First Meetings in Ender's Universe by Orson Scott Card

  Ender tried to figure the size of the enemy's sphere. Astronomy was beyond him. But now his curiosity was stirred.

  "What kind of weapons are on those ships? To be able to strike so fast?"

  Mazer shook his head. "The science is too much for you. You'd have to study many more years than you've lived to understand even the basics. All you need to know is that the weapons work."

  "Why do we have to come so close to be in range?"

  "The ships are all protected by forcefields. A certain distance away the weapons are weaker and can't get through. Closer in the weapons are stronger than the shields. But the computers take care of all that. They're constantly firing in any direction that won't hurt one of our ships. The computers pick targets, aim; they do all the detail work. You just tell them when and get them in a position to win. All right?"

  "No," Ender twisted the tube of the radio around his fingers. "I have to know how the weapons work."

  "I told you, it would take--"

  "I can't command a fleet--not even on the simulator--unless I know." Ender waited a moment, then added, "Just the rough idea."

  Mazer stood up and walked a few steps away. "All right, Ender. It won't make any sense, but I'll try. As simply as I can." He shoved his hands into his pockets. "It's this way, Ender. Everything is made up of atoms, little particles so small you can't see them with your eyes. These atoms, there are only a few different types, and they're all made up of even smaller particles that are pretty much the same. These atoms can be broken, so that they stop being atoms. So that this metal doesn't hold together anymore. Or the plastic floor. Or your body. Or even the air. They just seem to disappear, if you break the atoms. All that's left is the pieces. And they fly around and break more atoms. The weapons on the ships set up an area where it's impossible for atoms of anything to stay together. They all break down. So things in that area--they disappear."

  Ender nodded. "You're right, I don't understand it. Can it be blocked?"

  "No. But it gets wider and weaker the farther it goes from the ship, so that after a while a forcefield will block it. OK? And to make it strong at all, it has to be focused so that a ship can only fire effectively in maybe three or four directions at once."

  Ender nodded again, but he didn't really understand, not well enough. "If the pieces of the broken atoms go breaking more atoms, why doesn't it just make everything disappear?"

  "Space. Those thousands of kilometers between the ships, they're empty. Almost no atoms. The pieces don't hit anything, and when they finally do hit something, they're so spread out they can't do any harm." Mazer cocked his head quizzically. "Anything else you need to know?"

  "Do the weapons on the ships--do they work against anything besides ships?"

  Mazer moved in close to Ender and said firmly, "We only use them against ships. Never anything else. If we used them against anything else, the enemy would use them against us. Got it?"

  Mazer walked away, and was nearly out the door when Ender called to him.

  "I don't know your name yet," Ender said blandly.

  "Mazer Rackham."

  "Mazer Rackham," Ender said, "I defeated you."

  Mazer laughed.

  "Ender, you weren't fighting me today," he said. "You were fighting the stupidest computer in the Command School, set on a ten-year-old program. You don't think I'd use a sphere, do you?" He shook his head. "Ender, my dear little fellow, when you fight me, you'll know it. Because you'll lose." And Mazer left the room.

  Ender still practiced ten hours a day with his toon leaders. He never saw them, though, only heard their voices on the radio. Battles came every two or three days. The enemy had something new every time, something harder--but Ender coped with it. And won every time. And after every battle Mazer would point out mistakes and show Ender that he had really lost. Mazer only let Ender finish so that he would learn to handle the end of the game.

  Until finally Mazer came in and solemnly shook Ender's hand and said, "That, boy, was a good battle."

  Because the praise was so long in coming, it pleased Ender more than praise had ever pleased him before. And because it was so condescending, he resented it.

  "So from now on," Mazer said, "we can give you hard ones."

  From then on Ender's life was a slow nervous breakdown.

  He began fighting two battles a day, with problems that steadily grew more difficult. He had been trained in nothing but the game all his life, but now the game began to consume him. He woke in the morning with new strategies for the simulator and went fitfully to sleep at night with the mistakes of the day preying on him. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night crying for a reason he didn't remember. Sometimes he woke up with his knuckles bloody from biting them. But every day he went impassively to the simulator and drilled his toon leaders until the battles, and drilled his toon leaders after the battles, and endured and studied the harsh criticism that Rackham piled on him. He noted that Rackham perversely criticized him more after his hardest battles. He noted that every time he thought of a new strategy the enemy was using it within a few days. And he noted that while his fleet always stayed the same size, the enemy increased in numbers every day.

  He asked his teacher.

  "We are showing you what it will be like when you really command. The ratios of enemy to us."

  "Why does the enemy always outnumber us?"

  Mazer bowed his gray head for a moment, as if deciding whether to answer. Finally he looked up and reached out his hand and touched Ender on the shoulder. "I will tell you, even though the information is secret. You see, the enemy attacked us first. He had good reason to attack us, but that is a matter for politicians, and whether the fault was ours or his, we could not let him win. So when the enemy came to our worlds, we fought back, hard, and spent the finest of our young men in the fleets. But we won, and the enemy retreated."

  Mazer smiled ruefully. "But the enemy was not through, boy. The enemy would never be through. They came again, with more numbers, and it was harder to beat them. And another generation of young men was spent. Only a few survived. So we came up with a plan--the big men came up with the plan. We knew that we had to destroy the enemy once and for all, totally, eliminate his ability to make war against us. To do that we had to go to his home worlds--his home world, really, since the enemy's empire is all tied to his capital world."

  "And so?" Ender asked.

  "And so we made a fleet. We made more ships than the enemy ever had. We made a hundred ships for every ship he had sent against us. And we launched them against his twenty-eight worlds. They started leaving a hundred years ago. And they carried on them the ansible, and only a few men. So that someday a commander could sit on a planet somewhere far from the battle and command the fleet. So that our best minds would not be destroyed by the enemy."

  Ender's questions had still not been answered. "Why do they outnumber us?"

  Mazer laughed. "Because it took a hundred years for our ships to get there. They've had a hundred years to prepare for us. They'd be fools, don't you think, boy, if they waited in old tugboats to defend their harbors. They have new ships, great ships, hundreds of ships. All we have is the ansible, that and the fact that they have to put a commander with every fleet, and when they lose--and they will lose--they lose one of their best minds every time."

  Ender started to ask another question.

  "No more, Ender Wiggin. I've told you more than you ought to know as it is."

  Ender stood angrily and turned away. "I have a right to know. Do you think this can go on forever, pushing me through one school and another and never telling me what my life is for? You use me and the others as a tool, someday we'll command your ships, someday maybe we'll save your lives, but I'm not a computer, and I have to know!"

  "Ask me a question, then, boy," Mazer said, "and if I can answer, I will."

  "If you use your best minds to command the fleets, and you never lose any, then what do you need me for? Who am I replacing, if
they're all still there?"

  Mazer shook his head. "I can't tell you the answer to that, Ender. Be content that we will need you, soon. It's late. Go to bed. You have a battle in the morning."

  Ender walked out of the simulator room. But when Mazer left by the same door a few moments later, the boy was waiting in the hall.

  "All right, boy," Mazer said impatiently, "what is it? I don't have all night and you need to sleep."

  Ender wasn't sure what his question was, but Mazer waited. Finally Ender asked softly, "Do they live?"

  "Do who live?"

  "The other commanders. The ones now. And before me."

  Mazer snorted. "Live. Of course they live. He wonders if they live." Still chuckling, the old man walked off down the hall. Ender stood in the corridor for a while, but at last he was tired and he went off to bed. They live, he thought. They live, but he can't tell me what happens to them.

  That night Ender didn't wake up crying. But he did wake up with blood on his hands.

  Months wore on with battles every day, until at last Ender settled into the routine of the destruction of himself. He slept less every night, dreamed more, and he began to have terrible pains in his stomach. They put him on a very bland diet, but soon he didn't even have an appetite for that. "Eat," Mazer said, and Ender would mechanically put food in his mouth. But if nobody told him to eat he didn't eat.

  One day as he was drilling his toon leaders the room went black and he woke up on the floor with his face bloody where he had hit the controls.

  They put him to bed then, and for three days he was very ill. He remembered seeing faces in his dreams, but they weren't real faces, and he knew it even while he thought he saw them. He thought he saw Bean sometimes, and sometimes he thought he saw Lieutenant Anderson and Captain Graff. And then he woke up and it was only his enemy, Mazer Rackham.

  "I'm awake," he said to Mazer Rackham.

  "So I see," Mazer answered. "Took you long enough. You have a battle today."

  So Ender got up and fought the battle and he won it. But there was no second battle that day, and they let him go to bed earlier. His hands were shaking as he undressed.

  During the night he thought he felt hands touching him gently, and he dreamed he heard voices saying, "How long can he go on?"

  "Long enough."

  "So soon?"

  "In a few days, then he's through."

  "How will he do?"

  "Fine. Even today, he was better than ever."

  Ender recognized the last voice as Mazer Rackham's. He resented Rackham's intruding even in his sleep.

  He woke up and fought another battle and won.

  Then he went to bed.

  He woke up and won again.

  And the next day was his last day in Command School, though he didn't know it. He got up and went to the simulator for the battle.

  Mazer was waiting for him. Ender walked slowly into the simulator room. His step was slightly shuffling, and he seemed tired and dull. Mazer frowned.

  "Are you awake, boy?" If Ender had been alert, he would have cared more about the concern in his teacher's voice. Instead, he simply went to the controls and sat down. Mazer spoke to him.

  "Today's game needs a little explanation, Ender Wiggin. Please turn around and pay strict attention."

  Ender turned around, and for the first time he noticed that there were people at the back of the room. He recognized Graff and Anderson from Battle School, and vaguely remembered a few of the men from Command School--teachers for a few hours at some time or another. But most of the people he didn't know at all.

  "Who are they?"

  Mazer shook his head and answered, "Observers. Every now and then we let observers come in to watch the battle. If you don't want them, we'll send them out."

  Ender shrugged. Mazer began his explanation. "Today's game, boy, has a new element. We're staging this battle around a planet. This will complicate things in two ways. The planet isn't large, on the scale we're using, but the ansible can't detect anything on the other side of it--so there's a blind spot. Also, it's against the rules to use weapons against the planet itself. All right?"

  "Why, don't the weapons work against planets?"

  Mazer answered coldly, "There are rules of war, Ender, that apply even in training games."

  Ender shook his head slowly. "Can the planet attack?"

  Mazer looked nonplussed for a moment, then smiled. "I guess you'll have to find that one out, boy. And one more thing. Today, Ender, your opponent isn't the computer. I am your enemy today, and today I won't be letting you off so easily. Today is a battle to the end. And I'll use any means I can to defeat you."

  Then Mazer was gone, and Ender expressionlessly led his toon leaders through maneuvers. Ender was doing well, of course, but several of the observers shook their heads, and Graff kept clasping and unclasping his hands, crossing and uncrossing his legs. Ender would be slow today, and today Ender couldn't afford to be slow.

  A warning buzzer sounded, and Ender cleared the simulator board, waiting for today's game to appear. He felt muddled today, and wondered why people were there watching. Were they going to judge him today? Decide if he was good enough for something else? For another two years of grueling training, another two years of struggling to exceed his best? Ender was twelve. He felt very old. And as he waited for the game to appear, he wished he could simply lose it, lose the battle badly and completely so that they would remove him from the program, punish him however they wanted, he didn't care, just so he could sleep.

  Then the enemy formation appeared, and Ender's weariness turned to desperation.

  The enemy outnumbered them a thousand to one, the simulator glowed green with them, and Ender knew that he couldn't win.

  And the enemy was not stupid. There was no formation that Ender could study and attack. Instead the vast swarms of ships were constantly moving, constantly shifting from one momentary formation to another, so that a space that for one moment was empty was immediately filled with a formidable enemy force. And even though Ender's fleet was the largest he had ever had, there was no place he could deploy it where he would outnumber the enemy long enough to accomplish anything.

  And behind the enemy was the planet. The planet, which Mazer had warned him about. What difference did a planet make, when Ender couldn't hope to get near it? Ender waited, waited for the flash of insight that would tell him what to do, how to destroy the enemy. And as he waited, he heard the observers behind him begin to shift in their seats, wondering what Ender was doing, what plan he would follow. And finally it was obvious to everyone that Ender didn't know what to do, that there was nothing to do, and a few of the men at the back of the room made quiet little sounds in their throats.

  Then Ender heard Bean's voice in his ear. Bean chuckled and said, "Remember, the enemy's gate is down." A few of the other toon leaders laughed, and Ender thought back to the simple games he had played and won in Battle School. They had put him against hopeless odds there, too. And he had beaten them. And he'd be damned if he'd let Mazer Rackham beat him with a cheap trick like outnumbering him a thousand to one. He had won a game in Battle School by going for something the enemy didn't expect, something against the rules--he had won by going against the enemy's gate.

  And the enemy's gate was down.

  Ender smiled, and realized that if he broke this rule they'd probably kick him out of school, and that way he'd win for sure. He would never have to play a game again.

  He whispered into the microphone. His six commanders each took a part of the fleet and launched themselves against the enemy. They pursued erratic courses, darting off in one direction and then another. The enemy immediately stopped his aimless maneuvering and began to group around Ender's six fleets.

  Ender took off his microphone, leaned back in his chair, and watched. The observers murmured out loud, now. Ender was doing nothing--he had thrown the game away.

  But a pattern began to emerge from the quick confrontations with the en
emy. Ender's six groups lost ships constantly as they brushed with each enemy force--but they never stopped for a fight, even when for a moment they could have won a small tactical victory. Instead they continued on their erratic course that led, eventually, down. Toward the enemy planet.

  And because of their seemingly random course the enemy didn't realize it until the same time that the observers did. By then it was too late, just as it had been too late for William Bee to stop Ender's soldiers from activating the gate. More of Ender's ships could be hit and destroyed, so that of the six fleets only two were able to get to the planet, and those were decimated. But those tiny groups did get through, and they opened fire on the planet.

  Ender leaned forward now, anxious to see if his guess would pay off. He half expected a buzzer to sound and the game to be stopped, because he had broken the rule. But he was betting on the accuracy of the simulator. If it could simulate a planet, it could simulate what would happen to a planet under attack.

  It did.

  The weapons that blew up little ships didn't blow up the entire planet at first. But they did cause terrible explosions. And on the planet there was no space to dissipate the chain reaction. On the planet the chain reaction found more and more fuel to feed it.

  The planet's surface seemed to be moving back and forth, but soon the surface gave way to an immense explosion that sent light flashing in all directions. It swallowed up Ender's entire fleet. And then it reached the enemy ships.

  The first simply vanished in the explosion. Then, as the explosion spread and became less bright, it was clear what happened to each ship. As the light reached them they flashed brightly for a moment and disappeared. They were all fuel for the fire of the planet.

  It took more than three minutes for the explosion to reach the limits of the simulator, and by then it was much fainter. All the ships were gone, and if any had escaped before the explosion reached them, they were few and not worth worrying about. Where the planet had been there was nothing. The simulator was empty.

  Ender had destroyed the enemy by sacrificing his entire fleet and breaking the rule against destroying the enemy planet. He wasn't sure whether to feel triumphant at his victory or defiant at the rebuke he was certain would come. So instead he felt nothing. He was tired. He wanted to go to bed and sleep.