I’m grateful for the willingness of my good friends Erin Absher, Aaron Johnston, and Kathy Kidd, who set aside many other more important concerns in order to join my wife, Kristine, in giving me quick feedback on each chapter as it was written. It never ceases to amaze me how many errors—not just typos, but also continuity lapses and outright contradictions—can slip past me and three or four very careful readers, only to be caught by the next. If there are such mistakes still in this book, it’s not their fault!

  Beth Meacham, my editor at Tor, went the extra mile on this book. Still in pain from major surgery and drugged to the gills, she read this manuscript while the bits and bytes were still sizzling, and gave me excellent advice. Some of the best scenes in this book are here because she suggested them and I was smart enough to recognize a great idea when I heard it.

  The whole production team at Tor went to extraordinary lengths to help us bring out this book in time for a good publishing window, and I appreciate their patience with an author whose estimate of the time needed to complete this book was so laughably wrong.

  And Tom Doherty may just be the most creative publisher in the business. There’s no idea too wacky for him to at least consider it; and when he decides to do something unusual—like a series of “parallel novels”—he puts everything behind it and makes it happen.

  Barbara Bova’s creativity and dedication as my agent have blessed my family for most of my career. And I haven’t forgotten that the Ender saga first reached the public because, even before she became an agent, her husband, Ben Bova, found a novella called “Ender’s Game” on his slushpile and, with a few small changes, agreed to publish it in the August 1977 Analog magazine. That one decision (and it wasn’t a no-brainer—other editors turned it down cold) has been putting bread on my table and opening the door for readers to find my other work ever since.

  But when the writing day is done and I come down out of my garret room, it’s finding my wife, Kristine, and my daughter Zina there that makes it all worth doing. Thanks for the love and joy in my life each day. And to my other kids as well, for leading lives that I’m proud to be connected with.

  SHADOWS IN FLIGHT

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SHADOWS IN FLIGHT

  Copyright © 2011 by Orson Scott Card

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-6866-9

  First Edition: January 2012

  First Mass Market Edition: February 2013

  eISBN 9781466843936

  First eBook edition: March 2013

  For Lynn Hendee

  wise guide, fellow maker, true friend

  CHAPTER 1

  In the Giant’s Shadow

  The starship Herodotus left Earth in 2210 with four passengers. It accelerated nearly to lightspeed as quickly as it could, and then stayed at that speed, letting relativity do its work.

  On Herodotus, just over five years had passed; it had been 421 years on Earth.

  On Herodotus, the three thirteen-month-old babies had turned into six-year-olds, and the Giant had outlived his life expectancy by two years.

  On Earth, starships had been launched to found ninety-three colonies, beginning with the worlds once colonized by the Formics and spreading to other habitable planets as soon as they were found.

  On Herodotus, the six-year-old children were small for their age, but brilliant beyond their years, as the Giant had been when he was little, for in all four of them, Anton’s Key had been turned, a genetic defect and a genetic enhancement at the same time. Their intelligence was beyond the level of savants in every subject matter, without any of the debilitations of autism. But their bodies never stopped growing. They were small now, but by age twenty-two, they would be the size of the Giant, and the Giant would be long dead. For he was dying, and when he died, the children would be alone.

  In the ansible room of Herodotus, Andrew “Ender” Delphiki sat perched on three books atop a seat designed for adults. This was how the children operated the main computer that processed communication through the ansible, the instant communicator that kept Herodotus linked to all the computer networks of the ninety-four worlds of Starways Congress.

  Ender was reviewing a research report on genetic therapy that showed some promise, when Carlotta came into the ansible room. “Sergeant wants a sibmoot.”

  “You found me,” said Ender. “So can he.”

  Carlotta looked over his shoulder at the holodisplay. “Why do you bother?” she said. “There’s no cure. Nobody’s even looking for it anymore.”

  “The cure is for us all to die,” said Ender. “Then Anton syndrome disappears from the human species.”

  “We’ll die eventually,” said Carlotta. “The Giant is dying now.”

  “You know that’s all Sergeant wants to talk about.”

  “Well, we have to talk about it, don’t we?”

  “Not really. It’ll happen, and then we’ll deal with it.” Ender did not want to think about the Giant’s death. It was overdue, but as long as the Giant lived, Ender could hope to save him. Or at least bring him good news before he died.

  “We can’t talk in front of the Giant,” said Carlotta.

  “He’s not here in the ansible room,” said Ender.

  “You know he can hear us here if he wants.”

  The more time Carlotta spent with Sergeant, the more she sounded like him. Paranoid. The Giant is listening.

  “If he’s hearing us now, he knows we’re having a meeting, and what it’s about, and so he’ll listen wherever we are.”

  “Sergeant feels better about it when we take precautions.”

  “I feel better when I’m allowed to do my work.”

  “Nobody in the universe has Anton syndrome except us,” Carlotta said, “so the researchers have all stopped working on it even though there’s perpetual funding. Get over it.”

  “They’ve stopped and I haven’t,” said Ender.

  “How can you research it without lab equipment, without test subjects, without anything?”

  “I have this incredibly brilliant mind,” said Ender cheerfully. “I look at all the genetic research they’re doing and I’m connecting it with what we already know about Anton’s Key from back in the days when top scientists were working hard on the problem. I connect things that the humans could never see.”

  “We’re humans,” said Carlotta wearily.

  “Our children won’t be, if I can help it,” said Ender.

  “‘Our children’ is a concept that will never have a real-world example,” said Carlotta. “I’m not mating with either of my male sibs, which includes you. Period. Ever. It makes me want to puke.”

  “The idea of sex is what makes you puke,” said Ender. “But I’m not talking about ‘our children’ in the sense of any of us reproducing together. I’m talking about the children we’ll have when we rejoin the human race. Not the normal children, like our long-dead sibs who stayed with Mother and mated and had human children of their own. I’m talking about the children with turned Keys, the children who are little and smart like us. If I can find a way to cure them—”

  “The cure is to discard all the children like us, and keep the normal ones, and poof, Anton syndrome is gone.” Carlotta always came back to the same argument.

  “That’s not a cure, that’s extinction of our new species.”

  “We’re not a species if we can still interbreed with humans.”

  “We’re a species as soon as we find a way to pass along our brilliant minds without the fatal giantism.”

  “The Giant’s supposedly as brilliant as we are. Let him work on Anton’s Key. Now come along so Sergeant doesn’t get mad.”

  “We can’t let Sergeant boss us around just because he gets so angry when we don’t obey.”

  “Oh, brave talk,” said Carlotta. “You’re always the first to give in.”

  “Not at this moment.”

  “If Sergeant walked in here himself, you’d apologize and drop everything and come. You’re only delaying because you’re not afraid to annoy me.”

  “Just as you’re not afraid to annoy me.”

  “Come on.”

  “Where? I’ll join you later.”

  “If I say it, the Giant will listen in.”

  “The Giant will track us anyway. If Sergeant is right and the Giant spies on us all the time, then there’s nowhere to hide anyway.”

  “Sergeant thinks there is.”

  “And Sergeant’s always right.”

  “Sergeant might be right and we can humor him and it costs us nothing.”

  “I hate crawling through the air ducts,” said Ender. “You two love it, and that’s fine, but I hate it.”

  “Sergeant is being so nice today that he picked a place we can get to without going through ducts.”

  “Where?”

  “If I tell you, I have to kill you,” said Carlotta.

  “Every minute you take me away from my genetic research you’re bringing us that much closer to death.”

  “You already made your point, and it’s an excellent point, and I’m ignoring you because you are coming to our meeting if I have to drag you there in small pieces.”

  “If you regard me as expendable, have the meeting without me.”

  “Will you abide by whatever Sergeant and I decide?”

  “If by ‘abide by’ you mean ‘ignore completely,’ then yes. That’s what your plans deserve.”

  “We haven’t made plans yet.”

  “Today. You haven’t made plans yet today.”

  “Our other plans all failed because you didn’t follow them.”

  “I followed every plan I agreed with.”

  “We outvoted you, Ender.”

  “That’s why I never agreed to majority rule.”

  “Who’s in charge, then?”

  “Nobody. The Giant.”

  “He can’t leave the cargo bay. He’s not in charge of anything.”

  “Then why are you and Sergeant so afraid he might be listening in?”

  “Because all he cares about is us, and he has nothing to do but spy on us.”

  “He does research, just like me,” said Ender.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Results: zero. Time wasted: all of it.”

  “You won’t feel that way when I come up with the invasovirus that carries the cure to our giantism into every cell of your body and allows you to reach a normal human height and stop growing.”

  “With my luck, you’ll switch off Anton’s Key and make us all stupid.”

  “Normal humans aren’t stupid. They’re just normal.”

  “And they forgot us,” said Carlotta bitterly. “If they saw us again, they’d think we were nothing but children.”

  “We are children.”

  “Children our age are just learning to read and write and do their numbers,” said Carlotta. “We are more than a quarter of the way through our expected life span. We’re the equivalent of twenty-five years old, in their species.”

  Ender hated it when she threw his own arguments back at him. He was the one who argued that they were a new species, the next stage in human evolution, Homo antoninis, or perhaps Homo leguminensis, after the Giant, who had used the name “Bean” for most of his childhood. “They won’t see us again, so they won’t treat us like children,” said Ender. “I’m not content with a life span of twenty years, nor with death by overgrowing the capacity of our own hearts. I don’t intend to die gasping for breath while my brain dies because my heart can’t get enough blood to it. I have work to do and an absolute deadline for doing it.”

  Carlotta apparently was tired of bandying words. She leaned in close and whispered. “The Giant is dying. We have things to decide. If you don’t want to be included in the decisions, ever, then by all means skip this meeting.”

  Ender hated thinking about the Giant’s death. It would mean that Ender had failed, that whatever he learned later would have come too late.

  And something else, too. A deeper feeling than frustration at failing to reach a goal. Ender had read about human feelings, and the words he thought came closest were “anguish” and “grief.” He could not speak of this, however, because he knew what Sergeant would say. “Why, Ender, I believe you’re saying that you love the old monster.” And love, they knew, was a thing that came from the human side, from Mother, and Mother had chosen to stay behind on Earth so her ordinary human children could lead ordinary human lives.

  If love meant anything, the children had long ago concluded, it would have kept Mother with them, and their ordinary siblings, all of them on this ship, all of them looking together for a cure, for a new world, for a life together as a family.

  When they were not yet two years of age, they said this to Father. He was so angry he forbade them to criticize their mother again. “It was the right choice,” he said. “You have no understanding of love.”

  That was when they stopped calling him Father. As Sergeant said, “It was their decision to break the family. If we have no mother, then we have no father, either.” He was “the Giant” from then on. And they did not speak of Mother at all.

  But Ender thought of her. Did she feel, when we left, what I feel now, thinking of the Giant’s dying? Anguish? Grief? They decided what they thought was best for their children. What would the life of the normal siblings be on this ship, if they had kept the family together? They would be larger than Sergeant, Carlotta, and Ender, but they would feel like great stupid oafs, never able to keep up with the antonines, the leguminotes, whatever they decided to call themselves. Mother and the Giant were right to divide the family. They were right about everything. But Ender could never say that to Sergeant.

  You could never say anything to Sergeant that he didn’t want to hear.

  It was a recapitulation of human history, right here on the Herodotus, that the most angry, aggressive, and violent of the three children was the one who always got his way. If we’re a new species, we’re only somewhat improved. All the alpha-male nonsense of the chimps and gorillas is still preserved in us.

  Carlotta turned her back on him and started out of the room.

  “Wait,” said Ender. “Can’t you tell me what this is really about? Why are you always in on it, and I get things sprung on me with the two of you already in agreement, and no time for me to research anything or even come up with a decent argument?”

  To her credit, Carlotta looked a little embarrassed. “Sergeant does what he wants.”

  “But he always has you for an ally,” said Ender.

  “He could have you, too, if you didn’t always resist him.”

  “He doesn’t give me a chance to resist, he doesn’t listen. I’m the other male, don’t you see? He has you under his control and me off balance because he intends to be the alpha.”

  Carlotta frowned. “Mating is still a long way off.”

  “It’s already being determined by our choices now. Do you think Sergeant will take no for an answer?”

  “We won’t let him have his way on that.”

  “We?” said Ender. “What’s this we? There’s you and him, and then there’s me. Do you think you and I will suddenly become we just because you don’t want to have his incestuous babies? If we’re not we now, not ever, then why do you think I’ll risk my own survival to save you then?”

  Carlotta blushed. “I will not talk about this.”

  But you’ll think about it, Ender said silently. I made you think about it, and you won’t let go of it. The alliances we make now will be the alliances then. He’ll be the alpha male, you’ll be the devoted mate, and I’ll be the nonmating subjugated male, powerless to do anything but what the alpha commands. If he hasn’t killed me first. That’s the choice you’re making now.

  “Let’s go hear what Sergeant has to say,” said Ender. “Not that you don’t already know.”

  “I really don’t,” said Carlotta. “He doesn’t let me in on what he’s thinking any more than he does you.”

  Ender didn’t bother arguing with her, but it simply wasn’t true. Or if she really didn’t know, then she was always quick to come up with arguments to justify whatever nonsense Sergeant was trying to put forward. She always sounded as if she had agreed with Sergeant’s program even before he presented it.

  We’re still primates, only a few genes away from the hairless chimps that began to cook their food so that women stayed by the fire to do the cooking while their monogamous mates ranged and hunted to bring home meat. And only a few genes farther from the hairy chimps that mated whenever they could, usually by force, and lived in terror of displeasing the alpha male.

  The main difference is we come up with justifications and explanations, and we manipulate each other with words instead of violent displays or affectionate grooming. Or rather, our violent displays and affectionate grooming are words, so they take less energy, but do the same job.

  “I’ll pretend to believe you,” said Ender aloud, “in order to pretend that I think my presence at Sergeant’s meeting will do anything but prove his dominance over our pathetic little tribe.”

  “We’re a family,” said Carlotta.

  “Our species hasn’t existed long enough to evolve the family yet,” said Ender. But it was mere grumbling. He followed her into the bridge, where she pushed the manual lever to open the trap down to the maintenance shafts surrounding the plasma conductors, the ramscoop collector, and the gravity lens.

  “Yes, let’s spend hours here, and the whole question of founding a species becomes moot,” said Ender.

  “The shielding works, we’re not scooping much anyway, and shut up,” said Carlotta.