Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,24

foamed.

“One is poison and one is not,” said the Giant. “Guess right and I’ll take you into Fairyland.”

Guessing meant sticking his head into one of the glasses to drink. He never guessed right. Sometimes his head was dissolved. Sometimes he caught on fire. Sometimes he fell in and drowned. Sometimes he fell out, turned green, and rotted away. It was always ghastly, and the Giant always laughed.

Ender knew that whatever he chose he would die. The game was rigged. On the first death, his figure would reappear on the Giant’s table, to play again. On the second death, he’d come back to the landslides. Then to the garden bridge. Then to the mousehole. And then, if he still went back to the Giant and played again, and died again, his desk would go dark, “Free Play Over” would march around the desk, and Ender would lie back on his bed and tremble until he could finally go to sleep. The game was rigged but still the Giant talked about Fairyland, some stupid childish three-year-old’s Fairyland that probably had some stupid Mother Goose or Pac-Man or Peter Pan, it wasn’t even worth getting to, but he had to find some way of beating the Giant to get there.

He drank the creamy liquid. Immediately he began to inflate and rise like a balloon. The Giant laughed. He was dead again.

He played again, and this time the liquid set, like concrete, and held his head down while the Giant cut him open along the spine, deboned him like a fish, and began to eat while his arms and legs quivered.

He reappeared at the landslides and decided not to go on. He even let the landslides cover him once. But even though he was sweating and he felt cold, with his next life he went back up the hills till they turned into bread, and stood on the Giant’s table as the shot glasses were set before him.

He stared at the two liquids. The one foaming, the other with waves in it like the sea. He tried to guess what kind of death each one held. Probably a fish will come out of the ocean one and eat me. The foamy one will probably asphyxiate me. I hate this game. It isn’t fair. It’s stupid. It’s rotten.

And instead of pushing his face into one of the liquids, he kicked one over, then the other, and dodged the Giant’s huge hands as the Giant shouted, “Cheater, cheater!” He jumped at the Giant’s face, clambered up his lip and nose, and began to dig in the Giant’s eye. The stuff came away like cottage cheese, and as the Giant screamed, Ender’s figure burrowed into the eye, climbed right in, burrowed in and in.

The Giant fell over backward. The view shifted as he fell, and when the Giant came to rest on the ground, there were intricate, lacy trees all around. A bat flew up and landed on the dead Giant’s nose. Ender brought his figure up out of the Giant’s eye.

“How did you get here?” the bat asked. “Nobody ever comes here.”

Ender could not answer, of course. So he reached down, took a handful of the Giant’s eyestuff, and offered it to the bat.

The bat took it and flew off, shouting as it went, “Welcome to Fairyland.”

He had made it. He ought to explore. He ought to climb down from the Giant’s face and see what he had finally achieved.

Instead he signed off, put his desk in his locker, stripped off his clothes and pulled his blanket over him. He hadn’t meant to kill the Giant. This was supposed to be a game. Not a choice between his own grisly death and an even worse murder. I’m a murderer, even when I play. Peter would be proud of me.

7

SALAMANDER

“Isn’t it nice to know that Ender can do the impossible?”

“The player’s deaths have always been sickening, I’ve always thought the Giant’s Drink was the most perverted part of the whole mind game, but going for the eye like that—this is the one we want to put in command of our fleet?”

“What matters is that he won the game that couldn’t be won.”

“I suppose you’ll move him now.”

“We were waiting to see how he handled the thing with Bernard. He handled it perfectly.”

“So as soon as he can cope with a situation, you move him to one he can’t cope with. Doesn’t he get any rest?”

“He’ll have a month or two, maybe three, with his launch group. That’s