“But I’ll never live to see you get married and have children,” said Bean.

  “Don’t worry,” said Carlotta. “If Ender and you don’t find a cure for this, I’m never having children. I’m not passing this thing on to anybody.”

  “That’s my point,” said Bean. “When Petra and I conceived you, it was because we believed there was a scientist who could sort things out. He was the one who turned Anton’s Key in me in the first place. The one who killed all my fellow experiments. We never meant to do this to you. But it was done, and all we could think to do was whatever it took to give you a real life.”

  “Your life is real,” said Ender. “I’d be content with a life like yours.”

  “I’m living in a box that I can never leave,” said Bean, clenching his fists. He had never meant to say anything like this to them. The humiliation of his own self-pity was unbearable to him, but they had to understand that he was right to do whatever it took to keep them from getting cheated the way he had been. “If you spend the first five or ten years of your life in space like this, so what? As long as it gives you the next ninety years—and children who will have their century, and grandchildren. I’ll never see any such thing—but you will.”

  “No we won’t,” whispered Sergeant. “There is no cure. We’re a new species that has a life span of twenty-two years, apparently, as long as we spend our last five years at ten percent gravity.”

  “So why do you want to kill me?” asked Bean. “Isn’t my life short enough for you?”

  In answer, Sergeant clung to Bean’s sleeve and cried. As he did, Ender and Carlotta held each other’s hands and watched. What they were feeling, Bean didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure what Sergeant was crying for. He didn’t understand anybody and he never had. He was no Ender Wiggin.

  Bean tracked him now and then, checking in with the computer nets through the ansible, and as far as he could tell, Ender Wiggin wasn’t having much of a life, either. Unmarried, childless, flying from world to world, staying nowhere very long, and then getting back to lightspeed so he stayed young while the human race aged.

  Just like me. Ender Wiggin and I have made the same choice, to stay aloof from humanity.

  Why Ender Wiggin was hiding from life, Bean could not guess. Bean had had his brief sweet marriage with Petra. Bean had these miserable, beautiful, impossible children and Ender Wiggin had nothing.

  It’s a good life, thought Bean, and I don’t want it to end. I’m afraid of what will happen to these children when I’m gone. I can’t leave them now and I have no choice. I love them more than I can bear and I can’t save them. They’re unhappy and I can’t fix it. That’s why I’m crying.

  CHAPTER 3

  Watching the Sky

  Carlotta was doing gravity calibrations in the field footing at the very back of the ship when Ender came in to life support, which was just above where she was working. Or just forward of it, depending on how you thought of the ship.

  Gravity lensing made everything so confusing. The trays of lichen and algae and bacteria, which generated oxygen for the ship and also created the basic stuff used by the food processors, had to remain level, regardless of what the ship was doing. During acceleration there was no need to do anything at all—inertia gave the trays their proper “down” toward the rear of the ship. But during normal flight, the trays would be weightless, which was why the gravity lensing field had to be configured to give the trays an unaltered down, always toward the rear.

  Not only that, the lichen required at least half of Earth-normal gravity. But in the cargo hold just forward of—or above—life support, half a gee would kill Father in about an hour. His heart couldn’t take it. And since gravity from thousands of stars was being lensed, and the lensing had to be adjusted constantly as they drew nearer to or farther from the most massive stars, constant adjustments had to be made.

  Carlotta had charged herself with the duty of making sure the gravity gauges were always in perfect calibration, so the ship’s computers were working with accurate data about incoming gravitation and the lensed gravity in various parts of the ship. She had wired the cargo hold with so many fail-safes that alarms sounded if there were the slightest variation in the gravity affecting Father. Here in life support, the tolerances were much more robust. But she still had to make sure the lichen had enough gravity that it didn’t overgrow vertically and start shading the lower levels of each tray so that the algae could still photosynthesize at the lowest levels of the trays.

  Each tray was essentially a six-centimeter rain forest, with the lichens as the jungle trees, their intricate lacework structure rising as high as the gravity would allow, while light filtered down to the slow-flowing river below, where several varieties of algae created minihabitats for hundreds of different bacteria living in constantly shifting symbiosis. All the processed waste from the four humans—most of which came from Father, though the children’s output was no longer negligible—was dripped into the trays at a fairly steady rate, and around each drip source the bacteria had the job of decomposing it into nutrient soup that the algae and, eventually, the lichens could live on.

  Bacteria also ate decaying lichen and algae and each other. It was a bug-eat-bug world in there, yet a carefully contained one, so that nothing spilled. Then, one by one, the trays were automatically pulled out, skimmed of most of the lichens and some of the algae, then replaced to begin their two weeks of regrowth. Whatever had been skimmed became food.

  If there had been more people, the process would have been much faster—up to ten trays a day would have been skimmed. But then, there would have been more waste to fertilize the trays, so their regrowth would have been faster.

  And then there were the nonrenewable trace minerals that had to be bled into the system when they grew too depleted. It was a delicate balance but it could last centuries as long as the machinery was well tended and gravity or acceleration didn’t shift beyond the tolerances.

  In addition, there was the herb garden to look out for. This was not so automatic as life support, and without it their food would have been a nasty-tasting paste on nasty-tasting flatbreads. Carlotta had appointed that task to herself, too, as soon as Father could no longer get to the garden. Besides, his hands were so large that he could hardly manipulate the small leaves of the herbs. By the end of his time as ship’s farmer, Father was uprooting as much as harvesting, and the garden had suffered.

  The boys were content to leave all these maintenance matters to Carlotta. The result, she noted with a mix of pride and bitterness, was that she was obliquely in the traditional role of women: cooking and housekeeping.

  It took a willingness to repeat the same tasks over and over, and yet never become sloppy or lazy, and Carlotta wasn’t sure she could trust such work to either of her brothers. She wasn’t sure if it was species-wide gender differences or simply the personalities of the three of them, but for Ender, though he was capable of endless patience in pursuit of research, there always had to be a goal and a foreseeable end, while Sergeant had the attention span of, well, a six-year-old child.

  In fact, Carlotta had a theory that Sergeant was the most human of the three of them—the most like an ordinary child. He was emotionally more volatile, more in need of constant stimulation, more desperate for action, change, event. Which was precisely what life on the ship never offered. There were no crises. Ender’s research gave him results—usually negative—at a glacial pace, while Carlotta’s maintenance work gave her no change at all, except in her own knowledge and mastery of the machinery and the theory behind everything on the ship.

  Poor Sergeant. The most childlike of us, and therefore the one who suffers most from our utterly boring life. No wonder he keeps inventing fantasies of enemies and crises. Admittedly, killing Father was the most outrageous of his manufactured crises to date, and a deeply stupid and uncivilized act, but exactly the sort of thing that a child would think of.

  And Ender punching him in the nose and half choking him had given Sergeant a blessed dose of crisis.

  But the boy would heal, and his resentments and boredom and desperation would continue to fester and grow. What would he come up with next? Something terrible was going to happen someday. There simply weren’t enough people on this ship to give variety to life.

  “Sergeant needs a dog,” said Carlotta.

  Ender jumped. “What are you doing down here?”

  “My work,” said Carlotta. “What are you doing?”

  “Samples,” said Ender. “We’ve been working with viruses for gene splices for a long time, but there’s some productive work being done with bacterial latency and chemical triggers. The biggest problem is changing every cell in the body at the same time, and keeping the immune system from rejecting itself after the change. We have some of the bacteria here in the trays and I’m going to try combining traits with some of our intestinal bacteria to see whether I can improve on their techniques.”

  He sounded so happy.

  “You do know that Sergeant will never forget what happened the other day.”

  “You mean my beating the crap out of him?” said Ender. “I didn’t expect him to forget. In fact, I’m counting on him remembering.”

  “It was surprise that let you beat him this time. You’ll never surprise him again.”

  Ender sighed and made no answer.

  “As I said,” said Carlotta, “Sergeant needs a dog.”

  “Theoretically I suppose I could recapitulate all of evolutionary history and construct some small animal that he could amuse himself with. Unfortunately, it would take longer than our expected life span—and that’s if I only make him something like a squid. If I have to create a chordate life-form, it would take even longer, and I’m not sure we could control the results.”

  “He needs something he can love and control at the same time,” said Carlotta.

  “I thought that’s what you were for,” said Ender.

  “He doesn’t control me.”

  “Really?” said Ender. “Apparently the puppet is unaware of the strings.”

  “I’m aware of everything you’re aware of,” said Carlotta. “What you see as strings, I see as my ongoing effort to try to keep Sergeant from going bonkers.”

  “I think we can count his plan to murder the Giant as a major failure of that effort.”

  “I wouldn’t have let him do it,” said Carlotta.

  “When have you ever stopped him from doing anything?” The scorn in Ender’s voice made her want to hurt him. Just a little. Perhaps a liver biopsy in his sleep—small wound, intense pain, quick healing.

  “If you bothered to connect with anybody who isn’t involved in genetic research hundreds of lightyears away, you’d know how many crazy plans I’ve kept him from acting on. The only reason you even knew about this one was that he kept it from me until he sprang it on you and you broke his face.”

  “It needed breaking,” said Ender.

  “All you did was convert yourself into the primary enemy. Watch your back, Ender.”

  “I’ve already diverted some of my attention to tracking what Sergeant is doing.”

  “You’re so far behind him that whatever you’re tracking, I can assure you it isn’t Sergeant. Or rather, you’ll see only what he wants you to see.”

  “But I can learn a lot from what he wants me to see. Carlotta, I’m in the middle of something and I’m holding a lot of things in my head right now. I’d like to postpone our little chat until a more convenient time.”

  “Sergeant needs something he can work on.”

  “Sergeant doesn’t know how to work on anything that doesn’t involve violent action or life-and-death struggle,” said Ender.

  “Which is what you and I are both working on, when you think about it,” said Carlotta. “You’re trying to fight off our genetically coded giantism before it puts us in the cargo hold ourselves, and I’m trying to make sure all the ship’s systems keep working so we don’t die from some malfunction or accident.”

  “My point exactly,” said Ender. “Sergeant could work on really important things if he just put his mind to it. He’s smart enough—I could bring him up to speed on the genetic research in a few months.”

  “He doesn’t want to work for you, or for me. Sergeant is not a natural subordinate.”

  “Paranoid schizophrenics rarely are,” said Ender.

  “Don’t ever say things like that,” said Carlotta. “That’s a real condition, which Sergeant does not have, and if you allow yourself to regard him that way—”

  “Don’t you have even a shred of a sense of humor?” asked Ender.

  “There’s nothing funny about what life on this ship is doing to Sergeant.”

  “If I don’t laugh,” said Ender, “I’d have to take him seriously, and that would distract me from my work.”

  “I was hoping you could help me come up with something that will help Sergeant bear his life. He suffers more from loneliness than you and I do. He’s more like Father.”

  “The Giant and Sergeant? I never thought of that, but I think you might be right. Sergeant needs to be a street kid in constant danger of starving or getting killed. That would occupy him nicely. So what you really want is not a dog for Sergeant. More like a sabertooth tiger. Something that is stalking him constantly so that he can devote himself to fighting off genuine threats so he doesn’t have to keep making them up.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a companion that extends his life beyond the boundaries of the ship.”

  “A dog on another world?” asked Ender.

  “We have so much money, back in the human world, that it’s just funny. That Graff man set up Father’s finances so well that nobody back there has a clue just how wealthy we are.”

  “All the money we need would fit into my closed fist,” said Ender.

  “We have no use for it now,” said Carlotta, “except I thought maybe we could buy something that Sergeant could tend in a sort of virtual way, through the ansible. Get somebody to implant something in some animal, maybe. On some colony world with a lot of wild country. Maybe a predator—your sabertooth joke might be a good idea.”

  Ender stopped gathering samples and thought for a moment. “He’d hate it coming as a gift from us. Or even as an idea we thought of. He’d think we were doing therapy on him, which would be true. He doesn’t think he has a problem.”

  “I know,” said Carlotta, though she hadn’t really looked at it that way until Ender said it.

  “You always say you know, but I don’t think you knew any such thing,” said Ender.

  “I knew you’d say that,” said Carlotta.

  “All-wise, all-knowing, Carlotta the magnificent.”

  “About time you admitted it.”

  “There are bio-research labs on several worlds that are studying various xenofauna. I assume you’re suggesting that I invent some kind of excuse for this to be a project of mine, which I would talk about with believable enthusiasm, so that Sergeant will think he’s sneaking behind my back to get control of the creature and divert it to his own purposes.”

  “Something like that,” said Carlotta, whose thinking hadn’t gone that far, since she had only come up with her plan as she said it to Ender. “There’s no way I can do anything plausible along those lines, since my work is all here on the ship. But you have so many contacts by ansible.”

  “None of which have any idea that I’m a six-year-old antonine on a starship. I’m a different person to all of them, and because of the time differential I’m mostly doing data harvesting. None of them are relationships.”

  “I never thought they were.”

  “I just don’t want you to think that I have some vast network of friends back in the human universe. If they found out who I am and where we are, we’d probably get a brief burst of attention from the media and then somebody might investigate our finances and somebody else will find a reason that it’s illegal and take most of our money away from us.”

  “They can’t find it,” said Carlotta.

  “Our software and our agents say they can’t,” said Ender. “Doesn’t mean someone really resourceful can’t do things that surprise them. But back to your point—I could do something like that. I don’t think it would work, but it could be done and it might be worth trying. Do you want a pet, too?”

  “Maybe just a link with a household robot somewhere, so I can watch someone else doing routine maintenance, day after day, year after year, so I can remind myself that machines have lives more interesting than mine.”

  “So you have as much self-pity as the rest of us,” said Ender. “Don’t we all suffer.”

  “You say that as if it’s nothing,” said Carlotta.

  “Well, I don’t live as if it were nothing. I’m so bored with the work I do that there are days when I just wish I could die along with the Giant.”

  “Do you know why the Giant doesn’t want to die?” asked Carlotta.

  “Because he loves us,” said Ender, “and his work isn’t done until he’s pretty sure we have a chance at happiness. Whatever that is.”

  “He didn’t have to love us, you know,” said Carlotta. “You say that as if it were as natural as air.”

  Ender gestured at the life-support equipment all around him. “There’s nothing natural about the air we breathe.”

  “Father is a good man. A noble man. A genuinely unselfish man.”

  “Wrong,” said Ender. “Father is a feral child who came to admire a nun named Sister Carlotta and a slightly older boy named Ender Wiggin, and he wanted to be as good as he imagined them to be, so he bent his whole life to trying to pretend to be a real boy, and he’s continuing to act out that script, because he’s afraid that if he ever stops, he’ll find out that he’s still that same starving scavenger that stayed alive somehow on the streets of Rotterdam.”

  Carlotta laughed. “It doesn’t occur to you that maybe it was the role of the feral child that was forced onto him, and the good man in our cargo hold is the real Julian Delphiki?”