"As I said, you weren't suited for military life. You don't take orders very well. People aren't devoted to you, and you aren't devoted to anyone else."
"I might be, if I found somebody I respected enough."
"The only person you ever respected that much is on a colony ship right now and you'll never see him again."
"I could never have followed Ender."
"No, you never could. But he's the only person you respected enough. The trouble was, he was your younger brother. You couldn't have lived with the shame."
"Well, all this analysis is nice, but how does it help us now?"
"We don't have a plan either, Peter," said Rackham. "We're also just moving useful pieces into place. Taking others out of play. We have some assets, just as you do. We have our arsenal."
"You have the whole I.F. You could put a stop to all of this."
"No," said Rackham. "Polemarch Chamrajnagar is adamant about it, and he's right. We could force the world's armies to come to a halt. They would all obey us or pay a terrible price. But who would be ruling the world then?"
"The fleet."
"And who is the fleet? It's volunteers from Earth. And from that moment on, who would be our volunteers? People who love the idea of going out into space? Or people who want to control the government of Earth? It would turn us into an Earth-centered institution. It would destroy the colonization project. And the Fleet would be hated, because it would soon be dominated by people who loved power."
"Makes you sound like a bunch of nervous virgins."
"We are," said Rackham. "And that's a strange line, coming from a nervous virgin like you."
Peter didn't bother responding to that. "So you and Graff won't do anything that would compromise the purity of the I.F."
"Unless somebody brings out the nukes again. We won't let that happen. Two nuclear wars were enough."
"We never had a nuclear war."
"World War II was a nuclear war," said Rackham. "Even if only two bombs were dropped. And the bomb that destroyed Mecca was the end of a civil war within Islam being fought out through surrogates and terrorism. Ever since then, nobody has even considered using nukes. But wars that are ended by nukes are nuclear wars."
"Fine. Definitions."
"Hyrum and I are doing everything we can," said Rackham. "So is the Polemarch. And believe it or not, we're trying to help you. We want you to succeed."
"And now you're pretending that you've been rooting for me all along?"
"Not at all," said Rackham. "We had no idea whether you'd be a tyrant or a wise ruler. No idea of what method you'd use or what your world government would be like. We knew you couldn't do it by charisma because you don't have much. And I'll admit you emerged with greater clarity after we got a good look at Achilles."
"So you didn't really get behind me until you realized I was better than Achilles."
"Your achievements were so extraordinary that we were still wary of you. Then Achilles showed us that you were actually cautious and self-restrained, compared to what could have been done by somebody who was truly ruthless. We saw a tyrant on the make, and we realized you weren't one."
"Depending on how you define 'tyrant.' "
"Peter, we're trying to help you. We want you to unite the world under civilian government. Without any advice from us, you've determined to do it by persuasion and plebiscite instead of using armies and terror."
"I use armies."
"You know what I mean," said Rackham.
"I just didn't want you to have any illusions."
"So tell me what you're thinking. What you're planning. So we won't interfere with our meddling."
"Because you're on my side," Peter said scornfully.
"No, we're not 'on your side.' We're not really in this game, except insofar as it affects us. We're in the business of dispersing the human race to as many worlds as possible. But so far, only two colony ships have taken off. And it will be another generation before any of them lands. Far longer before we know whether the colonies will take hold and succeed. Even longer than that before we know if they'll become isolated worlds or trade will be profitable enough to make interstellar travel economically feasible. That's all we care about. But to accomplish it, we have to get recruits from Earth, and we have to pay for the ships—again, from Earth. And we have to do it without any hope of financial return for a hundred years at the best. Capitalism is not good at thinking a hundred years ahead. So we need government funding."
"Which you've managed to get even when I couldn't raise a dime."
"No, Peter," said Rackham. "Don't you understand? Everybody except the United States and Britain and a handful of smaller countries has stopped paying their assessments. We're living off our huge cash reserves. It's been enough to outfit two ships, to build a new class of gravity-controlled messenger ships, a few projects like that. But we're running out of money. We have no way to finance even the ships we already have under construction."
"You want me to win so I'll pay for your fleet."
"We want you to win so that the human race can stop spending its vast surpluses on ways to kill each other, and can instead send all the people that would have been killed in war out into space. And all the money that would have been spent on weapons can be spent on colony ships, and on trading ships, eventually. The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop."
Peter laughed. "You are such dreamers. Such idealists!"
"We were warriors and we studied our enemy. The Hive Queens. They failed because they were too unified. Human beings are a better design for a sentient species. Once we get over this war thing. What the Hive Queens tried, we can do. Spread out the species so it can develop truly new cultures."
"New cultures? When you insist that each colony be made up entirely of people from one nation, one language group?"
"We're not absolutely rigid on that, but yes. There are two ways of looking at species diversity. One is that every colony should contain a complete copy of the whole human race—every culture, every language, every race. But what's the point of that? Earth already has that! And look how well it's worked.
"No, the great colonies of the past have succeeded precisely because they were internally unified. People who knew each other, trusted each other, shared the same purposes, embraced the same laws. Each one monochromatic to begin with. But when we send out fifty monochromatic colony ships, but all different colors, so to speak—fifty different colonies, each with a separate cultural and linguistic root—then the human race can perform fifty different experiments. Real species diversity."
"I don't care what you say," said Peter, "I'm not going."
Rackham smiled. "We don't want you to."
"The two colony ships you've launched. One of them was Ender's."
"That's right."
"Who's the commander of the second ship?"
"Well, the ship is commanded by—"
"Who's going to rule the colony," said Peter.
"Dink Meeker."
So that was the plan. They meant to take Ender's Jeesh and anybody else who was dangerously talented in a military way and send them off into space. "So to you," said Peter, "this war between Han Tzu and Alai is your worst nightmare."