Dear Hyrum,
I have been warmly received as governor here, in no small part due to your long-distance intervention, as well as the enthusiasm of the natives.
We are still bringing colonists down from the ship as quickly as housing can be constructed for them. We are branching out into four settlements — the original, Miranda; and Falstaff, Polonius, and Mercutio. There was some enthusiasm for a Caliban village, but it quickly dissipated when people contemplated a future village school and what the mascot might look like.
You do understand, don't you, that local self-government is inevitable in the colonies, and the sooner the better. Well-intentioned as you are, and vital as it is that Earth continue to pay the astronomical (pun intended) expenses of starflight in the faint hope that it will eventually pay for itself, there is no way that the I.F. can force an unwanted governor on an unwilling populace — not for long.
Far better that I.F. ships come with ambassadorial status, to promote trade and good relations and deliver colonists and supplies to compensate for the burden they place on the local economy.
In token of which good counsel, I intend to serve for two years as governor, during which time I will sponsor the writing of a constitution. We will submit it to ColMin, not for approval — if we like it, it's our constitution — but for your judgment as to whether ColMin can recommend Shakespeare as a destination for colonists. That's where your power comes from — your ability to decide whether colonists can join an existing colony or not.
And perhaps some regulatory commission can meet by ansible, with a representative and single vote from every colony, to certify each other as worthy trading partners. In this way, a colony that sets up an intolerable government can be ostracized and cut off from trade and new colonists — but no one will commit the absurdity of trying to wage war (another word for enforcing policy) against a settlement that it takes half a lifetime to reach.
Does this letter constitute a declaration of independence? Not a very principled one. It's more a simple recognition that we're independent whether we make it official or not. These people survived for forty-one years completely on their own. They're glad to have received the supplies and the new breeding stock (plant, animal, human), but they did not have to have them.
In a way, each of these colonies is a hybrid — human by gene and cultural forebear, but formic by infrastructure. The formics built well; we don't have to clear land or search for water or process it, and their sewage systems seem to have been built for the ages. A fine monument! They still serve us by carrying away our poo. Because of what the formics prepared and what good scientists like Sel Menach accomplished in the colonies, the I.F. and ColMin don't have the clout that they might have had.
I say all this along with the sincere hope that we can eventually reach a point where every colony is visited every single year. Not in your lifetime or mine, probably, but that should be the goal.
Though if history is any guide, that ambition will seem absurdly modest within fifty years, as ships may very well come and go every six months, or every month, or every week of the year. May we both live to see it.
— Andrew
There is no accounting for the whims of children. When Alessandra was a toddler, Dorabella merely chuckled at the strange things she tried to do. When Alessandra was old enough to speak, her questions seemed to come from thought processes so random that it made Dorabella half believe that her child really was sent to her by fairies.
But by school age, children tended to become more reasonable. It was not teachers or parents who did it to them, but the other children, who either ridiculed or shunned a child whose actions and utterances did not conform with their standard of ordinariness.
Still, Alessandra never ceased to be able to come up with complete surprises, and of all times, with poor Quincy so frustrated at the way Ender had bested him in bureaucratic maneuvering, she picked this one to be completely unreasonable.
'Mother,' said Alessandra, 'most of the sleepers have woken now and gone down to Shakespeare, and I've been packed for days. When are we going?'
'Packed?' said Dorabella. 'I thought you had been seized by a fit of tidiness. I was going to ask the doctors to test you for some odd disease.'
'I'm not joking, Mother. We signed on to go to the colony. We're at the colony. Just one shuttle trip away. We have a contract.'
Dorabella laughed. But the girl really wasn't going to be teased out of this. 'Darling daughter of mine,' said Dorabella. 'I'm married now. To the admiral who captains this ship. Where the ship goes, he goes. Where he goes, I go. Where I go, you go.'
Alessandra stood there in utter silence. She seemed poised to argue.
And then she didn't argue at all. 'All right, Mother. So it's clean indoor living for another few years.'
'My dear Quincy tells me that our next destination is another colony, nowhere near so far from us as Earth. Only a few months of flying time.'
'But very tedious for me,' said Alessandra. 'With all the interesting people gone.'
'Meaning Ender Wiggin, of course,' said Dorabella. 'I did so hope that you might manage to attract that fine young man with prospects. But he seems to have chosen to cast us aside.'
Alessandra looked puzzled. 'Us?' she said.
'He's a very smart boy. He knew that by forcing my dear Quincy to leave Shakespeare, he was sending you and me away, too.'
'I never thought of that,' said Alessandra. 'Why, I'm very cross with him, then.'
Dorabella felt a sudden tingling of awareness. Alessandra was taking things too well. This was not like her. And this hint of childish petulance directed against Ender Wiggin seemed to be almost a parody of Dora-bella's deliberately childish fairy talk.
'What are you planning?' asked Dorabella.
'Planning? How can I plan anything when the crew are all so busy and the marines are down on the planet?'
'You're planning to sneak onto the shuttle without permission and go down to the planet's surface without my knowing it.'
Alessandra looked at Dorabella as if she were crazy. But since that was her normal expression, Dorabella fully expected to be lied to, and her daughter did not disappoint. 'Of course I wasn't,' said Alessandra. 'I fully expect to have your permission.'
'Well, you don't.'
'We came all this way, Mother.' Now she sounded like her petulant self, so that her arguments might be sincere. 'I at least want to visit. I want to say good-bye to all our friends from the voyage. I want to see the sky. I haven't seen sky for two years!'
'You've been in the sky,' said Dorabella.
'Oh, that was a smart answer,' said Alessandra. 'That makes my longing to be outdoors go away. just. Like. That.'
Now that Alessandra mentioned it, Dorabella realized that she, too, longed for a bit of a walk outdoors. The gym on the ship was always full of marines and crew members, and even though they were required to walk for a certain number of minutes a day on the treadmill, it was not as if that ever felt like you had truly gone somewhere.
'That's not unreasonable,' said Dorabella.
'You're joking,' said Alessandra.
'What, do you think it is unreasonable?'
'I didn't think you would ever think it was reasonable.'
'I'm hurt,' said Dorabella. 'I'm a human being, too. I long for the sight of clouds in the sky. They do have clouds here, don't they?'
'How would I know, Mother?'
'We'll go together,' said Dorabella. 'Mother and daughter, saying good-bye to our friends. We never got to do that when we left Monopoli.'
'We didn't have any friends,' said Alessandra.
'We certainly did too, and they must have thought we were so rude to leave without them.'
