"No, Abra," said Ender. "We really are what our genes make us. We really have whatever abilities they give. It's what we start with. Just because his genes were shaped deliberately, by a criminal scientist, doesn't mean they're any less his than our genes, which are shaped by random selection between the genes of our father and the genes of our mother. I was shaped deliberately, too. Not by illegal science, but my parents chose each other partly because they were each so brilliant, and then the International Fleet asked them to have a third child because my older brother and sister were so brilliant but still were not quite what the I.F. wanted. Does that mean that I'm not really me? Who would I be, if my parents hadn't given birth to me?"

Abra was having a hard time following the conversation. It made him sleepy. He yawned.

Then Ender came up with a comparison Abra understood. "It's like saying, What would this pump be, if it weren't a pump?"

"That's just dumb. It is a pump. If it weren't a pump, it wouldn't be anything at all."

"So now you understand."

Abra whispered the next question. "So you're like my father, and you don't believe people have souls?"

"No," said Ender. "I don't know about souls. I just know that while we're alive, in these bodies, we can only do what our body can do. My parents believe in souls. I've known people who were absolutely sure. Smart people. Good people. So just because I don't understand it doesn't mean I'm sure it can't be true."

"That's like what Papa says."

"See? He doesn't disbelieve in souls."

"But Mom talks like. she says that she can look in my eyes and see into my soul."

"Maybe she can."

"Like you can look into a gold bug larva and see what it's thinking?"

"Maybe," said Ender. "I can't see what it's thinking, though. I can only see what it pushes into my mind. I try to push thoughts into its mind, but I don't think I'm actually pushing. I think the ability to communicate by thoughts belongs completely to the larva. It pushes things into my mind, and then takes from my mind whatever I show it. But I'm not doing anything."

"Then how can you be better at it than other people, if you're not doing anything?"

"If I'm really better — and remember, your father and Po can't really know whether I am or not — then maybe it's because I have a mind that it's easier for a gold bug to get inside of."

"Why?" asked Abra. "Why would a human being born on Earth have a brain that was easier for a gold bug to get inside of?"

"I don't know," said Ender. "That's one of the things I came to this world to find out."

"That's not even true," said Abra. "You couldn't have come here to find out why your brain was easier for the buggers to understand because you didn't know your brain could do that until you got here!"

Ender laughed. "You just don't have any tolerance for kuso, do you?"

"What's kuso?"

"Mierda," said Ender. "Bullshit."

"Were you lying to me?"

"No," said Ender. "Here's the thing. I had dreams when I was fighting the war on Eros. I didn't know I was fighting the war, but I was. I had one dream where a bunch of formics were vivisecting me. Only instead of cutting open my body, they were cutting up my memories and displaying them like holographs and trying to make sense of them. Why did I have that dream, Abra? After I won the war and found out that I had really been fighting the hive queens and not just a computer simulation, or my teacher, I thought back to some of my dreams and I wondered. Were they trying just as hard to understand me as I was trying to understand them? Was that dream because on some level I was aware that they were getting inside my head, and it frightened me?"

"Wow," said Abra. "But if they could read your mind, why couldn't they beat you?"

"Because my victories weren't in my mind," said Ender. "That's the weird thing. I thought through the battles, yes, but I didn't see them like Bean did. Instead, I saw the people. The soldiers under me. I knew what those kids were capable of. So I put them in a situation where their decisions would be crucial, told them what I wanted them to do, and then I trusted them to make the decisions that would achieve my objective. I didn't actually know what they'd do. So being inside my head would never show the hive queens what I was planning, because I had no plan, not of a kind they could use against me."

"Is that why you thought that way? So they couldn't read your plans?"

"I didn't know the game was real. I've only thought of these things afterward. Trying to understand."

"But if that's true, then you were communicating with the buggers — formics — hive queens all along."

"I don't know. Maybe they were trying, but they couldn't make sense of it. I'm sure they didn't push anything into my head, or at least not clearly enough for me to understand it. And what could they take from my thoughts? I don't know. Maybe it didn't happen at all. Maybe I only dreamed about them because I kept thinking about them. What will I do when I face real hive queens? If this simulation were a real battle, how would a hive queen think? That sort of thing."

"What does Papa think?" asked Abra. "He's really smart and he knows more than anybody about the gold bugs now."

"I haven't discussed this with your father."

"Oh." Abra digested that thought in silence.

"Abra," said Ender. "I haven't talked about this with anybody."

"Oh." Abra felt overwhelmed by Ender's trust. He could not speak.

"Let's go to sleep," said Ender. "I want us to be wide awake and on our way at first light. This new colony needs to be several days' journey away, even by skimmer. And once we find the general area, I have to mark out specific places for buildings and fields and a landing strip for the shuttle and all that."

"Maybe we'll find another gold bug cave."

"Maybe," said Ender. "Or some other metal. Like the bauxite cave you found."

"Just because the aluminum bugs were all dead doesn't mean we won't find another cave that has living bugs, right?" said Abra.

"We might have found the only survivors," said Ender.

"But Papa says the odds are against that. He says it would be too co-incidental if the longest-surviving gold bugs just happened to be the ones that Uncle Sel and Po happened to discover."

"Your father's not a mathematician," said Ender. "He doesn't understand probability."

"What do you mean?"

"Sel and Po did find the cave with living gold bug larvae in it. Therefore the chance of their finding it, in this causal universe, is one hundred percent. Because it happened."

"Oh."

"But since we don't know how many other bug caves there are, or where they're situated, any guess at how likely we are to find one isn't about probability — it's just a guess. There's not enough data for mathematical probabilities."

"We know there was a second one," said Abra. "So it's not like we know nothing."

"But from the data we actually have, one cave with living gold bugs and one with dead aluminum ones, what would you conclude?"

"That we have as much chance of finding live ones as dead. That's what Father says."

"But that isn't really true," said Ender. "Because in the cave Sel and Po found, the bugs weren't thriving. They had almost died out. And in the other cave, they had died out. So now what are the odds?"

Abra thought hard about it. "I don't know," he said. "It depends on how big each colony was, and whether they would think of eating their own parents' bodies like these bugs did, and maybe other stuff I don't even know about."

"Now you're thinking like a scientist," said Ender. "Now, please think like a sleeping person. We have a long day tomorrow."

They traveled all day the next day, and it all began to look the same to Abra. "What's wrong with any of these places?" said Abra. "The. formics farmed there, and they did fine. And a landing strip could go there."