"I was thinking," said Ender, "that after such a long while, you might not want to spend the rest of your life in her fairyland. Maybe your world is better for you than her imaginary places. That's all I was thinking. She's made a lovely cocoon for you, but maybe you still want to break out of it and fly."

Alessandra stood there, her hand to her mouth. Then tears came to her eyes. "Per tutte sante," she said. "I was. doing what she wanted. I thought it was my own idea, but it was hers, it was. I wanted you to like me, I really did, that wasn't made up, but the idea of coming here. I wasn't getting away from her, I was obeying her."

"You were?" Ender said, trying to act as if he hadn't already guessed.

"She told me just what to do, how far to. " Alessandra started unbuttoning her blouse, tears flowing. She was wearing nothing under it. "What you were going to see, what you could touch, but no more.»

Ender stepped to her, embraced her again, to stop her from unbuttoning any more. Because even in this emotional moment, there was a part of him that only cared about the blouse and what would be revealed, not about the girl who was doing it.

"You do care about me," she said.

"Of course I do," said Ender.

"More than she does," she said. Her tears were dampening his shirt.

"Probably not," said Ender.

"I wonder if she cares for me at all," said Alessandra into his chest. "I wonder if I've ever been anything more than her puppet, just the way she was Grandmother's. Maybe if Mother had stayed home and hadn't married and hadn't had me, Grandmother would have been full of fairyland and beauty — because she was getting her way."

Perfect, thought Ender. Despite my own impulses, my biological distractibility, this has gone exactly right. Admiral Morgan would see that even though the sex angle didn't play according to script, Ender and Alessandra were still close, still bonding — whatever he wanted to read into it. The game was still on. Even if the romance was definitely on hold.

"The door to this room can't lock," said Ender.

"I know," she said.

"Someone might come in at any time." He thought it was best not to point out that surveillance cameras were in every room, including most particularly this one, and someone could be watching them right now.

She took the hint, pulled away from him, rebuttoned her blouse. This time all the way up to where she usually buttoned it. "You saw through me," she said.

"No," said Ender. "I saw you. Maybe your mother doesn't."

"I know she doesn't," said Alessandra. "I know it. I'm just — it's just — Admiral Morgan, that's what it is, she said she was bringing me here to find a young man with prospects, but she found an old man with even better prospects, that's what it is, and I just fit into her plans, that's all, I —»

"Don't do this," said Ender. "Your mother loves you, this wasn't cynical, she thought she was helping you get what you wanted."

"Maybe," said Alessandra. Then she laughed bitterly. "Or is this just your version of fairyland? Everybody wants me to be happy, so they construct a fake reality around me. Yes, I want to be happy, but not with a lie!"

"I'm not lying to you," said Ender.

She looked at him fiercely. "Did you desire me? At all?"

Ender closed his eyes and nodded.

"Look at me and say it."

"I wanted you," said Ender.

"And now?"

"There are lots of things I want that aren't right for me to have."

"You sound as if your mother taught you to say that."

"If I'd been raised by my mother, maybe she would have," said Ender. "But as it is, I learned that when I decided to go to Battle School, when I decided to live by the rules of that place. There are rules to everything, even if nobody made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if you're playing a different game and following those rules."

"Do you think that made sense of some kind?"

"To me it did," said Ender. "I want you. You wanted me. That's a nice thing to know. I had my first kiss."

"It wasn't bad, was it? I wasn't awful?"

"Let's put it this way," said Ender. "I haven't ruled out doing it again. Sometime in the future."

She giggled. The crying had stopped.

"I really do have work to do," said Ender. "And believe me, you woke me right up. Not sleepy at all. Very helpful."

She laughed. "I get it. Time for me to go."

"I think so," he said. "But I'll see you later. As we always do."

"Yes," said Alessandra. "I'll try not to act too giggly and strange."

"Act like yourself," said Ender. "You can't be happy if you're pretending all the time."

"Mother is."

"Which? Pretending? Or happy?"

"Pretending to be happy."

"So maybe you can grow up to be happy without having to pretend."

"Maybe," she said. And then she was gone.

Ender closed the door and sat down. He wanted to scream in frustration at thwarted desire, in rage at a mother who would send her daughter on such an errand, at Admiral Morgan for making all this necessary, at himself for being such a liar. "You can't be happy if you're pretending all the time." Well, his life certainly didn't contradict that statement. He was pretending all the time, and he certainly was not happy.

To: GovDes%ShakespeareCol@colmin.gov/voy

From: vwiggin%ShakespeareCol@colmin.gov/voy

Subj: relax about it, kid

E:

Nothing about your behavior with A should either surprise or embarrass you. If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.

— V

By the time Sel and Po had been a fortnight gone, with almost two hundred kilometers behind them, they had talked about every conceivable subject at least twice, and finally walked along in companionable silence most of the time, except when the exigencies of their journey forced them to speak.

One-sentence warnings: "Don't grab that vine, it's not secure."

Scientific speculations: "I wonder if that bright-colored froglike thing is venomous?"

"I doubt it, considering that it's a rock."

"Oh. It was so vivid I thought —»

"A good guess. And you're not a geologist, so how could you be expected to recognize a rock?"

Mostly there was nothing but their breathing, their footfalls, and the sounds and smells and sights of a new world revealing itself to the first of the human species to pass through this portion of it.

At two hundred clicks, though, it was time to stop. They had rationed carefully, but their food was half gone. They pitched a more permanent camp by a clear water source, chose a safe spot and dug a latrine, and pitched the tent with the stakes deeper and the ground more padded under the floor of it. They would be here for a week.

A week, because that's about how long they expected to be able to live on the meat of the two dogs they slaughtered that afternoon.

Sel was sorry that only two of the dogs were smart enough to extrapolate from the skins and carcasses that their human masters were no longer reliable companions. Those two left — they had to drive the other pair away with stones.

By now, like everyone else in the colony, both Sel and Po knew how to preserve meat by smoking it; they cooked only a little of the meat fresh, but kept the fire going to smoke the rest as it hung from the bending limbs of a fernlike tree. or treelike fern.

They marked out a rough circle on the satellite map they carried with them and each morning they set out in a different direction to see what they might find. Now they collected samples in earnest, and took photographs that they bounced to the orbiting transport ship for storage on the big computer there. The pictures they sent up, the test results, those were secure — they would not be lost, no matter what happened to Sel and Po.