Sergeant knelt by the door, pried up his magnetic feet, and lowered himself into the airlock. “Empty,” he said at once. They could all see as much in the box in the display that showed the visual from Sergeant’s helmet.

  “How hard to open the inner door?” asked Carlotta.

  “There’s a lever,” said Sergeant. “I don’t know if it’s electrical or mechanical. Big for the one, small for the other.”

  “Try it and see,” said Ender.

  “No,” said the Giant. “That would breach atmosphere.”

  “So close the outer door first,” said Ender.

  Silence. They all knew: That would cut off Sergeant’s escape route to the Puppy.

  “I don’t like it,” said the Giant.

  “Won’t learn anything until I do it,” said Sergeant. Again, his voice might have quavered a little.

  The outer door slid shut.

  “That one was electrical so the inner one probably is, too,” said Sergeant. “I didn’t damage the mechanism by forcing it.”

  “Or when you try to open it, you’ll find out that you did,” said Ender.

  I’M ABOUT TO SHUT DOWN YOUR STATION.

  Ender got up and walked over to sit beside Carlotta. “The Giant doesn’t like my ideas,” he said.

  “Neither do I,” said Carlotta.

  “I’m opening it,” said Sergeant. There was no loss of signal quality through the hull.

  The visual from Sergeant’s helmet showed almost nothing, even when Carlotta enlarged it to fill the holospace.

  “Switch on a light,” said Ender.

  “Light forward,” said Sergeant, sounding annoyed. Didn’t he like Ender making obvious suggestions? Poor boy.

  The visual now showed a low tunnel, with tunnels branching off in a couple of directions.

  “Nobody there to greet you,” said Carlotta. “They’re all dead.”

  “Or they laid a trap,” said Ender. “Go on in and see.”

  The entire display on Carlotta’s computer went blank.

  “Hey!” protested Carlotta.

  “I warned you, Ender,” said the Giant.

  “Why punish me?” demanded Carlotta.

  “Come on,” said Ender. “They’re dead, there’s no danger.”

  “Wrong,” said the Giant.

  The display came back on. It was obvious that Sergeant had indeed slid into the low tunnel. It was tall enough that Sergeant was probably sitting up.

  “There was motion a moment ago,” said the Giant. “While you were wasting my time with your immature behavior.”

  “Ender’s immature behavior,” said Carlotta.

  “Which you just matched,” said the Giant. “Sergeant is in a dangerous place and you’re wasting—”

  Motion in the display. Lots of motion. A dozen small creatures emerging from side tunnels and beelining toward Sergeant.

  “Get out of there,” said the Giant.

  At once the display jiggled and swiveled nauseatingly as Sergeant threw himself feetfirst back into the airlock.

  The airlock door was half closed when two of the small creatures launched themselves through the door. One went for Sergeant’s body, one for his helmet. It blocked at least one of the viewers, so the image lost its depth and went flat.

  “Open the airlock!” shouted Carlotta.

  Sergeant apparently had the presence of mind to remember where the lever was that controlled the outer door.

  “Catch one and hold on to it,” said Ender.

  “You’re a cold marubo,” said Carlotta, not admiringly. But it was the right thing to do, and they both knew it.

  The creature partially blocking the helmet’s viewers blew away.

  “I’ve got the one on my body,” said Sergeant. “It’s trying to eat through my suit.”

  “Get rid of it,” said the Giant urgently.

  “No, I’m holding it by the back now, away from me. It’s just wriggling now. It’s not sentient.”

  “How do you know?” asked the Giant.

  “Because it’s stupid,” said Sergeant. “Quick but dumb, like a crab maybe.”

  “Get back to the Puppy,” said the Giant.

  “It’s an air-breather,” said Sergeant. “Or maybe it just likes atmospheric pressure, because it finally stopped wriggling.”

  “Flash frozen,” said Ender. “Good way to gather specimens. Except for the destruction of every cell in its body.”

  “We’ll still be able to tell a lot about it,” said Carlotta. “When he gets it back here.”

  “You mean I’ll be able to tell a lot about it,” said Ender.

  “Are you going to keep what you find a secret from us?” asked Sergeant. “Or will we all know?”

  “He’s just being a brat,” said Carlotta. “I don’t know what’s got into him.”

  “He’s jealous because I got to do something important for once,” said Sergeant.

  The words stung because they were more than a little bit true.

  “It looks to me,” said Ender, “as if the rats have taken over the ship.”

  “Oh, that’s too much,” said Carlotta, standing up and facing Ender in a rage. “Sergeant risked his life while you sat here all cozy and—”

  “Carlotta, stand down,” said the Giant’s voice—over the intercom this time, instead of coming through the computer. “Ender wasn’t talking about our ship.”

  Carlotta instantly understood. “So you think that creature Sergeant caught is just … vermin?”

  “Maybe it had some other function before,” said Ender, “or they wouldn’t have had them on their ship. But they’re vermin now.”

  “Not the front line of defense?”

  “Defense from what?” asked Ender. “Nothing about that ship suggests that they expected to encounter anybody but their own crew.”

  “So … vermin that are out of control because the sentient masters of the ship are all dead? What have they been living on?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Ender. “But this is a generation ship, not a relativistic one. There must be an internal ecology. These got loose in the ship.”

  “And you know this because…”

  “Best guess,” said Ender.

  The Giant spoke again. “I’m glad to see your mind is finally engaged in the task at hand, Ender. Let’s hold off on any more argument between the two of you until Sergeant gets back with the specimen.”

  “Have you already reported this to Starways Congress?” asked Sergeant, who was now inside the Puppy.

  “It’s automatic,” said Carlotta.

  “No it isn’t,” said the Giant. “I cut off all automatic reports the moment you spotted that ship, Carlotta.”

  “You’re not telling them about this alien vessel?” asked Ender, surprised.

  “I haven’t even told them about this planet,” said the Giant. “Nothing.”

  Carlotta was stunned. “Why not? If this alien vessel turns out to be hostile—”

  “I have all the information stored. If they attack, I’ll release it in a microburst from the ansible. Till then, it’s our little secret.”

  “Is there some master plan going on here?” asked Ender. “Because if there is, maybe you should tell the rest of us, since you might stroke out and die at any time.”

  Carlotta slapped him. “Don’t talk to him like that!”

  “Keep your hands to yourself,” said Ender savagely. “It’s the truth, and the great Julian Delphiki can face any truth, can’t you, Father?”

  “There’s a plan,” said the Giant mildly. “No hitting, Carlotta. What are you, a five-year-old?”

  “I’m six,” said Carlotta lamely.

  “Then act your age. Children are supposed to have learned the no-hitting rule by first grade.”

  Comparing her to ordinary schoolchildren was so insulting that Carlotta threw herself back down on her chair in a huff and brought up some meaningless maintenance reports.

  “I think we should isolate the specimen,” said Ender. “In case it carries some kind of alien disease.”

  “We already ascertained long ago that the Formic biology is different enough from ours that their diseases don’t affect us and vice versa.”

  “What if they came up with something new on this ship?” said Ender. “What if they died of a plague?”

  “Then it won’t affect us,” said the Giant.

  “What if this isn’t the Formics?” asked Ender. “Then all your certainty goes out the window.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the Giant. “If it’s carrying a microbe, it was just killed in the vacuum of space.”

  “There are viruses that can survive hard space,” said Ender.

  “We can’t isolate it, Ender,” said the Giant. “Residue is already all over Sergeant’s pressure suit, and we don’t have any means of isolating it anyway. We’ll just take our chances. We never thought to equip this ship to deal with alien life-forms. We’re not supposed to be exploring.”

  Ender knew the Giant was right. Ender had spoken the moment he thought of the possibility of disease, but hadn’t thought any further than that. Sloppy. Embarrassing.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Ender, “and it’ll be a plague that puts us all out of our misery.”

  “What’s gotten into you!” demanded Carlotta.

  The Giant supplied the answer. “Ender just found out that there’s no way to cure any of us of our little genetic self-destruct mechanism. Not without losing our intellectual prowess. And probably not even then. It can’t be done.”

  “That’s how to break it to them,” said Ender. “Just blurt it out.”

  “I tried saying it to you gently a month ago,” said the Giant, “and you didn’t believe me.”

  Carlotta looked devastated. “So there’s no hope.”

  “We’ll all max out like the Giant,” said Ender, “and then we’ll die.”

  “You can put a lot of life into the next fifteen years,” said the Giant. “I did.”

  “But you weren’t cooped up in a starship a trillion kilometers from the nearest human beings,” said Carlotta bitterly. “This isn’t a life.”

  “Yes it is,” said the Giant. “It’s the one you have. Now get busy. Sergeant will be back in a minute, and we have to take this creature apart and analyze it. And keep this in mind, please: Somebody or something on that ship parked it in geosynchronous orbit. Until we know who or what did that, we have no idea what kind of danger or opportunity we’ve run into here.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Show and Tell

  When Bean was talking to them about science or history or engineering, he was hard-pressed to stay ahead of them. After all, Bean had spent his childhood learning only about the military, and his adult years—if they could be called that—actually leading troops in battle, or trying to stay one step ahead of Achilles. Solving real-world problems.

  Here on the Herodotus he hadn’t had that much of a head start on the children. With three of them pursuing their own lines of inquiry, it was all Bean could do to track what they were doing and learning while trying to do his own research along lines they weren’t pursuing. Fortunately, the kids didn’t think it was a race. They took time to play. Bean had no such luxury.

  In all these intellectual pursuits, they spoke to him, and he spoke to them, as equals. They were learning together, teaching each other. And they felt that equality. They had no idea that they were children.

  Calling him the Giant. Trying to hide from him. He understood the desire for privacy. He understood all the resentment—he agreed with it. How much had he hated Volescu when he finally understood just what his experiment had done to him?

  They didn’t understand how childish their reactions were. They felt like people, not children. Children never do understand their own childishness.

  Then again, it’s not as if children felt any emotions that adults didn’t also feel. Children simply hadn’t learned to hide their feelings as well as adults—they weren’t as advanced at lying.

  But their childishness amounted to more than that. They hadn’t learned to restrain the influence their feelings had over their actions. Wasn’t that the definition of adulthood? That you wanted one thing, but did another because you knew what was right and good, and wanted to do the right and the good more than you wanted to do what you wanted.

  The long view, that’s what children didn’t have. Yet if he challenged the children on this point, they’d be baffled. They took the long view! They just didn’t understand how “the long view” should apply to their immediate decisions.

  And why should they? They’d learn moderation and self-control the way children always did—by bumping up against another child’s immoderate, uncontrolled behavior. Meanwhile, though, Bean was afraid for them. Because he really didn’t have long to live. He could feel the labored beating of his heart all the time; he could hardly sleep for how his heart kept lurching in his chest. He would die long before they were mature enough to restrain their impulses, long before they had learned how to get along.

  They all thought they understood each other, and in many ways they did. What none of them was capable of understanding was their own character. They were so young, they still believed that the motive they knew about was the real reason for their actions. Adults could say, No, I won’t say that, because I’m really just envious, there’s nothing actually wrong with what he did. But the child wouldn’t be aware of the envy, only the anger, so the criticism, the insult, the gibe would be spoken and the damage done. Trust broken.

  They could not break trust with each other. They had to be able to count on each other or they had no future.

  But if they could stay alive and keep working together, what a future they had! Bean could not begin to explain to them what he had in mind. Well, he could, of course, but it would take away the last of their childhood, and they would feel the oppression of knowing that their whole future was mapped out for them.

  They had so little future, individually; but so much future, as the founders and builders of a new kind of human species.

  But if they couldn’t solve the problem of giantism and early death, their new species was fated to die just as they began to taste of adulthood. It would be a species trapped in perpetual childhood or, at best, adolescence. No, at worst. Volatile, rejecting roles forced on them by the needs of others—how could you found a new civilization based on the choices of adolescents? They rarely built anything, they just broke things.

  Meanwhile, though, when they were interested in a problem, it was wonderful to watch how their minds worked. Tiny hands, small even for six-year-olds, grasping instruments, typing instructions, manipulating data in the holospace; and their minds, leaping to conclusions—right ones, usually—and grasping the implications of those ideas. Like being in the room with three Newtons.

  Newtons and Einsteins who were selfish with the utter egotism of childhood. And it would always be thus.

  Maybe failure is the best option. Maybe if we don’t survive, maybe if the creatures on this ship destroy us, it will be better for the human race. Because what my children and I are creating here is a race of powerful children, filled with spite and fear and self-pity.

  All I can do is help them see a standard of behavior better than the one that comes naturally to them. They’ll either embrace it or not. I can’t control it.

  The convenient thing was that the children had their own self-chosen specialties. While Ender analyzed the half-exploded corpse of the alien rat-crab, Carlotta and Cincinnatus made repeated trips to the alien vessel in the Puppy. They did not return to the airlock. Instead, with Sergeant to protect her in case the ship started trying to defend itself and repel their tiny invasion, Carlotta opened all the maintenance hatches and took measurements and charted wiring and did whatever other engineering tasks were within her reach to figure out how the ship worked and, if possible, get some idea of what awaited them inside.

  Both projects were getting fascinating results; Bean checked in on them every hour or so, and kept the audio channels on so that if they said anything, he could respond, just so they thought he was looking over their shoulders.

  He wasn’t, though. He had a project of his own. He was using the Herodotus’s instruments and drones to probe the planet they were orbiting.

  It had an oxygen atmosphere. That meant that the bacterial revolution had taken place in the large oceans, and substantial plant life had moved onto the land. Scans in various locations showed no woody plants, mostly ground-huggers and ferns and fungi. Gravity of 1.2 gees on other worlds had not prevented the development of woody stems, leading to massive trunks, so the absence of wood on this world suggested that it was very young.

  And there was no trace of animal life. Not even insects, not even worms, though that might be a function of the kinds of probes he was able to send.

  That meant the planet was ripe for a takeover by a colony, with no worries about native animals; by a Starways Congress edict, plants were only required to be preserved as seeds, samples, and data, not in situ; animals changed everything, and large preserves, usually whole continents, had to be set apart to allow evolution to take its course.

  What the children could not know was that the presence of the alien ship was mere happenstance, though if two ships were to meet in space, it was far, far more likely to happen near a habitable planet than anywhere else. Bean had already been heading here. As soon as the ship’s sensors determined that there was a planet with an atmosphere in the goldilocks zone, he had bent the course of the ship ever so slightly to bring it to this location.

  If the alien ship hadn’t drawn them, Bean would have suggested that they stop and investigate for the sake of pure science. Because if one thing was clear to him, it was that these children could not spend their lives in this ship. They needed a world. They needed a project to engage them. They needed a place where they could create children in vitro and raise them as fast as the artificial wombs on the ship could produce them.

  And here Carlotta thought she had a complete map and a complete inventory of everything on the ship.

  But Petra and Bean had planned from the start that whether or not a cure was found for the fatal giantism, their brilliant children needed a home, a place where they could develop their new genotype in safety. An uncharted world.