A War of Gifts Page 2

  The man touched a small electronic patch on his belt and immediately the door burst open and a dozen armed men filed in.

  "I will place your father under arrest," said the man from the fleet. "And your mother. And anyone in this congregation who resists me."

  Mother came forward then, pushing her way past Father and several others. "Then you know nothing about us," said Mother. "We have no intention of resisting you. When a Roman demands a cloak from us, we give unto him our coat also." She pushed the two older girls toward the man. "Test them all. Test the youngest, too, if you can. She doesn't speak yet, but no doubt you have your ways."

  "We'll be back for them, even though the two youngest are illegal. But not till they come of age."

  "You can steal our son's body," said Mother. "But you can never steal his heart. Train him all you want. Teach him whatever you want. His heart is pure. He will recite your words back to you but he will never, never believe them. He belongs to the Pure Christ, not to the human race."

  Zeck held himself still, so he could not shudder as his body wanted to. Mother's boldness was rare, and always chancy. How would Father react to this? It was his place to speak, to act, to protect the family and the church.

  Then again, Father had said several times that a good helpmeet is one who is not afraid to give unwelcome counsel to her husband, and a man so foolish that he can't hear wisdom from his wife is not worthy to be any woman's husband.

  "Go with the man, Zeck," said Father. "And answer all questions with pure honesty."

  2

  ENDER'S STOCKING

  Peter Wiggin was supposed to spend the day at the Greensboro Public Library, working on a term paper, but he had lost interest in the project. It was two days before Christmas, a holiday that always depressed him. "Don't get me any gifts," he said to his parents last year. "Put the money into mutual funds and give it to me when I graduate."

  "Christmas drives the American economy," Father said. "We have to do our part."

  "It's not up to you what other people do and don't give you," said Mother. "Invest your own money and don't give us gifts."

  "Like that's possible," said Peter.

  "We don't like your gifts anyway," said Valentine, "so you might as well."

  This stung Peter. "There's nothing wrong with my gifts! You sound like I give you used Band-Aids or something."

  "Your gifts always look like you bought the cheapest things on sale and then decided after you got them home who you'd give them to."

  Which exactly nailed the process Peter went through. "Gee, Valentine," said Peter. "And everyone calls you the nice one."

  "Can't you two ever stop bickering?" said Mother wistfully.

  "Peace on Earth, good will toward brats," said Peter.

  That was last year. This year, Peter's investments--anonymous investments, of course, since he was still underage--were doing very well, and he had sold off enough shares to pay for some nice gifts for the family. Nobody was going to say there was anything wrong with this year's crop. Though he couldn't spend too much, or Dad would start to get way too curious about where Peter's money was coming from.

  His Christmas shopping was done. He wasn't going to do a paper on this topic, and he wasn't ready to start researching another one. There was nothing to do in this miserable town but go home.

  Which is why he came into the living room to find Mother crying over--of all things--a Christmas stocking.

  "Don't worry, Mother," he said. "You've been good. It won't be coal this year."

  She gave him a thin little courtesy laugh and quickly stuffed the stocking back into the box it was stored in. Only then did he realize whose it was.

  "Mom," he said. He couldn't help the tone of frustration and reproof in his voice. It's not like Ender was dead. He was just in Battle School.

  Mom got up from the chair where she was sitting and headed for the kitchen.

  "Mom, he's fine."

  She turned to him, gazed at him steadily with eyes like fire, though her voice was mild. "Oh--you've had a letter from him? A phone call? A secret report from the school administrators that they didn't provide to Ender's parents?"

  "No," said Peter, still unable to keep the impatience from his voice.

  Mother smiled acidly. "Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?"

  Peter resented the contempt in her tone. "And stroking his stocking and crying over it, that's supposed to make anything better?"

  "You really are a piece of work, Peter," she said, pushing past him.

  He followed her into the kitchen. "I bet they hang up stockings for them up in Battle School and fill them with little toy spaceships that make cool shooting noises."

  "I'm sure the Muslim and Hindu students will appreciate getting Christmas stockings," said Mother.

  "Whatever they do for Christmas, Mother, Ender isn't going to be missing us."

  "Just because you wouldn't miss us doesn't mean he doesn't."

  He rolled his eyes. "Of course I'd miss you."

  Mother said nothing.

  "I'm a perfectly normal kid. So's Ender. He'll be busy. He's getting along fine. He's adapting. People adapt. To anything."

  She turned slowly, reached across and touched his chest, then hooked a finger through the neckline of his shirt and drew him close. "You never adapt," she whispered, "to losing a child."

  "It's not like he's dead," said Peter.

  "It's exactly like he's dead," said Mother. "I will never again see the boy who left here. I'll never see him at age seven or nine or eleven. I'll have no memories of him at those ages, only what I can imagine. That's what the parents of dead children have. So until you actually know something about what you're talking about, Peter--human feelings, for instance--why don't you just shut up?"

  "Merry Christmas to you too," said Peter. He left the room.

  His own bedroom, when he entered it, felt strange to him. Alien. Bare. There was nothing there that expressed a personality. That had been a conscious decision on his part--anything individual that he put on display would give Valentine an advantage in their endless dueling. But at this moment, with Mother's accusation of his inhumanity still ringing in his ears, his bedroom looked so sterile that he hated the person who would choose to live in it.

  So he wandered back into the living room and reached into the box of Christmas stockings and pulled out the whole stack. Mother had cross-stitched their names and an iconic picture on each stocking. His own was a spaceship. Ender's stocking had a steam locomotive. But it was Ender in space, the little twit, while Peter was stuck on land with the locomotives.

  Peter thrust his hand down into Ender's stocking and started making it talk like a hand puppet. "I'm Mommy's bestest boy and I've been very very good."

  There was something in the toe of the stocking. Peter reached deeper into the sock, found it, and pulled it out. It was just a five-dollar piece--a nickel, as people had taken to calling them, though it was supposedly ten times the value of that long disused coin.

  "So you've taken to stealing things out of other people's stockings?" said Mother from the doorway.

  Peter felt as embarrassed as if he had been caught in an actual crime. "The toe was heavy," he said. "I was seeing what it was."

  "It wasn't yours, whatever it was," said Mother cheerily.

  "I wasn't going to keep it," said Peter. Though of course he would have done exactly that, on the assumption that it had been forgotten and would never be missed.

  But that was the stocking she had been holding and weeping over. She knew perfectly well the nickel was there.

  "You still put stuff in his stocking every year," he said, incredulous.

  "Santa fills the stockings," said Mother. "It has nothing to do with me."

  Peter shook his head. "Oh, Mother."

  "It has nothing to do with you," said Mother. "Mind your business."

  "This is morbid," said Peter. "Grieving for your hero-boy as if he were dead. He's fine. He's not g
oing to die, he's in the most sterile, oversupervised school in the universe, and after he wins the war he's going to come home amid cheers and confetti and give you a big hug."

  "Put back the five dollars," said Mother.

  "I will."

  "While I'm watching."

  That stung. "Don't you trust me, Mother?" asked Peter. He spoke in a sarcastically aggrieved voice, to hide the fact that he really was hurt.

  "Not where Ender is concerned," said Mother. "Or me, for that matter. The coin is Ender's. It shouldn't have anybody's fingerprints on it but his."

  "And Santa's," said Peter.

  "And Santa's."

  He dropped the coin down into the sock.

  "Now put it away."

  "You realize you're making it more and more tempting to set this thing on fire," said Peter.

  "And you wonder why I don't trust you."

  "And you wonder why I'm hostile and untrustworthy."

  "Doesn't it make you just the tiniest bit uncomfortable that I have to wait until I'm sure you're not going to be home before I can allow myself to miss my little boy?"

  "You can do what you want, Mother, whenever you want. You're an adult. Adults have all the money and all the freedom."

  "You really are the stupidest smart kid in the world," said Mother.

  "Again, just for reference, please take note of all the reasons I have to feel loved and respected in my own family."

  "I meant that in the nicest, most affectionate way."

  "I'm sure you did, Mommy," said Peter. He put the stocking into the box.

  Mother came over as he was starting to rise out of the chair. She pushed him back down, then reached into the box and took out Ender's stocking. She reached inside.

  Peter took the coin out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. "Worth a shot, don't you think?"

  "You're still so envious of your younger brother that you have to covet everything that's his?"

  "It's a fiver," said Peter, "and he isn't going to spend it. I was going to invest it and let it earn him some interest before he gets home in, oh, another six or eight years or whatever."

  Mother bent over and kissed his forehead. "Heaven knows why I still love you." Then she dropped the coin into the stocking, put the stocking into the box, reached out and slapped Peter's hand, and then took the box out of the room.

  The back of Peter's hand stung from the slap, but it was where her lips had touched his brow that his skin tingled the most.

  3

  THE DEVIL'S QUESTIONS

  Zeck got into a hovercar with the man. There was one soldier driving; the rest of the soldiers got into a different vehicle, a larger one that looked dangerous.

  "I'm Captain Bridegan," the soldier said.

  "I don't care what your name is," said Zeck.

  Captain Bridegan said nothing.

  Zeck said nothing.

  They got to Zeck's house. The door was standing open. A woman was waiting inside, with papers spread out on the kitchen table, along with a pile of blocks and other paraphernalia, including a small machine. She must have noticed Zeck looking at it because she touched it and explained, "It's a recorder. So other people can hear our session and evaluate it later."

  Captured lightning, thought Zeck. Just another device used by Satan to snare the souls of men.

  "My name," she said, "is Agnes O'Toole."

  "He doesn't care," said Bridegan.

  Zeck extended his hand. "I'm pleased to meet you, Agnes O'Toole." Didn't Bridegan understand the obligation of kindness and courtesy that all men owed to all women, since women's destiny was to go down into the valley of the shadow of death in order to bring more souls into the world to become purified so they could serve God? What tragic ignorance.

  "I'll wait out here," said Bridegan. "If that's all right with Zeck, here."

  He seemed to be waiting for an answer.

  "I don't care what you do," said Zeck, not bothering to look at him. He was a man of violence, as he had already proven, and so he was hopelessly impure. He had no authority in the eyes of God, and yet he had seized Zeck by the shoulders as if he had a right. Only Father had a duty to purify Zeck's flesh; no other had a right to touch him.

  "His father beats him," said Bridegan. And then he left.

  Agnes looked at him with raised eyebrows, but Zeck saw no need to explain. They had known about the chastisement of the impure flesh before they came--how else would Bridegan have known to take off his shirt and show the marks? Bridegan and Agnes obviously wanted to use these scars somehow. As if they thought Zeck wanted to be comforted and protected.

  From Father? From the instrument chosen by God to raise Zeck to manhood? As well might a man raise his puny hand to prevent God from working his will in the world.

  Agnes began the test. Whenever the questions dealt with something Zeck knew about, he answered forth-rightly, as his father had commanded him. But half the questions were about things completely outside Zeck's experience. Maybe they were about things on the vids, which Zeck had never watched in his life; maybe they were things from the nets, which Zeck only knew about because they were damnable webs made of lightning, laid before the feet of foolish souls to snare them and drag them down to hell.

  Agnes manipulated the blocks and then had him answer questions about them. Zeck saw at once what the purpose of the test was. So he reached over and took the blocks from her. Then he manipulated them to show each and every example drawn on two dimensions on the paper. Except one. "You can't make this one with these blocks," he said.

  She put the blocks away.

  The next test was entitled "Worldview Diagnostics: Fundamentalist Christian Edition." Since she covered this title almost instantly, it was obvious Zeck wasn't supposed to know what he was being tested on.

  She began with questions about the creation and Adam and Eve.

  Zeck interrupted her, quoting Father. "The book of Genesis represents the best job that Moses could do, explaining evolution to people who didn't even know the Earth was round."

  "You believe in evolution? Then what about Adam as the first man?"

  "The name 'Adam' means 'many,'" said Zeck. "There were many males in that troop of primates, when God chose one of them and touched him with his Spirit and put the soul of a man inside. It was Adam who first had language and named the other primates, the ones that looked like him but were not human because God had not given them human souls. Thus it says, 'And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.' What Moses originally wrote was much simpler: 'Adam named all the beasts that were not in the image of God. None of them could speak to him, so he was utterly alone.'"

  "You know what God originally wrote?" asked Agnes.

  "You think we're fundamentalists," said Zeck. "But we're not. We're Puritans. We know that God can only teach us what we're prepared to understand. The Bible was written by men and women of earlier times, and it holds only as much as they were capable of understanding. We have a greater knowledge of science, and so God can clarify and tell us more. He would be an unloving Father if he insisted on telling us only as much as humans could understand back in the infancy of our species."

  She leaned back in her chair. "So then why does your father call electricity 'lightning'?"

  "Aren't they the same thing?" asked Zeck, trying to hide his contempt.

  "Well, yes, of course, but--"

  "So Father calls it 'lightning' to emphasize how dangerous it is, and how ephemeral," said Zeck. "Your word 'electricity' is a lie, convincing you that because it runs through wires and shifts the on-off state of semiconductors, the lightning has been tamed and no longer poses a danger. But God says that it is in your machines that lightning is at its most dangerous, for lightning that strikes you out of the sky can only harm your body, while the lightning that has tamed you and trained you through the machines can steal your soul."

  "So God speaks to
your father," said Agnes.

  "As he speaks to all men and women who purify themselves enough to hear his voice."

  "Has God ever spoken to you?"

  Zeck shook his head. "I'm not yet pure."

  "And that's why your father whips you."

  "My father is God's instrument in the purification of his children."

  "And you trust your father always to do God's will?"

  "My father is the purest man on Earth right now."

  "Yet you have never trusted him enough to let him know you have a word-for-word memory."

  Her words struck him like a blow. She was absolutely right. Zeck had heeded Mother and never let Father see his unnatural ability. And why? Not because Zeck was afraid. Because Mother was afraid. He had taken her faithlessness inside himself as if it were his own, and so Father could not purify him. Could never purify him, because he had been deceiving Father for all these years.

  He rose to his feet.

  "Where are you going?" asked Agnes.

  "To Father."

  "To tell him about your phenomenal memory?" she asked pleasantly.

  Zeck had no reason to tell her anything, and so he didn't.

  Bridegan was waiting in the other room, blocking the door. "No sir," he said. "You're going nowhere."

  Zeck went back into the kitchen and sat back down at the table. "You're taking me into space, aren't you," he said.

  "Yes, Zeck," she said. "You are one of the best we've ever tested."

  "I'll go with you. But I'll never fight for you," he said. "Taking me is a waste of time."

  "Never is a long time," she said.

  "You think that if you take me far enough from Earth, I'll forget about God."

  "Not forget," she said. "Perhaps you'll transform your understanding."

  "Don't you understand how dangerous I am?" said Zeck.

  "We're actually counting on that," she said.

  "Not dangerous as a soldier," he said. "If I go with you, it will be as a teacher. I'll help the other children in your Battle School see that God does not want them to kill their enemies."

  "Oh, we're not worried about you converting the other kids," said Agnes.

  "You should be," said Zeck. "The word of God has power unto salvation, and no power on earth or in hell can stand against it."

  She shook her head. "I might worry," she said. "If you were pure. But you're not. So what power will you have to convert anybody?" She piled up the test booklets and stuffed them in the briefcase with the blocks and the recorder. "I have it on tape," she said loudly, for Bridegan to hear. "He said, 'I'll go with you.'"