IGMS Issue 8 (26 page)

Morgan read the letter, filled with rage and dread at first, but gradually taking a very different attitude. How could they imagine that he planned anything other than to oversee Wiggin's orderly assumption of power? How dare Chamrajnagar tell them anything that would lead them to think he intended anything else?

He would have to send them a very stiff letter informing them of his disappointment that they would treat him in this high-handed and completely unnecessary way.

No, if he sent a letter it would go into the record. He had to keep his record clean. And they were going to make a lot of hooplah about his being the first captain of a colony ship to complete his mission -- that would be a huge plus for his career.

He had to act as if this letter didn't exist.

The crowd was cheering. They had been cheering and clapping over and over again while Morgan read the letter. He looked out to see that they were now completely surrounding Wiggin, none of them even glancing at the shuttle, at the ramp, at Admiral Morgan. Now that he was looking at them, he could see that everyone was gazing intently at Ender Wiggin, devotedly, eagerly. Every word he said, they cheered at, or laughed, or wept.

Incredibly, they loved him.

Even without this letter, even without any intervention from IFCom or ColMin, Morgan lost this power struggle from the moment Ender Wiggin appeared in full uniform and called the veterans by name and invoked their memories of the dead. Wiggin knew how to win their hearts, and he did it without deception or coercion. All he did was care enough to learn their names and faces and remember them. All he did was lead them in victory forty-one years ago. When Morgan was in charge of a supply operation in the asteroid belt.

For all I know, this letter is a complete bluff. Wiggin wrote it himself. Just to keep me distracted while he carried out his public relations coup. If I decided to be obstructive, if I decided to work behind his back to undermine their confidence in him, to destroy him as governor so that I would
have
to step in and ...

They people cheered again, as Wiggin invoked the name of the acting governor.

No, Morgan would never be able to undermine their confidence in Wiggin. They wanted him to be their governor. While to them, Morgan was nothing. A stranger. An interloper. They weren't in the I.F. anymore. They didn't care about authority or rank. They were citizens of this colony now, but they had the legend of how they were founded. The great Ender Wiggin, by his victory, slew all the formics on the surface of this world, opening the land to these humans so they could come and dwell here. And now Wiggin had come among them in person. It was like the second coming of Christ. Morgan had zero chance now.

His aides were watching him intently. They had no idea what was in the letter, but he was afraid that his face might not have been as impassive as he'd meant, while he was reading it; in fact, his impassivity would be a strong message in itself. So now Morgan smiled at them. "Well, so much for our script. It seems Governor Wiggin had his own plans for how this day would go. It would have been nice of him to inform us, but ... there's no accounting for the pranks that boys will play."

His aides chuckled, because they knew he expected them to. Morgan knew perfectly well that they understood exactly what had happened here. Not the threats in the letter, but Wiggin's complete triumph. Nevertheless, Morgan would act as if this was exactly how things were always meant to turn out, and they would join him in acting that way, and ship's discipline would be maintained.

Morgan turned to the microphone. In a lull in the cheering and shouting of the crowd, he spoke, taking a friendly, joking tone. "Men and women of Shakespeare Colony, please forgive the interruption. This was not how the program for today was supposed to go."

The crowd turned toward him, distractedly, even annoyed. They immediately turned back to Wiggin, who faced Morgan, not with the jaunty smile of victory, but with the same solemn face that he always presented on the ship. The little bastard. He'd been plotting this the whole time, and never showed a sign of it. Even when Morgan looked over the vids of him in his quarters, even when he watched Wiggin with Dorabella's daughter, the boy never let his pretense lapse, not for a second.

Thank the stars he'll be staying on this world, and not returning to be my rival for preeminence in the I.F.

"I won't take but a moment more of your time," said Morgan. "My men will immediately unload all the equipment we brought with us, and the marines will stay behind to assist Governor Wiggin however he might desire. I will return to the ship and will follow Governor Wiggin's instructions as to the order and timing of the transfer of materials and persons from the ship to the ground. My work here is done. I commend you for your achievements here, and thank you for your attention."

There was scattered applause, but he knew that most of them had tuned him out and were merely waiting for him to be done in order to get back to lionizing Andrew Wiggin.

Ah well. When he got back to the ship, Dorabella would be there. It was the best thing he had ever done, marrying that woman.

Of course, he had no idea how she would take the news that she and her daughter would not be colonists after all -- that they would be staying with him on his voyage back to Earth. But how could they complain? Life in this colony would be primitive and hard. Life as the wife of an admiral -- the very admiral who was first to bring new settlers and supplies to a colony world -- would be a pleasant one, and Dorabella would thrive in such social settings; the woman really was brilliant at it. And the daughter -- well, she could go to university and have a normal life. No, not normal, exceptional -- because Morgan's position would be such that he could guarantee her the finest opportunities.

Morgan had already turned to go back inside the shuttle, when he heard Wiggin's voice calling to him. "Admiral Morgan! I don't think the people here have understood what you have done for us all, and they need to hear it."

Since Morgan had the words of Graff's and Wuri's letter fresh in his mind, he could not help but hear irony and bad intent in Wiggin's words. He almost decided to keep moving back into the shuttle, as if he hadn't heard the boy.

But the boy was the governor, and Morgan had his own command to think about. If he ignored the boy now, it would look to his own men like an acknowledgment of defeat -- and a rather cowardly one at that. So, to preserve his own position of respect, he turned to hear what the boy had to say.

"Thank you, sir, for bringing us all safely here. Not just me, but the colonists who will join with the original settlers and native-born of this world. You have retied the links between the home of the human race and these far-flung children of the species."

Then Wiggin turned back to the colonists. "Admiral Morgan and his crew and these marines you see here did not come to fight a war and save the human race, and none of them will die at the hands of our enemies. But they made one great sacrifice that is identical to one made by the original settlers here. They cut themselves loose from all that they knew and all that they loved and cast themselves out into space and time to find a new life among the stars. And every new colonist on that ship has given up everything they had, betting on their new life here among you."

The colonists spontaneously began applauding, a few at first, but soon all of them, and then cheering -- for Admiral Morgan, for the marines, for the unmet colonists still on the ship.

And the Wiggin boy, damn him, was saluting. Morgan had no choice but to return the salute and accept the gratitude and respect of the colonists as a gift from him.

Then Wiggin strode toward the shuttle -- but not to say anything more to Morgan. Instead, he walked toward the commander of the marine squad and called out to him by name. Had the boy learned the names of all of Morgan's crew and marines as well?

"I want you to meet your counterpart," Wiggin said loudly. "The man who commanded the marines with the original expedition." He led him to an old man, and they saluted each other, and in a few moments the whole place was chaotic with marines being swarmed by old men and women and young ones as well.

Morgan knew now that little of what Wiggin had done was really about him. Yes, he had to make sure Morgan knew his place. He accomplished that in the first minute, when he distracted Morgan with the letter while he showed that he knew all the original settlers by name, and acted -- with justification -- as the commander of veterans meeting with them forty-one years after their great victory.

But Wiggin's main purpose was to shape the attitude that this community would have toward Morgan, toward the marines, toward the starship's crew, and, most important, toward the new colonists. He brought them together with a knowledge of their common sacrifice.

And the kid claimed that he didn't like making speeches. What a liar. He said exactly what needed saying. Next to him, Morgan was a novice. No, a fumbling incompetent.

Morgan made his way back inside the shuttle, pausing only to tell the waiting officers that Governor Wiggin would be giving them their orders about unloading the cargo.

Then he went to the bathroom, tore the letter into tiny pieces, chewed them into pulp, and spat the wad into the toilet. The taste of paper and ink nauseated him, and he retched a couple of times before he got control of himself.

Then he went into his communications center and had lunch. He was still eating it when a lieutenant commander supervised a couple of the natives in bringing in a fine mess of fresh fruits and vegetables, just as Wiggin had predicted. It was delicious, and afterward, Morgan napped until one of his aides woke him to tell him the unloading was finished, they had taken aboard a vast supply of excellent foodstuffs and fresh water, and they were about to take off to return to the ship.

"The Wiggin boy will make a fine governor, don't you think?" Morgan said.

"Yes, sir, I believe so, sir," said the aide.

"And to think I imagined that he might need help from me to get started." Morgan laughed. "Well, I have a ship to run. Let's get back to it!"

My dad likes to say there are two things people should never see being made -- laws and sausages. I guess that means it can get pretty ugly when people are making laws, like in congress or at the school board. Dad took me to a school board meeting once, when they were fighting about whether to keep a certain book in the library. Let me tell you -- it got pretty ugly. These parents who had never even read the book were shouting about how bad it was because it had a word in it that I hear on the school bus all the time. Heck, I've heard a lot of parents use that word, too.

But this isn't about laws. See, most of the time when Dad shares that quote, it's right before we eat sausages. That got me thinking. What do they put in those things? With a whole piece of meat like a steak or spare ribs, I know exactly what it was before it got sliced up and wrapped in plastic. Even with hamburger, you can sort of see that it started out as meat. But sausages? Who knows. I guess it doesn't matter. Whatever is in there, they taste good -- that's for sure.

I didn't think I'd ever get a chance to find out. But then our class took a field trip to the Wexler Museum of Traditional Arts and Crafts. Yawn. Huge yawn. Arty-crafty-yawn. When I got off the bus, I noticed that the Wexler Museum was right next door to Philo's Phantastic Sausages.

Bingo. Or maybe I should say,
how phortunate
.

I ducked out of the line when we went into the museum. That was easy to do because we were with Mr. Exmire and Ms. Grunbalther, and they were always flirting with each other. Which reminds me of a third thing nobody should ever see being made -- Exmire and Grunbalther making meaningful glances at each other. Wretch.

So while these two fine adults educators were leading my eager classmates into a hall filled with painted crockery, ceramic tea pots, and fascinating textiles, I ducked around the other side of the bus and slunk off toward Philo's Phantastic Sausages in search of wisdom and enlightenment.