Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,47

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.”

“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. 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?”

“You don’t understand, sir. Our Battle School computer is only a part of the I.F. network. If 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.”

“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 mostruthless and unreliable human beings we’ve laid hands on. Why is he so important to Ender? Why, after all this time?”

“Honestly, sir, I don’t know. And the mind game program is designed so that it can’t tell us. It may not know itself, actually. This is uncharted territory.”

“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 I was the only one.”

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.

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.

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 had 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. 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?

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. And, in a way, it had. Peter took to it right away. Long walks out in the open, cutting through woods and out into the open country—going sometimes for a whole day, with only a sandwich or two sharing space with his desk in the pack on his back, with only a small pocket knife in his pocket.

But Valentine knew. She had seen a squirrel half-skinned, spiked by its little hands and feet with twigs pushed into the