And there it was: The tacit recognition that Ender wasn't going home. That he was never going to lead a normal life on Earth.
One by one the other kids got their orders, each saying good-bye before they left. It was increasingly awkward with each one, because Ender was more and more a stranger to them. He didn't hang out with them. If he happened to join in a conversation, he didn't stay long and never really engaged.
It wasn't a deliberate choice, he just wasn't interested in doing the things they did or talking about what they discussed. They were full of their studies, their return to Earth. What they'd do. How they'd find a way to get together again after they'd been home for a while. How much money they'd get as severance pay from the military. What they might choose as a career. How their families might have changed.
None of that applied to Ender. He couldn't pretend that it did, or that he had a future. Least of all could he talk about what really preyed on his mind. They wouldn't understand.
He didn't understand it himself. He had been able to let go of everything else, all the things he'd concentrated on so hard for so long. Military tactics? Strategy? Not even interesting to him now. Ways that he might have avoided antagonizing Bonzo or Stilson in the first place? He had strong feelings about that, but no rational ideas, so he didn't waste time trying to think it through. He let go of it, just the way he let go of his deep knowledge of everyone in his jeesh, his little army of brilliant kids whom he led through the training that turned out to be the war.
Once, knowing and understanding those kids had been part of his work, had been essential to victory. During that time he had even come to think of them as his friends. But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them. Now he had no use for them--not his choice, there simply wasn't a purpose to be served by keeping the group together. They didn't, as a group, exist. They were just a bunch of kids who had been on a long, difficult camping trip together, that's how Ender saw them now. They had pulled together to make it back to civilization, but now they'd all go home to their families. They weren't connected now. Except in memory.
So Ender had let go of them all. Even the ones who were still here. He saw how it hurt them--the ones who had wanted to be closer than mere pals--when he didn't let things change, didn't let them into his thoughts. He couldn't explain to them that he wasn't keeping them out, that there was simply no way they'd understand what it was that occupied him whenever he wasn't forced to think about something else:
The hive queens.
It made no sense, what the formics had done. They weren't stupid. Yet they had made the strategic mistake of grouping all their queens--not "their" queens, they were the queens, the queens were the formics--they had all gathered on their home planet, where Ender's use of the M.D. Device could--and did--destroy them utterly, all at once.
Mazer had explained that the hive queens must have gathered on their home planet years before they could have known that the human fleet had the M.D. Device. They knew--from the way Mazer had defeated their main expedition to Earth's star system--that their greatest weakness was that if you found the hive queen and killed her, you had killed the whole army. So they withdrew from all their forward positions, put the hive queens together on their home world, and then protected that world with everything they had.
Yes, yes, Ender understood that.
But Ender had used the M.D. Device early on in the invasion of the formic worlds, to destroy a formation of ships. The hive queens had instantly understood the capabilities of the weapon and never allowed their ships to get close enough together for the M.D. Device to be able to set up a self-sustaining reaction.
So: Once they knew that the weapon existed, and that humans were willing to use it, why did they stay on that single planet? They must have known that the human fleet was coming. As Ender won battle after battle, they must have known that the possibility of their defeat existed. It would have been easy for them to get onto starships and disperse from their home planet. Before that last battle began, they could all have been out of range of the M.D. Device.
Then we would have had to hunt them down, ship by ship, queen by queen. Their planets would still be inhabited by the formics, and so they could have fought us in bloody confrontations on every world, meanwhile building new ships, launching new fleets against us.
But they had stayed. And died.
Was it fear? Maybe. But Ender didn't think so. The hive queens had bred themselves for war. All the speculations of the scientists who had studied the anatomy and molecular structure of the formic corpses left over from the Second Formic War led to that conclusion: The formics were created, first and foremost, to fight and kill. That implied that they had evolved in a world where such fighting was necessary.
The best guess--at least the one that made the most sense to Ender--was that they weren't fighting some predatory species on their home world. Like humans, they would surely have wiped out any really threatening predator early on. No, they had evolved to fight each other. Queens fighting queens, spawning vast armies of formics and developing tools and weapons for them, each of them vying to be the dominant--or sole surviving--queen.
Yet somehow they had gotten over it. They had stopped fighting each other.
Was it before they had developed spaceflight and co
lonized other worlds? Or was it one particular queen who developed near-lightspeed ships and created colonies and then used the power that she had developed to crush the others?
It wouldn't have mattered. Her own daughters would surely have rebelled against her--it would go on and on, each new generation trying to destroy the one before. That was how hives on Earth worked, anyway--the rival queen must be driven off or killed. Only the non-reproducing workers could be allowed to stay, because they weren't rivals, they were servants.
It was like the immune system of an organism. Each hive queen had to make sure that any food their workers grew was used only to nurture her workers, her children, her mates, and herself. So any formic--queen or worker--that tried to infiltrate her territory and use her resources had to be driven off or killed.
Yet they had stopped fighting with each other and now cooperated.
If they could do that with each other, the implacable enemies that had driven each other's evolution long enough to become the brilliant sentient beings they were, then why couldn't they have done it with us? With the humans? Why couldn't they have tried to communicate with us? Made some sort of settlement with us, just as they had done with each other? Divided the galaxy between us? Live and let live?
In any of these battles, Ender knew that if he had seen a sign of an effort to communicate, he would have known instantly that it wasn't a game--there would have been no reason for the teachers to simulate any attempt to parley. They didn't regard that as Ender's business--they wouldn't train him for it. If some effort at communication had really happened, surely the adults would have stopped Ender at once, pretended that the "exercise" was over, and tried to deal with it on their own.
But the hive queens did not attempt to communicate. Nor did they use the obvious strategy of dispersal to save themselves. They had sat there, waiting for Ender to come. And then Ender had won, the only way he could: with devastating force.
It was how Ender always fought. To make sure that there was no further fighting. To use this victory to ensure that there was no more danger.
Even if I had known the war was real, I would have tried to do exactly what I did.
So in his mind he now asked the hive queens, over and over, though he knew they were dead and could not answer: Why?
Why did you decide to let me kill you?