Ender's Game, chapter six, in which ZERO GRAVITY RACISM saves the day

(Content note: racial slurs, bullying, tokenism, virtual violence.  Fun content note: origins of the Ferengi.)

I had blanked out parts of this chapter.  It's relatively easy if you have privilege shields, because Card at last reveals the game that spurred him to build the rest of the story to justify playing it, but wow, the abrupt throwaway racism.  Y'all be warned.

Ender's Game, p.54--65

Chapter Six: The Giant's Drink

You know where we start.

"Don't you see what's going on here?  He's stuck at the Giant's Drink in the mind game.  Is the boy suicidal?  You never mentioned it." 

"Everybody gets the Giant sometime." 

"But Ender won't leave it alone.  Like Pinual."

It took me the longest time to realise that Pinual is the aforementioned student who died in Battle School.  I'm pretty sure this is the only time he's mentioned by name--I always assumed it was a historical/military reference.  They're also arguing over whether he's causing too much tension in his class, which is apparently just as concerning as his indicators of potential self-harm?

"Give him time with the group.  To see what he does with it." 

"We don't have time." 

"We don't have time to rush too fast with a kid who has as much chance  of being a monster as a military genius."

This is Graff insisting that Ender should be moved out and his superior telling him to keep Ender there.  I read this chapter out of order this week, and that has caused me to notice something interesting--I'll get back to it later when we see the results of Graff being overruled here.  Also, a fun final bit:

"Graff, you give me ulcers." 

"You wouldn't have ulcers if you'd leave the school to me and take care of the fleet yourself." 

"The fleet is looking for a battle commander.  There's nothing to take care of until you get me that."

Dozens or hundreds of ships, thousands of crew and pilots, but the supreme commander of Earth's entire fleet has nothing to do with any of them until he gets his tactician.  I know this is hyperbole, but seriously, the amount of time this book spends telling us that Ender is the only thing who matters, ye gods.

Moving along.

It is time for the grand debut of the Battle Room, the core of this story.  For anyone who hasn’t read the books already: it’s a huge cubic room with doors in the middle of the walls on opposite ends and no gravity.  The kids, all wearing their battle suits, file out of the door and start moving along the walls by grabbing the sunken handholds, and the ones who lose their grip are stuck drifting in the air, trying to swim (which doesn’t work) unless someone else can reach out to grab them or launch off the wall and push them to the far side.  There’s a lot of trial and error; Ender and Shen start trying to bounce around the room to learn how to navigate.  In a rare moment of Ender not being Way Smarter Than Everyone Else, he is trying to figure out what to do if you get stuck drifting in the air, but he sees other kids are already experimenting (with no results) and he actually can’t think of anything they aren’t already trying.

(Ender’s Classmates Are Legitimately As Smart As Him tally: 1)

The suits are kind of awkward; they take extra effort to get moving and to slow down, and Ender accepts that no matter what “I’ll be clumsy for a while.  Better get started”.  This is maybe the best advice we’ve yet seen in this entire book—the same wisdom for writers is usually phrased as “Everyone starts out with 10,000 bad pages in them, and the key to becoming a good writer is to get them out of you as fast as possible”.  There's our Not Horrible moment for the chapter.

In a return to the shuttle scenario, everyone has trouble coping with the lack of ‘down’ in zero-G and the constant reorientations as they move around the room.  Ender launches himself toward a wall and thinks he’s flying, but that’s unsettling to him, so:

Then he forced himself to change his view.  He was hurtling toward a wall.  That was down.  And at once he had control of himself.  He wasn't flying, he was falling.  This was a dive.

He still has no control while drifting, and so checks out the one tool he has, the blaster-looking thing holstered in the side of his suit.  We’re told it has a bunch of buttons, but Ender only tests the red one (focused beam) and the white one (lamp).  Spoiler alert: we’re never going to find out what the rest of those buttons do and no one’s every going to use the lamp function ever again.  The Swiss Army Laser has one purpose and that is shooting.  Having determined that he can’t manoeuvre with it, Ender loses interest and goes back to bouncing.  He launches haphazardly again on an impulse towards Alai.

Oh, Alai.  You’re sweet, but you obviously didn’t exist before this page and you’re a borderline Magical Negro.  Happy birthday.  Canonically, however, Alai is “Bernard’s best friend”, according to Ender.  You’ll recall that last chapter we were told that Ender’s cyberbullying had destroyed Bernard’s powerbase and only the most sadistic students were still loyal to him.  Presumably this should mean that Bernard’s “best friend” is the most sadistic of them all?  Nope.  Alai sees Ender is on a crash course and quickly acts to help him land safely on the wall, despite knowing that Ender and Bernard are ARCHNEMESES.

"That's good," Ender said.  "We ought to practice that kind of thing." 

"That's what I thought, only everybody's turning to butter out there," Alai said.  "What happens if we get out there together?  We should be able to shove each other in opposite directions."  [....]  "Let's push off before we run into that bunch." 

"And then let's meet over in that corner."  Ender did not want this bridge into the enemy camp to fail.

They succeed, though Ender has to rebound several times to catch up to Alai, and then shows what he's figured out about their lasers.

"What does it do when you aim at a person?" asked Alai. 

"I don't know." 

"Why don't we find out?" 

"Ender shook his head.  "We might hurt somebody." 

"I meant why don't we shoot each other in the foot or something.  I'm not Bernard, I never tortured cats for fun."

From the first time I read this book, this was a characterisation thing that bothered me.  Why is Alai friends with Bernard?  What possible connection do they have?  Bernard is a sadistic, bullying, presumably-white French Separatist, and Alai is a clever, compassionate, black Muslim.  (I'm pretty sure we never actually find out where he's from, beyond 'Africa or maybe the Middle East'.)  We have no evidence whatsoever that they share any interests or history.  The only way this can make sense to me at all is if Alai is used to being bullied and so has taken the preventative route of finding the dominant bully in the group and befriending him in order to ward off anyone else's attacks.  We have no evidence of this, either, but that just puts it on an even footing with any other explanation, and it would at least start to explain this.

Anyway.  The lasers are for laser tag, obviously, more specifically laser freeze tag:

"Shoot me in the foot." 

"No, you shoot me." 

"Let's shoot each other." 

They did.  Immediately Ender felt the leg of the suit grow stiff, immobile at the knee and ankle joints.

They decide to start their first 'war' by commencing fire on the other dozens of students, but Ender first says they should invite Bernard to join them .  Alai is surprised at first, and then Ender adds Shen as well.  And... my god.  I mean... look, I don't know what Card thought was going on here, but--is it supposed to be reclamatory usage indicating that this generation of children is truly 'postracial' but not so far advanced that they've forgotten racism used to be a thing?  Did it occur to Card that there's a problem when 'postracial' is largely defined by PoC not complaining about racism?  Does he--okay, fine, just--here's the dialogue:

"And Shen." 

"That slanty-eyed butt-wiggler?" 

Ender decided that Alai was joking.  "Hey, we can't all be niggers." 

Alai grinned.  "My grandpa would've killed you for that." 

"My great great grandpa would have sold him first." 

"Let's go get Bernard and Shen and freeze these bugger-lovers."

Honest to fuck I don't know what this is for.  Gritty realism?  The harmonious future in which racial slurs have been defused and become harmless as long as people know you're joking?  (Actually, plenty of people would argue that's the case now, so maybe it's not supposed to be futuristic.)  Are they bonding by testing boundaries?  Does it not seem like a problem to anyone in this postracial situation when the now-'harmless' racial slurs are still only directed at the black kid and the Chinese kid?  Battle School is supposed to be super-international and its slang borrows from languages all over the world and no one's got a choice epithet for whitey?  Gwailo?  Yaku?  Alai could easily know 'firanji'* at least?  If you're going to argue that equality comes about when everyone's not upset about racial slurs anymore, take your own goddamn medicine, Card.

Where were we.

When Dap arrives, Our Heroes are laughing themselves sick in the thick of the thirty-six other students, since apparently not even one other student in the class figured out how laser tag works in time to zap one of them, despite Ender telling us earlier that he and every other child on Earth have had toy guns "almost since infancy".  The element of surprise didn't just beat nine-to-one odds, but made it a perfect sweep.  Of course it did.  Dap unthaws everyone and tells them to stop whining that it was an unfair fight, since everyone had an equal amount of time to start figuring things out and it's their own fault for not firing first or something.  Sure, that seems reasonable.

In the aftermath, apparently, the rift is healed in their class, and there is no more Team Ender and Team Bernard, because Alai is friends with everyone, and Bernard now calms down when Alai tells him to.  I'm going to give this a pass on plausibility because it's a rare thing: Ender has resolved a conflict by reaching out to other people and befriending them instead of just being so awesome that they must repent, and there isn't a lot of that in this book.  They vote Alai their class leader by a landslide, "and everyone settled into the new pattern.  The launch was no longer divided into Bernard's in-group and Ender's outcasts.  Alai was the bridge."

And, finally getting back to what I mentioned earlier, all of this happened because Graff was ordered not to do what he wanted and pull Ender out early.  Ender found a solution that involved bonding with people and being, if not empathetic exactly, at least open to the possibility that they didn't have to fight for dominance.  As much as Ender has the potential to be a monster, he can be a healthy being too, if Graff doesn't get his way.  (And while Graff may think he's doing what he must for ruthless efficiency, Alai is in several ways key to Ender's Ascension and victory, so this was not merely healthy, but necessary to save the world.)

So finally we find Ender back in his bunk, playing 'the mind game' on his desk, an automatically-adapting adventure game that presents him with different environments and puzzles as he roams.  Ender has beaten all of the normal puzzles, of course--he always knows how to dodge the cat if he turns into a mouse, and he's tired of the ducks, so he heads outside and starts climbing the big green hills.  In a nice bit of imagery, the hills swell and crack and reveal a vast loaf of bread, and when he hops down off of it he's on an enormous dinner table surrounded by huge food.  He keeps telling himself he won't come back here, but he has yet again--the Giant appears and sets down two shot glasses for him to pick from, a guessing game that inevitably kills him in some creative way.

Ender tries kicking the Giant in the chin this time, but it proceeds with the game as usual--doesn't matter whether he's afraid or belligerent, he gets the same problem thrown at him.

"One is poison and one is not," said the Giant.  "Guess right and I'll take you into Fairyland." 

Everyone knows that no one gets to Fairyland.  I'm amused by the names that Ender checks when thinking about how infantile it probably is: "Mother Goose or Pac-Man or Peter Pan".  Given the most effective narrative for Pac-Man, I'm not sure it'll end up in the canon of children's stories of the future, but it was worth a shot.

Ender knew that whatever he chose he would die.  The game was rigged.  On the first death, his figure would reappear on the Giant's table, to plan again.  On the second death, he'd come back to the landslides.  Then to the garden bridge.  The to the mousehole.  And then, if he still went back to the Giant and played again, and died again, his desk would go dark, "Free Play Over" would march around the desk, and Ender would lie back on his bed and tremble until he could finally go to sleep.

This is one of those sections that is again actually written really well, both is the implications for Ender's psyche at this moment and the gruesomeness as the Giant, as promised, kills him over and over with each attempt.  He falters for a moment, but ultimately always comes back.

He stared at the two liquids.  The one foaming, the other with waves in it like the sea  He tried to guess what kind of death each one held.  Probably a fish will come out of the ocean one and eat me.  The foamy one will probably asphyxiate me.  I hate this game.  It isn't fair.  It's stupid.  It's rotten.

Ender kicks the glasses over, dodges the Giant's hands, leaps up into its face, and digs into its eye with his hands until it dies.  When it topples, the landscape has changed again to an elegant forest, and a bat flutters down to ask what he's doing here, since "Nobody ever comes here."  Ender gifts it a handful of whatever substance he dug out of the Giant, and it flies off, welcoming him to Fairyland.  He shuts the game off and tries to sleep.

He hadn't meant to kill the Giant.  This was supposed to be a game.  Not a choice between his own grisly death and an even worse murder.  I'm a murderer, even when I play.  Peter would be proud of me.

And now we're back to the part of Ender's education that Graff is totally onboard with, wherein at all times he must be pushed to kill people to protect himself.  (Also, Peter as the embodiment of all evils.  Would Peter actually be proud of Ender killing in self-defence?  That's not really Peter's schtick.  Peter would, in keeping with his current character, have found some way to dominate the Giant and then keep it around to bully to bolster his own ego, I think.)

Graff argues against allowing Ender to be in situations that reward diplomatic and constructive problem-solving, and fights to keep him in the ones where the game is rigged and murder is the only solution.  And, as Erika helpfully pointed out, we're supposed to believe that Peter was too sadistic to meet Graff's needs, but everything that Graff is pushing Ender towards is supposedly exactly what Peter is good at.  Who are we supposed to believe?  Is Ender wrong that Peter would be much better at Graff's tests?  Is Graff wrong that this is the training Ender needs in order to become a good leader?  If Peter was too sadistic to make a good leader, why is Graff trying to push Ender that way again and again?  He doesn't seem to be particularly concerned that he'll damage Ender's empathy permanently, despite rather a lot of evidence that Ender has been failing at empathy again and again.

Graff is a goddamn supervillain.

---

*If the internet is to be believed, this is an old Arabic word for the French, which in Egyptian was pronounced 'firangi', which is in turn where Gene Roddenberry got 'Ferengi', the race of conniving ultracapitalist jackasses.  Star Trek progressivism always used to be so hilariously over the top.  Those were better days.