have gone north, into the jungles.
But jungles are far more dangerous to explore. I'm an old man. Jungles could kill me. This temperate plateau, colder than the colony because it's a little closer to the poles and higher in elevation, is also safer — at least in summer — for an old man who needs open country to hike through and nothing unusually dangerous to snag or snap at him.
On the fifth day, they crossed a path.
There was no mistaking it. It was not a road, certainly not, but that was no surprise, the formics had built few roads. What they made were paths, and those inadvertent, the natural result of thousands of feet treading the same route.
Those feet had trodden here, though it was forty years before. Trodden so long and often that after all these years, and overgrown as it was, the naked eye could trace the path of it through the pebbly soil of a narrow alluvial
