The Last Shadow (Ender's Saga, #6)

by Orson Scott Card

The fact that Peter Wiggin was rejected by Battle School may be the most important single indicator of the inadequacy of the school’s testing procedures.

“You grew like a fungus on the outside wall of the ship,” he said. “Father scraped you off and brought you inside just before we took off from Nokonoshima.”

sometimes you have to defeat yourself a little in order to maintain your independence.

Meanwhile, our children bicker with siblings and cousins, with only a few alliances here and there among them. They are an unpromising bunch, like the children of royalty throughout history. If they aren’t already conspiring to kill us and take control of the ship, they will begin doing so any time now. After all, we did, or at least Sergeant did and tried to bully Carlotta and me into joining him. It is disturbing how similar our children are to the way we were as children. But when I suggested to Carlotta that we jettison the whole tribe of them into the cold of space, she rolled her eyes and said, “Not yet.”

Toilets were weird here anyway.

Paper? They used paper to clean up? They couldn’t waste space on the Herodotus for toilet paper. Both toilets on the ship would automatically wash and then sterilize the user. Here you had to get your hands involved. She washed and washed afterward but never really felt clean. Why didn’t they bring civilization with them to this place? The Herodotus was built more than three thousand years before. If it had toilets that automatically washed you, why didn’t they install those on Lusitania? They actually had to manufacture the toilet paper here, and Sprout said that he figured it was most of the paper they produced. “They’ve got nothing more important to put on paper,” he said, and got a laugh from the others.

For half a million years humans had managed to poo without toilets. Even on wide-open grassland with nowhere to hide. They were probably completely open about it, too—what was the shame in getting rid of whatever the digestive system had determined wasn’t food? If there were drones watching her, what would they see? She could manage the job as well as any Neanderthal, she was sure.

She has started signing her journal entries “Ultima Thule,” embracing the geographical nickname her uncle Andrew gave her as a baby.

She describes hallucinations, but she was always aware that’s what they were; fear, dread, even panic, but all manageable by her iron determination.

“When word gets out that I have contributed toward the reelection of this clown or that one, then I have become the enemy of all his enemies and the even more hated rival of all his allies.” “Politics is about remaining perpetually uncommitted and also universally supportive. We could drop dollops of money into this or that cause, and signal that we are willing to spend that money when the occasion demands.”

“Unity is so basketball-crazy, and the politicians more so than most,” said Peter. “It’s an exciting game.” “It’s a fake game,” said Peter. “The gravity here is only ninety-four percent of the gravity of Earth. They keep the baskets at the regulation height, but now everybody can slam dunk, everybody can leap down the court at speeds unimaginable on Earth.” “They don’t play professional basketball on Earth anymore, do they?” asked Wang-Mu. “Nobody would pay to go see the games, they’re so slow and nobody seems to fly,” said Peter. “Nobody would broadcast them because nobody would watch.”

Queen: Welcome to my home, Raven that the humans call Dog. Dog: You have found a way to speak directly into my mind. Queen: Human speech is hard for you, and for me also. This is better. Dog: You are not human, yet they showed me that your children labor in the fields to grow food that humans eat. Queen: My children eat some of the same foods, and the pequeninos eat almost all of them. Dog: Are you then beasts of burden for the humans to exploit?

A dog talking to an insect like space Alien

“Oddly enough, the solution is simple. Pure uric acid will dissolve the layer of poop, and then you can wash the white stuff away with a bit of scrubbing.” “In other words, if you and your friends pee on my head and face, I can get the cement off me.”

Yuuto: Oh, that I’ll certainly do. There’s a reason I haven’t married since you left. Carlotta: No other woman can take my place? Yuuto: Which is like saying that no other storm can take the place of a tornado. Airi: No other wave can take the place of a tsunami.

“I believe that fairness is always worth striving for,” said Sprout, “even though it can’t always be achieved.” “And why can’t it always be achieved?” asked Ruqyaq. “Because sometimes there is no fair course of action,” said Sprout, “and sometimes because no one can think of a fair course. But most often because one side or the other, or both, have no desire for fairness. They seek only their own advantage, no matter what it costs the other, and so fairness remains out of reach for them, because they are not reaching for it.”

“Then a race of aliens called Formics entered the solar system and attacked Earth. Heroes managed to destroy their ship and fight them off, but it was only the beginning. We saw a vast fleet forming up and Mother and Father knew that we could not fight them off. We knew that their armaments were superior to ours and if we went back to help in the war, we would die along with the rest of humanity.

We had no plan to alter ourselves or the birds. But within the first ten years of the Flight, a certain group of people called themselves the Engineers, because they were the ones who made repairs and invented new machinery on the inside and outside of the ship. They were constantly leaving the parts of the ship that rotated to create gravity, and spent most of their time in weightless space, inside or out.”

So it doesn’t take accurate or complete information, thought Sprout, to be able to make giant leaps in technology that move right past the theory—or contradict it completely. It just takes an open, inventive mind.

But Sprout knew that there was nothing rational about his story. They really encased his head in so much poop that hardened into cement? Peeing on it made it soluble again? He held his breath three minutes in the water?—well, they all knew he could do that—and then the whole thing about Ruqyaq. His body, and then his story.

To Sprout it seemed unthinkable, to look forward to so brief a life. But then, anyone could die at any time, so anyone who counted on a full lifespan was delusional. You die when you die. Till then you live.