further delay.
They camped the first night in a grassy glen, sheltered from the wind that was coming up. It brought a storm in the night, but they were snug inside a tent, and without Abra even asking, Ender told him stories about Battle School and what the game was like, in the battleroom, and how it wasn't really a game at all, it was training and testing them for command. 'Some people are born to lead,' said Ender. 'They just think that way, whether they want to lead or not. While others are born craving authority, but they have no ability to lead. It's very sad.'
'Why would people want to do something they're not good at?' Abra tried to imagine himself wanting to be a scholar, in spite of his reading problem. It was just absurd.
'Leading is a strange thing,' said Ender. 'People see it happening, but they don't have a clue how it works.'
'I know,' said Abra. 'Most people are like that with machines. But they try to fix them anyway and make everything worse.'
'So you understand exactly,' said Ender. 'They don't see what a leader does, they just see how everybody respects a good leader, and they want to have the attention and respect without understanding what you actually have to do to earn it.'
'Everybody respects you,' said Abra.
'And yet I do almost nothing,' said Ender. 'I have to learn other people's jobs well enough to help them at their work, because I just don't have enough work of my own to do. Leading this colony is too easy to be a fulltime job.'
'Easy for you,' said Abra.
'I suppose,' said Ender. 'But then, even when I'm doing other jobs, I'm still doing my job as governor. Because I'm always getting to know people. You can't lead people you don't know or at least understand. In war, for instance, if you don't know what your soldiers can do, how can you lead them into battle and hope to succeed? The enemy, too. You have to know the enemy.'
Abra thought about that as they lay there in the darkness inside the tent. He thought about it so long that maybe he even dreamed for a while, about Ender sitting down and talking to the buggers — only the newcomers called them formics — and then exchanging Christmas gifts with them. But maybe he only imagined it while awake, because he was awake when he whispered, 'Is that why you spend so much time with the gold bugs?'
It was as if Ender had been thinking about the same thing, because he didn't give one of those impatient adult answers, like, What are you talking about? He knew that Abra was still holding to the thread of their prior conversation. In fact, Ender sounded sleepy, and Abra wondered if he had been dozing and Abra's voice had woken him and still Ender knew what he was talking about.
'Yes,' said Ender. 'I understood the hive queens well enough to defeat them. But not well enough to understand why they let me.'
'They let you?'
'No, they fought hard against me, to prevent my victory. But they also brought themselves together where I could kill them all in a single battle. And they knew I had the weapon that could do it. A weapon they understood better than we did, because we got it from them. We still don't fully understand the science of it. But they must have. And yet they gathered together and waited for me. I don't understand it. So. I try communicating with the gold bug larvae. To get some idea of how the hive queens thought.'
'Po says nobody's better at it than you.'
'Does he?'
'He says everybody else has to work and work to get a glimmer of an image into or out of the gold bugs' heads, but you could do it the very first time.'
'I didn't realize I was all that unusual,' said Ender.
'They talk about it when you're not there. Po talks about it with Papa.'
'Interesting,' said Ender. He didn't sound like he felt flattered, or like he was acting modest — Ender truly sounded like he thought of his unusual talent for talking with the gold bugs as a simple fact.
When he thought about it, this made sense to Abra. You shouldn't be proud of being good at something, if you were born with it. That would be as dumb as being proud of having two legs, or speaking a language, or pooping.
Because he was with Ender, Abra felt free to say what he had just thought of, and Ender laughed. 'That's right, Abra. Something you work to achieve, that's one thing. Why not be proud of it? Why not feel good about it? But something you were born with, that's just the way you are. Do you mind if I quote you?'
Abra wasn't sure what he meant by quoting. Was he going to write a scholarly paper? A letter to somebody? 'Go ahead,' said Abra.
'So. I'm unusually good at talking to the gold bugs,' said Ender. 'I had no idea. It's not talking, though. It's more like they show you what they remember, and put a feeling with it. Like, here's my memory of food, and they put hunger with it. Or the same image of food, plus a feeling of revulsion or fear, meaning, this is poisonous or I don't like the taste or. you get the idea.'
'No words,' said Abra.
'Exactly.'
'The way I see machinery,' said Abra. 'I have to find words to explain it to people, but when I see it, I just know. I don't think the machinery is talking to me, though. No feelings.'
'It may not be talking,' said Ender, 'but that doesn't mean you can't hear.'
'Exactly! Yes! That's right!' Abra almost shouted the words, and his eyes filled with tears, and he didn't even know why. Or. yes he did. No adult had ever known what it felt like before.
'I had a friend once, and I think he saw battles that way. I had to think things through, the way the forces were arranged, but Bean just saw. He didn't even realize that other people took longer to understand — or never did at all. To him it was simply obvious.'
'Bean? Is that a name?'
'He was an orphan. It was a street name. He didn't find out his real name until later, when people who cared about him did enough research to find out that he had been kidnapped as an embryo and genetically altered to make him such a genius.'
'Oh,' said Abra. 'So that's not what he really was.'
'No, Abra,' said Ender. 'We really are what our genes make us. We really have whatever abilities they give. It's what we start with. Just because his genes were shaped deliberately, by a criminal scientist, doesn't mean they're any less his than our genes, which are shaped by random selection between the genes of our father and the genes of our mother. I was shaped deliberately, too. Not by illegal science, but my parents chose each other partly because they were each so brilliant, and then the International Fleet asked them to have a third child because my older brother and sister were so brilliant but still were not quite what the I.F. wanted. Does that mean that I'm not really me? Who would I be, if my parents hadn't given birth to me?'
Abra was having a hard time following the conversation. It made him sleepy. He yawned.
Then Ender came up with a comparison Abra understood. 'It's like saying, What would this pump be, if it weren't a pump?'
'That's just dumb. It is a pump. If it weren't a pump, it wouldn't be anything at all.'
'So now you understand.'
Abra whispered the next question. 'So you're like my father, and you don't believe people have souls?'
'No,' said Ender. 'I don't know about souls. I just know that while we're alive, in these bodies, we can only do what our body can do. My parents believe in souls. I've known people who were absolutely sure. Smart people. Good people. So just because I don't understand it doesn't mean I'm sure it can't be true.'
'That's like what Papa says.'
'See? He doesn't disbelieve in souls.'
'But Mom talks like. she says that she can look in my eyes and see into my soul.'
'Maybe she can.'
'Like you can look into a gold bug larva and see what it's thinking?'
'Maybe,' said Ender. 'I can't see what it's thinking, though. I can only see what it pushes into my mind. I try to push thoughts into its mind, but I don't think I'm actually pushing. I think the ability to communicate by thoughts belongs completely to the larva. It pushes things into my mind, and then takes from my mind whatever I show it.
