Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,50
been studying history,” Peter said. “I’ve been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world. Think what Pericles did in Athens, and Demosthenes—”
“Yes, they managed to wreck Athens twice.”
“Pericles, yes, but Demosthenes was right about Philip—”
“Or provoked him—”
“See? This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismarck. Lenin.”
“Not exactly parallel cases, Peter.” Now she was disagreeing with him out of habit; she saw what he was getting at, and she thought it might just be possible.
“I didn’t expect you to understand. You still believe that teachers know something worth learning.”
I understand more than you think, Peter. “So you see yourself as Bismarck?”
“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. Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research. Precious few of them are actually in positions of power.”
“I guess we’re the lucky few.”
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I have a plan.”
“You always do.” She pretended nonchalance, but she listened eagerly.
“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. There’s even evidence.”
Valentine thought of the corpse of the squirrel in the woods and realized that even that discovery was part of Peter’s plan. Or at least he had made it part of his plan, after it happened.
“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.”
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. And what would it have meant to the world if in childhood he had been caught in a thresher or trampled by a horse?
“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.”
“I’ve been planning to come talk to you for a long time. But I kept being afraid.”
She put a pine needle in her mouth and blew it at him. It dropped almost straight down. “Another failed launch.” Why was he pretending to be weak?