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.

Ender's Shadow, chapter one, in which Bean is not as smart as he thinks he is

Welcome back, gentle reader, to the blog of presumptuous, holier-than-thou mudslinging against the bestselling and most critically acclaimed literature of our times.  My novel-writing month was excellent, thank you.  I'm 50K words into a new book about a girl who takes career advice from Satan and the formerly-indentured gay dragon pianist she recruits to help her burn down the capitalist oligarchy.  I'm pretty excited about it.  But the first draft of that probably won't be done until the end of the month, and it would be excessive to leave this blog bereft of content for so long, so, without further ado or due consideration of making good decisions, let's just leap into the Parallax Novel (read: author's own fanfiction) of the first book I leapt into more than a year ago: Ender's Shadow.

(Content: starvation, death, child abuse. Fun content: WHERE CAN SHADOWS HIDE?)

There is no terrifyingly oblivious introduction to this book, only a foreword that explains how it happened: Card remembered that linear time exists, that there are 3000 years of history to cash in on between Game and Speaker, and so we get Bean's story.  Okay, I lied about leaping directly in.  First, an anecdote.

I once met Orson Scott Card, when he came to a local bookstore on the launch tour for this book.  My copy of Ender's Shadow was signed by him, so I know the date: September 29, 1999.  (The inscription to my mother, who took me to the signing and thus introduced me to his books--for which I forgive her--reads "In the light, where can shadows hide?", which I don't hate as much as you might think.  Sure, it's pretentious nonsense, but it's a neatly generic phrase that he could scribble inside basically any fan's book to make it something more than his giant signature.  It's not, like, actively offensive.  That's pretty good for Card.)

Card was, in person, pretty normal.  He said he figured everyone there was going to read the book anyway (it wasn't a huge group), so rather than read aloud a passage, he just talked.  He told us about the many failed drafts of the Ender's Game movie script, which he had to veto because they insisted on giving Ender a love interest.  He talked about how Ender killing Stilson had been cut from the script, because it didn't work as well onscreen and it gave more weight to killing Bonzo later.  He also said that he expected to keep going with these: he would write a second book with Bean, and then go back and write another book from Petra's perspective.  That ended up not happening, of course; as of the next book, Shadow of the Hegemon, Petra is a main character in this series.  And, IRONIC SPOILERS, as of the third book, Shadow Puppets, she is relegated to being Bean's love interest.  Apparently no one vetoed that.

But I don't hate Bean and Petra as a couple, partly because Bean is a vastly better character and person than Ender.  Bean gets justifications: he's wicked smart because of MAD SCIENCE, but he's grievously lacking social skills and empathy, and those things hold him back.  Bean makes actual mistakes, which Ender could never be allowed.  Bean gets to be wrong, and grow, and in spite of his supposed coldness, Bean appreciates people in a way Ender never, ever approaches.  So, with the awareness that this is still a Card novel and reliably terrible, now let's get to it.

Ender's Shadow: p. 15--24

Chapter One: Poke

We're back once more to the realm of disembodied voices.  This time, it's Sister Carlotta talking to her liaison in the International Fleet.

"You think you've found somebody, so suddenly my program gets the ax?" 

"It's not about this kid that Graff found.  It' about the low quality of what you've been finding. [....] Your kids are so malnourished that they suffer serious mental degradation before you even begin testing them." [....] 

"They also represent possibility, as all children do." 

"That's the kind of sentimentality that discredits your whole project in the eyes of the I.F."

Carlotta is a nun of the Order of St Nicholas (Santa!), travelling the slums of Europe, supposedly searching for Battle School candidates, but more accurately trying to save street children, get them food and shelter and education, and using I.F. cash to do it.  I once again credit Card's craft if not any of his ideas; he quickly anchors us at the same time that Graff has started to focus on Ender, without making a big deal about it.  (Although I do wonder how it is that Carlotta heard about Ender.  Does Graff do a weekly email blast rating children he's seen lately from best to worst?)

But the rest of the chapter happens in the slums of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands (called the International Territory in the future, for reasons that are never fully explained).  We meet a girl named Poke, nine years old, leader of a crew of even younger children, watching out for dangers like cops with magnetic whips, who harass and abuse homeless kids in her city, and for the older children, eleven to thirteen.  The adults ignore children, but the older kids, "bullies", thieve from the younger ones all the time, because it's safer than stealing from stores and they get a power rush.

While on watch, Poke spots a tiny kid (she figures age two) who has climbed a garbage can to survey the street.  Poke immediately picks him out as smart, from the alertness in his eyes as he watches, but he's also obviously starving, days from death at best.  Poke thinks he's wasting his time, and we get the absolutely cartoonish level of deprivation in the slums:

If he wanted to survive, he should be following older scavengers and licking food wrappers behind them, getting the last sheen of sugar or dusting of flour clinging to the packaging, whatever the first comer hadn't licked off.

I'm in no position to talk--I'm writing this as I eat peppered broccoli from the farmers' market next to my building--but this has always struck me as taking the 'clinging to the edge of survival' imagery too far out from reality.  Like, you could try to get by on twice-licked pastry wrappers, but I'm pretty sure simple caloric math means you're going to last a day.  What was he eating a week ago that he's alive now?

Poke is briefly accosted by a pair of twelve-year-old prostitutes, whom she attempts to placate with half a stale pastry she's saved for exactly this kind of extortion.  They end up fighting over it, the fight ends when one flees, and they immediately cease to exist in the narrative, since their purpose is complete.  It's a step up from Card's past devotion to tell-not-show.  Poke turns around to see the tiny child, whom she pushes down, but he gets back up anyway.

"No, you little bastard, you're not getting nothing from me," said Poke. "I'm not taking one bean out of the mouths of my crew, you aren't worth a bean."

Guess who the kid is!  He asks why she submits to extortion, and suggests that they should instead hire a bully: get one big kid to agree to protect them in exchange for steady food.

"You think I never thought of that, stupid?" she said. "Only once he's bought, how I keep him?  He won't fight for us." 

"If he won't, then kill him," said the boy. [....] "You kill one bully, get another to fight for you, he want your food, he scared of you too."

He argues that a crew could easily take down a bully with coordination, if they tripped him up and had bricks ready to murder with.  Poke starts out hostile, thinking she'll have to kill him for being so defiant and uppity, but the plan entices her, especially the prospect of getting into the local kitchen.  Poke's self-appointed second-in-command, Sergeant, sarcastically says the kid is, after all, worth "one damn bean", and so he is named.  Poke reluctantly gives him a half-dozen peanuts she's been saving, which he eats one at a time, because he's too weak to make a fist himself.  Fed, Bean goes back to watch from his garbage can, telling Poke again to be ready to kill the first bully if he's too dangerous.

Bean is, predictably enough, a jerk inside his head, but at least this time it makes sense.  He's contemptuous of Poke on one level, thinking she's too compassionate and not ruthless enough to keep herself well-fed, but also acknowledges that he'll only survive because she's compassionate enough not to murder him now that she's taken his idea on.

He's also contemptuous of all the other children.  He came up with his carrot-and-stick hired-bully plan as soon as he understood the way of life in the slums, but couldn't figure out why no one else did it, so he focused on learning everything he could (including Dutch and IF Common) to figure out what he had failed to take into consideration.  He ultimately concluded that there was no other factor, and the other kids hadn't already implemented his plan because they were just too stupid.

Let the record show that Poke literally said she had already thought of Bean's plan but didn't trust that any bully would stay bought.  Bean isn't smarter; he's just too arrogant to believe his plan will fail to convert everyone.

Bean watches in anguish as Poke picks what he thinks is a terrible target: a bully with a damaged leg, called Achilles.  (I'll save you all a huge re-learning headache by saying now that it's pronounced in French style, 'ah-sheel', which the book fails to mention for several chapters, at which point it was too late for me to change the way I read it.)  Bean wanted a big burly guy who wouldn't think too much, but figures Poke has gone for the easy target, since he's disabled.  Poke overacts her subservience, alerting Achilles to the ambush, but with his limp, he can't get away in time.  (Pure coincidence: I'm also walking with a limp today, due to a bike crash.  Please do not ambush-murder me on the street.)  Bean climbs down and across the street again by the time they've bricked him onto his back.

"You get us into the food line at the shelter." 

"Sure, right, I will, I promise." 

Don't believe him. Look at his eyes, checking for weakness. 

"You get more food this way, too, Achilles. You get my crew. We get enough to eat, we have more strength, we bring more to you. You need a crew. The other bullies shove you out of the way--we've seen them!--but with us, you don't got to take no shit. See how we do it? An army, that's what we are."

Let the record further show that Poke specifically tailors her recruitment speech to Achilles in a way that Bean never addressed.  She picked a bully who survives by wits and sells him more with the logic than the threat of force.  She runs with Bean's ambush idea to the point of declaring her crew to be an army that can continue to pick off bullies at will.  Poke never gets credit for any of this, is my point.  Not even in Bean's later reflections on his childhood.  Card continues his theme of writing smart, capable women and failing to acknowledge their capabilities at all.

Achilles asks why they've never done this before, and catches her eyes flicking over to Bean.

"Kill him," said Bean. 

"Don't be stupid," said Poke. "He's in." 

"That's right," said Achilles. "I'm in. It's a good idea." 

"Kill him," said Bean. "If you don't kill him now, he's going to kill you." [....] 

"The next guy won't have my bad leg," said Achilles. "The next guy won't think he needs you. I know I do. [....] It's your crew, not mine [....] This is my family.  These are my kid brothers and sisters. I got to look after my family, don't I?"

Bean instantly determines that Achilles has instantly won the little kids over, by offering them the sense of love and belonging that they hunger for, and therefore it's too late to kill him, so he has to stop Poke as she prepares to brick him one last time.  To recap, these kids were totally on-board with bricking him savagely about five minutes ago, but the instant he says 'you're my siblings' he's untouchable.  This is Ender-level magical charisma we're dealing with, but with a vitally important twist: it's in the hands of the villain.  So, while I still think it's unearned in a narrative sense, it's never bothered me as part of the story.  Villains don't have to explain their magic; that's what makes them scary.  But, at least retroactively, he works for it with his actions for the rest of the chapter.

Poke tries to tell Bean to shove off (Bean's gamble on her compassion failed after all, weird, almost like he's not as smart as he thinks he is) but Achilles turns it into a test of authority by declaring that, crew or not, Bean is family now and therefore Poke can't exile him unless she's willing to kill Achilles as well.  Poke relents.

Achilles starts checking his injuries and laughingly praises the kids who just stoned him to the ground.  He starts learning all their names, apologising when he fails.

Fifteen minutes later, they loved him. 

If he could do this, thought Bean, if he's this good at making people love him, why didn't he do it before? 

Because these fools always look up for power. People above you, that never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.

This is a pretty good passage, even if it's a little weird for Bean to draw this conclusion after a day in which he's forced his way from starvation into a place of honor in a new street militia/family by demanding respect from people stronger than him.

[Achilles] reached into his pocket, took out the most incredible thing. A bunch of raisins. A whole handful of them. They looked at his hand as if it bore the mark of a nail in the palm.

You're a four-year-old science experiment in the Dutch slums and you don't know what a grape is, Bean; why are you making references to stigmata?

Bean gets the first raisin, as "the one who brought us all together", and Achilles jokes about how holding it in your mouth never turns it back into a grape ("What's a grape?"), and Bean thinks about how this, too, will win them away from Poke.  Poke, he explains, never gave them so much food from her own stash at once, because she never had it, but Bean is sure that they will fail to understand this and will think only of how much more generous Achilles is, "because they were stupid".  Bean hasn't been right in his estimations of anyone this chapter, but he does seem like he'd get along well with Peter 'You're All Sheeple' Wiggin.
So, on the one hand, Bean is supposed to be really bad at people; on the other, he's our viewpoint character and he's making sweeping tell-don't-show proclamations about the nature of humanity.  It's a little hard to decide if we're supposed to think he's right, here, but I suspect we are.  Still, death of the author, and I'm quite happy to take this as evidence of Bean's various failings.  Let's see how long my optimism lasts.

Next week: the Card classics: savage child violence, easily-manipulated adults, and nuns.

Speaker for the Dead, chapter four, in which Ender only has secret friends

The vagaries of an uncaring universe are such that there was not a Lullaby post on Thursday after all.  Look to the future Thursday the 23rd, when the blogqueen's majesty may shine forth.

(Content: discussion of Transatlantic slavery, racism.  Fun content: Space math, Spanish is newer than you think.)

Speaker for the Dead: p. 56--70

Chapter Four: Ender

More of Pipo's notes, this time discussing languages, and they're especially whatnappley this week.  The Little Ones apparently have four of their own, the common Males' Language, the less-common Wives' Language used to speak with females ("how's that for sexual differentiation!" Pipo notes, because he's a tool, and also doesn't seem interested in how the females speak to each other), the Tree Language used for prayers to totem trees, and the Father Tongue, drumming sticks together.  Pipo offhandedly notes that they believe the trees contain the spirits of their ancestors, which I'm sure isn't a massive hint about the secret life-cycle of aliens.  (Also, females are only "wives", never sisters or daughters, and "fathers" is only used for ancestor trees.  Foreshadow foreshadow!)

He acknowledges that the Little Ones are incredibly good at learning human languages, much better than humans are at learning theirs, and they speak Stark or Portuguese most of them time when humans are around and maybe even when they're not.  

Language contamination is regrettable, but perhaps was unavoidable if we were to communicate with them at all.

Actually, yeah, if they're so petrified about cultural contamination, why did they teach the Little Ones human languages at all?  Why didn't they devote themselves to speaking Males' or something?  ...What's that?  Because it would be inconvenient for the other characters and also this book is hilariously colonialist?  Well, I'm pretty sure they could still let Ender take part by having himself spend a week becoming a fluent poet in all four Little One languages, but... if you say so, voice of the bloody obvious.

Pipo notes that the Little Ones also named themselves, things like Rooter or Chupaćeu ("Sky-sucker") as they learned human vocabulary, and so he doesn't know if those are translations of their native names or nicknames or what, and Buddha only knows why he hasn't asked.  This contamination thing is so inconsistent I can barely care enough to try to sort it out.  Like: apparently they've already also learned Demosthenes' Hierarchy of Exclusion, which we know was published maybe a month ago, so what the hell, did Pipo bring them reading materials?  Does he typically keep them up to date on linguistic fads from around the galaxy?  But this is really an excuse for Card to indulge himself: the Little Ones consider us framlings, and--

Oddly, though, they refer to themselves as ramen, showing that they either misunderstand the hierarchy or view themselves from the human perspective!  And--quite an amazing turn--they have several times referred to the females as varelse!

ARE YOU NOT ALLOWED TO ASK THE QUESTION "WHY", PIPO?  What is your job, man!?  How do you--why would--

The brilliance of writing these things as notes at the beginning of chapters instead of actually writing the scenes with Pipo is not just that it lets him spread worldbuilding infodumps out over the course of the book, but also that the book quickly moves on to other scenes before the reader has the chance to realise that there is no conceivable plausible way these xenologer conversations could ever have happened.  Pipo taught them Stark and Portuguese and raman and varelse on purpose but can't say "That's not how I would use the term 'raman'; what do you mean to convey?"  If he's not able to say "I think you're misusing that word", how did he teach them languages in the first place?!

I've reached some kind of threshold where the terrible writing in this book is actually soothing: it is my rock, a constant anchor in the storm of an uncertain life.  Let's get back to Ender.

Ender is of course in his apartment in the fjord, and he's enjoying his window, having grown up in the Battle School where there were no windows or scenery.  (You know, they spent a bajillion dollars building it, it's got forcefield doors in the gym for no apparent reason, and no one considered putting wallscreens around the school to show images of home and remind the kids of what they're supposed to grow up to protect?)

As soon as he gets back, Jane whispers in his ear.  Jane is the internet.  Skipping ahead briefly:

Jane first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net.  The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to computers, and read every book in every library on every world.  She learned that human beings had long been afraid that someone like her would come to exist; in all the stories she was hated, and her coming meant either her certain murder or the destruction of mankind.  Even before she was born human beings had imagined her, and, imagining her, slain her a thousand times.

Jane sees Skynet as a cautionary tale from the other side, and I think this is the first idea I've actually liked in his book.  And then, naturally, she kept herself secret until she found The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and traced it back to Ender, the one person she trusted enough to reveal herself.  (She's made a holographic avatar as well, of course, an immortal child.  Ender's probably not supposed to be creepy in appreciating that.)

Jane gives Ender holographic hypotheticals about how Pipo died--she might be the first person to imagine it might have been a lone killer and not a tribe-approved execution.  She's a bit crude and immature, provoking Ender by sarcastically calling the worm-munching Little Ones an advanced civilisation, so Ender can point out that "Many a moral imbecile has good table manners".  Ender declares that the situation is "worse than it ever was with the buggers", because all of those videos showed cleaner kills, and I'd just like to point out that the first formic attack on Earth apparently burned down China just for starters, so maybe Ender is a little hypoerbolic here.  I mean, I'm sure he means 'it's going to be hard to convince people to empathise with these aliens after seeing this kind of murder', but it's not like humans have a good track record of empathising with other humans after a war (or anything remotely resembling war), so this just feels like "Oh golly, this season's villain is way scarier than last season's villain".

"Another incident like this, and there'll be an outcry for quarantine.  For replacing Milagre with a military garrison whose sole purpose is to keep the piggies ever from acquiring a technology to let them get off the planet."

Won't the military garrison be equipped with technology that would let them get off the planet?  I'm pretty sure I've seen that movie before.  Or those books.  Animorphs.  Other people read Animorphs, right?  Seerow's Kindness?  Jane, tell him about Seerow's Kindness.  This is another case where spy satellites would do a much better job than people.

"And the new xenologer is only a boy.  Pipo's son.  Libo.  Short for Liberdade Graças a Deus Figueira de Medici." 

"Liberdade.  Liberty?" 

"I didn't know you spoke Portuguese." 

"It's like Spanish.  I spoke the deaths of Zacatecas and San Angelo, remember?" 

"On the planet Moctezuma.  That was two thousand years ago."

Fun fact: Spanish isn't much more than a thousand years old; it split off from Latin sometime in the 700s.  Good thing language stopped evolving as soon as humanity developed spaceflight, eh?  (Except for Stark; we invented Stark, and then it stopped evolving too.)

Ender can tell Jane is trying to get him to go to Lusitania, and half-heartedly arguing he needs to settle down--apparently Valentine got married and pregnant.  Jane tempts him with some Biblical allusions, Satan offering Jesus rulership of the world, but she quickly moves on to the real temptation: to restore the name of Ender Wiggin to love and honor instead of hatred as the Xenocide.  Ender is still focused on the egg.

"I had hoped it would be here," said Ender.  "A wasteland, except at the equator, permanently underpopulated.  She's willing to try, too." 

"But you aren't?" 

"I don't think the buggers could survive the winter here.  Not without an energy source, and that would alert the government.  It wouldn't work."

Jane says that Ender has now lived on twenty-four of the Hundred Worlds and sees now that the formics wouldn't be safe on any of them*.  Ender says the formics can't live on Lusitania, insists that the Little Ones would be even more terrified of them than us, because they're more advanced than humans, and I feel like Ender is forgetting the formics aren't going to hatch strapped to fusion reactors and Ecstatic Shields, but sure, let's just go with the genius primitives being inherently afraid of smart people.

"How can you or anyone say what the pequeninos can deal with?  Until you go to them, learn who they are.  If they are varelse, Ender, then let the buggers use up their habitat, and it will mean no more to you than the displacement of anthills or cattle herds to make way for cities."

I feel like I'm missing something colossal here where people think that something being foreign is different from it being sapient or valuable.  The 'varelse' excuse made some sense for the formics--they didn't understand they were killing people and so didn't think it was any more immoral than humans would think of breaking an enemy's weapon.  But that wasn't about foreignness except to the extent that foreignness prevented understanding.  "I don't understand you, so I don't understand why this is wrong" is enormously different from "I don't understand you, therefore this isn't wrong".

The terrifying thing here is that this is now getting really fucking close to slavery apologetics.  When Europeans built the entire industry of North America on the genocide of indigenous peoples here and the chattel slavery of Africans, they put a metric fuckton of effort into pseudoscientific papers and theology and literature all designed to explain that the brown people were not really human, they just looked like it.  The case, essentially, was that because they were only mimicking humanity, it wasn't immoral to slaughter them at will.  And the case that the orders of foreignness apparently makes is that this means genocide and slavery weren't immoral as long as they were conducted by people who truly believed that propaganda.  And here's Jane, telling Ender that if the Little Ones are varelse, and not people we can relate to, then there is no immorality in wiping them out to make room for the formics.

But Ender is our compassionate hero, right?  Ender will have the comeback here, explaining to Jane that to meet a varelse is to lack certainty about what is moral and what is not--it is not simply a license to assume that they are automatons incapable of relating to our morality.  The formics were considered varelse as well, and now they're thought of as ramen.  Transition is possible and therefore desirable.  Varelse means be careful, not careless.

"They are ramen," said Ender.

Fuck you, Ender.

He goes on to insist that Pipo's death wasn't torture--it was too careful, too sacred, like they were trying to save his life, not kill him.  Jane is relentless, and finally someone points out that Ender's sole qualification to understanding everyone everywhere is that he "wrote a bestseller".

"I can only trust my intuition, Jane, the judgment that comes without analysis."

First principles!  Geniuses in sealed boxes!  (Though, as I think this blog shows, Card has good reason to hate analytical perspectives.)

Jane says she's got him cornered, that he either has to go to understand the Little Ones or to settle the formics, but both personal and altruistic goals point to Lusitania, and he's allowed to go, despite the Catholic License, because Novinha has requested a Speaker.  Ender looks at her holographic face, recognises the same weary pain that he saw in himself when he realised he had committed xenocide, and wonders what she's done to bring that on.  Speaker Scanner activated!

...His genius--or his curse--was his ability to conceive events as someone else saw them.  It had made him a brilliant military commander, both in leading his own men--boys, really-and in outguessing the enemy.  It also meant that from the cold facts of Novinha's life he was able to guess--no, not guess, to know--how her parents' death and virtual sainthood had isolated Novinha, how she had reinforced her loneliness by throwing herself into her parents' work. [....] There was no living soul on Lusitania who really knew Novinha.  But in this cave in Reyjavik, on the icy world of Trondheim, Ender Wiggin knew her, and loved her, and his eyes filled with tears for her.

I am distressed by the proportion of the Ender chapters so far which have been devoted entirely to telling us how awesome Ender is.  Even Ender's Game wasn't this egregious.  But at last he decides to go, if for no other reason than to help Novinha, even though she'll be thirty-nine by the time he arrives.  He wants to leave tomorrow.  In a flash of realism, Jane points out that starships take time to schedule.  The only one in orbit is a cargo ship intended to delivery high-priced skrika (it's a food and jewelry--really) to Cyrillia.

"I've never asked you how rich I am." 

"I've handled your investments rather well over the years." 

"Buy the ship and cargo for me." [....] 

"[The owner] has accepted your offer of forty billions dollars for the ship and its cargo." 

"Forty billion!  Does that bankrupt me?" 

"A drop in the bucket."

Jane has also nullified all the crew's contracts and bought them passage on other ships, since she can pilot the Havelok herself.  Let's just note that Ender won't arrive on Lusitania for twenty-two years, so it makes basically no difference whether he leaves tomorrow or weeks or months from now, so this whole thing is just an exercise in Ender being super-privileged and wealthy and his whims becoming fact.

Ender realises that Valentine won't come with him, and doesn't even intend to ask--she's married to a guy named Jakt, "lord of a hundred fishing vessels", expecting a baby, and they apparently have great conversations every day and love the ice floes.  How long have they been on Trondheim?  Ten years/three millennia travelling the galaxy and in a handful of months she met a guy, got married, and got pregnant?  Better than fridging her, but... really, Card?

The queen in her egg has been listening in this whole time as well, permanently psychically linked to Ender, and realises that leaving Valentine behind will cost him.  They discuss whether it's possible that the formics could settle on Lusitania, and Ender finally gets around to saying he won't destroy the Little Ones for the sake of the formics (though it's not clear to me if he would if he thought they were varelse).

In another fit of terrible science, the queen asserts that she experiences time objectively because of her philotic attunement, and so from her perspective it has been three thousand years that Ender has been on his quest--how does Ender not know that?  She didn't think it was worth mentioning after the first two millennia?  But she urges him faster, and Ender says that while people condemn the Xenocide publicly, not that many people really believe his book is true.  (Consistency, what?)

< In all our life, you are the first person we've known who wasn't ourself.  We never had to be understanding because we always understood.  Now that we are just this single self, you are the only eyes and arms and legs we have.  Forgive us if we are impatient. [....] We know who killed us, and it wasn't you.> 

It was me. 

<You were a tool.> 

It was me. 

<We forgive you.> 

When you walk on the face of a world again, then I can be forgiven.

I want to like this, I really do, mechanically I love the writing sometimes, but seriously, I don't care if Ender forgives himself or not.  He didn't know he was killing them all, but he never questioned the war, he never questioned murder as a solution, and I don't see any indication that he thinks he did anything wrong now.  His regrets are based in irrationality--he doesn't think "I wish I could go back and challenge the need for the invasion", he just wishes he hadn't been involved, that things had magically worked out differently.  Sorrow without any need to change.  It's a great excuse to have everyone tell your angsty protagonist how wonderful he is over and over again, but I got more of that than I needed from fanfiction as a teenager, thanks.

Next week: Valentine again at last!  Grand farewell?  The last bit of reasonable perspective we'll get?  We'll find out!

---

*So Ender has lived on twenty-four of the Hundred Worlds.  Let's be generous and assume that doesn't include Earth, since Earth was presumably not in the running for the new formic colony.  The latest is Trondheim.  The first was whichever world he found her on.  That means twenty-three interstellar flights of indeterminate length, adding up to about 3058 years, which means about 133 years skipped per flight.  Twenty-four worlds in ten years also means a new world every five months, including travel time (and Ender mentioned earlier he's never spent more than six months on a world, so Card must have done that much math at least).  I don't think we have enough information to determine the probable parameters of flight lengths, so I'm going to be lazy and assume an average of three months in space.  The velocity necessary for a time dilation of 133 years in 3 months means... 99.99982-ish % the speed of light.  Average.  (99.99968% if it's a four-month flight from Ender's perspective.)  Again, that's average, which means incorporating acceleration and deceleration requires the peak speed to be way, way faster, but I admit I'm honestly impressed/startled Card fit the story to these calculations.  This is the most care he's shown in anything so far.  (I haven't done the math to determine what happens if some of these flights are longer, or what happens if he stays on more than a few planets for 5-6 months each, or if planets are more or less than 133 light-years away.  Moctezuma was 2000 years ago and 15 worlds ago, if anyone wants to math harder.)

Ender's Game, introduction, in which we contemplate empathy

One last Ender's Game post.  Think of it as the bonus scene after the credits.  Most of y'all have expressed a wish to see Speaker next rather than Shadow, and thanks to a friend oft called Mad Scientist Alex, I will have my hands on a copy of Speaker next weekend without letting Card have any more cash.  Not sure how much I'll actually manage to get done, what with Erika getting married next Saturday (and her continued efforts to hook me up with one of her friends just because she thinks it would be funny), but I shall try to get something started.

Ender's Game: p. xi--xxvi

It's not really the point, but I'm kind of amused that Card opens the introduction by saying the first thing he wanted to do for the new hardcover edition of Ender's Game was to "fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared", and I wonder if no one else has ever pointed out that, for example, Bonzo's timeline is complete nonsense.  There, now we've got the pettiness out of the way.

Card says that Ender's Game started with speculation fuelled by Asimov's Foundation series and trying to imagine what the future would be like if technology advanced but people mostly didn't, except for the few people "who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people".  Not sure what to make of that when there's such a huge undercurrent of 'breeding true' in Game which gets bumped up to literal genetic engineering in Shadow.  The healing, I assume, doesn't refer to Game but to Speaker, because if it refers to anything in Game that is hilarious.

The military side of Game, Card explains, was largely drawn off Bruce Catton's "Army of the Potomac" trilogy, which involved the Union having a fantastic army but no general to match Lee until Grant, who lost so many soldiers but always made their deaths count.

It was because of Catton's history that I had stopped enjoying chess, and had to revise the rules of Risk in order to play it--I had come to understand something of war, and not just because of the conclusions Catton himself had reached.  I found meanings of my own in that history.

If you stop enjoying chess because you realise it bears no similarity to real war, I'm not sure you ever really understood the point of chess, or games in general.  (Okay, I lied, the pettiness is not out of the way.)  I will refrain from commenting on the meanings that Card drew from military history any more than I already have, which you may recall was when I pointed out that Card/Ender determined that the best soldiers are isolated, lonely, afraid, angry, and untrusting.

And even though I could not then have articulated what I understood of military leadership, I knew that I did understand it.  I understood, at levels deeper than speech, how a great military leader imposes his will on his enemy, and makes his own army a willing extension of himself.

This actually does match up okay with military modern theory as I understand it--the goal of combat as the Canadian Forces phrase it is 'to impose our will upon the enemy throughout their depth', basically meaning that the fighting is over once you are in such a good position that you can demand the enemy stop fighting.  This is what they teach you in some of the very first officer leadership courses, so I'm not sure it's quite the level of numinous epiphany that Card is phrasing here, but I haven't read Catton, so I can't comment.

Card then goes over his thought processes in creating the battleroom, which he states will clearly be used in real military training some day if there is "a manned military in space", leading me to wonder why it's in use in Battle School when they don't seem to have any use for footsoldiers.  He pauses to tell us all how unbearably boring archaeology is (sorry, Alex) before summarising the rise of his writing career in plays and short stories, leading to the publication of Ender's Game as the unexpectedly-improved retroactive backstory for the story he really wanted to tell, Speaker for the Dead.

It's not hard to find a record of how incredibly popular Ender's Game is.  Card recognises that there are some people who also hate the book--the degree of hatred astonished him.  As noted before, he says he expected some of it because, while he wrote in 'layers of meaning' for anyone who cared to analyse them, he also made it as accessible a book as he knew how, and thus those ivory-tower snobs felt that it was crude and were terrified of literature that didn't need them.  Et cetera.

[...] A guidance counselor for gifted children reported that she had only picked up Ender's Game to read it because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book.  She read it and loathed it.  Of course, I wondered what kind of guidance counselor would hold her son's tastes up to public ridicule, but the criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic.  They just don't talk like that, she said.  They don't think like that.

Card goes on to explain how Game scares people because it asserts that children are people and not just simplistic little monkeyfolk; how he is writing from his own sense that he has always been a complete person with fully developed thoughts and feelings.  I agree that what changes in us is our ability to predict, to express ourselves and--I might argue most importantly--our ability to empathise with others.  What's unrealistic about the children of Ender's Game to me isn't their complexity but their narrative convenience: the way Bonzo looks at Ender and on sight, without a word, knows that he has met a great and compassionate leader who will crush his dreams.  The way Ender can be at school for a few months out of his seven years of life and suddenly not know what it means to 'just live' like an ordinary civilian.  The way Graff (not a child, but no more realistic) can somehow know the perfect way to raise the perfect general despite apparently no one else approving or even recognising his strategies which have never worked before.  There are reasons that these people don't feel like people to me, and none of them are Petra Arkanian using the word 'polyglot' at age nine.

Also, I think there might be a difference between saying 'my son loved this book but I hated it' and 'hey everyone my son has terrible taste in books', and Card's inability or unwillingness to consider this might say something about the objectivity of aesthetics in his views.

Because the book does ring true with the children who read it.

He includes a letter from a girl named Ingrid on behalf of a dozen friends, all gifted teenagers at a two-week summer residential program at a university.

We are all in about the same position; we are very intellectually oriented and have found few people at home who share this trait.  Hence, most of us are lonely, and have been since kindergarten.  When teachers continually compliment you, your chances of "fitting in" are about nil. 

All our lives we've unconsciously been living by the philosophy, "The only way to gain respect is doing so well you can't be ignored." [....] However, in choosing these paths, most of us have wound up satisfied in ourselves, but very lonely. [....] 

You couldn't imagine the imapct your books had on us; we are the Enders of today.  Almost everything written in Ender's Game and Speaker applied to each one of us on a very, very personal level.  No, the situation isn't as drastic today, but all the feelings are there.

I don't want to single these kids out--that would be stupid, millions of people have read this book and I think Card is not wrong when he says that the people who love it best are the people who feel that it is deeply personal, that they are Ender.  Card also says that adults tend, not to identify with Ender, but to love or pity him.  One option is that this is a matter only of condescension, but another is that people don't stay one way for their whole lives.  As the popular wisdom goes, when we think about who we were a decade ago, most of us will agree, perhaps with reluctance, that we were bloody stupid.  And all probability is that a decade from now, we'll look back on our current selves and think we were/are bloody stupid.  This, in my opinion, is a good thing and vastly preferable to the alternative, that we never grow and improve.

And just maybe it's a good thing if we grow up and we stop thinking of ourselves as the forever-shunned unmatched genius on whom everyone is counting to save the entire world because they're all so inept and they need us even though they hate us.  Yes, kids need someone to identify with, and maybe that means they need to identify with someone who has the same misconceptions they do.  That's not something to be ashamed of.  But I wonder how much people remember that the ultimate secret of Ender's Game is that everyone was wrong the whole time, they were saving the world from a threat that didn't really exist, and they were so focused on their own egos and their imagined victories that they hurt and killed other children along the way.

Maybe sometimes people pity Ender, not because they don't understand him, but because they know what's coming when he gets some perspective.

There is a second letter excerpted, from an army helicopter pilot in Saudi Arabia, written during the first days of aerial assault in the Gulf War.  Ender's exhaustion in the book resonated with his own experiences in training and gave him inspiration to keep going.  He tells Card of their conditions, of the way outdated equipment keeps betraying them and people die from stupid mistakes, and suggests that maybe Card and his other favourite military author, John Steakley, could collaborate on a story of helicopter pilots of the near future.

Card goes on to tell us what this means--that this aviator did not read the book as a scare-quotes "work of literature" but "as epic, as a story that helped define his community", which... is not actually something the guy says in the portion of the letter that gets excerpted.  Hm.  Anyway, Card sees this as the man hoping for "a 'speaker for the dead' and for the living".  Author as eulogist.  It's an interesting idea, at least.

Card dismisses the idea that we read fiction "to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language--or at least I hope that's not our reason", because apparently fuck Shakespeare.  (This might explain why he was apparently unconcerned about the atrocities he visited upon the play Hamlet in his inconceivably homophobic fanfic, which is so incredibly disgusting that I will not link to anything about it and I advise no one to google it.  If it's too late for that, then you know what I mean.)  Anyway, he starts waxing on the mythic truth of fiction that allows us to identify "our own self-story" and then lists many examples of different people using Ender's Game as a text or subject for analysis in schools and papers and suchlike, which is a little funny after his earlier dismissal of angry lit profs who hated him for not writing something indecipherable.

All these uses are valid; all these readings of the book are "correct."

YOU HEARD HIM HE SAID IT ENDER/ALAI IS CANON NO TAKEBACKS.

The story of Ender's Game is not this book, though it has that title emblazoned on it.  The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory.  If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created,but as something that we made together.

This, ultimately, is actually what I hope for more than anything.  Because this book is so very popular, and we have just spent eight months looking at all of the reasons that is terrifying, but "Ender's Game" as a cultural phenomenon isn't the words on the pages, it's the storystuff bouncing around inside millions of heads.  And if those people are better than Card, then there's a chance they were in it for the lessons that it mostly doesn't teach, about remembering that communication can change everything and that trying to be someone's friend when no one else is willing just might be a small and vital step on the path to saving the world.  Or destroying the world.  Just... be careful with the world when you're making friends, I guess?

Ender's Game, chapter nine, part two, in which alternative interpretations abound

This chapter is a bit of a swerve.  (And possibly less hilarious than usual; my apologies if that's the case.)  There was a moment as I grappled with a plot twist in which I wondered if I had actually been misjudging the book all along and nearly reversed my position.  Then I remembered that I was blocking out all of the main characters so their vast heaving egos wouldn't obstruct my view of nice things.  But it's still an interesting ride.

(Content: depression, coercion.  Fun content: Ghostbusters, Slownx.)

Ender's Game: p. 138--153

Remember what I said about timeskips last week?

Nothing was different, nothing had changed in a year.

Doin' it wrong.

Well, it's not quite true; some things have changed:

At the age of nine he was a toon leader in Phoenix Army, with Petra Arkanian as his commander. [....] Alai was also a toon leader, in another army, and they were still good friends; Shen was not a leader, but that was no barrier.  Dink Meeker had finally accepted command and succeeded Rose the Nose in Rat Army's command.

I'm not sure I can express my disdain for that last line.  First, really, can no one drop 'the Nose' from Rosen Spaceberg's name?  What happened to Ender's dislike of racial slurs?  But secondly, what happened to Dink's entire characterisation as someone who rejects the philosophy that's pushed on them that they must seek to dominate and take command for the approval of the teachers?  What happened to his refusal to give up the game he loved and his refusal to play the game they wanted him to?  All of that reasoned morality is thrown aside for 'Dink's a commander now, yay!'  Why?  The most plausible theory to me is that it won't be long before Ender gets command, and if Ender became a commander while Dink still maintained that command is a morally dubious position, Ender would look like he might have made the wrong (that is to say, less-than-perfectly-pure) choice.  How do we keep Ender unquestionably untainted?  Total protonic reversal of Dink's worldview.  Whatever, it's not like it made him interesting or provided a desperately-needed dissenting opinion to the story.

Ender is deeply depressed and can't figure out why, given that it seems everything is going so well.  (He just hasn't gotten over Dink's replacement with the Dinktron 4X Victory And Friendship Unit.)  He comes to the conclusion that he receives too much respect.  No one goofs around with him, no one jokes or reminisces, there's just excitement about the games and tactics.  Shen and Alai joked with each other in that night's practice, calling back to the 'go nova' incident from the zero-G fight, and then remembered Ender was standing right there:

And they apologized again.  Back to business.  Back to respect.  And Ender realized that in their laughter, in their friendship, it had not occurred to them that he could have been included. 

How could they think I was part of it?  Did I laugh?  Did I join in?  Just stood there, watching, like a teacher.

 Here's an idea, Ender: maybe the problem isn't that it didn't occur to them, but that it didn't occur to you.  And your best friends noticed that you weren't laughing along with their joke, and they remembered that while they escaped that day unscathed, you dove protectively into a brawl and hurt a lot of other kids defending yourself, and they remember how that bothered you too, and that no one ever talked about it afterwards, and you still weren't talking about it as they laughed.  Maybe it occurred to them that you might hate thinking about that day and they were being insensitive.  Maybe, in short, they apologised because they actually give a damn about your feelings.

Nah, it's probably because he's so intimidatingly brilliant.  I'm trying not to judge Ender too harshly here, because he's suffering from some kind of depression and so he's naturally not going to come to conclusions like 'people care about me'.  However, I really don't think Card intended us to read anything into this other than what he tells us:

That's how they think of me, too.  Teacher.  Legendary soldier.  Not one of them.  Not someone that you embrace and whisper Salaam in his ear.  That only lasted while Ender still seemed a victim.  Still seemed vulnerable.  Now he was the master soldier, and he was completely, utterly alone.

From what I've read, Card believes that the essential core of this story that makes it resonate with so many people is exactly this: the lonely child--a figure that anyone empathetic both identifies with and wants to help.  He kind of meta-comments on this in the Shadow series, making the case that an elemental story will resonate with people even if they realise how contrived and simplistic it is.  Personal mileage may vary on how true that is, but what really leaps out at me about this point is that it comes at a moment that could be easily explained (as above) by people actually trying their hardest to be Ender's friends.  The loneliness might not be Ender's fault (depression is a jackwagon) but it still might just as easily be all in his head as a reflection of his actual circumstances.

He keeps playing the mind game, and apparently it's been the same all year--the rest of the game world doesn't acknowledge him now, no one has puzzles for him to solve, no one fights him, everything is quietly and peacefully simulating life around him, except in the tower at the End of the World, where he always kills the snake and sees Peter's face in the mirror and something kills him.  He does this yet again, and finally comes to the realisation that his place stuck in the game mirrors the way he feels about his life, and he calls it 'despair'.

Aside for a moment: this looks a lot like what we might call depression, as I will tend to do, and generally despair is not recognised as a clinical illness, although it might be a symptom of a broader problem.  I don't think Card refers to it as depression, which is just as well given how rapidly and unrealistically he's going to purge it, but I'm not sure that's a mercy so much as part of the broader problem that our depression narratives in our society are completely useless to actual depressed people.  Depression exists for lots of reasons, and while it can have instigating events, it is not as simple as 'this aspect of my life makes me sad' and it cannot be cured by a hug.  Fortunately for Ender, he doesn't live in the real world.  (Sucks to be us.)

Valentine comes to school to find I.F. guards at the doors, and a message at her desk calling her to the principal's office.  Demosthenes is getting to be a bigger name--discussed extensively on the international nets for having "outraged too many wise men and pleased too many fools", so Valentine is feeling the heat and is sure they have finally tracked her down.  Inside the principal's office, she finds Graff, who has been upgraded to "soft-bellied", and she continues to panic as he explains that he's there to talk about her brother, until she realises that they don't mean Peter.

...it was little Ender, who had disappeared so long ago, who was no part of Peter's plots now.  You were the lucky one, Ender.  You got away before Peter could trap you into his conspiracy.

They just brim with scorn for Peter, eh?  Valentine apparently considers begging equivalent to blackmail, and partnership equivalent to conspiracy.  Without her, the entire plan would utterly fall apart, and she admits that she joined partly because she too hungers to have great influence on the world, but... sure, it's all Evil Peter's diabolical scheme.

There's a brief and amazingly gratuitous bit where Graff says that they should take a walk, away from the listening devices that the assistant principal has bugged Dr Lineberry's office with, and produces one from behind a picture frame with an "I thought you knew" before walking out.  Just in case we forgot how much normal people suck compared to Our Heroes.  (Given that Graff is a supervillain, I half-suspect him of planting it there just for misdirection and discord.  He is a principal himself; he doesn't need others bucking for his position.  It's the Battle School way!)

Graff continues to be terrible at his job:

"Valentine, we need your help for Ender." 

"What kind of help?" 

"We aren't even sure of that.  We need you to help us figure out how you can help us." 

"Well, what's wrong?" 

"That's part of the problem.  We don't know."

I'm sure the point here is to impress upon us how incredibly complicated child psychology is when combined with the process of hammering a person into the perfect murder coordinator, but: seriously.  They can tell Ender is unhappy in spite of how wonderful his life is, they can see that he's been stuck at the tower room for over a year, but they can't guess why at all?  This is exactly what I'm talking about: Ender looks very much like a clinically depressed person, and the conviction that depression has a simple cause that needs to be fixed and then he'll be cured is flatly wrong and counterproductive.  Where the hell are the competent analysts?  Someone get Major Imbu in here.  He's probably busy programming a computer to find Jesus.

Graff fills Valentine in on the nature of the game, and she dismissively says that if Ender solved the unsolvable problem once before (the Giant's Drink) he'll solve this one in time as well, but Graff presses on to ask why Ender would see Peter in the mirror, and Valentine insists that they are complete opposites and it makes no sense, and once again I am disoriented by the vast gulf between the case that the book makes and the one that Card seems to believe it makes.  Graff starts getting pushier, explaining that Ender needs to be made okay and therefore he will get as invasive with the Wiggin family as he must, but he hopes Valentine can help him solve it neatly.

So she told him about the children in every school that Peter attended.  He never hit them, but he tortured them just the same.  Found what they were most ashamed of and told it to the person whose respect they most wanted.  Found what they most feared and made sure they faced it often.

But, Valentine tells us, he never did this to Ender, because "Ender never did anything to be ashamed of".  (I am suddenly very curious what life would have been like if Ender hadn't been taken away the day after he killed Stilson.)  Valentine insists that Ender "never gave in [....] to being like Peter", whereas she did because she wanted to kill Peter to protect Ender.  (See previous parenthetical, redoubled.)  She thinks Graff doesn't understand and believes that Peter and Ender are the same, and quite freaks out on him:

"Well maybe I'm like Peter, but Ender isn't he isn't at all, I used to tell him that when he cried, I told him that lots of times, you're not like Peter, you never like to hurt people, you're kind and good and not like Peter at all!"

Well, I'm convinced.  (It's moments like this that make me wonder if I'm being pranked and Card doesn't honestly believe Ender and Peter are opposites at all.)

Graff wants her to do exactly that again, in a letter rather than in person, admitting that they never let any of her previous letters through.  When Valentine tries to bargain to see Ender (whose first leave will now be at 18 rather than 12 because "we changed the rules"), Graff says they can just fake her letter using the ones she already sent before.  She demands to know why she should help at all, what kinds of terrible things they are doing to him, and I assume thunder rolls and Graff steeples his fingers as he chuckles and says "the terrible things are only about to begin".  Who says that?  WHY WOULD ANYONE SAY THAT AT THIS MOMENT?!  The scene ends right there, but can we just take a second to imagine how it goes as Graff realises that he used his outside voice and Valentine just stares at him and slowly plots how Demosthenes will harness 'his' vast mob to tear the International Fleet apart brick and beam?

Ender gets a letter, and it takes him a moment to realise it's from Valentine.  It's a short thing, only eleven sentences and weirdly badly punctuated considering that Val is such a genius writer--I suppose she's trying to play down her intelligence still, except that Graff already told her he knows she's smarter than most university professors now (because that is clearly a standardised unit).  It is the platonic ideal of awkward, basically leaping segue-free into 'so I bet some people think you're a cruel person now but I know you aren't'.  She of course takes some time to insult Peter before the end, because after being separated from her beloved baby brother for three years, that is her priority.

Ender notes all of Valentine's quirks that make it plausible that she wrote the letter, things like calling Peter "a slumbitch" and spelling psychoanalyse as "sikowanalize", which we are told are old in-jokes between the two of them because Card wants us to know that showing-not-telling is for losers who probably don't even have one Nebula Award.  He's not certain that she sent it, but he's smart enough to realise that even if she did, the only reason this letter got through when all the others didn't is that the teachers want to manipulate him with this one.  The theme of this chapter seems to be 'knowing people are manipulating you and letting them do it because you want to be changed', first with Peter and Valentine, and then with Valentine and Ender.  Interesting, given that Valentine is apparently convinced that helping Peter represents her fall to the Dark Side of the Smart, but she was easily won over to helping manipulate Ender.  Right after Graff did his supervillain act, too?  Questionable.

As ambivalent as I am about the characters' choices here, the writing is once again pretty good:

And the despair filled him again.  Now he knew why.  Now he knew what he hated so much.  He had no control over his own life.  [....]  Only the game was left to him, that was all, everything else was them and their rules and plans and lessons and programs, and all he could do was go this way or that way in battle.  The one real thing, the one precious real thing was his memory of Valentine [...] and they had taken her and put her on their side.  She was one of them now.  [....]  They knew about Peter in the mirror in the castle room, they knew about everything and to them Val was just one more tool to use to control him, just one more trick to play.  Dink was right, they were the enemy, they loved nothing and cared for nothing and he was not going to do what they wanted, he was damn well not going to do anything for them.

(Of course Dink was right, Ender.  His name is Dink Meeker.  Being right about everything is a survival mechanism at that point.)  He goes back to the tower in the game, confronts the serpent in the carpet, catches it, and kisses it (accidentally, because apparently the controls in this game are as graceful as a 6-year-old N64 C-stick) and it transforms into Valentine, who embraces him.  The mirror shows a dragon and a unicorn, and the wall opens onto a hall lined with cheering crowds and Valentine goes with him out into the world.  And every face in the crowd is Peter.

I confess this baffles me deeply.  The serpent who declared that Ender's only escape was death is revealed to actually be Valentine, who will now just follow him around everywhere he goes in the games?  (You know, they added this feature in the latest Pokémon editions.  I choose you, Female Passive Motivational Object!)  The most plausible interpretation I can see here is that Ender has been 'killing' his empathetic side for the last year because he is stuck thinking only in terms of 'how do I fight' instead of 'should I fight'.  So, by making the breakthrough that not all problems are best solved with murder, he is rewarded with a companion to help explore the universe.

It's been building for some time, but this is the point at which I have to conclude--despite having never yet read Speaker For The Dead--that this book is not meant to make sense on its own.  The last revelation and tragedy of this novel is that all of these lessons that Ender learns about empathy and the advantages of not murdering everyone you meet get thrown out the window and the remorseful aliens are obliterated.  It's a vast exercise in futility and rejected character development.  I could maybe be sold on that, the final sudden reversal that is about trying to understand the people you've been thinking aren't people, but more galling, the primary activity of these characters is to tell each other how virtuous and pure they are while they grievously fail all over the place.  If that message of desperate radical empathy were the core of the book, I might look on it much more kindly, but ultimately it is not about that: it's about a troubled child and his torments.  It's about identifying with a wearily-perfect character and feeling sorry for him at the same time.  It is, in point, a narcissistic story masquerading as a lesson in empathy.  I begin to suspect that I will have to read Speaker eventually, just to see if that book has the payoff that this one throws away.

Valentine is secretly awarded the "Star of the Order of the League of Humanity, First Class, which is the highest military award that can be given to a civilian", and judges herself harshly for having helped them, spurring her to write a Demosthenes article denouncing population laws and calling for humanity to spread across the universe, naming 'Third' "the most noble title any child can have".  Peter thinks she's trolling.  At this point, all I can wonder is how 'Third' even became a stigmatised title in broader society if they're often government-requisitioned geniuses.  It's one thing for children to mock the kid who is in any way different and another for society at large to be all "Ugh, I hate those really competent people".

And that's it for chapter nine and now things get cereal, because next week Ender takes command of his own army.  And I fly to Hawaii!  I'll try to make sure that doesn't throw off the schedule, because that is the infinite love that I have for my readers.