Ender's Shadow ew-6

by Orson Scott Card

  "What will it take to get you to help me with this?" asked Graff.

  "Try telling me the truth about what this information will mean to Bean."

  "He's got his primary teacher worried. He disappeared for twenty-one minutes on the way back from lunch – we have a witness who talked to him on a deck where he had no business, and that still doesn't account for that last seventeen minutes of his absence. He doesn't play with his desk —"

  "You think setting up false identities and writing phony diary entries isn't playing?"

  "There's a diagnostic / therapeutic game that all the children play – he hasn't even signed on yet."

  "He'll know that the game is psychological, and he won't play it until he knows what it will cost him."

  "Did you teach him that attitude of default hostility?"

  "No, I learned it from him."

  "Tell me straight. Based on this diary entry, it looks as though he plans to set up his own crew here, as if this were the street. We need to know about this Achilles so we'll know what he actually has in mind."

  "He plans no such thing," said Sister Carlotta.

  "You say it so forcefully, but without giving me a single reason to trust your conclusion."

  "You called me, remember?"

  "That's not enough, Sister Carlotta. Your opinions on this boy are suspect."

  "He would never emulate Achilles. He would never write his true plans where you could find them. He does not build crews, he joins them and uses them and moves on without a backward glance."

  "So investigating this Achilles won't give us a clue about Bean's future behavior?"

  "Bean prides himself on not holding grudges. He thinks they're counterproductive. But at some level, I believe he wrote about Achilles specifically because you would read what he wrote and would want to know more about Achilles, and if you investigated him you would discover a very bad thing that Achilles did."

  "To Bean?"

  "To a friend of his."

  "So he is capable of having friendships?"

  "The girl who saved his life here on the street."

  "And what's her name?"

  "Poke. But don't bother looking for her. She's dead."

  Graff thought about that a moment. "Is that the bad thing Achilles did?"

  "Bean has reason to believe so, though I don't think it would be evidence enough to convict in court. And as I said, all these things may be unconscious. I don't think Bean would knowingly try to get even with Achilles, or anybody else, for that matter, but he might hope you'd do it for him."

  "You're still holding back, but I have no choice but to trust your judgment, do I?"

  "I promise you that Achilles is a dead end."

  "And if you think of a reason why it might not be so dead after all?"

  "I want your program to succeed, Colonel Graff, even more than I want Bean to succeed. My priorities are not skewed by the fact that I do care about the child. I really have told you everything now. But I hope you'll help me also."

  "Information isn't traded in the I.F., Sister Carlotta. It flows from those who have it to those who need it."

  "Let me tell you what I want, and you decide if I need it."

  "Well?"

  "I want to know of any illegal or top secret projects involving the alteration of the human genome in the past ten years."

  Graff looked off into the distance. "It's too soon for you to be off on a new project, isn't it. So this is the same old project. This is about Bean."

  "He came from somewhere."

  "You mean his mind came from somewhere."

  "I mean the whole package. I think you're going to end up relying on this boy, betting all our lives on him, and I think you need to know what's going on in his genes. It's a poor second to knowing what's happening in his mind, but that, I suspect, will always be out of reach for you."

  "You sent him up here, and then you tell me something like this. Don't you realize that you have just guaranteed that I will never let him move to the top of our selection pool?"

  "You say that now, when you've only had him for a day," said Sister Carlotta. "He'll grow on you."

  "He damn well better not shrink or he'd get sucked away by the air system."

  "Tut-tut, Colonel Graff."

  "Sorry, Sister," he answered.

  "Give me a high enough clearance and I'll do the search myself."

  "No," he said. "But I'll get summaries sent to you."

  She knew that they would give her only as much information as they thought she should have. But when he tried to fob her off with useless drivel, she'd deal with that problem, too. Just as she would try to get to Achilles before the I.F. found him. Get him away from the streets and into a school. Under another name. Because if the I.F. found him, in all likelihood they would test him – or find her scores on him. If they tested him, they would fix his foot and bring him up to Battle School. And she had promised Bean that he would never have to face Achilles again.

  CHAPTER 8 – GOOD STUDENT

  "He doesn't play the fantasy game at all?"

  "He has never so much as chosen a figure, let alone come through the portal."

  "It's not possible that he hasn't discovered it."

  "He reset the preferences on his desk so that the invitation no longer pops up."

  "From which you conclude ..."

  "He knows it isn't a game. He doesn't want us analyzing the workings of his mind."

  "And yet he wants us to advance him."

  "I don't know that. He buries himself in his studies. For three months he's been getting perfect scores on every test. But he only reads the lesson material once. His study is on other subjects of his own choosing."

  "Such as?"

  "Vauban."

  "Seventeenth-century fortifications? What is he thinking?"

  "You see the problem?"

  "How does he get along with the other children?"

  "I think the classic description is 'loner.' He is polite. He volunteers nothing. He asks only what he's interested in. The kids in his launch group think he's strange. They know he scores better than them on everything, but they don't hate him. They treat him like a force of nature. No friends, but no enemies."

  "That's important, that they don't hate him. They should, if he stays aloof like that."

  "I think it's a skill he learned on the street – to turn away anger. He never gets angry himself. Maybe that's why the teasing about his size stopped."

  "Nothing that you're telling me suggests that he has command potential."

  "If you think he's trying to show command potential and failing at it, then you're right."

  "So ... what do you think he's doing?"

  "Analyzing us."

  "Gathering information without giving any. Do you really think he's that sophisticated?"

  "He stayed alive on the street."

  "I think it's time for you to probe a little."

  "And let him know that his reticence bothers us?"

  "If he's as clever as you think, he already knows."

  ***

  Bean didn't mind being dirty. He had gone years without bathing, after all. A few days didn't bother him. And if other people minded, they kept their opinions to themselves. Let them add it to the gossip about him. Smaller and younger than Ender! Perfect scores on every test! Stinks like a pig!

  That shower time was precious. That's when he could sign on to his desk as one of the boys bunking near him – while they were showering. They were naked, wearing only towels to the shower, so their uniforms weren't tracking them. During that time Bean could sign on and explore the system without letting the teachers know that he was learning the tricks of the system. It tipped his hand, just a little, when he altered the preferences so he didn't have to face that stupid invitation to play their mind game every time he changed tasks on his desk. But that wasn't a very difficult hack, and he decided they wouldn't be particularly alarmed that he'd figured it out.

  So far, Bean h
ad found only a few really useful things, but he felt as though he was on the verge of breaking through more important walls. He knew that there was a virtual system that the students were meant to hack through. He had heard the legends about how Ender (of course) had hacked the system on his first day and signed on as God, but he knew that while Ender might have been unusually quick about it, he wasn't doing anything that wasn't expected of bright, ambitious students.

  Bean's first achievement was to find the way the teachers' system tracked student computer activity. By avoiding the actions that were automatically reported to the teachers, he was able to create a private file area that they wouldn't see unless they were deliberately looking for it. Then, whenever he found something interesting while signed on as someone else, he would remember the location, then go and download the information into his secure area and work on it at his leisure – while his desk reported that he was reading works from the library. He actually read those works, of course, but far more quickly than his desk reported.

  With all that preparation, Bean expected to make real progress. But far too quickly he ran into the firewalls – information the system had to have but wouldn't yield. He found several workarounds. For instance, he couldn't find any maps of the whole station, only of the student-accessible areas, and those were always diagrammatic and cute, deliberately out of scale. But he did find a series of emergency maps in a program that would automatically display them on the walls of the corridors in the event of a pressure-loss emergency, showing the nearest safety locks. These maps were to scale, and by combining them into a single map in his secure area, he was able to create a schema of the whole station. Nothing was labeled except the locks, of course, but he learned of the existence of a parallel system of corridors on either side of the student area. The station must be not one but three parallel wheels, cross-linked at many points. That's where the teachers and staff lived, where the life support was located, the communications with the Fleet. The bad news was that they had separate air-circulation systems. The ductwork in one would not lead him to either of the others. Which meant that while he could probably spy on anything going on in the student wheel, the other wheels were out of reach.

  Even within the student wheel, however, there were plenty of secret places to explore. The students had access to four decks, plus the gym below A-Deck and the battleroom above D-Deck. There were actually nine decks, however, two below A-Deck and three above D. Those spaces had to be used for something. And if they thought it was worth hiding it from the students, Bean figured it was worth exploring.

  And he would have to start exploring soon. His exercise was making him stronger, and he was staying lean by not overeating – it was unbelievable how much food they tried to force on him, and they kept increasing his portions, probably because the previous servings hadn't caused him to gain as much weight as they wanted him to gain. But what he could not control was the increase in his height. The ducts would be impassable for him before too long – if they weren't already. Yet using the air system to get him access to the hidden decks was not something he could do during showers. It would mean losing sleep. So he kept putting it off – one day wouldn't make that much difference.

  Until the morning when Dimak came into the barracks first thing in the morning and announced that everyone was to change his password immediately, with his back turned to the rest of the room, and was to tell no one what the new password was. "Never type it in where anyone can see," he said.

  "Somebody's been using other people's passwords?" asked a kid, his tone suggesting that he thought this an appalling idea. Such dishonor! Bean wanted to laugh.

  "It's required of all I.F. personnel, so you might as well develop the habit now," said Dimak. "Anyone found using the same password for more than a week will go on the pig list."

  But Bean could only assume that they had caught on to what he was doing. That meant they had probably looked back into his probing for the past months and knew pretty much what he had found out. He signed on and purged his secure file area, on the chance that they hadn't actually found it yet. Everything he really needed there, he had already memorized. He would never rely on the desk again for anything his memory could hold.

  Stripping and wrapping his towel around him, Bean headed for the showers with the others. But Dimak stopped him at the door.

  "Let's talk," he said.

  "What about my shower?" asked Bean.

  "Suddenly you care about cleanliness?" asked Dimak.

  So Bean expected to be chewed out for stealing passwords. Instead, Dimak sat beside him on a lower bunk near the door and asked him far more general questions. "How are you getting on here?"

  "Fine."

  "I know your test scores are good, but I'm concerned that you aren't making many friends among the other kids."

  "I've got a lot of friends."

  "You mean you know a lot of people's names and don't quarrel with anybody."

  Bean shrugged. He didn't like this line of questioning any better than he would have liked an inquiry into his computer use.

  "Bean, the system here was designed for a reason. There are a lot of factors that go into our decisions concerning a student's ability to command. The classwork is an important part of that. But so is leadership."

  "Everybody here is just full of leadership ability, right?"

  Dimak laughed. "Well, that's true, you can't all be leaders at once."

  "I'm about as big as a three-year-old," said Bean. "I don't think a lot of kids are eager to start saluting me."

  "But you could be building networks of friendship. The other kids are. You don't."

  "I guess I don't have what it takes to be a commander."

  Dimak raised an eyebrow. "Are you suggesting you want to be iced?"

  "Do my test scores look like I'm trying to fail?"

  "What do you want?" asked Dimak. "You don't play the games the other kids play. Your exercise program is weird, even though you know the regular program is designed to strengthen you for the battleroom. Does that mean you don't intend to play that game, either? Because if that's your plan, you really will get iced. That's our primary means of assessing command ability. That's why the whole life of the school is centered around the armies."

  "I'll do fine in the battleroom," said Bean.

  "If you think you can do it without preparation, you're mistaken. A quick mind is no replacement for a strong, agile body. You have no idea how physically demanding the battleroom can be."

  "I'll join the regular workouts, sir."

  Dimak leaned back and closed his eyes with a small sigh. "My, but you're compliant, aren't you, Bean."

  "I try to be, sir."

  "That is such complete bullshit," said Dimak.

  "Sir?" Here it comes, thought Bean.

  "If you devoted the energy to making friends that you devote to hiding things from the teachers, you'd be the most beloved kid in the school."

  "That would be Ender Wiggin, sir."

  "And don't think we haven't picked up on the way you obsess about Wiggin."

  "Obsess?" Bean hadn't asked about him after that first day. Never joined in discussions about the standings. Never visited the battleroom during Ender's practice sessions.

  Oh. What an obvious mistake. Stupid.

  "You're the only launchy who has completely avoided so much as seeing Ender Wiggin. You track his schedule so thoroughly that you are never in the same room with him. That takes real effort."

  "I'm a launchy, sir. He's in an army."

  "Don't play dumb, Bean. It's not convincing and it wastes my time."

  Tell a useless and obvious truth, that was the rule. "Everyone compares me to Ender all the time 'cause I came here so young and small. I wanted to make my own way."

  "I'll accept that for now because there's a limit to how deeply I want to wade into your bullshit," said Dimak.

  But in saying what he'd said about Ender, Bean wondered if it might not be true. Why shouldn't I have suc
h a normal emotion as jealousy? I'm not a machine. So he was a little offended that Dimak seemed to assume that something more subtle had to be going on. That Bean was lying no matter what he said.

  "Tell me," said Dimak, "why you refuse to play the fantasy game."

  "It looks boring and stupid," said Bean. That was certainly true.

  "Not good enough," said Dimak. "For one thing, it isn't boring and stupid to any other kid in Battle School. In fact, the game adapts itself to your interests."

  I have no doubt of that, thought Bean. "It's all pretending," said Bean. "None of it's real."

  "Stop hiding for one second, can't you?" snapped Dimak. "You know perfectly well that we use the game to analyze personality, and that's why you refuse to play."

  "Sounds like you've analyzed my personality anyway," said Bean.

  "You just don't let up, do you?"

  Bean said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  "I've been looking at your reading list," said Dimak. "Vauban?"

  "Yes?"

  "Fortification engineering from the time of Louis the Fourteenth?"

  Bean nodded. He thought back to Vauban and how his strategies had adapted to fit Louis's ever-more-straitened finances. Defense in depth had given way to a thin line of defenses; building new fortresses had largely been abandoned, while razing redundant or poorly placed ones continued. Poverty triumphing over strategy. He started to talk about this, but Dimak cut him off.

  "Come on, Bean. Why are you studying a subject that has nothing to do with war in space?"

  Bean didn't really have an answer. He had been working through the history of strategy from Xenophon and Alexander to Caesar and Machiavelli. Vauban came in sequence. There was no plan – mostly his readings were a cover for his clandestine computer work. But now that Dimak was asking him, what did seventeenth-century fortifications have to do with war in space?

  "I'm not the one who put Vauban in the library."

  "We have the full set of military writings that are found in every library in the fleet. Nothing more significant than that."