Ender's Game es-1

by Orson Scott Card

  He had only been there a few minutes when someone knocked on his door.

  "Go away," he said softly. Whoever was knocking didn't hear him or didn't care. Finally, Ender said to come in.

  It was Bean.

  "Go away, Bean."

  Bean nodded but didn't leave. Instead he looked at his shoes. Ender almost yelled at him, cursed at him, screamed at him to leave. Instead he noticed how very tired Bean looked, his whole body bent with weariness, his eyes dark from lack of sleep; and yet his skin was still soft and translucent, the skin of a child, the soft curved cheek, the slender limbs of a little boy. He wasn't eight years old yet. It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.

  No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. But Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led, and he performed splendidly, and they won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.

  Taking Ender's silence and softening expression as permission to stay, Bean took another step into the room. Only then did Ender see the small slip of paper in his hand.

  "You're transferred?" asked Ender. He was incredulous, but his voice came out sounding uninterested, dead.

  "To Rabbit Army."

  Ender nodded. Of course. It was obvious. If I can't be defeated with my army, they'll take my army away. "Carn Carby's a good man," said Ender. "I hope he recognizes what you're worth."

  "Carn Carby was graduated today. He got his notice while we were fighting our battle."

  "Well, who's commanding Rabbit then?"

  Bean held his hands out helplessly. "Me."

  Ender looked at the ceiling and nodded. "Of course. After all, you're only four years younger than the regular age."

  "It isn't funny. I don't know what's going on here. All the changes in the game. And now this. I wasn't the only one transferred, you know. They graduated half the commanders, and transferred a lot of our guys to command their armies."

  "Which guys?"

  "It looks like—every toon leader and every assistant."

  "Of course. If they decide to wreck my army, they'll cut it to the ground. Whatever they're doing, they're thorough."

  "You'll still win, Ender. We all know that. Crazy Tom, he said, 'You mean I'm supposed to figure out how to beat Dragon Army?' Everybody knows you're the best. They can't break you down, no matter what they—"

  "They already have."

  "No, Ender, they can't—"

  "I don't care about their game anymore, Bean. I'm not going to play it anymore. No more practices. No more battles. They can put their little slips of paper on the floor all they want, but I won't go. I decided that before I went through the door today. That's why I had you go for the gate. I didn't think it would work, but I didn't care. I just wanted to go out in style."

  "You should've seen William Bee's face. He just stood there trying to figure out how he had lost when you only had seven boys who could wiggle their toes and he only had three who couldn't."

  "Why should I want to see William Bee's face? Why should I want to beat anybody?" Ender pressed his palms against his eyes. "I hurt Bonzo really bad today, Bean. I really hurt him bad."

  "He had it coming."

  "I knocked him out standing up. It was like he was dead, standing there. And I kept hurting him."

  Bean said nothing.

  "I just wanted to make sure he never hurt me again."

  "He won't," said Bean. "They sent him home."

  "Already?"

  "The teachers didn't say much, they never do. The official notice says he was graduated, but where they put the assignment—you know, tactical school, support, precommand, navigation, that kind of thing—it just said Cartagena, Spain. That's his home."

  "I'm glad they graduated him."

  "Hell, Ender, we're just glad he's gone. If we'd known what he was doing to you, we would've killed him on the spot. Was it true he had a whole bunch of guys gang up on you?"

  "No. It was just him and me. He fought with honor." If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. "I didn't fight with honor," Ender added. "I fought to win."

  Bean laughed. "And you did. Kicked him right out of orbit."

  A knock on the door. Before Ender could answer, the door opened. Ender had been expecting more of his soldiers. Instead it was Major Anderson. And behind him came Colonel Graff.

  "Ender Wiggin," said Graff.

  Ender got to his feet. "Yes sir."

  "Your display of temper in the battleroom today was insubordinate and is not to be repeated."

  "Yes sir," said Ender.

  Bean was still feeling insubordinate, and he didn't think Ender deserved the rebuke. "I think it was about time somebody told a teacher how we felt about what you've been doing."

  The adults ignored him. Anderson handed Ender a sheet of paper. A full-sized sheet. Not one of the little slips of paper that served for internal orders within the Battle School; it was a full-fledged set of orders. Bean knew what it meant. Ender was being transferred out of the school.

  "Graduated?" asked Bean. Ender nodded. "What took them so long? You're only two or three years early. You've already learned how to walk and talk and dress yourself. What will they have left to teach you?"

  Ender shook his head, "All I know is, the game's over." He folded up the paper. "None too soon. Can I tell my army?"

  "There isn't time," said Graff. "Your shuttle leaves in twenty minutes. Besides, it's better not to talk to them after you get your orders. It makes it easier."

  "For them or for you?" Ender asked. He didn't wait for an answer. He turned quickly to Bean, took his hand for a moment, and then headed for the door.

  "Wait," said Bean. "Where are you going? Tactical? Navigational? Support?"

  "Command School," Ender answered.

  "Pre-command?"

  "Command," said Ender, and then he was out the door, Anderson followed him closely. Bean grabbed Colonel Graff by the sleeve. "Nobody goes to Command School until they're sixteen!"

  Graff shook off Bean's hand and left, closing the door behind him.

  Bean stood alone in the room, trying to grasp what this might mean. Nobody went to Command School without three years of Pre-command in either Tactical or Support. But then, nobody left Battle School without at least six years, and Ender had had only four.

  The system is breaking up. No doubt about it. Either somebody at the top is going crazy, or something's gone wrong with the war, the real war, the bugger war. Why else would they break down the training system like this, wreck the game the way they did? Why else would they put a little kid like me in command of an army?

  Bean wondered about it as he walked back down the corridor to his own bed. The lights went out just as he reached his bunk. He undressed in darkness, fumbling to put his clothing in a locker he couldn't see. He felt terrible. At first he thought he felt bad because he was afraid of leading an army, but it wasn't true. He knew he'd make a good commander. He felt himself wanting to cry. He hadn't cried since the first few days of homesickness after he got here. He tried to put a name on the feeling that put a lump in his throat and made him sob silently, however much he tried to hold it down. He bit down on his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain. It didn't help. He would never see Ender again.

  Once he named the feeling, he could control it. He lay back and forced himself to go through the relaxing routine until he didn't feel like crying anymore. Then he drifted off to sleep. His hand was near his mouth. It lay on his pillow hesitantly, as if Bean couldn't decide whether to bite his nails or suck on his fingertips. His forehead was creased and furrowed. His breathing was quick and light. He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant.

  ***

  When he was crossing into the shuttle, Ender noticed for the first time that the insignia on Major
Anderson's uniform had changed. "Yes, he's a colonel now," said Graff. "In fact, Major Anderson has been placed in command of the Battle School, as of this afternoon. I have been reassigned to other duties."

  Ender did not ask him what they were.

  Graff strapped himself into a seat across the aisle from him. There was only one other passenger, a quiet man in civilian clothes who was introduced as General Pace. Pace was carrying a briefcase, but carried no more luggage than Ender did. Somehow that was comforting to Ender, that Graff also came away empty.

  Ender spoke only once on the voyage home. "Why are we going home?" he asked. "I thought Command School was in the asteroids somewhere."

  "It is," said Graff. "But the Battle School has no facilities for docking long-range ships. So you get a short landside leave."

  Ender wanted to ask if that meant he could see his family. But suddenly, at the thought that it might be possible, he was afraid, and so he didn't ask. Just closed his eyes and tried to sleep. Behind him, General Pace was studying him; for what purpose, Ender could not guess.

  It was a hot summer afternoon in Florida when they landed. Ender had been so long without sunlight that the light nearly blinded him, He squinted and sneezed and wanted to get back indoors. Everything was far away and flat; the ground, lacking the upward curve of Battle School floors, seemed instead to fall away, so that on level ground Ender felt as though he were on a pinnacle. The pull of real gravity felt different and he scuffed his feet when he walked. He hated it. He wanted to go back home, back to the Battle School, the only place in the universe where he belonged.

  *

  "Arrested?"

  "Well, it's a natural thought. General Pace is the head of the military police. There was a death in the Battle School."

  "They didn't tell me whether Colonel Graff was being promoted or court-martialed. Just transferred, with orders to report to the Polemarch."

  "Is that a good sign or bad?"

  "Who knows? On the one hand, Ender Wiggin not only survived, he passed a threshold, he graduated in dazzlingly good shape, you have to give old Graff credit for that. On the other hand, there's the fourth passenger on the shuttle. The one traveling in a bag."

  "Only the second death in the history of the school. At least it wasn't a suicide this time."

  "How is murder better, Major Imbu?"

  "It wasn't murder, Colonel. We have it on video from two angles. No one can blame Ender."

  "But they might blame Graff. After all this is over, the civilians can rake over our files and decide what was right and what was not. Give us medals where they think we were right, take away our pensions and put us in jail where they decide we were wrong. At least they had the good sense not to tell Ender that the boy died."

  "Its the second time, too."

  "They didn't tell him about Stilson, either."

  "The kid is scary."

  "Ender Wiggin isn't a killer. He just wins—thoroughly. If anybody's going to be scared, let it be the buggers."

  "Makes you almost feel sorry for them, knowing Ender's going to be coming after them."

  "The only one I feel sorry for is Ender. But not sorry enough to suggest they ought to let up on him. I just got access to the material that Graff's been getting all this time. About fleet movements, that sort of thing. I used to sleep easy at night."

  "Time's getting short?"

  "I shouldn't have mentioned it. I can't tell you secured information."

  "I know."

  "Let's leave it at this: they didn't get him to Command School a day too soon. And maybe a couple of years too late."

  13

  Valentine

  "Children?"

  "Brother and sister. They had layered themselves five times through the nets—writing for companies that paid for their memberships, that sort of thing. Devil of a time tracking them down."

  "What are they hiding?"

  "Could be anything. The most obvious thing to hide, though, is their ages. The boy is fourteen, the girl is twelve."

  "Which one is Demosthenes?"

  "The girl. The twelve-year-old."

  "Pardon me. I don't really think it's funny, but I can't help but laugh. All this time we've been worried, all the time we've been trying to persuade the Russians not to take Demosthenes too seriously, we held up Locke as proof that Americans weren't all crazy warmongers. Brother and sister, prepubescent—"

  "And their last name is Wiggin."

  "Ah. Coincidence?"

  "The Wiggin is a third. They are one and two."

  "Oh, excellent. The Russians will never believe—"

  "That Demosthenes and Locke aren't as much under our control as the Wiggin."

  "Is there a conspiracy? Is someone controlling them?"

  "We have been able to detect no contact between these two children and any adult who might be directing them."

  "That is not to say that someone might not have invented some method you can't detect. It's hard to believe that two children—"

  "I interviewed Colonel Graff when he arrived from the Battle School. It is his best judgment that nothing these children have done is out of their reach. Their abilities are virtually identical with—the Wiggin. Only their temperaments are different. What surprised him, however, was the orientation of the two personas. Demosthenes is definitely the girl, but Graff says the girl was rejected for Battle School because she was too pacific, too conciliatory, and above all, too empathic."

  "Definitely not Demosthenes."

  "And the boy has the soul of a jackal."

  "Wasn't it Locke that was recently praised as 'The only truly open mind in America'?"

  "It's hard to know what's really happening. But Graff recommended, and I agree, that we should leave them alone. Not expose them. Make no report at this time except that we have determined that Locke and Demosthenes have no foreign connections and have no connections with any domestic group, either, except those publicly declared on the nets."

  "In other words, give them a clean bill of health,"

  "I know Demosthenes seems dangerous, in part because he or she has such a wide following. But I think it's significant that the one of the two of them who is most ambitious has chosen the moderate, wise persona. And they're still just talking. They have influence, but no power."

  "In my experience, influence is power."

  "If we ever find them getting out of line, we can easily expose them."

  "Only in the next few years. The longer we wait, the older they get, and the less shocking it is to discover who they are."

  "You know what the Russian troop movements have been. There's always the chance that Demosthenes is right. In which case—"

  "We'd better have Demosthenes around. All right. We'll show them clean, for now. But watch them. And I, of course, have to find ways of keeping the Russians calm."

  *

  In spite of all her misgivings, Valentine was having fun being Demosthenes. Her column was now being carried on practically every newsnet in the country, and it was fun to watch the money pile up in her attorney's accounts. Every now and then she and Peter would, in Demosthenes' name, donate a carefully calculated sum to a particular candidate or cause: enough money that the donation would be noticed, but not so much that the candidate would feel she was trying to buy a vote. She was getting so many letters now that her newsnet had hired a secretary to answer certain classes of routine correspondence for her. The fun letters, from national and international leaders, sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, always diplomatically trying to pry into Demosthenes' mind—those she and Peter read together, laughing in delight sometimes that people like this were writing to children, and didn't know it.

  Sometimes, though, she was ashamed. Father was reading Demosthenes regularly; he never read Locke, or if he did, he said nothing about it. At dinner, though, he would often regale them with some telling point Demosthenes had made in that day's column. Peter loved it when Father did that—"See, it shows that the common man i
s paying attention"—but it made Valentine feel humiliated for Father. If he ever found out that all this time I was writing the columns he told us about, and that I didn't even believe half the things I wrote, he would be angry and ashamed.

  At school, she once nearly got them in trouble, when her history teacher assigned the class to write a paper contrasting the views of Demosthenes and Locke as expressed in two of their early columns. Valentine was careless, and did a brilliant job of analysis. As a result, she had to work hard to talk the principal out of having her essay published on the very newsnet that carried Demosthenes' column. Peter was savage about it. "You write too much like Demosthenes, you can't get published, I should kill Demosthenes now, you're getting out of control."

  If he raged about that blunder, Peter frightened her still more when he went silent. It happened when Demosthenes was invited to take part in the President's Council on Education for the Future, a blue-ribbon panel that was designed to do nothing, but do it splendidly. Valentine thought Peter would take it as a triumph, but he did not. "Turn it down," he said.

  "Why should I?" she asked, "It's no work at all, and they even said that because of Demosthenes' well-known desire for privacy, they would net all the meetings. It makes Demosthenes into a respectable person, and—"

  "And you love it that you got that before I did."

  "Peter, it isn't you and me, it's Demosthenes and Locke. We made them up. They aren't real. Besides, this appointment doesn't mean they like Demosthenes better than Locke, it just means that Demosthenes has a much stronger base of support. You knew he would. Appointing him pleases a large number of Russian-haters and chauvinists."

  "It wasn't supposed to work this way. Locke was supposed to be the respected one."

  "He is! Real respect takes longer than official respect. Peter, don't be angry at me because I've done well with the things you told me to do."