第一篇 回顾与展望 - the Educator Login page!

***The voyage was long. By the end of it, Val had finished the first volume of her history of the bugger wars andtransmitted it by ansible, under Demosthenes' name, back to Earth, and Ender had won something better than theadulation of the passengers. They knew him now, and he had won their love and their respect.He worked hard on the new world, governing by persuasion rather than fiat, and working as hard as anyone atthe tasks involved in setting up a self-sustaining economy. But his most important work, as everyone agreed, wasexploring what the buggers had left behind, trying to find among structures, machinery, and fields long untendedsome things that human beings could use, could learn from. There were no books to read -- the buggers neverneeded them. With all things present in their memories, all things spoken as they were thought, when the buggersdied their knowledge died with them.And yet. From the sturdiness of the roofs that covered their animal sheds and their food supplies, Ender learnedthat winter would be hard, with heavy snows. From fences with sharpened stakes that pointed outward he learnedthat there were marauding animals that were a danger to the crops or the herds. From the mill he learned that thelong, foul-tasting fruits that grew in the overgrown orchards were dried and ground into meal. And from theslings that once were used to carry infants along with adults into the fields, he learned that even thougn thebuggers were not much for individuality, they did love their children.Life settled down, and years passed. The colony lived in wooden houses and used the tunnels of the bugger cityfor storage and manufactories. They were governed by a council now, and administrators were elected, so thatEnder, though they still called him govertior, was in fact only a judge. There were crimes and quarrels alongsidekindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a humanworld. They did not wait so eagerly for each new transmission from the ansible; the names that were famous onEarth meant little to them now. The only name they knew was that of Peter Wiggin, the Hegemon of Earth; theonly news that came was news of peace, of prosperity, of great ships leaving the littoral of Earth's solar system,passing the comet shield and filling up the bugger worlds. Soon there would be other colonies on this world,Ender's World; soon there would be neighbors; already they were halfway here; but no one cared. They wouldhelp the newcomers when they came, teach them what they had learned, but what mattered in life now was whowould marry whom, and who was sick, and when was planting time, and why should I pay him when the calfdied three weeks after I got it.第 331 页 共 340 页http://www.en8848.com.cn/ 原 版 英 语 阅 读 网