"I'll try to keep Po from marrying Alessandra before you get home," said Mom.
"I don't care," said Abra. "They don't have to wait for me. It's not like they'll need me for the wedding night."
"Sometimes your face just needs slapping, Abra," said Mom. "But Ender puts up with you. The boy's a saint. Santo Andre."
"San Ender," said Abra.
"His Christian name is Andrew," said Mom.
"But the name that makes him holy is Ender," said Abra.
"My son the theologian. And you say you don't think you know everything!" Mother shook her heads, apparently disgusted with him.
Abra never understood how such arguments began, or why they usually ended with adults shaking their heads and turning away from him. He took their ideas seriously (except for their ideas about machinery); why couldn't they do the same for him?
Ender did. And he was going to spend days--weeks, maybe--with Ender Wiggin. Just the two of them.
They loaded the skimmer with supplies for three weeks, though Ender said he didn't think they'd be gone that long. Po came along to see them off, Alessandra clinging to him like a fungus, and he said, "Try not to be a nuisance, Abra."
"You're jealous that he's taking me and not you," said Abra.
Alessandra spoke up. A talking fungus, apparently. "Po doesn't want to go anywhere." Meaning, of course, that he couldn't bear to be away from her for a single second.
Po's face stayed blank, however, so that Abra knew perfectly well that while he might be completely imasen over the girl, he would still rather go on the trip with Ender than stay behind with her. Contrary to Mother's opinion of him, however, Abra said nothing at all. He didn't even wink at Po. He just kept his face exactly as blank as Po's. It was the Mayan way of laughing at somebody right in front of them, without being rude or starting a fight.
The journey was a strange experience for Abra. At first, of course, they simply skimmed along above the fields of home. Familiar ground. Then they followed the road to Falstaff, which was due west of Miranda; this was also familiar, since Abra's married sister Alma lived there with her husband, that big stupid eemo Simon, who always tickled younger children until they wet themselves and then made fun of them for peeing themselves like babies. Abra was relieved that Ender only paused to greet the mayor of the village and then moved on without any further delay.
They camped the first night in a grassy glen, sheltered from the wind that was coming up. It brought a storm in the night, but they were snug inside a tent, and without Abra even asking, Ender told him stories about Battle School and what the game was like, in the battleroom, and how it wasn't really a game at all, it was training and testing them for command. "Some people are born to lead," said Ender. "They just think that way, whether they want to lead or not. While others are born craving authority, but they have no ability to lead. It's very sad."
"Why would people want to do something they're not good at?" Abra tried to imagine himself wanting to be a scholar, in spite of his reading problem. It was just absurd.
"Leading is a strange thing," said Ender. "People see it happening, but they don't have a clue how it works."
"I know," said Abra. "Most people are like that with machines. But they try to fix them anyway and make everything worse."
"So you understand exactly," said Ender. "They don't see what a leader does, they just see how everybody respects a good leader, and they want to have the attention and respect without understanding what you actually have to do to earn it."
"Everybody respects you," said Abra.
"And yet I do almost nothing," said Ender. "I have to learn other people's jobs well enough to help them at their work, because I just don't have enough work of my own to do. Leading this colony is too easy to be a fulltime job."
"Easy for you," said Abra.
"I suppose," said Ender. "But then, even when I'm doing other jobs, I'm still doing my job as governor. Because I'm always getting to know people. You can't lead people you don't know or at least understand. In war, for instance, if you don't know what your soldiers can do, how can you lead them into battle and hope to succeed? The enemy, too. You have to know the enemy."
Abra thought about that as they lay there in the darkness inside the tent. He thought about it so long that maybe he even dreamed for a while, about Ender sitting down and talking to the buggers--only the newcomers called them formics--and then exchanging Christmas gifts with them. But maybe he only imagined it while awake, because he was awake when he whispered, "Is that why you spend so much time with the gold bugs?"
It was as if Ender had been thinking about the same thing, because he didn't give one of those impatient adult answers, like, What are you talking about? He knew that Abra was still holding to the thread of their prior conversation. In fact, Ender sounded sleepy, and Abra wondered if he had been dozing and Abra's voice had woken him and still Ender knew what he was talking about.
"Yes," said Ender. "I understood the hive queens well enough to defeat them. But not well enough to understand why they let me."
"They let you?"
"No, they fought hard against me, to prevent my victory. But they also brought themselves together where I could kill them all in a single battle. And they knew I had the weapon that could do it. A weapon they understood better than we did, because we got it from them
. We still don't fully understand the science of it. But they must have. And yet they gathered together and waited for me. I don't understand it. So...I try communicating with the gold bug larvae. To get some idea of how the hive queens thought."
"Po says nobody's better at it than you."