"I can't pretend that we're not able to track you and find you."
"But you can tell them that you're showing me the respect of not trying. At my request."
"Yes," said Ender. "I'll do that."
There was little more to say. They signed off and Sel went back to bed. He slept easily. And, as usual, woke just when he wanted to--an hour before dawn.
Po was waiting for him.
"I already said good-bye to Mom and Dad," he said.
"Good," said Sel.
"Thanks for letting me come."
"Could I have stopped you?"
"Yes," said Po. "I won't disobey you, Uncle Sel." All the grandchildren generation called him that.
Sel nodded. "Good. Have you eaten?"
"Yes."
"Then let's go. I won't need to eat till noon."
You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind. You see things that you never saw before. Things never seen by the eyes of human beings. And you see with your particular eyes, which were trained to see not just a plant, but this plant, filling this ecological niche, but with this and that difference.
And when your eyes have been trained for forty years to be familiar with the patterns of a new world, then you are Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who first saw the world of animalcules through a microscope; you are Carl Linnaeus, first sorting creatures into families, genera, species; you are Darwin, sorting lines of evolutionary passage from one species to another.
So it was not a rapid journey. Sel had to force himself to move with any kind of haste.
"Don't let me linger so long over every new thing I see," he told Po. "It would be too humiliating for my great expedition to take me only ten kilometers south of the colony. I must cross the first range of mountains, at least."
"And how will I keep you from lingering, when you have me photographing and sampling and storing and recording notes?"
"Refuse to do it. Tell me to get my bony knees up off the ground and start walking."
"All my life I'm taught to obey my elders and watch and learn. I'm your assistant. Your apprentice."
"You're just hoping we don't travel very far so when I die you don't have so long to carry the corpse."
"I thought my father told you--if you actually die, I'm supposed to call for help and observe your decomposition process."
"That's right. You only carry me if I'm breathing."
"Or do you want me to start now? Hoist you onto my shoulders so you can't discover another whole family of plants every fifty meters?"
"For a respectful, obedient young man, you can be very sarcastic."
"I was only slightly sarcastic. I can do better if you want."
"This is good. I've been so busy arguing with you, we've gone this far without my noticing anything."
"Except the dogs have found something."
It turned out to be a small family of the horned reptile that seemed to fill the bunny rabbit niche--a big-toothed leaf-eater that hopped, and would only fight if cornered. The horns did not seem to Sel to be weapons--too blunt--and when he imagined a mating ritual in which these creatures leapt into the air to butt their heads together, he could not see how it could help but scramble their brains, since their skulls were so light.
"Probably for a display of health," said Sel.