Ender's Game, chapter seven, part two, in which everyone gets naked

If this were a normal month, I'd have powered through to the end of the chapter, although chapter seven is about three times as long as they have been up to now.  However, it is a National Novel Writing Month, specifically Camp NaNo, and I have like 2000 words to go today, so this normal-length post will have to do and we will still have a third part two weeks from now.  Chapter is long, y'all.

(Content: violence, bullying, implicit sexism.  Fun content: the Mighty Ducks, Schroedinger's Nudity, a Spanish pop quiz.)

When last we left Our Heroes, psychic video games told the shadowy military authorities that this seven-year-old child murderer they have brought to their space school to learn to attempt genocide on inscrutable aliens might be somewhat emotionally messed up.  (Also, sexism is scientifically justified, white kids are more racism-sensitive than minorities, and being a sadist who controls himself is worse than being a killer who didn't mean it.)

Also I guess Ender transferred to Salamander Army.

Ender's Game: p.74--84

Ender arrives in a room half-full of naked boys.  Which is to say that he arrives at the Salamander Army dorm/barracks, a team of 41 kids (40 soldiers and their commander), and his attempt to figure out which one might wear commander tags is somewhat stymied because half the kids are in their regular uniform and half are in their "sleep uniform", which is to say naked.  (I have trouble imagining eight-year-olds thinking 'sleep uniform' is the best slang for nakedness, but whatever.)  They're all talking about battles, because we are told that is all the older students ever talk about.

Finally Ender gets spotted and explains that he's transferring to the command of Bonzo Madrid--he says it as 'bahn-zo' and a student only slightly larger than him corrects him: "Bone-so. The name's Spanish.  Bonzo Madrid.  Aqui nosotros hablamos español, Señor Gran Fedor."  (My mighty intellect and Google Translate can get as far as "Around here we speak Spanish, Mister Big ____", but I don't know what Fedor is.  In Portuguese it might be 'stench'?  Anyone know?)  Ender guesses that this person is Bonzo, but is again corrected:

"No, just a brilliant and talented polyglot.  Petra Arkanian.  The only girl in Salamander Army.  With more balls than anyone else in the room."

This is hilarious--not Petra's joke, but the context around it, given that we will learn in a couple of pages that Petra has been naked this whole time.  She's probably nine years old, okay, but... I'm just saying Ender failed a spot check if he thought there was a chance she was Bonzo.  I'm going to choose to believe that Ender was totally open to the possibility that Bonzo was a trans boy, but there is absolutely zero chance Card would have been onboard with that.*

The other Salamanders mock Petra, and Petra continues to scorn them, causing Ender terrible despair because he has clearly "made exactly the wrong friend".  But then he looks at the other jeering kids, and thinks of the wolf-children from the game, then thinks of Alai and decides that there must be at least one worthwhile person in the room.  Everyone falls quiet at once, and:

Ender turned to the door.  A boy stood there, tall and slender, with beautiful black eyes and slender lips that hinted at refinement.  I would follow such beauty, said something inside Ender.  I would see as those eyes see.

This is the second preteen boy described as "beautiful" in this book and we're not even 80 pages in.  I'm not sure we'll meet any major female characters from here on out, but suffice to say we won't even get physical descriptors for them, let alone superlatives.  All of the attractiveness is saved for the boys.  The often-naked boys.  This is what I was talking about when I said it was hard to tell if this book was more homophobic or homoerotic.  (I'm sure Card would be horrified that I would dare to hint there could be something sexual about the endless parade of naked boys in this book, but--look, if this were written by an out gay author, people would be asking him to tone down the queer.)

The extra sadness occurs to me that this would probably be a good way of writing a book with a young gay hero.  He doesn't even need to know he's gay to start with, and he doesn't need to actually lust over anyone--just save the poetic descriptions for other boys, and let a naked girl literally walk right up to him and not register in the slightest.  (For real: Bonzo's beautiful eyes have now received more narrative attention than the fact that Petra is not wearing a stitch.  I'm not saying there should be any kind of lusty lingering on that, but it quite simply hasn't been noted.  She's as naked as Stilson is dead**.)

Bonzo is not impressed with his new transfer.

"How long have you been working in the battleroom?" 

"A few months, now.  My aim is better." 

"Any training in battle maneuvers?  Have you ever been part of a toon?  Have you ever carried out a joint exercise?" 

Ender had never heard of such things.  He shook his head.

He knows the rules of manly warfare, he'll make references to great figures of military history, he's at military school, and the entire planet is currently ruled by a highly militarized government gearing up for global war, but he's never heard of "battle maneuvers".  A phrase that could not conceivably be more straightforward without being on Simple Wikipedia.  "Joint exercise" is about the same, and "toon" is just a bit of slang (short for 'platoon') to disguise the question "Have you ever fought in a group before?"  I am underwhelmed, and I think if the point of this scene weren't specifically to make Ender look out of his depth, he'd have worked at least half of this out.

Bonzo goes on to explain that Salamander Army is on the rise, at a 60% win rate and with key victories over well-regarded teams, and so he thinks Ender has been sent to drag him back down to obscurity.  Petra snarks a bit ("He isn't glad to meet you") and is told to shut up as Bonzo turns the incident into a rousing speech:

"To one trial, we now add another.  But whatever obstacles our officers choose to fling in our path, we are still--" 

"Salamander!" cried the soldiers, in one voice.  [....] 

"We are the fire that will consume them, belly and bowel, head and heart, many flames of us, but one fire." 

"Salamander!" they cried again. 

"Even this one will not weaken us."

Ender tries to join in by saying he'll work hard, but Bonzo is having none of it, intends to trade him away as fast as possible, and has no faith in him, telling him that he'll get his training at someone else's expense.  Petra snarks again, and Bonzo slaps her, drawing blood with the tips of his fingernails, before telling Ender that he won't join a toon, won't take part in training, and will stay out of actual battles as much as possible.  Ender realises that he has no hope of getting Bonzo's support, and so turns to Petra again.  She didn't flinch at all from the slap, which Ender takes as a sign that she is a person worth befriending after all, because as we have thoroughly established at this point showing feelings is a mortal flaw.

Bonzo banishes Ender to his bunk at the back of the room--because the station is a wheel, the rooms curve slightly, and Ender is so far back that he can't see the door anymore.  Petra appears, and Ender, who didn't know what a 'toon' was three minutes ago, is corrected on his assumption that she's a 'toon leader'.  His exact words.  What the hell.  Anyway, Petra explains that she has a bunk near the front of the room because she has prestige (she's a sharpshooter) and because Bonzo is afraid she'll start a revolution if he takes his eye off her.  (This, of course, is the actual reward for being 'so good they can't ignore you'--begrudging recognition and resentment and having to take abuse without a word.)  Petra wants to be friends too:

"I'm a girl," she said, "and you're a pissant of a six-year-old.  We have so much in common, why don't we be friends?" 

"I won't do your deskwork for you," he said. 

In a moment she realized it was a joke.  "Ha," she said.

Petra reacts the way someone with an actual sense of humour would in these situations, and I cheer her for it.  Because she's also always awesome, she offers to help train him in their spare time.  I mean, take it as you will that the one girl in the room is the one to take a compassionate and generous stance regarding the little new kid, but it's still a completely good and unselfish thing to do, which is possibly a first for this book.  Ender says that the battleroom will be full first thing in the morning, but Petra explains that there are actually nine of them, and SFs a bit about how allowing the battlerooms to float freely from the rest of the station is how they achieve zero-gravity.  That doesn't quite make sense, and Petra knows it--the actual takeaway is that the Battle School is lying about how advanced their technology is.  Shockingly.

Ender thanks her, which she accepts in the traditional manner of the badass (pausing briefly to look at him as she slow-mo walks away, and possibly there are explosions in the background) and Ender starts playing with his desk, discovering that the security system he built for himself is gone and he can't make another--his desk is no longer secure against anyone.  The lights start to go dim, bedtime, so Ender asks for directions to the bathroom, and the boy who answers tells him he can't go naked, he has to wear his uniform at all times and he is forbidden to speak to student in any other army unless told to do so by a teacher.

"And, uh, Bonzo get mad if you skin by Petra." 

"She was naked when I came in, wasn't she?" 

"She do what she like, but you keep you clothes on.  Bonzo's orders." 

That was stupid.  Petra still looked like a boy, it was a stupid rule.  It set her apart, made her different, split the army.  Stupid stupid.  How did Bonzo get to be a commander, if he didn't know better than that?  Alai would be a better commander than Bonzo.  He knew how to bring a group together. 

I know how to bring a group together, too, thought Ender.  Maybe I'll be commander someday.

So, for the record, maybe half an hour ago Ender watched Bonzo slap Petra across the face so hard that he drew blood, but this is the part that makes Ender think Bonzo makes bad decisions.  Bullying and physical violence are one thing, but people should be allowed to wander around stark naked if they want!  (Seriously, how did Bonzo slapping Petra like that not trigger every last one of Ender's 'Peter' alerts?  Physical bullying is supposed to be the kind he's not okay with!)

Ender is taunted at first in the bathroom for being six, but then recognised as 'the kid from the game room', and smirks to himself that soon, if not in Salamander then in some other army, he'll be known as a good soldier.  He'll show them all.  SHOW THEM A--

The next morning, he and Petra are waiting for their battleroom and continue talk about advanced technology.  Ender observes that there's gravity in the corridor right outside the room, and Petra adds that the rooms still stay zero-G even when they're linked to the corridor, so it can't really be about the free-floating.  She also teasingly warns him that terrible fates have befallen those students who dared to investigate these mysteries of the universe.

"So I'm not the first person to ask the question." 

(Ender's Classmates Are Legitimately As Smart As Him tally: 2)

"You remember this, little boy."  When she said little boy it sounded friendly, not contemptuous.  "They never tell you any more truth than they have to.  But any kid with brains knows that there've been some changes in science since the days of old Mazer Rackham and the Victorious Fleet.  Obviously we can now control gravity.  Turn it on and off, change the direction, maybe reflect it--I've thought of lots of neat things you could do with gravity weapons and gravity drives on starships."

Petra goes on a bit about gravity weapons being used to tear planets apart, but Ender feels he already has the most important information, which is that the teachers do not tell the truth.  Which is a bit of a strange specific conclusion--the teachers are very manipulative, to be sure, but I can only think of two other outright lies they'll tell him, and both are major plot points.  Admittedly, keeping gravity-warping technology secret is also a very big deal, but it seems like a big deal for everyone back on Earth too, scientists and engineers, not just the students of Battle School, so maybe 'the teachers' aren't really the ones to focus on here, except to the extent that 'the teachers' represent the military oligarchy?

They practice; Petra observes that he has no bad habits and she will give him all his good ones, so she's pleased, and they cover a lot of advice for how to play laser freeze tag in zero-G, which is a fun thought experiment but not really super-relevant to our purposes here.  He is indeed benched for Salamander's actual training session, which means he sits off to one side with his desk.  Rather than doing schoolwork, he watches them, and he admits to himself that he's not nearly coordinated enough to perform the techniques that the older students can, or the formations they move in.  He is, however, the ultimate military mind, so he notices the weaknesses as well: the inflexibility of formations to respond to changing situations, the inability for individual soldiers to make decisions and take actions.

So this criticism isn't based in analysis of any kind of bigotry or unrealism or cruelty on Card's part, but a straightforward tactical question: have real armies worked like this since we left behind the age of the musket?  Formations are fine in hand-to-hand combat, but when everyone's got lasers and you can be attacked from literally any direction, surely the value of your exact arrangement is not that high?  Has anyone ever won a firefight through timely use of the Flying V?  The main purpose of a formation in the battleroom would seem to be that your frontline soldiers can act as shields for the back, but that doesn't seem to be a common technique, since the enemy is mildly surprised when Ender (obvs) eventually uses it.

Ender might feel that it's stifling for individual soldiers to not be able to improvise on the fly, but he doesn't seem to be considering the value of coordination, the impact of having many parts moving in concert, which is the actual point of having a commander on the field.  I suppose it could be a matter of degree--maybe Bonzo literally forces his soldiers to not move within their formation at all, like the boys in the gameroom kept using their same rigid patterns against Ender--but Ender sounds like he's in favour of letting soldiers constantly improvise, which sounds to me like the ongoing fantasy of the rank-and-file soldier who thinks he's much smarter and more aware than his commander and he's being held back by stupid commands.

So yeah, basically the same 'ugh it is so hard being the smartest guy in the room' as usual.

That's where we'll have to cut it off for this week, folks--tune in next time to see how Ender resolves his training dilemma, manipulates Bonzo's brawn with his brains, and how he next gets to SHOW THEM ALL when he gets into a proper battle/game.  (Spoiler: there will not be enough Petra.)

---

*Flash forward horror: In Shadow of the Hegemon, ages from now, it is revealed that Petra ranked so high on aggression in early observation that her parents had her genetically tested to see if she was 'actually a boy'.  Petra considers this a matter of deep shame.  I consider the fact that Card wrote all of this and editors approved it to be a matter of deep shame.  [See bekabot's comment below on why this makes no biological sense regardless.]

**I mean this comparison very literally, in the sense that both things are true but hidden from us at the time because they make the rest of the story make no sense in context.  We're told later that Stilson had been dead all along, we're told later that Petra was naked the whole time, and then it's like the waveform collapses and the book retcons itself and hopes we don't notice.  Schroedinger's plot point.