Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,134

better than getting beaten up by Lem and Stem. But it was his responsibility to make sure they worked on what they were supposed to work on. He had no authority himself, and even if he had, he couldn’t have done anything if they chose to defy him. Adults could use their own outselves to give the girls’ clants a shove, which they would feel in their own bodies as well. But Danny had no outself, or hadn’t found one, anyway. The only thing he could do was find an adult and report them—but by the time an adult arrived, they’d be working on what they were supposed to work on, and the adult would be annoyed at Danny.

Not that the adult would doubt Danny’s word—he was known not to lie, and besides, they knew exactly what Tina, Mona, and Crista were like. But the very fact that Danny had to fetch an adult to enforce the rules meant that he really wasn’t worth very much as a clant-minder. Sometimes Danny was conscientious enough to report such antics as these, but most of the time Danny put his own survival ahead of the goal of pushing the children to develop their skills, and let them get away with whatever they wanted.

The danger was that when these children grew up, they would remember how worthless Danny had been as a child-minder, and far from being grateful that he hadn’t reported them when they were young, they’d realize he couldn’t be trusted to take care of their own children. Then he’d just be Poor Uncle Danny the drekka. Or Poor Old Danny, the body under the nameless headstone on Hammernip Hill.

All he could do was kick out at them, dispersing the stuff out of which their clants were formed, so they’d have to take a few moments to gather them up again and shape themselves again. It took only a second or two—they’d been making forest fairies of this size since they were nine or ten, and Danny was the darling little eight-year-old that they liked to pamper when adults were around or torture when they weren’t.

Well, even though Danny couldn’t make a clant the size of a thimble, he had listened well during the early lessons and remembered things that those with talent often forgot. For instance, he knew the warning about letting drowthers capture a small and fragile clant. “You hold the clant,” Uncle Poot had told them, “and the clant holds you. If you let them capture you when you’re little, they can keep your outself from returning to your body, which leaves you completely helpless.”

“Why can’t we just toss away the clant?” Danny had asked—for in those days, he still expected to be able to use these lessons.

“You have to be able to spin and leap to cast away the bits from which you made the clant,” said Uncle Poot. “If they trap you so you can’t move far enough, the bits of clant stay bound to you. It’s just the way it works.”

“I’ll just make my clant with scissors,” Friggy, Danny’s best friend in those days, had boasted. “Then I’ll cut my way out.”

“Make your clant with scissors?” Uncle Poot had laughed. “Why not make it with a gun and shoot your captors through the sack they caught you in?”

“The clants that children make are faint and small,” said Danny. “They have no strength in them.”

“That’s right,” said Uncle Poot. “The son of Odin never forgets. It’s only truly a clant when it’s full-size and every bit as solid as you are in your own body. Until then it’s a small or a faint or a face, and it could no more lift a pair of scissors than a boulder.”

Remembering such lessons, Danny pulled his tee-shirt off over his head and then idly scratched his side, as if that had been his purpose. The girls made their clants point at him and pantomime rolling on the ground with laughter—they really were quite good at giving lifelike movements to their smalls—but all that mattered to Danny was that they weren’t paying attention to the danger they were in. It took only a moment for Danny to have his shirt down on top of the two nearest fairies and another moment for him to gather it into a sack containing them.

The third was free, and it leapt and scampered up the sack, up his arms, into his face. But it was a mere annoyance—he swept it away with a