The Ender Quintet (Omnibus) Page 5

  “They do love you, Ender. But you have to understand what your life has cost them. They were born religious, you know. Your father was baptized with the name John Paul Wieczorek. Catholic. The seventh of nine children.”

  Nine children. That was unthinkable. Criminal.

  “Yes, well, people do strange things for religion. You know the sanctions, Ender—they were not as harsh then, but still not easy. Only the first two children had a free education. Taxes steadily rose with each new child. Your father turned sixteen and invoked the Noncomplying Families Act to separate himself from his family. He changed his name, renounced his religion, and vowed never to have more than the allotted two children. He meant it. All the shame and persecution he went through as a child—he vowed no child of his would go through it. Do you understand?”

  “He didn’t want me.”

  “Well, no one wants a Third anymore. You can’t expect them to be glad. But your father and mother are a special case. They both renounced their religions—your mother was a Mormon—but in fact their feelings are still ambiguous. Do you know what ambiguous means?”

  “They feel both ways.”

  “They’re ashamed of having come from noncompliant families. They conceal it. To the degree that your mother refuses to admit to anyone that she was born in Utah, lest they suspect. Your father denies his Polish ancestry, since Poland is still a noncompliant nation, and under international sanction because of it. So, you see, having a Third, even under the government’s direct instructions, undoes everything they’ve been trying to do.”

  “I know that.”

  “But it’s more complicated than that. Your father still named you with legitimate saints’ names. In fact, he baptized all three of you himself as soon as he got you home after you were born. And your mother objected. They quarreled over it each time, not because she didn’t want you baptized, but because she didn’t want you baptized Catholic. They haven’t really given up their religion. They look at you and see you as a badge of pride, because they were able to circumvent the law and have a Third. But you’re also a badge of cowardice, because they dare not go further and practice the noncompliance they still feel is right. And you’re a badge of public shame, because at every step you interfere with their efforts at assimilation into normal complying society.”

  “How can you know all this?”

  “We monitored your brother and sister, Ender. You’d be amazed at how sensitive the instruments are. We were connected directly to your brain. We heard all that you heard, whether you were listening carefully or not. Whether you understood or not. We understand.”

  “So my parents love me and don’t love me?”

  “They love you. The question is whether they want you here. Your presence in this house is a constant disruption. A source of tension. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not the one who causes tension.”

  “Not anything you do, Ender. Your life itself. Your brother hates you because you are living proof that he wasn’t good enough. Your parents resent you because of all the past they are trying to evade.”

  “Valentine loves me.”

  “With all her heart. Completely, unstintingly, she’s devoted to you, and you adore her. I told you it wouldn’t be easy.”

  “What is it like, there?”

  “Hard work. Studies, just like school here, except we put you into mathematics and computers much more heavily. Military history. Strategy and tactics. And above all, the Battle Room.”

  “What’s that?”

  “War games. All the boys are organized into armies. Day after day, in zero gravity, there are mock battles. Nobody gets hurt, but winning and losing matter. Everybody starts as a common soldier, taking orders. Older boys are your officers, and it’s their duty to train you and command you in battle. More than that I can’t tell you. It’s like playing buggers and astronauts—except that you have weapons that work, and fellow soldiers fighting beside you, and your whole future and the future of the human race depends on how well you learn, how well you fight. It’s a hard life, and you won’t have a normal childhood. Of course, with your mind, and as a Third to boot, you wouldn’t have a particularly normal childhood anyway.”

  “All boys?”

  “A few girls. They don’t often pass the tests to get in. Too many centuries of evolution are working against them. None of them will be like Valentine, anyway. But there’ll be brothers there, Ender.”

  “Like Peter?”

  “Peter wasn’t accepted, Ender, for the very reasons that you hate him.”

  “I don’t hate him. I’m just—”

  “Afraid of him. Well, Peter isn’t all bad, you know. He was the best we’d seen in a long time. We asked your parents to choose a daughter next—they would have anyway—hoping that Valentine would be Peter, but milder. She was too mild. And so we requisitioned you.”

  “To be half Peter and half Valentine.”

  “If things worked out right.”

  “Am I?”

  “As far as we can tell. Our tests are very good, Ender. But they don’t tell us everything. In fact, when it comes down to it, they hardly tell us anything. But they’re better than nothing.” Graff leaned over and took Ender’s hands in his. “Ender Wiggin, if it were just a matter of choosing the best and happiest future for you, I’d tell you to stay home. Stay here, grow up, be happy. There are worse things than being a Third, worse things than a big brother who can’t make up his mind whether to be a human being or a jackal. Battle School is one of those worse things. But we need you. The buggers may seem like a game to you now, Ender, but they damn near wiped us out last time. They had us cold, outnumbered and outweaponed. The only thing that saved us was that we had the most brilliant military commander we ever found. Call it fate, call it God, call it damnfool luck, we had Mazer Rackham.

  “But we don’t have him now, Ender. We’ve scraped together everything mankind could produce, a fleet that makes the one they sent against us last time seem like a bunch of kids playing in a swimming pool. We have some new weapons, too. But it might not be enough, even so. Because in the eighty years since the last war, they’ve had as much time to prepare as we have. We need the best we can get, and we need them fast. Maybe you’re not going to work out for us, and maybe you are. Maybe you’ll break down under the pressure, maybe it’ll ruin your life, maybe you’ll hate me for coming here to your house today. But if there’s a chance that because you’re with the fleet, mankind might survive and the buggers might leave us alone forever—then I’m going to ask you to do it. To come with me.”

  Ender had trouble focusing on Colonel Graff. The man looked far away and very small, as if Ender could pick him up with tweezers and drop him in a pocket. To leave everything here, and go to a place that was very hard, with no Valentine, no Mom and Dad.

  And then he thought of the films of the buggers that everyone had to see at least once a year. The Scathing of China. The Battle of the Belt. Death and suffering and terror. And Mazer Rackham and his brilliant maneuvers, destroying an enemy fleet twice his size and twice his firepower, using the little human ships that seemed so frail and weak. Like children fighting with grown-ups. And we won.

  “I’m afraid,” said Ender quietly. “But I’ll go with you.”

  “Tell me again,” said Graff.

  “It’s what I was born for, isn’t it? If I don’t go, why am I alive?”

  “Not good enough,” said Graff.

  “I don’t want to go,” said Ender, “but I will.”

  Graff nodded. “You can change your mind. Up until the time you get in my car with me, you can change your mind. After that, you stay at the pleasure of the International Fleet. Do you understand that?”

  Ender nodded.

  “All right. Let’s tell them.”

  Mother cried. Father held Ender tight. Peter shook his hand and said, “You lucky little pinheaded fart-eater.” Valentine kissed him and left her tears on his cheek.

  There was nothing
to pack. No belongings to take. “The school provides everything you need, from uniforms to school supplies. And as for toys—there’s only one game.”

  “Good-bye,” Ender said to his family. He reached up and took Colonel Graff’s hand and walked out the door with him.

  “Kill some buggers for me!” Peter shouted.

  “I love you, Andrew!” Mother called.

  “We’ll write to you!” Father said.

  And as he got into the car that waited silently in the corridor, he heard Valentine’s anguished cry. “Come back to me! I love you forever!”

  4

  LAUNCH

  “With Ender, we have to strike a delicate balance. Isolate him enough that he remains creative—otherwise he’ll adopt the system here and we’ll lose him. At the same time, we need to make sure he keeps a strong ability to lead.”

  “If he earns rank, he’ll lead.”

  “It isn’t that simple. Mazer Rackham could handle his little fleet and win. By the time this war happens, there’ll be too much, even for a genius. Too many little boats. He has to work smoothly with his subordinates.”

  “Oh, good. He has to be a genius and nice, too.”

  “Not nice. Nice will let the buggers have us all.”

  “So you’re going to isolate him.”

  “I’ll have him completely separated from the rest of the boys by the time we get to the School.”

  “I have no doubt of it. I’ll be waiting for you to get here. I watched the vids of what he did to the Stilson boy. This is not a sweet little kid you’re bringing up here.”

  “That’s where you’re mistaken. He’s even sweeter than he looks. But don’t worry. We’ll purge that in a hurry.”

  “Sometimes I think you enjoy breaking these little geniuses.”

  “There is an art to it, and I’m very, very good at it. But enjoy? Well, maybe. When they put back the pieces afterward, and it makes them better.”

  “You’re a monster.”

  “Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?”

  “Just a medal. The budget isn’t inexhaustible.”

  They say that weightlessness can cause disorientation, especially in children, whose sense of direction isn’t yet secure. But Ender was disoriented before he left Earth’s gravity. Before the shuttle launch even began.

  There were nineteen other boys in his launch. They filed out of the bus and into the elevator. They talked and joked and bragged and laughed. Ender kept his silence. He noticed how Graff and the other officers were watching them. Analyzing. Everything we do means something, Ender realized. Them laughing. Me not laughing.

  He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn’t think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn’t find such a place in himself. He was afraid, and fear made him serious.

  They had dressed him in a uniform, all in a single piece; it felt funny not to have a belt cinched around his waist. He felt baggy and naked, dressed like that. There were TV cameras going, perched like animals on the shoulders of crouching, prowling men. The men moved slowly, catlike, so the camera motion would be smooth. Ender caught himself moving smoothly, too.

  He imagined himself being on TV, in an interview. The announcer asking him, How do you feel, Mr. Wiggin? Actually quite well, except hungry. Hungry? Oh, yes, they don’t let you eat for twenty hours before the launch. How interesting, I never knew that. All of us are quite hungry, actually. And all the while, during the interview, Ender and the TV guy would slink along smoothly in front of the cameraman, taking long, lithe strides. The TV guy was letting him be the spokesman for all the boys, though Ender was barely competent to speak for himself. For the first time, Ender felt like laughing. He smiled. The other boys near him were laughing at the moment, too, for another reason. They think I’m smiling at their joke, thought Ender. But I’m smiling at something much funnier.

  “Go up the ladder one at a time,” said an officer. “When you come to an aisle with empty seats, take one. There aren’t any window seats.”

  It was a joke. The other boys laughed.

  Ender was near the last, but not the very last. The TV cameras did not give up, though. Will Valentine see me disappear into the shuttle? He thought of waving at her, of running to the cameraman and saying, “Can I tell Valentine good-bye?” He didn’t know that it would be censored out of the tape if he did, for the boys soaring out to Battle School were all supposed to be heroes. They weren’t supposed to miss anybody. Ender didn’t know about the censorship, but he did know that running to the cameras would be wrong.

  He walked the short bridge to the door in the shuttle. He noticed that the wall to his right was carpeted like a floor. That was where the disorientation began. The moment he thought of the wall as a floor, he began to feel like he was walking on a wall. He got to the ladder, and noticed that the vertical surface behind it was also carpeted. I am climbing up the floor. Hand over hand, step by step.

  And then, for fun, he pretended that he was climbing down the wall. He did it almost instantly in his mind, convinced himself against the best evidence of gravity until he reached an empty seat. He found himself gripping the seat tightly, even though gravity pulled him firmly against it.

  The other boys were bouncing on their seats a little, poking and pushing, shouting. Ender carefully found the straps, figured out how they fit together to hold him at crotch, waist, and shoulders. He imagined the ship dangling upside down on the undersurface of the Earth, the giant fingers of gravity holding them firmly in place. But we will slip away, he thought. We are going to fall off this planet.

  He did not know its significance at the time. Later, though, he would remember that it was even before he left Earth that he first thought of it as a planet, like any other, not particularly his own.

  “Oh, already figured it out,” said Graff. He was standing on the ladder.

  “Coming with us?” Ender asked.

  “I don’t usually come down for recruiting,” Graff said. “I’m kind of in charge there. Administrator of the School. Like a principal. They told me I had to come back or I’d lose my job.” He smiled.

  Ender smiled back. He felt comfortable with Graff. Graff was good. And he was principal of the Battle School. Ender relaxed a little. He would have a friend there.

  Adults helped the other boys belt themselves in place, those who hadn’t done as Ender did. Then they waited for an hour while a TV at the front of the shuttle introduced them to shuttle flight, the history of space flight, and their possible future with the great starships of the I.F. Very boring stuff. Ender had seen such films before.

  Except that he had not been belted into a seat inside the shuttle. Hanging upside down from the belly of Earth.

  The launch wasn’t bad. A little scary. Some jolting, a few moments of panic that this might be the first failed launch since the early days of the shuttle. The movies hadn’t made it plain how much violence you could experience, lying on your back in a soft chair.

  Then it was over, and he really was hanging by the straps, no gravity anywhere.

  But because he had already reoriented himself, he was not surprised when Graff came up the ladder backward, as if he were climbing down to the front of the shuttle. Nor did it bother him when Graff hooked his feet under a rung and pushed off with his hands, so that suddenly he swung upright, as if this were an ordinary airplane.

  The reorientations were too much for some. One boy gagged; Ender understood then why they had been forbidden to eat anything for twenty hours before the launch. Vomiting in null gravity wouldn’t be fun.

  But for Ender, Graff’s gravity game was fun. And he carried it further, imagining that Graff was actually hanging upside down from the center aisle, and then picturing him sticking straight out from a side wall. Gravity could go any which way. However I want it to go. I can make Graff stand on his head and he doesn’t even know it.

  “What do you think is so funny, Wiggin?”
>
  Graff’s voice was sharp and angry. What did I do wrong, thought Ender. Did I laugh out loud?

  “I asked you a question, soldier!” barked Graff.

  Oh yes. This is the beginning of the training routine. Ender had seen some military shows on TV, and they always shouted a lot at the beginning of training before the soldiers and the officer became good friends.

  “Yes sir,” Ender said.

  “Well answer it, then!”

  “I thought of you hanging upside down by your feet. I thought it was funny.”

  It sounded stupid, now, with Graff looking at him coldly. “To you I suppose it is funny. Is it funny to anybody else here?”

  Murmurs of no.

  “Well why isn’t it?” Graff looked at them all with contempt. “Scumbrains, that’s what we’ve got in this launch. Pinheaded little morons. Only one of you had the brains to realize that in null gravity directions are whatever you conceive them to be. Do you understand that, Shafts?”

  The boy nodded.

  “No you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. Not only stupid, but a liar too. There’s only one boy on this launch with any brains at all, and that’s Ender Wiggin. Take a good look at him, little boys. He’s going to be a commander when you’re still in diapers up there. Because he knows how to think in null gravity, and you just want to throw up.”

  This wasn’t the way the show was supposed to go. Graff was supposed to pick on him, not set him up as the best. They were supposed to be against each other at first, so they could become friends later.

  “Most of you are going to ice out. Get used to that, little boys. Most of you are going to end up in Combat School, because you don’t have the brains to handle deep-space piloting. Most of you aren’t worth the price of bringing you up here to Battle School because you don’t have what it takes. Some of you might make it. Some of you might be worth something to humanity. But don’t bet on it. I’m betting on only one.”

  Suddenly Graff did a backflip and caught the ladder with his hands, then swung his feet away from the ladder. Doing a handstand, if the floor was down. Dangling by his hands, if the floor was up. Hand over hand he swung himself back along the aisle to his seat.