Well, we've finally reached
that subplot. The one even fans of the book like to clown on. But first, a word from our sponsors:
"I didn't call you in here to waste time.
Yet here we are.
How in hell did the computer do that?”
"I don't know.”
"How could it pick up a picture of Ender's brother and put it into the graphics in this Fairyland routine?”
"Colonel Graff, I wasn't there when it was programmed. All I know is that the computer's never taken anyone to this place before.
Isn't the point of this game that it can create new scernarios on the fly? Surely this kind of thing happens all the time.
Fairyland was strange enough, but this isn't Fairyland anymore. It's beyond the End of the World, and--”
"I know the names of the places, I just don't know what they mean.”
"Fairyland was programmed in. It's mentioned in a few other places. But nothing talks about the End of the World. We don't have any experience with it.”
So, we've basically reached this point:
"I don't like having the computer screw around with Ender's mind that way. Peter Wiggin is the most potent person in his life, except maybe his sister Valentine.”
We could just not let him play the computer game. That was what my parents did when my evil abusive older brother kept turning up in
BioShock. Okay, I just wasn't doing my fucking homework, but the principle is similar.
"And the mind game is designed to help shape them, help them find worlds they can be comfortable in.”
So was the Giant's Drink born from a widespread death-urge in the student body? A sense of futility? We should probably look into this.
"You don't get it, do you, Major Imbu? I don't want Ender being comfortable with the end of the world. Our business here is not to be comfortable with the end of the world!”
"The End of the World in the game isn't necessarily the end of humanity in the bugger wars. It has a private meaning to Ender.”
"Good. What meaning?”
"I don't know, sir. I'm not the kid. Ask him.”
"Major Imbu, I'm asking you.”
Ah, why not ask Ender? In
actual schools, when a kid has emotional problems or starts acting out, we usually ask them
why. We don't always take their answers entirely at face-value, but it's an important part of the process. Graff seems terrified of Ender ever realising that people are invested in his development, which is an odd fear when he personally invited him to space-school, and has told him more than once that he's the last, best hope for humanity. Is he afraid Ender will realise the games are monitored? Because that's already a widespread rumour among the students. Even if he does, worst case scernario, he stops playing the mind game. Which, given that Ender mostly uses it for emotional scab-picking, doesn't seem like a bad outcome to me?
"There could be a thousand meanings.”
"Try one.”
"You've been isolating the boy. Maybe he's wishing for the end of this world, the Battle School.
Wouldn't be the only one.
Or maybe it's about the end of the world he grew up with as a little boy, his home, coming here. Or maybe it's his way of coping with having broken up so many other kids here. Ender's a sensitive kid, you know, and he's done some pretty bad things to people's bodies, he might be wishing for the end of that world.”
I really don't see how Ender is particularly sensitive. This is a difficult distinction to articulate, but I never get the impression during Ender's post-ultraviolence pity-parties that he's particular disturbed by the
pain he causes, just that he's
capable of violence at all. He never stops to think about how the kids he beats up feels, or worry if he did them serious damage, or if, in retrospect, they really deserved to have their nuts pureed. Ender never once asks himself, "Did I hurt Stilson because of tactical expedience, or was I just
angry?" and the narrative doesn't question him on that front either. You might say that kind of introspection or empathy is a bit beyond most eight year olds, but Ender's meant to be an emotional and intellectual prodigy.
"Or none of the above.”
"The mind game is a relationship between the child and the computer. Together they create stories. The stories are true, in the sense that they reflect the reality of the child's life. That's all I know.”
Good to know Shadiversity's line flourises even in the distant future.
"And I'll tell you what I know, Major Imbu. That picture of Peter Wiggin was not one that could have been taken from our files here at the school. We have nothing on him, electronically or otherwise, since Ender came here. And that picture is more recent.”
"It's only been a year and a half, sir, how much can the boy change?”
"He's wearing his hair completely differently now. His mouth was redone with orthodontia. I got a recent photograph from landside and compared.
Okay, so how did Ender recognise him immediately?
The only way the computer here in the Battle School could have got that picture was by requisitioning it from a landside computer. And not even one connected with the I.F. That takes requisitionary powers. We can't just go into Guilford County North Carolina and pluck a picture out of school files. Did anyone at this school authorize getting this?”
And if the computer was trying to fuck with Ender using his brother's image, why did it bother fetching a recent picture of Peter, rather than one of him as Ender would remember him?
"You don't understand, sir. Our Battle School computer is only a part of the I.F. network. lf we want a picture, we have to get a requisition, but if the mind game program determines that the picture is necessary--”
"It can just go take it.”
"Not just every day. Only when it's for the child's own good.”
So, it can access any computer system on Earth whenever it feels like.
"OK, it's for his good. But why. His brother is dangerous, his brother was rejected for this program because he's one of the worst human beings we've laid hands on. Why is he so important to Ender? Why, after all his time?”
"Why, less than two years after leaving home, does Ender's older brother who tormented him his entire childhood still loom large in his mind?"
"Honestly, sir. I don't know. And the mind game program is designed so that it can't tell us.
Why not?
It may not know itself, actually. This is uncharted territory.”
I mean, that would make more sense.
"You mean the computer's making this up as it goes along?”
"You might put it that way.”
"Well, that does make me feel a little better. I thought l was the only one.”
And again, this thing can access any computer system it wants.
Valentine celebrated Ender's eighth birthday alone, in the wooded back yard of their new home in Greensboro. She scraped a patch of ground bare of pine needles and leaves, and there scratched his name in the dirt with a twig. Then she made a small teepee of twigs and needles and lit a small fire. It made smoke that interwove with the branches and needles of the pine overhead. All the way into space, she said silently. All the way to the Battle School.
You love to see Mormons get in touch with their Native American roots.
No letters had ever come, and as far as they knew their own letters had never reached him. When he first was taken, Father and Mother sat at the table and keyed in long letters to him every few days. Soon, though, it was once a week, and when no answers came, once a month. Now it had been two years since he went, and there were no letters, none at all, and no remembrance on his birthday. He is dead, she thought bitterly, because we have forgotten him.
So, did nobody tell the Wiggins there were no letters allowed at Battle School? While we're on the subject, why not? It's not like this is a
Halo situation where the kids are being subjected to crimes against humanity, they're just playing laser-tag. If the they're afraid of the kids leaking intel, just censor the letters like every other military post mass-literacy. Does nobody see the benefit of preserving a connection to humanity in the kids who're meant to be protecting us from alien genocide? I get the feeling Card chucked this detail in because it was sad, not because it made sense.
But Valentine had not forgotten him. She did not let her parents know, and above all never hinted to Peter how often she thought about Ender, how often she wrote him letters that she knew he would not answer. And when Mother and Father announced to them that they were leaving the city to move to North Carolina, of all places, Valentine knew that they never expected to see Ender again. They were leaving the only place where he knew to find them.
Phone-books were another technology lost during the bugger wars.
How would Ender find them here, among these trees, under this changeable and heavy sky? He had lived deep in corridors all his life, and if he was still in the Battle School, there was less of nature there. What would he make of this?
I could totally see a very young child thinking moving house means her brother (or Santa) will never be able to find them again, I'm just not sure why Valentine is thinking more like a six year old now she's about ten or so.
Valentine knew why they had moved here. It was for Peter, so that living among trees and small animals, so that nature in as raw a form as Mother and Father could conceive of it, might have a softening influence on their strange and frightening son.
I mean, it makes sense. Hitler was well known for his hatred of small animals and natural landscapes.
But Valentine knew. She had seen a squirrel half-skinned, spiked by its little hands and feet with twigs pushed into the dirt. She pictured Peter trapping it, staking it, then carefully parting and peeling back the skin without breaking into the abdomen, watching the muscles twist and ripple. How long had it taken the squirrel to die? And all the while Peter had sat nearby, leaning against the tree where perhaps the squirrel had nested, playing with his desk while the squirrel's life seeped away.
Naturally Valentine never mentioned this to her parents, despite the fact they clearly knew something was wrong with Peter.
At first she was horrified, and nearly threw up at dinner, watching how Peter ate so vigorously, talked so cheerfully. But later she thought about it and realized that perhaps, for Peter, it was a kind of magic, like her little fires; a sacrifice that somehow stilled the dark gods that hunted for his soul. Better to torture squirrels than other children. Peter has always been a husbandman of pain, planting it, nurturing it, devouring it greedily when it was ripe; better he should take it in these small, sharp doses than with dull cruelty to children in the school.
Or it made his tiny dick hard, either or.
"A model student," said his teachers. "I wish we had a hundred others in the school just like him. Studies all the time, turns in all his work on time. He loves to learn.”
But Valentine knew it was a fraud. Peter loved to learn, all right, but the teachers hadn't taught him anything, ever. He did his learning through his desk at home, tapping into libraries and databases, studying and thinking and, above all, talking to Valentine.
I get the impression Card's ideal school is a summer-camp with no staff and wifi.
Still, it was good. Peter never fought anymore. Never bullied. Got along well with everybody. It was a new Peter.
Everyone believed it. Father and Mother said it so often it made Valentine want to scream at them. It isn't the new Peter! It's the old Peter, only smarter!
If only you had proof that he hadn't changed, like a bunch of tortured animal carcasses!
"I've been deciding," said Peter, "whether to kill you or what.”
Valentine leaned against the trunk of the pine tree, her little fire a few smoldering ashes. "I love you, too, Peter.”
My friend was right, trying to make the
Addams Family serious was a mistake.
"It would be so easy. You always make these stupid little fires. It's just a matter of knocking you out and burning you up. You're such a firebug.”
"I've been thinking of castrating you in your sleep.”
In this society they'd probably give you a medal.
"No you haven't. You only think of things like that when I'm with you. I bring out the best in you. No, Valentine, I've decided not to kill you. I've decided that you're going to help me.”
"I am?" A few years ago, Valentine would have been terrified at Peter's threats. Now, though, she was not so afraid. Not that she doubted that he was capable of killing her. She couldn't think of anything so terrible that she didn't believe Peter might do it. She also knew, though, that Peter was not insane, not in the sense that he wasn't in control of himself. He was in better control of himself than anyone she knew. Except perhaps herself. Peter could delay any desire as long as be needed to; he could conceal any emotion.
People love to fantasise about these genius serial killer types, but the boring truth is that kids like Peter tend to be less like Hannibal Lecter, and more like the 80 IQ mouthbreather scrawling racial slurs in a public toilet. What I'm saying is, Peter, we're all waiting for you.
"Valentine, things are coming to a head. I've been tracking troop movements in Russia.”
"What are we talking about?”
One thing Card did predict, little twerps who think they're experts on the Russian military.
"The world, Val. You know Russia? Big empire? Warsaw Pact? Rulers of Eurasia from the Netherlands to Pakistan?”
As you can see, the Soviet Union is still alive and kicking about two centuries in the future. I honestly don't feel right clowning on Card too hard for that prediction. I imagine for most people in the West, the idea that the other global superpower would go tits-up less than ten years after this was written would've seemed absurd. To quote the good Mr. Hank Hill, we did not yet know the Russians were incompetent. I
will, however, clown on the fact that, rather than accept that all science fiction eventually becomes alternate history, Card chose to retcon in sequels and later printings that Peter was talking about a
New Warsaw Pact. In other words, Russia got sick of capitalism with extra sweatsuits, adopted communism again, and reconquered all its old territory plus change. You might recognise this as the plot of the
Simpsons episode where Homer joined the navy.
This also raises some questions about Ender's family backstory. Early on, it was mentioned that Poland was under international sanction for not enforcing the two-child laws due to its strongly Catholic population, making it a pariah state. But it's still called the Warsaw Pact, which kind of implies Poland never broke away from the largely atheist Soviet Union. So, what's up with that?
"The Polemarch is Russian, isn't he? And he knows what's happening with the fleet. Either they've found out the buggers aren't a threat after all, or we're about to have a big battle. One way or another, the bugger war is about to be over. They're getting ready for after the war.”
"If they're moving troops, it must be under the direction of the Strategos.”
"It's all internal, within the Warsaw Pact.”
This was disturbing. The facade of peace and cooperation had been undisturbed almost since the bugger wars began. What Peter had detected was a fundamental disturbance in the world order. She had a mental picture, as clear as memory, of the way the world had been before the buggers forced peace upon them. "So it's back to the way it was before.”
So, the political situation is about as fraught and fractuous as it is in our time, and the I.F isn't really a world government so much as a military alliance... but they're still able to make everyone on Earth learn English as a first language and enforce global population control? And also ban Islam, maybe?
"A few changes. The shields make it so nobody bothers with nuclear weapons anymore. We have to kill each other thousands at a time instead of millions."
I find it kind of amusing that both
Ender's Game and
Dune use futuristic shields to handwave away advances in warfare, but while
Dune went for a kind of fedual bladed weapon kind of thing,
Ender's Game just wanted to be able to do WW2 again.
Also, Dune is pretty overrated as a book.
Mhhm! Excuse me, something in my throat.
What disturbed Valentine most of all was that Peter did not seem at all worried. "Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?”
"For both of us, Val.”
"Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.”
Look, we had to test puberty blockers on someone.
"But we don't think like other children, do we, Val? We don't talk like other children. And above all, we don't write like other children.”
I've never seen anyone be so smug about being so shit at writing. Okay, maybe Elizer Yudkowsky, but that's a story for another day.
"For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we've strayed from the topic, I think." Still, Valentine found herself getting excited. Writing was something Val did better than Peter.
Bullshit, you're both written by Orson Scott Card.
Valentine could persuade other people to her point of view-- she could convince them that they wanted what she wanted them to want. Peter, on the other hand, could only make them fear what he wanted them to fear. When he first pointed this out to Val, she resented it. She had wanted to believe she was good at persuading people because she was right, not because she was clever. But no matter how much she told herself that she didn't ever want to exploit people the way Peter did, she enjoyed knowing that she could, in her way, control other people. And not just control what they did. She could control, in a way, what they wanted to do. She was ashamed that she took pleasure in this power, and yet she found herself using it sometimes. To get teachers to do what she wanted, and other students. To get Mother and Father to see things her way. Sometimes, she was able to persuade even Peter. That was the most frightening thing of all-- that she could understand Peter well enough, could empathize with him enough to get inside him that way. There was more Peter in her than she could bear to admit, though sometimes she dared to think about it anyway. This is what she thought as Peter spoke: You dream of power, Peter, but in my own way I am more powerful than you.
Remember, Valentine was supposed to be too tender-hearted for the military.
"I see myself as knowing how to insert ideas into the public mind. Haven't you ever thought of a phrase, Val, a clever thing to say, and said it, and then two weeks or a month later you hear some adult saying it to another adult, both of them strangers? Or you see it on a video or pick it up on a net?”
"I always figured I heard it before and only thought I was making it up.”
"You were wrong. There are maybe two or three thousand people in the world as smart as us, little sister. Most of them are making a living somewhere.
They all have podcasts.
Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research. Precious few of them are actually in positions of power.”
Card seems to have real contempt for actual teachers.
"Funny as a one-legged rabbit, Val.”
"Of which there are no doubt several in these woods.”
"Hopping in neat little circles.”
Valentine laughed at the gruesome image and hated herself for thinking it was funny.
Nobody in this family is alright.
"Val, we can say the words that everyone else will be saying two weeks later. We can do that. We don't have to wait until we're grown up and safely put away in some career.”
Ah, so Peter runs r/antiwork.
"Peter, you're twelve.”
"Not on the nets I'm not. On the nets I can name myself anything I want, and so can you.”
Peter and Valentine were instantly doxxed by Null's frozen head.
"On the nets we are clearly identified as students, and we can't even get into the real discussions except in audience mode, which means we can't say anything anyway.”
Some people call this subplot Card predicting the internet, but it's more like he scaled up the internet as it when he wrote the book--back when it was mostly only accesible to people in the government, academia, or certain parts of the corporate world. He also imagines it as a place for important, invitation only political discussion, and not a platform for memes, Japanese cartoons, and giving each other baroque mental illnesses.
"We can get on the nets as full-fledged adults. with whatever net names we want to adopt, if Father gets us onto his citizen's access.”
"And why would he do that? We already have student access. What do you tell him, I need citizen's access so I can take over the world?”
"No, Val. I won't tell him anything. You’ll tell him how you're worried about me. How I'm trying so very hard to do well at school, but you know it's driving me crazy because I can never talk to anybody intelligent, everybody always talks down to me because I'm young, I never get to converse with my peers. You can prove that the stress is getting to me.”
He also imagines that little children are by default are barred from posting. Maybe I've been too harsh on this setting.
"So you get him to authorize us to share his citizen's access. To adopt our own identities there, to conceal who we are so people will give us the intellectual respect we deserve.”
This book must be second only to Seven of Nine in introducing nerdy kids to masturbation.
Valentine could challenge him on ideas, but never on things like this. She could not say, What makes you think you deserve respect? She had read about Adolf Hitler. She wondered what he was like at the age of twelve. Not this smart, not like Peter that way, but craving honor, probably that.
Is it me, or does "honour" come up a lot in this book?
And what would it have meant to the world if in childhood he had been caught in a thresher or trampled by a horse?
Norman Spinrad would be like, 17% less smug.
"Val," Peter said. "I know what you think of me. I'm not a nice person, you think.”
Valentine threw a pine needle at him. "An arrow through your heart.”
You cannot imagine the pain I'm in reading this whole chapter.
"You're just what the world needs. A twelve-year-old to solve all our problems.”
Usually you need to be Swedish and look like you have FAS to do that.
"It's not my fault I'm twelve right now. And it's not my fault that right now is when the opportunity is open. Right now is the time when I can shape events. The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that's partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words-- on the right words at the right time.”
"I was just thinking of comparing you to him.”
"I don't hate Jews, Val. I don't want to destroy anybody. And I don't want war, either.
Pretty sure one of those things is a lie.
"Peter, we're children, don't you understand that? We're going to school, we're growing up--" But even as she resisted, she wanted him to persuade her. She had wanted him to persuade her from the beginning.
"I have no reason to trust Peter or help him out, but I'm going to because plot."
But Peter didn't know that he had already won. "If I believe that, if I accept that, then I've got to sit back and watch while all the opportunities vanish, and then when I'm old enough it's too late. Val, listen to me. I know how you feel about me, you always have. I was a vicious, nasty brother. I was cruel to you and crueler to Ender before they took him. But I didn't hate you. I loved you both, I just had to be-- had to have control, do you understand that? It's the most important thing to me, it's my greatest gift, I can see where the weak points are, I can see how to get in and use them, I just see those things without even trying. I could become a businessman and run some big corporation, I'd scramble and maneuver until I was at the top of everything and what would I have? Nothing. I'm going to rule, Val, I'm going to have control of something. But I want it to be something worth ruling. I want to accomplish something worthwhile. A Pax Americana through the whole world. So that when somebody else comes, after we beat the buggers, when somebody else comes here to defeat us, they'll find we've already spread over a thousand worlds, we're at peace with ourselves and impossible to destroy. Do you understand? I want to save mankind from self-destruction.”
I feel like mentioning
Children and
God-Emperor of Dune came out years before this.
She had never seen him speak with such sincerity. With no hint of mockery, no trace of a lie in his voice. He was getting better at this. Or maybe he was actually touching on the truth. "So a twelve-year-old boy and his kid sister are going to save the world?”
"How old was Alexander? I'm not going to do it overnight. I'm just going to start now. If you'll help me.”
I wouldn't compare your scheme for world peace to the guy whose empire famously collapsed as soon as he died of too much party-rocking.
"I don't believe what you did to those squirrels was part of an act. I think you did it because you love to do it.”
Suddenly Peter wept into his hands. Val assumed that he was pretending, but then she wondered. It was possible, wasn't it, that he loved her, and that in this time of terrifying opportunity he was willing to weaken himself before her in order to win her love. He's manipulating me, she thought, but that doesn't mean he isn't sincere. His cheeks were wet when he took his hands away, his eyes rimmed in red. "I know," he said. "It's what I'm most afraid of. That I really am a monster. I don't want to be a killer but I just can't help it.”
Card is really incapable of conveying emotion in his prose or dialogue.
She had never seen him show such weakness. You're so clever, Peter. You saved your weakness so you could use it to move me now. And yet it did move her. Because if it were true, even partly true. then Peter was not a monster, and so she could satisfy her Peter-like love of power without fear of becoming monstrous herself. She knew that Peter was calculating even now, but she believed that under the calculations he was telling the truth. It had been hidden layers deep, but he had probed her until he found her trust.
Everyone in this family is a cold reptilian freak, next.
This chapter is quite painfully long and covers both the elder siblings and Ender, so, I'm splitting this up.
