Ender's Shadow, chapters twenty-three and twenty-four, in which Bean steps aside

I almost put 'the last Card post ever' under the below 'fun content' tag, but of course then I remembered that, sooner or later, I'm going to have to do one more post on the Ender's Game movie.  So there's that, though I'm not sure when, exactly.

As I have vowed many times, I'm not doing any more Orson Scott Card books on this blog.  I'm quite done; this one is the best and I am not willing to spend any more of my life on his time.  So, enjoy the below, but next week be sure to come back for the very first post on: The Eye of the World, Book One of The Wheel of Time.

I'm going to regret this, I just know it.

But first, we've got to finish up with Card's books at least, so read on, you tenacious followers.  Y'all make this endurable.

(Content: ableism, genocide, child abuse. Fun content: asteroid dodgeball, male novelists, terrifying Space Humans, tons of fanfiction, Adam Savage, and yet more goddamn Bible references.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 352--379

Chapter Twenty-Three: Ender's Game

The opening exchange between Graff and Admiral Placeholder-Designed-To-Make-Others-Look-Better is predictable, as Graff tries to convince him to arrest "the Polemarch and his conspirators", although as I understand this world that means 'all Russians', so... that seems hard.  Admiral Placeholder of course refuses to "fire the first shot", because then he'll be blamed for the ensuing war, etc etc politics cowards whatever.  I hate Graff and I don't know who this guy is, so I can't imagine why I'm supposed to be invested in this subplot.  Anyway, it's xenocide time again and Bean is in prophet mode for Our MurderSaviour:

With Ender there,Bean immediately stepped back into his place among the toon leaders. No one mentioned it to him. He had been the leading commander, he had trained them well, but Ender had always been the natural commander of this group [....] They felt known by the one whose honor they needed. Bean simply did not know how to do that. His encouragement was always more obvious, a bit heavy-handed. [....] Ender was just... himself. Authority came from him like breath.

Card continues to subscribe to the notion that narrative 'showing' is only used for minor matters, like spending several pages detailing the logistics of crawling around inside an air duct, whereas the powerful art of 'telling' is saved for those grand moments when you need to contrast the essential natures of your dual protagonists to drive home your thesis on intelligence distinct from leadership.

Bean also informs us that Ender doesn't call on him nearly as much as he wishes, focusing instead on his besties: Petra, Alai, Dink, and Shen.  The previous book informed us that Ender analysed Bean's skills and found he floundered with large fleets but used small squadrons to devastating effect; here we're told that this was actually Mazer Rackham downplaying Bean's skills so that Bean can always be standing by to hit the button and take over Ender's leadership if Ender freezes or passes out in the middle of battle.

They hear about Mazer Rackham's 'testing' plan, which Bean pegs as suspicious, but the best part is this logical leap, when he sees the globe formation of the enemy ships that Rackham supposedly programmed, surrounding a single decoy queen:

So why would Rackham expect the Buggers to expect humans to strike for a single ship? 

Bean thought back to those vids that Ender had watched over and over in Battle School--all the propaganda film of the Second Invasion. 

They never showed the battle because there wasn't one. Nor did Mazer Rackham command a strike force with a brilliant strategy. Mazer Rackham hit a single ship and the war was over.

Just so we're clear here, I didn't snip out any text.  Bean makes a flying leap from 'Mazer, pretending to be the formics, is decoying with a lone ship, which he thinks the real formics will do, therefore there was no battle whatsoever in the Second Invasion'.  Now, okay, the leap to 'they're faking a queen therefore the queen is their weak point' is a legitimate move, cool, but the additional decision that there was no actual battle around Saturn is pure magical intuition.  Bean has no reason to believe that Mazer didn't kill the queen after a long and devastating battle of brilliant tactics.  If he won with one shot and not military skill, what's supposed to qualify him to program anything else the formics are doing in battle?  Why does one skill (laser tag, or alien empathy) keep translating into total mastery of war?

Bean similarly hears that the testing pattern is going to mimic a campaign, and he instantly concludes that all of his guesses are right, the formics have many worlds and the humans are invading all of them and the formics will learn from battle to battle because they have instant communications etc etc I am literally recapping Card recapping himself.  Also, Bean has apparently given up on his 'I must not believe my own wild theory' plan, continuing his signature move of completely changing his mind between scenes for no given reason.

Ender starts relying most of all on Petra (what happened to Alai running whole fleets himself?), and fails to notice as Bean does that she's a perfectionist and her mistakes are grinding her down.

He was so good with people, and yet he seemed to think she was really tough, instead of realizing that toughness was an act she put on to hide her intense anxiety.

Silly Ender, thinking that a girl is actually tough rather than just having an abrasive veneer covering her deeply vulnerable femininity.  Bean can't be bothered with her right now, of course, he's busy toughly weathering the total lack of recognition he gets (the others don't come to him for tactical support, except for Tom and Han) as he keeps an eye on everything and tries to coordinate behind the scenes as the battles get rougher.  Man Tough.  Man Tough Strong Do My Job Grr Whiskey.

Petra passes out in the middle of battle, Bean has to catch Ender's attention to get him to react, and they pull it together with heavy losses while Petra breaks down sobbing, blaming herself, until she's taken away to, presumably, the infirmary.  She comes back, "but her ebullience was gone", because if ever there was a word to summarise Petra's tactical brilliance, 'cheerful' is definitely it.  Not courage or determination or sharp calculation, but always having a smile on her face.  I'm so done with Card.

Petra's not the only one down this time; Vlad goes catatonic and Fly Molo breaks down laughing in the middle of battle.  As Ender keeps slowing down as well, Bean steps in more to clarify and support his orders, and he starts getting some acknowledgement and back-pats from his friends, and his heart grows three sizes, and then it's the final battle.

Graff comes to beg Bean to come up with some miracle to save the day.  (Bean is finally the only person to point out that Mazer is probably psychologically torn up and taking it out on Ender because all these pilots dying in battle are Mazer's friends from decades ago.  There's an underused concept there.)  Bean's got nothing, especially once he sees the formic homeworld and its ten-thousand-ship fleet in orbit.

I'm going to be a jackass about math one last time.  Let's assume for no good reason that the formic homeworld is about the same size as Earth.  Earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometres.  Ten thousand ships in flight means each ship needs to cover about 51,000 square klicks  from a human ship reaching the surface.  Half that if they knew what direction the humans would come from and they've only covered that hemisphere of the planet, of course.  So, assuming a hex grid, each formic ship is, what, 120 klicks apart by land?  (I'm not adjusting distance for altitude of flight, but if they're flying above the atmosphere, it's obviously a much greater distance between ships.)  That's not going to give us the kind of incredibly tight swarm Card describes, so do we assume that means the formic homeworld is tiny?  If it isn't, then I'm less convinced that this is as hard a shot to pull off as they imply.  They have eighty ships; the formics need to prevent every single one of them from entering the atmosphere.  If we're looking at the planet from a distance like this but it's minutes away rather than days, all of the ships involved are obviously moving at ridiculous speeds, far beyond anything we 21st century humans have ever achieved, so if our only goal is to reach the planet (and both Bean and the formics see that it must be so), I feel like the formics are at a bigger disadvantage here than we think.  It's exactly the problem Bean described before: if they spread their fleet away from the surface (to keep humans from getting anywhere near firing range) they need exponentially more ships to create a thick enough field to ensure no one slips through.  How quickly can their ships change direction in space?  Can they get from the north pole to the southern hemisphere as quickly as humans can get from hovering out in space to the south pole?  What are our acceleration/deceleration parameters here?

A kindlier blogger would just say that, since Bean sees this as a hopeless fight, obviously the parameters are such that the formic defence swarm is indeed an impassable blockade, but you and I both know I ran out of kindliness long ago.

I'm mostly thinking that this whole fight could be adequately side-stepped if the human fleet contained 79 normal fighters and a single fighter with good cloaking technology to slip down to the south pole and shiv the planet.  Why don't we have that?  Why don't we have ten thousand drones whose sole purpose is to project a small Ecstatic Field and make it look like we have a fleet just as big as theirs, since it's canon that you can't see through shields?  Do they have a moon?  Have we considered busting that and just letting tidal forces obliterate their civilisation?  Have we considered using our sweet stolen gravity technology to give them a moon?  Is no one worried that they might have split off, you know, five hundred of their endless swarm of ships on a mission of vengeance against Earth weeks ago when they found out we had a planet-buster weapon and we were coming for them?

Where we were?

Ender stares in silence at all of this for a full minute before a blinking button lights up on Bean's console, which he knows will put him in command if he touches it.  Bean determines the teachers think that Ender has frozen up, while Bean knows Ender has just reached the same hopeless conclusion Bean has, and because he thinks it's a game, he's going to quit.  Bean agrees, and has nothing in mind except bitter irony when he says "Remember [...] the enemy's gate is down".

I'm fuzzy on why it's necessary that they "dodge here and there through the ever-shifting formations of the enemy swarms" and "every third or fourth move takes us closer and closer to the planet".  It's a straight line, the distances involved make the idea of a 'thick' swarm ridiculous, like flying through an asteroid belt and worrying about collisions.  If you can reach the edge of their swarm and not die, you can probably get to the far side before they can so much as track you.

But the formics don't strike (I'm not even sure if they're shooting), and Bean comes up with a series of hypotheses to explain this: they fear clustering and getting Doctored, they just have too many ships in flight for too few queen minds to effectively coordinate, and they're focused (inexplicably) on blocking the human retreat, because they "have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life [....] but they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong".  There is much heroic talk about leaping on grenades to save your foxhole comrades, and suicide bombing, collectively and charming summarised as "insane".  Sigh.

Bean concludes that the formics aren't afraid of Dr Device right now because all the human fighters would die with the planet, and wonders whether Ender has somehow learned to empathise with them enough to predict this, but decides it doesn't matter even if it's all luck now, because either way Ender is the one who chose the tactics in this battle and all the others:

It was Ender whose previous victories taught the enemy to think of us as one kind of creature when we are really something quite different. He pretended all this time that humans were rational beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor aliens could ever have conceived of in their nightmares.

For a refreshing break to a realm of more interesting science fiction ideas, allow me to recommend this tumblr compilation of notes on humans from the perspective of aliens.

Anyway, Bean gets around to feeling sorry for the pilots currently on their way to die committing xenocide at Ender's command, and he remembers Sister Carlotta's favourite scripture, Absalom and David, and presses the fleet override button just long enough to speak to all of the pilot simultaneously (and no one else, and apparently no one notices that Bean just took control from Ender for several seconds, and how does he give control back afterwards anyway?)--

...knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man's mouth. "My son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!"

(Bean is tragically unaware that all of the pilots are women.  Graff's obsession with filling Battle School with more boys than pants wasn't in effect eighty years ago.)

They make their final dive, they all fire (except Petra's squadron, given rear guard duty against the actual swarm), and "the ships that launched too early watched their Dr. Device burn up in the atmosphere before it could go off", because apparently it's a missile in this continuity.  Does the Device not work on gas and vapour for some reason?  But Bean gives the last ship an order to detonate their Doctor onboard, without launching, and somehow that is close enough to hit the planet.

But long before the last ship was swallowed up, all the maneuvering had stopped. They drifted, dead. Like the dead Bugger ships in the vids of the Second Invasion.

BEAN YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE VIDS OH MY GOD CARD.

Out in the hall, Bean tells the others that, yes, those cool special effects really could happen because they did happen, they just won, and Graff appears to confirm this (I guess after Ender has already passed out or whatever) and inform them that the species is dead.  Petra, of course, immediately breaks down in tears, making her, by the way, the first person to mourn for the formics, so let's keep that in mind the next time anyone talks about how magical the Speaker for the Dead was.  Dink comforts Petra, everyone leaves except Bean and Graff, who are still chatting when gunfire sounds off from the Polemarch's rebellion.  Friendly marines secure the barracks, and Graff takes Bean to the ansible room to hear the news.  The last several lines are actually pretty funny banter and all, but whatever.  People joking around corpses is standard for this book.

Ender's Game is, quite clearly, a massive exercise in putting a child in the position of committing genocide without bearing any actual responsibility for it, because he's kept unaware.  Bean, conversely, is fully aware, totally onboard, and gives the last commands that guarantee victory.  On the other hand, Ender said in Speaker for the Dead that he retrospectively would have been onboard with it if he'd known, and therefore bears equal guilt.

There's nothing much to be said about Bean's lack of thought towards the formics that I haven't said about Ender, except for this: Bean came up with his plan (the Third Invasion) because he thought there was no ansible, so the invasion fleet would hit the formics just when they found out they had lost the Second Invasion.  When he found out there was an ansible, if he'd had the slightest sense in his head, he should have realised that the formics therefore knew they lost the moment it happened, seventy years ago, and thus could have launched their own fleet just as long ago.  We don't know how humanity found the formic homeworlds, so we don't know what kind of scanning and astrometric surveying technology we've all got, but surely we might have noticed if, the first time we Doctored one of their fleets, they decided to launch a full re-invasion fleet toward Earth, or drew their forces back to defend themselves.  Nada.  The formics haven't apparently responded to anything at all.

Bean can catch the hesitation in someone's voice and from it reason his way into understanding the entire secret strategy and technology behind the whole of the Third Invasion, but the marauding monsters (with thousands of times the ships humanity can field) spend seventy years very specifically not attacking Earth again and it doesn't pique his curiosity at all?

Bean has realised that the formics are hive-minds, Bean has thought far enough ahead to realise that the formics might not have realised that humans weren't hive-minds to start with, and all the consequences that spill out of that, and he could have done so in a matter of seconds.  The screen comes up, Ender stares flatly at the impossibility of the final battle, Bean sees the thousands of formic ships that have been built and never sent to kill anyone, and when Ender finally starts giving commands, Bean shouts: Stop.  Because instead of his hopeless "the enemy's gate is down", the lesson he remembers is 'The real enemy isn't the other army; the real enemy is the teacher'.

And that's the real strength of fanfiction that Card doesn't have, here: fanfiction is created by those who adore and immerse themselves in the story, but it is also, most importantly, created by those who didn't feel like the original story was enough.

Let's take Harry Potter here, because while I've been out of fanfic for years, some of the best I still see around the web is in that world.  Harry Potter fanfiction isn't just fun for people who like the idea of wizard school, it's also vitally important for people who want to know that they exist and are good and strong and worthy magicians despite not being cis or straight or (frankly) white, and people who need more than 'all was well' and to talk about the story of recovering and not just winning.  Harry Potter fanfiction is important for people for whom it is not adequate or acceptable that Harry grows up in an abusive environment and no one ever calls Dumbledore on it, or that the youngest survivors of the war are at risk of the same treatment again, or the idea that you can tell who's good and who's bad by the colour of their school uniform.

And Card doesn't have that, here, because he mashed several stories together, he wrote Ender's Game so he'd have his divine white saviour hero for Speaker for the Dead, and it did that job and it can't be done any other way without uprooting his whole original plan, so Bean can't say any of those things, he can't be that smart, despite day after chapter after day of doing exactly that thing, again and again.  Ender's Game, for him, is already good enough.  Ender's Shadow doesn't really exist to comment on that, or to change anything except a handful of details, and then not much--we met Petra, Corn Moon, and Wu, but Bean still says there were only a dozen girls in Battle School (estimated minimum student body of 1000).  The retcons (like everyone knowing about the formic hive-mind) are obviously unintentional.

So, in the end, I have a hard time thinking worse of Bean for going along with xenocide, because even though it could have been completely in his character to understand the situation, his writer couldn't allow him to do that, because the first story was already good enough for him.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Homecoming

Graff informs Carlotta that, before they were defeated, Russia grabbed Achilles out of whatever prison they were keeping him in, being the only Battle School child not currently under I.F. guard.  Dun dun DUNNNN.  Carlotta, of course, is a protagonist and therefore has to be shocked that Graff is up for court-martial, "a scapegoat for victory".  Sigh.

When Eros has been safely reclaimed from Russian rebels, the dream team gather at last to go see Ender, who's been unconscious the whole time.  Bean recognises that Ender has been torturing himself emotionally, grieving for the formics while Bean cares less about their whole species than he does about Poke.

Then it's mostly recapping and Bean narratively informing us how true everything is: "Bean believed him", "Bean felt the truth of that", et cetera.  There's also a line I never paid attention to before,"If the universe had any kindness in it, or even simple justice, Ender would never have to take another life", which I assume is an ironic nod to Speaker for the Dead and the transition of Human to his tree stage.  Meh.

Bean is the only one who already knows that Ender is the only one not going back to Earth, as part of the peace treaty that Locke put together.  Bean thinks of many reasons Ender's own brother would ban him from returning to Earth, but can't decide.  He vows to meet him one day and find out, and destroy Peter if Bean decides this was in fact a betrayal.  Which strikes me as deeply out of character for Bean, who has (until last chapter, when he signed off on the formics' death) never cared about revenge at all.  They're sent home, one by one, and that's the last mention of Ender in this book.

The last page and a half is, in a rare case, one of the best parts of the book.  The Delphiki parents gleefully await the arrival of their son Nikolai (but why now, when Bean started the ball rolling weeks or months ago and it takes so much longer to get back from Eros than Battle School?), and prepare a small feast, and they see the car coming, and it's only when Nikolai gets out with another tiny boy that dad finally tells Elena that Bean survived.  I'll include it here, for completeness, because Card is a terrible person who does terrible things, and it's important to also recognise that a person can be that and write this:

"He's been told that he's coming just for a visit. That legally he is not our child, but rather a ward of the state. We don't have to take him in, if you don't want to, Elena." 

"Hush, you foolish man," she said. 

[....] Her husband spoke. Elena recognized his words at once, from the gospel of St. Luke. But because he had only memorized the passage in Greek, the little on did not understand him. No matter. Nikolai began to translate into Common, the language of the fleet, and almost at once the little one recognized the words, and spoke them correctly, from memory, as Sister Carlotta had once read it to him years before. 

"Let us eat, and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." Then the little one burst into tears and clung to his mother, and kissed his father's hand. 

"Welcome home, little brother," said Nikolai. "I told you they were nice."

This isn't a book about how hard it is to be the only special person in the room, or how morally justified murder is if we think we're threatened, or how super sad we are about the terrible things we've done for no good reason.  This is a story about what it's like to be this scrawny little genius jackass named Bean, and that is why it's better than Ender's Game.

Next week: hey, my copy of Eye of the World has a back-cover blurb from Card himself, who spoke of Robert Jordan's "powerful vision of good and evil" and "fascinating people moving through a rich and interesting world".  We're so screwed.

Ender's Shadow, chapters twenty-one and twenty-two, in which Bean is not the smartest person

(Content: misogyny, emotional manipulation. Fun content: Petra Arkanian and Ace McShane are the best crossover ship.)

Ender's Shadow: pp. 319--351

Chapter Twenty-One: Guesswork

Unnamed Important Military figures (I'm guessing Anderson and... I'm going to pretend Levi as well) open by discussing the logistics of getting Ender's dream-team through all their pre-war training before they're ready for xenocide.  It really drives home just how amazingly inefficient all of their spread-out Secret Schools are:

"ISL is two months away from you,and by the time they're done with Tactical, the voyage from there to FleetCom will be four months. That gives them only three months in Tactical before we have to bring them to Command School. Three months in which to compress three years of training."

The whole 'you have eleven seconds to master this secret technique that most people have to reincarnate to spend a second lifetime to learn' is standard enough child hero fare, but our first question is why again all these various schools need to be so incredibly far apart.  I mean, Eros is only around the orbit of Mars, so we're apparently not using the Park Shift engine for cheap fast easy relativistic flight for some reason, but why are they moving around at all?  This fleet is operating on the basis that there's no difference between having your general aboard the flagship versus sitting at a desk seventy light-years away, but you need to waste half your remaining training time shipping your miracle students on a whirlwind tour of the solar system rather than just using your instant communications tech to access whatever software or skype tutoring they need in one place.  (Sure, they would need to lie properly to cover up the instant communications being used, but as we're about to see, they're already doing that, and not well.)

Also:

"I'm not faulting Colonel Graff, you understand, he had no way of knowing." 

"Knowing what?" 

"That Achilles is a serial killer." 

"That should make Graff happy. Ender's count is up to two."

They talk about how amazing it is that Ender, the team-builder, got cornered and went for a solo fight, while Bean the Lonely Loner brought together a squad for a nonviolent solution, and how that's so far against their predilections, apparently forgetting that Ender's establishing moment is killing a bully in a one-on-one fight and Bean's first moment is transforming a street gang into a sort of microfeudalistic patronage.  Also, remember how I talked about the general who picked Ender's friends for his campaign team feeling foolish once Ender decides to go the Distant Unapproachable Genius route for his leading role?  I was clearly wrong, because they didn't actually put that much thought into it.

"So send ten." 

"Which ten?" 

"How the hell should I know?  Well... Bean, him for sure. And the nine others that you think would work best with either Bean or Ender in command, whichever one it turns out to be."

So from three dozen our dream team roster has been retconned down to 'whichever ten you like, plus Carn Carby since we've already got him here'.  The world-saving world-ending assault force command group has been assembled with all the careful consideration and approval processes of a company softball team.

Bean gets his transfer orders, has a final chat with the Rabbit toon leaders about how they lost all five of their games and that's okay because they were learning improvisation and teamwork from each other, which are more important now than the ability to follow one smart guy's completely battle plan, ending with "losing is a much more powerful teacher than winning", which I feel raises some serious questions about Ender's endless winning streak in this narrative.

He then goes to have a last chat with Nikolai, who has been promoted yet again to be the new Rabbit Commander (that's just a fun phrase), and they speculate on whether it's End of the World time.  Bean says the signals are mixed; the teachers are acting like it's the final countdown, but nothing seems to be happening in the solar system to suggest they're bunkering down for an incoming invasion.  Bean says if they were going to launch their own invasion fleet, the time to do that was right after the Second Invasion.  Nikolai points out that humanity might not know where the formic homeworld is (Bean didn't think of that, especially if they don't communicate via light the way we do; Bean insists light is "still faster than anything else."

"Anything else that we know about," said Nikolai. 

Bean just looked at him. 

"Oh, I know, that's stupid. The laws of physics and all that. I just--you know, I keep thinking, that's all. I don't like to rule things out just because they're impossible."

Once again, a thing I actually really like in this book: Nikolai might not be a miracle child, but he's thoughtful and open-minded, and sometimes that means he's smarter than Bean.

Also, Nikolai was one of those who went to trap Achilles, of course, and Bean is very grateful.

"Someday," said Bean, "you're going to need me the way I needed you. And I'll be there."

Flat-out untrue; Nikolai disappears a few chapters into the next book and we will never speak of him again.  Sigh.

So they get loaded onto a destroyer for the four-month journey, and we get a full roster at last: Dink, Petra, Alai, Shen, Vlad, "Dumper", Tom, Fly Molo, Han Tzu, and Bean (Bustopher Kobayashi is of course already there, with Carn Carby).  Bean remains suspicious of Petra's reliability, obvs, but rather than resolve that sidequest just yet, he spends four months in the library reading recent Earth history, learning about how Russia threatens to conquer the world at any moment so easily.  No, for reals.

Where the Chinese simply took it for granted that they were and should be the center of the universe, the Russians, led by a series of ambitious demagogues and authoritarian generals, felt that history had cheated them out of their rightful place, century after century, and it was time for that to end. [....] Everything was in place for a vast power play the moment the Buggers were defeated--or before, if they thought it was to their advantage. Oddly, the Russians were rather open about their intentions--they always had been. They had no talent for subtlety, but they made up for it with amazing stubbornness. [....] Along with their national vigor, the Russians had also nurtured their astonishing talent for misgovernment, that sense of personal entitlement that made corruption a way of life.

It just goes on like this, vast heaving tracts of telling-not-showing about the nature of Earth back home, making up bad future Russians so Card can tell us how they extrapolate from our own contemporary Russians, generalising the millions of inhabitants of a country with "effective borders back to the peak of Soviet power--and beyond" according to some vague traits found among the ruling class of the 20th century.  I mean to say: why is this here?

(Lest we think Card is just an anti-Russian zealot, he also criticises Chinese national narcissism ("To the Chinese, once something was known in China, it was known everywhere that mattered") and the apathy of "the Euro-American nations", which is a phrase almost as hilarious as 'Judeo-Christian' is in glossing and blurring of radically different histories and traditions and mindsets into a vague 'obviously we all get along in our community of whiteness' melange.)

The actual reason it's here is so Bean can bring up Locke and Demosthenes, consider whether they might really be the same person, decide they think and write too differently despite their similar factual premises, and so write an anonymous essay to mail to both of them.  Bean, with his total lack of access to reconnaissance data, accurately draws up the Russian threat, their Obvious Strategy, and how to pre-empt it.  He is also the one to call for the Battle/Tactical/Command School kids to be sent home immediately after victory, so they won't be captured by the Russians "or kept in ineffectual isolation by the I.F."  Within days, Demosthenes and Locke both demand the kids come home (which, of course, is meant to set up the Shadow sequels, but kind of undercuts the point in Ender's Game that Locke and Demosthenes were never supposed to both throw their support behind something until it was the Big Score, saving the world from itself after Ender wins the war).

Three days later, they ship out with Carn.  We'll find out next chapter that this is because the Battle School kids are already being shipped home, but, despite Bean specifically listing, Battle, Tactical, and Command in his essay, apparently everyone back on Earth has rapidly forgotten that Tactical and Command exist.  Slapdash, which is especially weird given that this is Bean collaborating with the Wiggins, all of whom are supposed to be perfect.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Reunion

Graff and Admiral Whomeverthefuck continue to discuss the arrangements for the students at Command School, and top of Graff's mind is the insistence that "Ender can't do his job unless he knows about the ansible" whereas if Bean finds out "he'll leap straight to the core situation", and I know I complained about this last time, but once again, why does Ender need to know about the ansible in order to play his campaign?  Anything.  I will accept literally any practical reason that Ender's video game proficiency would be reduced if he didn't know about our instant communications technology.  I can't find one.  But this, we are told, is basically the whole reason that Ender and his friends never get to spend any time together apart from their voicechat during games.

"But if this is so, then Bean, is not capable of being Ender's backup, because then he would have to be told about the ansible." 

"It won't matter then." 

"But you yourself were the author of the proposition that only a child--" 

"Sir, none of that applies to Bean." 

Okay, wow, this is now also the first canonical indication that Graff is actually the one who came up with the idea that a twelve-year-old is the ideal commander for their xenocidal campaign.  Now, that's not surprising, since Graff's favourite kind of soldier is one whom he can easily manipulate into anything at a whim, but it re-re-re-emphasises the question from the dawn of time: who the fuck is Hyrum Graff?  How did he, a colonel/schoolteacher, convince the whole Fleet Command and Triumvirate to put their entire desperate suicide-mission plan on the shoulders of a child?

Of course, we know Mazer Rackham said the same thing, and Rackham's existence is secret, so maybe Graff is just the 'public' author of Rackham's plan, except this guy knows the whole plan so he must also know Rackham is still alive, so we're back to Graff being inexplicably influential even though everyone hates him and his ridiculous theories.  Graff and Rackham desperately needed to be the same character.

Now it's time for Bean to resolve the Petra plot thread, when people start for the first time talking about their pre-Battle-School lives.  Bean isn't bashful about spewing his whole street kid deal, including Poke, Achilles, and her eventual murder, which of course moves Petra to tears and she flees the room--Bean follows.  He makes an extended plea for her to tell him what she was doing when she baited Ender, how they need to trust each other, how he has "opened his soul" to them (such a natural line, innit), and Petra neatly shuts him down.

"You told me about your feelings. [...] So good, it's a relief to know you have them, or at least to know that you think it's worth pretending to have them, nobody's quite sure about that. But what you don't ever tell us is what the hell is actually going on here. [....] The teachers told you things back in Battle School that none of the rest of us knew."

Petra's wrath makes me all warm and fuzzy sometimes.

Bean is of course shocked to realise that other people are actually paying attention, and he admits that he hacked the student records and the teachers asked him to assemble Dragon Army, which similarly shocks Petra immensely, though, again, the public facts about Dragon Army (rejects and newbies) are still true, so I don't know why everyone thinks this is such a big deal.

Anyway, Petra admits that she did bait Ender in the hallway That One Time, and elaborates her plan: get into a brawl (with herself protecting Ender, and Dragons and other armies sure to join in), Ender gets punched a little but everything cools off, and all of the bullies (who hated Bonzo only a bit less than they did Ender) get bored and Bonzo loses his power to rabble-rouse.  She adds that she thinks the only reason Ender didn't go along with her plan was that Bean was in the middle of it and guaranteed to get mangled like a soft-centred truffle in a snowblower, and thus it's Bean's indirect fault that Ender had his deathmatch in the showers.  Which--I mean, Petra's not wrong about a lot of this.

(I am left wondering where Petra was the next day, when she looked around the commanders' mess that apparently only had a couple dozen kids in it and noticed that neither Ender nor Bonzo were present.  Was she just forbidden to enter the boys' showers?  There's been no mention of gendered facilities and everyone is naked all the time anyway.  Petra wouldn't have been held back like Dink was; Petra would have been this guy:

Bean admits his plan kinda sucked too, even if he doesn't like hers, and responds to mockery by telling Petra he's the best friend she's got there.  (He's apparently not paying attention to the amount of time Petra spends with Dink Meeker, Professional Decent Supportive Person.)  His evidence goes thusly:

"Because I'm the only one of these boys who ever chose to have a girl as his commander."

Bean, you colossal jackass.  You chose Poke as your 'commander' because you thought she was foolishly compassionate, and spent every moment with her meditating on how much smarter you were than her, based on no evidence except your own self-satisfaction.  No one else in your class has ever had the chance to pick their commander anyway.  What kind of self-aggrandising entitlement is this now?

Because he's such a supportive friend, Bean goes on to explain that "you're not really one of the guys" and of the estimated dozen (?!) girls in Battle School, Petra was the only really good soldier.  Bean explains that the only reason none of them have ever asked her why she 'betrayed' Ender is that they don't have enough respect for her to believe she didn't just screw up.  Because what good friends do is tell you all your other friends don't like you as much as you think they do and that you can only trust them, because they once did a Thing that objectively proves they respect women.  Oh my god.  This is, like, their first major interaction that will seed all their future trust and friendship and eventual coupling, and it reads like he's grooming her for abuse.  GET IT OFF OF ME.

They arrive at Eros, which Bean quickly realises was originally carved into a base by the formics, and thus was the goldmine of new technology like the gravity manipulators.  He concludes instantly that the I.F. never announced this because it would have scared people to learn how technologically advanced the formics were.  I think that's a really bad conclusion, because 1) a single formic ship killed a hundred million people in the First Invasion and 2) humanity has now survived two full invasions in spite of advanced technology.  We're used to overcoming enemies with advanced technology, we've been used to that forever, since long before Ace McShane beat a dalek down with a baseball bat.  I'm not sure how finding out their gravity-controlling powers were inadequate to resist the might of the human spirit would scare people more.

Because Card has reached his comfort level with gender equality, Petra gets separate quarters and the dozen boys share two rooms.  The environment creeps Bean out, but when he wakes up from nightmares, he instead realises something else is bothering him: he was talking to a technician today, someone fixing a simulator game, and commented that the thing was completely accurate except there was no time-delay for lightspeed communications, and the technician took a minute to even realise what he meant before brushing it off.  The only possible conclusion: humanity got the ansible from the formics as well.  The only possible consequent: they will wage the war from here, never knowing when it stops being simulator games and starts being an invasion campaign.

Now, within the confines that this book has given us, I do think this is at least relatively clever writing: a tiny slip-up by a technician that Bean extrapolates into all of its possible consequences, seeing how it fits with the other oddities (like how they get trained on older-model ships instead of the newest).  It's not easy to write characters who are supposed to be incredibly smart, and this kind of logical leap makes some sense.  Of course, he still hasn't resolved the question of how we found the formic homeworld (and all of their other bases, which, what?), but that doesn't come up in Bean's self counter-argument, as he tries to convince himself that this can't possibly be true because he doesn't want to get distracted thinking about people dying in space while he's leading them.

They start training with the voice command interface, and everyone takes turns being leader, but Bean declares it's obvious that they're getting set up to play under Ender, and he gets dragged before Graff to explain where he's getting all his secret knowledge.  Their real concern, of course, is that Bean has figured out The Terrible Truth, but Bean insists that if he knows anything, it's obviously not affecting his performance.  Graff laughs, turns off the recorder, and tells Bean about the Battle School kids going home, who Locke and Demosthenes are, and that they found Bean's biological family and he's Julian Delphiki, brother of Nikolai.  He grapples with this unprovoked infodump and decides he's being manipulated with sweet, sweet lies, thinks that he won't give up the name Poke gave him so easily as that, and this is reinforced when they are reunited with Ender, who quickly identifies his besties over the headset: Alai, and Bean.  It's not bad.

Next week: the finale grande, in which Bean is a willing accessory to xenocide.

Ender's Shadow, chapters seven and eight, in which Bean confirms that the author is right about everything

(Content: bullying, justification of genocide.  Fun content: Mallory Ortberg's brilliance, Amy Pond's scorn, and marquesses.  Marqueese?)

Ender's Shadow: p. 101--136

Chapter six ends with Carlotta viewing the very same plastic-lidded toilet tank that Bean hid within, and confirming his story with the janitor, Pablo de Noches.  In case we forgot, he is a not-very-bright unpretentious blue-collar sort of man, who saved Bean because "I thought God was the baby. Jesus say, if you do it to this little one, you do it to me."  Card never seems to have room in this series for people who are neither supergeniuses nor hapless oafs.  (Pablo seems to struggle with speaking Common, but he and Carlotta only slip into Spanish for one line each, and separately.  Card's insistence on shoving bits of Spanish in and making his character fumble through English the rest of the time is especially weird in a novel where it's so easy to just say "Carlotta asked him in Spanish", but then we wouldn't get the awkward sentence structure that Card prefers in order to showcase ethnicity.)

Carlotta works her way through various theological thoughts about the beast of Revelation ("the Bugger, the Formic monster") and the false prophet, and how wonderful and impossible Bean is, and returns home to start researching genetic engineering and to seal up all of Bean's clothes and bedding for DNA evidence.  She figures he's either the saviour or the antichrist and either way she wants to know, so, high-five to her.

Chapter Seven: Exploration

We open with the teachers discussing their student tracking data, which has picked up Bean's twenty-one minute post-lunch tour from last chapter, but the data in question is hilariously, implausibly bad.  Just so we're clear:

"Tracking the uniforms that departed from the mess hall and the uniforms that entered the barracks, we come up with an aggregate of twenty-one minutes. That could be twenty-one children loitering for exactly one minute, or one child for twenty-one minutes. [....They arrived] spaced out in groups of two or three, a few solos. Just the way they left the mess hall."

These folks are running uniform-tracking software that knows who's wearing what suit (as soon as they palm into the system for lunch) and tracks how long uniforms aren't where they're supposed to be, but somehow it was overbudget for them to actually track which uniform goes where when.  But if they know what the arrival pattern back in the barracks was, they must be tracking that somehow--I am struggling to imagine any kind of tracking system that would allow them to collect only the 'aggregate' without actively throwing out more information that had been given to them freely.

Atrocious security is kind of a theme in this chapter: Dimak arrives to teach them all how to palm into their desks, and because there's an empty bunk available, Bean takes the opportunity to use his left hand to palm into that bunk's system as well, so he has two computer accounts.  The computer keeps a tally of how many accounts there should be, and so one other kid is locked out of the system until Dimak overrides it.  Bean concludes that they know what he's done, and so he will use his second account to keep a secret diary of secrets that will distract the teachers while he does all of his actual private work with his main account.  I'd like to think that the Battle School teachers are prepared for 'look over there, a distraction!', but this is Bean, so probably not.  He also instantly sees through the reverse-psychology that Dimak uses to encourage them to play the Mind Game, by telling them they're only allowed a few minutes after their homework is done.

More touring, the gym, the arcade, and Bean waxes philosophical about the existence of bullies, no longer fighting over food and survival, but still enforcing a social order by shoving little kids out of the way as soon as their mandated turn is over.  Bean observes and complies dispassionately:

No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn't help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do. There was no place in that list for "feel." Not that Bean didn't have feelings. He simply refused to think about them or dwell on them or let them influence his decisions, when anything important was at stake.

This is it.  This is peak Objective Man.  I CHOOSE NOT TO BE AFFECTED BY EMOTIONS, says the five-year-old knot of fear and ambition.  I can't adequately respond to this myself, so I'm just going to ask Mallory Ortberg to tell four minutes of male novelist jokes while I compose myself.

(Fun aside: my brother, a former reservist officer, was taught to follow the OUDA Loop to avoid locking up in field situations: Observe, Understand, Decide, Act.  That's basically identical to Bean's process, making it possibly the most accurate bit of military theory in this whole series.)

Ender isn't in the arcade, of course, but Bonzo is, and he attracts Bean's attention by being the only one who hates Ender.  Bean investigates, first learning that random passers-by think Bonzo is "contemptible", and then directly asking Bonzo to tell him the truth about Ender, "because you won't lie to me".  Bean, of course, secretly believes that Bonzo will do nothing but lie, and so is thoroughly prepared when Bonzo recaps Ender's time in Salamander, how Ender navigated the teachers into getting him his own practice time in the battleroom (which Bean thinks is an impressive solution) and adds interjections like "I'm not stupid!" (which Bean thinks is a guarantee of stupidity).  Bonzo insists that Ender's disloyalty means no commander in the school wants him, but at this point Ender is either the best soldier in Rat Army or the second-in-command under Petra Arkanian's Phoenix Army, so presumably that's not true either.

Bonzo moves on, having made his plans to violence Ender clear, and Bean silently concludes "If they leave you in command of an army for another day, it's just so that the other students can learn how to make the best of taking orders from a higher-ranking idiot", which... is that true?  Bean's word is gospel, generally, but we never really have resolved the mystery of how Bonzo got to be a commander, not just briefly, but for five nonlinear years when the Battle School structure allows at most a single-digit percentage of students to ever get any time in command.  I'm sure in some prior post I theorised this very thing, that Graff keeps Bonzo around specifically to play the villain to Graff's Chosen One(s), but I so did not expect that to become canon.

Back in his room, Bean writes a fake diary entry, in which he pretends he's planning to assemble his own street gang and model himself off Achilles, and then tries to fall asleep at the designated lights-out.  He overhears other children crying, homesick, and mulls how much he's not like them.  He doesn't have feelings.  He just plans his ascension to command and thinks about how silly empathy is even if it makes Ender strong because it also makes people stupid like how it got Poke killed and then what are these tears on his pillow that is ridiculous.

Back on Earth, Graff emails Carlotta to ask who Achilles is, and they power-play at each other a bit until Graff skypes with her.  Carlotta plays ignorant, talking about the mythical Achilles until she finally corrects Graff that the bully's name is pronounced "ah-SHEEL. French."  She instantly sees through Bean's diary ruse, counsels Graff on not underestimating Bean, and lets on that Achilles is probably a murderer.  (As someone who runs a tabletop RPG, I reach helplessly at the book, trying to stop Carlotta from telling Graff that this new upstart protagonist has a ready-made villain to face in dramatic conflict to further his character arc at the end of Act Two.)  Carlotta asks in return for information on illegal human genome projects from the last decade:

"I think you're going to end up relying on this boy, betting all our lives on him, and I think you need to know what's going on in his genes."

Author's genetic inevitability and evo-psych fetish: sated.  I didn't really notice this bit when I first read the book, but after the obsession with genetics in Speaker for the Dead, I wonder if they don't literally mean that Bean's psychology is going to be determined more by the consequences of genetic engineering than it is by the environments and unaware, unmodified people he's growing up with.

Chapter Eight: Good Student

Three months later, Bean is getting perfect scores on every test and the teachers think he's spending all his free time reading seventeenth-century treatises on military fortifications.  He is, of course, actually hacking their system (slowly, in a refreshing burst of omniscience) and just making it look like he's reading the works of Vauban and Frederick the Great.  He manages to assemble, out of emergency maps, a rough schematic of the entire Battle School, seven times larger than most students believe it is (nine decks per wheel, not four, and three wheels, not one), and makes plans to go spying through the air ducts as soon as possible.

Dimak pulls him aside to ask Bean how he's doing, socially, and comment on his lack of friendships.  Bean attempts to bluff his way through obediently, but trips up, which I like in the same way that I always feel relief when Our Heroes actually screw up:

"And don't think we haven't picked up on the way you obsess about Wiggin." 

"Obsess?" Bean hadn't asked about him after that first day. Never joined in discussions about the standings. Never visited the battleroom during Ender's practice sessions. 

Oh. What an obvious mistake.

This of course also neatly explains why Ender's never heard of everyone's favourite bunny-muppet when they do finally meet in Dragon Army.

Dimak also confronts Bean about his search history library use, and what Vauban has to do with space war.  Bean starts bluffing, improvising off the top of his head what he could learn from Vauban's fortifications, how impossible it is to create 'walls' when fighting in three dimensions to protect an entire planet, and from there leaps to the conclusion that the only defence is a faster offence.  So, in the space of a page, Bean takes us from "fortifications are impossible in space" to:

"So we build a fleet as quickly as possible and launch it against their home world immediately. That way the news of their defeat reaches them at the same time as our devastating counterattack." [....] it dawned on him that he was right about everything "That fleet was already sent. Before anybody on this station was born, that fleet was launched."

Bean also found a copy of Ender's Game in the library.

Now, that's a neat conclusion, sure, but I'm not sold on it being the only conclusion.  Like: Bean notes that the larger their 'fortification' is, the more they get stretched out, so protecting the entire solar system is impossible, but he also notes that the only thing they need to protect is Earth, so I'm not sure why we should care that we can't protect the whole system.  He notes that only one ship needs to get through in order to devastate the planet, as they saw with the famous Scouring of China, but if they had the resources to create an invasion fleet immediately after the Second Invasion, could they honestly not construct an adequate planetary defence in another seventy years?  (What are all their ships doing, if the supposed big defence fleet out in the Belt doesn't exist?  How many people know the truth about the fleet and how has no one else figured it out?)  They have the Ecstatic Shield installed in enough places around Earth to prevent nuclear weapons from ever being used effectively, and if you can stop a nuke in flight, you can stop a ship as well.  What kinds of assaults might Earth not be safe from?  I can think of two options:

1. Relativistic bombardment.  Ramp a ship up to near-lightspeed, aim it at Earth from light-years away, and go.  It doesn't even need to be a ship; it can just be the heaviest rock you can strap engines to.  This technique is not, to our knowledge, used by the humans or the formics in any war, which suggests to me that it's impossible or there's some easy defence they've already figured out, like Star Wars interdictor fields that kill warp drives and make said projectiles easy catches.
2. Doctor Device.  Humanity has no reason to think the formics know how this works, since we came up with it on our own, but anyone smart enough to invent such a thing would have to realise that it's the greatest planet-buster imaginable.  (I forgot how great that comment thread about the Doctor Device was; if you're a physics nerd you should go read it again.)  So, while it's certainly terrifying to think that they could invent one and bring it to Earth, we've got an ultimate weapon against them, we know how their queens work, and we would leave behind no evidence that they could use to reverse-engineer it if we dusted their incoming fleet.

I mean to say, it's one thing when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and another if you give an entire planetary fleet an unstoppable force to swing, an immovable object to hide behind, and exactly one thing to protect.  They thought this was a worse plan than their desperation xenocide fleet?

Anyway, Dimak brushes this off and leaves, but Bean saw him sweat, and spends some time mulling why the Fleet would bother hiding this Obvious Truth from everyone.  He's also read enough of human military history now that he can make all the references to old wars that people kept spewing in Ender's Game, and he concludes, like Dink Meeker, that the Fleet exists instead to keep Earth from imploding into a vortex of global war and to keep the child-geniuses out of nationalistic hands.  He's sure this plan is doomed to fail, and thus he needs to make friends with his classmates, the future warlords of Earth.

A kid named Nikolai apologises to Bean for telling Dimak that Bean stole his password, and asks what Bean was doing rummaging in the station maps.

Until this moment, Bean would have blown off the question--and the boy.

And you have no idea how hard I'm resisting the obvious military-school-queer-subtext jokes, but (spoilers) Nikolai is actually Bean's twin brother, so I'm not going there.

Instead, Bean shares his discover of the other two wheels and five decks, and Nikolai suggests that those parts were never actually built, but the maps remain because bureaucrats never throw anything away.

"I never thought of that," said Bean. He knew, given his reputation for brilliance, that he could pay Nikolai no higher compliment. As indeed the reaction of the other kids in nearby bunks showed. No one had ever had such a conversation with Bean before. No one had ever thought of something that Bean hadn't obviously though of first. Nikolai was blushing with pride.

Ye gods, Bean is supposed to be the one no one really likes; why is Nikolai blushing already?  But they start talking and socialising like real people, including one girl who is named here Corn Moon and then never mentioned again, ever, in this or any other book, quality representation, well done.

Next week: the only kind of acceptable gay man in Card's world is one who has been punished, tamed, and speaks only of regret for his forays into forbidden knowledge.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter eighteen, in which Card hurriedly scrawls To Be Continued across the page

I don't see any useful way of splitting this chapter up, and practically nothing actually happens, so we're just going to go for a huge sprint to the end.  There is a light at the end of the tunnel, because the tunnel is on fire.

(Content: ableism, incest, sexualisation of minors, misogyny.  Fun content: Stephen Hawking's wikipedia biography tells this book's story better than it does.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 356--382

Chapter Eighteen: The Hive Queen

The final intro-excerpt is from the Speaker for the Dead's latest publication, The Life of Human.  It's a fairly straightforward depiction of life inside the mothertree, drinking sap and occasionally making a dash for the light when the tree opens, until one day he's fast enough to make it through and discovers there is an entire new world out there, transitioning from the first life to the second life.  There's nothing particularly super-empath about this section, so I assume the magic words have to come in later (unless this is another case of Ender just intuiting information rather than asking the Little Ones what it's like inside the mothertree, or asking them to relay the words of Human's tree).

What does get me is that this is another case of a Miraculously Brilliant and Heartbreaking publication from someone only naming themselves Speaker for the Dead, and it's got to be a matter of public record that the only Speaker on Lusitania is Andrew Wiggin, and maybe someone might take another crack at piecing together the way all three of the great Speaker texts were anonymously published on planets where a guy named Andrew Wiggin lived, and the first such Andrew Wiggins were the brother of Peter the Hegemon and of Valentine who was Demosthenes and maybe could a historian connect some dots please.  (It's presumably a retcon, but according to the Shadow series, everyone found out who Locke and Demosthenes were within a couple of years of Ender and Valentine leaving Earth.)

We return to Miro, whose malice towards science has been turned back around on him, because he rapidly heals from all temporary damage but also rapidly runs into a layer of permanent damage that Dr Navio can do nothing to address, presumably because he's run out of anti-witch salt.  So, in three days Miro can sort of walk, sort of talk, like "a very healthy man who is a hundred years old", but he's going to stay that way forever.  Science.  (I'm not sure who Navio's reference point is; my grandmother is ninety-nine (and a half) and while she won't be running any marathons, she likes going for walks, she's as sharp-minded and articulate as anyone I've ever met, and for her birthday her friends got her a personalised billiard cue because she's a pool shark.  So his idea of 'very healthy for 100' seems off, to me.)

There's a nice big heap of disability tragedy porn as everyone thinks about how lucky he is not to be bedridden for the rest of his life, how awful he feels listening to his own voice slurring, how he understands why none of them want to stay home with him now that he doesn't need constant attention, and he doesn't want them to stay either; he wants to be out asking the Little Ones direct questions at last.  There's no actual explanation for why he can't do that--he's at least partly mobile, and they should be able to create some sweet mechanised wheelchairs in the future, not to mention speech-generating devices that could help with his intelligibility (he could probably even use his own voice, given all the audio notes they've saved).

Speaker was written and published in the mid-1980s, pretty much exactly the same time that Stephen Hawking was publishing A Brief History of Time and also got his first speech-generator equipment.  (I strongly recommend reading up on Hawking; his life story hits a lot of the themes that this book goes for, loss and recovery and incomparable brilliance and bringing enlightenment to the masses and complicated marriage dynamics, but without the huge shovelfuls of racism and colonialist apologism.)  I don't know if Card was making any intentional reference, or if he had any particular interest in Hawking's work, but I feel like the publication of mass-market science by a man with significant motor and verbal disabilities should probably have made it easy to find out what the cutting edge of assistive devices looks like and try extrapolating that three thousand years into the future.  My point is that Miro's life here doesn't suck because he's disabled now; Miro's life sucks because Card and all of his characters have no interest in helping Miro maintain any connections to his family, job, or lifestyle.

Card is at least upfront about some of this--Miro relays questions to Ouanda for her to ask the Little Ones, but apparently Ouanda doesn't value her colleague now that they're not going to bang, soshe gets direct answers to his questions and leaves them at that rather than ask follow-ups or probe issues.  For that matter, the Little Ones have been running around Milagre for years even when it was illegal; why aren't any of them just coming to see Miro at home and chat for a few hours?

Miro is still creepy as hell himself, since privately in his own mind he still wants to run away with Ouanda and live in the woods and Lannister it up, but he knows that she is "a believer, a belonger. She couldn't possibly violate the only universal human law."  I am deeply distressed that Miro casts 'not wanting to bone your sibling' as the product only of bowing to popular belief and not, like, a reasonable reaction to a messed-up hypothetical.  I don't think peer pressure is the issue here.  (I'm always unsettled when people talk about morality like it's the result of popular vote or only external sources, as in that old favourite 'how can you be moral without God', and I'm just saying that the main places I hear this concept come from are conservative Christians and that Miro is our only confirmed atheist in the cast.)

In a neapolitan twist of horror, Miro compares his situation to that of his mother, since Novinha and Libo boned even though it was against the rules (extramarital affairs are apparently just like incest), but concedes that there is a difference (yay) because Libo was able-bodied and "not this useless carcass" (goddammit).

Enough of Miro.  Ouanda's helping the Little Ones develop phonetic alphabets for Males' and Wives' languages,Quim is trying to figure out how to translate the gospels, and Ender and some construction workers are colonising the hell out of them by installing plumbing, computers, teaching them more agriculture, and trying to domesticate cabra to pull plows.  (Apparently they can have a computer terminal with full galactic library access but a mechanical plow is out of the question.)

At the same time, Ender was trying to keep them self-sufficient, inventive, resourceful. The dazlle of electricity would make myths that would spread through the world from tribe to tribe, but it would be no more than rumor for many, many years. It was the wooden plow, the scythe, the harrow, the amaranth seed that would make the real changes, that would allow piggy population to increase tenfold wherever they went.

Misogyny Update: medical intervention to allow mothers to survive to adulthood is disgusting colonialist meddling that might completely overturn their society in unpredictable ways, but technological intervention to increase their total population by 1000% is just neighbourly.

Ela is frankensteining away in her lab, creating anti-Descolada plants, animals, and insects from Earth roots, because clearly what this fragile ecosystem characterised by unprecedentedly weird and unspeakably fast mutation really needs is a bunch of foreign species introduced in rapid succession--I mean, they managed to dodge that amaranth had the potential to choke out literally all other vegetation on the planet, so clearly there's no risk making dozens of new species intended to neutralise the infection that is the foundation of all plant, animal, and insect reproduction in the world.  Novinha, for her part, is working specifically on creating something to let the hive queen and the formics resist the Descolada, which sounds borderline impossible, so I'm going to guess it'll take seven weeks.

More disgusting ableism through Miro, who considers himself "less human than the piggies were [....] he was varelse now".  Remember when this book started and I thought the Hierarchy of Exclusion was sort of adorably gratuitous and illustrative of Card's ego?  I hate it.  I hate it so much.  It has never once been actually used to bring someone closer together, to say 'you think these people are incomprehensible but you just don't understand them'; its sole purpose is voting people out of personhood.

One day Miro finds that he's accidentally somehow cut through multiple layers of security into Ouanda's confidential science files, but rather than admit it, he just steers the conversation towards the same subjects, and they talk a little more like old times, about actual science.  Then the computer starts feeding him everyone's files (except Ender), and becomes intuitive to his commands rather than needing exact typing every time.  When he tries to tell the mayor, Ender shows up instead and says it's not a program helping him, but a person, an impossibly fast person with very few friends.

"Not human," said Miro. 

"Raman," said Ender. "More human than most humans."

What the hell does that mean?  How are we grading humanness in this galaxy?  By my tally, here is our current in-universe ranking of humanity from most-human to least:

• Ender Wiggin
• People Ender Wiggin likes and/or has claimed ownership of
• The immortal consciousness of the internet
• Practically everyone else
• Pig-shaped alien genius-savages who turn into trees when you cut them open (or are devoured by their young)
• Bug-shaped alien psychics with absolute control over billions of drone-bodies they birthed themselves
• People with disabilities

Miro snarks that he doesn't want a companion or a pet, Ender snaps at him not to be a jackass and to show her absolute trust and loyalty, because her only other friend once showed her an hour's thoughtless disloyalty and things were never the same again after that.  Miro realises that Ender is passing a dear friend over to him, and suddenly the whole thing gains a new level of creepy; a man giving ownership of a woman to another, younger man.  Not sold on the creepy?  Miro turns back to the terminal when Ender leaves, and there's a hologram:

She was small, sitting on a stool, leaning against a holographic wall. She was not beautiful. Not ugly, either. Her face had character. Her eyes were haunting, innocent, sad. Her mouth delicate, about to smile, about to weep. Her clothing seemed veil-like, insubstantial, and yet instead of being provocative, it revealed a sort of innocence, a girlish, small-breasted body, the hands clasped lightly in her lap, her legs childishly parted with the toes pointing inward. She could have been sitting on a teeter-totter in a playground. Or on the edge of her lover's bed.

Jane is smart enough to first make it clear that she's ungropeable, and Miro pauses to think about how no one will ever sleep with him because he's gross now.  She goes on about all she sees and hears in the galaxy, and Miro admits that he wants to leave Lusitania, and there's a bunch of ironic flirtation because I guess that's the only way a boy and a three-thousand-year-old philotic consciousness containing the knowledge of all humanity which is currently projecting itself in the ghostly holographic shape of a girl can really get to know each other.

Elsewhere, Ender and Olhado go exploring--he lets Olhado drive the shuttle, presumably because there are no pilots on Lusitania and also Card was exhausted after naming all those other characters.  (Plus Olhado can plug his eye into the computer and, I don't know, pilot with his mind or something; it's not clear.)  They're surveying for a spot to release the hive queen.  We get a quick breakdown of Ela's findings, which all just validate her initial guesses: land life on Lusitania consists of reeds/flies, riverbank grass/snakes, grass/goats, vines/birds, vines/worms, bushes/bugs, and trees/Little Ones.

That was the list, the whole list of surface animals and plants of Lusitania. Under water there were many, many more. But the Descolada had left Lusitania monotonous. [....] Lusitania, like Trondheim, was one of the rare worlds that was dominated by a single motif instead of displaying the whole symphony of possibility. [....] Lusitania's climate and soil cried out a welcome to the oncoming plow, the excavator's pick, the mason's trowel. Bring me to life, it said.

I don't even know what to say to that; apparently bringing landscape to life means plowing fields clear, digging up the rocks you like best, stacking them into huge buildings, and letting loose a scourge of your favourite alien critters that have been genetically engineered to kill the molecular symbiote of the entire world.

Ender did not understand that he loved this place because it was as devastated and barren as his own life, stripped and distorted in his childhood by events every bit as terrible, on a small scale, as the Descolada had been to this world. [....] He fit this place as if he had planned it. The boy who walked beside him through the grama felt like his true son, as if he had known the boy from infancy.

Ender's really an excellent poster boy for appropriation and colonisation; all he has to do is assert how strongly he feels something and suddenly 'I was severely bullied' is indistinguishable from 'mass extinction-level event', and 'I really like this kid I've hung out with for a few weeks' means he can just assert legitimate fatherhood (without asking Olhado).  I don't mean to suggest that bullying is a minor issue, or that it's not wonderful to find a person and immediately feel a comfortable, trusting bond, but the parade of Ender declaring his personal experiences and feeling equal to everything and everyone else he meets is goddamn exhausting.

They find a spot for the hive queen, and Jane reports (businesslike) that Novinha's ready with daisies that the formics can drink from to ward off the Descolada.  Ender is sad that she doesn't joke with him anymore, but reflects instead on his new family and how much he loves his almost-kids and how sad he is that Miro's life is irrevocably stolen from him and no one can do anything to help.  Olhado comes up with a solution: literally ship him away for a while, Mazer-Rackham-style, to bring him back in time for the Evacuation Fleet to arrive.  (Olhado says Rackham only experienced two years, while Ender's Game said eight, but, again, Card fucking hates calendars.)

"Miro's the smartest person in Lusitania, and the best. He doesn't get mad, you know. Even in the worst of times with Father. Marcão. Sorry, I still call him Father." 

"That's all right. In many ways he was."

Card's genetic-continuity fetish also means that it's magnanimous to declare that the person who was actually around his kids and to some degree helped raise them might have some claim to fatherhood comparable to the man who secretly provided a gamete and then never spoke to them again if he could avoid it.  Also, the kid whose most noteworthy recent decision was to cross an agony field with only the protection of alien grasses because he was afraid he wasn't going to be allowed to marry his sister--this is the guy you want making decisions in thirty years, but you also want to make sure he only has a couple of years' time to reflect and mature before he gets those responsibilities?  This sounds like a good idea... why?

As they return home, Ender admits that he is the Xenocide, and Olhado is amused because, in his estimation, saying the Speaker was the Devil made for good sermons, but if The BISHOP had said Ender was the Xenocide the people of Lusitania would have murdered him on the spot.

"Why don't you now?" 

"We know you now. That makes all the difference, doesn't it? Even Quim doesn't hate you now. When you really know somebody, you can't hate them."

Apparently, when you really know somebody, anything terrible they say and do ceases to be terrible?

"Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them." 

"Is that a circular paradox? Dom Cristão says that most truth can only be expressed in circular paradoxes."

This chapter was written specifically to cause me pain.

"It's just cause and effect. We never can sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause--knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart."

This would be a vastly more compelling argument to me if I felt that I had to be absolutely pure in order to draw any kind of moral conclusion.  Suffice to say that I don't.  I mean, I don't think hatred is inherently productive or valuable either, but I don't feel any particular need to try to identify with the perspective of people who hate me for whatever reason, philosophy or politics or religion or orientation.  And as I think we've seen, the stuff that Ender thinks is a universal desire includes 'expanding to engulf the whole of existence', so I don't think he's a good source on universal human nature either.

(As a side note, Ender states that even if he had known what he was doing in the final battle, he would still have destroyed the formic homeworld, thus undermining the central conceit of the book and all the vast secrecy around his training.  Olhado asks if she might not now get revenge; Ender says he's as sure of it as he is of everything, and admits he's gambling everyone's lives on it without so much as asking them.)

The next day, Valentine calls, twenty-two years older than when Ender last saw her.  She's coming to Lusitania--in the face of panic and anti-Little-One propaganda and the threat of the Descolada, she's revived Demosthenes, found out the fleet has Doctor Device, and they're leaving now, with all their electronic tracks covered by someone called Jane.  She, and Jakt, and their three kids, and Plikt.  Ender volunteers to send Miro to meet them and "make the last week of your voyage very educational", because apparently he figures Miro's two-decades-out-of-date information will be more valuable than, say, stopping to pick up an ansible transmission with a few years' worth of scientific notes and journal updates from the entire family?  He doesn't bother to ask Miro; Jane has already convinced him, and showed him the recording of Ender and Valentine's discussion, because privacy is still forbidden.  Ender is unsettled just to realise that Jane is now Miro's bestie more than his own, which is at least a taste of actually empathising with all the people whose privacy Ender has trampled every day for the last couple of decades.

Before he goes, Miro wants to know properly why Pipo and Libo died.  Ender says that it was an honor, but more to honor Leaf-eater and Mandachuva, and the only reason that the humans died instead was the Little One's I-kill-you-or-you-kill-me honor system.  Libo brought them the amaranth, but Leaf-eater convinced the Wives to allow a huge generation to be born, gambling that there would be food waiting for them when they left the tree.  (In this description, the amaranth wasn't the first technology that the xenologers gave the Little Ones--from flipping back through the book, it is possible that the first thing was the process for neutralising the cyanide in merdona root, then a bunch of other stuff like bows and arrows, then amaranth, then they killed him.)  For advocating this and being proven right, Leaf-eater was given the honor of getting sliced, but Libo refused.  Okay.  Sure.

But then we go back to Pipo and it's worse than ever.  Ender reports that Pipo's great discovery was that the plague that killed humans was naturally part of the Little Ones, "that their bodies could handle transformations that killed us".  Mandachuva's great achievement was concluding that humans were not gods, just an older and more experienced race with advanced tech.  So he was granted slicing, and asked Pipo to do it, and when he refused, tried to make Pipo's body undergo a transformation which they had literally just been told was fatal to humans.

God, I'm glad this book is almost over.

"There are worse reasons to die [...] than to die because you cannot bear to kill." 

"What about someone," said Miro, "who can't kill, and can't die, and can't live, either?" 

"Don't deceive yourself," said Ender. "You'll do all three someday."

How the hell is 'you'll kill someone someday' supposed to be heartening?

Miro leaves the next day, and no one likes hanging around at home for some weeks because they feel his absence.  Ender reflects on his own parents and suspects that they didn't hurt so much when he left, or want him back.

He already loved another man's children more than his parents had loved their own child. Well, he'd get fit revenge for their neglect of him. He'd show them, three thousand years later, how a father should behave. Bishop Peregrino married them in his chambers.

Not included: 'But Ender did not feel any hatred toward his parents, because deep inside he could find his own desire to abandon his children to a brutal military school and never see them again'.

Having reviewed all the science available, Ender lived with the Little Ones for a week while writing the Life of Human, and got reviews and input from Leaf-eater and Mandachuva (and they were to be planted within "a hand of hands of days" from Human's planting, so apparently all of this has happened in less than 25 or so days, unless the Little Ones have more than five fingers, meaning Novinha solved the Descolada for the formics in maybe two weeks, as opposed to my estimate of seven).  He invites everyone he likes out to Human's sapling, now three metres tall, and reads it to them--it takes less than an hour, and I wonder what all he has to say after the first five pages of larval form--a lot of interactions with the xenologers and blazed-out stumbling around Milagre in the middle of the night, I guess?

"Speaker," said the Bishop, "almost thou persuadest me to become a humanist."

I still don't get this.  First, why would understanding biology and alien cultures cause the Bishop (living next to aliens for decades) to abandon Catholicism in favour of a label that specifically excludes aliens?  Is he taking a subtle shot at Ender?  I think he's taking a shot at Ender and no one else is catching on.  I love meta-Bishop.

"This was why I called you here," said Novinha. "I dreamed once of writing this book.  But you had to write it."

Ender says she was important, both her scientific work and the way her family 'made him whole', thus making it appropriately clear that women support men who are responsible for actually achieving the things women aspire to.

Jane spams the galaxy with the book, and with the text of the treaty, and the images of Human being converted into a tree.  Most people think it's some kind of fake, or believe it but still think the Little Ones are too alien and terrible, but some buy into it completely and start protesting, start calling the fleet a Second Xenocide, and trouble spreads across the galaxy.  I wonder if maybe they should have tried doing that before they launched Miro into space in a time-dilation process that everyone compares to death.

And then they place the hive queen's cocoon in the ground in the spot Ender chose, next to some anti-Descolada daisies and a dead cabra, and fly off, and Ender sobs in his seat as he picks up on the philotic overflow of the queen's joy as she breaks free of the cocoon, feeds, lays the first dozen eggs, and starts to grow.

Next week: We interrogate the introduction to figure out what the hell was up with this book.

Ender's Game, chapter thirteen, part two, in which Graff ruins everything again

(Content: apologetics for privilege and conquest.  Fun content: elephant art, astrothermodynamics.)

Time for Graff to justify a bunch of things that he can't actually justify and, in some cases, doesn't actually need to be justified.  I didn't notice that until Ender's Shadow, when they keep a bit of information from Bean while saying they had to give it to Ender--but I am getting ahead of myself. The point is that Graff is useless.

Ender's Game: p. 242--254

Valentine has gone, and Ender literally walks up off the beach, into the house, and asks Graff if they'll leave right away.  Have to give him points for decisiveness, I guess.  For the fifth time in the book, Ender reflects on how he's not taking anything with him, and I'm trying to find a progression now--when he left home, Graff told him everything would be provided and he didn't need to bring anything; when he joined Salamander and then Rat, he was forbidden to bring anything; when he left Battle School, he was comforted to see that Graff also came away empty-handed; now, leaving Earth, there isn't anything he can imagine wanting to bring with him.  Perhaps not a progression, then, but (if not for how bizarre some of those 'he can't bring anything' moments were) it is perhaps an interesting way of checking in on his mindset.  Ender is committed to the goal now; he's going back to school to win the war and save the world, not to do well on tests.  Not that Graff will let that go by without bludgeoning us with some blunt metaphors along the way.

"Back when the population was growing [...] they kept this area in woods and farms.  Watershed land.  The rainfall 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. [....] When you live with metal walls keeping out the cold of space, it's easy to forget why Earth is worth saving."

Weeeeeeelll no.  Not really, no.  (And not just because space isn't 'cold' unless you are in the shade.)  The Earth is indeed deep, but anything that could be considered 'alive' is pretty much done once you get a surprisingly short distance underground.  Then it's thousands and thousands of miles of increasingly hot stone and metal.  There are a lot of living things in the world other than humans, that's a good thing to keep in mind, but 'save the whales' and 'save the plate tectonics' are rather different concepts and only one of them makes a good rallying cry.

"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."

 Just in case we've forgotten, Graff: in the seventy or eighty years since the Second Invasion, you've been running Battle School and you have never had a candidate who was capable of passing all your tests.  They fail or they burn out.  It's not that there was once a great one or two but it was long ago and they're too old now--this method has never worked.  So why, Graff, why are you so sure that the problem is with the students and not the tests? Mazer Rackham wasn't trained like this.  Mazer Rackham wasn't anything special--he was a nigh-unheard-of low-ranking commander with a history of disciplinary problems.  But we'll start getting into that more next week.

They march through the Fleet base to the shuttle; Ender notices that at first everyone pays attention to Graff with his Maximum Clearance Ball (he's carrying around some kind of pingpong ball that opens every door), but as they get into high-clearance areas they're more interested in Ender, who seems even less likely to be there.  Ultimately, just the two of them board the shuttle; Graff confirms that his only job now is to stay with Ender.  Ender thinks about what this implies for his importance, and basically starts channelling every white guy who has just stared into the face of privilege theory.

Peter could have fantasies about ruling the world, but Ender didn't have them.  Still, thinking back on his life in Battle School, it occurred to him that although he had never sought power, he had always had it.  But he decided that it was a power born of excellence, not manipulation.  He had no reason to be ashamed of it.  He had never, except perhaps with Bean, used his power to hurt someone.

I was deeply tempted to bring in Five-Tongue Fleming again to tell Ender that he is Wrong about this, but eventually I had to conclude that he is right that he did not use his power to hurt Bonzo.  He got away with killing Bonzo because he's the favourite son, the Chosen One, but I will grant that if he had been in the same situation and was not Graff's favourite, he would have killed Bonzo anyway.  (Possibly not the most sterling absolution ever.)  And in the years leading up to that point, when he could have apparently revolutionised tactics and training for Rat and Phoenix and ultimately the entire Battle School, and perhaps given insights and skills to hundreds of students rather than saving them all so he could show off when he got command of Dragon, strictly speaking he wasn't using his power to hurt people, but instead actively failing to use his power to help people.  Ender is innocent of not abusing his power by only the slightest margin, and he has benefitted from it anyway, but because he never intended to hurt people, he assures himself that he's a perfectly moral person.

Sometimes I am embarrassed for just how accurately and ruthlessly this book portrays its morality.

There's some competent SFing about the shuttle up to Inter-Planetary Launch and Graff requisitioning a ship to a secret destination.  Graff takes a moment to show affection to Ender with a gentle touch while he thinks Ender is asleep, which is shockingly not-creepy, before he gets right back to being a supervillain.  The pilot of their little ship thinks they're going to Inter-Stellar Launch, but is corrected that he'll actually be taking them to I.F. Command, the location of which which he does not have clearance to know (rather, his ship will guide him with the help of Graff's Ping-Pong Ball of Leadership).

"And I'm supposed to close my eyes during the whole voyage so I don't figure out where we are?" 

"Oh, no, of course not.  I.F. Command is on the minor planet Eros, which should be about three months away from here at the highest possible speed.  Which is the speed you'll use, of course." 

"Eros?  But I thought that the buggers burned that to a radioactive--ah.  When did I receive security clearance to know this?" 

"You didn't.  So when we arrive at Eros, you will undoubtedly be assigned to permanent duty there."

Graff adds jokingly that the war might be over in fifteen years and so the location can be declassified and their pilot will be free to go.  Seriously, this happens.  There's no advance planning to make sure a pilot with clearance is available, there are no volunteers for 'a one-way trip' to help with the war effort; Graff just decides 'You look like a convenient pilot; your life and career are now over because I need a ride'.  The pilot is predictably furious; Graff benevolently 'overlooks' his insubordination.  Skipping temporarily ahead to when they leave the ship, three months later:

The captain was bitter at having to leave his tug; Ender and Graff felt like prisoners finally paroled from jail.  When they boarded the shuttle that would take them to the surface of Eros, they repeated perverse misquotations of the lines from the videos that the captain had endlessly watched, and laughed like madmen.  The captain grew surly and withdrew by pretending to go to sleep.

Even here on a black rock in space at the end of humanity, Ender and Graff can take time to amuse themselves by bullying someone who can't fight back.  It is especially hilarious that we're told they feel like prisoners freed from jail, given that their pilot is now literally a prisoner until the end of either the war or his life, whichever comes first.  Ender Wiggin, master of empathy and sweetness.

But before that, they have three months aboard the shuttle, during which Graff jeopardises everything for no reason at all by giving Ender a lot of information that he absolutely does not need.  I understand giving him information on the formics--how they're all drones and they've never managed to hold one in captivity for long before it just fell over dead, how they lack any apparent sex organs but are probably mostly female, which doesn't stop Graff from calling them 'he'.  That's worth knowing, the hive structure and all.  What Ender really doesn't need to know about is the philotic effect: instantaneous telepathic communication, which humanity has now built into our ships.

"So they knew about their defeat the moment it happened," said Ender.  "I always figured--everybody always said that they probably only found out they lost the battle twenty-five years ago." 

"It keeps people from panicking," said Graff. [....] "We've taken some terrible risks, Ender, and we don't want to have every net on earth second-guessing those decisions.  You see, as soon as we had a working ansible, we tucked it into our best starships and launched them to attack the buggers home systems. [....] Our timing was pretty good.  They'll all be arriving in combat range within a few months of each other.  Unfortunately, our most primitive, outdated equipment will be attacking their homeworld." [....] 

"When will they arrive?" 

"Within the next five years, Ender."

Graff explains that the master ansible is waiting for them at I.F. Command, ready for humanity's greatest command to lead those ships into battle.  They want it to be Ender.  Ender says he can't possibly be ready in five years.  Graff says then they'll make do with what they have, which he immediately clarifies is "nobody".  Ender at least sees this for the transparent rubbish that it is, but thinks to himself that he doesn't need the extra motivation anyway:

I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I won't be fooled into it.  I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.

Which is in turn hilarious because Ender is absolutely being fooled, and it baffles me that he doesn't expect it at all.  In Ender's Shadow, Graff specifically says that Bean mustn't be allowed to learn about the ansible because he'll guess the whole thing from that, but that Ender had to be told in order to do his job.  Except that as far as Ender is aware, his job for the next five years consists entirely of study and testing.  The entire point, supposedly, of letting Ender fight Bonzo, of bringing Valentine to fix him, was to make sure that Ender was independent and committed to saving humanity--this bit with the ansible and the five-year timeline is unnecessary for motivation.  Graff will also insist later that his whole plan desperately depended on Ender not knowing what he was doing--so why in hell is he telling Ender right now the two facts that he needs in order to puzzle it out?

The answer is of course purely Doylist: Card needs the reader to have this information so that he can spring the big reveal on us quickly later instead of having to throw in all this stuff about philotic physics and the human assault fleet in order to have it make sense.

Also, because we skipped it over--Ender asks if the Third Invasion (humans attacking aliens) is necessary, and if they aren't just going to leave us alone now that we've beaten them twice.  Graff says that they have to be safe, that the aliens already tried to exterminate us twice without provocation, and we can't risk it again.  But he also acknowledges that with the whole human fleet flying out to invade, we're defenceless on Earth and if there is a third alien invasion coming our way, we'll probably all get wiped out.  In other words, they're attacking the aliens because they might invade us again, but our military strategy is also completely built on the assumption that they aren't attacking us again, despite having had seventy years to build and launch their own fleet.

At this point I'm pretty sure that humanity's military would drastically increase in efficiency and effectiveness if they gave absolute power to one of those painting elephants.

As they take the final shuttle down to Eros, Ender asks why they're fighting the war to begin with, and Graff rattles off the list of unproven hypotheses--it's their religion, or their need to colonise, or they picked up our TV broadcasts and decided that we were too evil to be saved.  (If only they had caught the right anime series, they might think we were just delightful and ridiculous.  "My queen!  The blond ones grow delicious mushrooms to express despair!")  Graff's explanation is simply that, with the insurmountable communication barrier (their inborn telepathy keeps them from grasping how else beings might communicate) they decided we just couldn't be trusted and so had to be subjugated for their own safety, and humanity has made the same decision about them.  Basically, 'this might be an us-or-them situation, so let's assume it is and let's make sure we win'.  Graff also evopsychs about how nature can't produce a species that doesn't have a collective desire to survive, even if it allows individual sacrifice, because apparently he's never heard of panda breeding programs, but more to the point:

"As for me," said Ender, "I'm in favour of surviving." 

"I know," said Graff.  "That's why you're here."

Weeeeell, actually, Ender is in favour of defiantly doing as he pleases and handling threats to his safety through the focused application of violence.  That's not quite the same thing.  There are a lot of things Ender could have done, as we've discussed before, that would have let him survive without having to kill other children.  That is why he's there.  Because he has a toolbox full of solutions to your problems and all of them are murder.  Remember?  That's why Valentine couldn't be the Chosen One?  Yeah.  That.  It's about the killing, not the survival.  And in the end, it turns out you didn't need to make those things touch anyway.

Next week: Ender meets someone who should have replaced Graff from the very beginning.