"It just played into your hands so nicely, we couldn't help but think you had something to do with it."
"No, you did," said Peter. "You made these kids crazy in Battle School. Now they're all mad kings, using the lives of their subjects as playing pieces in a tawdry game of one-upmanship."
Rackham sat back, looking a little sick. "We didn't want this either. And I don't think they're crazy. Somebody must see some advantage in starting this war, and yet I can't think who. You're the only one who stands to gain, so we thought..."
"Believe it or not," said Peter, "I would not start a war like this, even if I thought I could profit from picking up the pieces. The only people who start wars that are bound to depend on human waves getting cut down by machine guns are fanatics or idiots. I think we can safely rule out idiocy. So...that leaves Virlomi."
"That's what we're afraid of. That she's actually come to believe her image. God-blessed and irresistible." Rackham raised an eyebrow. "But you knew that. You met with her."
"She proposed marriage to me," said Peter. "I turned her down."
"Before she went to Alai."
"I have a feeling that she married Alai on the rebound."
Rackham laughed. "She offered you India."
"She offered me an entanglement. I turned it into an opportunity."
"You knew when you turned her down that she'd be angry and do something stupid."
Peter shrugged. "I knew she'd do something spiteful. Something to show her power. I had no idea she'd try Alai, and I certainly had no idea he'd actually fall for it. Didn't he know she was crazy? I mean, not clinically, but drunk on power."
"You tell me why he did it," said Rackham.
"He was one of Ender's Jeesh," said Peter. "You and Graff must have so much paper on Alai that you know when he scratches his butt."
Rackham only waited.
"Look, I don't know why he did it, except maybe he thought he could control her," said Peter. "When he came home from Eros, he was a naive and righteous Muslim boy who's been sheltered ever since. Maybe he just wasn't ready to deal with a real live woman. The question now is, how will this play out?"
"How do you think it will play out?"
"Why should I tell you what I think?" said Peter. "What possible advantage will I get from you and Graff knowing what I'm expecting and what I'm preparing to do about it?"
"How will it hurt?"
"It'll hurt because if you decide your goals are different from mine, you'll meddle. Some of your meddling I've appreciated, but right now I don't want either the I.F. or ColMin doing one damn thing. I'm juggling too many balls to want some volunteer juggler to come in and try to help."
Rackham laughed. "Peter, Graff was so right about you."
"What?"
"When he rejected you for Battle School."
"Because I was too aggressive," said Peter wryly. "And look what he actually accepted."
"Peter," said Rackham. "Think about what you just said."
Peter thought about it. "You mean about juggling."
"I mean about why you were rejected for Battle School."
Peter immediately felt stupid. His parents had been told that he was rejected because he was too aggressive--dangerously so. And he had wormed that information out of them at a very young age. Ever since then, it had been a burden he carried around inside--the judgment that he was dangerous. Sometimes it had made him bold; more often, it had made him not trust his own judgment, his own moral framework. Am I doing this because it's right? Am I doing this because it will really be to my benefit? Or only because I'm aggressive and can't stand to sit back and wait? He had forced himself to be more patient, more subtle than his first impulse. Time after time he had held back. It was because of this that he had used Valentine and now Petra to write the more dangerous, demagogic essays--he didn't want any kind of textual analysis to point to him as the author. It was why he had held back from any kind of serious arm-twisting with nations that kept playing with him about joining the FPE--he couldn't afford to have anyone perceive him as coercive.
And all this time, that assessment of him was a lie.
"I'm not too aggressive."
"It's impossible to be too aggressive for Battle School," said Rackham. "Reckless--now, that would be dangerous. But nobody has ever called you reckless, have they? And your parents would have known that was a lie, because they could have seen what a calculating little bastard you were, even at the age of seven."
"Why thanks."
"No, Graff looked at your tests and watched what the monitor showed us, and then he talked to me and showed me, and we realized: You weren't what we wanted as commander of the army, because people don't love you. Sorry, but it's true. You're not warm. You don't inspire devotion. You would have been a good commander under someone like Ender. But you could never have held the whole thing together the way he did."
"I'm doing fine now, thanks."
"You're not commanding soldiers. Peter, do Bean or Suri love you? Would they die for you? Or do they serve you because they believe in your cause?"
"They think the world united under me as Hegemon would be better than the world united under anyone else, or not united at all."
"A simple calculation."
"A calculation based on trust that I've damn well earned."
"But not personal devotion," said Rackham. "Even Valentine--she was never devoted to you, and she knew you better than anyone."
"She pretty much hated me."
"Too strong, Peter. Too strong a word. She didn't trust you. She feared you. She saw your mind like clockwork. Very smart. She always figured you were six steps ahead of her."
Peter shrugged.
"But you weren't, were you?"
"Ruling the world isn't a chess game," said Peter. "Or if it is, it's a game with a thousand powerful pieces and eight billion pawns, and the pieces keep changing their capabilities, and the gameboard never stays the same. So just how far ahead can you possibly see? All I could do was put myself into a position with the most possible influence, and then exploit whatever opportunities came."
Rackham nodded. "But one thing was certain. Your off-the-charts aggressiveness, your passion to control events, we knew that you would place yourself in the center of everything."
It was Peter's turn to laugh. "So you left me home from Battle School so I would be what I am now."
"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."
Rackham nodded.
"Don't worry," said Peter.
"Don't worry?"
"All right," said Peter. "Worry if you want. But your offer to Ender's Jeesh, to take them all off planet, to give them colonies--now I understand what it's about. You care about these kids whose lives you coopted. You want to get them off to worlds where there's no rival. They can use their talents to help a community triumph over a new world."
"Yes."
"But the most important thing is, they won't be on Earth."
Rackham shrugged.
"You knew that nobody could ever unite the world as you need it to be united while those highly trained, highly aggressive, publicly certified geniuses are still in it."
"We didn't see a way it could happen."
"Well, that's a lie," said Peter. "You saw the way it would happen, because it's obvious. One of them would be the ruler of Earth, and all the others would be dead."
"Yes, we saw that, but it wasn't an option."
"Why not? It's the human way of settling things."
"We love these kids, Peter."
"But love them or not, they'll all die eventually. No, I think you would have been content to let them work it out, if you thought it would work. If you thought one of them would emerge triumphant. What you couldn't stand was the knowledge that they were so evenly matched that none of them would win. They'd use up the resources of Earth, all that surplus population, and still there'd be no clear winner."
"That wouldn't help anything," said Rackham.
"So if you could have found a cure for Bean's condition, you wouldn't need me. Because Bean could do it. He could defeat the others. He could unite the world. Because he's so much better than they are."
"But he's going to die," said Rackham.
"And you love him," said Peter. "So you're going to try to save his life."
"We want him to help you win first."
"That's not possible," said Peter. "Not in the time he has left."
"By 'win,'" said Rackham, "I mean, we want him to help you get into a position where your victory is inevitable, given your abilities. Right now, you could be stopped by all kinds of chance events. Having Bean inc
reases your power and influence. Another thing that would help is if we could get the rest of the Jeesh off this planet. If we've removed from the board all the pieces that could challenge you--if, in effect, you're the queen in a game of knights and bishops--then you won't need Bean anymore."
"I'll need somebody," said Peter. "I'm not trained for war the way these Battle School kids were. And as you said, I'm not the kind of guy that soldiers want to die for."
Rackham leaned forward. "Peter, tell us what you're planning."
"I'm not planning anything," said Peter. "I'm simply waiting. When I met Virlomi, I realized that she was the key to everything. She's volatile, she's powerful, and she's drunk. I knew that she'd do something destabilizing. Something that would break things apart."
"So you think the war between India and China will happen? And that Alai's Muslim League will be drawn into it?"
"That's possible," said Peter. "I hope it won't happen."
"But if it does, you'll be poised to attack Alai when his forces are tied up fighting China."
"No," said Peter.
"No?"
"We're not going to attack anybody," he said.
"Then...what?" said Rackham. "Whoever emerges from that war--"
"I don't think that war's going to amount to much," said Peter, "if it happens at all. But if it does happen, then both sides will be weakened by it. There's no shortage of ambitious nations ready to step in and pick up the pieces."
"So what do you think is going to happen?"
"I don't know," said Peter. "I wish you'd believe me. There's only one thing I'm sure of. Alai's and Virlomi's marriage is doomed. And if you want either or both of them to command any of your precious colonies, you'd better make sure you're ready to get them off planet fast."
"Are you planning something?" asked Rackham.
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