Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 1 - Ender's Game Page 10

"So you won't mind if I notify them?"

  "Of course I mind, you meddlesome ass. This is something to be decided by people who know what they're doing, not these frightened politicians who got their office because they happen to be politically potent in the country they came from."

  "But you understand why I'm doing it."

  "Because you're such a short-sighted little bureaucratic bastard that you think you need to cover yourself in case things go wrong. Well, if things go wrong we'll all be bugger meat. So trust me now, Anderson, and don't bring the whole damn Hegemony down on review. What I'm doing is hard enough without them."

  "Oh, is it unfair? Are things stacked against you? You can do it to Ender, but you can't take it, is that it?"

  "Ender Wiggin is ten times smarter and stronger than I am. What I'm doing to him will bring out his genius. If I had to go through it myself, it would crush me. Major Anderson, I know I'm wrecking the game, and I know you love it better than any of the boys who play. Hate me if you like, but don't stop me."

  "I reserve the right to communicate with the Hegemony and the Strategoi at any time. But for now do what you want."

  "Thank you ever so kindly."

  ***

  "Ender Wiggin, the little fart head who leads the standings, what a pleasure to have you with us." The commander of Rat Army lay sprawled on a lower bunk wearing only his desk. "With you around, how can any army lose?" Several of the boys nearby laughed.

  There could not have been two more opposite armies than Salamander and Rat. The room was rumpled, cluttered, noisy. After Bonzo, Ender had thought that indiscipline would be a welcome relief. Instead, he found that he had come to expect quiet and order, and the disorder here made him uncomfortable.

  "We doing OK, Ender Bender. I Rose de Nose, Jewboy extraordinaire, and you ain't nothin but a pinheaded pinprick of a goy. Don't you forget it."

  Since the IF was formed the Strategos of the military forces had always been a Jew. There was a myth that Jewish generals didn't lose wars. And so far it was still true. It made any Jew at the Battle School dream of being Strategos, and conferred prestige on him from the start. It also caused resentment. Rat Army was often called the Kike Force, half in parody of Mazer Rackham's Strike Force. There were many who liked to remember that during the Second Invasion, even though an American Jew, as President, was Hegemon of the alliance, an Israeli Jew was Strategos in overall command of IF, and a Russian Jew was Polemarch of the fleet, it was Mazer Rackham, a little-known, twice-court-martialled, half-Maori New Zealander whose Strike Force broke up and finally destroyed the bugger fleet in the action around Saturn.

  If Mazer Rackham could save the world, then it didn't matter a bit whether you were a Jew or not, people said.

  But it did matter, and Rose the Nose knew it. He mocked himself to forestall the mocking comments of anti-semites-- almost everyone he defeated in battle became, at least for a time, a Jew-hater-- but he also made sure everyone knew what he was. His army was in second place, bucking for first.

  "I took you on, goy, because I didn't want people to think I only win because I got great soldiers. I want them to know that even with a little puke of a soldier like you I can still win. We only got three rules here. Do what I tell you and don't piss in the bed."

  Ender nodded. He knew that Rose wanted him to ask what the third rule was. So he did.

  "That was three rules. We don't do too good in math here."

  The message was clear. Winning is more important than anything.

  "Your practice sessions with half-assed little Launchies are over, Wiggin. Done. You're in a big boys' army now. I'm putting you in Dink Meeker's toon. From now on, as far as you're concerned, Dink Meeker is God."

  "Then who are you?"

  "The personnel officer who hired God." Rose grinned. "And you are forbidden to use your desk again until you've frozen two enemy soldiers in the same battle. This order is out of self-defence. I hear you're a genius programmer. I don't want you screwing around with my desk.

  Everybody erupted in laughter. It took Ender a moment to understand why. Rose had programmed his desk to display-- and animate-- a bigger-than-life sized picture of male genitals, which waggled back and forth as Rose held the desk on his naked lap. This is just the sort of commander Bonzo would trade me to, thought Ender. How does a boy who spends his time like this win battles?

  Ender found Dink Meeker in the game room, not playing, just sitting and watching. "A guy pointed you out," Ender said. "I'm Ender Wiggin."

  "I know," said Meeker.

  "I'm in your toon."

  "I know," he said again.

  "I'm pretty inexperienced."

  Dink looked up at him. "Look, Wiggin, I know all this. Why do you think I asked Rose to get you for me?"

  He had not been dumped, he had been picked up, he had been asked for. Meeker wanted him. "Why?" asked Ender.

  "I've watched your practice sessions with the Launchies. I think you show some promise. Bonzo is stupid and I wanted you to get better training than Petra could give you. All she can do is shoot."

  "I needed to learn that."

  "You still move like you were afraid to wet your pants."

  "So teach me."

  "So learn."

  "I'm not going to quit my free time practice sessions."

  "I don't want you to quit them."

  "Rose the Nose does."

  "Rose the Nose can't stop you. Likewise, he can't stop you from using your desk."

  "I thought commanders could order anything."

  "They can order the moon to turn blue, too, but it doesn't happen. Listen, Ender, commanders have just as much authority as you let them have. The more you obey them, the more power they have over you."

  "What's to stop them from hurting me?" Ender remembered Bonzo's blow.

  "I thought that was why you were taking personal attack classes."

  "You've really been watching me, haven't you?"

  Dink didn't answer.

  "I don't want to get Rose mad at me. I want to be part of the battles now, I'm tired of sitting out till the end."

  "Your standings will go down."

  This time Ender didn't answer.

  "Listen, Ender, as long as you're part of my toon, you're part of the battle."

  Ender soon learned why. Dink trained his toon independently from the rest of Rat Army, with discipline and vigour; he never consulted with Rose, and only rarely did the whole army manoeuvre together. It was as if Rose commanded one army, and Dink commanded a much smaller one that happened to practice in the battle room at the same time.

  Dink started out the first practice by asking Ender to demonstrate his feet-first attack position. The other boys didn't like it. "How can we attack lying on our backs?" they asked.

  To Ender's surprise, Dink didn't correct them, didn't say, "You aren't attacking on your back, you're dropping downward toward them." He had seen what Ender was doing, but he had not understood the orientation that it implied. It soon became clear to Ender that even though Dink was very, very good, his persistence in holding onto the corridor gravity orientation instead of thinking of the enemy gate as downward was limiting his thinking.

  They practised attacking an enemy-held star. Before trying Ender's feet-first method, they had always gone in standing up, their whole bodies available as a target. Even now, though, they reached the star and then assaulted the enemy from one direction only; "Over the top," cried Dink, and over they went. To his credit, he then repeated the exercise, calling, "Again, upside down," but because of their insistence on a gravity that didn't exist, the boys became awkward when the manoeuvre was under, as if vertigo seized them.

  They hated the feet-first attack. Dink insisted that they use it. As a result, they hated Ender. "Do we have to learn how to fight from a Launchy?" one of them muttered, making sure Ender could hear. "Yes," answered Dink. They kept working.

  And they learned it. In practice skirmishes, they began to realise how much harder it was to s
hoot an enemy attacking feet first. As soon as they were convinced of that, they practised the manoeuvre more willingly.

  That night was the first time Ender had come to a practice session after a whole afternoon of work. He was tired.

  "Now you're in a real army," said Alai. "You don't have to keep practising with us."

  "From you I can learn things that nobody knows," said Ender.

  "Dink Meeker is the best. I hear he's your toon leader."

  "Then let's get busy. I'll teach you what I learned from him today."

  He put Alai and two dozen others through the same exercises that had worn him out all afternoon. But he put new touches on the patterns, made the boys try the manoeuvres with one leg frozen, with both legs frozen, or using frozen boys for leverage to change directions.

  Halfway through the practice, Ender noticed Petra and Dink together, standing in the doorway, watching. Later, when he looked again, they were gone.

  So they're watching me, and what we're doing is known. He did not know whether Dink was his friend; he believed that Petra was, but nothing could be sure. They might be angry that he was dome what only commanders and toon leaders were supposed to do-- drilling and training soldiers. They might be offended that a soldier would associate so closely with Launchies. It made him uneasy, to have older children watching.

  "I thought I told you not to use your desk." Rose the Nose stood by Ender's bunk.

  Ender did not look up. "I'm completing the trigonometry assignment for tomorrow."

  Rose bumped his knee into Ender's desk. "I said not to use it."

  Ender set the desk on his bunk and stood up. "I need trigonometry more than I need you."

  Rose was taller than Ender by at least forty centimetres. But Ender was not particularly worried. It would not come to physical violence, and if it did, Ender thought he could hold his own. Rose was lazy and didn't know personal combat.

  "You're going down in the standings, boy," said Rose.

  "I expect to. I was only leading the list because of the stupid way Salamander Army was using me."

  "Stupid? Bonzo's strategy won a couple of key games."

  "Bonzo's strategy wouldn't win a salad fight. I was violating orders every time I fired my gun."

  Rose hadn't known that. It made him angry. "So everything Bonzo said about you was a lie. You're not only short and incompetent, you're insubordinate, too."

  "But I turned defeat into stalemate, all by myself."

  "We'll see how you do all by yourself next time." Rose went away.

  One of Ender's toonmates shook his head. "You dumb as a thumb."

  Ender looked at Dink, who was doodling on his desk. Dink looked up, noticed Ender watching him, and gazed steadily back at him. No expression. Nothing. OK, thought Ender, I can take care of myself.

  Battle came two day's later. It was Ender's first time fighting as part of a toon; he was nervous. Dink's toon lined up against the right-hand wall of the corridor and Ender was very careful not to lean, not to let his weight slip to either side. Stay balanced.

  "Wiggin!" called Rose the Nose.

  Ender felt dread come over him from throat to groin. A tingle of fear that made him shudder. Rose saw it.

  "Shivering? Trembling? Don't wet your pants, little Launchy." Rose hooked a finger over the butt of Ender's gun and pulled him to the forcefield that hid the battle room from view. "We'll see how well you do now, Ender. As soon as that door opens, you jump through, go straight ahead toward the enemy's door."

  Suicide. Pointless, meaningless self-destruction. But he had to follow orders now, this was battle, not school. For a moment Ender raged silently; then he calmed himself. "Excellent, sir," he said. "The direction I fire my gun is the direction of their main contingent."

  Rose laughed. "You won't have time to fire anything, pinprick."

  The wall vanished. Ender jumped up, took hold of the ceiling handholds, and threw himself out and down, speeding toward the enemy door.

  It was Centipede Army, and they only beginning to emerge from their door when Ender was halfway across the battle room. Many of them were able to get under cover of stars quickly but Ender had doubled up his legs under him and, holding his pistol at his crotch, he was firing between his legs and freezing many of them as they emerged.

  They flashed his legs, but he had three precious seconds before they could hit his body and put him out of action. He froze several more, then flung out his arms in equal and opposite directions. The hand that held his gun ended up pointing toward the main body of Centipede Army. He fired into the mass of the enemy, and then they froze him.

  A second later he smashed into the forcefield of the enemy's door and rebounded with a crazy spin. He landed in a group of enemy soldiers behind a star; they shoved him off and spun him even more rapidly. He rebounded out of control through the rest of the battle, though gradually friction with the air slowed him down. He had no way of knowing how many men he had frozen before getting iced himself, but he did get the general idea that Rat Army won again, as usual.

  After the battle Rose didn't speak to him. Ender was still first in the standings, since he had frozen three, disabled two, and damaged seven. There was no more talk about insubordination and whether Ender could use his desk. Rose stayed in his part of the barracks, and left Ender alone.

  Dink Meeker began to practice instant emergence from the corridor-- Ender's attack on the enemy while they were still coming out of the door had been devastating. "If one man can do that much damage, think what a toon can do." Dink got Major Anderson to open a door in the middle of a wall, even during practice sessions, instead of just the floor level door, so they could practice launching under battle conditions. Word got around. From now on no one could take five or ten or fifteen seconds in the corridor to size things up. The game had changed.

  More battles. This time Ender played a proper role within a toon. He made mistakes. Skirmishes were lost. He dropped from first to second in the standings, then to fourth. Then he made fewer mistakes, and began to feel comfortable within the framework of the toon, and he went back up to third, then second, then first.

  After practice one afternoon, Ender stayed in the battle room. He had noticed that Dink Meeker usually came late to dinner, and he assumed it was for extra practice. Ender wasn't very hungry, and he wanted to see what it was Dink practised when no one else could see.

  But Dink didn't practice. He stood near the door, watching Ender.

  Ender stood across the room, watching Dink.

  Neither spoke. It was plain Dink expected Ender to leave. It was just as plain that Ender was saying no.

  Dink turned his back on Ender, methodically took off his flash suit, and gently pushed off from the floor. He drifted slowly toward the centre of the room, very slowly, his body relaxing almost completely, so that his hands and arms seemed to be caught by almost non-existent air currents in the room.

  After the speed and tension of practice, the exhaustion, the alertness, it was restful just to watch him drift. He did it for ten minutes or so before he reached another wall. Then he pushed off rather sharply, returned to his flash suit, and pulled it on.

  "Come on," he said to Ender.

  They went to the barracks. The room was empty, since all the boys were at dinner. Each went to his own bunk and changed into regular uniforms. Ender walked to Dink's bunk and waited for a moment till Dink was ready to go.

  "Why did you wait?" asked Dink.

  "Wasn't hungry."

  "Well, now you know why I'm not a commander."

  Ender had wondered.

  "Actually, they promoted me twice, and I refused."

  "Refused?"

  "They took away my old locker and bunk and desk, assigned me to a commander cabin and gave me an army. But I just stayed in the cabin until they gave in and put me back into somebody else's army."

  "Why?"

  "Because I won't let them do it to me. I can't believe you haven't seen through all this crap yet, Ender. B
ut I guess you're young. These other armies, they aren't the enemy. It's the teachers, they're the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win, it amounts to nothing. We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other, and all the time the old bastards are watching us, studying us, discovering our weak points, deciding whether we're good enough or not. Well, good enough for what? I was six years old when they brought me here. What the hell did I know? They decided I was right for the program, but nobody ever asked me if the program was right for me."

  "So why don't you go home?"

  Dink smiled crookedly. "Because I can't give up the game." He tugged at the fabric of his flash suit, which lay on the bunk beside him. "Because I love this."

  "So why not be a commander?"

  Dink shook his head. "Never. Look what it does to Rosen. The boy's crazy. Rose de Nose. Sleeps in here with us instead of in his cabin. Why? Because he's scared to be alone, Ender. Scared of the dark."

  "Rose?"

  "But they made him a commander and so he has to act like one. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's winning, but that scares him worst of all, because he doesn't know what he's winning, except that I have something to do with it. Any minute somebody could find out that Rosen isn't some magic Israeli general who can win no matter what. He doesn't know why anybody wins or loses. Nobody does."

  "It doesn't mean he's crazy, Dink."

  "I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. We're not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't commanders, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get a little crazy."

  Ender tried to remember what other children were like, in his class at school, back in the city. But all he could think of was Stilson.

  "I had a brother. Just a normal guy. All he cared about was girls. And flying. He wanted to fly. He used to play ball with the guys. A pick-up game, shooting balls at a hoop, dribbling down the corridors until the peace officers confiscated your ball. We had a great time. He was teaching me how to dribble when I was taken."