IGMS Issue 6

by IGMS

  They were afraid.

  Of what? They had all the power.

  Or did they? His questions were sincere, but they also were dangerous -- he was asking the teacher to go behind the curriculum, to look at the roots of things. And that's not what they were trained to do. Most of them had never even thought about the issues that Peter raised.

  But so what? Why couldn't they look at the question and realize that it was interesting? Why couldn't they leap into it the way Peter wanted to and explore it and speculate and try out new ideas? Or challenge the old ones?

  Instead they usually resorted to, "That will come later, Peter," or "We have to cover a certain amount of material today, Peter, and digressions don't help." Never even an attempt to answer.

  They were so afraid of appearing ignorant or stupid in front of the rest of the class that they hid behind their authority and silenced him. The kids who were openly hostile they could deal with, tease, develop a relationship. But Peter Wiggin -- he had to be locked into an isolation cell in the midst of the classroom, kept from discussion, treated as if he didn't exist. If he were mentally retarded, asking questions like, "Where can I buy gum?" or "What do you call the color of your shirt?" they could not treat him with more contempt.

  The result was that Peter did not speak in class any more than he could help -- which just about killed him, since so much of what they taught was shallow or insufficient or mechanical or flat wrong. The other kids weren't geniuses but they were bright, they could have learned at a much deeper level and it might even have woken some of them up. But the teachers were talking to the desks, and to the kids who acted like desks.

  Peter's petty vengeance was never to fulfil any of their assignments as given. Whatever they assigned, he would look at it and find a perverse way to do something much deeper and more interesting. Then he would turn it in on the date the original assignment was due. Like writing about Hannibal when they assigned a paper on Rome. You want Rome? I'll give you Carthage.

  When he started doing this, some of the teachers gave him Fs. "Fulfil the assignment," they wrote. Peter didn't mind. An F from an idiot who valued obedience over achievement was like a gold star. As the Fs piled up during the first quarter, he sent his papers to various journals -- anonymously, of course, so that his age and lack of credentials were not so obvious -- and while the peer-reviewed journals were out of the question, there were several peripheral journals that posted his F papers in order to spark discussion among the adult scientists and historians and critics. On the nets he was taken seriously.

  At the end of that first quarter of open rebellion, his parents were called in to consult about his failing grades. Even on the final exams for the quarter he had answered, not the questions they asked, but the questions he thought they should have asked. So his grades in these classes were perfect Fs.

  His answer was to bring his laptop to the conference and sign on to the net. Then he showed his parents, the principal, and the teachers each of the places online where his papers had been published and adults were discussing them -- often with excitement, using them as springboards for long and sometimes heated discussion.

  "Are you saying that you plagiarized these from the net?" asked one of the teachers.

  Father turned to her and did not attempt to hide his scorn. "He's showing you that after you failed his paper, he got it published on a professional forum."

  The teacher stiffened. "The goal of the class is to cover the material assigned and fulfil the assignments given."

  "Well," said Father, "that's the wrong paradigm. The goal is supposed to be guiding the students to complete understanding of the material. What I'd like to know is how you imagine Peter could write something like this without a complete understanding of the material you're teaching?"

  After much hemming and hawing, it finally came down to this. The teachers said, though not in so many words, that they didn't have time to read Peter's papers. They were simply too demanding. They only had time to evaluate student work that was attempting to fulfil the assignment. Just because Peter's writings demonstrated that he had a complete grasp of the material did not make it any less time-consuming for them to read and evaluate.

  Father stood up then and said, "Then I suggest you give Peter the A he obviously deserves, and save his papers to read over the summer. Consider it your inservice professional training. But don't treat a student like Peter as if he were failing, when the failure is obviously elsewhere." With that, Father simply walked out of the conference. And from then on, Peter got automatic As on everything he wrote. As far as he knew, no one read his papers now.

  The teachers hated him.

  And so did the other students. He was treated as if he didn't exist. Completely ignored. Even by the girls. And if he had any doubts about it, Bell had made it clear that their ignoring him was not because they didn't notice him. It was active ostracism. They hated him before he opened his mouth.

  And that made no evolutionary sense, as far as Peter could tell. He and these girls were at the age when hormones were guiding most of their waking thoughts. These girls should be looking for males with the markers of power and achievement. Future providers and protectors. Peter was younger than most, and smaller, but he was clearly the most intelligent boy they knew, destined for greatness, and yet they shunned him and looked for boys with good looks and cool clothes and more than a hint of violence about them.

  They're chimps, searching for the alpha male. In a civilized society, I'm the most alpha male they can possibly find -- but no, they aren't looking for human alphas, marked by intellect, creativity, boldness. They're looking for chimp markers: physical strength, aggression, violence. Which male will prevail in physical combat? I want his sperm!

  Chimpettes.

  Peter looked at his reflection in the glass of the classroom window. He was actually rather tall -- for his age. He had no excess body fat, and he was reasonably good in Phys. Ed. He could run, he could hit a ball with a stick, he could kick a goal. He wasn't the best but he was definitely an asset to teams and held his own in one-on-one games. Other guys at his level were taken seriously by girls. Why did his intellect banish him from alpha status?

  Deep down in their chimp minds, the girls must be unconsciously terrified that any children I sired would have huge brains and therefore would be painful to deliver through their skinny little pelvises.

  Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was the anger in his eyes, which he could see even in the poor reflection in the glass.

  Except ... wasn't anger a sign of aggression? Chimp-girls like these should be drawn to his aggression. And yet they were repelled. Everyone was repelled.

  Even his family hated him. Father could come and stand up for him, treating his teachers and principal with the scorn that they deserved -- but it didn't mean Father liked Peter. At home, Father never sought conversation with him.When Peter came to him, Father would converse with him, and at a very high level, with real respect. Yet Peter always had to initiate it. Father never looked for a chance to be with him.

  And Mother -- well, she talked to Peter all the time, but even when she said she loved him, it was always in some ass-backward way that was as much of an insult as a protestation of love. It was always about how she loved him despite his complete unloveability.

  It had always been that way, he could see that now, even when he was little. But not until Ender came along was it clear to Peter how he was despised. Only when he could see how his parents and Valentine doted on Ender did he realize what was so painfully missing from his own life. That's what love for a boychild looks like, and I would never have known about it if I hadn't seen the way they treat Ender.

  He studied his reflection in one of the windows of the school. What was it that made people detest him?

  Somebody like me should be admired, Peter thought fiercely. I should be looked up to. I should be surrounded by people who want to hear what I'm saying, to know what I'm thinking, to provide me with whatever I
want, to have my friendship.

  That's the research paper I should be writing. Speculations on the self-defeating rejection of the superior offspring among primates.

  Why are they afraid of me?

  Why aren't they more afraid?

  Peter stood at the edge of the school property and realized, for the second time that day, that there was nowhere he could go, nothing he could do. He would go home because there was no other indoor space where he actually had a right to eat or sleep. As a minor, he could not go anywhere interesting.

  So, again, he went home, walking this time in the darkening evening, looking at the Christmas lights come on along the residential streets. Ho ho ho. Aren't we bright and jolly.

  Valentine walked into his room -- without knocking, of course -- and saw him lying on his bed, watching a vid on the far wall.

  "Baboons," she said. "Studying up to join a troop?"

  "Trying to identify the genetic source of your best features," said Peter. "When exactly is it that your butt turns red?"

  "Don't you hear yourself? How sick you sound?"

  Finally Peter turned to look at her. "You chose to come in and start insulting me. How does that make me the sick one?"

  She just shook her head. "Golly, Peter. You really have the Christmas spirit, don't you? Somehow you've got it in your head that you're Tiny Tim. Life's just treatin' you so bad."

  "'Home is where, when you have to go there, they treat you like shit.'"

  "From Dickens to a coprophiliac version of Frost. Peter, have you actually noticed that nobody likes you? Is that what this is about? Because if it is, let me tell you a secret. When you spend your life being cruel to everyone around you, it doesn't build up this vast reservoir of love just waiting to be released when you need some."

  This was so outrageous Peter could hardly believe it. "I've never been cruel to anybody."

  "Are you insane?" asked Valentine. Then she laughed. "I know, the lunatic is the last to know. But seriously, Peter, don't you get it? Mom and Dad think that the only reason Ender said yes to Battle School and left us when he didn't have to is because he was scared of you."

  "Why would he be scared of me?" asked Peter. And then of course he remembered that the very day Ender left, he had threatened to kill him. "I was joking."

  "Oh, really? You said that you would pretend that it was a joke, but then one day, when nobody was expecting anything, when we'd forgotten all about it, there'd be a accident."

  "I thought Ender was supposed to be so smart -- he knew I didn't mean it."

  "I'm smart too, Peter, and I know you did mean it."

  "Did not." He said it in a completely bored tone, so she'd know he didn't actually care what she believed.

  "At the time you did. Maybe at this moment you don't. But if Ender were still here, then he'd annoy you again -- by being better than you, no doubt, that always seemed to be the trigger -- and then you'd mean it again."

  "At no point in his life has it bothered me that Ender was better than me, mostly because at no point in his life has he ever been better than me."

  "A statement you can make without refutation only because Ender is gone so there's no way to bring up the obvious evidence."

  "What pisses me off about Ender," said Peter, "is the way everybody loves him no matter what he does. I'm surprised Mom and Dad didn't save his used diapers in a shrine in the back yard."

  "Did you know? I used to love you," said Valentine.

  The words stung more than Peter would have imagined. "I'm glad you got over it."

  "Yeah," she said. "You managed to make me so ashamed of it I tried to pretend it was never true. But it was. I worshiped the very ground you knocked me down on."

  "And then what happened?"

  "Ender was born," said Valentine. "To show me what a brother was, so I finally realized you weren't one."

  "It's a genetic thing," said Peter. "Once a brother, always a brother."

  "You can't be a brother," said Valentine, "when you live in a universe where only you exist. You're a narcissist, Peter. The navel of the universe, and you spend your life contemplating yourself."

  "And yet you still came into my room."

  "Because Mom was crying in the living room," said Valentine. "I just wanted to know what you did."

  "She was crying before I ever talked to her. About baby Ender's widdo bitty stocking."

  "Ah, yes. I bet you were really warm and sympathetic."

  "No," said Peter. "I was cruel."

  When he said it, he realized that it was true.

  But Mother had been cruel to him, too. The very act of worshiping Ender's damn Christmas stocking was cruel.

  "Get out of my room," Peter said to her. "And close the door behind you."

  She looked at him, made as if to say something, then thought better of it, apparently, because she only turned around and left.

  She even closed the door. Gently. No wonder everyone thought she was so nice.

  Back when Peter was five, he had read in one of Dad's science websites how the human shoulder clearly evolved from the brachiating arm of the other primates to a throwing arm. The first missile weapon, said the article, was the thrown stone, which could kill a small animal at fifty feet.

  Peter had taken that as a challenge, and even though he was still too young to expect a fifty-foot range, he could at least work on his aim. By the time he was six, practicing almost every day for two years, he could clip a tulip off its stem from twenty feet away. He thought that was about as good as a primate his size could be expected to do.

  Then he started working on moving targets. Squirrels were pretty easy to hit, though at his age at the time he didn't throw with much force and they only got annoyed and scampered away. Lizards were a lot harder, because they tended to dodge the moment his arm started swinging -- but when he hit them, he knocked them right out.

  For a while he saved all the lizard bodies but then Mom found them and threw them out, along with a lecture about how human beings were supposed to be stewards of the Earth, and animals were only to be killed for need. In vain did he explain that if he ever needed to kill an animal, it might be better if he had practiced a little first.

  So he no longer kept his trophies. And after a while it was just too easy to keep doing it every day. Still, he knew a useful skill when he acquired it, and so over the years he had practiced every week or so. By the time he was ten, he could knock down squirrels every time -- and now from fifty feet away, just as that old article had promised. He had a good arm.

  His practice never seemed to help him with softball or baseball, though. The balls were too big and soft. He could have pitched a stone into the strike zone every time, but it didn't come up very much in games. He wasn't allowed to aim for a real target, like the head.

  It was stones with a nice heft that did the job right. He could throw them faster, get more spin on them, control the arc perfectly, and hit squirrels on the head, not just knocking them down, but knocking them out. Then it was a simple matter to pick them up by the head, give a nice snap with that good throwing arm, and break the neck. Completely painless to the unconscious squirrel.

  At age ten, Peter took a lot of satisfaction from knowing that if civilization ever broke down and he had to live on what he could kill, he wouldn't go hungry. Not that he expected the breakdown of civilization. It was just good to know that he had learned how to use his arm for what it had evolved to do.

  But he did something else, too. Just a few times, when he had an unconscious squirrel in his hands, he didn't snap the neck. Instead, taking his dissecting kit from school -- he was in eighth grade, and they cut up lots of things and took the kits home, so clearly they expected him to find interesting subjects for private study -- he staked out the squirrel and flayed it alive.

  Twice he did it and the squirrel never recovered consciousness. He peeled the skin back, then sectioned and lifted off the anterior rib cage, without piercing any of the organs underneath. He really ha
d a deft hand.

  I could be a surgeon, he thought, if I didn't know it was a waste of time for me to do a job that only affects one person at a time.

  He left the squirrels staked out for Valentine to find.

  The third time, though, the squirrel had woken up during the flaying. He had not imagined that a squirrel could make a sound like that.

  He tried to continue with the operation, but he couldn't concentrate and his hand trembled. Or maybe it was deliberate. Unconsciously deliberate? Was that possible? But the scalpel nicked the heart and the squirrel bled out in moments.

  That one he didn't leave spread-eagled for the insects. He dug with his hands in the red clay that passed for soil and buried the squirrel.

  He remembered the place in the woods behind the house, and went there now, though it was nearly dark. He didn't know what he expected to see. There was nothing. Just leaf-covered soil. He scraped away the leaves with his shoes and exposed the soil be there wasn't even a mound anymore. Nothing to suggest that the squirrel had ever been buried there.

  What was I thinking? Peter asked himself. The first two squirrels should have stopped me. Why was I going on with it? I had learned anything I was going to learn from the first one. It wasn't science, it wasn't curiosity. I was starting to like it. To like knowing that they were alive while I did it to them.

  Is that what all these people see in me? The person who could vivisect a living creature?

  Why can't they see the person who couldn't stand to hear a squirrel scream? The person who buried the body instead of displaying it?

  No, Peter told himself. That's backward. They see the person who would leave those vivisected corpses to be discovered. Just because one time I chose not to do it doesn't change what I am.

  When I sat across from Bell today in the library, thought Peter, I offered to help her. I was being nice.