But I'm not doing anything.'
'Then how can you be better at it than other people, if you're not doing anything?'
'If I'm really better — and remember, your father and Po can't really know whether I am or not — then maybe it's because I have a mind that it's easier for a gold bug to get inside of.'
'Why?' asked Abra. 'Why would a human being born on Earth have a brain that was easier for a gold bug to get inside of?'
'I don't know,' said Ender. 'That's one of the things I came to this world to find out.'
'That's not even true,' said Abra. 'You couldn't have come here to find out why your brain was easier for the buggers to understand because you didn't know your brain could do that until you got here!'
Ender laughed. 'You just don't have any tolerance for kuso, do you?'
'What's kuso?'
'Mierda,' said Ender. 'Bullshit.'
'Were you lying to me?'
'No,' said Ender. 'Here's the thing. I had dreams when I was fighting the war on Eros. I didn't know I was fighting the war, but I was. I had one dream where a bunch of formics were vivisecting me. Only instead of cutting open my body, they were cutting up my memories and displaying them like holographs and trying to make sense of them. Why did I have that dream, Abra? After I won the war and found out that I had really been fighting the hive queens and not just a computer simulation, or my teacher, I thought back to some of my dreams and I wondered. Were they trying just as hard to understand me as I was trying to understand them? Was that dream because on some level I was aware that they were getting inside my head, and it frightened me?'
'Wow,' said Abra. 'But if they could read your mind, why couldn't they beat you?'
'Because my victories weren't in my mind,' said Ender. 'That's the weird thing. I thought through the battles, yes, but I didn't see them like Bean did. Instead, I saw the people. The soldiers under me. I knew what those kids were capable of. So I put them in a situation where their decisions would be crucial, told them what I wanted them to do, and then I trusted them to make the decisions that would achieve my objective. I didn't actually know what they'd do. So being inside my head would never show the hive queens what I was planning, because I had no plan, not of a kind they could use against me.'
'Is that why you thought that way? So they couldn't read your plans?'
'I didn't know the game was real. I've only thought of these things afterward. Trying to understand.'
'But if that's true, then you were communicating with the buggers — formics — hive queens all along.'
'I don't know. Maybe they were trying, but they couldn't make sense of it. I'm sure they didn't push anything into my head, or at least not clearly enough for me to understand it. And what could they take from my thoughts? I don't know. Maybe it didn't happen at all. Maybe I only dreamed about them because I kept thinking about them. What will I do when I face real hive queens? If this simulation were a real battle, how would a hive queen think? That sort of thing.'
'What does Papa think?' asked Abra. 'He's really smart and he knows more than anybody about the gold bugs now.'
'I haven't discussed this with your father.'
'Oh.' Abra digested that thought in silence.
'Abra,' said Ender. 'I haven't talked about this with anybody.'
'Oh.' Abra felt overwhelmed by Ender's trust. He could not speak.
'Let's go to sleep,' said Ender. 'I want us to be wide awake and on our way at first light. This new colony needs to be several days' journey away, even by skimmer. And once we find the general area, I have to mark out specific places for buildings and fields and a landing strip for the shuttle and all that.'
'Maybe we'll find another gold bug cave.'
'Maybe,' said Ender. 'Or some other metal. Like the bauxite cave you found.'
'Just because the aluminum bugs were all dead doesn't mean we won't find another cave that has living bugs, right?' said Abra.
'We might have found the only survivors,' said Ender.
'But Papa says the odds are against that. He says it would be too co-incidental if the longest-surviving gold bugs just happened to be the ones that Uncle Sel and Po happened to discover.'
'Your father's not a mathematician,' said Ender. 'He doesn't understand probability.'
'What do you mean?'
'Sel and Po did find the cave with living gold bug larvae in it. Therefore the chance of their finding it, in this causal universe, is one hundred percent. Because it happened.'
'Oh.'
'But since we don't know how many other bug caves there are, or where they're situated, any guess at how likely we are to find one isn't about probability — it's just a guess. There's not enough data for mathematical probabilities.'
'We know there was a second one,' said Abra. 'So it's not like we know nothing.'
'But from the data we actually have, one cave with living gold bugs and one with dead aluminum ones, what would you conclude?'
'That we have as much chance of finding live ones as dead. That's what Father says.'
'But that isn't really true,' said Ender. 'Because in the cave Sel and Po found, the bugs weren't thriving. They had almost died out. And in the other cave, they had died out. So now what are the odds?'
Abra thought hard about it. 'I don't know,' he said. 'It depends on how big each colony was, and whether they would think of eating their own parents' bodies like these bugs did, and maybe other stuff I don't even know about.'
'Now you're thinking like a scientist,' said Ender. 'Now, please think like a sleeping person. We have a long day tomorrow.'
They traveled all day the next day, and it all began to look the same to Abra. 'What's wrong with any of these places?' said Abra. 'The. formics farmed there, and they did fine. And a landing strip could go there.'
'Too close,' said Ender. 'Not enough room for the newcomers to develop their own culture. So close that if they became envious of Falstaff village, they might try to take it over.'
'Why would they do that?'
'Because they're human,' said Ender. 'And, specifically, because then they'd have people who knew everything that we know and can do everything we do.'
'But they'd still be our people,' said Abra.
'Not for long,' said Ender. 'Now that the villages are separate, the Falstaffians will start thinking about what's good for Falstaff. They might resent Miranda for thinking we should be their boss, and maybe they'd want to join these new people voluntarily.'
Abra thought about that for about ten clicks. 'What would be wrong with that?' he said.
This time it took Ender a moment of thought before he was able to answer. 'Ah, Falstaff joining the new people voluntarily. Well, I don't know if anything would be wrong with it. I just know that what I want to happen is for all the villages — including the new one — to be separate enough to develop their own traditions and cultures, and far enough apart that they won't fight over the same resources, yet close enough to intermarry and trade. I'm hoping that there's some perfect distance apart that will make it so they don't start fighting each other, or at least not for a long time.'
'As long as we have you as governor, we'll just win anyway,' said Abra.
'I don't care who wins,' said Ender. 'It's having a war at all that would be terrible.'
'That's not how you felt when you beat the formics!'
'No,' said Ender. 'When the survival of the human race is at stake, you can't help but care who wins. But in a war between colonists on this planet, why would I care which side won? Either way, there'd be killing and loss and grief and hate and bitter memories and the seeds of wars to come. And both sides would be human, so no matter what, humans would lose. And lose and keep on losing. Abra, I sometimes say prayers, did you know that? Because my parents prayed. I sometimes talk to God even though I don't know anything about him. I ask him: Let the wars end.'
'They have ended,' said Abra. 'On earth. The Hegemon united the whole world and nobody's at war
