Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 1 - Ender's Game

by Orson Scott Card

  Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. "I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!" He was crying. He was out of control.

  "Of course we tricked you into it. That's the whole point," said Graff. "It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough."

  "And it had to be a child, Ender," said Mazer. "You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's what you were born for."

  "We had pilots with our ships, didn't we."

  "Yes."

  "I was ordering pilots to go in and die and I didn't even know it."

  "They knew it, Ender, and they went anyway. They knew what it was for."

  "You never asked me! You never told me the truth about anything!"

  "You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it."

  "Tell me later," Ender said. His eyes closed.

  Mazer Rackham shook him. "Don't go to sleep, Ender," he said. "It's very important."

  "You're finished with me," Ender said. "Now leave me alone."

  "That's why we're here." Mazer said, "We're trying to tell you. They're not through with you, not at all, it's crazy down there. They're going to start a war, Americans claiming the Warsaw Pact is about to attack, and the Pact saying the same thing about the Hegemon. The bugger war isn't twenty-four hours dead and the world down there is back to fighting again, as bad as ever. And all of them are worried about you. And all of them want you. The greatest military leader in history, they want you to lead their armies. The Americans. The Hegemon. Everybody but the Warsaw Pact, and they want you dead."

  "Fine with me," said Ender.

  "We have to take you away from here. There are Russian marines all over Eros, and the Polemarch is Russian. It could turn to bloodshed at any time."

  Ender turned his back on them again. This time they let him. He did not sleep, though. He listened to them.

  "I was afraid of this, Rackham. You pushed him too hard. Some of those lesser outposts could have waited until after. You could have given him some days to rest."

  "Are you doing it, too, Graff? Trying to decide how I could have done it better? You don't know what would have happened if I hadn't pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked. Memorise that defence, Graff. You may have to use it, too."

  "Sorry."

  "I can see what it's done to him. Colonel Liki says there's a good chance he'll be permanently damaged, but I don't believe it. He's too strong. Winning meant a lot to him, and he won."

  "Don't tell me about strong. The kid's eleven. Give him some rest, Rackham. Things haven't exploded yet. We can post a guard outside his door."

  "Or post a guard outside another door and pretend that it's his."

  "Whatever."

  They went away. Ender slept again.

  ***

  Time passed without touching Ender, except with glancing blows. Once he awoke for a few minutes with something pressing his hand, pushing downward on it, with a dull, insistent pain. He reached over and touched it; it was a needle passing into a vein. He tried to pull it out, but it was taped on and he was too weak. Another time he awoke in darkness to hear people near him murmuring and cursing. His ears were ringing with the loud noise that had awakened him; he did not remember the noise. "Get the lights on," someone said. And another time he thought he heard someone crying softly near him.

  It might have been a single day; it might have been a week; from his dreams, it could have been months. He seemed to pass through lifetimes in his dreams. Through the Giant's Drink again, past the wolf-children, reliving the terrible deaths, the constant murders; he heard a voice whispering in the forest, You had to kill the children to get to the End of the World. And he tried to answer. I never wanted to kill anybody. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to kill anybody. But the forest laughed at him. And when he leapt from the cliff at the End of the World, sometimes it was not clouds that caught him, but a fighter that carried him to a vantage point near the surface of the buggers' world, so he could watch, over and over, the eruption of death when Dr. Device set off a reaction on the planet's face; then closer and closer, until he could watch individual buggers explode, turn to light, then collapse into a pile of dirt before his eyes. And the queen, surrounded by infants; only the queen was Mother, and the infants were Valentine and all the children he had known in Battle School. One of them had Bonzo's face, and he lay there bleeding through the eyes and nose, saying, You have no honour. And always the dream ended with a mirror or a pool of water or the metal surface of ship, something that would reflect his face back to him.

  At first it was always Peter's face, with blood and a snake's tail coming from the mouth. After a while, though, it began to be his own face, old and sad, with eyes that grieved for a billion, billion murders -- but they were his own eyes, and he was content to wear them.

  That was the world Ender lived in for many lifetimes during the five days of the League War.

  When he awoke again he was lying in darkness. In the distance he could hear the thump, thump of explosions. He listened for a while. Then he heard a soft footstep.

  He turned over and flung out a hand, to grasp whoever was sneaking up on him. Sure enough, he caught someone's clothing and pulled him down toward his knees, ready to kill him if need be.

  "Ender, it's me, it's me!"

  He knew the voice. It came out of his memory as if it were a million years ago.

  "Alai."

  "Salaam, pinprick. What were you trying to do, kill me?"

  "Yes. I thought you were trying to kill me."

  "I was trying not to wake you up. Well, at least you have some survival instinct left. The way Mazer talks about it, you were becoming a vegetable."

  "I was trying to. What's the thumping."

  "There's a war going on here. Our section is blacked out to keep us safe."

  Ender swung his legs out to sit up. He couldn't do it, though. His head hurt too bad. He winced in pain."

  "Don't sit up, Ender. It's all right. It looks like we might win it. Not all the Warsaw Pact people went with the Polemarch. A lot of them came over when the Strategos told them you were loyal to the IF."

  "I was asleep."

  "So he lied. You weren't plotting treason in your dreams, were you? Some of the Russians who came in told us that when the Polemarch ordered them to find you and kill you, they almost killed him. Whatever they may feel about other people, Ender, they love you. The whole world watched our battles. Videos, day and night. I've seen some. Complete with your voice giving the orders. It's all there, nothing censored. Good stuff. You've got a career in the vids."

  "I don't think so," said Ender.

  "I was joking. Hey, can you believe it? We won the war. We were so eager to grow up so we could fight in it, and it was us all the time. I mean, we're kids. Ender. And it was us." Alai laughed. "It was you, anyway. You were good, bosh. I didn't know how you'd get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good."

  Ender noticed the way he spoke in the past good. "What am I
now, Alai?"

  "Still good."

  "At what?"

  "At -- anything. There's a million soldiers who'd follow you to the end of the universe."

  "I don't want to go to the end of the universe."

  "So where do you want to go? They'll follow you."

  I want to go home, thought Ender, but I don't know where it is.

  The thumping went silent.

  "Listen to that," said Alai.

  They listened. The door opened. Someone stood there. Someone small. "It's over," he said. It was Bean. As if to prove it, the lights went on.

  "Ho, Bean," Ender said.

  "Ho, Ender."

  Petra followed him in, with Dink holding her hand. They came to Ender's bed. "Hey, the hero's awake," said Dink.

  "Who won?" asked Ender.

  "We did, Ender," said Bean. "You were there."

  "He's not that crazy, Bean. He meant who won just now." Petra took Ender's hand. "There was a truce on Earth. They've been negotiating for days. They finally agreed to accept the Locke Proposal."

  "He doesn't know about the Locke Proposal--"

  "It's very complicated, but what it means here is that the IF. will stay in existence, but without the Warsaw Pact in it. So the Warsaw Pact marines are going home. I think Russia agreed to it because they're having a revolt of the Slavic helots. Everybody's got troubles. About five hundred died here, but it was worse on Earth."

  "The Hegemon resigned," said Dink. "It's crazy down there. Who cares."

  "You OK?" Petra asked him, touching his head. "You scared us. They said you were crazy, and we said they were crazy."

  "I'm crazy," said Ender. "But I think I'm OK."

  "When did you decide that?" asked Alai.

  "When I thought you were about to kill me, and I decided to kill you first. I guess I'm just a killer to the core. But I'd rather be alive than dead."

  They laughed and agreed with him. Then Ender began to cry and embraced Bean and Petra, who were closest. "I missed you," he said. "I wanted to see you so bad."

  "You saw us pretty bad," Petra answered. She kissed his cheek.

  "I saw you magnificent," said Ender. "The ones I needed most, I used up soonest. Bad planning on my part."

  "Everybody's OK now," said Dink. "Nothing was wrong with any of us that five days of cowering in blacked-out rooms in the middle of a war couldn't cure."

  "I don't have to be your commander any more, do I?" asked Ender. "I don't want to command anybody again."

  "You don't have to command anybody," said Dink, "but you're always our commander."

  Then they were silent for a while.

  "So what do we do now?" asked Alai. "The bugger war's over, and so's the war down there on Earth, and even the war here. What do we do now?"

  "We're kids," said Petra. "They'll probably make us go to school. It's a law. You have to go to school till you're seventeen."

  They all laughed at that. Laughed until tears streamed down their faces.

  Chapter 15 -- Speaker for the Dead

  The lake was still; there was no breeze. The two men sat together in chairs on the floating dock. A small wooden raft was tied up at the dock; Graff hooked his foot in the rope and pulled the raft in, then let it drift out, then pulled it in again.

  "You've lost weight."

  "One kind of stress puts it on, another takes it off. I'm a creature of chemicals."

  "It must have been hard."

  Graff shrugged. "Not really. I knew I'd be acquitted."

  "Some of us weren't so sure. People were crazy for a while there. Mistreatment of children, negligent homicide -- those videos of Bonzo's and Stilson's deaths were pretty gruesome. To watch one child do that to another."

  "As much as anything, I think the videos saved me. The prosecution edited them, but we showed the whole thing. It was plain that Ender was not the provocateur. After that, it was just a second-guessing game. I said I did what I believed was necessary for the preservation of the human race, and it worked; we got the judges to agree that the prosecution had to prove beyond doubt that Ender would have won the war without the training we gave him. After that, it was simple. The exigencies of war."

  "Anyway, Graff, it was a great relief to us. I know we quarrelled, and I know the prosecution used tapes of our conversations against you. But by then I knew that you were right, and I offered to testify for you."

  "I know, Anderson. My lawyers told me."

  "So what will you do now?"

  "I don't know. Still relaxing. I have a few years of leave accrued. Enough to take me to retirement, and I have plenty of salary that I never used, sitting around in banks. I could live on the interest. Maybe I'll do nothing."

  "It sounds nice. But I couldn't stand it. I've been offered the presidency of three different universities, on the theory that I'm an educator. They don't believe me when I say that all I ever cared about at the Battle School was the game. I think I'll go with the other offer."

  "Commissioner?"

  "Now that the wars are over, it's time to play games again. It'll be almost like vacation, anyway. Only twenty-eight teams in the league. Though after years of watching those children flying, football is like watching slugs bash into each other."

  They laughed. Graff sighed and pushed the raft with his foot.

  "That raft. Surely you can't float on it."

  Graff shook his head. "Ender built it."

  "That's right. This is where you took him."

  "It's even been deeded over to him. I saw to it that he was amply rewarded. He'll have all the money he ever needs."

  "If they ever let him come back to use it."

  "They never will."

  "With Demosthenes agitating for him to come home?"

  "Demosthenes isn't on the nets any more."

  Anderson raised an eyebrow. "What does that mean?"

  "Demosthenes has retired. Permanently."

  "You know something, you old fart eater. You know who Demosthenes is."

  "Was."

  "Well, tell me!"

  "No."

  "You're no fun any more, Graff."

  "I never was."

  "At least you can tell me why. There were a lot of us who thought Demosthenes would be Hegemon someday."

  "There was never a chance of that. No, even Demosthenes' mob of political cretins couldn't persuade the Hegemon to bring Ender back to Earth. Ender is far too dangerous."

  "He's only eleven. Twelve, now."

  "All the more dangerous because he could so easily be controlled. In all the world, the name of Ender is one to conjure with. The child-god, the miracle worker, with life and death in his hands. Every petty tyrant-to-be would like to have the boy, to set him in front of an army and watch the world either flock to join or cower in fear. If Ender came to Earth, he'd want to come here, to rest, to salvage what he can of his childhood. But they'd never let him rest."

  "I see. Someone explained that to Demosthenes?"

  Graff smiled. "Demosthenes explained it to someone else. Someone who could have used Ender as no one else could have, to rule the world and make the world like it."

  "Who?"

  "Locke."

  "Locke is the one who argued for Ender to stay on Eros."

  "All is not always as it seems."

  "It's too deep for me, Graff. Give me the game. Nice, neat rules. Referees. Beginnings and endings. Winners and losers and then everybody goes home to their wives."

  "Get me tickets to some games now and then, all right?"

  "You won't really stay here and retire, will you?"

  "No."

  "You're going into the Hegemony, aren't you?"

  "I'm the new Minister of Colonisation."

  "So they're doing it."

  "As soon as we get the reports back on the bugger colony worlds. I mean, there they are, already fertile, with housing and industry in place, and all the buggers dead. Very convenient. We'll repeal the population limitation laws--"

  "Which eve
rybody hates--"

  "And all those thirds and fourths and fifths get on starships and head out for worlds known and unknown."

  "Will people really go?"

  "People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world."

  "What the hell, maybe they can."

  ***

  At first Ender believed that they would bring him back to Earth as soon as things quieted down. But things were quiet now, had been quiet for a year, and it was plain to him now that they would not bring him back at all, that he was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person.

  And there was the matter of the court martial on the crimes of Colonel Graff. Admiral Chamrajnagar tried to keep Ender from watching it, but failed -- Ender had been awarded the rank of admiral, too, and this was one of the few times he asserted the privileges the rank implied. So he watched the videos of the fights with Stilson and Bonzo, watched as the photographs of the corpses were displayed, listened as the psychologists and lawyers argued whether murder had been committed or the killing was in self-defence. Ender had his own opinion, but no one asked him, Throughout the trial, it was really Ender himself under attack. The prosecution was too clever to charge him directly, but there were attempts to make him look sick, perverted, criminally insane.

  "Never mind," said Mazer Rackham. "The politicians are afraid of you, but they can't destroy your reputation yet. That won't be done until the historians get at you in thirty years."

  Ender didn't care about his reputation. He watched the videos impassively, but in fact he was amused. In battle I killed ten billion buggers, who were as alive and wise as any man, who had not even launched a third attack against us, and no one thinks to call it a crime.

  All his crimes weighed heavy on him, the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo no heavier and no lighter than the rest.

  And so, with that burden, he waited through the empty months until the world that he had saved decided he could come home.

  One by one, his friends reluctantly left him, called home to their families, to be received with heroes' welcomes in their towns. Ender watched the videos of their homecomings, and was touched when they' spent much of their time praising Ender Wiggin, who taught them everything, they said, who taught them and led them into victory. But if they called for him to be brought home, the words were censored from the videos and no one heard the plea.