Ender's Game

Bonzo, watched as the photographs of the corpses were displayed, listened as the psychologists and lawyers argued whether murder had been committed or the killing was in self-defense. Ender had his own opinion, but no one asked him, Throughout the trial, it was really Ender himself under attack. The prosecution was too clever to charge him directly, but there were attempts to make him look sick, perverted, criminally insane.

'Never mind,' said Mazer Rackham. 'The politicians are afraid of you, but they can't destroy your reputation yet. That won't be done until the historians get at you in thirty years.'

Ender didn't care about his reputation. He watched the videos impassively, but in fact he was amused. In battle I killed ten billion buggers, who were as alive and wise as any man, who had not even launched a third attack against us, and no one thinks to call it a crime.

All his crimes weighed heavy on him, the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo no heavier and no lighter than the rest.

And so, with that burden, he waited through the empty months until the world that he had saved decided he could come home.

One by one, his friends reluctantly left him, called home to their families, to be received with heroes' welcomes in their towns. Ender watched the videos of their homecomings, and was touched when they' spent much of their time praising Ender Wiggin, who taught them everything, they said, who taught them and led them into victory. But if they called for him to be brought home, the words were censored from the videos and no one heard the plea.

For a time, the only work in Eros was cleaning up after the bloody League War and receiving the reports of the starships, once warships, that were now exploring the bugger colony worlds.

But now Eros was busier than ever, more crowded than it had ever been during the war, as colonists were brought here to prepare for their voyages to the empty bugger worlds. Ender took part in the work, as much as they would let him, but it did not occur to them that this twelve-year-old boy might be as gifted at peace as he was at war. But he was patient with their tendency to ignore him, and learned to make his proposals and suggest his plans through the few adults who listened to him, and let them present them as their own. He was concerned, not about getting credit, but about getting the job done.

The one thing he could not bear was the worship of the colonists. He learned to avoid the tunnels where they lived, because they would always recognize him—the world had memorized his face—and the they would scream and shout and embrace him and congratulate him and show him the children they had named after him and tell him how he was so young it broke their hearts and they didn't blame him for any of his murders because it wasn't his fault he was just a child—

He hid from them as best he could.

There was one colonist, though, he couldn't hide from.

He wasn't inside Eros that day. He had gone up with the shuttle to the new ISL, where he had been learning to do surface work on the starships; it was unbecoming to an officer to do mechanical labor, Chamrajnagar told him, but Ender answered that since the trade he had mastered wasn't much called for now, it was about time he learned another skill.

They spoke to him through his helmet radio and told him that someone was waiting to see him as soon as he could come in. Ender couldn't think of anyone he wanted to see, and so he didn't hurry. He finished installing the shield for the ship's ansible and then hooked his way across the face of the ship and pulled himself up into the airlock.

She was waiting for him outside the changing room. For a moment he was annoyed that they would let a colonist come to bother him here, where he came to be alone; then he looked again, and realized that if the young woman were a little girl, he would know her.

'Valentine,' he said.

'Hi, Ender.'

'What are you doing here?'

'Demosthenes retired. Now I'm going with the first colony.'

'It's fifty years to get there—'

'Only two years if you're aboard the ship.'

'But if you ever came back, everybody you knew on Earth would be dead—'

'That was what I had in mind. I was hoping, though, that someone I knew on Eros might come with me.

'I don't want to go to a world we stole from the buggers. I just want to go home.'

'Ender, you're never going back to Earth. I saw to that before I left.'

He looked at her in silence.

'I tell you that now, so that if you want to hate me, you can hate me from the beginning.'

They went to Ender's tiny compartment in the ISL and she explained. Peter wanted Ender back on Earth, under the protection of the Hegemon's Council. 'The way things are right now, Ender, that would put you effectively under Peter's control, since half the council now does just what Peter wants. The ones that aren't Locke's lapdogs are under his thumb in other ways.'

'Do they know who he really is?'

'Yes. He isn't publicly known, but people in high places know him. It doesn't matter any more. He has too much power for them to worry about his age. He's done incredible things, Ender.'

'I noticed the treaty a year ago was named for Locke.'

'That was his breakthrough. He proposed it through his friends from the public policy nets, and then Demosthenes got behind it, too. It was the moment he had been waiting for, to use Demosthenes' influence with the mob and Locke's influence with the intelligentsia to accomplish something noteworthy. It forestalled a really vicious war that could have lasted for decades.'

'He decided to be a statesman?'

'I think so. But in his cynical moments, of which there are many, he pointed out to me that if he had allowed the League to fall apart completely, he'd have to conquer the world piece by piece. As long as the Hegemony exists, he can do it in one lump.'

Ender nodded. 'That's the Peter that I knew.'

'Funny, isn't it? That Peter would save millions of lives.'

'While I killed billions.'

'I wasn't going to say that.'

'So he wanted to use me?'

'He had plans for you, Ender. He would publicly reveal himself when you arrived, going to meet you in front of all the videos. Ender Wiggin's older brother, who also happened to be the great Locke, the architect of peace. Standing next to you, he would look quite mature. And the physical resemblance between you is stronger than ever. It would be quite simple for him, then, to take over.'

'Why did you stop him?'

'Ender, you wouldn't be happy spending the rest of your life as Peter's pawn.'

'Why not? I've spent my life as someone's pawn.'

'Me too. I showed Peter all the evidence that I had assembled, enough to prove in the eyes of the public that he was a psychotic killer. It included full-color pictures of tortured squirrels and some of the monitor videos of the way he treated you. It took some work to get it all together, but by the time he saw it, he was willing to give me what I wanted. What I wanted was your freedom and mine.'

'It's not my idea of freedom to go live in the house of the people that I killed.'

'Ender, what's done is done. Their worlds are empty now, and ours is full. And we can take with us what their worlds have never known—cities full of people who live private, individual lives, who love and hate each other for their own reasons. In all the bugger worlds, there was never more than a single story to be told; when we're there, the world will be full of stories, and we'll improvise their endings day by day. Ender, Earth belongs to Peter. And if you don't go with me now, he'll have you there, and use you up until you wish you'd never been born. Now is the only chance you'll get to get away.'

Ender said nothing.

'I know what you're thinking, Ender. You're thinking that I'm trying to control you just as much as Peter or Graff or any of the others.'