Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

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  To Ben Bova for opening the door

  and

  to Tom Doherty for pulling me through.

  1

  Back when the first alien invasion struck Earth, the panicked response of the human race was to try to discover and train a generation of genius commanders who could lead humanity to victory over the Formics. Eventually, they started training younger and younger cadets. The idea was to find Napoleon, Sun Tzu, or Genghis Khan at the age of six or so and train him to be ready to lead the human race to victory. Or survival.

  The general opinion was that Battle School was a resounding success, because it produced Andrew “Ender” Wiggin and his tiny jeesh of brilliant children, who crushed every fleet sent against them and finally destroyed the Formics’ home world. Since then, some have taken pity on our adversaries and piously regretted wiping them out of the universe. That’s a repentance that is safe to express because once the enemy is extinct, there’s no going back.

  That great victory is still a part of the folklore of the Hundred Worlds. But those who have seriously studied the records of Battle School and the psychological testing of the children who attended there, as well as during its later years as Fleet School, offer a different conclusion. In other words, as soon as you actually know anything about what really happened, the folklore falls apart.

  The supposedly rigorous testing of the children before admitting them to Battle School was, like almost all intelligence and aptitude tests, testing for nothing much beyond the ability to do well on tests, that test in particular. Throwing their tests up a flight of stairs and taking the candidates whose tests landed on even-numbered steps would have predicted future military command success with just as much accuracy.

  Deep study of Andrew Wiggin has revealed that his tremendous success in command and leadership owed nothing to his training, which was haphazard, hostile, and incompetent. Instead, his “innate character” (a term most psychologists now dispute as somewhere between misleading and meaningless—mostly because, having no respect for their own innate character, they doubt its existence in others) caused him to turn every disadvantage the system used against him into a tool for training himself and a group of cooperating students.

  That all of his jeesh and other followers ended up having influential careers in and out of the military is due, not to any training in Battle School or any testing thereafter, but to their innate character.

  Their innate character determined whether they would respond to Andrew Wiggin’s invitation to train with him. That fact, and only that fact, separated the later high achievers from the rest.

  Some have concluded that this means the ideal training is to create a hostile environment and see who rises out of it through their own resourcefulness and cooperation with others. But the tests made based on this hypothesis have had no better than mixed results.

  Some have concluded that no matter how you interpret the data, whatever Master Bureaucrat Hyrum Graff and Retired War Hero Mazer Rackham did, in the design of Battle School and the training of Andrew Wiggin, worked.

  Some have pointed out that Andrew Wiggin’s brother, Peter, best known as the Hegemon (see The Hive Queen and The Hegemon, disseminated under the pseudonym “Speaker for the Dead”), received none of the training his younger brother received, and was rejected by Battle School for his excessive ambition and callous disregard for the pain of others.

  Yet he is honored today as well as in his lifetime for achieving the unification of Earth under a single government rooted in principles of liberty, democracy, and fairness. The fact that Peter Wiggin was rejected by Battle School may be the most important single indicator of the inadequacy of the school’s testing procedures.

  For the purpose of our overview of the Battle School and Fleet School graduates, it is perhaps sufficient to recognize this: When you select, from the entire human population, the children who are best according to any measure of intelligence that includes verbal ability, logic, and spatial relationships, and who test well in empathy, mind-reading, and adaptive social skills, you will discover that they do very well in verbal ability, logic, spatial relationships, empathy, mind-reading, and adaptive social skills throughout their lives.

  It is not a mark of bad science, but of good science, when a conclusion is not rejected merely because it is obvious.

  —Carlotta Delphiki, Herodotus Papers

  Thulium did not like the nickname “Ultima Thule,” but since she also did not like the name Thulium, there wasn’t much to choose from between them. The twins, her older brothers, always called her Ultima, while the cousins called her as little as possible, since they all feared her father, the one called Sergeant, and therefore most of them avoided hanging around with any of his kids.

  That was a hard thing to bring off, considering that they all lived cooped up in the small starship Herodotus. You could wander to the most remote spot on the ship, and someone could find you within about two minutes, since all the other kids knew all the hiding places as well as Thulium did. Better, in fact, since she was the youngest, even though she was younger than Blue by only three months.

  At breakfast somebody mentioned that today was Blue’s birthday, and Thulium had muttered something about how her birthday must be coming up in a couple of months.

  “You don’t have a birthday, Ultima,” said Dys, the twin who insisted he wasn’t identical.

  Lanth, the identical twin, might have started fighting with Dys over this, but it was apparently more fun to goad Thulium than to quarrel with Dys. Safer, too. “You grew like a fungus on the outside wall of the ship,” he said. “Father scraped you off and brought you inside just before we took off from Nokonoshima.”

  “Leave her alone,” said Little Mum, the oldest of the cousins, but only by a year.

  “Says the Mother Superior,” said Lanth. “We’re not doing anything to her.”

  “Except telling her the truth about her parentage,” said Dys.

  “When the Herodotus was parked at the Tochoji Spaceport undergoing repairs and refitting,” said Lanth, “some giant poopy-birds kept pooping on the ship, and a virulent fungus grew in the poo. That’s what Father scraped off to make you.”

  Thulium shook her head. “Tochoji Spaceport was in geosynchronous orbit directly over the capital city Tochoji. The Herodotus never touched the surface of the planet because there’s no surface spaceport large enough to receive a starship. You do understand that I can read at a very high level, and because I’m interested, I have already learned far more about our family history than you ever will.”

  “The poopy-birds are space birds, Ultima Thule,” said Lanth
. “They breathe in giant farts and they can live on that for about a year before they have to breathe again. Meanwhile, they poop almost constantly.”

  “You haven’t fooled her since she was less than five,” said Little Mum, whose real name was Petra. “Why do you keep trying?”

  “Because in her heart of hearts,” said Dys, “she actually believes what we say enough to wonder if it might, in some way, be true.”

  “Do not,” said Thulium, trying to sound tired.

  “What’s your job for today, Twins?” said Little Mum. “That is, once you stop annoying your sister.”

  “We don’t report to you,” said Dys.

  “Your father specifically assigned you to report to me,” said Little Mum.

  “That was last week,” said Lanth.

  “Unrescinded,” said Little Mum.

  “If you try to boss me around,” said Dys, “I’ll heave you out an airlock.”

  “Don’t try that until you’ve disabled the software and hardware that track us all continuously,” said Mum.

  “Already did that,” said Lanth. “Still tracks all the rest of you, but not me and Dys.”

  “In your dreams,” said Mum.

  “It happens that Lanth and I are very very smart,” said Dys.

  “So is everybody on this ship,” said Thulium.

  “She’s got a point,” said Dys.

  “Doesn’t mean we’re not smarter than the parents. In fact, I think that was the genetic plan,” said Lanth. “Go down to a planet—they didn’t care which, but Nokonoshima drew the short straw—go down, mate with some locals, have as many babies as possible within a couple of years. It turned out to take four years because nobody wanted Aunt Carlotta. Then they kidnap the babies, go back into space leaving the spouses behind, and raise the little bunnies on the Herodotus until they decide whether we kids are smart enough to please them. And they will only be pleased when we prove that we got all of our intelligence from them, and not from our Nokonoshima parents.”

  “And what if we’re not smart enough?” asked Dys, leaning in to Thulium. “I mean, obviously Lanth and I are, but you, Ultima Thule, I worry about you. Papa’s kind of ruthless, and he has very high standards. I don’t think you’ve ever said or done anything smart enough to earn you a place in this ship.”

  Little Mum squirted a mild vinegar solution into Dys’s face. He squawked and raced to the bathroom to rinse it out of his eyes.

  “You didn’t have to do that, Petra,” said Thulium.

  “Uncle Sergeant authorized me to do exactly that if they started being cruel to you. He knows the kind of children he spawned.”

  “I’m that kind of child, too, since he’s my father,” said Thulium.

  “If you ever bully people like the twins do, you’ll get some weak vinegar solution in your eyes, too,” said Little Mum.

  “I’m not like them at all,” said Thulium.

  “Then we must assume you’re like your mother,” said Little Mum.

  “I wish I remembered her.”

  “You weren’t three weeks old when we left Nokonoshima,” said Little Mum. “You couldn’t possibly remember her.”

  “Part of our inheritance from the Giant is that we have amazing memories when we’re little,” said Thulium. “But not amazing enough.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Little Mum. “Our parents knew from the start that they’d have a bunch of kids to keep the Giant’s genes alive until the human race needs us. They also knew that we would have to be raised in a controlled environment.”

  “This tiny prison,” said Thulium.

  Her father’s voice entered the conversation, quietly insinuating itself as if he had been part of it all along. “This tiny prison is where Ender, Carlotta, and I all grew up,” he said.

  Thulium had heard this same nonsense before. “The Giant raised three of you, and there are seven of us grandchildren.”

  “But the Giant took up the space of thirty children your size,” said Father. “So you should rejoice in the luxurious space you have compared to our childhood.”

  “It was selfish of you to kidnap us and sequester us away from our mother,” said Thulium.

  “Your mother was a kind but normal woman, which means she could dress herself and read simple texts, but otherwise she was not fit to rear a child of mine,” said Father.

  “I’ll bet she was nicer than you will ever be,” said Thulium.

  “She certainly was,” said Father. “Everybody is nicer than I will ever be.”

  “Not the twins,” said Thulium.

  “Oh, have they been picking on you again?”

  Thulium glanced at Little Mum, who was studiously looking at her hands in her lap.

  “You don’t need to appeal to the witness of others,” said Father. “I will believe whatever you tell me.”

  “They say ridiculous things designed to make me angry,” said Thulium.

  “Does it work?”

  “Sometimes,” said Thulium. “Not because I believe them, but because I don’t understand why they hate me.”

  “They hate you,” said Father, “because your mother obviously cared more about you than she did about them. They didn’t understand, and still don’t, that her suckling babe is always more important to a human woman than her toddlers.”

  “Doesn’t that mean they’re too stupid to be descended from the Giant?” asked Thulium.

  “You all tested positive for the modified Anton’s Key gene before we took any of you with us on the Herodotus,” said Father. “And I suppose that is what the twins lie about most, to make you think perhaps we’ll chuck you out of the blowhole because you’re too dumb to carry on the family tradition.”

  Thulium shrugged. “I know they’re lying.”

  “But you don’t know they’re lying,” said Father.

  Thulium wasn’t sure what distinction he was making. “Do you mean I’m not certain?” asked Thulium. “Of course I’m certain. You told me we all have Anton’s Key, modified version, so we won’t die of giantism like your father did.”

  “And if I told you, it must be true,” said Father.

  “No,” said Lanth. “You lie to everybody all the time.”

  “Only when it’s funny,” said Father.

  “It’s never funny,” said Lanth.

  “It is to me,” said Father. “Hello, Dys. Back from washing vinegar out of your eyes?”

  “I think she’s mixed it with something a lot stronger,” said Dys.

  “Quite likely,” said Father. “But you can be sure it isn’t permanently damaging, because I only gave her authority to stop you from being an idiot, not kill you or maim you.”

  Thulium knew that the part of the discussion concerning her was over. Even though Father pretended that he completely adored his little girl Thulium, it was the twins he loved, because he could train them to be soldiers, while Thulium would always be a girl, with less strength and stamina. Not worth training. As if Father had ever been a real soldier. Anything he learned about military training had come from books and vids.

  Thulium decided to leave the room. She’d get something more to eat later in the morning. Maybe she’d make Aunt Carlotta feed her lunch in her family quarters. Blue, Carlotta’s youngest, was Thulium’s only friend.

  But no, today was Blue’s birthday, so maybe Aunt Carlotta wouldn’t have time for her.

  Then again, maybe she would, because Blue got teased by the older kids almost as much as Thulium did, so Carlotta would want Thulium close by throughout whatever birthday celebration they might have, so Blue would have a friend he could trust.

  As she was about to leave, Aunt Carlotta came in, bustling on some errand that involved food stored in the dry pantry. With Father and the twins at the far side of the mess hall, Thulium asked Aunt Carlotta, quietly, “Do we get the day off of lessons because it’s Blue’s birthday?”

  “You do,” said Aunt Carlotta, not in a quiet voice at all, “and Blue does. All the older kids sti
ll have class.”

  “Not fair!” cried Dys, from across the room where Father had been admonishing him while examining his eyes.

  “So you’re not paying attention to me,” said Father. “Listening in on irrelevant conversations while I’m trying to teach you to think like a warrior.”

  “Who are we ever going to go to war with in here?” demanded Dys.

  “Whoever comes at us trying to kill us,” said Father. “I thought you understood that concept long ago.”

  “Why would anybody want to kill us?” said Dys.

  “Because we’re not part of the human race. We’re smarter than they are, and that terrifies them,” said Father.

  “Nobody knows we exist,” said Thulium, crossing the room.

  “Everybody knows we exist, if they know anything about history,” said Father. “And it keeps some of them awake at night, wondering when and where we might turn up.”

  “They think we died, the way the Giant died,” said Thulium.

  “That’s what they tell themselves in order to sleep,” said Father.

  “Why should they be afraid of us?” asked Thulium.

  “Someday the bogeyman is going to come,” said Father, “and they’ll need us to defeat the bogeyman and save the human race.”

  “Like Ender Wiggin,” said Thulium.

  “Like your grandfather the Giant,” said Father. “Wiggin got the credit. But yes, like Ender Wiggin in the storybooks.”

  “So they won’t hate us, they’ll be grateful, and they won’t go to war with us,” said Thulium.

  “After we defeat the bogeyman,” said Father, “they’ll understand just how wise and powerful we are. That’s when they’ll decide to destroy us, if they can.”

  “Can they?” asked Thulium.

  “It’ll be interesting to find out, won’t it, my darling poppet,” said Father.

  “No,” said Thulium. “I don’t want to save the humans if they’re like what you say, ungrateful and murderous.”

  “And yet right now we don’t have a breeding population of Leguminids,” said Father. “So we need some viable populations of humans to maintain a high level of technology and agriculture on many worlds so we can choose a breeding population when it’s time for you lovely younglings to mate.”