Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) - Orson Scott Card Page 0,96

to beat Peter?” she asked.

“No,” he answered.

“Beat the buggers. Then come home and see who notices Peter Wiggin anymore. Look him in the eye when all the world loves and reveres you. That’ll be defeat in his eyes, Ender. That’s how you win.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“Yes I do.”

“No you don’t. I don’t want to beat Peter.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want him to love me.”

She had no answer. As far as she knew, Peter didn’t love anybody.

Ender said nothing more. Just lay there. And lay there.

Finally Valentine, the sweat dripping off her, the mosquitos beginning to hover as the dusk came on, took one final dip in the water and then began to push the raft in to shore. Ender showed no sign that he knew what she was doing, but his irregular breathing told her that he was not asleep. When they got to the shore, she climbed onto the dock and said, “I love you, Ender. More than ever. No matter what you decide.”

He didn’t answer. She doubted that he believed her. She walked back up the hill, savagely angry at them for making her come to Ender like this. For she had, after all, done just what they wanted. She had talked Ender into going back into his training, and he wouldn’t soon forgive her for that.

Ender came in the door, still wet from his last dip in the lake. It was dark outside, and dark in the room where Graff waited for him.

“Are we going now?” asked Ender.

“If you want to,” Graff said.

“When?”

“When you’re ready.”

Ender showered and dressed. He was finally used to the way civilian clothes fit together, but he still didn’t feel right without a uniform or a flash suit. I’ll never wear a flash suit again, he thought. That was the Battle School game, and I’m through with that. He heard the crickets chirping madly in the woods; in the near distance he heard the crackling sound of a car driving slowly on gravel.

What else should he take with him? He had read several of the books in the library, but they belonged to the house and he couldn’t take them. The only thing he owned was the raft he had made with his own hands. That would stay here, too.

The lights were on now in the room where Graff waited. He, too, had changed clothing. He was back in uniform.

They sat in the back seat of the car together, driving along country roads to come at the airport from the back. “Back when the population was growing,” said Graff, “they kept this area in woods and farms. Watershed land. The rainfall here starts a lot of rivers flowing, a lot of underground water moving around. The Earth is deep, and right to the heart it’s alive, Ender. We people only live on the top, like the bugs that live on the scum of the still water near the shore.”

Ender said nothing.

“We train our commanders the way we do because that’s what it takes—they have to think in certain ways, they can’t be distracted by a lot of things, so we isolate them. You. Keep you separate. And it works. But it’s so easy, when you never meet people, when you never know the Earth itself, when you live with metal walls keeping out the cold of space, it’s easy to forget why Earth is worth saving. Why the world of people might be worth the price you pay.”

So that’s why you brought me here, thought Ender. With all your hurry, that’s why you took three months, to make me love Earth. Well, it worked. All your tricks worked. Valentine, too; she was another one of your tricks, to make me remember that I’m not going to school for myself. Well, I remember.

“I may have used Valentine,” said Graff, “and you may hate me for it, Ender, but keep this in mind—it only works because what’s between you, that’s real, that’s what matters. Billions of those connections between human beings. That’s what you’re fighting to keep alive.”

Ender turned his face to the window and watched the helicopters and dirigibles rise and fall.

They took a helicopter to the I.F. spaceport at Stumpy Point. It was officially named for a dead Hegemon, but everybody called it Stumpy Point, after the pitiful little town that had been paved over when they made the approaches to the vast islands of steel and concrete that dotted Pamlico Sound. There were still waterbirds taking their fastidious little steps