“Do we know where they are?”
“Yes.”
“So we’re not waiting for the Third Invasion.”
“We are the Third Invasion.”
“We’re attacking them. Nobody says that. Everybody thinks we have a huge fleet of warships waiting in the comet shield—”
“Not one. We’re quite defenseless here.”
“What if they’ve sent a fleet to attack us?”
“Then we’re dead. But our ships haven’t seen such a fleet, not a sign of one.”
“Maybe they gave up and they’re planning to leave us alone.”
“Maybe. You’ve seen the videos. Would you bet the human race on the chance of them giving up and leaving us alone?”
Ender tried to grasp the amounts of time that had gone by. “And the ships have been traveling for seventy years—”
“Some of them. And some for thirty years, and some for twenty. We make better ships now. We’re learning how to play with space a little better. But every starship that is not still under construction is on its way to a bugger world or outpost. Every starship, with cruisers and fighters tucked into its belly, is out there approaching the buggers. Decelerating. Because they’re almost there. The first ships we sent to the most distant objectives, the more recent ships to the closer ones. Our timing was pretty good. They’ll all be arriving in combat range within a few months of each other. Unfortunately, our most primitive, outdated equipment will be attacking their homeworld. Still, they’re armed well enough—we have some weapons the buggers never saw before.”
“When will they arrive?”
“Within the next five years, Ender. Everything is ready at I.F. Command. The master ansible is there, in contact with all our invasion fleet; the ships are all working, ready to fight. All we lack, Ender, is the battle commander. Someone who knows what the hell to do with those ships when they get there.”
“And what if no one knows what to do with them?”
“We’ll just do our best, with the best commander we can get.”
Me, thought Ender. They want me to be ready in five years. “Colonel Graff, there isn’t a chance I’ll be ready to command a fleet in time.”
Graff shrugged. “So. Do your best. If you aren’t ready, we’ll make do with what we’ve got.”
That eased Ender’s mind.
But only for a moment. “Of course, Ender, what we’ve got right now is nobody.”
Ender knew that this was another of Graff’s games. Make me believe that it all depends on me, so I can’t slack off, so I push myself as hard as possible.
Game or not, though, it might also be true. And so he would work as hard as possible. It was what Val had wanted of him. Five years. Only five years until the fleet arrives, and I don’t know anything yet. “I’ll only be fifteen in five years,” Ender said.
“Going on sixteen,” said Graff. “It all depends on what you know.”
“Colonel Graff,” he said. “I just want to go back and swim in the lake.”
“After we win the war,” said Graff. “Or lose it. We’ll have a few decades before they get back here to finish us off. The house will be there, and I promise you can swim to your heart’s content.”
“But I’ll still be too young for security clearance.”
“We’ll keep you under armed guard at all times. The military knows how to handle these things.”
They both laughed, and Ender had to remind himself that Graff was only acting like a friend, that everything he did was a lie or a cheat calculated to turn Ender into an efficient fighting machine. I’ll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I won’t be fooled into it. I’ll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.
The tug reached Eros before they could see it. The captain showed them the visual scan, then superimposed the heat scan on the same screen. They were practically on top of it—only four thousand kilometers out—but Eros, only twenty-four kilometers long, was invisible if it didn’t shine with reflected sunlight.
The captain docked the ship on one of the three landing platforms that circled Eros. It could not land directly because Eros had enhanced gravity, and the tug, designed for towing cargoes, could never escape the gravity well. He bade them an irritable good-bye, but Ender and Graff remained cheerful. The captain was bitter at having to leave his tug; Ender and Graff felt like prisoners finally paroled from jail. When they boarded the shuttle that would take them to the surface of Eros, they repeated perverse misquotations of lines from the videos that the captain had endlessly watched, and laughed like madmen. The captain grew surly and withdrew by pretending to go to sleep. Then, almost as an afterthought, Ender asked Graff one last question.
“Why are we fighting the buggers?”
“I’ve heard all kinds of reasons,” said Graff. “Because they have an overcrowded system and they’ve got to colonize. Because they can’t stand the thought of other intelligent life in the universe. Because they don’t think we are intelligent life. Because they have some weird religion. Because they watched our old video broadcasts and decided we were hopelessly violent. All kinds of reasons.”
“What do you believe?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“I want to know anyway.”
“They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also remember. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”
“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”
“If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”
“What if we just left them alone?”
“Ender, we didn’t go to them first, they came to us. If they were going to leave us alone, they could have done it a hundred years ago, before the First Invasion.”
“Maybe they didn’t know we were intelligent life. Maybe—”
“Ender, believe me, there’s a century of discussion on this very subject. Nobody knows the answer. When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let’s make damn sure we’re the ones alive at the end. Our genes won’t let us decide any other way. Nature can’t evolve a species that hasn’t a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we’ll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they’ll kill every last one of us.”
“As for me,” said Ender, “I’m in favor of surviving.”
“I know,” said Graff. “That’s why you’re here.”
14
ENDER’S TEACHER
“Took your time, didn’t you, Graff? The voyage isn’t short, but the three-month vacation seems excessive.”
“I prefer not to deliver damaged merchandise.”
“Some men simply have no sense of hurry. Oh well, it’s only the fate of the world. . . . Never mind me. You must understand our anxiety. We’re here with the ansible, receiving constant reports of the progress of our starships. We have to face the coming war every day. If you can call them days. He’s such a very little boy.”
“There’s greatness in him. A magnitude of spirit.”
“A killer instinct, too, I hope.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve planned out an impromptu course of study for him. All subject to your approval, of course.”
“I’ll look at it. I don’t pretend to know t
he subject matter, Admiral Chamrajnagar. I’m only here because I know Ender. So don’t be afraid that I’ll try to second-guess the order of your presentation. Only the pace.”
“How much can we tell him?”
“Don’t waste his time on the physics of interstellar travel.”
“What about the ansible?”
“I already told him about that, and the fleets. I said they would arrive at their destination within five years.”
“It seems there’s very little left for us to tell him.”
“You can tell him about the weapons systems. He has to know enough to make intelligent decisions.”
“Ah. We can be useful after all, how very kind. We’ve devoted one of the five simulators to his exclusive use.”
“What about the others?”
“The other simulators?”
“The other children.”
“You were brought here to take care of Ender Wiggin.”
“Just curious. Remember, they were all my students at one time or another.”
“And now they are all mine. They are entering into the mysteries of the fleet, Colonel Graff, to which you, as a soldier, have never been introduced.”
“You make it sound like a priesthood.”
“And a god. And a religion. Even those of us who command by ansible know the majesty of flight among the stars. I can see you find my mysticism distasteful. I assure you that your distaste only reveals your ignorance. Soon enough Ender Wiggin will also know what I know; he will dance the graceful ghost dance through the stars, and whatever greatness there is within him will be unlocked, revealed, set forth before the universe for all to see. You have the soul of a stone, Colonel Graff, but I sing to a stone as easily as to another singer. You may go to your quarters and establish yourself.”
“I have nothing to establish except the clothing I’m wearing.”
“You own nothing?”
“They keep my salary in an account somewhere on Earth. I’ve never needed it. Except to buy civilian clothes on my—vacation.”
“A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction.”
“When I’m tense, I eat. Whereas when you’re tense, you spout solid waste.”
“I like you, Colonel Graff. I think we shall get along.”
“I don’t much care, Admiral Chamrajnagar. I came here for Ender. And neither of us came here for you.”
Ender hated Eros from the moment he shuttled down from the tug. He had been uncomfortable enough on Earth, where floors were flat; Eros was hopeless. It was a roughly spindle-shaped rock only six and a half kilometers thick at its narrowest point. Since the surface of the planetoid was entirely devoted to absorbing sunlight and converting it to energy, everyone lived in the smooth-walled rooms linked by tunnels that laced the interior of the asteroid. The closed-in space was no problem for Ender—what bothered him was that all the tunnel floors noticeably sloped downward. From the start, Ender was plagued by vertigo as he walked through the tunnels, especially the ones that girdled Eros’s narrow circumference. It did not help that gravity was only half of Earth-normal—the illusion of being on the verge of falling was almost complete.
There was also something disturbing about the proportions of the rooms—the ceilings were too low for the width, the tunnels too narrow. It was not a comfortable place.
Worst of all, though, was the number of people. Ender had no important memories of the scale of the cities of Earth. His idea of a comfortable number of people was the Battle School, where he had known by sight every person who dwelt there. Here, though, ten thousand people lived within the rock. There was no crowding, despite the amount of space devoted to life support and other machinery. What bothered Ender was that he was constantly surrounded by strangers.
They never let him come to know anyone. He saw the other Command School students often, but since he never attended any class regularly, they remained only faces. He would attend a lecture here or there, but usually he was tutored by one teacher after another, or occasionally helped to learn a process by another student, whom he met once and never saw again. He ate alone or with Colonel Graff. His recreation was in a gym, but he rarely saw the same people in it twice.
He recognized that they were isolating him again, this time not by setting the other students to hating him, but rather by giving them no opportunity to become friends. He could hardly have been close to most of them anyway—except for Ender, the other students were all well into adolescence.
So Ender withdrew into his studies and learned quickly and well. Astrogation and military history he absorbed like water; abstract mathematics was more difficult, but whenever he was given a problem that involved patterns in space and time, he found that his intuition was more reliable than his calculation—he often saw at once a solution that he could only prove after minutes or hours of manipulating numbers.
And for pleasure, there was the simulator, the most perfect videogame he had ever played. Teachers and students trained him, step by step, in its use. At first, not knowing the awesome power of the game, he had played only at the tactical level, controlling a single fighter in continuous maneuvers to find and destroy an enemy. The computer-controlled enemy was devious and powerful, and whenever Ender tried a tactic he found the computer using it against him within minutes.
The game was a holographic display, and his fighter was represented only by a tiny light. The enemy was another light of a different color, and they danced and spun and maneuvered through a cube of space that must have been ten meters to a side. The controls were powerful. He could rotate the display in any direction, so he could watch from any angle, and he could move the center so that the duel took place nearer or farther from him.
Gradually, as he became more adept at controlling the fighter’s speed, direction of movement, orientation, and weapons, the game was made more complex. He might have two enemy ships at once; there might be obstacles, the debris of space; he began to have to worry about fuel and limited weapons; the computer began to assign him particular things to destroy or accomplish, so that he had to avoid distractions and achieve an objective in order to win.
When he had mastered the one-fighter game, they allowed him to step back into the four-fighter squadron. He spoke commands to simulated pilots of four fighters, and instead of merely carrying out the computer’s instructions, he was allowed to determine tactics himself, deciding which of several objectives was the most valuable and directing his squadron accordingly. At any time he could take personal command of one of the fighters for a short time, and at first he did this often; when he did, however, the other three fighters in his squadron were soon destroyed, and as the games became harder and harder he had to spend more and more of his time commanding the squadron. When he did, he won more and more often.
By the time he had been at Command School for a year, he was adept at running the simulator at any of fifteen levels, from controlling an individual fighter to commanding a fleet. He had long since realized that as the battleroom was to Battle School, so the simulator was to Command School. The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game. People dropped in from time to time to watch him play. They never spoke—hardly anyone ever did, unless they had something specific to teach him. The watchers would stay, silently watching him run through a difficult simulation, and then leave just as he finished. What are you doing, he wanted to ask. Judging me? Determining whether you want to trust the fleet to me? Just remember that I didn’t ask for it.
He found that a great deal of what he had learned at Battle School transferred to the simulator. He would routinely reorient the simulator every few minutes, rotating it so that he didn’t get trapped into an up-down orientation, constantly reviewing his position from the enemy point of view. It was exhilarating at last to have such control over the battle, to be able to see every point of it.
It was also frustrating to have so little control, too, for the computer-controlled fighter
s were only as good as the computer allowed. They took no initiative. They had no intelligence. He began to wish for his toon leaders, so that he could count on some of the squadrons doing well without having his constant supervision.
At the end of his first year he was winning every battle on the simulator, and played the game as if the machine were a natural part of his body. One day, eating a meal with Graff, he asked, “Is that all the simulator does?”
“Is what all?”
“The way it plays now. It’s easy, and it hasn’t got any harder for a while.”
“Oh.”
Graff seemed unconcerned. But then, Graff always seemed unconcerned. The next day everything changed. Graff went away, and in his place they gave Ender a companion.
He was in the room when Ender awoke in the morning. He was an old man, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Ender looked at him expectantly, waiting for the man to speak. He said nothing. Ender got up and showered and dressed, content to let the man keep his silence if he wanted. He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, something that was part of someone else’s plan and not his own, he would find out more information by waiting than by asking. Adults almost always lost their patience before Ender did.
The man still hadn’t spoken when Ender was ready and went to the door to leave the room. The door didn’t open. Ender turned to face the man sitting on the floor. He looked to be about sixty, by far the oldest man Ender had seen on Eros. He had a day’s growth of white whiskers that grizzled his face only slightly less than his close-cut hair. His face sagged a little and his eyes were surrounded by creases and lines. He looked at Ender with an expression that bespoke only apathy.
Ender turned back to the door and tried again to open it.
“All right,” he said, giving up. “Why’s the door locked?”
The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 27
