'I bet they brood about it every day. 'What ever happened to that rude girl Alessandra, who left us without saying good-bye — forty years ago.»
Dorabella laughed. Alessandra did have such biting wit. 'That's my smart little fairy daughter. Titania had nothing on you when it came to bitchiness.'
'I wish you had stopped reading Shakespeare with Taming of the Shrew.'
'I've been living inside A Midsummer Night's Dream my whole life and I never knew it,' said Dorabella. 'That was what felt like coming home to me, not reaching some strange planet.'
'Well, I live inside The Tempest,' said Alessandra. 'Trapped on an island and desperate to get off.'
Dorabella laughed again. 'I'll ask your father to let us ride down with one of the shuttles and come back up with another. How's that?'
'Excellent. Thank you, Mother.'
'Wait a minute,' said Dorabella.
'What do you mean?'
'You agreed too quickly. What are you planning? Do you think you can sneak away into the woods and hide till I go off and leave without you? That will never happen, my dear. I will not go without you, and Quincy will not go without me. If you try to run away, marines will track you down and find you and drag you back to me. Do you understand?'
'Mother,' said Alessandra, 'the last time I ran away was when I was six.'
'My dear, you ran away only a few weeks before we left Monopoli. When you skipped school and went to visit your grandmother.'
'That wasn't running away,' said Alessandra. 'I came back.'
'Only after you found out that your grandmother was Satan's widow.'
'I didn't know the devil was dead.'
'Married to her, can you imagine he wouldn't kill himself?'
Alessandra laughed. That's how it was done — you lay down the law, but then you make them laugh and be happy about obeying you.
'We'll visit Shakespeare, and then we'll come back home to the ship. The ship is home now. Don't forget that.'
'Of course not,' said Alessandra. 'But Mama.'
'Yes, darling fairy girl?'
'He's not my father.'
Dorabella took a moment to figure out what she was talking about. 'Who's not your what?'
'Admiral Morgan,' said Alessandra. 'Not my father.'
'I'm your mother. He's my husband. What do you think that makes him, your nephew?'
'Not. My. Father.'
'Oh, I'm so sad,' said Dorabella. 'Here I thought you were happy for me.'
'I'm very happy for you,' said Alessandra. 'But my father was a real man, not the king of the fairies, and he didn't prance off into the woods, he died. Anyone you marry now will be your husband, but not my father.'
'I didn't marry anyone, I married a wonderful man with whom I am bound to have more children, so that if you reject him as your father, he will have no shortage of other heirs on whom to bestow his estate.'
'I don't want his estate.'
'Then you'd better marry well,' said Dorabella, 'because you don't want to raise your own children in poverty the way I did.'
'Just don't call him my father,' said Alessandra.
'You have to call him something, and so do I. Be reasonable, darling.'
'Then I'll call him Prospero,' said Alessandra, 'because that's what he is.'
'What? Why?'
'A powerful stranger who has us completely under his control. You're Ariel, the sweet one who loves your master. I'm Caliban. I just want to be set free.'
'You're a teenager. You'll grow out of it.'
'Never.'
'There is no such thing as freedom,' said Dorabella, getting impatient. 'Sometimes, though, there's a chance to choose your master.'
'Very well, Mother. You chose your master. But I haven't chosen mine.'
'You still think the Wiggin boy even notices you.'
'I know that he does, but I'm not pinning my hopes on him.'
'You offered yourself to him, my dear, and he turned you down flat. It was quite humiliating, even if you didn't realize it.'
Alessandra's face turned a bit red and she stalked to the door of their quarters. Then she whirled around, real pain and fury on her face. 'You watched,' she said. 'Quincy recorded it and you watched!'
'Of course I did,' said Dorabella. 'If I hadn't, he or some crewman would have watched. Do you think I wanted them ogling your body?'
'You sent me to Ender expecting me to get naked with him, and you knew they were recording it, and you watched it. You watched me.'
'You didn't get naked, did you? And so what if you had? I saw your naked body from angles you've never even thought of during the butt-wiping years.'
'I hate you, Mother.'
'You love me, because I always watch out for you.'
'And Ender didn't humiliate me. Or reject me. He rejected you. He rejected the way you made me act!'
'What happened to, 'Oh thank you, Mother! Now I shall have the man I love'?'
'I never said that.'
'You thanked me and giggled and thanked me again. You stood there and let me make you up like a whore to entice him. At what point did I force you to do something against your will?'
'You told me what I had to do if I wanted Ender to love me. Only a man like Ender doesn't fall for tricks like yours!'
'A man? A boy is what you mean. The only reason he didn't fall for that 'trick' was because he probably hasn't reached sexual maturity. If he's even a heterosexual.'
'Listen to yourself, Mother,' said Alessandra. 'One minute Ender is the beginning and end of the world, the best chance for a great man that I'll ever have a chance to find. The next minute, he's a gay little boy who shamed me. You judge him according to whether he's useful to you.'
'No, my pet. Whether he's useful to my little girl.'
'Well, he isn't,' said Alessandra.
'That was my point,' said Dorabella. 'And yet you gave me a tongue-lashing for saying so. Do make up your mind, my little Caliban.' Then Dorabella burst into laughter, and, completely against her will, so did Alessandra. The girl was so angry at herself for laughing, or at Dorabella for making her laugh, that she fled from the room, slamming the door behind her. Or trying to — the pneumatics caught it and it closed quite gently.
Poor Alessandra. Nothing went the way she wanted.
Welcome to the real world, my child. Someday you'll see that my getting dear Quincy to fall in love with me was the best thing I ever did for you. Because I do everything for you. And all I ask in return is that you hold up your end and take the opportunities I get for you.
Valentine tried to walk normally into the room, to remain perfectly calm. But she was so disgusted with Ender that she could hardly contain herself. The boy was so busy making himself «available» to all the new colonists and old settlers, answering questions, chatting about things that he could not possibly remember from half-hour interviews two years ago, when he was so tired he could hardly speak. Yet when someone with whom he had a genuine personal relationship was looking for him, he was nowhere to be found.
It was just like the way he had refused to write to their parents. Well, he hadn't refused. He had always promised to do it. Then he simply never did.
For the past two years, he had promised — by implication, if not by word — that if the poor Toscano girl fell
