What disturbed Valentine most of all was that Peter did not seem at all worried. “Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?”
“For both of us, Val.”
“Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.”
“But we don’t think like other children, do we, Val? We don’t talk like other children. And above all, we don’t write like other children.”
“For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we’ve strayed from the topic, I think.” Still, Valentine found herself getting excited. Writing was something Val did better than Peter. They both knew it. Peter had even named it once, when he said that he could always see what other people hated most about themselves, and bully them, while Val could always see what other people liked best about themselves, and flatter them. It was a cynical way of putting it, but it was true. Valentine could persuade other people to her point of view—she could convince them that they wanted what she wanted them to want. Peter, on the other hand, could only make them fear what he wanted them to fear. When he first pointed this out to Val, she resented it. She had wanted to believe she was good at persuading people because she was right, not because she was clever. But no matter how much she told herself that she didn’t ever want to exploit people the way Peter did, she enjoyed knowing that she could, in her way, control other people. And not just control what they did. She could control, in a way, what they wanted to do. She was ashamed that she took pleasure in this power, and yet she found herself using it sometimes. To get teachers to do what she wanted, and other students. To get Mother and Father to see things her way. Sometimes, she was able to persuade even Peter. That was the most frightening thing of all—that she could understand Peter well enough, could empathize with him enough to get inside him that way. There was more Peter in her than she could bear to admit, though sometimes she dared to think about it anyway. This is what she thought as Peter spoke: You dream of power, Peter, but in my own way I am more powerful than you.
“I’ve been studying history,” Peter said. “I’ve been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world. Think what Pericles did in Athens, and Demosthenes—”
“Yes, they managed to wreck Athens twice.”
“Pericles, yes, but Demosthenes was right about Philip—”
“Or provoked him—”
“See? This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismarck. Lenin.”
“Not exactly parallel cases, Peter.” Now she was disagreeing with him out of habit; she saw what he was getting at, and she thought it might just be possible.
“I didn’t expect you to understand. You still believe that teachers know something worth learning.”
I understand more than you think, Peter. “So you see yourself as Bismarck?”
“I see myself as knowing how to insert ideas into the public mind. Haven’t you ever thought of a phrase, Val, a clever thing to say, and said it, and then two weeks or a month later you hear some adult saying it to another adult, both of them strangers? Or you see it on a video or pick it up on a net?”
“I always figured I heard it before and only thought I was making it up.”
“You were wrong. There are maybe two or three thousand people in the world as smart as us, little sister. Most of them are making a living somewhere. Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research. Precious few of them are actually in positions of power.”
“I guess we’re the lucky few.”
“Funny as a one-legged rabbit, Val.”
“Of which there are no doubt several in these woods.”
“Hopping in neat little circles.”
Valentine laughed at the gruesome image and hated herself for thinking it was funny.
“Val, we can say the words that everyone else will be saying two weeks later. We can do that. We don’t have to wait until we’re grown up and safely put away in some career.”
“Peter, you’re twelve.”
“Not on the nets I’m not. On the nets I can name myself anything I want, and so can you.”
“On the nets we are clearly identified as students, and we can’t even get into the real discussions except in audience mode, which means we can’t say anything anyway.”
“I have a plan.”
“You always do.” She pretended nonchalance, but she listened eagerly.
“We can get on the nets as full-fledged adults, with whatever net names we want to adopt, if Father gets us onto his citizen’s access.”
“And why would he do that? We already have student access. What do you tell him, I need citizen’s access so I can take over the world?”
“No, Val. I won’t tell him anything. You’ll tell him how you’re worried about me. How I’m trying so very hard to do well at school, but you know it’s driving me crazy because I can never talk to anybody intelligent, everybody always talks down to me because I’m young, I never get to converse with my peers. You can prove that the stress is getting to me. There’s even evidence.”
Valentine thought of the corpse of the squirrel in the woods and realized that even that discovery was part of Peter’s plan. Or at least he had made it part of his plan, after it happened.
“So you get him to authorize us to share his citizen’s access. To adopt our own identities there, to conceal who we are so people will give us the intellectual respect we deserve.”
Valentine could challenge him on ideas, but never on things like this. She could not say, What makes you think you deserve respect? She had read about Adolf Hitler. She wondered what he was like at the age of twelve. Not this smart, not like Peter that way, but craving honor, probably that. And what would it have meant to the world if in childhood he had been caught in a thresher or trampled by a horse?
“Val,” Peter said. “I know what you think of me. I’m not a nice person, you think.”
Valentine threw a pine needle at him. “An arrow through your heart.”
“I’ve been planning to come talk to you for a long time. But I kept being afraid.”
She put a pine needle in her mouth and blew it at him. It dropped almost straight down. “Another failed launch.” Why was he pretending to be weak?
“Val, I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me. That you wouldn’t believe I could do it.”
“Peter, I believe you could do anything, and probably will.”
“But I was even more afraid that you’d believe me and try to stop me.”
“Come on, threaten to kill me again, Peter.” Did he actually believe she could be fooled by his nice-and-humble-kid act?
“So I’ve got a sick sense of humor. I’m sorry. You know I was teasing. I need your help.”
“You’re just what the world needs. A twelve-year-old to solve all our problems.”
“It’s not my fault I’m twelve right now. And it’s not my fault that right now is when the opportunity is open. Right now is the time when I can shape events. The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that’s partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time.”
“I was just thinking of comparing you to him.”
“I don’t hate Jews, Val. I don’t want to destroy anybody. And I don’t want war, either. I want the world to hold together. Is that so bad? I don’t want us to go back to the old way. Have you read about the world wars?”
“Yes.”
“We can go back to that again. Or worse.
We could find ourselves locked into the Warsaw Pact. Now, there’s a cheerful thought.”
“Peter, we’re children, don’t you understand that? We’re going to school, we’re growing up—” But even as she resisted, she wanted him to persuade her. She had wanted him to persuade her from the beginning.
But Peter didn’t know that he had already won. “If I believe that, if I accept that, then I’ve got to sit back and watch while all the opportunities vanish, and then when I’m old enough it’s too late. Val, listen to me. I know how you feel about me, you always have. I was a vicious, nasty brother. I was cruel to you and crueler to Ender before they took him. But I didn’t hate you. I loved you both, I just had to be—had to have control, do you understand that? It’s the most important thing to me, it’s my greatest gift, I can see where the weak points are, I can see how to get in and use them, I just see those things without even trying. I could become a businessman and run some big corporation, I’d scramble and maneuver until I was at the top of everything and what would I have? Nothing. I’m going to rule, Val, I’m going to have control of something. But I want it to be something worth ruling. I want to accomplish something worthwhile. A Pax Americana through the whole world. So that when somebody else comes, after we beat the buggers, when somebody else comes here to defeat us, they’ll find we’ve already spread over a thousand worlds, we’re at peace with ourselves and impossible to destroy. Do you understand? I want to save mankind from self-destruction.”
She had never seen him speak with such sincerity. With no hint of mockery, no trace of a lie in his voice. He was getting better at this. Or maybe he was actually touching on the truth. “So a twelve-year-old boy and his kid sister are going to save the world?”
“How old was Alexander? I’m not going to do it overnight. I’m just going to start now. If you’ll help me.”
“I don’t believe what you did to those squirrels was part of an act. I think you did it because you love to do it.”
Suddenly Peter wept into his hands. Val assumed that he was pretending, but then she wondered. It was possible, wasn’t it, that he loved her, and that in this time of terrifying opportunity he was willing to weaken himself before her in order to win her love. He’s manipulating me, she thought, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t sincere. His cheeks were wet when he took his hands away, his eyes rimmed in red. “I know,” he said. “It’s what I’m most afraid of. That I really am a monster. I don’t want to be a killer but I just can’t help it.”
She had never seen him show such weakness. You’re so clever, Peter. You saved your weakness so you could use it to move me now.
And yet it did move her. Because if it were true, even partly true, then Peter was not a monster, and so she could satisfy her Peter-like love of power without fear of becoming monstrous herself. She knew that Peter was calculating even now, but she believed that under the calculations he was telling the truth. It had been hidden layers deep, but he had probed her until he found her trust.
“Val, if you don’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll become. But if you’re there, my partner in everything, you can keep me from becoming—like that. Like the bad ones.”
She nodded. You are only pretending to share power with me, she thought, but in fact I have power over you, even though you don’t know it. “I will. I’ll help you.”
As soon as Father got them both onto his citizen’s access, they began testing the waters. They stayed away from the nets that required use of a real name. That wasn’t hard because real names only had to do with money. They didn’t need money. They needed respect, and that they could earn. With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were their words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.
They used throwaway names with their early efforts, not the identities that Peter planned to make famous and influential. Of course they were not invited to take part in the great national and international political forums—they could only be audiences there until they were invited or elected to take part. But they signed on and watched, reading some of the essays published by the great names, witnessing the debates that played across their desks.
And in the lesser conferences, where common people commented about the great debates, they began to insert their comments. At first Peter insisted that they be deliberately inflammatory. “We can’t learn how our style of writing is working unless we get responses—and if we’re bland, no one will answer.”
They were not bland, and people answered. The responses that got posted on the public nets were vinegar; the responses that were sent as mail, for Peter and Valentine to read privately, were poisonous. But they did learn what attributes of their writing were seized upon as childish and immature. And they got better.
When Peter was satisfied that they knew how to sound adult, he killed the old identities and they began to prepare to attract real attention.
“We have to seem completely separate. We’ll write about different things at different times. We’ll never refer to each other. You’ll mostly work on the west coast nets, and I’ll mostly work in the south. Regional issues, too. So do your homework.”
They did their homework. Mother and Father worried sometimes, with Peter and Valentine constantly together, their desks tucked under their arms. But they couldn’t complain—their grades were good, and Valentine was such a good influence on Peter. She had changed his whole attitude toward everything. And Peter and Valentine sat together in the woods, in good weather, and in pocket restaurants and indoor parks when it rained, and they composed their political commentaries. Peter carefully designed both characters so neither one had all of his ideas; there were even some spare identities that they used to drop in third party opinions. “Let both of them find a following as they can,” said Peter.
Once, tired of writing and rewriting until Peter was satisfied, Val despaired and said, “Write it yourself, then!”
“I can’t,” he answered. “They can’t both sound alike. Ever. You forget that someday we’ll be famous enough that somebody will start running analyses. We have to come up as different people every time.”
So she wrote on. Her main identity on the nets was Demosthenes—Peter chose the name. He called himself Locke. They were obvious pseudonyms, but that was part of the plan. “With any luck, they’ll start trying to guess who we are.”
“If we get famous enough, the government can always get access and find out who we really are.”
“When that happens, we’ll be too entrenched to suffer much loss. People might be shocked that Demosthenes and Locke are two kids, but they’ll already be used to listening to us.”
They began composing debates for their characters. Valentine would prepare an opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her. His answer would be intelligent, and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and good political rhetoric. Valentine had a knack for alliteration that made her phrases memorable. Then they would enter the debate into the network, separated by a reasonable amount of time, as if they were actually making them up on the spot. Sometimes a few other netters would interpose comments, but Peter and Val would usually ignore them or change their own comments only slightly to accommodate what had been said.
Peter took careful note of all their most memorable phrases and then did searches from time to time to find those phrases cropping up in other places. Not all of them did, but most of them were repeated here and there, and some of them even showed up in the major debates on the prestige nets. “We’re being read,” Peter said. “The ideas are seeping out.”
“The phrases, anyway.”
“That’s just the measure. Look, we’re having some influence. Nobody quotes us by name, yet, but they’re discussing the points we raise. We’re helping set the agenda. We’re getting there.”
“Should we try to get into the main debates?”
> “No. We’ll wait until they ask us.”
They had been doing it only seven months when one of the west coast nets sent Demosthenes a message. An offer for a weekly column in a pretty good newsnet.
“I can’t do a weekly column,” Valentine said. “I don’t even have a monthly period yet.”
“The two aren’t related,” Peter said.
“They are to me. I’m still a kid.”
“Tell them yes, but since you prefer not to have your true identity revealed, you want them to pay you in network time. A new access code through their corporate identity.”
“So when the government traces me—”
“You’ll just be a person who can sign on through CalNet. Father’s citizen’s access doesn’t get involved. What I can’t figure out is why they wanted Demosthenes before Locke.”
“Talent rises to the top.”
As a game, it was fun. But Valentine didn’t like some of the positions Peter made Demosthenes take. Demosthenes began to develop as a fairly paranoid anti-Russian writer. It bothered her because Peter was the one who knew how to exploit fear in his writing—she had to keep coming to him for ideas on how to do it. Meanwhile, his Locke followed her moderate, empathic strategies. It made sense, in a way. By having her write Demosthenes, it meant he also had some empathy, just as Locke also could play on others’ fears. But the main effect was to keep her inextricably tied to Peter. She couldn’t go off and use Demosthenes for her own purposes. She wouldn’t know how to use him. Still, it worked both ways. He couldn’t write Locke without her. Or could he?
“I thought the idea was to unify the world. If I write this like you say I should, Peter, I’m pretty much calling for war to break up the Warsaw Pact.”
“Not war, just open nets and prohibition of interception. Free flow of information. Compliance with the League rules, for heaven’s sake.”
Without meaning to, Valentine started talking in Demosthenes’ voice, even though she certainly wasn’t speaking Demosthenes’ opinions. “Everyone knows that from the beginning of the League the Second Warsaw Pact was to be regarded as a single entity where those rules were concerned. International free flow is still open. But between the Warsaw Pact nations these things are internal matters. That was why they were willing to allow American hegemony in the League.”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 15
