to allow us to have one more child, then why not?"
"But then they took Ender."
"And by the time they took him, it was too late. To raise Peter and Valentine in our faith. If you don't teach children when they're little, it's never really inside them. You have to hope they'll come to it later, on their own. It can't come from the parents, if you don't begin when they're little."
"Indoctrinating them."
"That's what parenting is," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Indoctrinating your children in the social patterns that you want them to live by. The intellectuals have no qualms about using the schools to indoctrinate our children in their foolishness."
"I wasn't trying to provoke you," said Bean.
"And yet you use words that imply criticism."
"Sorry," said Bean.
"You're still a child," said Mrs. Wiggin. "No matter how bright you are, you still absorb a lot of the attitudes of the ruling class. I don't like it, but there you are. When they took Ender away, and we finally could live without constant scrutiny of every word that we said to our children, we realized that Peter was already completely indoctrinated in the foolishness of the schools. He would never have gone along with our earlier plan. He would have denounced us. We would have lost him. So do you cast off your firstborn child in order to give birth to a fourth or fifth or sixth? Peter seemed sometimes not to have any conscience at all. If ever anyone needed to believe in God, it was Peter, and he didn't."
"He probably wouldn't have anyway," said Bean.
"You don't know him," said Mrs. Wiggin. "He lives by pride. If we had made him proud of being a secret believer, he would have been valiant in that struggle. Instead he's ... not."
"So you never even tried to convert him to your beliefs?" asked Bean.
"Which ones?" asked Mrs. Wiggin. "We had always thought that the big struggle in our family would be over which religion to teach them, his or mine. Instead we had to watch over Peter and find ways to help him find ... decency. No, something much more important than that. Integrity. Honor. We monitored him the way that the Battle School had monitored all three of them. It took all our patience to keep our hands off when he forced Valentine to become Demosthenes. It was so contrary to her spirit. But we soon saw that it was not changing her-that her nobility of heart was, if anything, stronger through resistance to Peter's control."
"You didn't try to simply block him from what he was doing?"
She laughed harshly. "Oh, now, you're supposed to be the smart one. Could someone have blocked you? And Peter failed to get into Battle School because he was too ambitious, too rebellious, too unlikely to fulfill assignments and follow orders. We were supposed to influence him by forbidding him or blocking him?"
"No, I can see you couldn't," said Bean. "But you did nothing at all?"
"We taught him as best we could," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Comments at meals. We could see how he tuned us out, how he despised our opinions. It didn't help that we were trying so hard to conceal that we knew everything he'd written as Locke; our conversations really were ... abstract. Boring, I suppose. And we didn't have those intellectual credentials. Why should he respect us? But he heard our ideas. Of what nobility is. Goodness and honor. And whether he believed us at some level or simply found such things within himself, we've seen him grow. So ... you ask me if you can trust him, and I can't answer, because ... trust him to do what? To act as you want him to? Never. To act according to some predictable pattern? I should laugh. But we've seen signs of honor. We've seen him do things that were very hard, but that seemed to be not just for show, but because he really believed in what he was doing. Of course, he might have simply been doing things that would make Locke seem virtuous and admirable. How can we know, when we can't ask him?"
"So you can't talk to him about what matters to you, because you know he'll despise you, and he can't talk to you about what matters to him, because you've never shown him that you actually have the understanding to grasp what he's thinking."
Tears sprang to her eyes and glistened there. "Sometimes I miss Valentine so much. She was so breathtakingly