"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."

"Too close," said Ender. "Not enough room for the newcomers to develop their own culture. So close that if they became envious of Falstaff village, they might try to take it over."

"Why would they do that?"

"Because they're human," said Ender. "And, specifically, because then they'd have people who knew everything that we know and can do everything we do."

"But they'd still be our people," said Abra.

"Not for long," said Ender. "Now that the villages are separate, the Falstaffians will start thinking about what's good for Falstaff. They might resent Miranda for thinking we should be their boss, and maybe they'd want to join these new people voluntarily."

Abra thought about that for about ten clicks. "What would be wrong with that?" he said.

This time it took Ender a moment of thought before he was able to answer. "Ah, Falstaff joining the new people voluntarily. Well, I don't know if anything would be wrong with it. I just know that what I want to happen is for all the villages—including the new one—to be separate enough to develop their own traditions and cultures, and far enough apart that they won't fight over the same resources, yet close enough to intermarry and trade. I'm hoping that there's some perfect distance apart that will make it so they don't start fighting each other, or at least not for a long time."

"As long as we have you as governor, we'll just win anyway," said Abra.

"I don't care who wins," said Ender. "It's having a war at all that would be terrible."

"That's not how you felt when you beat the formics!"

"No," said Ender. "When the survival of the human race is at stake, you can't help but care who wins. But in a war between colonists on this planet, why would I care which side won? Either way, there'd be killing and loss and grief and hate and bitter memories and the seeds of wars to come. And both sides would be human, so no matter what, humans would lose. And lose and keep on losing. Abra, I sometimes say prayers, did you know that? Because my parents prayed. I sometimes talk to God even though I don't know anything about him. I ask him: Let the wars end."

"They have ended," said Abra. "On earth. The Hegemon united the whole world and nobody's at war anywhere."

"Yes," said Ender. "Wouldn't it be ridiculous if they finally got peace on Earth and we just started up the whole warfare thing again here on Shakespeare?"

"The Hegemon is your brother, right?" asked Abra.

"He's Valentine's brother," said Ender.

"But she's your sister," said Abra.

"He's Valentine's brother," said Ender, and his face looked sort of dark and Abra didn't ask him what in the world he was talking about.

On the third day of their trip, as the sun got to about two hands above the western horizon—time on clocks and watches meant nothing here, since they had all been made on Earth for Earth days, and nobody liked any of the schemes for dividing up the Shakespearian day into hours and minutes—Ender finally stopped the skimmer on the crest of a hill overlooking a broad valley with overgrown orchards and fields with forty years' growth of trees in them. There were tunnel entrances in some of the surrounding hills, and chimneys that showed there had been manufacturing here.

"This place looks as likely as any," said Ender. So, just like that, the site of the new colony was chosen.

They pitched the tent and Ender fixed dinner and he and Abra walked down into the valley together and looked inside a couple of the caves. No bugs, of course, since this wasn't that kind of settlement, but there was machinery of a kind that they hadn't seen before and Abra wanted to plunge right in and figure it all out but Ender said, "I promise you'll be the first one to get a look at these machines, but not now. Not tonight. That's not our mission. We have to lay out a colony. I have to determine where the fields will be, the water source—we have to find the formic sewer system, we have to see if we can wake up their generating equipment. All the things that Sel Menach's generation did, long before you were born. But before too long, we'll have time for the formic machines. And then, believe me, they'll let you spend days and weeks on them."

Abra wanted to wheedle like a little kid, but he knew Ender was right. And so he accepted Ender's promise and stayed with him for the rest of that night's walk.

The sun had set before they got back to camp—they had only a faint light in the sky when they turned in to sleep. This time their conversation consisted of Ender asking Abra to tell stories that his parents had told him, his father's Mayan stories and his mother's Chinese stories and the Catholic stories they both had in common, and that took until Abra could hardly keep his eyes open, and then they slept.

The next day, Ender and Abra marked out fields and laid out streets, recording everything on the holomaps in Ender's field desk, which were automatically transmitted to the orbiting computer. No need even to call Papa on the satfone, because he would get all this information automatically and he could see the work they were doing.

Late in the afternoon, Ender sighed and said, "You know, this is actually kind of boring."

"Really?" said Abra sarcastically.

"Even slaves get time off now and then."

"Who?" Abra was afraid this was some school-learning thing that he didn't know because he couldn't read and stopped going to school.

"You have no idea how happy it makes me that you don't know what I'm talking about."

Well, if Ender was happy, Abra was happy.

"For the next hour, I say we do whatever we want," said Ender.

"Like what?" asked Abra.

"What, you mean I have to decide for you what you think would be fun?"