Orson Scott Card - [Ender 01.4] Read online

  The Gold Bug

  by

  Orson Scott Card

  It was all based on trust, wasn't it? You join the Fleet, you train until it's as natural to pilot your ship as to dance, as reflexive to fight with the ship's weapons as to use your fists.

  Then you go where they send you, leaving behind your family and friends, knowing that relativistic travel ensures you'll never see them again. To all intents and purposes, you've already given your life for your country — no, your species.

  You can only trust that when you commit to battle near some far-off world, the commander they've assigned to you will actually win, will make it worth the sacrifice.

  As to you, personally, does it matter whether you live or die? Sel Menach asked himself this question more than once during the two-year voyage to war. Sometimes he thought it really didn't matter at all.

  All he cared about was victory.

  But when they got to the Formic world, forty lightyears from Earth, and he and his warship hurtled from the transport and faced the enemy formation, he discovered that no matter what his mind decided, his body was determined to live.

  It was a child's voice he heard over his headset, giving commands to his squad. And another child giving commands to his commander. They had been warned; it had been explained to them. Mazer Rackham's voice came over the ansible, acquainting them with how these children had been screened, trained, tested, and now the finest military minds among the human race, the most relentlessly competitive, with the fastest reflexes, would give them their orders.

  "They don't know the test they're taking is real," said Rackham. "To them, it's all about winning. I can assure you that the supreme commander, Ender Wiggin, does not waste his resources. He will be as careful of your lives as if he knew you were there."

  We're trusting our lives to children? But what choice did they have? In some ways, the actual battle was not too different from what the children must be experiencing on their simulators. Inside Sel's fighter, there was no sound except the voices of commanders and fellow pilots, and the Dvoak and Smetana he always played to help keep him calm and focused. When a fellow pilot was killed, all Sel heard was the soft voice of the computer saying "Connection broken with" and the fighter's i.d. If the killed ship had been maneuvering fairly nearby, there would be a blink of light on the simulator.

  An hour after they poured out of the transport it was over. Total victory.

  Not a Formic ship in the sky. And their losses had been, all else being equal, light.

  Mazer's promise about the child commanders turned out to be true.

  When the surviving fighters returned to the transport and sat together to watch the replay of the battle on the large simulator, no one could find a single decision to criticize.

  Each of the individual children had done well; but on the third viewing Sel began to grasp the genius of Ender Wiggin's overall strategy. He had maneuvered the enemy into an untenable position, forcing the enemy to expose himself, the enemy to be aggressive, the enemy to sustain the losses. Wiggin had been careful of lives that he didn't even know where involved.

  But victory in this place was not complete victory. Who knew how many ships were under construction on the planet's surface? How long would it be before a new enemy arose? They watched the succeeding battles, fought near different worlds, on their simulator, and Sel's awe at these children only grew. There were mistakes, but the overall design of the battles was always so deft that they were all in awe of Ender Wiggin.

  As the Admiral of their expedition said, "No military force has ever been so well commanded or so wisely used."

  Then came the final battle, when they were lost in despair. Vast swarms of enemy ships hopelessly outnumbered the human fleet.

  "If he thinks it's a game," said Sel to his friend Ramon, "or even a test, what's to stop him from refusing to go on?"

  "Refuse or not, we've lost the war right here."

  And this time it seemed that Wiggin had met his match, as he broke with all his previous practice and simply Artwork by Jin Han, created for the DabelPro comic book version of "Gold Bug,"

  Copyright 2007 by Dabel Brothers Productions sent his paltry fleet straight into the swarming enemy.

  But there was a method to his madness, it seemed. As they listened to the chatter — the boy called Bean talking to Ender Wiggin — they began to get a glimmer of what Ender might have in mind.

  And then the order came, the final mad assault on the planet's surface, the detonation of the M.D. device, the disintegration of the entire world.

  Victory.

  They celebrated. They drank. They wept for joy. They remembered all the people back on Earth that once upon a time they knew and loved, and wept again in grief. For by now they were all forty years older, and before this fleet could return eighty years would have gone by.

  But they weren't going home. They had never planned to. Knowing what relativistic space travel would do to them, that they could never return to the lives they had once had, they set out on this expedition knowing that if they won, it would cease to be a military fleet and become, all at once, a colony.

  They had expected to have to fight for control of the planet's surface, and it was to be a mission of extermination, like the one the Formics had launched against Earth.

  But after that last battle, it wasn't necessary. The queens of all the conquered worlds had been gathered together on the last planet. All their eggs in one basket, so to speak.

  When they died, the workers and larvae on all the worlds died with them. Not immediately, but within hours or days.

  Sel Menach set foot on the Formic planet that the enemy had tried to protect from them, not as a soldier, but as a xenobiologist. It was his job to find some way to protect the alien life forms from the terrestrial ones, and vice versa. Could alien parasites pose a danger to them? The answer was yes. Until Sel found a comprehensive drug treatment, more fighter pilots died from nearmicroscopic airborne burrowing worms than had died in their battle in space.

  But he found the treatment, which, injected monthly, made human blood fatal to the worms. He found ways to keep maize and amaranth from succumbing to alien molds.

  Within a few years, his expertise became less important, on a daily basis, and he was just another worker in the human colony. The Admiral was now the Governor. And Sel Menach was, to all intents and purposes, a peasant.

  He, like half the males, lost the lottery to have a fertile mate. The unchosen men had the option of taking drugs to control their libido, so they were not consumed with envy or frustration. Sel did not bother with the drug. Not that he felt no desire; he simply had better things to think about. He worked his turn as a farmer during the days, then returned to his lab at night to work on genetic solutions to the problems of yield and storage and pest resistance.

  Others, with different areas of expertise, studied climate patterns and determined that this world was in a cycle of ice ages like those of Earth, though the hot phases would never be as intense or brief as the warm times on Earth. Earth would have another Ice Age long before this planet did; but the cold here would be deeper, and the terrestrial seeds and roots were not adapted. It was Sel's job to help them adapt to the extreme cold so that the plants that humans depended on for survival would outlast the thousands of years of winter, when at last they came.

  It would be millennia from now. But that was the way Sel had learned to think. It was the only attitude that could make his losses bearable. I am not living in my own lifetime now, he told himself. I am living on a planetary scale. I am living for the survival of generations of children unrelated to me.

  He was nearly fifty years old when the first gen
eration of children reached a marriageable age. He went to the Governor then and told him that the first preference for mating should go to the older men who had not mated in the first generation.

  "These would be, in effect, exogamous marriages," Sel explained. "If this new generation marries only each other, then the gene pool will be too small; if they bring in the sperm of the older men who never mated, then the gene pool is vastly increased."

  The Governor sighed. "This is not going to be a popular decision," he said. "These young people were not pilots or soldiers. They know the Formics only as legends and pictures and vids. They want to marry for love. They'll assume at once that your advice is that of an old man yearning for young flesh."

  "Which is why I remove myself from consideration. I recommend as a scientist, not as a man; ten generations from now, we'll be far stronger for having followed my advice."

  In the end, the Governor made it a voluntary and temporary thing.

  Young women who agreed would be married to older men, but only until one child was born. That child would be raised by the mother and her new, younger mate, with the biological father as godfather to the child. Some women refused. Most consented — and, as the Governor said to Sel, in private, "It was because of the great respect they have for you. They know they eat so bountifully because of your work with the plants and animals they use for food."

  Sel refused to accept the praise. "I only happen to be our chief xenobiologist. If another man of the same training had been in my place, he would have done the same things."

  "The problem we have, my friend," said the Governor, "is that many of the women insist that it's your seed they want, and no other."

  "But mine is not available," said Sel.

  "Forgive my asking, my friend, but don't you like women?"

  "Like them, love them — and children, too," said Sel. "But it will never be said that I benefitted personally from this odd little experiment in exogamy."

  "You disappoint many women."

  "I would also disappoint them if I mated with them. My children would probably be as ugly as me, and as stubborn."

  "You have a point," said the Governor, but his jest was a sad one.

  "Your sacrifice will make my job easier."

  By then the Governor was old, and it was not his job much longer. He died, and the ship carrying the new governor, long ago dispatched from Earth, had not yet come.

  So they held an election, and chose, for their acting Governor, Sel Menach, father of none, uncle of all, or so it seemed. He governed for five years, continuing his scientific work, settling disputes, diversifying the colony and setting up smaller villages far enough away, and in different enough environments, that they could learn more about the life of this world.

  Then the colony ship came from Earth. It had been sent only a few months after the great victory, but it was forty years in coming — though it seemed only two years to those aboard. It brought ten times as many people as were already in the colony.

  It also brought the new governor, appointed by the Ministry of Colonization and backed, should anyone choose to resist his authority, by forty well-armed young Marines among the new colonists.

  The original colonists — the old settlers, they already called themselves — learned the new governor's name only a few weeks before the ship came into orbit. It was Ender Wiggin himself, the architect of victory, who would govern them, though he was still only a child of fourteen years.

  The old settlers were angry and afraid. The generation that had fought and won the battle, that had first explored this planet's surface and cleared away and burned the bodies of the formics who had died in this area, the ones who had first grown terrestrial crops here and lived in terror of the parasites that attacked the blood and lived for a time in the caves of the formics until they developed the right tools to build with the right kinds of trees to make houses — that generation was old.

  The young ones, who were now in the strength of adulthood, in their twenties and thirties, knew nothing of Earth. This was their home, and someone in a far-off place had decided to dump so many new colonists on them that they would become a small minority. And to add insult to injury, a child would rule over them.

  "He is not an ordinary child," Sel Menach said. "He's the reason the human race possesses this world, and the enemy does not. He's the reason human beings are spreading out through this corner of the galaxy, instead of struggling to survive in the back hills of our own world, hunted down by Formics."

  "So they gave him a reward — our land! Us!"

  "Do you think this is a reward?" said Sel. "I think his reward would have been to go home to Earth. To his mother and father. Instead he was sent here. They must have been afraid of him on Earth. In an earlier age, he would simply have been killed."

  It was a sobering thought. But it didn't make the old settlers any more enthusiastic to have him rule over them.

  "We who came with the original fleet, we knew that we would lose everything. If we had simply returned to Earth, all our friends would have been dead, our families as well. So before we ever left on this expedition, we were trained in the skills and sciences that would give us the best chance of survival on this planet. We thought we might have to fight for every inch of it; thanks to Ender Wiggin's complete victory, we did not. But we still struggled, and why? We're old now.

  We worked so hard in order to give this colony to other people, people we didn't know, people who hadn't even been born when we arrived.

  You."

  "But that's different. We're your own children."

  Sel smiled. "Not mine."

  They had no answer for that.

  "That's what civilization is," said Sel.

  "You labor all your life to create a gift, large or small, which you then hand to strangers to build on and improve for the generation after.

  Some of them might be genetically related to us; most of them will not.

  We've built something fine here, but with far larger numbers each of our little colonies can now become towns. We can begin to specialize, to trade, the spread farther across this planet's surface. We can make of this a world as diverse and rich and productive as Earth. Maybe even better. And we need their genes, these newcomers. We need a shot of fresh DNA to make our future generations competitive with the humans being born on Earth. We need them every bit as much as they needed us to prepare the ground for their arrival. We are allies in our species' war for survival. We are brothers and sisters on a planet where the indigenous life has no kinship with us at all."

  Fine speeches were enough to quell the immediate rebellion. But once the new colonists arrived, there would be conflicts and misunderstandings — it was bound to be so. It would be a constant labor of explanation, of patience, of nudges here and accommodations there to keep the peace. Sel knew just how to do it, but it would be hard, and he was tired, and besides, it was someone else's job. Ender Wiggin's.

  Not his.

  So Sel began quietly to prepare for an expedition southward. It would be on foot — there had been no beasts of burden in the original expedition, and he was not going to deprive the colony of any of its vehicles. And even though many of the new edible hybrids had spread widely, he meant to pass out of their optimum climate, which meant he would have to carry his food with him. Fortunately, he didn't eat much, and he would bring along six of the new dogs he had genetically altered to be able to metabolize the local proteins. The dogs would hunt, and then he would harvest two of them — and turn the other four loose, two breeding pairs that could live off the land.

  New predators turned loose in the wild — Sel knew exactly how dangerous this could be to the local ecology. But they could not eat all the native species and could do nothing with the vegetation, and it would be important during later exploration and colonization to find edible and tamable creatures loose in the wild.

  We aren't here to preserve the local ecology like a museum. We're here to colonize, to suit the world for
ourselves.

  Which is precisely what the Formics were doing to Earth. Only their approach was much more drastic — burn all, and then plant vegetation from the Formics' native planet.

  Was that what they had done here? Sel didn't think so. He had found none of the species the Formics had planted on Earth during the Scouring of China nearly a century ago. This was one of the Formics' oldest colonies, and its flora and fauna seemed to be too distant, genetically, to have shared common ancestors with the Formic varieties. It must have been settled before they developed the formification strategy they had begun to use on Earth.

  In all the years till now, Sel had had to devote himself entirely to the genetic research required to keep the colony viable, and then to governing the colony. Now that his replacement was here, he could go into hitherto unexplored lands and learn what he could.

  He could not go any great distance — he supposed a few hundred kilometers would be his limit, for it would do no good to range so far that he could not return and report his findings.

  With the help of the lead xenogeneticist, Ix Tolo, Sel prepared a kit of the sampling and testing equipment he'd need — well, not all that he'd need, but all that he could carry along with his supplies. It was a meager kit, but Ix didn't even argue with him about it, which was unusual. "Why aren't you telling me that there's no point in making this journey if I don't have the equipment I need?"

  "Because," said Ix, "I know you're not really traveling as a scientist."

  "I'm not?"

  "Look at you — an old man, planning a hundred-click journey."

  "Farther than that."

  "Like an old elephant, searching for a place to die."

  "I don't plan on dying."

  "Governor Menach," said Ix, "you're an old man who doesn't want to face his fourteen-year-old successor."

  "I don't want to get in his way," said Sel.

  "You know everybody and everything, and he knows very little."

  "He saved the human race."

  "He knows very little about governing this colony. He has authority without relationships or influence. You're making it far harder for him by going."