Unrelated to anything: there is no good reason that the first button that gets highlighted after you've written a blog post's title should be 'Publish'.

(Content: cultural supremacy, genocide, ritual murder. Fun content: I will never get tired of the graffiti of Pompeii.)


This chapter is so long that I think something has to happen, but that also means it gets split over two weeks so we can really soak up all of the ways in which this is a terrible book.  Let's start with this opening exchange from one of Ouanda's transcripts:

LEAF-EATER: Human says that when your brothers die, you bury them in the dirt, and then make your houses out of that dirt. (Laughs.) 

MIRO: No. We never dig where people are buried. 

LEAF-EATER: (becomes rigid with agitation): Then your dead don't do you any good at all!

I have some vague hope that we're about to solve the Science Mystery, so Card is throwing the most blatant possible indications at us that the trees are literally 'dead' Little Ones.  What interests me more is this cliche where the 'primitive tribe' is always presented as vastly more horrified by outsiders not following the same rituals or values, compared to the wise outsiders who know everyone has different practices and remain utterly mellow about it.  I'm hoping that we're about to get a little reversal of that, when humanity finally figures out what the Little Ones' deal is and they get to be shocked and horrified at the Truth About War, but I don't expect we're ever going to get the Little Ones being all mellow and "Huh, so that's what humans do; interesting".  Their reactions always have to be overwhelmingly emotional, either raucous laughter or revulsion and knives, because that is how we always characterise 'primitive tribes'.

Mind you, the Lusitanians are themselves also a tiny monoculture settlement largely isolated from any other concepts of societal structure, and we've been seeing a whole lot of how that limits their capacity to understand things (e.g., bad definitions of male/female, sex and gender, social hierarchies, and restrictive expectations of alien biology in general), but I'm still waiting to see that acknowledged and not just presented in the form of "All of our science cannot fathom these strange creatures!"

Anyway.  Miro and Ouanda have zero problem getting Ender through the village fence, because no one likes acknowledging that the fence is there and no one watches it.  Miro and Ouanda might be the only people whose palmprints can open the door, but... security cameras?  Surely this privacy-exploding settlement has space for a monk or two who spend all their time hidden away with rosary beads and a wall of TVs showing key security points around the colony?

They pause by Rooter's tree for Ouanda to exposit about how they've relied on Rooter for most of their spiritual advice over the last seven years, which they get by drumming rituals that they've heard but never seen, using fallen wood sticks.  Ender thinks they would have done well in Battle School--Miro's total emotional control, Ouanda's sense of responsibility--but still quickly acts to assert his authority over these teenagers by demonstrating that he knows about Rooter and interrogates them about the trees (never planted anywhere except in corpses, no saplings elsewhere in the woods).  He works out that Miro's worry is that there's a Little One in danger of getting murdered that night, but rather than hurry, he decides he can let Ouanda question him now.

He leans back against the tree, appreciating the view up through the leaves, and is struck by sudden déjà vu, though all he can think is that he's never seen a tree like this before.  (He does not, for example, connect it to the last blast of imagery he got via the Hive Queen.)

Miro and Ouanda begin telling him about the "Questionable Activities", which is not a sexual euphemism (yet!) but refers to the technological meddling they've started.  Ender does take a moment to think about how obvious it is that they're in love [HINT: IT IS NOT OBVIOUS] and be sad that they will hate him when he soon speaks Marcos' death and "drive[s] the wedge of the incest tabu between you".  Which is a weird phrasing, to me.  Like... he's not making the tabu up or anything.  They are half-siblings and it would be a bad idea for them to reproduce.  Focusing on 'tabu' makes it sound like he's sorry more about the social pressure they'll feel to not hook up, like it's some kind of arbitrary old tradition.  Maybe I'm reading too much into what's just supposed to somehow be formal prose.

This next chunk is difficult to figure out how to approach, because on the one hand this is obviously the Turning Point where everything changes, but first Card needs everyone to lay out their philosophies so that Ender can explain to us what is True and what is Stupid.  And I feel like being fair to the book means giving those chunks some attention, but on the other hand it's just so boring.

The meddling all started when the Little Ones were running low on grubs and starvation was imminent, so they expected there would be a war and they would all die.  They were weirdly cheerful about this, but Libo decided he had to save them, so he showed them how to sun-bake merdona root to neutralise its poisonous enzymes.  Ouanda and Miro furiously defend their actions, saying they can't be dispassionate about the lives of the Little Ones the way they would about animals.

Miro struggled for words. "It's as if you could go back, to old Earth, back before the Xenocide, before star travel, and you said to them, You can travel among the stars, you can live on other worlds. And then showed them a thousand little miracles. Lights that turn on from switches. Steel. Even simple things--pots to hold water. Agriculture. They see you, they know what you are, they know that they can become what you are, do all the things that you do. What do they say--take this away, don't show us, let us live out our nasty, short, brutish little lives, let evolution take its course? No. They say, Give us, teach us, help us. [....] And the longer we stay, the more they try to learn, and the more they learn, the more we see how learning helps them, and if you have any kind of compassion, if you understand that they're--they're--" 

"Human." 

"Ramen, anyway. They're our children, do you understand that?"

I absolutely understand why this would be Miro's perspective on things, but this seems to be the part that Ender agrees with, so we're supposed to take it as fundamentally right, if condescending, since he characterises the Little Ones as immature--children--simply because their tech levels are lower.  Maybe the most powerful single thing I've ever read about ancient history is records of the graffiti of Pompeii, because you can only read things like "Marcus loves Spendusa", "I have buggered men", and "If anyone sits here, let him read this first of all: if anyone wants a screw, he should look for Attice; she costs 4 sestertii" so many times before you realise that humans, on a fundamental level, have pretty much been the same for untold millennia, regardless of our technological sophistication.  What gets me is that Card isn't going to stop presenting the Little Ones as being chaotic and childlike, which clashes with the apparent implication that it's a terrible mistake to think of them as anything lesser than full responsible individuals.

Miro notes as well that the Little Ones insist Ender ('Andrew', still) is the original Speaker, the author of HQ&H, and they claim that the Hive Queen speaks to them and has promised to bring them endless gifts of technology.  Ender realises that the Hive Queen is somehow in contact with them, and specifically learns that she's talking to a mind inside Rooter's tree, which Miro and Ouanda pretend to believe.

"How condescending of you," said Ender [inexplicably not struck down by a righteous deity of hypocrisy]. 

"It's standard anthropological practice," said Miro. 

"You're so busy pretending to believe them, there isn't a chance in the world you could learn anything from them."

I'm not sure how he reached that conclusion, since this is literally the first he's heard of it, five seconds ago, but I guess he is drawing a line from that 'they're like our children' bit earlier.

"You're cultural supremacists to the core.  You'll perform your Questionable Activities to help out the poor little piggies, but there isn't a chance in the world you'll notice when they have something to teach you."

I realise I've levelled this same accusation at Miro and Ouanda myself, but I have the advantage of knowing that they've been getting accurate information from Rooter for several years, whereas the only thing Ender knows they've been told is something spectacularly implausible for which they have zero evidence (that the secret Main Character of the Universe has arrived, bringing with him literally every plot-important aspect of history in the last three thousand years).

Ender continues to attack their hypocrisy, apparently daring karma to strike him down on the spot, by pointing out that they have treated Pipo and Libo's deaths as the inexplicable, unjustifiable actions of senseless animals, even as they claim to recognise the Little Ones as ramen/human.  And, well, look--he's not wrong that it has been one long atrocious decision to never ask the Little Ones about why they killed Pipo and Libo, but I'm not seeing how it's valuable to cram that into his sister's special pseudo-Nordic Framework of Who Counts As People.  Here on backwards pre-star-travel Earth, we're also capable of recognising individuals who aren't equipped to be held fully accountable for their actions--usually children, but also people under particular types of stress or mental illness.  There are a lot of analogies that could be drawn here.  Really, sticking with the 'children' thing would probably work better, because then instead of constantly shifting what we mean by 'species' (Miro says the Little Ones are 'human'; Ender makes reference to humanity having 'kicked him out'), we could continue to consider how children who are never taught about the consequences of particular harmful actions may keep doing those harmful things without caring.  A toddler who is too rough with a pet isn't an alien incapable of ever understanding what empathy means.  They're ignorant about animals.  Little Ones are ignorant about humans and how much we don't like to be eviscerated.  Adults are responsible for fixing toddlers' ignorance.  Here on Lusitania, humans are responsible for fixing the Little Ones' ignorance.  Ender says that ramen bear responsibility for their actions, but no one considers the idea that people take responsibility for educating themselves, either.  Humans, adults, whatever our shorthand term is for 'sapient being considered worthy, independent, and accountable', are capable of asking questions and solving their own problems and not just sitting around waiting for the Main Character to explain the ways of the world to them.  Yet, somehow, in all of this reminding us that the Little Ones are people, Card forgot to have the Little Ones investigate the humans, ask why Pipo didn't grow a tree, ask how humans reproduce, or make any substantial effort to solve the Science Mystery from the other direction.  They've been too busy shouting that humans are 'like cabras' (which is apparently not true, given what we've heard about cabras?) and alternately revering and shunning Ouanda.  The whole 'Little Ones are not like children' message is kind of undercut when the author presents them as needing to be saved from their ignorance by a sensible human.

Ender hints that he really is the first Speaker, but before that can go much further, they find Leaf-Eater.  He immediately recognises the Speaker and then retreats into the woods again, and there's more hostility between Ender and Ouanda as he questions whether they actually know how to read Little One body language, she admits they don't always but also that he can't possibly to learn all they know in ten minutes, and Ender says he doesn't need to since he's got them there assisting.  Ender really can't decide whether he's got any respect for these two.  Miro not-very-reluctantly admits that Ender is right, they've been making lots of foolish assumptions, but then Ender goes back to 'but that's impossible!' thoughts himself when he hears about the bread.

In the face of starvation, Libo taught the Little Ones how to make merdona safe, how to make bread, and then as soon as the first loaves had been delivered to the Wives, Libo was killed.  Ender thinks it's completely unthinkable that the Little Ones would murder somebody who helped them so much, but then, I kid you not, he compares it to Miro and Ouanda: despite them being "better and wiser" than Congress, they'll be hauled off for trial and prison if they're ever caught.  Yes.  Murdering someone who teaches you how to bake is definitely similar to enacting judicial measures against people who break galactic law to completely reshape the development of the only known sapient aliens.  Ender, however, thinks that this would only make sense"if you viewed humans as a single community, and the piggies as their enemies; if you thought that anything that helped the piggies survive was somehow a menace to humanity. Then the punishment of people who enhanced the piggies' culture would be designed, not to protect the piggies, but to keep the piggies from developing."

I haven't said much thus far about cultural contamination, because human history again tends to show that when we meet strangers with cool toys, we want to make with the sharing.  Even in the most atrocious cases, in genocides like the European colonisation of the Americas, the Aboriginal peoples did like the idea of steel and horses and trading, and Europe just about fell over itself when it came to flora, fauna, and that all-important 'How Not To Die In Canadian Winter' knowledge.  (Or, if you're more into Asian history, one of the reasons the Mongol Empire was a lot better than it gets credit for is that they worked that scientific exchange like mad, spreading Chinese medicine west and Arabian metallurgy east, leading to a mess of new inventions.)  So my default assumption about humans, at least, is that while we'd really prefer not to have our culture stolen or dictated to us, we do love us new technology a lot of the time.  The goal should probably be to allow that while not allowing one side to take control of the other's way of life.

But, personally, I think Ender is missing the even-more-obvious conclusion, which is not that humanity sees itself as one community and the Little Ones as the Other, but that humanity sees itself as a bunch of communities and the Little Ones as a political football that they can cheerfully toss around in order to enable themselves to make statements about morality and virtue and protecting the weak, thus gaining credibility and public favour over their opponents.  Y'know, just like current politicians and literally every marginalised population slice (like women, POC, queer folk, people with disabilities, or some kind of impossible individual who is more than one of these things).  Ender has, for no apparent reason, concluded that people really care what happens to the Little Ones, because they are potentially a super-dangerous enemy, while also viewing them as primitive child-animals incapable of real understanding.

Ender makes a really blatant title-drop, quietly mulling over how, in his theoretical framework, Miro and Ouanda would be seen as traitors to their species.

"Renegades," he said aloud. 

"What?" said Miro.  "What did you say?" 

"Renegades. Those who have denied their own people, and claimed the enemy as their own." 

"Ah," said Miro.

The Hugo award and the Nebula, folks.  Like... both.

Ouanda objects to this, but Miro says that according to the bishop, they denied their humanity a long time ago (I legitimately have no idea what he means by that), and Ender explains that they are renegades when they treat the Little Ones like people, but when they treat them according to congressional law, they treat them like animals.

"And you?" said Miro. "Why are you a renegade?" 

"Oh, the human race kicked me out a long time ago. That's how I got to be a speaker for the dead."

I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure Ender got to be a speaker when he discovered that he hadn't actually killed every formic and decided to relay their history, and I'm pretty sure he got kicked out when he prosecuted one of his pseudonyms under the other (Andrew Wiggin used the Speaker for the Dead to explain the consequences of the work of Ender the Xenocide).  I'm reminded that Ender was actually prosecuted by proxy, right after the war, and was righteously acquitted.  The best way I can read this is that he thinks humanity kicked him out when they made him their general, turned him from a child into a weapon and a celebrity, untouchable by mere legal systems, which in turn necessitated that he create another larger-than-life-persona to make sure that his memory (but not him personally) suffer some conviction.  The only person who could make everyone hate Ender was Ender himself, and as soon as he realised that, he realised that he was not really human anymore, but some kind of mortal god, a force majeure.  But if that's how Card wants me to read that line, he's going to need to do a little more of the heavy lifting himself.

Next week: a brief and unnecessary interlude in the Ribeira house, and then, yes, it's finally here: plot happens.

So I read ahead for the rest of the book.  I can confirm that things actually happen from this point on, relatively consistently.  None of these things are good.  It's bad, y'all.  It is legitimately worse than I expected.  Imagine how low my expectations are after all this time.  Now consider the fact that, days later, I was still thinking of new ways in which this book had failed to meet them.  This book was a misguided idea for a short story that was over-inflated until it filled the width of a novel and still it rushed the mystery revelations in such a way that they only barely might make sense.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  We're still only in chapter fourteen.  Goggles on, people.

(Content: family dysfunction, death, suicide, colonisation.  Fun content: Ender Wiggin is ha-Satan.)


One more unnecessary roadblock in the discoveries finally happening out in the woods--we cut back to the Ribeira house, where Ela is serving dinner and enjoying the calm that comes from neither Novinha nor Miro being home, since that means she's in charge and (unlike them) she actually makes an effort to keep the younger children subdued.  Of course, since the family has been Touched By A Xenocide, they're in some kind of healing trance; Olhado and Quim are barely speaking to anyone and she only has to tell Grego off twice for tormenting Quara.  Then the meal ends and Quim settles in for the attack by accusing Olhado of teaching Ender how to spy in their files, and thus being "the devil's servant".  Olhado briefly considers launching into a full assault, but thinks he has no support in the room, and so surrenders and apologises.

"I hope," said Ela, "that you mean that you're sorry that you didn't mean to do it. I hope you aren't apologizing for helping the Speaker for the Dead."

Quim is enraged by the idea that they should help "the spy", and starts shouting, but Ela leaps up and shoves him back, keeps shoving until they run into the wall, and shouts louder:

"Mother's secrets are the cause of half the poison in this house! Mother's secrets are what's making us all sick, including her! So maybe the only way to make things right here is to steal all her secrets and get them out in the open where we can kill them!"

Well.  Let's consider this.  Reasons the Ribeira house is fucked up:

1. Abusive father (recently deceased)
2. Neglectful mother
3. Estranged eldest son who basically lives in the woods
4. Eldest daughter desperately trying to fill parental role while also solving the Science Mystery
5. Zero community support

I'm not 100% sure that's a comprehensive list, but I think that's the top five, and none of them are 'Novinha won't tell anyone what Pipo discovered about Descolada'.  Don't get me wrong; there are huge scientific issues and questions about the very purpose of the colony and the philosophy with which humanity approaches the unknown, but it's a bit monomaniacal for Ela to insist that her siblings will only learn how to not be terrible to each other if someone purges the last bit of privacy in their mother's life.  (Spoilers for next chapter, but Ender's Speaking for Marcos won't actually require any of that scientific knowledge either.)

"The only real treason is obeying Mother, because what she wants, what she has worked for all her life, is her own self-destruction and the destruction of this family."

The quantity of hatred that gets piled on Novinha for being an impulsive and irrational person (not surprising given her apparently completely neglected childhood) and the lack of responsibility put on Marcos for being physically violent and verbally abusive is just boggling.

Olhado begins to sob, as Ela has convinced him that he hasn't actually sinned, and when she looks up she sees Novinha has arrived and overheard this last rant.  Having accepted her role as Scapegoat Villain of the novel, she just says that "for all I know she might be right", dismisses everyone, and settles down on the floor to comfort Olhado for the first time in years.

We return to the forest, where it's time for Miro to tell-not-show us more about how terrifying Ender is:

Miro had expected him to be wise. He had not expected him to be so intrusive, so dangerous. Yes, he was wise, all right, he kept seeing past pretense, kept saying or doing outrageous things that were, when you thought about it, exactly right. It was as if he were so familiar with the human mind that he could see, right on your face, the desires so deep, the truths so well-disguised that you didn't even know yourself that you had them in you.

Y'all might recall that back in Ender's Game I argued that one of the biggest flaws running through the book could have been corrected if "Hyrum Graff" was actually a false identity for Mazer Rackham, who would reveal his true self to Ender when they arrived at Eros, thus giving "Graff" an actual backstory, motivations, and justification for his otherwise inexplicable fetish for neglectful and abusive training environments.  There was no good reason for those two characters to be separate.

This is as good as time as any to make my recommendation for the mistake in Speaker for the Dead that would have made it work so, so much better: Ender Wiggin shouldn't be the hero.  Ender should be, narratively speaking, the antagonist.  (As distinct from 'villain'; done properly this is the kind of story that doesn't really need a villain.)  When one is writing about magic--and let's not pretend that Ender Wiggin is not, for all narrative purposes, a wizard--it is very easy to ruin tension by using ill-defined magic to get your protagonists out of trouble, but you are always allowed to use magic, no matter how vague or unprecedented, to get your protagonists into trouble.  Ender the Xenocide, atoning priest, who comes into town and somehow learns everyone's secrets no matter how hard they try to hide them but has a thousand of his own, who sees through lies and breezes through computer security and damn near walks through walls and then drags all your secrets out for everyone to see: he's a nightmare, he's Keyser Soze, he's the devil, and in a better book he would be treated as such, and it would be the most incredible, awe-inspiring twist when the town lies in ruins at the whims of this strange ancient man's idea of truth and morality and then he suddenly seems to switch sides and help our heroes save the day, because he isn't the relatable everyman hero, the ansibles themselves are in love with him and he carries the last egg of the scourge of Earth, he's a force majeure, he's ha-Satan.

There are two core ways magic can work: you can be in on the secrets and be impressed by the performance, showmanship and wonderment and seeing the way a good magician tricks everyone into thinking they're so much more mystical than they are, or you can cheerfully decide to be an uninitiated audience member and accept the show for all the impossibility that it pretends to be.  These are both perfectly valid.  Card's mistake here is in not committing to either one, because he lets us in behind the curtain to see what Ender's secret techniques are, but instead of "I make them look over here and then I finesse the egg away here and sneak the dove out here, presto", the secret is "I snap my fingers and a dove appears because shut up", and, as far as secrets go, that's really not satisfying at all.  There's no effort, no cost, no artistry to admire; everything just happens because the story says Ender can't be stopped.  Card lets us see the inner workings of his magic and they're boring.

They come to the Little Ones' village and Miro wonders how many of the foreign technologies Ender spots: bows, pots, roots being leached of cyanide, but Ender just waits until the Little Ones bring him their copy of The Hive Queen and the Hegemon and, when asked, confirms that he wrote it.  Ouanda shows a flash of vindication at this blatant lie, because the poor girl still hasn't realised what kind of book she's in.  Human notices this, and Ender snarks that it still hasn't occurred to them that Rooter told the truth.  He's so deadpan that it finally occurs to Miro that someone who travels a lot (like a speaker) probably could skip over three thousand years realtime, and that the original Speaker would probably be very interested in sapient aliens.  They ask if Ender will bring them the hive queen, and Ender says again that he hasn't decided yet, and once again Miro begins to question whether it's possible that the formics aren't all dead.  And, of course, if these things are true, then it becomes quite likely that Rooter's tree really does talk.

The Little Ones ask what Ender wants, saying they have nothing worth trading to him, and he says he needs true stories, but he only speaks for the dead, and the Little Ones bust out what I'm going to call, on the spur of the moment, the best part of the entire book:

"We are dead! [....] We are being murdered every day. Humans are filling up all the worlds. The ships travel through the black of night from star to star to star, filling up every empty place. Here we are, on our one little world, watching the sky fill up with humans. The humans build their stupid fence to keep us out, but that is nothing. The sky is our fence!"

I'm not sure it's explained how they know this--if Miro has told them about colonisation or if they've heard about it through the hive queen--but finally the Little Ones actually get to speak for themselves about what actually concerns them, and while it doesn't particularly touch on the kinds of genocidal horrors that colonisation has meant on Earth, it's a vague gesture in that direction and at this moment that is like rain in the desert to me.

And then, because these are primitive tribals and can't be allowed to be taken seriously for too long, Human leaps up, then runs up a tree and leaps off as though trying to fly, and crashes to the ground hard enough that they briefly think he's dead.

In all the years that Miro had known the piggies, in all the years before, they had never once spoken of star travel, never once asked about it. Yet now Miro realized that all the questions they did ask were oriented toward discovering the secret of starflight.

Like, for example, that time a few chapters ago when they literally asked Miro to bring them metal so they could learn how to make the machine that drove Ender's shuttle down from orbit.  Just sayin': that's not a hard couple of dots to connect.  Arrow reports that Rooter told them the hive queen would tell them everything they need to know: "metal, fire made from rocks, houses made from black water, everything". Ender says that there are many ways to learn to fly, some better than others, and he'll only teach them the things that he knows won't destroy them, and again there's an actual good moment from the Little Ones:

"If we are ramen," shouted Human into the Speaker's face, "then it is ours to decide, not yours! And if we are varelse, then you might as well kill us all right now, the way you killed all the hive queen's sisters!"

Miro, still struggling on the path to genre savviness, wonders how they could possibly think Andrew Wiggin is "the monster Ender", but Ender just sheds tears. The Little Ones demand to know what this means, and when told it shows "pain or grief or suffering", begin to let out wails like Miro has never heard before--their own way of showing pain, because Mandachuva says he saw tears in Pipo and Libo's eyes, and Miro realises that they have only just understood that Pipo and Libo suffered when they were cut open.  Ouanda staggers away to sob, while Miro asks how it's possible that Ender is the first Speaker and also the Xenocide.  Ender says that regardless of how they're viewed, those figures were both human,and then tells the Little Ones that they aren't to blame for things they did in ignorance.  He points out as well that it's easy for humanity to love the formics, all dead, but they fear the Little Ones, and the thought that one day humanity might come to a new world and find that someone else got there first.

"We don't want to be there first," said Human. "We want to be there too."

Lines like that are really strange to reconcile with moments like those which follow--Ender agrees that it's time they tell each other everything, but then admits that he doesn't know what to ask first, and Ouanda asks what's clearly supposed to be a Wham Line sort of question, though I feel a mite cheated.

"You have no stone or metal tools," she said. "But your house is made of wood, and so are your bows and arrows."

Ender earlier noted that their weapons appeared to be fallen wood, so I've been assuming that the trees used for their house were fallen as well, and wood can be shaped by scouring or what have you, but Miro boggles that no one else has ever asked this question in fifty years.  Ender explains that humans fell and shape wood with cutting tools.

It took a moment for the Speaker's words to sink in. Then suddenly, all the piggies were on their feet. They began running around madly, purposelessly, sometimes bumping into each other or into trees for the log houses. Most of them were silent, but now and then one of them would wail, exactly as they cried out a few minutes ago.

Miro's response to the plot twist is to be quietly amazed at his failure of inquisition.  The Little Ones' response is literally to run around in a senseless mob running into objects like cartoon characters, finally showing the emotion that they've supposedly been hiding from humans since the beginning.  Card could have tried much, much harder to not be constantly hitting the racist primitive tribal tropes.  The Little Ones begin flinging themselves at Ender's feet, begging humanity not to cut down their fathers, offering themselves as sacrifices, until Ender points out that no human has ever cut down a Lusitanian tree.  Ouanda is mostly shocked at their hypocrisy, given that they carved her father open.  Ender has decided it's not time to resolve that plot point yet, and is far more curious about their carpentry techniques--they're shocked at the idea that they should "ask a brother to give himself, just so you can see it", but Leaf-Eater (who wandered off some time ago) appears and bellows orders in the Wives' Language.  Ouanda tries to translate, but all she can get is something about doing what Ender says and "all of them dying", though she assures us they're not afraid.  Miro is impressed:

"I've got to hand it to you--you've caused more excitement here in half an hour than I've seen in years of coming here."

Of course he has, Miro, you inept pseudoscientist, but half of that is because literally everything that matters in the galaxy in the last three thousand years has revolved around him and the other half is that he's the only one who seems to have noticed that once you started revealing humanity's secrets it was ridiculous to stop halfway.  Hell, Ouanda was the one who asked the Wham Question anyway.

The Little Ones gather around an ancient tree, climb up, and start singing and drumming on it with sticks.  After a few minutes it tilts and half them jump off to make sure it's falling toward the clearing.  The tree sheds its branches until it's a single straight pole, and then that topples over.  They stroke the bark until it splits open and they carry it away in large sheets (Miro's never seen them use the bark for anything, and we won't see it again either).  The ends of the fallen branches are smooth, dry, and cold.  Lastly, they swarm over the naked trunk, still singing, and trace shapes over the wood, again and again, until it splits where they touch, and they pull the trunk apart into hundreds of shapes--weapons, knives, strands to make baskets, and lastly a half-dozen poles, until the whole trunk is used.

Finally Mandachuva came to him and spoke softly. "Please," he said. "It's only right that you should sing for the brother." 

"I don't know how," said Miro, feeling helpless and afraid. 

"He gave his life," said Mandachuva, "to answer your question."

Miro at last does come forward, kneels with Human, and sings, at first hesitantly, but once he understand the point of it he grows more confident, singing thanks to the tree for its sacrifice and promising to use it for the good of the tribe, and at last repeating the same rites that he said over Libo's body.

Now, this has some emotional weight to it, and I hate to feel like I'm willfully missing the point of a story, but I can't quite get over what a bad biological plan this is.

So we're clear on this--the trees, the sapient trees that Little Ones grow into after 'death', are capable of reshaping their wood to provide tools for the tribe, that's great, but evolutionarily, why in the world would they develop so that it's all-or-nothing?  They apparently can't choose to just shed a branch, or only part of their trunk, or else they would have done so just to demonstrate the principle to Miro.  Given what we'll learn in a couple of chapters (that the trees are the fertile males) that shooting themselves in the foot, genetically.  My first thought was that it was sort of like if the rule for organ donors was "If we're taking one kidney out, we may as well chop-shop the rest of you too", but in this case it's a little more like if humans realised we could make rope out of our hair but evolved so that the only way we could get our hair was to collapse into a pile of cold cuts.  It's just a bad idea on a variety of levels.

And given that the trees can reshape their wood without killing themselves (again, this is made explicit in later chapters), I'm a bit confused as to why they would fell trees to make their houses rather than have the living trees morph and weave themselves together to form a house shape without--and this is important--committing suicide for the sake of a breakfast nook.

Next week: Ender speaks the death of Marcos Ribeira and reveals everything to everyone.  I'm sure he'll be very sensitive to others' feeling and not just go for shock value.  (Pfffbhahahahaaaa.)

I'm tackling this chapter slightly out of order, because for some inconceivable reason Card didn't lay out his chapters with the explicit intent of helping a blogger dissect them on the internet thirty years later.  This is a big one (thirty pages) and Ender's monologue makes up half of it, but it's the middle half.  So I'm going to tackle all of that this week, and then go back and do the first quarter and the last quarter next week.  The only thing you really need to know going in is that all of the most important cardboard cutouts authority figures prod each other into going to the Speaking even if they don't want to accidentally legitimise the devil agnostic terrorist.

(Content: ableism, victim blaming, family violence, abuse apologetics and statistics. Fun content: the Bishop, Fred Clark, and speechwriting tips from April Ludgate.)


This is it: the Speaking of the death of Marcos Ribeira; the pivotal event that must, in its way, stand as the defence of this whole book.  This is the sole responsibility of a speaker, the demonstration of Ender's mastery of human understanding, and the most complete account we have of what it means, in Ender's estimation, to tell the whole truth about someone who can no longer speak for themselves.  We have been told, more than once, that Ender does that which seems outrageous but is ultimately right.

People show up to hear him based on the compelling power of rumour, because they're all really superstitious:

So word spread that Marcão's little girl Quara, who had been silent since her father died, was now so talkative that it got her in trouble in school. And Olhado, that ill-mannered boy with the repulsive metal eyes, it was said that he suddenly seemed cheerful and excited. Perhaps manic. Perhaps possessed. Rumors began to imply that somehow the Speaker had a healing touch, that he had the evil eye, that his blessing made you whole, his curses could kill you, his words could charm you into obedience.

Card explains that this is partly the Bishop's fault, because he made Ender sound like the devil's personal servant, and the villagers are less interested in good versus evil than they are in strong versus weak (and God is mighty and therefore scary) so checking out what this supposed miracle-worker is offering.  Space-faring colonists with some of the most brilliant scientists ever, almost four thousand years in our future, are comparison-shopping Satanism on the basis of what they heard down at the pub.

They gather in the praça, where the mayor has provided Ender with the Legally Mandatory Microphone.  We get a roll call indicating that every named human on the planet is there, including Conceição (Pipo's widow), Bruxinha (Libo's widow), and, spurring a flurry of whispers, THE BISHOP in simple priestly robes rather than his fanciest vestments.  They start wondering if he's going to engage Ender in divine battle like an outtake from St John's Apocalypse, which would frankly be twelve million times better than what's actually going to happen.

Ender shows up, looking "ghostly" because he's so white in a huge crowd of black people.  He starts by listing Marcos' "official data. Born 1929. Died 1970. Worked in the steel foundry. Perfect safety record. Never arrested. A wife, six children. A model citizen, because he never did anything bad enough to go on the public record." I seriously question the claim that 'not arrested' is the sole criterion for considering somebody a model citizen. If you're not an avid reader of Fred Clark, this is as good as time as any to read his post on "God's battered wife", a character (in books which outdo even these for awfulness) who blames herself for forcing God to smite her, and who, in that world's bizarre theology, managed "to act like a good person without actually being a good person".

Throughout this passage, Card rejects the 'show, don't tell' dichotomy and creates a third malformed option, wherein he tells by showing--members of the audience analyse Ender's speech as he goes, to explain to us why it works.  For example, Ender doesn't Orate, preferring a conversational tone: "Only a few of them noticed that its very simplicity made his voice, his speech utterly believable. He wasn't telling the Truth, with trumpets; he was telling the truth, the story that you wouldn't think to doubt because it's taken for granted." (If this does need to be said outright, it's a rare moment when I think it would work better in Ender's own thoughts, reminding himself to keep a casual voice in hopes of compelling them, showing his strategy rather than stating its effects.)

Ender goes on about the strength of Big Marcos, Marcão, whose might was so important in manual work in the foundry, where people's lives depended on him.  Marcos' colleagues nod sagely to each other:

They had all bragged to each other that they'd never talk to the framling atheist. Obviously one of them had, but now it felt good that the Speaker got it right, that he understood what they remembered of Marcão. Every one of them wished that he had been the one to tel about Marcão to the Speaker. They did not guess that the Speaker had not even tried to talk to them. After all these years, there were many things that Andrew Wiggin knew without asking.

Oh my goddamn stars and fucking garters. Ender, without the slightest information beyond 'Marcos was a burly steelworker', has correctly guessed the entirety of his co-workers' perceptions of his entire twenty-year career.  Not one of them is like "Okay, yeah, he was a competent assembly-line worker but he was a terrible conversationalist, and he skewed the whole the team, because I once tried to get the guys to confront him about beating his wife and they were like 'mind your own business' and then I got passed over for a promotion because they thought I didn't have their backs in case word ever got out that their home lives weren't all rainbows and unicorn giggles".  Nope.  People aren't that complex.  People don't have histories and independent thought and secret judgments like that; those are for main characters.  Factory workers who aren't plot-relevant enough to have names form a two-sentence opinion of a man and then it remains immutable for decades.

Then Ender comes to Marcos' third name, Cão, Dog, for when he'd been beating his wife bloody.  The audience silently snarks at Ender for his lack of decorum in bringing this up, but they know they've all said the same in private. Ender goes on that none of them liked Novinha, but "she was smaller than he was, and she was the mother of his children, and when he beat her he deserved the name of Cão", as if her height or their lack of children might have excused it?  Novinha is right there in the crowd, of course, and people glance her way with a mix of fear and pity. (Why do they fear her? She has no power over them, and we're told that they care much more about power than good or evil; the worst she can do is make them feel guilty by saying exactly what Ender is already saying.)

Ender goes on about how Marcos had no friends, even in the bars, how he was always surly and short-tempered whether he was sober or about to pass out, had no respect from anyone as soon as he stepped out of the foundry, was "hardly a man at all", but they're all genre-savvy enough to realise that Ender is about to turn on them, because someone who is 'hardly a man' is still a man.  The other foundry-workers catch on first, thinking in unison as befits their interchangeable NPC status: "We should not have ignored him as we did. If he had worth inside the foundry, then perhaps we should have valued him outside, too."  Yeah, that's definitely where your priorities were skewed.  Well done, detectives.

Ender says they called him Cão "long before he earned it", when he eleven years old and already two metres tall, and they called him names because his size made them "ashamed" and "helpless", which are very weird reactions that, as an unpopular and very tall child, I don't recall ever having aimed at me by anyone. Dom Cristão (Ye Must Love Reapers) the COTMOC remarks quietly that "They came for gossip, and he gives them responsibility", in case readers are just as stupefied as Card's cast.

Ender goes on about bullies, about how they attacked young Marcos "because as big as he is, you can make him do things", and at last I see some justification for this atrocity, because in the same way that Ender invented the notion of Novinha and fell in love with her before they met, he's invented his own Marcos as well, and Ender hates bullying* and sympathises with the child who can't help being so far above his classmates that it makes them uncomfortable.  Ender is gracious, of course, and says that children can't be blamed for being "cruel without knowing better", which sounds like a lot of 'boys will be boys' rubbish that deflects all responsibility from parents or from children (in a series with a running theme that children are full people with complete and complex emotions and psychologies).

Ender seems to say that "You called him, a dog, and so he became one", and this is a feint, but first we get the less-genre-savvy plebes giving what Card considers to be the obvious and inadequate responses: Ela is furious that Ender is excusing her father's brutality, and THE BISHOP thinks to himself that people must be held responsible for their own sins or they can never really repent.  Ender strikes again:

"Your torments didn't make him violent--they made him sullen. And when you grew out of tormenting him, he grew out of hating you. He wasn't one to bear a grudge. His anger cooled and turned into suspicion. [....] So how did he become the cruel man you knew him to be? Think a moment. Who was it who tasted his cruelty? His wife. His children. Some people beat their wife and children because they lust for power, but are too weak or stupid to win power in the world [....] but Marcos Ribeira wasn't one of them. Think a moment. Did you ever hear of him striking his children? Ever? You who worked with him--did he ever try to force his will on you? [....] Marcão was not a weak and evil man. He was a strong man. He didn't want power. He wanted love. Not control. Loyalty."

It seems redundant, but:

Clearly, Ender argues, if Marcos only beat his wife, it wasn't proof of a failure of character, because he'd have tried to subjugate and hurt everyone else around him, too.  He must have a strong man who wanted love, and had some other reason for constantly abusing Novinha!  I'm struggling to find the words.  Is it inconceivable to everyone present that Marcos was a thoughtful abuser who beat his wife because it made him feel strong and he knew that she was the one victim no one would care enough about to save?  Because that's literally what happened: no one intervened, because it was only Novinha, not their sweet innocent children.  Abusers aren't uniformly compelled to try to dominate everyone they meet.  Ender is one step away from saying "But look at all the people the defendant didn't murder! Clearly killing that one person would have been out of character for him and so we mustn't jump to conclusions!"

There's a reason that vulnerable populations have higher rates of every kind of abuse: because if the victim is old, or not white, or queer, or disabled, or especially a woman, and god forbid you're more than one of those things, you have a lot less power to fight back, because most people won't care that much.  It's easier for abusers to get away with it, and people are so busy talking about how abusers must be these 'out of control' monsters that they don't dare imagine that they could be cautious, contemplative folks who pick their victims carefully, until they find the right vulnerable target.  They create a situation where people are more willing to say that there must be extenuating circumstances, that we need the whole story.  Which is exactly what Ender is supposedly giving us.  Real abuse, he assures us, would be the act of a senseless monster, and Marcos isn't a monster, so this must be something else.

Ender recounts the full story of how bullies ganged up on twelve-year-old Marcos one day, and when he struck back, they claimed he had attacked unprovoked, and young Novinha, the sole witness, gave the testimony that acquitted him  (I don't know how Ender got this story; he doesn't seem to have asked anyone for the details and Jane isn't at his beck anymore.)  Grego, in the audience, cheers at the story of his mother saving his father.  Ender explains that in Novinha's mind, she wasn't helping Marcos, but undermining the other children she disliked; in Marcos' mind, she had been kind to him, and he worshipped her for six years before marrying her.  He pauses to regroup before his second volley of victim-blaming:

"And why did she endure it, this strong-willed, brilliant woman? She could have stopped the marriage at any moment. The Church may not allow divorce, but there's always desquite, and she wouldn't be the first person in Milagre to quit her husband. She could have taken her suffering children and left him. But she stayed."

Why does she stay? Why does she stay? Why does she stay? Why does she stay?  There are a lot of answers to that question, because people won't stop asking it, because they don't want any answer except the one they've already got, which is that if she stays, it's her own fault.  And that's basically what Ender is going to say, but first he explains why it's her fault: she needed a cover, Marcos was dying, and after the Descolada ended Novinha was the only one left who knew.

"I saw the genetic scans. Marcos Maria Ribeira never fathered a child. His wife had children, but they were not his, and he knew it, and she knew he knew it. It was part of the bargain that they made when they got married."

Quim leaps up and threatens Ender for calling his mother a whore, and then for some reason falters when he realises that he said 'whore' and Ender didn't.  He demands that Novinha refute this, but she doesn't, and he thinks about how adulterers are tortured in hell for mocking creation.  He swears at her in Portuguese that Google Translate isn't quite equipped to handle (or Card's grammar is patchy) but the essence of it is 'Who'd you fuck to make me?' Novinha holds Olhado back from attacking his brother, and the crowd gasps but stays in fascination--the narration assures us that if she denied Ender's accusation, they would have mobbed him on the spot, but since she didn't, they just want the rest of the tabloid details.

Ender explains what he knows about why Novinha blamed herself for Pipo's death (her mysterious files on the Descolada), and how cartoonish galactic law would give her husband access to those files, meaning she could never marry her true love Libo, but she cut a deal with Marcos that Libo would father all her children.  (No evidence given that they actually hashed this deal out; it appears to be another of Ender's magical intuitions.)  Bruxinha curses Ender and three of her daughters help her away from the praça, including Ouanda.  Ender, again with no evidence that I'm aware of, explains that Libo tried to resist, as did Novinha, and they might spend years shunning each other before they were overwhelmed with the need to bang again.

"They never pretended there was anything good about what they were doing. They just couldn't live for long without it."

THE BISHOP silently observes that Ender is "giving her a gift", telling her not to blame herself for Libo's failures of fidelity.  Much of the crowd is now weeping, because as much as they already disliked Novinha, they don't like finding out that Libo had a twenty-year affair.  This might be the least-terrible bit of the speech, acknowledging to some minor degree that men are actually responsible for their commitments and not purely at the mercy of relentless Other Women.

Ender asserts that Marcos married Novinha partly for the social acceptance of having a proper family but mostly out of love:

"He never really hoped that she would love him the way he loved her, because he worshipped her, she was a goddess, and he knew that he was diseased, filth, an animal to be despised. He knew she could not worship him, or even love him. He hoped that she might someday feel some affection. That she might feel some--loyalty. [....] He never broke his promise to Novinha. Didn't he deserve something from her? At times it was more than he could bear. She was no goddess. Her children were all bastards."

I really hope we're not supposed to take this as an unusual situation, instead of the painfully common situation (both at the general level and in more targeted arrangements) that boils down to one of the best-known psychological phenomena in the world.

We cut to Miro, who's barely paying attention anymore because he's reeling from learning that Ouanda is his sister, and taking the opportunity to tragically-fanboy at Ender.  We get a summary of what this book wants to be and should have been, where Ender is the antagonist instead of Our Hero:

How could he have known that instead of a benevolent priest of a humanist religion he would get the original Speaker himself, with his penetrating mind and far too perfect understanding? He could not have known that beneath that empathic mask would be hiding Ender the destroyer, the mythic Lucifer of mankind's greatest crime, determined to live up to his name, making a mockery of the life work of Pipo, Libo, Ouanda, and Miro himself by seeing in a single hour with the piggies what all the others had failed in almost fifty years to see, and then riving Ouanda from him with a single, merciless stroke from the blade of truth; that was the voice that Miro heard, the only certainty left to him, that relentless terrible voice. Miro clung to the sound of it, trying to hate it, yet failing because he knew, could not deceive himself, he knew that Ender was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was illusion, and the illusion had to die. [....] Somehow this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn't blind his eyes or drive him mad. I must listen to this voice and let its power come to me so I, too, can stare at the light and not die.

There's something tragic about Orson Scott Card, to have skill enough to turn phrases like that, and to use that gift for evil.

Ender goes on to say that Novinha knew "what she was", knew she was hurting all the people around her, and so she "endured, even invited" abuse from her husband, because "no matter how much Marcão might hate her, she hated herself much more". The Bishop nods sagely and thinks that while these are secrets that he thinks should have been spoken in private, he can see how it's affected the whole community to finally understand the story that they have been half-involved in for decades.  (Note that we will literally never hear about any beneficial consequences of this enlightenment; we don't even get that thing from Ender's Game where we're told that it 'makes them wise' and causes them to re-evaluate their own relationships.  That's not the point of this story.  They're here to glorify Ender, not to gain from him.)

Ender finishes by saying that everyone in the story suffered and sacrificed, that everyone in Milagre is culpable for causing some part of the pain.

"But remember this: Marcão's life was tragic and cruel, but he could have ended his bargain with Novinha at any time. He chose to stay. He must have found some joy in it."

No, Ender, that is stupid and wrong and I can't actually be bothered to dignify something so blatantly foolish with a comprehensive response.

"And Novinha [...] has also borne her punishment. [...] If you're inclined to think she might deserve some petty cruelty at your hands, keep this in mind: she suffered everything, did all this for one purpose: to keep the piggies from killing Libo." 

The words left ashes in their hearts.

---

*Unless it's electronic and vaguely homophobic.**
**Or committed against a girl who disrespected her commander.***
***Or he needs to put a smart brat in his place on the first day after singling him out unprovoked as an exercise in team spirit and hostile mentorship.****
****Actually, screw it, Ender is blatantly in favour of bullying as long as he likes the perpetrator.

It's been a week and still I am continually struck by new layers or wrong and terrible in Ender's Speaking.  If, perchance, you are an avid reader but you haven't delved into all the comments on last Sunday's post, enrich yourself by doing so now, because this book is fractally bad and its depths are worth exploring.  (I'll also take a moment to thank all my readers, commenters and silent alike.  Y'all provide me with the drive to keep at this.)  It got to the point where I grabbed Ender's Shadow off the shelf and started flipping through it again, because Shadow has always been my favourite and I've always planned to proceed to it after Speaker for the sake of ending on a high note, but... Card's work is so wretched that I'm struggling with how much more time I want to spend with his creations.  Shadow benefits enormously from its unreliable narrator, because that means that when Bean is being a jackass, the odds are that we're supposed to judge him harshly for it, and when he thinks someone is useless, odds are that he's going to recant later when he grasps their value.  On the other hand, Card has continually proven unworthy of the benefit of the doubt.  A matter to keep considering.

"I was very young when I was appointed to be Governor of the new Lusitania Colony. [Young?  I am shocked.] It was a great honor to be chosen, a great trust [....] What the committee apparently overlooked was the fact that I was already suspicious, deceptive, and chauvinistic." 

"These are virtues of yours that we have all come to admire," said Bishop Peregrino. 

Bosquinha smiled. "My chauvinism meant that as soon as Lusitania Colony was mine, I became more loyal to the interests of Lusitania than to the interests of the Hundred Worlds or Starways Congress. [....] We are not a colony [...] We are an experiment. I examined our charter and license and all the Congressional Orders pertaining to us, and I discovered that the normal privacy laws did not apply to us."

You guys, I laughed so hard when I read this the first time.  Normal privacy laws?!  All one-and-a-half of them?  The only thing that surprises me about privacy laws in this universe is that there isn't an executive mandate requiring all teenagers' journals to be broadcast over billboards in a constant stream of awkward earnestness.  Also, it hadn't occurred to me until now, but I note that Lusitania has no democracy whatsoever.  The GoverMayor was appointed by congress and the bureaucracy is run by the church.  This system is begging to fill with corruption until it's pouring out of every window.

The Mayor went on to put a program in place to monitor intrusions, of which she says there have been few over the years, except some predictable spying after Pipo and Libo's deaths.  (Hey, does this mean that Congress grabbed the Descolada files after all, in spite of Novinha's protections, and they've got secret labs around the galaxy researching this doom plague under maximum classification?  Oh, look, it's another premise that would be way more exciting than anything else going on right now: the quest to find the government's labs before someone weaponises this wicked alien DNA-eater.)  The other two incidents have been recent, starting three days earlier:

"When the Speaker for the Dead arrived," said Bishop Peregrino. 

Bosquinha was amused that the Bishop obviously regarded the Speaker's arrival as such a landmark date that he instantly made such a connection.

Ender's the first outsider to come to the colony in a century and the Bishop publicly declared that he is the servant of the devil; of course he considers it a landmark date.  What the hell else could this possibly mean?  Does the privacy override mean that Bosquina has seen his STAY OUT--BISHOPS ONLY folders where he's photoshopped Ender's face over Jesus and scrawled a big heart with an arrow through it around the border?

There have been two scans since then.  One was obviously Jane, browsing everything relate to the xenologers and xenobiologists at blitzing speed, walking through all security protocols like nothing.  They mull what congressional pull Ender might have.

Dom Crisão nodded wisely. "San Angelo once wrote--in his private journals, which no one but the Children of the Mind ever read--" 

The Bishop turned on him with glee. "So the Children of the Mind do have secret writings of San Angelo!" 

"Not secret," said Dona Cristã. "Merely boring. Anyone can read the journals, but we're the only ones who bother."

I feel like a solid 60% of this book could be summed up with 'fucking Catholics, amirite?' and Card would still have made about the same quality argument.

"What he wrote," said Dom Cristão, "was that Speaker Andrew is older than we know. Older than Starways Congress, and in his own way perhaps more powerful." 

Bishop Peregrino snorted. "He's  boy. Can't be forty years old yet."

I am questioning all of the life choices that led to me reading this book.  Also, oh my god, there has been a religious order of monks reading about the myth of the ancient Speaker Andrew for two thousand years and none of them have bothered conducting the research that it would take to find out that he's Ender Wiggin, which Plikt managed to do in four years based on a hunch while maintaining a full time job as a grad student.

The Mayor calls them out on their derails and explains that there's a scan happening at that very moment, apparently copying all Lusitanian files offworld and priming to delete everything on the colony as soon as it's done.  The Bishop sputters about how this is something Congress would do to worlds "in rebellion", and I wonder what that even means in a galaxy where communications are instant, ships take decades to travel between worlds, and a single yacht with a double-barrelled raygun can destroy a planet in five seconds.  Do they refuse to pay taxes?  What possible use could there be for interplanetary taxes?

The COTMOCs already noticed the intrusion, transferred all their records to other COTMOC monasteries "at great expense" (how, how does the ansible cost anything and how do they get the money to pay for it), but they realise that Congress will probably not allow a digital restoration, so they're now furiously printing hardcopies of the most important stuff.  I wonder what that is, on this tiny single-purpose colony.  We'll never find out, obviously.  The Bishop is furious that he wasn't informed and so couldn't start printing things himself, but the Mayor insists:

"[...] even if we began this morning, when the intrusion started, we could not have printed out more than a hundredth of one percent of the files that we access every day."

What in blazes are they doing on this planet?!  My day job involves cross-comparisons of documentation relating to government programs totalling millions of dollars of resources in action and I could print out all the documents I need to access in the average month in, at best, a morning.  I know printer technology has advanced a lot in the thirty years since this book was published, but these people are three or four millennia ahead of us.

Bosquinha noticed something else important: Ender is invisible; he has no files in Lusitanian memory and so would be immune to congressional action.  The Bishop furiously demands if they're suggesting they email Ender all of their files, and the Mayor says she's already done so:

"It was a high priority transfer, at local speeds, so it runs much faster than the Congressional copying. I am offering you a chance to make a similar transfer, using my highest priority so that it takes precedence over all other local computer usage."

What exactly does "local speeds" mean when interplanetary computer communications are literally instantaneous?  Is it a bandwidth thing?  But they've already said that Ender's files aren't part of Lusitanian memory, so must that not mean that they aren't local and they still have to be beamed offworld?  Or does she just mean that Jane moves all his files to wherever he is but keeps them invisible in local memory?  I'm just saying, Doctor Who has more robust explanations of computer science, and they have clockwork robots.

Reaper excitedly accepts and Harrow sets about queuing emails up via the Mayor's login on the Bishop's terminal, and I'm briefly reminded of the many Dramatic Conference Calls of the Left Behind novels.  Telecommunications are the stuff of real narrative action.  The Bishop also accepts and snarks at anyone who thought that he would put his pride over taking "the only way God has opened for us to preserve the vital records of the Church", so I guess this is the turning point Jane was aiming for where everyone bands together against evil congress, and we realise the Bishop (who keeps leatherbound copies of the Bible so congress can never steal the word of God from him) is actually not necessarily such a bad guy after all.

He smiled. Maliciously, of course.

Enough of this scene.  There's more dramatic organising and prioritising of spreadsheets, then the Mayor mentions that Ender plans to speak Marcos' death that evening, in just a few minutes.  Reaper says he wants to hear the man who spoke San Angelo's death, and the Bishop snarks that he'll send a representative (though as we know from last week he'll actually show up in person).  They leave, and the Mayor, walking alone, wonders what Miro and Ouanda must have done to trigger this kind of action.  She's sharp enough to realise that it has to have been their doing (she sadly misses the possibility that it's a flailing attempt to capture Ender now that he's been lured into a dead end*) but she can't imagine what they've done.

It was a very good thing that governments under the Starways Code were forbidden to own any instruments of punishment that might be used for torture. For the first time in her life, Bosquinha felt such fury that she might use such instruments, if she had them.

Moral response: you haven't even asked them yet woman why are you thinking about torture before you've even had a chance to say 'we're in trouble what have you done' you are not fit to lead a samba let alone a colony.

Practical response: Mayor, I don't know if anyone's told you, but your entire village is surrounded by a fence that projects some kind of electromagnetic agony field.  You literally live inside an instrument "that might be used for torture".

Speaking of torture and speaking, next is the part where Ender forces the entire colony listen to him be terrible for fifteen pages.  Skipping ahead:


In the aftermath of Ender's echoing jackwagonry, Novinha's children cluster around her (Olhado, Ela, Quara, and Grego wailing that "all my papas are dead").

Ender stood behind the platform, looking at Novinha's family, wishing he could do something to ease their pain. There was always pain after a speaking, because a speaker for the dead did nothing to soften the truth.

Don't blame him; he's just being honest!

Ender knew from the faces that looked up at him as he spoke that he had caused great pain today. He had felt it all himself, as if they had passed their suffering to him.

You know, as much as I love the X-Wing series and the Thrawn books and especially Traitor, I'm generally pretty critical of the Star Wars novels, especially the later series, especially Legacy of the Force, which took everything brilliant about Traitor and burned it down out of panic and reactionary cries for simplistic, objective moral binarism.  Traitor made the New Jedi Order salvageable, and Legacy of the Force made made it irredeemable again.  But even then, in the midst of ruining all that prior authors had earned, there was something they did right: there was a character who thought that he was so empathetic, that he felt other people's pain so intensely, that he was allowed to inflict harm on the innocent and still be the hero.  And that guy was the evil wretch who almost destroyed galactic civilisation, moping all the way about how hard it was and how much he suffered when he hurt people.  The worst dross of Star Wars pulp novels has a sturdier and more nuanced moral core than this award-winning classic.

What I'm saying, Ender, is that if they had "passed their suffering" to you, they wouldn't be getting crushed by it right now.  What you're feeling is what normal humans call 'compassion', and it means nothing unless it drives you to action.

The Mayor comes to meet him, "extremely upset, barely under control at all", to report that his starship has been commandeered by Congress.  Ender immediately guesses that Congress is responding to something Miro and Ouanda have done, and says he won't let them go.

"Let me tell you why you will let them go, why we'll all let them go to stand trial. Because Congress has stripped our files. The computer memory is empty except for the most rudimentary programs that control our power supply, our water, our sewer. Tomorrow now work can be done because we haven't enough power to run any of the factories, to work in the mines, to power the tractors. I have been removed from office. I am now nothing more than the deputy chief of police, to see that the directives of the Lusitanian Evacuation Committee are carried out."

Not to miss the point, but shouldn't the actual chief of police be involved in this conversation as well?  Or, given how excellently they apparently enforce the law on this planet and conduct investigations, is the chief of police's schedule full because the chief is a burlap sack full of inedible grains wearing a cowboy hat and a monocle?

Ender is a bit surprised at the evacuation, and the Mayor explains that the colony is being revoked, and I can't tell if anyone remembers that it'll probably take thirty years or more for ships to arrive (unless Trondheim just happens to have ships on hand to move a few thousand people and their stuff).  Apparently once Miro and Ouanda are en route to Trondheim, Congress will restore access to their necessities.  Ender cracks up hearing that they saved their key files by emailing them to him.  He suggests that, the instant they restore their files from his access, they cut off the ansibles.

"Then we really would be in rebellion. And for what?" 

"For the chance to make Lusitania the best and most important of the Hundred Worlds. [....] Please,this place is too important for the chance to be missed." 

"The chance for what?" 

"To undo what Ender did in the Xenocide three thousand years ago."

'Undo' will remain an overly strong word until such time as Ender learns how to literally resurrect the dead queens.  There's a lot else to say here, but I've said all of it long ago when first asking why Ender didn't just take the hive queen away to an uninhabited planet far from human cities or any other creatures.  The Mayor agrees to try to convince the COTMOCs and the Bishop to properly rebel, and runs off.  Then, briefly, Jane:

"Don't let them sever the ansible connection. [....] I can make them think you've cut off your ansible, but if you really do it then I won't be able to help you."

Ender first accuses her of setting all this in motion, then starts trying to apologise for cutting her off, promising to never do it again, but she doesn't speak again.  He thinks it's enough to know she's still there, still listening.

Ender was surprised to find tears on his cheeks. Tears of relief, he decided. Catharsis. A speaking, a crisis, people's lives in tatters, the future of the colony in doubt. And I cry in relief because an overblown computer program is speaking to me again.

Huh, yeah.  That's true, Ender.  It's almost as if other people's enormous pain doesn't actually impact you half as much as you like to tell yourself it does, but you're extremely concerned with whether special individuals still think you're the most important being in the galaxy.  How curious and inexplicable.

Ela is waiting for Ender in his shack.  She's predictably shocked; she thought she had guessed all of her mother's important secrets.  She's especially pained for Miro and Ouanda; Ender says the cruelty was their not knowing for so long, and now they can solve it themselves; Ela grimly suggests that, as an even worse sequel to their mother, her brother will secretly bang his half-sister for the rest of their lives.

Ender asks for help, saying he needs to know immediately how the Descolada works, and so needs Ela to convince Novinha to help him.  He demonstrates that Congress has enacted a computer lockdown, reveals the charges against Miro and Ouanda, and his plan for rebellion.  Though at first Ela said that Novinha wouldn't speak to him, she assures Ender that, for her children, for Miro, she would in fact do anything.

For a moment she sat still. Then a synapse connected somewhere, and she stood up and hurried toward the door. 

She stopped. She came back, embraced him, kissed him on the cheek. "I'm glad you told it all," she said. "I'm glad to know it." 

He kissed her forehead and sent her on her way.

I prefer to think that Ela realised that she had dropped character for a moment and so had to quickly recover by acting like she had, as usual, instantly forgiven him and has no plans to extract recompense for his cruelty.  Ender then flops on his bed and thinks about how he would trade Novinha all her pain in exchange for a child who trusted him as much as Ela trusts her mother to do the right thing.  Ender's making a powerful bid to have his signature move changed from 'Murder everyone who displeases me' to 'Wallow in how awesome I am because I know how much other people overestimate the significance of their pain'.

Next week: Literally everyone forgets how fences work.

---
*Oh my god, how great would it be if the Little Ones were actually genetically-engineered and everything on Lusitania was actually a century-long hoax intended to trap the invisible untouchable vagabond Xenocide?  Put him on a planet without the manufacturing capacity to build starships, infect it with a plague that means no one can ever leave lest they kill whole worlds, cut off its ansibles for rebelling, and that goddamn Speaker for the Dead is safely defused with the full support of the general public.

It's so disorienting to have things actually happening in the latter half of the book.  Card mentions in the introduction that his original vision for the novel began with the Speaker arriving to speak Marcos' quite normal non-mysterious death, ordinary Tuesday.  Kinda shows; all the plot is on this end.

(Content: death, violent imagery, victim blaming.  Fun content: depends how into religious doctrine you are.)


This chapter opens with Bible AU fanfic.  Specifically, it's about John 8:1-11, 'let the one without sin cast the first stone', etc, and it has an interestingly controversial history about whether it's 'real' gospel or not.  You can pick your favourite version of the Bible from a drop-down menu on that site, but here, in Ye Must Love Reapers' translation of San Angelo's writings about Ender's fanfic, we get two different parables about how the rabbi (explicitly not Jesus) reacts.

He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I am his loyal servant." 

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

This interpretation doesn't work for me--the rabbi is corrupt, and he argues for the woman to be spared out of mercy, but it wasn't the rabbi's corruption that actually saved her; it was the decision of the crowd based on their agreement with the philosophy that the rabbi suggested.  There's exactly one corrupt person in the community as described, and his power is voluntary.

In the second take, the rabbi waits for everyone else to drop their stones, then grabs one and murders the woman himself.

"Nor am I without sin," he says to the people. "But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it." 

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

Again, we have this confusion between 'community' and 'rabbi'.  The rest of the crowd was completely willing to relent, but the rabbi took sole responsibility as judge/jury/executioner.  This only makes sense in Card's world, where the only people who actually do anything and thus count as 'community' are the protagonists, and everyone else is furniture.

San Angelo concludes by talking about how this illustrates Jesus' daring optimism (expecting people to show mercy while preserving the law') and I wonder just how much harder Card can push the Ender-is-Messiah button.

We catch up with Miro doing a Walk of Despondency because his girlfriend is his sister, his father wasn't his father, his boss was his father, and the Little Ones are Space Dryads.  Hell of a day.  There's some casual sex-shaming when he wonders if Libo and Novinha hooked up inside the Xenobiologist's Station, or "was it more discreet, rutting in the grass like hogs on the fazendas?"  Stay classy, Miro.  He arrives at the gate in the village fence and makes the eminently sensible decision to deal with his pain by living in the woods forever.  (Not that I haven't considered that on long days myself.)

He laid his right hand on the identification box and reached out his left to pull the gate. For a split second he didn't realize what was happening. Then his hand felt like it was on fire, like it was being cut off with a rusty saw, he shouted and pulled his left hand away from the gate. Never since the gate was built had it stayed hot after the box was touched by the Zenador's hand.

The gate then informs him that his authority has been revoked, and he and Ouanda are to hand themselves over to the mayor and be shipped to Trondheim to stand trial.  He panic-mopes that no one will be able to tell the Little Ones what's happened, about how every trace of the colony will be destroyed, instinctively grabs for the gate and gets zapped again.  He waves, hoping to catch the attention of a Little One, but he expects the mayor to arrive shortly since the gate is apparently under observation.  (It isn't.  Their concepts of privacy are so weird.)  Miro starts walking beside the fence and hooting, the sound that he and Ouanda use to call each other in the forest (you remember all the times they've done that before this exact moment, right? Nah) and hoping that it will summon one of the Little Ones out of the woods, even though he's apparently only ever used it to call Ouanda and specifically not one of the Little Ones.  I don't even know.

In THE BISHOP's office, Quim is petulantly receiving the we're-not-having-a-witch-hunt-for-your-mother lecture.  He asserts that Ender is indeed the devil and he's never going home, and when the Bishop points out that Jesus forgave everyone and we can't all have the Blessed Virgin for our moms, Quim similarly tries to cast Catholicism and speaking as inherently opposed:

"Has the church made way here for the speakers for the dead? Should we tear down the Cathedral and use the stones to make an amphitheater where all our dead can be slandered before we lay them in the ground?"

The Bishop shuts him down, puts forth the more reasonable suggestion that Ender should have only told the people personaly involved what he knew and let them decide for themselves what to do.  Quim is unmoved by the evidence that his mother loves him, but the Bishop points out that under Catholic doctrine, if she had confessed, she would have been completely forgiven without ever telling anyone else the truth, and then shuffles Quim off to pray for forgiveness for not showing forgiveness.

For a science fiction classic about an atheist hero relating to an alien species whose 'religion' is scientifically accurate, I don't think this book could possibly spend more time talking about comparative religion.

The Bishop's secretary lets Ender in, and when the Bishop doesn't rise to meet him, Ender kneels and waits.  Eventually the Bishop approaches, holds out his hand for a ring kiss, but Ender doesn't move and eventually the Bishop asks if he's being mocked.  Ender relates that bit of backstory about his parents being "a closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon", which the Bishop finds way too convenient.  He also does the math right quick and determines that the last time it was forbidden to be Catholic anywhere in the galaxy was pre-galactic-colonisation Earth, three millennia earlier, and determines that this means Ender was a Third.  I've increasingly liked the Bishop over the last chapter (apparently the Battle School rules about horrendous adversity magically transforming you into a better person still hold true), but this just feels like extra-gratuitous continuity in order to remind us that this book is definitely a sequel to Ender's Game.

There's more back-and-forth about what was the right thing to do and who needs blessings and when Ender found out about Miro and Ouanda's Questionable Activities (in the non-making-out, contravention-of-interstellar-law sense of the term) before the Mayor arrives, and then they both go back to being typical jackwagons.

"I've always been respectful of authority," said the Speaker. 

"You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor," the Bishop reminded him. With a smile. 

The Speaker's smile was just as chilly. "And you're the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn't talk to me."

Oh my god Ender you didn't deign to talk to them anyway you just magically intuited everything Jane hadn't gotten around to telling you.  Am I supposed to feel tension?  Because I can't say that people being snippy and giving each other refrigerated smiles is really gripping prose.  I've written scenes like that and I always get huge warning bells in my head because I get bored writing them, and if I'm bored while writing, the reader will be bored while reading.  The Bishop's power is largely by convention and Ender's power is by narrative fiat; I don't care if they like each other.

Ender says they have to wait until Novinha arrives, so we cut to Ela finding Novinha out in the grass by their house.

Her mother had not worn he hair down in many years. It looked strangely free, all the more so because Ela could see how it curled and bent where it had been so long forced into a bun. It was then that she knew that the Speaker was right. Mother would listen to his invitation. [....] Mother is glad, thought Ela, to have it known that Libo was her real husband, that Libo is my true father. Mother is glad, and so am I.

Not that literally letting one's hair down can't be a sign of relaxation and freedom from crushing secrecy, but I'm not sure what makes Ela so sure it's that, and not, say the outward sign of someone who believes they have nothing left to lose and so sees no reason to be bound by social strictures or expectations.  She's an alien biologist; she above all others on the planet has potential now to go full badass Mad Scientist.  In a more interesting book...

Novinha says yes, she'll go, and yes, she'll tell them everything she knows about the Descolada, and says that she never told Ela because Ela was doing better xenobiology on her own:

"You're my apprentice. I have complete access to your files without leaving any footprints. What kind of master would I be if I didn't watch your work?" 

"But--" 

"I also read the files you hid under Quara's name. You've never been a mother, so you didn't know that all the file activities of a child under twelve are reported to the parents every week."

So, to recap, children can hide nothing from parents, apprentices can hide nothing from masters, and Novinha spent twenty-two years trying to hide the secret of the Descolada from everyone but also approvingly watching over her daughter/apprentice as she tried to piece the genetic theory together while also forbidding her access to the Descolada files that she personally didn't fully understand anyway.  I have no adequate words.  This is just a blatant against-character retcon for the sake of making Novinha suddenly seem reasonable now that it's not important to the plot for her to be supremely irrational.

Novinha does still hate Ender and is betrayed that her children trust him so implicitly but not their own mother.  Now, I'm all on-board with hating Ender, but Novinha just admitted that she's been secretly spying on her kids and erratically denying Ela information while putting up a front of disinterest, so I don't think she should be surprised she's not everyone's closest confidante.

Ela is still totally convinced that all the pain is Novinha's fault:

"I love Libo, the way everybody in Milagre loved him. But he was willing to be a hypocrite, and so were you, and without anybody even guessing, the poison of your lies hurt us all."

We went over this a while back, but the only aspect of Libo and Novinha's secret affair that has obviously contributed to harm in the town is that Miro and Ouanda didn't know not to make out.  Everything else is directly attributable to Marcos' abuse, Novinha's neglect, and the disinterest of everyone else in the colony.  That can only be blamed on Novinha if you think that Marcos' abuse and everyone else's disinterest is directly, 100% the inevitable result of Novinha not being nice enough.

"It's easy to tell the truth," said mother softly, "when you don't love anybody." 

"Is that what you think?" said Ela. "I think I know something, Mother. I think you can't possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them. I think the Speaker loved Father. Marcão, I mean. I think he understood him and loved him before he spoke."

Our evidence for this is... look, we'll get back to that.

(Is it weird to anyone else that in the space of two hours all of Novinha's kids have stopped thinking of Marcos as their 'father'?  Libo's literal only contribution to any of them but Miro was genetic.  Sure, if they see this as a good time to reject the idea that the verbal abuser they lived with deserves any familial loyalty, they're welcome to do that, but it's hard not to see this instead as a logical offshoot of Card's obsessive fetish for genetic lines.)

But really, why should we think that Ender loved Marcos?  What did he do that demonstrated this deep and abiding compassion--explain to everyone in town that it was all Novinha's doing?  He gave them context for Marcos' death, but come on, that's the job of journalists and biographers and no one says that their jobs are driven by an all-encompassing love.  The things Ender told us about Marcos were obvious, surface facts (he was burly, he was surly, he fixated on the one time a pretty girl was nice to him) that he found out with about five minutes'"research" from publicly available sources.  The secrets he revealed were scientific facts that Jane worked out in thirty seconds.  None of this required a special love.  If this is going to be Card's core thesis, he's going to need to justify it much more extensively.

But Novinha breaks down and embraces her daughter and swears she has always loved her, and Ela reflects on how Ender has finally erased the barriers between them.

"You're thinking about that damnable Speaker even now, aren't you?" whispered her mother. 

"So are you," Ela answered.

I imagine that's a problem a lot of people in this galaxy have during intimate moments.

(There's a very wise proverb: "The best safeword is 'as a white man I think that', because it can kill any mood.")

We'll leave off here for this week, so we won't get around to the Insurmountable Waist-High Fence until next time.

Hello and welcome to the new year!  This week we finally catch up with Ender again and it is just amazingly bad.  Also, don't miss Erika's return to Thursday posts later this week with the prologue of Lullaby!

When would-be xenologers complain that I am not getting the right sort of data from my observations of the pequeninos, I always urge them to reread the limitations placed upon me by law.  I am permitted to bring no more than one assistant on field visits; I may not ask questions that might reveal human expectations, lest they try to imitate us; I may not volunteer information to elicit a parallel response; I may not stay with them more than four hours at a time; except for my clothing, I may not use any products of technology in their presence, which includes cameras, recorders, computers, or even a manufactured pen to write on manufactured paper; I may not even observe them unawares.

The specification of 'manufactured' is kind of interesting to me, since it seems to imply that if he were able to craft some kind of makeshift pen and paper those would be allowed.  Surely the greater concern is that they not introduce written language if the Little Ones have no such concept?

But my main protest here is tricky, because it's a clash of reality-versus-story, a bit like people complaining that Frodo doesn't just leap on Gwaihir's back and fly all the way to Mordor to throw the Ring into the Cracks from half a league up.  The in-universe reason is that the skies of Mordor aren't safe and they'd lose all hope of stealth, which is worse than a long walk.  The real reason, of course, is that the point of the story is Frodo's quest and the way it scours Middle-Earth with a reckoning against those who would choose power and domination over peace and mercy.  So, if Speaker is about the chaos of surviving cultural contact when the galaxy-roaming humans of the distant future meet some low-tech incomprehensible aliens and try not to interfere, it sort of misses the point to argue that this should be side-stepped.  And yet!

I feel like Card desperately wants to forget that this story is taking place three thousand years in the future.  Not even just three thousand years in our future, but three thousand years from Ender's time--Ender's time in which humanity already had the technology to sculpt gravity, to create fields that shred molecules in a hungry nova, to project harmless forcefields so subtle that they could easily be confused for physical doors inside an army gymnasium in space.  They can make tiny chips they clip to your spine that let them directly pick up every sensory input your body receives and how it reacts.  They can transmit information instantaneously across any distance, and they know this can be done with biological systems, perfect telepathy.

I think maybe it wouldn't have been a huge stretch to build little observational drones that noiselessly hover around with anti-grav engines, maybe wrap them up in cloaking forcefields, and set them to drift through the forest just listening in.  (I'm pretty sure the forcefields in Ender's Game were always completely opaque, not invisibility cloaks, but I'm only asking them for one technological advancement in three thousand years to pull this off.)  Now, zero question that this would be a huge invasion of privacy, and that is not going to be morally okay with everyone.  On the other hand, the option they did go with still involves tremendous risk, gets little information, has lead to two deaths in this chapter, and is guaranteed to cause some degree of the cultural contamination which supposedly everyone is completely terrified of instigating.  So maybe they should rethink which is the lesser of two evils here.

Anyway.  Pipo's explains "I can't tell you how they court and reproduce because, shockingly, they haven't invited us to watch them bang", flips off his antagonist with academic flair, and we draw back out to the galactic scale, where news of his death has just been ansible-broadcast across the Hundred Worlds.

Within hours, scholars, scientists, politicians, and journalists began to strike their poses.  A consensus soon emerged.  One incident, under baffling circumstances, does not prove the failure of Starways Council policy toward the piggies.  On the contrary, the fact that only one man died seems to prove the wisdom of the present policy of near inaction.  We should, therefore, do nothing except continue to observe at a slightly less intense pace.

I know Card means this as an indictment of this idea, if only because he's talking about the herd-agreement of eggheads, tyrants, and muckrakers trying to look good, rather than the reasoned conclusions of a single pure genius in a sealed box who has never met another living being.  That's where you get the good stuff.
Libo is ordered to cut his contact down to an eighth of its previous level and to not ask the Little Ones what happened to Pipo.

There was also much concern about the morale of the people of Lusitania.  They were sent many new entertainment programs by ansible, despite the expense, to help take their minds off the grisly murder.  And then, having doe the little that could be done by framlings, who were, after all, lightyears away from Lusitania, the people of the Hundred Worlds returned to their local concerns.

Some standard issue panem et circenses criticism of the galaxy, boring--the interesting thing here to me is that this implies ansible broadcast is actually incredibly expensive.  Here I've been assuming that everyone had access to the galactic internet all the time at minimal cost.  We've been told, after all, that it's the pervasive influence of the ansible that keeps all of the Hundred Worlds speaking the same languages--Pipo and Libo upload their findings to the galaxy every single day--yet sending them a Netflix update is an expense out of the ordinary?  They have to file a special requisition explaining their dire need for sitcoms?

It's funny that these books and this author are seen as such a giant in the world of science fiction when it seems so often to be actively antagonistic to coherent and consistent science.  I mean, sure, the SFF umbrella absolutely has room for stories with a high-tech aesthetic and all the scientific rigour of Dr Seuss, but it might be worth asking ourselves if these things would fly by without comment if, for example, the author were a woman and not the type of Jesus-and-warfare, no-homo man that Card is.

In case anyone was worried that Ender might have become a mere human in the last twenty years, the very first sentence describing him assures us that he's still the best person ever:

Outside Lusitania, only one man among the half-trillion human beings in the Hundred Worlds felt the death of João Figueira Alvarez, called Pipo, as a great change in the shape of his own life.

Only Ender feels any personal impact from Pipo's death.  No student of xenology who followed his writings with the faith of a disciple and dreamed of making first contact one day, no desperately compassionate person who feels the pain across the millennia of the xenocide of the formics and fearful of interspecies violence, no one anywhere else in the galaxy feels that their life has been changed by the apparent brutal murder of Pipo Alvarez except Ender.  Sigh.

Andrew Wiggin, who tends not to go by 'Ender' anymore, is speaker for the dead on the ice planet Hoth Trondheim in the university city of Reykjavik, built into the side of a fjord, bastion of Nordic culture.  No, come back, I'm serious.  The most Nordicful place in the galaxy isn't on Earth, it's a college built into a fjord on icy fjord world.  It's a beautiful day in Epcot Galaxy.

Andrew/Ender is a temporary professor, overseeing a discussion among history students about whether the destruction of the Formics was necessary before humans could expand across the stars, which he knows always comes down to people hating on Ender the Xenocide, so he tries not to pay too much attention.  Instead, he listens to his stud--which is to say, the ansible bluetooth gizmo "worn like a jewel in his ear"--reporting Pipo's death, and he interrupts his students to ask them about the Little Ones.

"They are our only hope of redemption," said one, who took Calvin rather more seriously than Luther.

Card just doesn't care that three thousand years have passed, apparently.  The theologies of Calvin and Luther are still a huge deal to these university students, rather than any other authors who might have made some contributions to concepts of theodicy and salvation.  They aren't even Nordic theologists!  (I suppose John Calvin did flee to Switzerland before publishing his big stuff [edit: I have been reminded that Switzerland is also not a Nordic country, my bad], but that doesn't change the fact that Card appears to mostly have wanted to set this book last week, a few blocks from his house.  I wouldn't even know what the hell these people are talking about if I hadn't been reading Fred Clark for the last six years.  Shorthand: they disagreed a bit on the degree to which salvation from hell was flexible or predetermined.)

The students start disagreeing about alienness and empathy, leading Andrew/Ender to call on Plikt, the only person in the class who has read Demosthenes' latest publication, in which she defines the the 'orders of foreignness': utlannings of another city, framlings of another world, ramen of another species, and "the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible."  The other students are irritated with Plikt, and Andrew calls them out for just being ashamed that they haven't read Demosthenes' new history yet and so feeling stupid because she has.  Card/Ender seem to have forgotten since last book that the smart kid who gets picked out by the teacher as Best Student just makes the resentment even worse.

I'm going to quote heavily a bit, because this is intensely bad stuff.

Plikt goes on to defend the Third Invasion:

"...Ender was not a true xenocide, for when he destroyed the buggers, we knew them only as varelse; it was not until years later, when the original Speaker for the Dead wrote the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, that humankind first understood that the buggers were not varelse at all, but ramen."

Another student contradicts her, declaring that 'dead is dead'.

Andrew sighed at Styrka's unforgiving attitude; it was the fashion among Calvinists at Reykjavik to deny any weight to human motive in judging the good or evil of an act. [...] Because Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act, it made students like Styrka quite hostile to Andrew.  Fortunately, Andrew did not resent it--he understood the motive behind it.

I imagine that all y'all have read Kinsey Hope's essay on Magical Intent.  But in this case, it's not even Ender's philosophy that bothers me so much--it's far from the first time Ender would be howlingly wrong--but that the opposition is such a hilarious straw philosophy:

"This talk of varelse and raman is nonsense.  If the piggies murder, then they are evil, as the buggers were evil.  If the act is evil, then the actor is evil." 

Andrew nodded.  "There is our dilemma.  There is the problem.  Was the act evil, or was it, somehow, to the piggies' understanding at least, good?  Are the piggies raman or varelse?  For the moment, Styrka, hold your tongue.  I know all the arguments of your Calvinism, but even John Calvin would call your doctrine stupid." 

"How do you know what Calvin would--" 

"Because he's dead," roared Andrew, "and so I'm entitled to speak for him!"

Oh my god.  Ender has grown up from being the isolated resentful smart kid's validation fantasy and become the smart kid's fantasy of what it would be like to be a teacher.  At last he has the authority to shout down the stupid students.  (He reflects that Styrka is smart enough that he will drop his philosophy before he graduates, which I suppose is a form of twisted praise.)

These are the two positions we are given: either good and evil exist only in our heads and so no action of itself contains any moral weight (in which case, near as I can tell, the most 'moral' life is led by someone who never learns that other people are capable of feeling pain), or good and evil are absolutes that infect us through our actions--if you do a bad thing then you are a bad person, you should be punished, end of story, no mitigating factors, world without end amen.

It seems to me like the main purpose of both of these systems is to level judgment: to definitively declare that a person was Good or Bad.  Sometime in the last decade, I lost all interest in trying to lay a final judgment on people; I tend to think more in terms of 'situation is good', 'situation can be fixed', and 'situation needs to be escaped'.  Actions can be good or bad--we can see that from their harmful results--and intentions can be good or bad--we can see that by whether people care about their results.  If someone causes harm with good intentions, that doesn't make their action good; it makes it salvageable.  If a person wants to do good and fails, then they should be enthusiastic about understanding how they screwed up and how to not screw up in future.  If a person causes harm intentionally, then the first challenge is getting them to agree that they shouldn't have done it.  Both of these cases are in the 'situation can be fixed' category.  If a person causes harm and doesn't care (or did so maliciously) and they can't be talked out of it, then we end up in the 'situation needs to be escaped' category.

Intentions, in this framework, don't impart their morality to actions.  They tell us what to do next.  Judgment doesn't, of itself, make anything better.  I'm mostly in favour of making things better.  Judgment is a distraction.  Judgment is boring, it's static, like the dead that Ender demands the right to speak for.  Am I good, am I bad?  Fucking yawn.  I am still alive and I will use my time trying to be better.

Andrew leaves his students and starts thinking of himself as Ender again, recalling his past, giving us solid timelines at last.  It is the year 1948 Starways Code, and he destroyed the formics in 1180 BSC, so 3128 years precisely since the xenocide.  He's about thirty-five now, having spent the last ten years of his life skipping from world to world constantly--the math tells us he's been skipping an average of 50 years every two months, although we don't know what the average length of an interplanetary voyage is among human colonies (his first voyage was 50 years, anyway).

Hey, remember when Graff mentioned that travel from Earth to Battle School cost more money than a highly-qualified professional would make in their entire career?  Apparently it's still so common than Ender never lands on a planet and finds that they're just not intending to send a ship out for the next year or so.  Also, let's note that Ender has zero trouble communicating with anyone there on Trondheim, despite three thousand years of supposed linguistic evolution.  It's not just that the ansible keeps a common language among the worlds; it literally keeps language static for three thousand years.  But it's also super expensive to use and so transmitting new sitcoms to Lusitania is a big deal.

I hate to be a hypocrite, and I really am about improvement more than judgment, so, pro tip to aspiring novelists: don't do these things, because they suck and you can do better.  You can handwave.  Ender's apparently got the internet in his brain; use those three thousand years of advanced technology to say that someone invented neural interfaces that rapidly update language centres of the brain in order to help address these exact sorts of time-dilation issues.  (Hell, the ownership of that kind of software practically begs to be the centre of its own sci fi story--they who control the evolution of language control the fate of humanity.)

Plikt follows Ender after class; she keeps up with the news and she has realised that Ender had to have got the report of Pipo's death in the middle of class, which means he's got ansible priority, which is a big deal.  She's also tried to investigate him and found that "Everything's classified.  Classified so deep that I can't even find out what the access level is.  God himself couldn't look up your life story."  Subtle, Ender.  Maybe just make up a fake name and say you're from South Carolina?  That seems easier.

Plikt wants to be a Speaker too, and aspires to one day speak for Ender, which means understanding his story first, but Ender's having none of it, and as he escapes her she shouts that she knows he's going to Lusitania, although there hasn't been any request for him to go yet.  There's some standard-issue 'I don't care about anyone or owe anyone anything', with the exception of the last hive queen, though she's not named.  Normal foreshadowy stuff, so angst, much ominous.

Next week: Novinha derails her life's work and vital science in a fit of passion over her boyfriend.

(And again, do not miss the blogqueen's triumphant return with Lullaby this Thursday!)

Well, about a year later, I finally return to this clusterfuck of a series. Updates will be sporadic (based on when my health allows me the mental ability, spoons, and snark to tackle this) but if there is an update, it will be on a Thursday. My goal is every other week, but I know I can't commit to that.

I tried to read this book in one go, with the intention to then go through it again and write about it chapter by chapter, but it was both too long and too awful. I honestly don't really remember what happened as far as I did read, so you all get to see my shock and disgust as I unearth these suppressed memories. Grab your drinks because you need to drink enough for both of us, dear reader.

You want to know how much I forgot? I forgot that this book opens with first-person baby Grey hanging around his Mom's corpse and being hungry and playing with cars. I--I'm not even going to quote any of it because

1) First person child narration, even when done well* is creepy and annoying.
2) EL James attempting to drama and angst porn is also creepy and annoying
3) Honestly, the writing in those two paragraphs is just such a jumble of bad I don't even know what to grab to demonstrate it.

So I will summarize: Grey hangs out with Mom-corpse, is hungry/thirsty and eats some unidentified gross stuff while puttering around not understanding that Mom isn't sleeping. Her drug-dealer ex turns up, freaks out, boots Grey in the head out of the way to investigate the body, calls the cops, and peaces out and locks the door. Cop turns up, grabs Grey who freaks out and... this leads to him forgetting how to words? Or running out of words? Even being put in this character's head at this moment, it's just all so... blunt force that I actually find myself less certain as to what is supposed to be going on with them.

Don’t touch me. I stay by Mommy. No. Stay away from me. The lady policeman has my blankie, and she grabs me. I scream. Mommy! Mommy! I want my Mommy. The words are gone. I can’t say the words. Mommy can’t hear me. I have no words.

OK, I get that we're trying to establish how he ended up doing the whole "not talking for a few years" thing (which, given the amount of therapy he was put in from such a young age, still does not seem quite feasible to me but I am not a child psychologist) and the whole "no touching" bit (that one seems more reasonable to me to have manifested in the way it did, even with being treated intensely from a young age) but eeeehhhh. At least EL James is trying to show, not tell? Like, it's an improvement.  (But she's already told us. Over. And over. And over. I no longer care to be shown.)

We then get a smash cut to Ana tearfully reassuring Grey in third person--and that is weird to me. Was EL James struggling to write Grey in first person? I get why it's not Ana, this scene is very much about Grey, but switching to third person (which we have not seen at any other point in the series) is a strange narrative choice that doesn't work for me. I think it would have worked better if the whole book was third person (James' third person is actually not nearly as terrible as her first person) or had stuck with Grey for the whole chapter.

“Ana.” He breathes her name, and it’s a talisman against the black choking panic coursing through his body.

“Hush, I’m here.” She curls around him, her limbs cocooning him, her warmth leeching into his body, forcing back the shadows, forcing back the fear. She is sunshine, she is light . . . she is his.

Grey is, as far as I can tell, in the middle of a panic attack when he wakes up. I am lucky enough to not have had a panic attack, but not all of my loved ones have been so lucky. For the sake of privacy I won't go into too much detail, but I'm like 90% sure you can't hug away a panic attack. I've tried. What surprises me is Grey, who until the last book had a lot of issues with touching, in a moment when he is, if not having a panic attack, on the cusp of maybe having one, isn't set off more by touching. That seems like it would be more internally consistent. I mean, I get Ana apparently has some high level cleric spells (she's been power leveling between books it seems) that have allowed her to become light incarnate (that's gotta be at least a level 10 spell) but being able to magic away deep rooted psychological problems is still some hella high-leveled shit and I don't think she's had enough time between books to both power level AND become a shrink. However on top of not being a child psychologist, I am actually not any kind of psychologist, so this is not my area of expertise. (That involves fire. So much fire).

I also see that even in third person Grey is claiming Ana as "his". That will never not be weird to me. I will sometimes claim The Husbeast's** limbs as my own, and ignore his protests of needing them, and there is nothing sexy or romantic about this. I do it entirely to harass him. So when I see someone claiming another person as their own, I associate it with all the wrong things and it's either creepy and Gollum-like or involves evil giggling followed by trying to hide the other person under the blanket and hope they're not like birds and think that nothing else exists now.

“Please let’s not fight.” His voice is hoarse as he wraps his arms around her.

 You were just asleep what? How does that even? I don't?

“The vows. No obeying. I can do that. We’ll find a way.” The words rush out of his mouth in a tumble of emotion and confusion and anxiety.

Dude this is a hell of a non-sequitur. I assume they were fighting about this before bed?I mean, they fight constantly in book 2 so that seems like another Tuesday in their household. I kind of like that we're being told he's disoriented and confused and anxious here--not just shaking off the (almost?) panic attack. I guess even Ana's high level light-magic healing spells can't even do that (I'd look into taking some levels in healing if I could) and as annoyingly unrealistic as Grey's feelings and trauma is--bouncing wildly between melodramatic and "tidied up neatly by the end of the episode" levels of simplicity--I do appreciate when James hits on something resembling human.

I am a concerned for Ana that Grey is only agreeing to compromise on her not agreeing to obey him, in front of all their friends and family (a call that seems painfully obvious on her part), when he's like this. Grey is shaken and upset, and Ana is the one thing (he thinks) that can help. It is taking that to have him say "OK, I need (not want) you in my life because you fix a thing, so I will do what it takes to keep you here so you can keep fixing that, 'kay?" which is still shitty and unhealthy and so typically Grey.

“Yes. We will. We’ll always find a way,” she whispers and her lips are on his, silencing him, bringing him back to the now.

HER KISS CAN TRANSPORT HIM THROUGH TIME I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT SPHERE THAT SPELL BELONGS TO IS ANA A MAGICAL GIRL?!


That brings us to the end of the prologue (it is, unlike every other chapter, blissfully short). Keep an eye on twitter (@SnappyErika) or tumblr (for those of you lamenting Will not being on twitter, he IS on tumblr!) for news on updates, or, you know, come back and check the 50 Shades Freed tag. Do what feels good friends. As always, your comments encourage me to forge forward into this awful, and I need all the encouragement I can get. Till another Thursday! Erika out!



*I could not finish this book because while it was very well written and engaging in a horrific sort of way my inherent lack of ability to kids made it too hard to get through for me.
**He was promoted from The Boy after we got married, and a reminder since I've been away and it keeps coming up in comments on older posts, Will and The Husbeast are not the same person. [WW note: It is impossible to overstate how important this distinction is.]

Finally Mandachuva tore off a blade of capim near the ground, folded it carefully into a thick wad, and put it in his mouth to chew it. He say down after a while. The others began teasing him, poking him with their fingers, pinching him. He showed no sign of noticing. [....] Mandachuva stood up, a bit shaky for a moment. Then he ran at the fence and scrambled to the top, flipped over, and landed on all fours on the same side as Miro.

It turns out the Little Ones have been hopping over the fence at night and strolling around town for years now.  Not going to lie, I cracked up a little at this part.  I mean, it makes no sense or difference--they haven't learned anything in town that impacts the plot, and they've never been spotted because the Starways Panopticon doesn't believe in security cameras--but the level of "Oh, yeah, by the way, your technology is less than useless" is hilarious in its excess.

Miro says the grass is an anesthetic, and they correct him, saying they feel the pain--worse than dying--but "it's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self."  Miro recalls Libo's corpse with a mass of grass in its mouth.  Mandachuva says he'll go find Ouanda, since he's been in the village a few dozen times now and knows where everyone lives.  Which of course means that there's no one to pinch Miro and help him test his pain sensitivity as he starts chewing grass.  Well:

He pinched himself. As the piggies said, he felt the pain, but he didn't cared. All he cared about was that this was a way out, a way to stay on Lusitania. To stay, perhaps, with Ouanda.

Yes, dear reader, Our Hero is desperately seeking a way to take his half-sister away into the forest to "raise a family of humans who had completely new values, learned from the piggies".  You may commence retching; I'll still be here when you're done.

He ran at the fence and seized it with both hands. The pain was no less than before, but now he didn't care, he scrambled up to the top. But with each new handhold the pain grew more intense, and he began to care, he began to care very much about the pain, he began to realize that the capim had no anesthetic effect on him at all, but by this time he was already at the top of the fence. [...] Momentum carried him above the top and as he balanced there his head passed through the vertical field of the fence.

Mandachuva returns in time to haul himself up the fence and shove Miro over to the other side.  They argue about planting him immediately before he dies, but Human insists the pain is just an illusion and he'll recover, though he shows no signs.  Mandachuva runs off again to find Ouanda.

We cut back to Ender meeting with all the important people.  Novinha arrives:

He noticed that her hair was down and windblown, and for the first time since he came to Lusitania, Ender saw in her face a clear image of the girl who in her anguish had summoned him less than two weeks, more than twenty years ago.

So... wait, she's finally free and at ease, and so she looks more than ever like the isolated, self-loathing, desperate heretic teenager acting out of self-sabotaging panic?

Ender explains that he's gathered them to decide whether to rebel against the congressional order.  They say they have no choice, but Ender says all of congress' power and threats depends on the ansible.  THE BISHOP says they can't cut off the ansible or they'd lose contact with the Vatican, but Ender (without asking her first, obvs), reveals Jane's power:

"I have a friend whose control over ansible communications among all the Hundred Worlds is complete--and completely unsuspected [....] And she has told me that when I ask her to, she can make it seem to all the framlings that we here on Lusitania have cut off our ansible connection. [....] In sohrt, we will have eyes and they will be blind."

The mayor calls this out as the act of rebellion/war that it would be considered, but Ender can intuit that she likes the idea even as she tries to resist it, which is also creepy as hell--her mouth says no but her eyes say insurrection.  THE BISHOP of course continues to argue, saying that evacuation may suck:

"But a law was broken, and the penalty must be paid." 

"What if the law was based on a misunderstanding, and the penalty is far out of proportion to the sin?"

Lest we lose track, the law here was based on the possibility that introducing human culture and technology to the Little Ones might cause them harm, and about ten pages ago we were informed that the Little Ones currently intend to use their new tech to wage a war of conquest across their entire planet.  That's not a misunderstanding, that's prescient.  The penalty is foolish (as if intervening in twenty years will help), but Ender's counterargument boils down to "I can fix it", which is only going to get you an acquittal if your judge is The Honorable Mr Justice Bob the Builder.

Ender says that if they do what congress says, then they are approving of the law and the punishment*, and they shouldn't do that until they know everything.  There's some more ego-stroking; Ender says they all have to decide together,"the civil and religious and intellectual leadership of Lusitania", or they can't rebel, and the Bishop calls Ender a fourth power, "as dangerous as Satan", yet submitting to them.  Ender says he wants to be one of them.

"As a speaker for the dead?" asked the Bishop. 

"As Andrew Wiggin. I have some other skills that might be useful. Particularly if you rebel. And I have other work to do that can't be done if humans are taken from Lusitania."

First: skills useful for rebellion?  Like, what, tactically?  Ender doesn't have a fleet to destroy the rest of humanity with.  Second: I'm like 150% sure that Ender's work restoring the hive queen would actually be a jillion times easier if he didn't have to worry about humans next door.

Ender recaps for them: he went into the woods, the Little Ones have read HQ&H and the Bible, they want to travel the galaxy and fear human colonisation, humans only advanced so far because we found formic technology and ran with it and now we fear that the Little Ones will do the same if we give them anything.  Libo started meddling because the xenologers have never thought the Little Ones were just savages (Ender says this after literally accusing Miro and Ouanda of thinking of the Little Ones as beastly primitives two chapters ago), and they killed him "exactly the way they put to death their own most honored citizens" (I'm not sure what he's basing that conclusion on).  Then it's time for more theology:

"If you really believed that someone was perfect in heart, bishop, so righteous that to live another day could only cause them to be less perfect, then wouldn't it be a good thing for them if they were killed and taken directly into heaven?"

I would love to dive into this, except that is' one of Fred Clark's best-tread wheelhouses.  Suffice to say that this logic only works if you first assume that the sole point is to go to heaven as assuredly and quickly as possible, and not, for example, to do anything in particular on Earth with your perfection and holiness.  Screw the plebes, you got yours and if they deserved your help they should have offered you paradise first.  (Spoiler: we'll never find out if or how Little Ones die of old age, or what the consequences are for their tree phase.)

Anyway, Ender recaps the tree-splitting ritual, and explains that the Little Ones and the trees are the same species now, despite this being practically impossible.

Novinha interrupts the hubbub to point out that, if congress copied all their files, then they've got her parents' research on Descolada now.  (Apparently no one in the last thirty years has bothered to research any aspect of this ultimate plague, because this is the galaxy of terrible science.)  This means they won't evacuate the planet after all, because while the Descolada is controlled, it's still lying dormant in their bodies.

Bosquinha was appalled. "So anywhere we go--" 

"We can trigger the complete destruction of the biosphere." 

"And you kept this a secret?" asked Dom Cristão. 

"There was no need to tell it. No one had ever left Lusitania, and no one was planning to go."

I can only say 'worst scientists ever' so many times.

But with Ela and Ender's discoveries, Novinha has figured out Pipo's last discovery, that Descolada is part of the reproductive process, and thus she's 'figured out' that every animal on the planet has a plant counterpart.  The river grass hatches watersnakes.  The capim fertilises the cabra.  No, don't ask how she made that leap based on no more evidence than we've been given.  She is senior scientist and her intuition is fact.

The Bishop says this must mean they won't evacuate the colony after all, and Ye Must Love Reapers says they'll be put under quarantine and so they have no reason to submit to the congressional order anyway.  The Bishop finally points out that if Little Ones pose the same threat to the galaxy, and so their dreams of spaceflight must be equally impossible.  Ela thinks they could learn to fully control it one day, but Ender says congress will see this as another formic war, only this time the retroactive tragedy is averted: they'll obliterate Milagre and all of the Little Ones who've had human contact, and keep a compassionate blockade over the planet, no xenocide needed.

"You were there," said the Bishop. "You were there the first time, weren't you. When the buggers were destroyed."

I kind of love the way the Bishop just keeps grabbing historical facts out of intuition in order to make the situation sound more serious.  HEY READERS, REMEMBER HOW IMPORTANT ENDER IS?

Ouanda bursts in, Bosquinha tries to casually arrest her, and she blurts out that Miro's gone over the fence.  They scramble to call Dr Navio, but Ouanda says they can't get through the fence unless they shut it off, and congress has that control now.  Mandachuva strolls in and asks if this means they should eviscerate plant Miro, earning a chorus of horror.  Ender says they need to cut the ansibles immediately, and prods the Bishop with scriptures about leaving the ninety-nine safe sheep to save the lost one.  As they leave:

"Tell me, Speaker [...] if we rebelled against Starways Congress, would all the rules about contact with the piggies be ended?" 

"I hope so," said Ender. [....] 

"Then," said the Bishop, "we'd be able to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Little Ones, wouldn't we? There'd be no rule against it."

First priority: convert the heathens.  I feel like there are a lot of other theological questions to be addressed here first, such as "why" and "are we sure God wants humans to convert aliens" and "have you ever heard of the crusades", but given how we've had the Bishop characterised so far, I suppose his top concern is building his own authority by getting more laypeople under him.  I'm not a fan of proselytising for a variety of reasons, though I do figure it should be allowed (all else equal), but maybe we could spare like five minutes to think about power differentials and coercion and unequal access to information.

When they arrive at the fence, Novinha has already tried to climb it and Ela is holding her back from a second attempt.  Ela recaps the recap, that Miro tried and failed to numb himself with capim.  Ender talks to human, and says he'll bring down the fence and rebel against congress and bring them the hive queen, but only if they let him meet with the Wives to write a treaty first.  He gets a consensus, although Leaf-eater snarks at Human and Novinha is horrified that they're putting everyone in danger of evisceration like Pipo and Libo, and the Bishop's agreement is contigent on getting to preach to the Little Ones.

"Jane," murmured Ender. 

"That's why I love you," said Jane. "You can do anything, as long as I set up the circumstances just right."

Oh my god Jane Ender hasn't done anything.  Everyone reported the facts to each other: Ela's research, Novinha's conclusions, Miro and Ouanda's observation of the tree ritual, Reaper's understanding of how congress would react, the Bishop's desire to convert the Little Ones, all due to the crisis that you personally engineered.  I've played visual novels that were more demanding than Ender's role in this.

Jane 'cuts' the ansible, Ender climbs the fence and hauls Miro back over just as the doctor arrives, and Ouanda follows him over, saying she'll need his help if he's meeting with the Wives.  Ela does the same, and they take off into the woods.

Now, obviously they were going to rebel anyway, but:

1) Literally the only way anyone can think of to cross the agony fence is to declare planetary rebellion?  You till fields!  You mine!  You work steel!  You're supposedly advanced scientists!  Run a tractor through it, dynamite it, swing an axe through its power cables, literally any of the many techniques humanity can bring to bear against fence technology!

2) How the hell does this agony fence work?  It's a physical fence, clambered over like it's chain link, but its agony field not only radiates from the metal but in a vertical field projected upwards?  Does this not result in hundreds of bird corpses piling up on either side year after year as the more reckless of each generation misjudge how high the field is projected, or try to land on it?  Is there no safety suit or lead blanket that could be thrown over the top to make a safe passage?  Does the agony field pierce literally every known form of matter?

3) Why a fence?  Ostensibly it's to keep out the Little Ones, and they must not be allowed to see human technology (remember, Pipo was forbidden to use a ballpoint pen in their sight) but Miro and the Little Ones can see each other and converse through it, and it's structured so that an immune creature (or a robot, perhaps, given the AIs that humanity should be programming) can easily get handholds in the links?  You know what would have been literally a billion times more effective, if you were going to use a huge power-draining fence anyway?  A forcefield, like the ones used in Battle School.  Impassable by any force we're aware of save the Doctor Device, absolutely opaque, absolutely frictionless, and cheap enough to operate that they're used as doors on a space station.  Harder to climb over, but no chance for colossal neural damage in case of an accident!  (Miro's been damaged because he went over the top, but would the same thing not have happened if he tripped and fell face-first against the side of the fence one day?)

Next week: even when women are infertile, they're characterised as loud harridans with full responsibility for raising children.

---

*This is one of Card's things, the same principle that inspired him to say he was compelled to try to destroy any government that would dare attempt to enforce anything as society-ruining as same-sex marriage.  As yet, I haven't heard about him getting arrested for plotting his own insurrection, so I have to assume that he's either a hypocrite or he's changed his mind and he fully endorses marriage equality.  NO, CARD, PICK A SIDE OF MY FALSE DICHOTOMY AND LIKE IT.

So, between life events and exhaustion and a bout of depression (now lessened), I've been failing at getting Speaker posts done.  Should get back on track for next Sunday.  In the meantime, have a post on a couple of my favourite subjects: language and queer politics.

'Queer' is a contentious word.  I'm a fan of it--I refer to myself as queer on a regular basis--but not everyone is, because for some people it's a slur and it always will be.  Which is awkward mostly because it's the only word we've got right now that isn't an acronym (or worse, an initialism) for trying to collectively refer to the many demographics that aren't heterocis.  LGBTTQIAP+.  QUILTBAG.  What's we're getting at is basically:

• Homosexual (comprising lesbian and gay, but there's never an H in these things)
• Bisexual (hello!)
• Pansexual (neither identical to nor exclusive of bisexuality)
• Asexual (encompassing a whole spectrum of grey/demi variations)
• (also any of the above can have '-romantic' swapped in for '-sexual' for finer delineations)
• Trans (without the asterisk, for several reasons)
• Genderfluid/genderqueer (these are both themselves big umbrellas)
• Two-spirit (all across North America)
• Intersex (which is related but in many ways very different from these other things, which is part of what I'm getting at here)

There's also GSRM for 'Gender, Sexual, and Romantic Minorities', which has its own set of problems and isn't even whimsically pronounceable.  (I'd get into why, but that's a whole post on its own--if you're not familiar with the subject, it's worth a google.)

Well, that was a nice vacation.  Welcome back to the carnival of nightmares.

(Content: colonialism, ableism, misogyny, racism, dehumanization of non-parents. Fun content: hot tree sex, matriarchy, Rainbow Army.)


We start with an email from the chairman of the Xenological Oversight Committee, Gobawa Ekimbo, to the director of the Congressional Security Agency, which begins:

Find out how word got out that the Evacuation Fleet is armed with the Little Doctor. That is HIGHEST PRIORITY. Then find out who this so-called Demosthenes is.

Yup.  The fleet that is supposed to show up at Lusitania in twenty-two years and remove the colony is armed with planet-busters.  This raises a lot of questions, the first batch of which are from the realm of 'hey, remember those three millennia we skipped'?

1. In three thousand years, no one has learned how to defend against Doctor Device?
2. In three thousand years, no one has put legal restrictions in place so that Doctor Device has to be, like, authorised by a unanimous public vote of Starways Congress before it can be pulled out of the dusty vault where it is presumably stored?
3. In three thousand years, no one has thought of a weapon/defence that might be more useful in maintaining a 'peaceful' planetary blockade than the World Eater?  They haven't got satellite networks that could electromagnetically stun any ships that tried to take off, or interdictor fields that prevent Park shifts?  People remember that getting into space is super hard, right?  Preventing someone from getting into space is possibly the easiest task that anyone can perform.*

We're closing in on the end now.  This is the supposed climax of the book, and then there's a final chapter to pretend to resolve plot points and set up the sequels.  Needless to say, there's very little tension, because it's mostly about Ender giving the Little Ones the Simple Wikipedia version of peaceful nationalist propaganda (irony meter broken) and them instantly realising how much better this way of life is because they're very smart and just needed to be shown the ways of civilisation.

(Content: misogyny, imperialism, racism, death. Fun content: more matriarchy, the most harrowing Garfield story ever.)

Harder still was the concept of law and government. The wives ruled: to the piggies, it was that simple. But Ender had finally got them to understand that humans made their laws differently, and thathuman laws applied to human problems. To make them understand why humans needed their own laws, Ender had to explain to them human mating patterns.

If that makes the slightest sense to anyone, please let me know.  "We just let our adult females tell us what to do." "Humans can't do that." "Why not?" "Well, unlike your species, human women generally survive pregnancy." "Oh, heavens!  You can't put them in charge!  Fertility is the mind-killer!" Is that it?

"Stop!" shouted Ender. His voice was far louder than he had ever let it be heard before.  Immediately everyone fell silent; the echo of his shout seemed to linger among the trees. [....] "Tell Shouter that if she lets Leaf-eater translate words that we humans have said among ourselves, then he is a spy. And if she lets him spy on us, we will go home now and you will have nothing from us. I'll take the hive queen to another world to restore her."

In case we thought that all this talking was insufficiently manly (it's been ages since we heard about Ender's rippling white shoulder muscles), he asserts his power through shouting and threats and defines 'spy' to suit his own purposes when, in all likelihood, the Little Ones have never had such a concept before in their history.  (Hard to sneak around a forest and do reconnaissance when literally every tree is sentient and psychic and your enemy.)

On the plus side, Human does raise some counterpoints, arguing that Ender is meddling in Little One affairs (Ender says he only promised not to "try to change you more than is necessary") and that he knows Milagre has basically declared war on their own galactic government, so he finds this hypocritical.

Surely Pizarro, for all his shortcomings, had an easier time of it with Atahualpa.

That is an actual line of text in this book.  That is what our hero is thinking right now because his translator has made some very fast and comprehensive assumptions about human politics based on an incomplete understanding of intergalactic law. Of course Pizarro 'had an easier time of it' you colossal jackwagon; Pizarro was a colonialist warmonger who held a mock trial and then murdered Atahualpa when he got bored of dealing with him.  'For all his shortcomings'?  Who the hell edited this book?  STEP FUCKING ONE: CHECK IF YOUR HERO EMPATHISES WITH A HISTORICAL MONSTER.

(Actual line from wikipedia, at the end of the introduction: "modern Peruvians look askance at Pizarro, considering him the force behind the destruction of their indigenous culture, language, and religion".  You don't say.)

Ender explains that they hope not to actually fight other humans, and if they do, the point will be to win the right to star travel for the Little Ones.

"We have set aside our humanness to become ramen with you. [....] Human and piggy and hive queen, here on Lusitania, will be one. All humans. All buggers. All piggies."

Human considers this, and then waxes poetic about the Little Ones' lifestyle, their histories of war (their oldest fathertrees are the heroes of the war that started their forest; their "houses are made of the cowards"), and they've been increasingly excited about their prospects for global domination over the last few years (Human says ten, which doesn't match the timeline, but what else is new for Card).  Asking them to abruptly give up those dreams is hard, he insists.

"Your dream is a good one", said Ender.  "It's the desire of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control."

If Card keeps telling me what the fundamental desires of all living creatures are, I'm going to have to declare him raman.  If things like 'ownership of the universe' or 'endless grandchildren' were really universal desires, he probably wouldn't need to tell us as much quite so frequently or persistently.

I'm torn on how much of Ender's further arguments to share, because on the one hand it's like the word of the day on Sesame Street is 'imperialism', but on the other, I did sign up to examine what the hell is going on in this book for my many confusingly-devoted readers.

• Ender points out that humans have given them technology instead of conquering them, and thus modelled the idea that it's possible to make other people greater without making yourself weaker.
• Human counters with the idea that strength is relative and thus if all the tribes gain technology at the same rate, none of them have really gained anything.
• Ender walks through the idea that it's possible to bring glory to your fathertree without killing any of the other fathertrees in the forest, and (once Human buys into this), argues that the lines dividing 'in my tribe' and 'not in my tribe' are arbitrary, and therefore the best way to own the universe and maximise your glory is to bring everyone into your tribe.

"If we say the tribe is all the Little Ones in the forest, and all the trees, than that is what the tribe is. [....] We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe." 

Ender marveled at his mind, this small raman. How few humans were able to grasp this idea, or let it extend beyond the narrow confines of their tribe, their family, their nation.

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.)


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

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.

It's been a hell of a ride, hasn't it?  This is the final Speaker for the Dead post, and July is a novel-writing month, so I wouldn't count on a lot of new blog content during that time.  After that, I may return with Ender's Shadow, the retelling of Ender's Game from Bean's perspective, which I still consider to be Card's best novel (I just think that's a lower bar than I used to).  Or maybe I'll move on to something else entirely.  Maybe something good?  Or at least better?  Erika the Blogqueen has contemplated doing a series on Mistborn; I've got like eighteen books partly read lying around my apartment and half of Wheel of Time that I inherited from a former roommate.  We'll keep you posted on our post-July posting plans.

(Content: ableism, partner abuse, racism. Fun content: y'all like point-form lists, right?)


So... Speaker for the Dead, eh?  What was up with that?  It takes some careful planning to create a story where all of the problems exist solely because people would literally rather die than ask a direct question.  As I belaboured back in chapter fourteen, Ender was in a much better position to play an antagonist who proves to be a friend than he was to be the hero, yet he's presented to us as the hero because he's the only one who isn't afraid of the truth.  This needs explaining, and in the spirit of Speaker for the Dead, I'm going to argue that we can figure out what caused this atrocity by tracing back its evolutionary history to a catastrophic plague the 1980s.

Speaker for the Dead is a sequel, but it didn't begin life that way--and you don't have to read it that way, either.  It was my intention all along for Speaker to be able to stand alone, for it to make sense whether you have read Ender's Game or not. Indeed, in my mind this was the "real" book; if I hadn't been trying to write Speaker for the Dead back in 1983, there would never have been a novel version of Ender's Game at all.

Interesting premise.  Let's summarise Speaker for the Dead by chapter:

1. Pipo rescues young Novinha from sadness by taking her in as his daughter (in a weirdly romantic relationship with her pseudo-brother), then is horribly murdered by the mysterious primitive aliens.
2. Ender Wiggin is super-smart and philosophical and a three-thousand-year-old war hero, and people have very strong opinions on the morality of being an alien because his ultra-brilliant sister wrote an essay about fjords a couple of months ago.  He also owes a mysterious debt to someone.
3. Novinha hides all the science that somehow led to Pipo's confrontation and death, and also breaks up with her pseudo-brother to protect him, but also summons Ender Wiggin to cross the galaxy to solve the mystery that she believes must never be solved.
4. Ender Wiggin's girlfriend is the internet and he's super rich and he carries the last survivor of his accidental genocide. 
5. Ender Wiggin breaks up with his newlywed pregnant sister to cross the galaxy in a private star cruiser in hopes of protecting aliens.  His best student figures out the truth and devotes her life to serving his sister's family.
6. Novinha's children are terrible.  Ender arrives and immediately astonishes the mayor with his knowledge and history, learns that Libo died after all, scares children because the Bishop has told them he's the devil, and befriends one of Novinha's kids.
7. Novinha's children are terrible.  Ender enters their home, subdues them by physical force or argument, refuses to leave, and tells them how foolish they are for not understanding their little brother.  Novinha's dead husband used to beat her.
8. Novinha comes home.  Ender tells her he knows everything, she's a terrible mother, and he will redeem her.
9. Ender's literal internet girlfriend Jane reveals that all of Novinha's kids were fathered by Libo.  Libo's kids, Miro and Ouanda, are bad at science.
10. Ender befriends the local monastic sect because he was besties with their founder two thousand years earlier.  Jane distracts Ender, so he switches her off for a bit.
11. Being cut off from Ender for an afternoon utterly devastates Jane and she spends the equivalent of 50,000 years in recovery, then sparks an interstellar police action.
12. Ender is super rich, Novinha is obsessed with him, and her children are fractionally less terrible now that they're obsessed with him as well.
13. The aliens demand to meet with Ender because he is everything.  Ela reveals to Ender that she's secretly been doing real science for years.
14. Miro and Ouanda take Ender to meet the aliens.  Ender tells them that they're terrible scientists, and the aliens then reveal everything to him because he's so important.
15. The government locks down the planetary computers, but they save some vital information because Ender is special.  Ender makes the entire colony sympathise with a dead abuser by explaining that he couldn't have kids and his wife cheated on him.
16. Everyone tells each other everything now that Ender is there.  Miro wants to run away to the forest to marry his sister, but grievously injures himself instead through terrible science.  The colony rebels because Ender is so special that he can completely prevent any consequences to rebellion for the next thirty years.
17. The aliens tell Ender everything else they haven't said.  Ender teaches them how not to be terrible warmongering savages, signs a contract, and ritually murder-metamorphoses an alien volunteer to seal the deal.
18. Miro is permanent disabled and shoved in temporal storage for later.  Ender gets the girl, brings civilisation to the primitive aliens, learns that his sister is uprooting her family to come meet him, and revives the last survivor of his war crime, clearing his conscience.

So when I thought of the idea of an alien species which, in order to reproduce, had to slaughter each other in terrible intertribal wars, it was only natural that I decided the story should be told from the viewpoint of a human scientist studying them.  Only gradually, over several years, did I develop the idea of the piggies and their strange lifecycle, and the intertribal war receded in importance--so much so that I didn't need to make it an issue in Speaker for the Dead at all.

What if Ender Wiggin comes to an alien world as a Speaker of Death, and accidently gets caught up in the mystery of why these piggies are slaughtering each other? It had a delicious symmetry to it--the man who, as a child, destroyed one alien species now has a chance to save another.

...that the book was unwritable.  In order to make the Ender Wiggin of Speaker make any kind of sense, I had to have this really long, kind of boring opening chapter that brought him from the end of the Bugger War to the beginning of the story of Speaker some three thousand years later!  It was outrageous.  I couldn't write it.

He had many good ideas. Of course, most of them dealt with small fixes for problems in the manuscript as it now stood. One comment he made, however, illuminated everything for me. "I couldn't tell Novinha's kids apart," he said. "I couldn't remember which was which."

This, Card tells us, was the key.  Novinha's kids were "nothing but placeholders", like a younger sister in another novel whom he would forget existed for hundreds of pages at a time until he finally decided to retcon her into dying in infancy, because I guess the death of a baby sister is exactly the same as her never existing?  But he couldn't just cut her kids:

Because I wanted Novinha to be voluntarily isolated, I had to have her be otherwise acceptable to her neighbors. In a Catholic colony like Lusitania, this meant Novinha needed to have a bunch of kids.

Wait, what?  There's an entire sect of teacher-administrators on this planet whose whole deal is that they are married without children.  (I'm not entirely sure what to make of the assertion that Novinha is and had to be voluntarily isolated, given that we're told she was isolated from a young age because no one took the time to understand her and for the rest of her life no one tried to stop Marcos from beating her--Card's insistence that Novinha literally signed up for physical abuse still horrifies me.)

Once you've read Speaker, of course, you'll wonder what the story would be without Novinha's children, and the answer is, It wouldn't be much!

The romantic hero is unconnected. He belongs to no community; he is wandering from place to place, doing good (as he sees it), but then moving on. This is the life of the adolescent, full of passion, intensity, magic, and infinite possibility; but lacking responsibility, rarely expecting to have to stay and bear the consequences of error. [....] Only when the loneliness becomes unbearable do adolescents root themselves [....] many fail at adulthood and constantly reach backward for the freedom and passion of adolescence. But those who achieve it are the ones who create civilization.

Most novels get by with showing the relationships between two or, at the most, three characters. This is because the difficulty of creating a character increases with each new major character that is added to the tale.

What happens, then, when you start with a family with a mother, a dead father, and six troubled children, and then add a stranger who intrudes into the family and transforms every one of them?

I sat there with Gregg, assigning some immediate and obvious trait to each of the children that would help the reader keep track of them. Oh, yes, Olhado is the one with the metal eyes; Quara is the one who says outrageous things after long silences; Grego is the violent one; Quim is the religious fanatic; Ela is the weary mother-figure; Miro is the eldest son, the hero in the others' eyes. These "hooks" could only serve to introduce the children--I'd have to develop them far beyond that point--but having found those hooks, I had a plan that would let me proceed with confidence.

Besides--and here you are about to learn something truly vile about me--having a third book would mean that I didn't have to figure out some way to resolve the two loose threads that I knew would be dangling at the end of Speaker: what happens to the hive queen? And what happens to the fleet that Starways Congress sends?

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.


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.

These posts are actually proving a little trickier than I thought, if only because there are fewer things that agonise me in this book.  So this feels a little heavy on the recapping, relatively speaking.  We'll see if that improves in future.

(Content: violence against children, starvation. Fun content: Bean Bunny, I kid you not.)


The featureless plane of dialogue this week is Carlotta speaking with Helga, manager of the local shelter kitchen, whom we also haven't met yet.  Helga bemoans the way the bullies prevent the smaller children from ever getting into the kitchen, or brutalising them later if they do manage to sneak in, but reports that this has suddenly changed.  It's a glimpse forward into the middle of the chapter:

"I mean, can civilisation suddenly evolve all over again, in the middle of a jungle of children?" 

"That's the only place it ever evolves."

That's deep, dude.

Bean spends the next few weeks being unobtrusive in the crew, because he has no more brilliant ideas despite being an ultra-genius and the only child capable of grasping how much better life could be in the slums.  He knows Achilles is still watching him, and suspects he plans some revenge for the way Bean originally told Poke to kill him, but he also figures he's powerless enough that there's nothing he can do about that if Achilles does decide to get his murder on.  Bean can even be pragmatically dismissive of his own life, which is something I haven't seen often in a protagonist.

Achilles keeps them up until last light practicing their bully-swarming tactics, advising them on how bullies are likely to fight back and react.  Poke continues to act as crew boss, which Bean thinks is a further indication of her stupidity, because she fails to recognise how powerless she is, unlike Bean does.  No consideration given to whether, maybe, Poke is also acting in the way she thinks will best protect her by keeping the matriarch position that she's held.  (Spoilers: when Poke dies, the kids do in fact grieve for her, indicating that she did still have their support and they may have been one of the factors keeping her alive until then, since no one wanted to risk provoking her crew and their bricks.)

The next morning, they deploy in soldierly fashion, with Poke's 2IC Sergeant taking the most dangerous role as bait.  They head to the kitchen lineup and Sarge slips into line just in front of a bully that Achilles points out, and Bean reverse-engineers the decision to determine that Achilles picked the strongest bully without any friends around, so they won't get into a brawl when they take him down.

The bully is shocked that Sarge would provoke him, gives him a shove (to the side), and Sarge intentionally sprawls into the next bully in line, then pulls the cunning "He pushed me into you" maneuver.  He bluffs well enough that the two bullies snap at each other ("Watch yourself, skinny boy"), and Achilles chooses that moment to leap in and start berating their target for pushing "my boy" into "my friend", and before the second bully can say he's not Achilles' friend, the crew hits their target's legs and pass loose cobblestones to Achilles, who bricks the downed bully.

The others in line backed away from the fight. This was a violation of protocol. When bullies fought each other, they took it into the alleys, and they didn't try for serious injury, they fought until supremacy was clear and it was over. This was a new thing, using cobblestones, breaking bones. It scared them, not because Achilles was so fearsome to look at, but because he had done the forbidden thing, and he had done it right out in the open.

Once again, we've got a character astonishing their enemies so badly that they're incapable of even speaking a word of protest against his magnificence, but this still bothers me less than Ender wowing Battle School, again because Achilles is supposed to be scary to us.  Evil wizard; yes good.

Achilles signals Poke to bring the crew into the line (but she's still totally not important or a leader, y'all) while he rants at the other bullies about how they can disrespect him all they want but if they harm his family "some truck's going to come down this street and known you down and break your bones", a"s he has declared just happened to the downed bully, "right here in front of my soup kitchen!"  The "my" is a challenge, Bean tells us, and as he continues to rant, the other bullies say nothing, keeping their eyes too much on the little kids who tripped the first kid.  We don't really get a sense of numbers here, although there are apparently bullies enough that they can eat all the food the kitchen offers.  And no one homeless over age 13 comes here either, because this must be as close a parallel to Battle School as possible.  I'm not sure how I feel about that; maybe if they specified that there were other shelters around but this one was just for children it'd fly smoother for me.

They at least don't win with a single ambush and rant; Achilles gets right up in the face of the most-belligerent-looking bully and then they floor the next-ranked-down bully.  Achilles doesn't brick this one, just threatens to and then sends him to the back of the line as a show of dominance.  Before anything else can happen, Helga opens the door and Achilles is there to thank her for feeding "my family".  They get in, they eat their soup as fast as possible, stash their bread, and prepare to book it before any of the bullies start thinking about retribution, but not before Achilles can talk about how terrible the 'truck accident' was, and the need for a guard and a light at the door to keep the kids safe.  Bean can see that Helga is waffling, so he turns on maximum Adorable Street Urchin to thank her for feeding them and keeping them safe.

Then they book it to avoid the bullies, and while Helga puts in new precautions (lights, a guard cop), the bullies do not in fact embrace Achilles' new world order, that day or in the weeks that follow.  Although Achilles can still bluster his way into the kitchen every day with the crew, they still have to hide afterwards.  Something else that the first Ender books could have done with more of: the brilliant character makes a prediction about things, pulls off an audacious feat, and doesn't actually get the result they claimed.

So Bean pulls another Adorable Street Urchin move in line one morning: he asks another bully, in front of Helga, why he doesn't bring his family to the shelter.  Helga is delighted by the idea that other bullies keep 'families', and agrees it's a new rule that 'families' eat first.  Achilles is displeased with Bean for taking this initiative, but buys the argument that they'll be safer if the other bullies are busy trying to win over their own kids, and Bean thinks the probability he'll get murdered some day drops a little.


So now we properly meet Carlotta the nun, who's come to find the great civiliser.  She's a Nun On The Edge; her order doesn't like that she works for the I.F., but she's threatened to try to revoke their tax/draft-exempt status if they stop her, and she fully expects to get kicked out when the war ends.  Carlotta gives Card the desperately-needed opportunity to gets lots of theological references in the books, opening with stuff about God putting strength in humble places, Jesus the son of a carpenter, et cetera.  She's never yet sent anyone to Battle School, but she's got some kids into school and her early successes are graduating from college, so that ain't bad for a vocation.

Without getting into Shadow of the Hegemon too much, the things about Carlotta are thusly: I actually really like her character.  She's a good person, she's got a sharp mind, and she is never, ever awed by Bean or anyone else.  She's a woman whose attractiveness will never be discussed at all, unlike the gratuitous hot nun of Speaker's first chapter.  But she is also Bean's 'mother' (not literally) and she will never in these books be important for any reason except as a satellite to Bean's story: she nurtures him, sends him off, investigates him, rescues him, guides him, and eventually (ongoing spoiler warning okay y'all) dies in the next book literally because the villain wants to hurt Bean.  She gets some great dialogue, but her treatment is 100% devaluation and marginalisation of women as accessories for men.

And because two (counting Petra) Strong Female Characters is the extent of the weight Card can bear, she is introduced in contrast to Helga, who runs the soup kitchen and is a babbler.  Helga talks like a one-scene witness in a police procedural who needs to establish the 'realism' of her character immediately with run-on sentences and bad diction and then get out of the way to make room for the protagonists.  She recaps events from her own perspective, how Achilles has brought order and compassion to the streets right in response to seeing bullies fight in the kitchen line, since she doesn't think he could possibly have been involved in Ulysses' savage bricking.

We also get this self-righteous gem, the first of the Shadow retcons:

"...little Bean, it was true, I didn't know how he had muscles enough to walk, to stand, his arms and legs were as thin as an ant--oh, isn't that awful? To compare him to the Buggers? Or I should say, the Formics, since they're saying now that Buggers is a bad word in English, even though I.F. Common is not English, even though it began that way, don't you think?"

Shazam, the aliens are henceforth evermore referred to as formics.  I wonder if Card would tell us that this, too, was not about 'bowing to the prudes' who noted that he named his evil alien horde with a homophobic slur, but to improve the clarity of the intent of his artwork by preventing misunderstandings among new readers who wouldn't grasp the subtlety of whoops I've stopped caring.

Carlotta comes to see the children line up, sees Achilles' injury, and knows Battle School won't take him unless it can be repaired.

Few adult men were good fathers. This boy of--what, eleven? twelve?--had already learned to be an extraordinarily good father. Protector, provider, king, god to his little ones.

Carlotta's standards could use some improvement.  I mean, 1) Achilles hasn't protected them from anyone for weeks, if ever; 2) we've heard about no shows of affection towards the kids, only worshipful rituals where they offer him shares of their bread each morning; 3) the kids are used to getting beaten and otherwise abused by adults, so their own standards for 'good fatherhood' are pretty fricking low.

 Achilles refuses to leave his family, ever, so Carlotta agrees to meet them in the alleys to teach them a bit.  Achilles agrees, noting that none of the kids can read, and she reflects that he probably can't either.

But, for some reason, [...] the smallest of them all, the one called Bean, caught her eye. She looked at him, into eyes with sparks in them like distant campfires in the darkest night, and she knew that he knew how to read. She knew, without knowing how, that it was not Achilles at all, that it was this little one that God had brought her here to find.

She shakes this notion off immediately, and I continue (as I have from the beginning) to find it all needlessly twee.  Nice phrasing, no idea how to picture that imagery, nothing added to the story from this incident.

Bean stays quiet during 'school', hiding his multilingualism and math skills, luxuriating in just listening to her, "in the sound of high language well spoken", because Bean is a street kid and therefore still absolutely buys into the hierarchy of appropriate grammar and punctuation that sets the academically-educated apart from slum dialects.

After a week, he screws up; she passes out a multiple choice 'Pre-Test' and he starts circling answers before she's begun guiding them through, thus giving away his reading and other skills.  Carlotta catches him, looks it over, and demands that he finish, though he tries to backpedal.

"You did the first fifteen in about a minute and a half," said Sister Carlotta. "Please don't expect me to believe that you're suddenly having a hard time with the next question."

Carlotta is my favourite.  (Though, really, she might consider why Bean is hiding his brilliance and not call him out where everyone can here him

After the lesson, Sarge confronts Bean about knowing how to read, about not teaching the rest of them, and rather than explain that he didn't want to get murdered for being a danger to Achilles, Bean takes off for a day.  He's vulnerable, as a known 'son' of Achilles, since most bullies are having a hard time keeping children loyal to them and so are still resentful of the new hierarchy.

Bean nevertheless sneaks around to watch other families and realises that Achilles doesn't make the common mistakes, ruling through fear and punishment instead of being their smiling god.  (Not an intentional WTNV reference.)

Poke had chosen right, after all. By dumb luck, or maybe she wasn't all that stupid.

DO YOU THINK, BEAN?  This is the only time he considers this; forevermore he will think of poor sweet stupid Poke who was kind instead of smart.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Because she had picked, not just the weakest bully, the easiest to beat, but also the smartest, the one who understood how to win and hold the loyalty of others. All Achilles had ever needed was the chance.

Poke has realised that Achilles still bears a grudge against her, and she loves him the way all the kids do, so Bean hopes that maybe the emotional rejection Achilles shows will be 'revenge enough'.  (Nope.)  But while he mulls this, Bean overhears some bullies talking about how Ulysses is out of the hospital and looking for revenge, and how they hope he kills Achilles outright and they can leave his kids to starve, so he heads back homeward to report on the danger and we out.

Next week: Poke gets fridged and everyone is still smarter than Bean thinks they are.

The second-last thing I did with this post was write its title, and as soon as I did that bit of snark I realised how accurate it is.  Ender's Shadow has a nun's POV, so it's excusable that it's even more religiously-flavoured than Game, but some of the metaphors stretch to the breaking point.  In this chapter, someone thinks of Achilles as God and Poke as Jesus, which leaves Bean to be at best an apostle, but really, that's what he always is: Ender is the messiah, Bean is his best disciple, chronicling the holy man's journey and sacrifices and struggling with the confusion that comes from standing next to the Most Important Person In The Universe.  Now I'm going to start wondering if it's possible to directly link the jeesh to specific individuals.  (Though if Petra is Peter, Card has a lot of explaining to do.)

(Content: transphobia, homelessness, violent death. Fun content: book recommendations and attempted autopsychoanalysis.)


The other thing about Carlotta, as Bean's pseudo-parent, is that she is this book's Graff, constantly having to tell other people how brilliant her favourite student really is, and focusing all of her time on making sure said student is given appropriate treatment by the space military.  So of course when she, as the New Graff, encounters the Old Graff, they must snark until one of them gains dominance to be the Alpha Graff.  She's still pushing for Achilles:

"If he passes your exacting intellectual and personality requirements, it is quite possible that for a minuscule portion of the brass button or toilet paper budget of the I.F., his physical limitations might be repaired."

It occurs to me that this book is part of a theme in my teenage reading--I read both Game and Shadow when I was 14, around the same time that my favourite fantasy novel was the magnificent Villains By Necessity by Eve Forward, which is a parody and commentary on the stock tropes of quest fantasy.  Villains By Necessity features one portion that's an extended mockery of the cast from Dragonlance, which I didn't realise for well over a decade, because I got maybe fifty pages into Dragonlance before consigning it to the shelf of never getting picked up again.  (As one friend once said of Dragonlance, it's the kind of book where you can hear the dice rolling in the background.)  It's by no means an inaccessible book for people who haven't read the standbys of fantasy, but it's got one thing in common with Ender's Game: part of the appeal is in the judgment.  (Mind you, Villains By Necessity is an affectionate judgment, riffing off everything from Jack Vance to the Smurfs yet still running a plot that's essentially grounded in the philosophical implications of D&D alignments, while Ender's Game is, as we've seen, the extended indulgence of people who think they're always the smartest person in the room.)  And then came Ender's Shadow, which is basically Card's fix-fic and commentary on his own smarter-than-everyone story, so that's two levels of meta and judgment, and then we're through the looking glass.

My point, I suppose, is that there was a key period in my teenage years when my favourite books were the ones that got really meta with their commentary on other books, some of which I had never actually read, and I'm like 30% sure this is why I now write a blog that dissects and comments on other people's books*.

Anyway, since Carlotta is to Graff as Bean is to Ender, she's smart enough to tell Graff not to close off his options, and she notes that Bean also has great potential, despite his apparent limitations: "Small. Young. But so was the Wiggin boy, I hear."  (By my estimates, Ender has already been at Battle School for more than a year at this point, so I think that would put him in Rat Army, doing well enough that his reputation could have spread, though I'm still surprised Carlotta would know details.  I guess Graff's email blasts are still going out every Wednesday afternoon.)

Back on the streets of Rotterdam, Bean reports that Ulysses (the bully who got bricked in line) is back for revenge, and Achilles declares that he'll have to go on the run for his family's protection.  Bean thinks this is foolish and asking for trouble, but he stays quiet and resolves to remain with the crew, since this leaves Poke in charge again and he still thinks she's as sharp as a bag of hammers.

That night, with Achilles gone, Bean follows Poke out of the alley where they hide and into the alley that serves as their latrine, where he confronts her on a series of matters: they all know she's a girl, that she still bears a grudge against Achilles, and that she's planning to do something about the current situation, but let's focus on that first bit.

"I guess if you were going to tell about me you already would have," she said. 

"They all know you're a girl, Poke. When you're not there, Papa Achilles talks about you as 'she' and 'her'."

This is Card we're talking about, who would presumably rather suckerpunch Jesus than affirm the identity of anyone trans, but the statistics are pretty clear: trans people face homelessness at a drastically greater rate than cis people, and it's if anything even worse for trans youth, although it can be hard to tell since queer kids don't always get surveyed and aren't always willing to out themselves due to the dangers they face.  In canon, Poke just presents as male because she hopes people will take her more seriously that way, and they don't really get into whether this is intended to protect her from street predators.  Thing is, we have no idea what the backstory is for any of these kids--they just sprang into existence as street urchins.  People are homeless for reasons, and usually not ones as SFFy as Bean's.

So I can't exactly call this a missed opportunity, because Poke is about to get fridged and if there's something we need even less of than cis women in refrigerators, it's trans people in refrigerators.  But while we're glossing over the matter of gender presentation among homeless kids, we can just note that both Achilles and Bean are colossal jackasses on this point.  If Poke were a trans boy, then Bean and Achilles would be misgendering him and substantially increasing the dangers he faced from predators and other violent people on the cruel streets of Rotterdam, since predators select targets carefully based on who's least able to fight back.  If Poke were a cis girl presenting as a boy for protection, then Bean and Achilles would still be removing that protection, only for the apparent sake of proving their intelligence and 'lowering' Poke in the others' eyes.

The point is that people will generally tell you what they want to be called and then that's what you call them.

Anyway, Bean's not sure what her plan is--he suspects she's going to run off and protect Achilles, or kill Ulysses, or kill Achilles herself and frame Ulysses--but she denies it, tells him off, and banishes him back to their sleeping alley.  I'm fuzzy on how much time is supposed to have passed, but Bean has apparently grown substantial musculature since we met him, because he literally parkours after her:

He went back into the crawl space where they slept these days, but immediately crept out the back way and clambered up crates, drums, low walls, high walls, and finally got up onto a low-hanging roof. He walked to the edge in time to see Poke slip out of the alley into the street. She was going somewhere. To meet someone.

Also unaddressed: Bean found Poke in the alley but knew she wasn't there to relieve herself, and then she waited in the alley long enough for him to clamber his way up top to watch her leave.  What was she in there for, except to give him time to follow her?  (The whole roof-climbing business is immediate abandoned as Bean slides down a rainpipe and follows her on street level.)

He's sure she's either meeting Ulysses or Achilles for one reason or another, but he can't imagine why--obviously not to plead, persuade, or sacrifice herself: "these were all things that Bean might have thought of doing--but Poke didn't think that far ahead."  If we didn't have the narrative constantly telling us so, would we have any reason to believe Poke wasn't just as smart as all of the other 'brilliant' children in this book?

She gets to a riverside dock and meets a boy there, in the shadows, and Bean can't see who it is, only that they embrace and kiss.  The only words he can pick out are Poke saying "You promised", and then a passing boat light illuminates Achilles' face.  Bean leaves and thinks about how little he understands "this thing between girls and boys".  But among Bean's superpowers is his danger sense, a combination of Spider-Man intuition and Sherlock Holmes analytical scanning that combine into a flawless fear awareness--if he feels scared, it is 100% of the time because there is something to be afraid of, even if he doesn't know what yet.  (Mind you, if Achilles and Poke were a couple, the earlier insistence on calling her a girl is suddenly explained by Achilles 'no homo' reflex.)

He processes for awhile, and decides that Poke made Achilles promise not to kill Bean, but Bean (being the smart one, unlike Poke, who is stupid, did we know, had we heard) realises that Poke is a nine-year-old girl who stood over Achilles with a brick in her hand, and therefore she's the one he hates most, the one that he has to kill in order to erase the shame of that memory from his mind.  Now, he realises, Achilles can blame Ulysses, and call it defence of his family when he kills the other bully, because he was patient.

But remember, Bean doesn't have any capacity for empathy or understanding what's going on in other people's minds.

Bean runs back too late, of course, and though he thinks for a moment that Achilles is the one who knows how to love and Bean is the broken one who thinks about the best time to murder helpless children, he finds Poke already dead in the water.  He muses on how kind and decent and stupid she was, but at least admits his own mistakes (trusting Achilles at all) and acknowledges that she made some good decisions after all (Achilles was smart enough to revolutionise street crew culture).  And, because he's so brilliant, he comes up with a cunning plan to escape Achilles' wrath now that Poke isn't around to protect him: nothing.  Literally nothing except lying awake at night, aware that one day Achilles intends to murder him too.

But then it's Nun Time again, as Carlotta tries to grapple with the children's loss and provide spiritual comfort even as she continues testing Bean (since Achilles is gone).  Bean, of course, doesn't care for religion.

Well, if compassion didn't work, sternness might.

I would snark about how this is our beacon of refinement and civilisation, except that her version of 'sternness' is explaining what the tests are actually for, how there's a vast world of humanity of which Rotterdam is a tiny fragment, and Bean might yet go to  School in space and learn to fight off the alien hordes.

"The whole human race, Bean, that's what this test is about. Because the Formics--" 

"The Buggers," said Bean. Like most street urchins, he sneered at euphemism.

Unless our pioneering xenobiologists have literally given the aliens the scientific name 'Buggers', that is the euphemism, Card.  Accept that you got called out on your homophobia and move on with your life.

As soon as Bean hears about going to space, he asks if he can start over, and Carlotta gives him a second set of tests, designed not to be completed in the allotted time, although of course Bean does, with near-perfect scores.  She gives him the full six-year-old tests next, and although he lacks the life experience to fully understand the questions, he still does better than anyone else she's ever tested.

Carlotta becomes suspicious, and questions Bean more about the revolution in street life, whose ideas these were, and bit by bit he reveals that he was the one who suggested it to Poke, whose only mistake was choosing Achilles.  (One more time: Poke's first words on hearing Bean's idea were to assert she'd already had the same idea but she didn't trust any bullies to stay bought.  Poke was 100% right about everything.)

"You mean because he couldn't protect her from Ulysses?" 

Bean laughed bitterly as tears slid down his cheeks.

But remember, Bean is a cold, calculating robot incapable of fully engaging in normal human emotions.

Carlotta pieces it together quickly, and realises Bean mostly wants to go to space to get away from Achilles.  She's torn since she knows Achilles isn't necessarily disqualified from Battle School just because he murdered a kid.  Unlike Stilson, they wouldn't even have to cover this one up!  Bean insists that only one of them should go to space, since if they're together Achilles will murder him, and Carlotta hopes that if she can just get Achilles off the streets, that will be enough to properly civilise him.

Then she realized what nonsense she had been thinking. It wasn't the desperation of the street that drove Achilles to murder Poke. It was pride. [....] It was Judas, who did not shrink to kiss before killing. What was she thinking, to treat evil as if it were a mere mechanical product of deprivation?

In case it wasn't clear yet, Achilles is our new Bonzo, and therefore unsuited to saving humanity; only to being given a rare and valuable leadership position in the Battle School games for a period of extended and nonlinear time.

Carlotta invites Bean to stay with her while she has his tests processed for entry to Battle School, and we go back to the crew, for Sergeant's only POV section of the book, where Achilles appears the next morning, saying that he couldn't stay away.  Poke and Bean are gone, and Sarge does his rounds of town, picking up rumours, until he hears they pulled a body out of the river.  He finds the authorities still with her body, checks under the tarp, and identifies her as Poke, murdered by Ulysses.  On hearing this, Achilles reluctantly agrees that Ulysses has to die, and sends Sergeant out to spread the message:

"Let it be known on the street that the challenge stands. Ulysses doesn't eat in any kitchen in town, until he faces me. That's what he decided for himself, when he chose to put a knife in Poke's eye."

But of course Sarge didn't tell them how Poke died, and so immediately realises that Achilles was the one who really killed her, but he goes along with it anyway, for his own survival and that of the rest of the children.

She was like Jesus that Helga preached about in her kitchen while they ate. She died for her people. And Achilles, he was like God. He made people pay for their sins no matter what they did. 

The important thing is, stay on the good side of God. That's what Helga teaches, isn't it? Stay right with God.

It can be hard to keep track of exactly how we're supposed to interpret the references to Christianity in these books, but presumably this is meant to be a grievous misunderstanding that nevertheless illustrates how the wisdom of the Bible can fit to a variety of circumstances even when it's being twisted by the uneducated.  I dunno.  The point is, Sarge doesn't turn Achilles in, and so life for the urchins can be presumed to continue in the direction it's been going since he assumed power, so with any luck they'll have conquered Europe in a month.

Next week: we begin to unravel the mystery of Bean the Tiny Ultragenius.

---

*A substantial credit also goes to the TV show Supernatural.  I missed large portions of seasons 2/3/4, but I started watching again when angels and demons were going on, and I got curious as to what the 'real' story of Lucifer was, because I had never read the Bible.  (Turns out there isn't one?)  This kicked off my grand exploration into deuterocanonical Biblical interpretations and the broader Lucifer mythology and long story short I ended up an avid follower of Fred Clark's work on the Left Behind books, and that's the actual reason we're here now.

Y'know, this book really isn't as bad as Ender's Game for a very simple reason: Ender's Game is about what a burden it is to be an amazing person whom everyone else torments even though you're destined to save the entire world someday, and Ender's Shadow is about what it's like to be Bean.  Where Game couldn't go a chapter without telling us how wonderful Ender is or making proclamations on absolute human nature, Shadow is more of a straight underdog story interspliced with a bit of Science Mystery and Finding Your Family in both literal and figurative terms.  I'm finding, as I read ahead, that it's no worse than most books I intentionally keep on my shelves.  And I didn't make this blog to give maximum publicity to Orson Scott Card, so rather than detail every chapter of the book regardless of content, I'm going to start skimming to hit the interesting points.

(Content: starvation, child death, hostile teachers. Fun content: OSC writes his own fanfiction.)


Graff and Carlotta, discussing Achilles and Bean, are basically a standup routine.

"He gives the right answers, but they aren't true." 

"And what test did you use to determine this?" 

"He committed murder." 

"Well, that is a drawback."

Is it, Graff?  Is it really?  But Graff tells her to forget Achilles, then, and focus on Bean.  Bean starts getting Battle School cram school, and when he's not studying, he gets to draw, or play games, or tell Carlotta about his past.  He remembers flawlessly, back to when he was only a few months old, learning to crawl, climbing out of his crib in "the clean place" (some kind of laboratory full of babies) because he had picked up from the adults that there was something bad coming.  So he hid, and a janitor found him but wasn't allowed to keep him (they're in the International Territory and he's not allowed to adopt, despite not having any kids of his own?), so Bean ran away and starved for three years until he found Poke.

Carlotta tells him that this is all impossible ("I guess that means I'm dead") unless God was watching over him, and Bean interrogates the idea that God kept Bean alive because he loved him but he let all those other kids starve   This is again a substantial improvement for Card, I think, as Bean takes a plausible atheistic stance when Carlotta says God kept him alive for a purpose:

It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn't mention God or had some reason why it was a good thing after all. As far as Bean could see, though, the dead kids would rather have been alive, just with more food. [....] Because if there was somebody in charge, then he ought to be fair, and if he wasn't fair, then why should Sister Carlotta be so happy that he was in charge?

Looking ahead to the later Shadow books, Bean never quite converts; I believe at one point after losing Carlotta he makes an off-hand reference to whatever God thinks and, when asked if he believes, responds 'More and more, and less and less', which I could take to mean that he sees more and more evidence that someone is scripting the universe, but less and less reason to believe that they're any kind of brilliant/benevolent God-figure like Carlotta believes in.  We never really get into the question of millions of starving children again either way.

The rest of the chapter is just investigation, as Bean realises that Carlotta is trying to figure out what kind of lab Bean came from, so he learns how maps work and runs away to track down the janitor with his perfect memory.  When he does, Carlotta arrives with the cops and reveals that she followed him:

"I didn't want to interfere until you found him. Just in case you think you were really smart, young man, we intercepted four street thugs and two known sex offenders who were after you." 

Bean rolled his eyes. "You think I've forgotten how to deal with them?" 

Sister Carlotta shrugged. "I didn't want this to be the first time you ever made a mistake in your life."

Sister Carlotta is probably my favourite of all Card's creations, but lest we forget she's one of Card's creations, we have the next scene.

They interrogate the janitor, Pablo de Noches, and work out that since the company who owned the space Bean came from has no existing records, it was obviously an organ farm, buying babies from poor immigrant families and harvesting them for parts to save rich peoples' babies with defects.  The inspector is the Designated Stupid Character for the scene, and so brushes all of this off as irrelevant even as he explains it to scornful Carlotta.  Carlotta insists that Bean's parents must be remarkably smart and thus prominent, and the Designated Stupid Character continues to be insightful:

"Maybe.  Maybe not," said the inspector. "I mean, some of these refugees, they might be brilliant, but they're caught up in desperate times. To save the other children, maybe they sell a baby. That's even a smart thing to do. It doesn't rule out refugees as the parents of this brilliant boy you have."

Carlotta agrees that this is possible (spoilers: no, Bean's parents aren't broke refugees) and leaves with the conclusion that Bean is a miracle, so it's time to ship him to space.

"You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom."

Not really a spoiler: Dimak is president of the Hyrum Graff fan club and intentionally trying to mimic his techniques with Ender.  So, while Bean's Spider-Sense warns him that he had the best scores and so he's going to end up the real target of this scene, the teacher goes on to tell the students how stupid they are, and that even if he had been wrong, it would be a waste of time to point it out.

I would like to believe that this is supposed to be commentary on the American school system, since Dimak also adds that 'teachers are powerful, students are not; don't provoke when you can't defend'.  Bean agrees with this, but silently adds that you have to notice when the teachers are wrong, you just shouldn't point it out because that gives everyone else your advantage.

I'm rarely on-board with stories where the protagonist is meant to be unlikable, but Bean is an exception and I have to conclude that it's because I do actually relate to him, once he's off the streets.  His deep social awkwardness and attempts to calculate appropriate social responses to stimuli, his 'excuse me, I didn't request to be supplied with feelings' ways.  A jackass, but one with the potential to do better, unlike Ender, who's already 'perfect' and just needs the plebes to stay out of his way.

Dimak says that this one loud student was less wrong than normal, because someone aced almost all of the tests, all of the psychology and command-relevant questions, but had terrible physical scores.  Card doubles-down for the paraquel: instead of Graff telling the group that Ender is the only one who matters, Dimak asks Bean to guess who this was, makes Bean say it, then congratulates him on his accurate self-assessment, concluding that the only thing that matters is winning the war, so worship the smart ones and hope they rain undeserved mercy on you.  Bean just thinks about how stupid his tactical advice is, recommending that no one commit to a fight unless they're sure of their advantage, and they blast off into space while Dimak replays Graff's zero-G headstand tricks.

Some of the launchies ahead of Bean in line were resentful and called back some vague, pathetic insults, which only caused more hooting and derision from the older kids. Bean had seen older, bigger kids who hated younger ones because they were competition for food, and drove them away, not caring if they caused the little ones to die. He had felt real blows, meant to hurt. He had seen cruelty, exploitation, molestation, murder. These other kids didn't know love when they saw it.

So here's a thing about humanity: we're extremely relative.  Happiness is a complicated thing, but it's getting studied, and the results are only shocking to people who think, like Bean, that feelings are calculated decisions. We compare our happiness to our environment and adjust accordingly, which is why billionaires aren't billions of times happier than people on welfare.  As someone currently dragging himself out of a kind of abrupt depressive episode like I haven't felt in years, I'm particularly aware that mental health isn't solely determined by your environment or what seems reasonable.

My point being that Bean is foolish to assume that passing insults are a sign of affection just because he's seen children kill each other, and to think that the other children are all wrong and just don't understand and appreciate the love being poured onto them.  And if those other launchies feel attacked because they are being catcalled, that's not invalid, because any hypothetical intentions don't just neutralise the distress they create.  The normalisation of 'I do this thing, even though you say you hate it, because I want to show affection' needs to be pulled out of our culture by the root.  Anything that resembles 'tough love' can fuck off.  Parents abusing children to 'toughen them up', men catcalling women on the street, children picking on other children on the playground because they don't know what to do with a crush: these things are not equivalent, but they come from a common poisoned well, and it's this nonsense.

Bean in particular gets catcalled for being so small, and thus compared to Ender.  He spends the chapter piecing together Battle School culture: older students form officially-recognised crews (armies), but while they have the potential to be bullies, they only matter because the teachers have turned them against him, so the teachers are the real enemy.  He realises Ender is some kind of celebrity, so being compared to him boosts his ego, but reduces his ability to blend.

There's more food-rejection nonsense; like Ender before him, Bean thinks they served him too much, so he shoves the excess onto other kids' plates.  On the one hand, "letting his hunger be his guide" is excellent advice; on the other, everyone we're supposed to like in this series only ever eats less than they're told.  Sigh.

The rest of his scene is wandering Battle School after lunch, figuring out how to get around, where things are, who the armies are.  He gets caught up in a class-change and catcalled more (two years later, Dink Meeker gets called out for using the exact same line about walking between his legs without touching his balls that he used on Ender, THIS IS FANFICTION) and then grabbed by Petra Arkanian, who solves problems.  She's rational enough that Bean is willing to talk to her, but he brushes her off as "a take-charge person and didn't have anybody to take charge of until he came along", so I guess we're not at the part where we're supposed to go back to liking Petra yet.  (She does, however, make the useful point that it's impossible to do anything without revealing your character to the teachers, such as how Bean's sneaking around will show his insistence on solitude and exploration.)

There's more repeating, this time without the charm, such as Bean showing up in the game room, reaching exactly the same conclusions as Ender about how badly the other kids play the game, asking for a turn, and getting laughed at (though this time they leave rather than actually following through on the offer).  There's an extended sequence about him fitting himself into an air duct just to see if he can, and figuring out that he's just fulfilling his need to always have an escape route, before he finds his barracks again (perfect memory) and settles in for naptime.

There's one more scene in this chapter, but since we've ramped up the pace, I'll leave it until next week.  What do y'all think of moving at this rate?  Anyone who's read Shadow yourselves, did I miss anything that you would have liked to see examined more?

Also, make sure to come back on Thursday for a new post from the blogqueen, especially if you know Judge Dredd.

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

"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.


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.

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.

"After three months in Battle School, he figured out that defensive war makes no sense and that we must have launched a fleet against the Bugger home worlds right after the end of the last war." 

"He knows that? And you come telling me he knows how many decks there are?"

But of course they are confident that they can deceive the infinite supergenius of Bean as long as they can find a lie he will believe, so that's no problem and he can stick around because his supergenius may yet be useful.  All I can think of right now is that tugboat captain whose life Graff casually derailed into indefinite isolation because Graff couldn't be bothered to schedule his ride in advance or ask for volunteers.

Sister Carlotta, in the meantime, has met with Anton, who doesn't have a last name, ever, despite appearing in later books.  Anton is another supergenius and thus very adept at exposition:

"I'm just an old Russian scientist living out the last years of his life on the shores of the Black Sea."

Said no actual human ever.  Anton tries to shock Carlotta by indicating that he's fantasising about her, but Carlotta is unflappable and/or has excellent gaydar*, so she just goes on to tell him what she learned: that he is cited constantly by academic papers on the subject of genetic engineering on human intelligence, but none of his papers actually exist in any other record; he never published.  Now, I mean, I'm sure back in the dark ages (1999) when this book was published these things might have been less automated, but here in the modern world, Google Scholar (the godsend of students writing academic papers everywhere) can track citations in a fraction of a second, so I'm struggling a little with the idea that the government obliterated this guy's life's work, placed a chip in his head to prevent him from ever talking about it again, and put him under permanent armed guard, but they decided editing other people's bibliographies was a step overboard.

Carlotta "hypothetically" describes Bean's situation, absurdly smart and perhaps modified, and asks how she could "hypothetically" test for the change, and Anton's explanation leaps cheerfully back and forth over the ableism threshold as he describes 'savants' in less-than-clinical terms that I won't quote here and sums up with "How can they be so brilliant, and so stupid?"  He almost goes on to explain his discovery, but cuts himself off, "because I have been served with an order of inhibition."  Basically, he's wired into an anxiety feedback loop so that if he ever gets stressed out--for example, by talking about his work--he immediately falls into an incapacitating panic attack.

Of course, much like the bibliographies that were too much effort to scrub, this too can be overcome with a calming ritual and some roundabout dialogue, so Anton starts bantering with Carlotta about theology, and it's actually kind of entertaining (I kind of wish the later books were just about them on adventures).  It's also an excuse for more of the Biblical allusions that Card never tires of, but after a couple of pages he gets around to the point, that humanity could be immortal, "but God made us with death inside":

"Two trees--knowledge and life. you eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying."

He doesn't last much longer before he stops being able to trick his own brain into believeing that he's not revealing forbidden secrets, and he collapses; Carlotta turns him onto his back--no, wrong, wrong, you turn people onto their side, Carlotta--and waits for the guard to come running.

The man was youngish, but not terribly bright-looking. The implant was supposed to keep [Anton] from spilling his tale; it was not necessary for his guards to be clever.

Oh lord, not only is intelligence the only metric of human worth but now we can see it by looking at people.  (The guard racks up several more insults from the narrative for the rest of the scene.)  Carlotta diplomatically gets out of there rather than wait for him to wake up, which seems cold at first, but maybe she figures she is herself now a panic trigger for Anton.  More importantly, she understands Anton's Key now, a genetic tweak that makes Bean an ultragenius but cuts his lifespan short, and resolves to find the person who used it.


Carlotta and Graff also continue bantering and it's much less entertaining (she wants more clearance, he wants her to psychoanalyse Bean), but at least for once someone points out:

"There's a war on, yet you fence me around with foolish secrecy. Since there is no evidence of the Formic enemy spying on us, this secrecy is not about the war. It's about the Triumvirate maintaining their power over humanity."

This really should be a bigger deal.  If Carlotta knows the Formics aren't spying on humanity, presumably everyone knows that.  If everyone knows that, then the secrecy around everything--the hidden asteroid base, the fleet supposedly in the asteroid belt which nevertheless no one on Earth can see--should raise some serious questions about the decision-making processes of the people in power.  Now, one meta level up, they put a chip in Anton's head rather than killing him because we're still supposed to see humanity's leaders as good people, and two meta levels up, he had to be alive so Carlotta could talk to him, but if I wanted a Doylist interpretation here, I wonder if the point of the incredibly circuitous and resource-intensive 'order of inhibition' isn't just to be able to show people that of course the government cares most of all about protecting human lives, look at all the trouble we go to, and so don't bother asking tricky questions or looking too hard at the gladiatorial arena we're building in the school showers.

Bean is finally ready to make his exploratory spelunking expedition through the Battle School air ducts, and it goes on for pages of twisting and crawling that we don't need to detail, up and down, inconveniently placed ducts that let him see teachers' quarters but not their computer screens, hot vents and cold walls (Card runs with the usual assumption that vacuum is 'cold', which is not quite as true as he'd like, but whatever).  Oh--and Bean is naked the whole time.  Get out your shot glasses, people, we're back in Battle School and pants are for losers who aren't secure in their heterosexuality!

Bean finds a teacher headed for a shower and decides to wait until the guy comes back and logs into his computer again (so Bean can get his password) but he hears a conversation further up the duct and goes to find Dimak holo-skyping with Graff.  (Are holograms really that cheap now?  Would a flatscreen not do the job?)

They're talking about 'giving her access' and 'whether the boy is human' and 'can't get him into the mind game' and 'what makes him tick, and after a page Bean realises they're talking about him: "New species. Genetically altered. Bean felt his heart pounding in his chest. What am I?" They also talk about a security breach and needing to lock him down, and, in clearly the best moment, Graff wonders if it counts as saving humanity if they only win the war by replacing themselves with a new species:

"Foot in the door. Camel's Nose in the tent.  Give them an inch." 

"Them, sir?" 

"Yes, I'm paranoid and xenophobic. That's how I got this job. Cultivate those virtues and you, too, might rise to my lofty station."

This is as good a time as any to remember that, according to the story, no one but Ender could have won the Third Invasion, and no one but Graff could have made him do it, and the formics weren't planning to invade Earth again anyway, so Graff's hilarious paranoid xenophobia is the literal sole driving force behind the whole xenocide.

Bean mulls which secret he might have guessed (he suspects it's the invasion fleet, or that Battle School was created to strip Earth's nations of their future military leaders).  He goes back, memorises the now-showered teachers' login, and heads back to bed, mulling his luck and figuring out very rational reasons that it was actually all a result of his own good decision-making.  With that ego-stroking settled, he decides on his new plan to allay the teachers' suspicions about his character:

He had to become Ender Wiggin.

This book would be both spectacularly awful and utterly amazing if the rest of it consisted of Bean's slow Talented-Mr-Ripley absorption of Ender's identity, but no luck.  I'm honestly not sure what this means; I don't remember Bean doing anything to make himself look Enderier.


The teachers figure out what Bean's done as soon as he makes himself his own teacher-class identity, but they resolve to let him have it--if he won't play the mind game, they can see how he plays his own games, and Dimak insists he's the look-not-touch type of snooper.  Bean's first priority is apparently reading every student's profile.  He scored better than any of them, but he realises that everyone in Battle School is a genius, and he's not necessarily any more charismatic, courageous, cautious, or able to outguess his opponents than they are.  He sets about trying to solve the mystery of Ender Wiggin, who gives so much of his time to newer, inept students instead of focusing on building himself up.  There's another page of talking about how wonderful and mysterious Ender is, then bro-time with Bean and Nikolai bonding (Nikolai is dubbed "a place-holder" in his profile, sparking Bean's ire and sudden uncertainty about whether the teacher's evaluations mean anything, for Bean is a protective unknowing brother), and then it's time for another cameo, when Bean tracks down Ender's oldest friend, Shen.

Shen stumblingly explains how wonderful Ender is, trying to describe how he unified his launch group by making friends with Alai to then neutralise Bernard, and this is such an Ender-worship chapter I almost forgot which book it was:

"Ender's good, man. You just--he doesn't hate anybody. If you're a good person, you're going to like him. You want him to like you. If he likes you, then you're OK, see? But if you're scum, he just makes you mad."

This is the verbatim definition of protagonist-centred morality, and the person it's centred on once murdered a child on the playground for shoving him.

All of the charisma talk makes Bean fear that Ender is Achilles again, secretly ready to kill anyone for crossing him, but that's not enough to stop his obsessive research, as he apparently continues interviewing Ender's friends and reading all the files.  The deadline is closing in on war, Bean decides, as the teachers focus their attention on their favourite students ever more.  Bean puts it down to career militarism, the popularity contest that gets entrenched in any institution that favours a particular attitude and look.  This is interesting mostly because of Bean's thoughts on Petra Arkanian:

...who had obnoxious personalities but could handle strategy and tactics in their sleep, who had the confidence to lead others into war, to trust their own decisions and act on them--they didn't care about trying to be one of the guys, and so they got overlooked, every flaw became magnified, every strength belittled.

This whole book is kind of a saving throw for Petra, telling us she's actually much better than her girls-can't-cut-it presentation in Ender's Game would suggest, but who is Card talking to at this point?  Is he arguing that Petra was always good enough but people focus on the negative aspects of her character's presentation because she's a girl?  Or is this just a throwaway line telling us that Petra is underappreciated in-universe?  There isn't much evidence for that, since she's been promoted to commander of Phoenix Army by now and stomping all over the competition in laser tag.

Last scene for this week: Carlotta has a new security clearance and very quickly sherlocks her way back to Volescu, the scientist who ran an 'organ farm' in Rotterdam that was actually a genetic engineering lab.  He's amused by her questioning:

"This is like those Nazi medical crimes all over again. You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research."

The historical significance of Nazi medical experiments is something I'm not informed enough to give any kind of lecture on, although if you can stomach it there are essays worth reading.  The one point I want to include is that we tend to have this idea that there are incredible secrets, the Forbidden Knowledge of the Universe, that we could get if only we were unethical enough to test it, and the reality is that this is rarely true.  Humans are bright enough creatures that if we can figure out what information we're looking for, we can generally also figure it out how to get it without destroying a person.  This is why Mythbusters is a great show and not a carnival of horror.  Do not trust anyone who thinks the only way to learn something is via atrocity.

Volescu fills in the last blank: with Anton's Key turned in Bean's genetics, he is permanently in child-mode, learning at lightning speed, always forming new brain pathways, and always growing at an accelerated rate.  By his mid-twenties, he'll be a giant, and his heart will give out from the strain.  Volescu claims that he made all the embryos with his own genes, and he is therefore Bean's father, but Carlotta vows that Bean will never find this out, because dad's a monster.  Quest complete!  The new quest is to save Bean's life.

Next week: turns out Anakin built C-3PO Bean created Dragon Army.

---

*I thought it was in this book, but no, here he pretends to flirt with Carlotta; it's not until book three, Shadow Puppets, that Anton says he's gay, although of course he says it in the most amazingly offensive way possible:

"...I was of a disposition not to look upon women with desire. [....] In that era, of my youth, the governments of most countries were actively encouraging those of us whose mating instinct had been short-circuited to indulge those desires and take no mate, have no children. Part of the effort to funnel all of human endeavor into the great struggle with the alien enemy. So it was almost patriotic of me to indulge myself in fleeting affairs that meant nothing, that led nowhere. Where could they lead?"

I--wow.  I had forgotten just how incredibly bad this was.  I don't know if Card is obsessed with genetic continuity because he's a huge homophobe or vice-versa, but if we had any doubt, that should be gone now.  Where do I point to show how incredibly wrong this is?  Ellen Degeneres and Portia di Rossi?  Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka?  Wanda and Alex Sykes?  Alan Cumming and Grant Shaffer?  No wonder Card is terrified of same-sex marriage; it's providing more and more concrete proof that he's been lying his whole life.

The pages that follow this are no better and maybe worse, explaining how everyone (including those rascally gays) feels an absolutely incontrovertible bone-deep desire to marry someone of the inscrutable 'opposite sex' and create children, and basically that's why Ender's Shadow is the last Orson Scott Card book I will write about on this blog.

(Content: racism, bullying. Fun content: more of Card's own fanfiction.)


Pressure to get Ender to Command School because war soon et cetera.  Graff has started holding all of his secure meetings in the battleroom control centre, because it has a separate air system Bean can't creep through.  That seems like a totally reasonable solution, as opposed to, like, assigning any of your spectacularly advanced monitoring technology to follow him, or perhaps a literal person.  But yeah, reorganise your office space completely around this kid.  (Dimak says Bean has grown too big anyway, and stopped doing the weird exercises that were meant to help him crawl through ducts.)

Bean has written and anonymously published a paper, "Problems in Campaigning Between Solar Systems Separated by Lightyears", which all the staff have quickly read and pondered--somehow Graff knows Bean wrote it, even though none of the other teachers do.  (Note from the next scene: Bean literally just wrote it and left it in his directory for them to find.  How does every teacher not know who wrote it?)  It's fascinating to me, noticing how much Card gets away with people having or not having certain information in a way that the reader is meant to ignore.  Dimak likes the idea of just setting Bean loose as a theorist and forgetting military training, but Graff has already put on his xenocide boots and he's not taking them off now.  (Side note: between all his other work, Bean has now taught himself French and German so he can read treatises in their original language.  I kind of like this, on its own, the idea that he's just that absurdly talented with languages, but piling it on top of everything else still gets an eyeroll.)

Here's a bit I've never understood:

"But he believes his false theory only because he doesn't know about the ansible. Do you understand? Because that's the main thing we'd have to tell him about, isn't it?"

This is not the first or last time Graff has insisted that Ender needs to know about the ansible in order to lead the final campaign, but that has never been justified to me.  Ender always thinks he's playing games, and he doesn't need to know about the ansible to do that; it only increases the likelihood that he'll realise the games aren't games.  They even tell Ender the things Bean has guessed--that Earth already launched its fleet, that the Third Invasion is a human attack on the formics--so the only reason Ender apparently doesn't figure it out is that he's just not that bright.  That's as close as we ever get to explicit that they didn't want Ender to be the smartest person ever for their plan, but just smart enough to push the button and take the attention.

They finally try to justify the existence of Bonzo Madrid by saying Bean was partially right in his criticism of officer criteria, because they test for qualities in highly-regarded Second Invasion veterans and the war was too short to "weed out the deadwood".  Graff puts all the blame on "our tests" giving Bonzo command despite his ineptitude, and never discusses the option of, say, teacher evaluations pointing out that he's useless and shouldn't be in space.  (Remember early in Ender's Game when Bonzo was actually moderately competent because he relied on discipline?  Those were the days.)  Of course, we also theorised that Graff wants Bonzo there as Ender's antagonist, so he would talk like his hands are tied by 'the tests', wouldn't he?

Since Bean's got his own ideas about what qualities the tests are missing, Graff decides to finally make him and Ender touch: Bean is assigned to create a full army roster out of launchies and any of the soldiers currently on transfer lists.  When Dimak tells Bean this, of course, Bean rapidly figures out it's a new army for Ender (so they can accelerate him to graduation) and that they'll use the Dragon Army name because of the supposed 'curse'.  Bean is dismissed, but takes the time to talk back to Dimak further about how bad the student evaluation criteria are anyway before he leaves, and then, with no sense of irony, decides that Dimak won't fiddle with the roster as a show of power, because he's a better person than that.  Bean: calculating people's virtues so he can insult them to their face without fear of repercussions.  Charmer.

Bean's so grim writing up his roster (trying to make sure that he won't get passed over for toon leader himself, then actually having a moment of self-awareness about his narcissism) that Nikolai stops by to check on him, jokes about letters from home.  Nikolai knows Bean grew up on the street; Bean knows Nikolai was an only child and immensely spoiled because his parents had to use so much surgical intervention and embryo manipulation just to have him (foreshadow foreshadow).  They banter, Bean goes back to work with three more slots to fill in the roster.  He finally adds Crazy Tom, despite the risk of him hulking out if he disagrees with Ender, and Wu:

...which of course had become Woo and even Woo-hoo. Brilliant at her studies, absolutely a killer in the arcade games, but she refused to be a toon leader and as soon as her commanders asked her, she put in for a transfer and refused to fight until they gave it to her. Weird.

Here we have another case of a girl in Battle School who has never been mentioned before and won't be again, whose character is defined by a combination of skill and refusal to be important.  It's almost artful, to have distilled the Faux Action Girl into such a condensed form, even leaving enough room to make it clear that her comrades-in-arms "of course" found a way to combine a dose of racism with a dash of sexual harassment.  (Seriously, it sucks to have a Chinese name in these books.  Wu?  Woo-hoo.  Han Tzu?  Hot Soup.  Andrew?  ENDER.  Granted, other white people also get stupid nicknames on occasion, like Ducheval being Shovel, but that one actually gets called out and ended, while Hot Soup goes on.)

At last, after some hemming and hawing, Bean puts Nikolai in the final slot, on the basis that he won't drag the team down and Bean wants his bro to be part of the imminent sensation that will be Dragon Army, to be able to tell stories of the days when he was the legendary Ender Wiggin's school buddy.

Dragon Army assembles for the first time in their barracks, and we get the first of the truly parallel scenes--the same dialogue as Ender's Game, but from Bean's perspective and thoughts.  Ender lets them all settle in for three minutes, then calls them to practice.  Bean isn't the one who shouts "But I'm naked!" [drink!] but he is also naked, because they had to cut down a flash suit to fit his tiny monkey frame and he can't figure out some of the makeshift fasteners.  (Buttons: much harder than German conjugation.)  But Bean silently knows he's only really angry at himself, because he should have known they would go straight to practice, so he doesn't complain as he runs naked down the hall with his suit in his arms.


In what is presumably a typo, the first two lines of faceless featureless dialogue actually end with "said Sister Carlotta" and "said Graff".  Carlotta wants Bean's genetic info to do a test (she doesn't believe he's Volescu's kid, and hopes that means it's all a lie and he'll live) but Graff confirms that Fleet scientists have already determined Anton's Key probably works exactly the way we were told.  Then they congratulate each other on how awesome their favourite students are.

This chapter is mostly Ender's Game chapter ten, with Bean's snark and narcissism instead of Ender's anxiety and narcissism.  This is the first time we've seen Bean in the battleroom, and of course he's already figured out the same thing Petra did, that the zero-G effects have to be artificial rather than a trick of non-rotation like the school claims.  Bean makes it explicit that gravity-bending machines are utterly unknown in the rest of humanity--again, why is the Fleet allowed to do this,when everyone knows there are no formic spies?  (Anti-grav never comes up in the later Shadow books on Earth, suggesting that the Fleet doesn't let that tech out after the war, either.)

Ender sends them all out in waves, and finally tells Bean that he can use a side handhold, as we know, and Bean's upfront ire ("Go suck on it") is now justified as frustration that Ender made him run naked through the halls because his suit was tricky, but takes pity for his size.  Bean just does his anti-nausea trick as he muppetflails through the room and ricochets off a side wall to join the formation.  Ender does his whole angry-drill-sergeant rant, Bean is bored, Ender teaches them "the enemy's gate is down", off they go on another leap, and Ender starts picking on Bean again to answer his various strategic questions.  We've seen this.

Bean is at first mildly scandalised that Ender doesn't know who he is already, and thinks Ender is making a fool out of himself:

"Excellent. At least I have one soldier who can figure things out." 

Bean was disgusted. This was the commander who was supposed to turn Dragon into a legendary army? Wiggin was supposed to be the alpha and omega of the Battle School, and he's playing the game of singling me out to be the goat.

It goes on, and on, like we saw before, but around the 'string bean' joke, Bean realises that Ender is successfully tapping into everyone else's resentment of him--unifying most of the army in their frustration at how the toddler keeps out-geniusing the rest of them.  Bean, of course, also thinks this is a terrible mistake because Ender is undermining his best soldier, because Bean is awesome and Bean knows it and so should everyone else.  In Ender's Game, this would have been serious; here I'm 80% sure it's supposed to be as ironic as I read it, because Bean is a jerk.

After practice, Bean and Ender have their showdown, and Bean's I-can-be-your-best-or-your-worst remarks are spun in his head as 'I will only be effective with your trust and respect, useless if you mock me', which is a hell of a retcon, but a mechanically fascinating thing to see, as a writer.  Card makes the sensible choice to not literally retcon any of the dialogue, but does his damnedest to create alternate interpretations of lines he wrote fifteen years earlier to mean something completely different.  He does occasionally add Bean's thoughts directly, almost like new dialogue, but doesn't pretend Ender picks up on it:

"So I don't even get a chance to learn before I'm being judged." That's not how you bring along talent.

Maybe the best thing about this whole thing, thematically, is that Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, when they overlap like this, are like a study in how the same events can look very different depending on your preconceptions and biases, which is supposedly the over-arching theme of Game and Speaker.  It's not great writing, but the ideas are neat, and I'd like to see a less-terrible author try the same thing in a book that actually was about that, instead of books that claim to be about that but are actually about how incredibly awesome Ender Wiggin is.

Post-argument, Bean is shaken up, and realises that he's reached the point where he can feel sick with fear even when he's not at risk of dying in a cold gutter anymore--he's counting on Ender seeing his potential and giving him an awesome future, like he did with Poke.


There's not actually a whole lot to analyse here that I can see (commenters are encouraged to disagree if y'all have your own copies and thoughts), but I'll at least recap.

Graff reports to Carlotta that Volescu really isn't Bean's genetic father, though he's a close relative, and so Carlotta goes off to find Volescu's secret half-brother.  In the meantime, we're also warned that Achilles has been removed from his ground school, on Graff's decision that he's super-smart and belongs in Battle School.  Carlotta tells him that if they're both in Battle School, one will definitely die, and accuses Graff of being "determined to let them find out which is fittest in the best Darwinian fashion", because Carlotta is the best character.

In the barracks, Bean and Fly Molo (leader of A Toon and apparently therefore second-in-command for Dragon Army) get into a fight over strategy when Fly criticises Ender's fragmentation and delegation.  When Bean's snark gets too sharp, Fly rushes him, and Nikolai comes to his aid, tragically not screaming DEATH FROM ABOVE.  Han Tzu finally breaks it up, they all agree they were insubordinate, and Nikolai explains to Bean that he's tense because he's sure he's the worst soldier in Dragon.  Bean does a bad job reassuring him, because his spectacular analysis and empathy skills have been turned off this scene to show that he has flaws.

Carlotta sherlocks her way through bureaucracy and secret files to find Bean's genetic parents, discovers that they had twenty-three frozen embryos stored years ago for impregnation (the twenty-fourth was already born, Nikolai), and they collectively discover that the remaining twenty-three were stolen.  Carlotta shares as much about Volescu as she's legally allowed, and discovers that if they had another boy, they were going to name him Julian, for his father.  Dad correctly guesses that one of the twenty-three stolen embryos wasn't destroyed and has since grown up a bit, and Carlotta confirms it and promises that if she can make it happen, they'll meet one day.

Back on Battle School, Major Anderson has a chat with Nikolai, basically saying "You are literally the only person Bean likes, please keep being his friend", and Nikolai has some realistic dialogue about dissociation (thinking of himself in his baby pictures as a different person, and seeing that person in Bean), but ultimately insists that Anderson has nothing to worry about, because they're not friends, they're brothers, and it's all very heartwarming and mildly out-of-place in this book, as the only scene not from Bean or Carlotta's perspective.  I suppose it helps, in that it gives Nikolai some psychological justification for his weird attachment to Bean the jackass ultragenius, but it also just feels like a lot of self-indulgent irony, with the 'chosen brothers' secretly being genetic brothers as well, because genetics are the best everything.

Next week: Bean's secret and completely ineffectual war to proselytise for Ender and stop Bonzo.