Ender's Game

***

From then on, Ender was either with Mazer Rackham or alone. The old man rarely spoke, but he was there; at meals, at tutorials, at the simulator, in his room at night. Sometimes Mazer would leave, but always, when Mazer wasn't there, the door was locked, and no one came until Mazer returned. Ender went through a week in which he called him Jailor Rackham, Mazer answered to the name as readily as to his own, and showed no sign that it bothered him at all. Ender soon gave it up.

There were compensations—Mazer took Ender through the videos of the old battles from the First Invasion and the disastrous defeats of the I.F. in the Second Invasion. These were not pieced together from the censored public videos, but whole and continuous. Since many videos were working in the major battles, they studied bugger tactics and strategies from many angles. For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

'Why aren't you dead?' Ender asked him. 'You fought your battle seventy years ago. I don't think you're even sixty years old.'

'The miracles of relativity,' said Mazer. 'They kept me here for twenty years after the battle, even though I begged them to let me command one of the starships they launched against the bugger home planet and the bugger colonies. Then they—came to understand some things about the way soldiers behave in the stress of battle.'

'What things?'

'You've never been taught enough psychology to understand. Enough to say that they realized that even though I would never be able to command the fleet—I'd be dead before the fleet even arrived—I was still the only person able to understand the things I understood about the buggers. I was, they realized, the only person who had ever defeated the buggers by intelligence rather than luck. They needed me here to—teach the person who would command the fleet.'

'So they sent you out in a starship, got you up to a relativistic speed—'

'And then I turned around and came home. A very dull voyage, Ender. Fifty years in space. Officially, only eight years passed for me, but it felt like five hundred. All so I could teach the next commander everything I knew.'

'Am I to be the commander, then?'

'Let's say that you're our best bet at present.'

'There are others being prepared, too?'

'No.'

'That makes me the only choice, then, doesn't it'?'

Mazer shrugged.

'Except you. You're still alive, aren't you? Why not you?'

Mazer shook his head.

'Why not? You won before.'

'I cannot be the commander for good and sufficient reasons.'

'Show me how you beat the buggers, Mazer.'

Mazer's face went inscrutable.

'You've shown me every other battle seven times at least. I think I've seen ways to beat what the buggers did before, but you've never shown me how you actually did beat them.'

'The video is a very tightly kept secret, Ender.'

'I know. I've pieced it together, partly. You, with your tiny reserve force, and their armada, those great big heavy-bellied starships launching their swarms of fighters. You dart in at one ship, fire at it, an explosion. That's where they always stop the clips. After that, it's just soldiers going into bugger ships and already finding them dead inside.'

Mazer grinned. 'So much for tightly kept secrets. Come on, let's watch the video.'

They were alone in the video room, and Ender palmed the door locked. 'All right, let's watch.'

The video showed exactly what Ender had pieced together. Mazer's suicidal plunge into the heart of the enemy formation, the single explosion, and then—

Nothing. Mazer's ship went on, dodged the shock wave, and wove his way among the other bugger ships. They did not fire on him. They did not change course. Two of them crashed into each other and exploded a needless collision that either pilot could have avoided. Neither made the slightest movement.

Mazer sped up the action. Skipped ahead. 'We waited for three hours,' he said. 'Nobody could believe it.' Then the I.F. ships began approaching the bugger starships. Marines began their cutting and boarding operations. The videos showed the buggers already dead at their posts.

'So you see,' said Mazer, 'you already knew all there was to see.'

'Why did it happen?'

'Nobody knows. I have my personal opinions. But there are plenty of scientists who tell me I'm less than qualified to have opinions.'

'You're the one who won the battle.'

'I thought that qualified me to comment, too, but you know how it is. Xenobiologists and xenopsychologists can't accept the idea that a starpilot scooped them by sheer guesswork. I think they all hate me because, after they saw these videos, they had to live out the rest of their natural lives here on Eros. Security, you know. They weren't happy.'

'Tell me.'

'The buggers don't talk. They think to each other, and it's instantaneous like the philotic effect. Like the ansible. But most people always thought that meant a controlled communication like language—I think you a thought and then you answer me. I never believed that. It's too immediate, the way they respond together to things. You've seen the videos. They aren't conversing and deciding among possible courses of action. Every ship acts like part of a single organism. It responds the way your body responds during combat, different parts automatically, thoughtlessly doing everything they're supposed to do. They aren't having a mental conversation between people with different thought processes. All their thoughts are present, together, at once.'

'A single person, and each bugger is like a hand or a foot?'

'Yes. I wasn't the first person to suggest it, but I was the first person to believe it. And something else. Something so childish and stupid that the xenobiologists laughed me to silence when I said it after the battle. The buggers are bugs. They're like ants and bees. A queen, the workers. That was maybe a hundred million years ago, but that's how they started, that kind of pattern. It's a sure thing none of the buggers we saw had any way of making more little buggers. So when they evolved this ability to think together, wouldn't they still keep the queen? Wouldn't the queen still be the center of the group? Why would that ever change?'

'So it's the queen who controls the whole group.'

'I had evidence, too. Not evidence that any of them could see, it wasn't there in the First Invasion, because that was exploratory. But the Second Invasion was a colony. To set up a new hive, or whatever.'

'And so they brought a queen.'

'The videos of the Second Invasion, when they were destroying our fleets out in the comet shell.' He began to call them up and display the buggers' patterns. 'Show me the queen's ship.'

It was subtle. Ender couldn't see it for a long time. The bugger ships kept moving, all of them. There was no obvious flagship, no apparent nerve center. But gradually, as Mazer played the videos over and over again, Ender began to see the way that all the movements focused on, radiated from a center point. The center point shifted, but it was obvious, after he looked long enough, that the eyes of the fleet, the I of the fleet, the perspective from which all decisions were being made, was one particular ship. He pointed it out.

'You see it. I see it. That makes two people out of all of those who have seen this video. But it's true, isn't it.'

'They make that ship move just like any other ship.'

'They know it's their weak point.'

'But you're right. That's the queen. But then you'd think that when you went for it, they would have immediately focused all their power on you. They could have blown you out of the sky.'