The Ender Quintet (Omnibus)

by Card, Orson Scott

  The old man continued to look at him blankly.

  So this is a game, thought Ender. Well, if they want me to go to class, they’ll unlock the door. If they don’t, they won’t. I don’t care.

  Ender didn’t like games where the rules could be anything and the objective was known to them alone. So he wouldn’t play. He also refused to get angry. He went through a relaxing exercise as he leaned on the door, and soon he was calm again. The old man continued to watch him impassively.

  It seemed to go on for hours, Ender refusing to speak, the old man seeming to be a mindless mute. Sometimes Ender wondered if he were mentally ill, escaped from some medical ward somewhere in Eros, living out some insane fantasy here in Ender’s room. But the longer it went on, with no one coming to the door, no one looking for him, the more certain he became that this was something deliberate, meant to disconcert him. Ender did not want to give the old man the victory. To pass the time he began to do exercises. Some were impossible without the gym equipment, but others, especially from his personal defense class, he could do without any aids.

  The exercises moved him around the room. He was practicing lunges and kicks. One move took him near the old man, as he had come near him before, but this time the old claw shot out and seized Ender’s left leg in the middle of a kick. It pulled Ender off his feet and landed him heavily on the floor.

  Ender leapt to his feet immediately, furious. He found the old man sitting calmly, cross-legged, not breathing heavily, as if he had never moved. Ender stood poised to fight, but the other’s immobility made it impossible for Ender to attack. What, kick the old man’s head off? And then explain it to Graff—oh, the old man kicked me, and I had to get even.

  He went back to his exercises; the old man kept watching.

  Finally, tired and angry at this wasted day, a prisoner in his room, Ender went back to his bed to get his desk. As he leaned over to pick up the desk, he felt a hand jab roughly between his thighs and another hand grab his hair. In a moment he had been turned upside down. His face and shoulders were being pressed into the floor by the old man’s knee, while his back was excruciatingly bent and his legs were pinioned by the old man’s arm. Ender was helpless to use his arms, he couldn’t bend his back to gain slack so he could use his legs. In less than two seconds the old man had completely defeated Ender Wiggin.

  “All right,” Ender gasped. “You win.”

  The man’s knee thrust painfully downward. “Since when,” asked the man, his voice soft and rasping, “do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?”

  Ender remained silent.

  “I surprised you once, Ender Wiggin. Why didn’t you destroy me immediately afterward? Just because I looked peaceful? You turned your back on me. Stupid. You have learned nothing. You have never had a teacher.”

  Ender was angry now, and made no attempt to control or conceal it. “I’ve had too many teachers, how was I supposed to know you’d turn out to be a—”

  “An enemy, Ender Wiggin,” whispered the old man. “I am your enemy, the first one you’ve ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher.”

  Then the old man let Ender’s legs fall. Because he still held Ender’s head to the floor, the boy couldn’t use his arms to compensate, and his legs hit the surface with a loud crack and a sickening pain. Then the old man stood and let Ender rise.

  Slowly Ender pulled his legs under him, with a faint groan of pain. He knelt on all fours for a moment, recovering. Then his right arm flashed out, reaching for his enemy. The old man quickly danced back and Ender’s hand closed on air as his teacher’s foot shot forward to catch Ender on the chin.

  Ender’s chin wasn’t there. He was lying flat on his back, spinning on the floor, and during the moment that his teacher was off balance from his kick, Ender’s feet smashed into the old man’s other leg. He fell in a heap—but close enough to strike out and hit Ender in the face. Ender couldn’t find an arm or a leg that held still long enough to be grabbed, and in the meantime blows were landing on his back and arms. Ender was smaller—he couldn’t reach past the old man’s flailing limbs. Finally he managed to pull away and scramble back near the door.

  The old man was sitting cross-legged again, but now the apathy was gone. He was smiling. “Better, this time, boy. But slow. You will have to be better with a fleet than you are with your body or no one will be safe with you in command. Lesson learned?”

  Ender nodded slowly. He ached in a hundred places.

  “Good,” said the old man. “Then we’ll never have to have such a battle again. All the rest with the simulator. I will program your battles now, not the computer; I will devise the strategy of your enemy, and you will learn to be quick and discover what tricks the enemy has for you. Remember, boy. From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.”

  The old man’s face grew serious again. “You will be about to lose, Ender, but you will win. You will learn to defeat the enemy. He will teach you how.”

  The teacher got up. “In this school, it has always been the practice for a young student to be chosen by an older student. The two become companions, and the older boy teaches the younger one everything he knows. Always they fight, always they compete, always they are together. I have chosen you.”

  Ender spoke as the old man walked to the door. “You’re too old to be a student.”

  “One is never too old to be a student of the enemy. I have learned from the buggers. You will learn from me.”

  As the old man palmed the door open, Ender leaped into the air and kicked him in the small of the back with both feet. He hit hard enough that he rebounded onto his feet, as the old man cried out and collapsed on the floor.

  The old man got up slowly, holding onto the door handle, his face contorted with pain. He seemed disabled, but Ender didn’t trust him. Yet in spite of his suspicion he was caught off guard by the old man’s speed. In a moment he found himself on the floor near the opposite wall, his nose and lip bleeding where his face had hit the bed. He was able to turn enough to see the old man standing in the doorway, wincing and holding his back. The old man grinned.

  Ender grinned back. “Teacher,” he said. “Do you have a name?”

  “Mazer Rackham,” said the old man. Then he was gone.

  From then on, Ender was either with Mazer Rackham or alone. The old man rarely spoke, but he was there; at meals, at tutorials, at the simulator, in his room at night. Sometimes Mazer would leave, but always, when Mazer wasn’t there, the door was locked, and no one came until Mazer returned. Ender went through a week in which he called him Jailor Rackman. Mazer answered to the name as readily as to his own, and showed no sign that it bothered him at all. Ender soon gave it up.

  There were compensations. Mazer took Ender through the videos of the old battles from the First Invasion and the disastrous defeats of the I.F. in the Second Invasion. These were not pieced together from the censored public videos, but whole and continuous. Since many videos were working in the major battles, they studied bugger tactics and strategies from many angles. For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

  “Why aren’t you dead?” Ender asked him. “You fought your battle seventy years ago. I don’t think you’re even sixty years old.”

  “The miracle of relativity,” said Mazer. “They kept me here for twenty years after the battle, even though I begged them to let me command one of the starships they launched against the bugger home planet and the bugge
r colonies. Then they—came to understand some things about the way soldiers behave in the stress of battle.”

  “What things?”

  “You’ve never been taught enough psychology to understand. Enough to say that they realized that even though I would never be able to command the fleet—I’d be dead before the fleet even arrived—I was still the only person able to understand the things I understood about the buggers. I was, they realized, the only person who had ever defeated the buggers by intelligence rather than luck. They needed me here to—teach the person who would command the fleet.”

  “So they sent you out in a starship, got you up to a relativistic speed—”

  “And then I turned around and came home. A very dull voyage, Ender. Fifty years in space. Officially, only eight years passed for me, but it felt like five hundred. All so I could teach the next commander everything I knew.”

  “Am I to be the commander, then?”

  “Let’s say that you’re our best bet at present.”

  “There are others being prepared, too?”

  “No.”

  “That makes me the only choice, then, doesn’t it?”

  Mazer shrugged.

  “Except you. You’re still alive, aren’t you? Why not you?”

  Mazer shook his head.

  “Why not? You won before.”

  “I cannot be the commander for good and sufficient reasons.”

  “Show me how you beat the buggers, Mazer.”

  Mazer’s face went inscrutable.

  “You’ve shown me every other battle seven times at least. I think I’ve seen ways to beat what the buggers did before, but you’ve never shown me how you actually did beat them.”

  “The video is a very tightly kept secret, Ender.”

  “I know. I’ve pieced it together, partly. You, with your tiny reserve force, and their armada, those great big heavy-bellied starships launching their swarms of fighters. You dart in at one ship, fire at it, an explosion. That’s where they always stop the clips. After that, it’s just soldiers going into bugger ships and already finding them dead inside.”

  Mazer grinned. “So much for tightly kept secrets. Come on, let’s watch the video.”

  They were alone in the video room, and Ender palmed the door locked. “All right, let’s watch.”

  The video showed exactly what Ender had pieced together. Mazer’s suicidal plunge into the heart of the enemy formation, the single explosion, and then—

  Nothing. Mazer’s ship went on, dodged the shock wave, and wove his way among the other bugger ships. They did not fire on him. They did not change course. Two of them crashed into each other and exploded—a needless collision that either pilot could have avoided. Neither made the slightest movement.

  Mazer sped up the action. Skipped ahead. “We waited for three hours,” he said. “Nobody could believe it.” Then the I.F. ships began approaching the bugger starships. Marines began their cutting and boarding operations. The videos showed the buggers already dead at their posts.

  “So you see,” said Mazer, “you already knew all there was to see.”

  “Why did it happen?”

  “Nobody knows. I have my personal opinions. But there are plenty of scientists who tell me I’m less than qualified to have opinions.”

  “You’re the one who won the battle.”

  “I thought that qualified me to comment, too, but you know how it is. Xenobiologists and xenopsychologists can’t accept the idea that a starpilot scooped them by sheer guesswork. I think they all hate me because, after they saw these videos, they had to live out the rest of their natural lives here on Eros. Security, you know. They weren’t happy.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The buggers don’t talk. They think to each other, and it’s instantaneous, like the philotic effect. Like the ansible. But most people always thought that meant a controlled communication, like language—I think you a thought and then you answer me. I never believed that. It’s too immediate, the way they respond together to things. You’ve seen the videos. They aren’t conversing and deciding among possible courses of action. Every ship acts like part of a single organism. It responds the way your body responds during combat, different parts automatically, thoughtlessly doing everything they’re supposed to do. They aren’t having a mental conversation between people with different thought processes. All their thoughts are present, together, at once.”

  “A single person, and each bugger is like a hand or a foot?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t the first person to suggest it, but I was the first person to believe it. And something else. Something so childish and stupid that the xenobiologists laughed me to silence when I said it after the battle. The buggers are bugs. They’re like ants and bees. A queen, the workers. That was maybe a hundred million years ago, but that’s how they started, that kind of pattern. It’s a sure thing none of the buggers we saw had any way of making more little buggers. So when they evolved this ability to think together, wouldn’t they still keep the queen? Wouldn’t the queen still be the center of the group? Why would that ever change?”

  “So it’s the queen who controls the whole group.”

  “I had evidence, too. Not evidence that any of them could see. It wasn’t there in the First Invasion, because that was exploratory. But the Second Invasion was a colony. To set up a new hive, or whatever.”

  “And so they brought a queen.”

  “The videos of the Second Invasion, when they were destroying our fleets out in the comet shell.” He began to call them up and display the buggers’ patterns. “Show me the queen’s ship.”

  It was subtle. Ender couldn’t see it for a long time. The bugger ships kept moving, all of them. There was no obvious flagship, no apparent nerve center. But gradually, as Mazer played the videos over and over again, Ender began to see the way that all the movements focused on, radiated from a center point. The center point shifted, but it was obvious, after he looked long enough, that the eyes of the fleet, the I of the fleet, the perspective from which all decisions were being made, was one particular ship. He pointed it out.

  “You see it. I see it. That makes two people out of all of those who have seen this video. But it’s true, isn’t it.”

  “They make that ship move just like any other ship.”

  “They know it’s their weak point.”

  “But you’re right. That’s the queen. But then you’d think that when you went for it, they would have immediately focused all their power on you. They could have blown you out of the sky.”

  “I know. That part I don’t understand. Not that they didn’t try to stop me—they were firing at me. But it’s as if they really couldn’t believe, until it was too late, that I would actually kill the queen. Maybe in their world, queens are never killed, only captured, only checkmated. I did something they didn’t think an enemy would ever do.”

  “And when she died, the others all died.”

  “No, they just went stupid. The first ships we boarded, the buggers were still alive. Organically. But they didn’t move, didn’t respond to anything, even when our scientists vivisected some of them to see if we could learn a few more things about buggers. After a while they all died. No will. There’s nothing in those little bodies when the queen is gone.”

  “Why don’t they believe you?”

  “Because we didn’t find a queen.”

  “She got blown to pieces.”

  “Fortunes of war. Biology takes second place to survival. But some of them are coming around to my way of thinking. You can’t live in this place without the evidence staring you in the face.”

  “What evidence is there in Eros?”

  “Ender, look around you. Human beings didn’t carve this place. We like taller ceilings, for one thing. This was the buggers’ advance post in the First Invasion. They carved this place out before we even knew they were here. We’re living in a bugger hive. But we already paid our rent. It cost the marines a thousand lives to clear them out of
these honeycombs, room by room. The buggers fought for every meter of it.”

  Now Ender understood why the rooms had always felt wrong to him. “I knew this place wasn’t a human place.”

  “This was the treasure trove. If they had known we would win that first war, they probably would never have built this place. We learned gravity manipulation because they enhanced the gravity here. We learned efficient use of stellar energy because they blacked out this planet. In fact, that’s how we discovered them. In a period of three days, Eros gradually disappeared from telescopes. We sent a tug to find out why. It found out. The tug transmitted its videos, including the buggers boarding and slaughtering the crew. It kept right on transmitting through the entire bugger examination of the boat. Not until they finally dismantled the entire tug did the transmissions stop. It was their blindness—they never had to transmit anything by machine, and so with the crew dead, it didn’t occur to them that anybody could be watching.”

  “Why did they kill the crew?”

  “Why not? To them, losing a few crew members would be like clipping your nails. Nothing to get upset about. They probably thought they were routinely shutting down our communications by turning off the workers running the tug. Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future. Murder’s no big deal to them. Only queen-killing, really, is murder, because only queen-killing closes off a genetic path.”

  “So they didn’t know what they were doing.”

  “Don’t start apologizing for them, Ender. Just because they didn’t know they were killing human beings doesn’t mean they weren’t killing human beings. We do have a right to defend ourselves as best we can, and the only way we found that works is killing the buggers before they kill us. Think of it this way. In all the bugger wars so far, they’ve killed thousands and thousands of living, thinking beings. And in all those wars, we’ve killed only one.”

  “If you hadn’t killed the queen, Mazer, would we have lost the war?”

  “I’d say the odds would have been three to two against us. I still think I could have trashed their fleet pretty badly before they burned us out. They have great response time and a lot of firepower, but we have a few advantages, too. Every single one of our ships contains an intelligent human being who’s thinking on his own. Every one of us is capable of coming up with a brilliant solution to a problem. They can only come up with one brilliant solution at a time. The buggers think fast, but they aren’t smart all over. But on our side, even when some incredibly timid and stupid commanders lost the major battles of the Second Invasion, some of their subordinates were able to do real damage to the bugger fleet.”