Somewhere along the line, this story collection got completely out of hand. It's that age-old artistic decision of what to leave in and what to leave out. Some of the decisions were easy. All my Worthing stories would be part of an omnibus volume called The Worthing Saga, so I didn't need to include any of them. And all my Mormon Sea stories would appear in the collection The Folk of the Fringe, so they wouldn't need to be included in my general story collection, either. Even with those stories left out, however, no matter how I configured a reasonable-sized book, I was leaving out too many stories that I wanted to include.
So I settled on something not of reasonable size. I talked to my editor, Beth Meacham, and proposed that we release a single-volume hardcover collection, but then split it into two regular-length paperbacks. She thought it sounded weird but, being Beth Meacham, she didn't reject it out of hand. Instead she thought about it until she liked the idea, and then went to Tom Doherty who also liked it, and voila—an egregiously oversized book was born. Because once the floodgate had opened, I pretty much included every story that I wasn't actually ashamed of.
Which brings us to this part of the collection. Think of this as a bonus section, something that only buyers of the ridiculously expensive hardcover edition receive. It won't be in any of the paperback volumes that bud off from this book. Only you will ever see it.
Why, you ask, are you so fortunate? It's not as if this percentage of the book was free—you paid for the cost of the paper and typesetting of this part of the book as surely as you paid for all the rest. The thing is: As Beth and I looked over the list of stories that were going into Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, we realized that we were approaching the point where this book would be complete. It would be the volume of record. So why not go all the way? Why not include the stuff that was so weird or out-of-genre that it wasn't going to appear anywhere else, ever.
I don't want you to think, though, that we were completely indiscriminate in what we included. For instance, we didn't include a single one of my two-dozen-or-so plays. Nor did we inflict on you any of my poetry except for “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow.” There are more than two hundred audioplays and a couple of dozen animated videoscripts from my work for Living Scriptures that aren't included. Nor have we reprinted here any of my dozens of review columns for Fantasy and Science Fiction or Science Fiction Review. There are also dozens of computer articles and computer game reviews that you are being spared. When you think of it, we were downright selective.
There is also one published bit of science fiction that isn't included here. Between this book, The Worthing Saga, and The Folk of the Fringe, all of my ASF and fantasy short stories will be in print, except for a harmless little story called “Happy Head”
which appeared in—well, someplace. In that story I used direct brain-to-computer hookups before the cyberpunks did, but that's about the only thing about the story that doesn't embarrass me now, so even if you happen to find it in your complete run of —a certain magazine—I urge you to think of it as something written by an earnest young graduate student rather than anything I did. I think the editor bought it only because it had some interesting ideas in it, not because anybody could actually take it seriously as a story. Everybody's allowed to have a mistake or two that appears in print. But I don't have to cooperate in bringing it to your attention, no matter how much amusement you might get from it.
The works in this section fall into several categories:
I've had a long habit of adapting some of my shorter works into novels; the trouble with this is that the shorter works are essentially killed. Yet at the time I wrote them, “Ender's Game,” “Mikal's Songbird,” and the epic poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow” represented my very best work. I had no idea they would ever be expanded on; they were meant to stand complete. Furthermore, both stories were nominated for awards and the poem actually won one. For historical interest if nothing else, we figured they ought to be in print somewhere. This is the place.
I'm not ashamed of these stories—they were the best I could do at the time, and they still hold up rather well. But they just don't deserve the same standing as the stories that I still believe in; and I didn't think the ideas were worth the effort of going back and rewriting the stories so they were up to snuff. So here they are, for such entertainment as they offer. And perhaps they'll also provide some encouragement to young authors who will read them, smile brightly, and say, “If these could get published, anything can!”
Let's face it—if this collection has any commercial viability, it's as a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories. But that isn't the only kind of story I write. And Beth and I thought you might enjoy getting a look at the sort of thing I write for other audiences. Many of the stories were originally aimed at the Mormon audience. Others don't have any discernable audience on God's green Earth. But we thought there was even a valid genre reason for including them in a collection of science fiction and fantasy: For some of you, at least, reading Mormon fiction will be the most alien experience you've ever had.
“Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember—the enemy's gate is down. If you step through your own door like you're out for a stroll, you're a big target and you deserve to get hit. With more than a flasher.” Ender Wiggins paused and looked over the group. Most were just watching him nervously. A few understanding. A few sullen and resisting.
First day with this army, all fresh from the teacher squads, and Ender had forgotten how young new kids could be. He'd been in it for three years, they'd had six months —nobody over nine years old in the whole bunch. But they were his. At eleven, he was half a year early to be a commander. He'd had a toon of his own and knew a few tricks, but there were forty in his new army. Green. All marksmen with a flasher, all in top shape, or they wouldn't be here—but they were all just as likely as not to get wiped out first time into battle.
“Remember,” he went on, “they can't see you till you get through that door. But the second you're out, they'll be on you. So hit that door the way you want to be when they shoot at you. Legs up under you, going straight down.” He pointed at a sullen kid who looked like he was only seven, the smallest of them all. “Which way is down, greenoh!”
“Toward the enemy door.” The answer was quick. It was also surly, as if to say, Yeah, yeah, now get on with the important stuff.
“Name, kid?”
“Bean.”
“Get that for size or for brains?”
Bean didn't answer. The rest laughed a little. Ender had chosen right. This kid was younger than the rest, must have been advanced because he was sharp. The others didn't like him much, they were happy to see him taken down a little. Like Ender's first commander had taken him down.
“Well, Bean, you're right onto things. Now I tell you this, nobody's gonna get through that door without a good chance of getting hit. A lot of you are going to be turned into cement somewhere. Make sure it's your legs. Right? If only your legs get hit, then only your legs get frozen, and in nullo that's no sweat.” Ender turned to one of the dazed ones. “What're legs for? Hmmm?”
Blank stare. Confusion. Stammer.
“Forget it. Guess I'll have to ask Bean here.”
“Legs are for pushing off walls.” Still bored.
“Thanks, Bean. Get that, everybody?” They all got it, and didn't like getting it from Bean. “Right. You can't see with legs, you can't shoot with legs, and most of the time they just get in the way. If they get frozen sticking straight out you've turned yourself into a blimp. No way to hide. So how do legs go?”
A few answered this time, to prove that Bean wasn't the only one who knew anything. “Under you. Tucked up under.”
“Right. A shield. You're kneeling on a shield, and the shield is your own legs. And there's a trick to the suits. Even when your legs are flashed you can still kick off. I've never seen anybody do it but me—but you're all gonna learn it.”
Ender Wiggins turned on his flasher. It glowed faintly green in his hand. Then he let himself rise in the weightless workout room, pulled his legs under him as though he were kneeling, and flashed both of them. Immediately his suit stiffened at the knees and ankles, so that he couldn't bend at all.
“Okay, I'm frozen, see?”
He was floating a meter above them. They all looked up at him, puzzled. He leaned back and caught one of the handholds on the wall behind him, and pulled himself flush against the wall.
“I'm stuck at a wall. If I had legs, I'd use legs, and string myself out like a string bean, right?”
They laughed.
“But I don't have legs, and that's better, got it? Because of this.” Ender jackknifed at the waist, then straightened out violently. He was across the workout room in only a moment. From the other side he called to them. “Got that? I didn't use hands, so I still had use of my flasher. And I didn't have my legs floating five feet behind me. Now watch it again.”
He repeated the jackknife, and caught a handhold on the wall near them. “Now, I don't just want you to do that when they've flashed your legs. I want you to do that when you've still got legs, because it's better. And because they'll never be expecting it. All right now, everybody up in the air and kneeling.”
Most were up in a few seconds. Ender flashed the stragglers, and they dangled, helplessly frozen, while the others laughed. “When I give an order, you move. Got it? When we're at a door and they clear it, I'll be giving you orders in two seconds, as soon as I see the setup. And when I give the order you better be out there, because whoever's out there first is going to win, unless he's a fool. I'm not. And you better not be, or I'll have you back in the teacher squads.” He saw more than a few of them gulp, and the frozen ones looked at him with fear. “You guys who are hanging there. You watch. You'll thaw out in about fifteen minutes, and let's see if you can catch up to the others.”
For the next half hour Ender had them jackknifing off walls. He called a stop when he saw that they all had the basic idea. They were a good group, maybe. They'd get better.
“Now you're warmed up,” he said to them, “we'll start working.”
Ender was the last one out after practice, since he stayed to help some of the slower ones improve on technique. They'd had good teachers, but like all armies they were uneven, and some of them could be a real drawback in battle. Their first battle might be weeks away. It might be tomorrow. A schedule was never printed. The commander just woke up and found a note by his bunk, giving him the time of his battle and the name of his opponent. So for the first while he was going to drive his boys until they were in top shape—all of them. Ready for anything, at any time. Strategy was nice, but it was worth nothing if the soldiers couldn't hold up under the strain.
He turned the corner into the residence wing and found himself face to face with Bean, the seven-year-old he had picked on all through practice that day. Problems. Ender didn't want problems right now.
“Ho, Bean.”
“Ho, Ender.”
Pause.
“Sir,” Ender said softly.
“We're not on duty.”
“In my army, Bean, we're always on duty.” Ender brushed past him.
Bean's high voice piped up behind him. “I know what you're doing, Ender, sir, and I'm warning you.”
Ender turned slowly and looked at him. “Warning me?”
“I'm the best man you've got. But I'd better be treated like it.”
“Or what?” Ender smiled menacingly.
“Or I'll be the worst man you've got. One or the other.”
“And what do you want? Love and kisses?” Ender was getting angry now.
Bean was unworried. “I want a toon.”
Ender walked back to him and stood looking down into his eyes. “I'll give a toon,” he said, “to the boys who prove they're worth something. They've got to be good soldiers, they've got to know how to take orders, they've got to be able to think for themselves in a pinch, and they've got to be able to keep respect. That's how I got to be a commander. That's how you'll get to be a toon leader. Got it?”
Bean smiled. “That's fair. If you actually work that way, I'll be a toon leader in a month.”
Ender reached down and grabbed the front of his uniform and shoved him into the wall. “When I say I work a certain way, Bean, then that's the way I work.”
Bean just smiled. Ender let go of him and walked away, and didn't look back. He was sure, without looking, that Bean was still watching, still smiling, still just a little contemptuous. He might make a good toon leader at that. Ender would keep an eye on him.
Captain Graff, six foot two and a little chubby, stroked his belly as he leaned back in his chair. Across his desk sat Lieutenant Anderson, who was earnestly pointing out high points on a chart.
“Here it is, Captain,” Anderson said. “Ender's already got them doing a tactic that's going to throw off everyone who meets it. Doubled their speed.”
Graff nodded.
“And you know his test scores. He thinks well, too.”
Graff smiled. “All true, all true, Anderson, he's a fine student, shows real promise.”
They waited.
Graff sighed. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Ender's the one. He's got to be.”
“He'll never be ready in time, Lieutenant. He's eleven, for heaven's sake, man, what do you want, a miracle?”
“I want him into battles, every day starting tomorrow. I want him to have a year's worth of battles in a month.”
Graff shook his head. “That would have his army in the hospital.”
“No, sir. He's getting them into form. And we need Ender.”
“Correction, Lieutenant. We need somebody. You think it's Ender.”
“All right, I think it's Ender. Which of the commanders if it isn't him?”
“I don't know, Lieutenant.” Graff ran his hands over his slightly fuzzy bald head. “These are children, Anderson. Do you realize that? Ender's army is nine years old. Are we going to put them against the older kids? Are we going to put them through hell for a month like that?”
Lieutenant Anderson leaned even farther over Graffs desk.
“Ender's test scores, Captain!”
“I've seen his bloody test scores! I've watched him in battle, I've listened to tapes of his training sessions, I've watched his sleep patterns, I've heard tapes of his conversations in the corridors and in the bathrooms, I'm more aware of Ender Wiggins than you could possibly imagine! And against all the arguments, against his obvious qualities, I'm weighing one thing. I have this picture of Ender a year from now, if you have your way. I see him completely useless, worn down, a failure, because he was pushed farther than he or any living person could go. But it doesn't weigh enough, does it, Lieutenant, because there's a war on, and our best talent is gone, and the biggest battles are ahead. So give Ender a battle every day this week. And then bring me a report.”
Anderson stood and saluted. “Thank you, sir.”
He had almost reached the door when Graff called his name. He turned and faced the captain.
“Anderson,” Captain Graff said. “Have you been outside, lately I mean?”
“Not since last leave, six months ago.”
“I didn't think so. Not that it makes any difference. But have you ever been to Beaman Park, there in the city? Hmm? Beautiful park. Trees. Grass. No nullo, no battles, no worries. Do you know what else there is in Beaman Park?”
“What, sir?” Lieutenant Anderson asked.
“Children,” Graff answered.
“Of course children,” said Anderson.
“I mean children. I mean kids who get up in the morning when their mothers call them and they go to school and then in the afternoons they go to Beaman Park and play. They're happy, they smile a lot, they laugh, they have fun. Hmmm?”
“I'm sure they do, sir.”
“Is that all you can say, Anderson?”
Anderson cleared his throat. “It's good for children to have fun, I think, sir. I know I did when I was a boy. But right now the world needs soldiers. And this is the way to get them.”
Graff nodded and closed his eyes. “Oh, indeed, you're right, by statistical proof and by all the important theories, and dammit they work and the system is right but all the same Ender's older than I am. He's not a child. He's barely a person,”
“If that's true, sir, then at least we all know that Ender is making it possible for the others of his age to be playing in the park.”
“And Jesus died to save all men, of course.” Graff sat up and looked at Anderson almost sadly. “But we're the ones,” Graff said, “we're the ones who are driving in the nails.”
Ender Wiggins lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. He never slept more than five hours a night—but the lights went off at 2200 and didn't come on again until 0600. So he stared at the ceiling and thought.
He'd had his army for three and a half weeks. Dragon Army. The name was assigned, and it wasn't a lucky one. Oh, the charts said that about nine years ago a Dragon Army had done fairly well. But for the next six years the name had been attached to inferior armies, and finally, because of the superstition that was beginning to play about the name, Dragon Army was retired. Until now. And now, Ender thought, smiling, Dragon Army was going to take them by surprise.
The door opened quietly. Ender did not turn his head. Someone stepped softly into his room, then left with the sound of the door shutting. When soft steps died away Ender rolled over and saw a white slip of paper lying on the floor. He reached down and picked it up.
“Dragon Army against Rabbit Army, Ender Wiggins and Cam Carby, 0700.”
The first battle. Ender got out of bed and quickly dressed. He went rapidly to the rooms of each of his toon leaders and told them to rouse their boys. In five minutes they were all gathered in the corridor, sleepy and slow. Ender spoke softly.
“First battle, 0700 against Rabbit Army. I've fought them twice before but they've got a new commander. Never heard of him. They're an older group, though, and I know a few of their old tricks. Now wake up. Run, doublefast, warmup in workroom three.”
For an hour and a half they worked out, with three mock battles and calisthenics in the corridor out of the nullo. Then for fifteen minutes they all lay up in the air, totally relaxing in the weightlessness. At 0650 Ender roused them and they hurried into the corridor. Ender led them down the corridor, running again, and occasionally leaping to touch a light panel on the ceiling. The boys all touched the same light panel. And at 0658 they reached their gate to the battleroom.
The members of toons C and D grabbed the first eight handholds in the ceiling of the corridor. Toons A, B, and E crouched on the floor. Ender hooked his feet into two handholds in the middle of the ceiling, so he was out of everyone's way.
“Which way is the enemy's door?” he hissed.
“Down!” they whispered back, and laughed.
“Flashers on.” The boxes in their hands glowed green. They waited for a few seconds more, and then the gray wall in front of them disappeared and the battleroom was visible.
Ender sized it up immediately. The familiar open grid of most early games, like the monkey bars at the park, with seven or eight boxes scattered through the grid. They called the boxes stars. There were enough of them, and in forward enough positions, that they were worth going for. Ender decided this in a second, and he hissed, “Spread to near stars. E hold!”
The four groups in the corners plunged through the forcefield at the doorway and fell down into the battleroom. Before the enemy even appeared through the opposite gate Ender's army had spread from the door to the nearest stars.
Then the enemy soldiers came through the door. From their stance Ender knew they had been in a different gravity, and didn't know enough to disorient themselves from it. They came through standing up, their entire bodies spread and defenseless.
“Kill 'em, E!” Ender hissed, and threw himself out the door knees first, with his flasher between his legs and firing. While Ender's group flew across the room the rest of Dragon Army lay down a protecting fire, so that E group reached a forward position with only one boy frozen completely, though they had all lost the use of their legs— which didn't impair them in the least. There was a lull as Ender and his opponent, Cam Carby, assessed their positions. Aside from Rabbit Army's losses at the gate, there had been few casualties, and both armies were near full strength. But Cam had no originality—he was in a four-corner spread that any five-year-old in the teacher squads might have thought of. And Ender knew how to defeat it.
He called out, loudly, “E covers A, C down. B, D angle east wall.” Under E toon's cover, B and D toons lunged away from their stars. While they were still exposed, A and C toons left their stars and drifted toward the near wall. They reached it together, and together jackknifed off the wall. At double the normal speed they appeared behind the enemy's stars, and opened fire. In a few seconds the battle was over, with the enemy almost entirely frozen, including the commander, and the rest scattered to the corners. For the next five minutes, in squads of four, Dragon Army cleaned out the dark corners of the battleroom and shepherded the enemy into the center, where their bodies, frozen at impossible angles, jostled each other. Then Ender took three of his boys to the enemy gate and went through the formality of reversing the one-way field by simultaneously touching a Dragon Army helmet at each corner. Then Ender assembled his army in vertical files near the knot of frozen Rabbit Army soldiers.
Only three of Dragon Army's soldiers were immobile. Their victory margin—38 to 0—was ridiculously high, and Ender began to laugh. Dragon Army joined him, laughing long and loud. They were still laughing when Lieutenant Anderson and Lieutenant Morris came in from the teachergate at the south end of the battleroom.
Lieutenant Anderson kept his face stiff and unsmiling, but Ender saw him wink as he held out his hand and offered the stiff, formal congratulations that were ritually given to the victor in the game.
Morris found Cam Carby and unfroze him, and the thirteen-year-old came and presented himself to Ender, who laughed without malice and held out his hand. Cam graciously took Ender's hand and bowed his head over it. It was that or be flashed again.
Lieutenant Anderson dismissed Dragon Army, and they silently left the battleroom through the enemy's door—again part of the ritual. A light was blinking on the north side of the square door, indicating where the gravity was in that corridor. Ender, leading his soldiers, changed his orientation and went through the forcefield and into gravity on his feet. His army followed him at a brisk run back to the workroom. When they got there they formed up into squads, and Ender hung in the air, watching them.
“Good first battle,” he said, which was excuse enough for a cheer, which he quieted. “Dragon Army did all right against Rabbits. But the enemy isn't always going to be that bad. And if that had been a good army we would have been smashed. We still would have won, but we would have been smashed. Now let me see B and D toons out here. Your takeoff from the stars was way too slow. If Rabbit Army knew how to aim a flasher, you all would have been frozen solid before A and C even got to the wall.”
They worked out for the rest of the day.
That night Ender went for the first time to the commanders' mess hall. No one was allowed there until he had won at least one battle, and Ender was the youngest commander ever to make it. There was no great stir when he came in. But when some of the other boys saw the Dragon on his breast pocket, they stared at him openly, and by the time he got his tray and sat at an empty table, the entire room was silent, with the other commanders watching him. Intensely self-conscious, Ender wondered how they all knew, and why they all looked so hostile.
Then he looked above the door he had just come through. There was a huge Scoreboard across the entire wall. It showed the win/loss record for the commander of every army; that day's battles were lit in red. Only four of them. The other three winners had barely made it—the best of them had only two men whole and eleven mobile at the end of the game. Dragon Army's score of thirty-eight mobile was embarrassingly better.
Other new commanders had been admitted to the commanders' mess hall with cheers and congratulations. Other new commanders hadn't won thirty-eight to zero.
Ender looked for Rabbit Army on the Scoreboard. He was surprised to find that Cam Carby's score to date was eight wins and three losses. Was he that good? Or had he only fought against inferior armies? Whichever, there was still a zero in Cam's mobile and whole columns, and Ender looked down from the Scoreboard grinning. No one smiled back, and Ender knew that they were afraid of him, which meant that they would hate him, which meant that anyone who went into battle against Dragon Army would be scared and angry and less competent. Ender looked for Cam Carby in the crowd, and found him not too far away. He stared at Carby until one of the other boys nudged the Rabbit commander and pointed to Ender. Ender smiled again and waved slightly. Carby turned red, and Ender, satisfied, leaned over his dinner and began to eat.
At the end of the week Dragon Army had fought seven battles in seven days. The score stood 7 wins and 0 losses. Ender had never had more than five boys frozen in any game. It was no longer possible for the other commanders to ignore Ender. A few of them sat with him and quietly conversed about game strategies that Ender's opponents had used. Other much larger groups were talking with the commanders that Ender had defeated, trying to find out what Ender had done to beat them.
In the middle of the meal the teacher door opened and the groups fell silent as Lieutenant Anderson stepped in and looked over the group. When he located Ender he strode quickly across the room and whispered in Ender's ear. Ender nodded, finished his glass of water, and left with the lieutenant. On the way out, Anderson handed a slip of paper to one of the older boys. The room became very noisy with conversation as Anderson and Ender left.
Ender was escorted down corridors he had never seen before. They didn't have the blue glow of the soldier corridors. Most were wood paneled, and the floors were carpeted. The doors were wood, with nameplates on them, and they stopped at one that said “Captain Graff, supervisor.” Anderson knocked softly, and a low voice said, “Come in.”
They went in. Captain Graff was seated behind a desk, his hands folded across his potbelly. He nodded, and Anderson sat. Ender also sat down. Graff cleared his throat and spoke.
“Seven days since your first battle, Ender.”
Ender did not reply.
“Won seven battles, one every day.”
Ender nodded.
“Scores unusually high, too.”
Ender blinked.
“Why?” Graff asked him.
Ender glanced at Anderson, and then spoke to the captain behind the desk. “Two new tactics, sir. Legs doubled up as a shield, so that a flash doesn't immobilize. Jackknife takeoffs from the walls. Superior strategy, as Lieutenant Anderson taught, think places, not spaces. Five toons of eight instead of four of ten. Incompetent opponents. Excellent toon leaders, good soldiers.”
Graff looked at Ender without expression. Waiting for what, Ender wondered. Lieutenant Anderson spoke up.
“Ender, what's the condition of your army?”
Do they want me to ask for relief? Not a chance, he decided. “A little tired, in peak condition, morale high, learning fast. Anxious for the next battle.”
Anderson looked at Graff. Graff shrugged slightly and turned to Ender.
“Is there anything you want to know?”
Ender held his hands loosely in his lap. “When are you going to put us up against a good army?”
Graffs laughter rang in the room, and when it stopped, Graff handed a piece of paper to Ender. “Now,” the captain said, and Ender read the paper: “Dragon Army against Leopard Army, Ender Wiggins and Pol Slattery, 2000.”
Ender looked up at Captain Graff. “That's ten minutes from now, sir.”
Graff smiled. “Better hurry, then, boy.”
As Ender left he realized Pol Slattery was the boy who had been handed his orders as Ender left the mess hall.
He got to his army five minutes later. Three toon leaders were already undressed and lying naked on their beds. He sent them all flying down the corridors to rouse their toons, and gathered up their suits himself. When all his boys were assembled in the corridor, most of them still getting dressed, Ender spoke to them.
“This one's hot and there's no time. We'll be late to the door, and the enemy'll be deployed right outside our gate. Ambush, and I've never heard of it happening before. So we'll take our time at the door. A and B toons, keep your belts loose, and give your flashers to the leaders and seconds of the other toons.”
Puzzled, his soldiers complied. By then all were dressed, and Ender led them at a trot to the gate. When they reached it the forcefield was already on one-way, and some of his soldiers were panting. They had had one battle that day and a full workout. They were tired.
Ender stopped at the entrance and looked at the placement of the enemy soldiers. Some of them were grouped not more than twenty feet out from the gate. There was no grid, there were no stars. A big empty space. Where were most of the enemy soldiers? There should have been thirty more.
“They're flat against this wall,” Ender said, “where we can't see them.”
He took A and B toons and made them kneel, their hands on their hips. Then he flashed them, so that their bodies were frozen rigid.
“You're shields,” Ender said, and then had boys from C and D kneel on their legs and hook both arms under the frozen boys' belts. Each boy was holding two flashers. Then Ender and the members of E toon picked up the duos, three at a time, and threw them out the door.
Of course, the enemy opened fire immediately. But they mainly hit the boys who were already flashed, and in a few moments pandemonium broke out in the battleroom. All the soldiers of Leopard Army were easy targets as they lay pressed flat against the wall or floated, unprotected, in the middle of the battleroom; and Ender's soldiers, armed with two flashers each, carved them up easily. Pol Slattery reacted quickly, ordering his men away from the wall, but not quickly enough—only a few were able to move, and they were flashed before they could get a quarter of the way across the battleroom.
When the battle was over Dragon Army had only twelve boys whole, the lowest score they had ever had. But Ender was satisfied. And during the ritual of surrender Pol Slattery broke form by shaking hands and asking, “Why did you wait so long getting out of the gate?”
Ender glanced at Anderson, who was floating nearby. “I was informed late,” he said. “It was an ambush.”
Slattery grinned, and gripped Ender's hand again. “Good game.”
Ender didn't smile at Anderson this time. He knew that now the games would be arranged against him, to even up the odds. He didn't like it.
It was 2150, nearly time for lights out, when Ender knocked at the door of the room shared by Bean and three other soldiers. One of the others opened the door, then stepped back and held it wide. Ender stood for a moment, then asked if he could come in. They answered, of course, of course, come in, and he walked to the upper bunk, where Bean had set down his book and was leaning on one elbow to look at Ender.
“Bean, can you give me twenty minutes?”
“Near lights out,” Bean answered.
“My room,” Ender answered. “I'll cover for you.”
Bean sat up and slid off his bed. Together he and Ender padded silently down the corridor to Ender's room. Ender entered first, and Ender closed the door behind them.
“Sit down,” Ender said, and they both sat on the edge of the bed, looking at each other.
“Remember four weeks ago, Bean? When you told me to make you a toon leader?”
“Yeah.”
“I've made five toon leaders since then, haven't I? And none of them was you.”
Bean looked at him calmly.
“Was I right?” Ender asked.
“Yes, sir,” Bean answered.
Ender nodded. “How have you done in these battles?”
Bean cocked his head to one side. “I've never been immobilized, sir, and I've immobilized forty-three of the enemy. I've obeyed orders quickly, and I've commanded a squad in mop-up and never lost a soldier.”
“Then you'll understand this.” Ender paused, then decided to back up and say something else first.
“You know you're early, Bean, by a good half year. I was, too, and I've been made a commander six months early. Now they've put me into battles after only three weeks of training with my army. They've given me eight battles in seven days. I've already had more battles than boys who were made commander four months ago. I've won more battles than many who've been commanders for a year. And then tonight. You know what happened tonight.”
Bean nodded. “They told you late.”
“I don't know what the teachers are doing. But my army is getting tired, and I'm getting tired, and now they're changing the rules of the game. You see, Bean, I've looked in the old charts. No one has ever destroyed so many enemies and kept so many of his own soldiers whole in the history of the game. I'm unique—and I'm getting unique treatment.”
Bean smiled. “You're the best, Ender.”
Ender shook his head. “Maybe. But it was no accident that I got the soldiers I got. My worst soldier could be a toon leader in another army. I've got the best. They've loaded things my way—but now they're loading it all against me. I don't know why. But I know I have to be ready for it. I need your help.”
“Why mine?”
“Because even though there are some better soldiers than you in Dragon Army— not many, but some—there's nobody who can think better and faster than you.” Bean said nothing. They both knew it was true.
Ender continued, “I need to be ready, but I can't retrain the whole army. So I'm going to cut every toon down by one, including you. With four others you'll be a special squad under me. And you'll learn to do some new things. Most of the time you'll be in the regular toons just like you are now. But when I need you. See?”
Bean smiled and nodded. “That's right, that's good, can I pick them myself?”
“One from each toon except your own, and you can't take any toon leaders.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Bean, I don't know. I don't know what they'll throw at us. What would you do if suddenly our flashers didn't work, and the enemy's did? What would you do if we had to face two armies at once? The only thing I know is—there may be a game where we don't even try for score. Where we just go for the enemy's gate. That's when the battle is technically won—four helmets at the corners of the gate. I want you ready to do that any time I call for it. Got it? You take them for two hours a day during regular workout. Then you and I and your soldiers, we'll work at night after dinner.”
“We'll get tired.”
“I have a feeling we don't know what tired is.” Ender reached out and took Bean's hand, and gripped it. “Even when it's rigged against us, Bean. We'll win.”
Bean left in silence and padded down the corridor.
Dragon Army wasn't the only army working out after hours now. The other commanders had finally realized they had some catching up to do. From early morning to lights out soldiers all over Training and Command Center, none of them over fourteen years old, were learning to jackknife off walls and use each other as living shields.
But while other commanders mastered the techniques that Ender had used to defeat them, Ender and Bean worked on solutions to problems that had never come up.
There were still battles every day, but for a while they were normal, with grids and stars and sudden plunges through the gate. And after the battles, Ender and Bean and four other soldiers would leave the main group and practice strange maneuvers. Attacks without flashers, using feet to physically disarm or disorient an enemy. Using four frozen soldiers to reverse the enemy's gate in less than two seconds. And one day Bean came to workout with a 300-meter cord.
“What's that for?”
“I don't know yet.” Absently Bean spun one end of the cord. It wasn't more than an eighth of an inch thick, but it could have lifted ten adults without breaking.
“Where did you get it?”
“Commissary. They asked what for. I said to practice tying knots.”
Bean tied a loop in the end of the rope and slid it over his shoulders.
“Here, you two, hang on to the wall here. Now don't let go of the rope. Give me about fifty yards of slack.” They complied, and Bean moved about ten feet from them along the wall. As soon as he was sure they were ready, he jackknifed off the wall and flew straight out, fifty yards. Then the rope snapped taut. It was so fine that it was virtually invisible, but it was strong enough to force Bean to veer off at almost a right angle. It happened so suddenly that he had inscribed a perfect arc and hit the wall hard before most of the other soldiers knew what had happened. Bean did a perfect rebound and drifted quickly back to where Ender and the others waited for him.
Many of the soldiers in the five regular squads hadn't noticed the rope, and were demanding to know how it was done. It was impossible to change direction that abruptly in nullo. Bean just laughed.
“Wait till the next game without a grid! They'll never know what hit them.”
They never did. The next game was only two hours later, but Bean and two others had become pretty good at aiming and shooting while they flew at ridiculous speeds at the end of the rope. The slip of paper was delivered, and Dragon Army trotted off to the gate, to battle with Griffin Army. Bean coiled the rope all the way.
When the gate opened, all they could see was a large brown star only fifteen feet away, completely blocking their view of the enemy's gate.
Ender didn't pause. “Bean, give yourself fifty feet of rope and go around the star.” Bean and his four soldiers dropped through the gate and in a moment Bean was launched sideways away from the star. The rope snapped taut, and Bean flew forward. As the rope was stopped by each edge of the star in turn, his arc became tighter and his speed greater, until when he hit the wall only a few feet away from the gate he was barely able to control his rebound to end up behind the star. But he immediately moved all his arms and legs so that those waiting inside the gate would know that the enemy hadn't flashed him anywhere.
Ender dropped through the gate, and Bean quickly told him how Griffin Army was situated. “They've got two squares of stars, all the way around the gate. All their soldiers are under cover, and there's no way to hit any of them until we're clear to the bottom wall. Even with shields, we'd get there at half strength and we wouldn't have a chance.”
“They moving?” Ender asked.
“Do they need to?”
“I would.” Ender thought for a moment. “This one's tough. We'll go for the gate, Bean.”
Griffin Army began to call out to them.
“Hey, is anybody there!”
“Wake up, there's a war on!”
“We wanna join the picnic!”
They were still calling when Ender's army came out from behind their star with a shield of fourteen frozen soldiers. William Bee, Griffin Army's commander, waited patiently as the screen approached, his men waiting at the fringes of their stars for the moment when whatever was behind the screen became visible. About ten yards away the screen suddenly exploded as the soldiers behind it shoved the screen north. The momentum carried them south twice as fast, and at the same moment the rest of Dragon Army burst from behind their star at the opposite end of the room, firing rapidly.
William Bee's boys joined battle immediately, of course, but William Bee was far more interested in what had been left behind when the shield disappeared. A formation of four frozen Dragon Army soldiers was moving headfirst toward the Griffin Army gate, held together by another frozen soldier whose feet and hands were hooked through their belts. A sixth soldier hung to his waist and trailed like the tail of a kite. Griffin Army was winning the battle easily, and William Bee concentrated on the formation as it approached the gate. Suddenly the soldier trailing in back moved—he wasn't frozen at all! And even though William Bee flashed him immediately, the damage was done. The formation drifted to the Griffin Army gate, and their helmets touched all four corners simultaneously. A buzzer sounded, the gate reversed, and the frozen soldier in the middle was carried by momentum right through the gate. All the flashers stopped working, and the game was over.
The teachergate opened and Lieutenant Anderson came in. Anderson stopped himself with a slight movement of his hands when he reached the center of the battleroom. “Ender,” he called, breaking protocol. One of the frozen Dragon soldiers near the south wall tried to call through jaws that were clamped shut by the suit. Anderson drifted to him and unfroze him.
Ender was smiling.
“I beat you again, sir,” Ender said.
Anderson didn't smile. “That's nonsense, Ender,” Anderson said softly. “Your battle was with William Bee of Griffin Army.”
Ender raised an eyebrow.
“After that maneuver,” Anderson said, “the rules are being revised to require that all of the enemy's soldiers must be immobilized before the gate can be reversed.”
“That's all right,” Ender said. “It could only work once, anyway.” Anderson nodded, and was turning away when Ender added, “Is there going to be a new rule that armies be given equal positions to fight from?”
Anderson turned back around. “If you're in one of the positions, Ender, you can hardly call them equal, whatever they are.”
William Bee counted carefully and wondered how in the world he had lost when not one of his soldiers had been flashed and only four of Ender's soldiers were even mobile.
And that night as Ender came into the commanders' mess hall, he was greeted with applause and cheers, and his table was crowded with respectful commanders, many of them two or three years older than he was. He was friendly, but while he ate he wondered what the teachers would do to him in his next battle. He didn't need to worry. His next two battles were easy victories, and after that he never saw the battleroom again.
It was 2100 and Ender was a little irritated to hear someone knock at his door. His army was exhausted, and he had ordered them all to be in bed after 2030. The last two days had been regular battles, and Ender was expecting the worst in the morning.
It was Bean. He came in sheepishly, and saluted.
Ender returned his salute and snapped, “Bean, I wanted everybody in bed.”
Bean nodded but didn't leave. Ender considered ordering him out. But as he looked at Bean it occurred to him for the first time in weeks just how young Bean was. He had turned eight a week before, and he was still small and—no, Ender thought, he wasn't young. Nobody was young. Bean had been in battle, and with a whole army depending on him he had come through and won. And even though he was small, Ender could never think of him as young again.
Ender shrugged and Bean came over and sat on the edge of the bed. The younger boy looked at his hands for a while, and finally Ender grew impatient and asked, “Well, what is it?”
“I'm transferred. Got orders just a few minutes ago.”
Ender closed his eyes for a moment. “I knew they'd pull something new. Now they're taking—where are you going?”
“Rabbit Army.”
“How can they put you under an idiot like Carn Carby!”
“Cam was graduated. Support squads.”
Ender looked up. “Well, who's commanding Rabbit then?”
Bean held his hands out helplessly.
“Me,” he said.
Ender nodded, and then smiled. “Of course. After all, you're only four years younger than the regular age.”
“It isn't funny,” Bean said. “I don't know what's going on here. First all the changes in the game. And now this. I wasn't the only one transferred, either, Ender. Ren, Peder, Brian, Wins, Younger. All commanders now.”
Ender stood up angrily and strode to the wall. “Every damn toon leader I've got!” he said, and whirled to face Bean. “If they're going to break up my army, Bean, why did they bother making me a commander at all?”
Bean shook his head. “I don't know. You're the best, Ender. Nobody's ever done what you've done. Nineteen battles in fifteen days, sir, and you won every one of them, no matter what they did to you.”
“And now you and the others are commanders. You know every trick I've got, I trained you, and who am I supposed to replace you with? Are they going to stick me with six greenohs?”
“It stinks, Ender, but you know that if they gave you five crippled midgets and armed you with a roll of toilet paper you'd win.”
They both laughed, and then they noticed that the door was open.
Lieutenant Anderson stepped in. He was followed by Captain Graff.
“Ender Wiggins,” Graff said, holding his hands across his stomach.
“Yes, sir,” Ender answered.
“Orders.”
Anderson extended a slip of paper. Ender read it quickly, then crumpled it, still looking at the air where the paper had been. After a few moments he asked, “Can I tell my army?”
“They'll find out,” Graff answered. “It's better not to talk to them after orders. It makes it easier.”
“For you or for me?” Ender asked. He didn't wait for an answer. He turned quickly to Bean, took his hand for a moment, and then headed for the door.
“Wait,” Bean said. “Where are you going? Tactical or Support School?”
“Command School,” Ender answered, and then he was gone and Anderson closed the door.
Command School, Bean thought. Nobody went to Command School until they had gone through three years of Tactical. But then, nobody went to Tactical until they had been through at least five years of Battle School. Ender had only had three.
The system was breaking up. No doubt about it, Bean thought. Either somebody at the top was going crazy, or something was going wrong with the war—the real war, the one they were training to fight in. Why else would they break down the training system, advance somebody—even somebody as good as Ender—straight to Command School? Why else would they ever have an eight-year-old greenoh like Bean command an army?
Bean wondered about it for a long time, and then he finally lay down on Ender's bed and realized that he'd never see Ender again, probably. For some reason that made him want to cry. But he didn't cry, of course. Training in the preschools had taught him how to force down emotions like that. He remembered how his first teacher, when he was three, would have been upset to see his lip quivering and his eyes full of tears. Bean went through the relaxing routine until he didn't feel like crying anymore. Then he drifted off to sleep. His hand was near his mouth. It lay on his pillow hesitantly, as if Bean couldn't decide whether to bite his nails or suck on his fingertips. His forehead was creased and furrowed. His breathing was quick and light. He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant.
There's a war on, they said, and that was excuse enough for all the hurry in the world. They said it like a password and flashed a little card at every ticket counter and customs check and guard station. It got them to the head of every line.
Ender Wiggins was rushed from place to place so quickly he had no time to examine anything. But he did see trees for the first time. He saw men who were not in uniform. He saw women. He saw strange animals that didn't speak, but that followed docilely behind women and small children. He saw suitcases and conveyor belts and signs that said words he had never heard of. He would have asked someone what the words meant, except that purpose and authority surrounded him in the persons of four very high officers who never spoke to each other and never spoke to him.
Ender Wiggins was a stranger to the world he was being trained to save. He did not remember ever leaving Battle School before. His earliest memories were of childish war games under the direction of a teacher, of meals with other boys in the gray and green uniforms of the armed forces of his world. He did not know that the gray represented the sky and the green represented the great forests of his planet. All he knew of the world was from vague references to “outside.”
And before he could make any sense of the strange world he was seeing for the first time, they enclosed him again within the shell of the military, where nobody had to say There's a war on anymore because no one within the shell of the military forgot it for a single instant of a single day.
They put him in a spaceship and launched him to a large artificial satellite that circled the world.
This space station was called Command School. It held the ansible.
On his first day Ender Wiggins was taught about the ansible and what it meant to warfare. It meant that even though the starships of today's battles were launched a hundred years ago, the commanders of the starships were men of today, who used the ansible to send messages to the computers and the few men on each ship. The ansible sent words as they were spoken, orders as they were made. Battleplans as they were fought. Light was a pedestrian.
For two months Ender Wiggins didn't meet a single person. They came to him namelessly, taught him what they knew, and left him to other teachers. He had no time to miss his friends at Battle School. He only had time to learn how to operate the simulator, which flashed battle patterns around him as if he were in a starship at the center of the battle. How to command mock ships in mock battles by manipulating the keys on the simulator and speaking words into the ansible. How to recognize instantly every enemy ship and the weapons it carried by the pattern that the simulator showed. How to transfer all that he learned in the nullo battles at Battle School to the starship battles at Command School.
He had thought the game was taken seriously before. Here they hurried him through every step, were angry and worried beyond reason every time he forgot something or made a mistake. But he worked as he had always worked, and learned as he had always learned. After a while he didn't make any more mistakes. He used the simulator as if it were a part of himself. Then they stopped being worried and gave him a teacher.
Maezr Rackham was sitting cross-legged on the floor when Ender awoke. He said nothing as Ender got up and showered and dressed, and Ender did not bother to ask him anything. He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, he would often find out more information faster by waiting than by asking.
Maezr still hadn't spoken when Ender was ready and went to the door to leave the room. The door didn't open. Ender turned to face the man sitting on the floor. Maezr was at least forty, which made him the oldest man Ender had ever seen close up. He had a day's growth of black and white whiskers that grizzled his face only slightly less than his close-cut hair. His face sagged a little and his eyes were surrounded by creases and lines. He looked at Ender without interest.
Ender turned back to the door and tried again to open it.
“All right,” he said, giving up. “Why's the door locked?”
Maezr continued to look at him blankly.
Ender became impatient. “I'm going to be late. If I'm not supposed to be there until later, then tell me so I can go back to bed.” No answer. “Is it a guessing game?” Ender asked. No answer. Ender decided that maybe the man was trying to make him angry, so he went through a relaxing exercise as he leaned on the door, and soon he was calm again. Maezr didn't take his eyes off Ender.
For the next two hours the silence endured, Maezr watching Ender constantly, Ender trying to pretend he didn't notice the old man. The boy became more and more nervous, and finally ended up walking from one end of the room to the other in a sporadic pattern.
He walked by Maezr as he had several times before, and Maezr's hand shot out and pushed Ender's left leg into his right in the middle of a step. Ender fell flat on the floor.
He leaped to his feet immediately, furious. He found Maezr sitting calmly, cross-legged, as if he had never moved. Ender stood poised to fight. But the other's immobility made it impossible for Ender to attack, and he found himself wondering if he had only imagined the old man's hand tripping him up.
The pacing continued for another hour, with Ender Wiggins trying the door every now and then. At last he gave up and took off his uniform and walked to his bed.
As he leaned over to pull the covers back, he felt a hand jab roughly between his thighs and another hand grab his hair. In a moment he had been turned upside down. His face and shoulders were being pressed into the floor by the old man's knee, while his back was excruciatingly bent and his legs were pinioned by Maezr's arm. Ender was helpless to use his arms, and he couldn't bend his back to gain slack so he could use his legs. In less than two seconds the old man had completely defeated Ender Wiggins.
“All right,” Ender gasped. “You win.”
Maezr's knee thrust painfully downward.
“Since when,” Maezr asked in a soft, rasping voice, “do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?”
Ender remained silent.
“I surprised you once, Ender Wiggins. Why didn't you destroy me immediately afterward? Just because I looked peaceful? You turned your back on me. Stupid. You have learned nothing. You have never had a teacher.”
Ender was angry now. “I've had too many damned teachers, how was I supposed to know you'd turn out to be a—” Ender hunted for a word. Maezr supplied one.
“An enemy, Ender Wiggins,” Maezr whispered. “I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy, Ender Wiggins. No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. I am your enemy, from now on. From now on I am your teacher.”
Then Maezr let Ender's legs fall to the floor. Because the old man still held Ender's head to the floor, the boy couldn't use his arms to compensate, and his legs hit the plastic surface with a loud crack and a sickening pain that made Ender wince. Then Maezr stood and let Ender rise.
Slowly the boy pulled his legs under him, with a faint groan of pain, and he knelt on all fours for a moment, recovering. Then his right arm flashed out. Maezr quickly danced back and Ender's hand closed on air as his teacher's foot shot forward to catch Ender on the chin.
Ender's chin wasn't there. He was lying flat on his back, spinning on the floor, and during the moment that Maezr was off balance from his kick Ender's feet smashed into Maezr's other leg. The old man fell on the ground in a heap.
What seemed to be a heap was really a hornet's nest. Ender couldn't find an arm or a leg that held still long enough to be grabbed, and in the meantime blows were landing on his back and arms. Ender was smaller—he couldn't reach past the old man's flailing limbs.
So he leaped back out of the way and stood poised near the door.
The old man stopped thrashing about and sat up, cross-legged again, laughing. “Better, this time, boy. But slow. You will have to be better with a fleet than you are with your body or no one will be safe with you in command. Lesson learned?”
Ender nodded slowly.
Maezr smiled. “Good. Then we'll never have such a battle again. All the rest with the simulator. I will program your battles, I will devise the strategy of your enemy, and you will learn to be quick and discover what tricks the enemy has for you. Remember, boy. From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.”
Then Maezr's face became serious again. “You will be about to lose, Ender, but you will win. You will learn to defeat the enemy. He will teach you how.”
Maezr got up and walked toward the door. Ender stepped back out of the way. As the old man touched the handle of the door, Ender leaped into the air and kicked Maezr in the small of the back with both feet. He hit hard enough that he rebounded onto his feet, as Maezr cried out and collapsed on the floor.
Maezr got up slowly, holding on to the door handle, his face contorted with pain. He seemed disabled, but Ender didn't trust him. He waited warily. And yet in spite of his suspicion he was caught off guard by Maezr's speed. In a moment he found himself on the floor near the opposite wall, his nose and lip bleeding where his face had hit the bed. He was able to turn enough to see Maezr open the door and leave. The old man was limping and walking slowly.
Ender smiled in spite of the pain, then rolled over onto his back and laughed until his mouth filled with blood and he started to gag. Then he got up and painfully made his way to the bed. He lay down and in a few minutes a medic came and took care of his injuries.
As the drug had its effect and Ender drifted off to sleep he remembered the way Maezr limped out of his room and laughed again. He was still laughing softly as his mind went blank and the medic pulled the blanket over him and snapped off the light. He slept until pain woke him in the morning. He dreamed of defeating Maezr.
The next day Ender went to the simulator room with his nose bandaged and his lip still puffy. Maezr was not there. Instead, a captain who had worked with him before showed him an addition that had been made. The captain pointed to a tube with a loop at one end. “Radio. Primitive, I know, but it loops over your ear and we tuck the other end into your mouth like this.”
“Watch it,” Ender said as the captain pushed the end of the tube into his swollen lip.
“Sorry. Now you just talk.”
“Good. Who to?”
The captain smiled. “Ask and see.”
Ender shrugged and turned to the simulator. As he did a voice reverberated through his skull. It was too loud for him to understand, and he ripped the radio off his ear.
“What are you trying to do, make me deaf?”
The captain shook his head and turned a dial on a small box on a nearby table. Ender put the radio back on.
“Commander,” the radio said in a familiar voice.
Ender answered, “Yes.”
“Instructions, sir?”
The voice was definitely familiar. “Bean?” Ender asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Bean, this is Ender.”
Silence. And then a burst of laughter from the other side. Then six or seven more voices laughing, and Ender waited for silence to return. When it did, he asked, “Who else?”
A few voices spoke at once, but Bean drowned them out. “Me, I'm Bean, and Peder, Wins, Younger, Lee, and Vlad.”
Ender thought for a moment. Then he asked what the hell was going on. They laughed again.
“They can't break up the group,” Bean said. “We were commanders for maybe two weeks, and here we are at Command School, training with the simulator, and all of a sudden they told us we were going to form a fleet with a new commander. And that's you.”
Ender smiled. “Are you boys any good?”
“If we aren't, you'll let us know.”
Ender chuckled a little. “Might work out. A fleet.”
For the next ten days Ender trained his toon leaders until they could maneuver their ships like precision dancers. It was like being back in the battleroom again, except that now Ender could always see everything, and could speak to his toon leaders and change their orders at any time.
One day as Ender sat down at the control board and switched on the simulator, harsh green lights appeared in the space—the enemy.
“This is it,” Ender said. “X, Y, bullet, C, D, reserve screen, E, south loop, Bean, angle north.”
The enemy was grouped in a globe, and outnumbered Ender two to one. Half of Ender's force was grouped in a tight, bulletlike formation, with the rest in a flat circular screen—except for a tiny force under Bean that moved off the simulator, heading behind the enemy's formation. Ender quickly learned the enemy's strategy: whenever Ender's bullet formation came close, the enemy would give way, hoping to draw Ender inside the globe where he would be surrounded. So Ender obligingly fell into the trap, bringing his bullet to the center of the globe.
The enemy began to contract slowly, not wanting to come within range until all their weapons could be brought to bear at once. Then Ender began to work in earnest. His reserve screen approached the outside of the globe, and the enemy began to concentrate his forces there. Then Bean's force appeared on the opposite side, and the enemy again deployed ships on that side.
Which left most of the globe only thinly defended. Ender's bullet attacked, and since at the point of attack it outnumbered the enemy overwhelmingly, he tore a hole in the formation. The enemy reacted to try to plug the gap, but in the confusion the reserve force and Bean's small force attacked simultaneously, while the bullet moved to another part of the globe. In a few more minutes the formation was shattered, most of the enemy ships destroyed, and the few survivors rushing away as fast as they could go.
Ender switched the simulator off. All the lights faded. Maezr was standing beside Ender, his hands in his pockets, his body tense. Ender looked up at him.
“I thought you said the enemy would be smart,” Ender said.
Maezr's face remained expressionless. “What did you learn?”
“I learned that a sphere only works if your enemy's a fool. He had his forces so spread out that I outnumbered him whenever I engaged him.”
“And?”
“And,” Ender said, “you can't stay committed to one pattern. It makes you too easy to predict.”
“Is that all?” Maezr asked quietly.
Ender took off his radio. “The enemy could have defeated me by breaking the sphere earlier.”
Maezr nodded. “You had an unfair advantage.”
Ender looked up at him coldly. “I was outnumbered two to one.”
Maezr shook his head. “You have the ansible. The enemy doesn't. We include that in the mock battles. Their messages travel at the speed of light.”
Ender glanced toward the simulator. “Is there enough space to make a difference?”
“Don't you know?” Maezr asked. “None of the ships was ever closer than thirty thousand kilometers to any other.”
Ender tried to figure the size of the enemy's sphere. Astronomy was beyond him. But now his curiosity was stirred.
“What kind of weapons are on those ships? To be able to strike so fast?”
Maezr shook his head. “The science is too much for you. You'd have to study many more years than you've lived to understand even the basics. All you need to know is that the weapons work.”
“Why do we have to come so close to be in range?”
“The ships are all protected by forcefields. A certain distance away the weapons are weaker and can't get through. Closer in the weapons are stronger than the shields. But the computers take care of all that. They're constantly firing in any direction that won't hurt one of our ships. The computers pick targets, aim; they do all the detail work. You just tell them when and get them in a position to win. All right?”
“No.” Ender twisted the tube of the radio around his fingers. “I have to know how the weapons work.”
“I told you, it would take—”
“I can't command a fleet—not even on the simulator—unless I know.” Ender waited a moment, then added, “Just the rough idea.”
Maezr stood up and walked a few steps away. “All right, Ender. It won't make any sense, but I'll try. As simply as I can.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “It's this way, Ender. Everything is made up of atoms, little particles so small you can't see them with your eyes. These atoms, there are only a few different types, and they're all made up of even smaller particles that are pretty much the same. These atoms can be broken, so that they stop being atoms. So that this metal doesn't hold together anymore. Or the plastic floor. Or your body. Or even the air. They just seem to disappear, if you break the atoms. All that's left is the pieces. And they fly around and break more atoms. The weapons on the ships set up an area where it's impossible for atoms of anything to stay together. They all break down. So things in that area—they disappear.”
Ender nodded. “You're right, I don't understand it. Can it be blocked?”
“No. But it gets wider and weaker the farther it goes from the ship, so that after a while a forcefield will block it. OK? And to make it strong at all, it has to be focused, so that a ship can only fire effectively in maybe three or four directions at once.”
Ender nodded again, but he didn't really understand, not well enough. “If the pieces of the broken atoms go breaking more atoms, why doesn't it just make everything disappear?”
“Space. Those thousands of kilometers between the ships, they're empty. Almost no atoms. The pieces don't hit anything, and when they finally do hit something, they're so spread out they can't do any harm.” Maezr cocked his head quizzically. “Anything else you need to know?”
“Do the weapons on the ships—do they work against anything besides ships?”
Maezr moved in close to Ender and said firmly, “We only use them against ships. Never anything else. If we used them against anything else, the enemy would use them against us. Got it?”
Maezr walked away, and was nearly out the door when Ender called to him.
“I don't know your name yet,” Ender said blandly.
“Maezr Rackham.”
“Maezr Rackham,” Ender said, “I defeated you.”
Maezr laughed.
“Ender, you weren't fighting me today,” he said. “You were fighting the stupidest computer in the Command School, set on a ten-year-old program. You don't think I'd use a sphere, do you?” He shook his head. “Ender, my dear little fellow, when you fight me you'll know it. Because you'll lose.” And Maezr left the room.
Ender still practiced ten hours a day with his toon leaders. He never saw them, though, only heard their voices on the radio. Battles came every two or three days. The enemy had something new every time, something harder—but Ender coped with it. And won every time. And after every battle Maezr would point out mistakes and show Ender that he had really lost. Maezr only let Ender finish so that he would learn to handle the end of the game.
Until finally Maezr came in and solemnly shook Ender's hand and said, “That, boy, was a good battle.”
Because the praise was so long in coming, it pleased Ender more than praise had ever pleased him before. And because it was so condescending, he resented it.
“So from now on,” Maezr said, “we can give you hard ones.”
From then on Ender's life was a slow nervous breakdown.
He began fighting two battles a day, with problems that steadily grew more difficult. He had been trained in nothing but the game all his life, but now the game began to consume him. He woke in the morning with new strategies for the simulator and went fitfully to sleep at night with the mistakes of the day preying on him. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night crying for a reason he didn't remember. Sometimes he woke with his knuckles bloody from biting them. But every day he went impassively to the simulator and drilled his toon leaders until the battles, and drilled his toon leaders after the battles, and endured and studied the harsh criticism that Maezr Rackham piled on him. He noted that Rackham perversely criticized him more after his hardest battles. He noted that every time he thought of a new strategy the enemy was using it within a few days. And he noted that while his fleet always stayed the same size, the enemy increased in numbers every day.
He asked his teacher.
“We are showing you what it will be like when you really command. The ratios of enemy to us.”
“Why does the enemy always outnumber us?”
Maezr bowed his gray head for a moment, as if deciding whether to answer. Finally he looked up and reached out his hand and touched Ender on the shoulder. “I will tell you, even though the information is secret. You see, the enemy attacked us first. He had good reason to attack us, but that is a matter for politicians, and whether the fault was ours or his, we could not let him win. So when the enemy came to our worlds, we fought back, hard, and spent the finest of our young men in the fleets. But we won, and the enemy retreated.”
Maezr smiled ruefully. “But the enemy was not through, boy. The enemy would never be through. They came again, with more numbers, and it was harder to beat them. And another generation of young men was spent. Only a few survived. So we came up with a plan—the big men came up with the plan. We knew that we had to destroy the enemy once and for all, totally, eliminate his ability to make war against us. To do that we had to go to his home worlds—his home world, really, since the enemy's empire is all tied to his capital world.”
“And so?” Ender asked.
“And so we made a fleet. We made more ships than the enemy ever had. We made a hundred ships for every ship he had sent against us. And we launched them against his twenty-eight worlds. They started leaving a hundred years ago. And they carried on them the ansible, and only a few men. So that someday a commander could sit on a planet somewhere far from the battle and command the fleet. So that our best minds would not be destroyed by the enemy.”
Ender's question had still not been answered. “Why do they outnumber us?”
Maezr laughed. “Because it took a hundred years for our ships to get there. They've had a hundred years to prepare for us. They'd be fools, don't you think, boy, if they waited in old tugboats to defend their harbors. They have new ships, great ships, hundreds of ships. All we have is the ansible, that and the fact that they have to put a commander with every fleet, and when they lose—and they will lose—they lose one of their best minds every time.”
Ender started to ask another question.
“No more, Ender Wiggins. I've told you more than you ought to know as it is.”
Ender stood angrily and turned away. “I have a right to know. Do you think this can go on forever, pushing me through one school and another and never telling me what my life is for? You use me and the others as a tool, someday we'll command your ships, someday maybe we'll save your lives, but I'm not a computer, and I have to know!”
“Ask me a question, then, boy,” Maezr said, “and if I can answer, I will.”
“If you use your best minds to command the fleets, and you never lose any, then what do you need me for? Who am I replacing, if they're all still there?”
Maezr shook his head. “I can't tell you the answer to that, Ender. Be content that we will need you, soon. It's late. Go to bed. You have a battle in the morning.”
Ender walked out of the simulator room. But when Maezr left by the same door a few moments later, the boy was waiting in the hall.
“All right, boy,” Maezr said impatiently, “what is it? I don't have all night and you need to sleep.”
Ender wasn't sure what his question was, but Maezr waited. Finally Ender asked softly, “Do they live?”
“Does who live?”
“The other commanders. The ones now. And before me.”
Maezr snorted. “Live. Of course they live. He wonders if they live.” Still chuckling, the old man walked off down the hall. Ender stood in the corridor for a while, but at last he was tired and he went off to bed. They live, he thought. They live, but he can't tell me what happens to them.
That night Ender didn't wake up crying. But he did wake up with blood on his hands.
Months wore on with battles every day, until at last Ender settled into the routine of the destruction of himself. He slept less every night, dreamed more, and he began to have terrible pains in his stomach. They put him on a very bland diet, but soon he didn't even have an appetite for that. “Eat,” Maezr said, and Ender would mechanically put food in his mouth. But if nobody told him to eat he didn't eat.
One day as he was drilling his toon leaders the room went black and he woke up on the floor with his face bloody where he had hit the controls.
They put him to bed then, and for three days he was very ill. He remembered seeing faces in his dreams, but they weren't real faces, and he knew it even while he thought he saw them. He thought he saw Bean sometimes, and sometimes he thought he saw Lieutenant Anderson and Captain Graff. And then he woke up and it was only his enemy, Maezr Rackham.
“I'm awake,” he said to Maezr.
“So I see,” Maezr answered. “Took you long enough. You have a battle today.”
So Ender got up and fought the battle and he won it. But there was no second battle that day, and they let him go to bed earlier. His hands were shaking as he undressed.
During the night he thought he felt hands touching him gently, and he dreamed he heard voices saying, “How long can he go on?”
“Long enough.”
“So soon?”
“In a few days, then he's through.” •
“How will he do?”
“Fine. Even today, he was better than ever.”
Ender recognized the last voice as Maezr Rackham's. He resented Rackham's intruding even in his sleep.
He woke up and fought another battle and won.
Then he went to bed.
He woke up and won again.
And the next day was his last day in Command School, though he didn't know it. He got up and went to the simulator for the battle.
Maezr was waiting for him. Ender walked slowly into the simulator room. His step was slightly shuffling, and he seemed tired and dull. Maezr frowned.
“Are you awake, boy?” If Ender had been alert, he would have cared more about the concern in his teacher's voice. Instead, he simply went to the controls and sat down. Maezr spoke to him.
“Today's game needs a little explanation, Ender Wiggins. Please turn around and pay strict attention.”
Ender turned around, and for the first time he noticed that there were people at the back of the room. He recognized Graff and Anderson from Battle School, and vaguely remembered a few of the men from Command School—teachers for a few hours at some time or another. But most of the people he didn't know at all.
“Who are they?”
Maezr shook his head and answered, “Observers. Every now and then we let observers come in to watch the battle. If you don't want them, we'll send them out.”
Ender shrugged. Maezr began his explanation. “Today's game, boy, has a new element. We're staging this battle around a planet. This will complicate things in two ways. The planet isn't large, on the scale we're using, but the ansible can't detect anything on the other side of it—so there's a blind spot. Also, it's against the rules to use weapons against the planet itself. All right?”
“Why, don't the weapons work against planets?”
Maezr answered coldly, “There are rules of war, Ender, that apply even in training games.”
Ender shook his head slowly. “Can the planet attack?”
Maezr looked nonplussed for a moment, then smiled. “I guess you'll have to find that one out, boy. And one more thing. Today, Ender, your opponent isn't the computer. I am your enemy today, and today I won't be letting you off so easily. Today is a battle to the end. And I'll use any means I can to defeat you.”
Then Maezr was gone, and Ender expressionlessly led his toon leaders through maneuvers. Ender was doing well, of course, but several of the observers shook their heads, and Graff kept clasping and unclasping his hands, crossing and uncrossing his legs. Ender would be slow today, and today Ender couldn't afford to be slow.
A warning buzzer sounded, and Ender cleared the simulator board, waiting for today's game to appear. He felt muddled today, and wondered why people were there watching. Were they going to judge him today? Decide if he was good enough for something else? For another two years of grueling training, another two years of struggling to exceed his best? Ender was twelve. He felt very old. And as he waited for the game to appear, he wished he could simply lose it, lose the battle badly and completely so that they would remove him from the program, punish him however they wanted, he didn't care, just so he could sleep.
Then the enemy formation appeared, and Ender's weariness turned to desperation.
The enemy outnumbered him a thousand to one, the simulator glowed green with them, and Ender knew that he couldn't win.
And the enemy was not stupid. There was no formation that Ender could study and attack. Instead the vast swarms of ships were constantly moving, constantly shifting from one momentary formation to another, so that a space that for one moment was empty was immediately filled with a formidable enemy force. And even though Ender's fleet was the largest he had ever had, there was no place he could deploy it where he would outnumber the enemy long enough to accomplish anything.
And behind the enemy was the planet. The planet, which Maezr had warned him about. What difference did a planet make, when Ender couldn't hope to get near it? Ender waited, waited for the flash of insight that would tell him what to do, how to destroy the enemy. And as he waited, he heard the observers behind him begin to shift in their seats, wondering what Ender was doing, what plan he would follow. And finally it was obvious to everyone that Ender didn't know what to do, that there was nothing to do, and a few of the men at the back of the room made quiet little sounds in their throats.
Then Ender heard Bean's voice in his ear. Bean chuckled and said, “Remember, the enemy's gate is down.” A few of the other toon leaders laughed, and Ender thought back to the simple games he had played and won in Battle School. They had put him against hopeless odds there, too. And he had beaten them. And he'd be damned if he'd let Maezr Rackham beat him with a cheap trick like outnumbering him a thousand to one. He had won a game in Battle School by going for something the enemy didn't expect, something against the rules—he had won by going against the enemy's gate.
And the enemy's gate was down.
Ender smiled, and realized that if he broke this rule they'd probably kick him out of school, and that way he'd win for sure: He would never have to play a game again.
He whispered into the microphone. His six commanders each took a part of the fleet and launched themselves against the enemy. They pursued erratic courses, darting off in one direction and then another. The enemy immediately stopped his aimless maneuvering and began to group around Ender's six fleets.
Ender took off his microphone, leaned back in his chair, and watched. The observers murmured out loud, now. Ender was doing nothing—he had thrown the game away.
But a pattern began to emerge from the quick confrontations with the enemy. Ender's six groups lost ships constantly as they brushed with each enemy force—but they never stopped for a fight, even when for a moment they could have won a small tactical victory. Instead they continued on their erratic course that led, eventually, down. Toward the enemy planet.
And because of their seemingly random course the enemy didn't realize it until the same time that the observers did. By then it was too late, just as it had been too late for William Bee to stop Ender's soldiers from activating the gate. More of Ender's ships could be hit and destroyed, so that of the six fleets only two were able to get to the planet, and those were decimated. But those tiny groups did get through, and they opened fire on the planet.
Ender leaned forward now, anxious to see if his guess would pay off. He half expected a buzzer to sound and the game to be stopped, because he had broken the rule. But he was betting on the accuracy of the simulator. If it could simulate a planet, it could simulate what would happen to a planet under attack.
It did.
The weapons that blew up little ships didn't blow up the entire planet at first. But they did cause terrible explosions. And on the planet there was no space to dissipate the chain reaction. On the planet the chain reaction found more and more fuel to feed it.
The planet's surface seemed to be moving back and forth, but soon the surface gave way in an immense explosion that sent light flashing in all directions. It swallowed up Ender's entire fleet. And then it reached the enemy ships.
The first simply vanished in the explosion. Then, as the explosion spread and became less bright, it was clear what happened to each ship. As the light reached them they flashed brightly for a moment and disappeared. They were all fuel for the fire of the planet.
It took more than three minutes for the explosion to reach the limits of the simulator, and by then it was much fainter. All the ships were gone, and if any had escaped before the explosion reached them, they were few and not worth worrying about. Where the planet had been there was nothing. The simulator was empty.
Ender had destroyed the enemy by sacrificing his entire fleet and breaking the rule against destroying the enemy planet. He wasn't sure whether to feel triumphant at his victory or defiant at the rebuke he was certain would come. So instead he felt nothing. He was tired. He wanted to go to bed and sleep.
He switched off the simulator, and finally heard the noise behind him.
There were no longer two rows of dignified military observers. Instead there was chaos. Some of them were slapping each other on the back; some of them were bowed, head in hands; others were openly weeping. Captain Graff detached himself from the group and came to Ender. Tears streamed down his face, but he was smiling. He reached out his arms, and to Ender's surprise he embraced the boy, held him tightly, and whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ender.”
Soon all the observers were gathered around the bewildered child, thanking him and cheering him and patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand. Ender tried to make sense of what they were saying. Had he passed the test after all? Why did it matter so much to them?
Then the crowd parted and Maezr Rackham walked through. He came straight up to Ender Wiggins and held out his hand.
“You made the hard choice, boy. But heaven knows there was no other way you could have done it. Congratulations. You beat them, and it's all over.”
All over. Beat them. “I beat you, Maezr Rackham.”
Maezr laughed, a loud laugh that filled the room. “Ender Wiggins, you never played me. You never played a game since I was your teacher.”
Ender didn't get the joke. He had played a great many games, at a terrible cost to himself. He began to get angry.
Maezr reached out and touched his shoulder. Ender shrugged him off. Maezr then grew serious and said, “Ender Wiggins, for the last months you have been the commander of our fleets. There were no games. The battles were real. Your only enemy was the enemy. You won every battle. And finally today you fought them at their home world, and you destroyed their world, their fleet, you destroyed them completely, and they'll never come against us again. You did it. You.”
Real. Not a game. Ender's mind was too tired to cope with it all. He walked away from Maezr, walked silently through the crowd that still whispered thanks and congratulations to the boy, walked out of the simulator room and finally arrived in his bedroom and closed the door.
He was asleep when Graff and Maezr Rackham found him. They came in quietly and roused him. He awoke slowly, and when he recognized them he turned away to go back to sleep.
“Ender,” Graff said. “We need to talk to you.”
Ender rolled back to face them. He said nothing.
Graff smiled. “It was a shock to you yesterday, 1 know. But it must make you feel good to know you won the war.”
Ender nodded slowly.
“Maezr Rackham here, he never played against you. He only analyzed your battles to find out your weak spots, to help you improve. It worked, didn't it?”
Ender closed his eyes tightly. They waited. He said, “Why didn't you tell me?”
Maezr smiled. “A hundred years ago, Ender, we found out some things. That when a commander's life is in danger he becomes afraid, and fear slows down his thinking. When a commander knows that he's killing people, he becomes cautious or insane, and neither of those help him do well. And when he's mature, when he has responsibilities and an understanding of the world, he becomes cautious and sluggish and can't do his job. So we trained children, who didn't know anything but the game, and never knew when it would become real. That was the theory, and you proved that the theory worked.”
Graff reached out and touched Ender's shoulder. “We launched the ships so that they would all arrive at their destination during these few months. We knew that we'd probably have only one good commander, if we were lucky. In history it's been very rare to have more than one genius in a war. So we planned on having a genius. We were gambling. And you came along and we won.”
Ender opened his eyes again and they realized that he was angry. “Yes, you won.”
Graff and Maezr Rackham looked at each other. “He doesn't understand,” Graff whispered.
“I understand,” Ender said. “You needed a weapon, and you got it, and it was me.”
“That's right,” Maezr answered.
“So tell me,” Ender went on, “how many people lived on that planet that I destroyed.”
They didn't answer him. They waited awhile in silence, and then Graff spoke. “Weapons don't need to understand what they're pointed at, Ender. We did the pointing, and so we're responsible. You just did your job.”
Maezr smiled. “Of course, Ender, you'll be taken care of. The government will never forget you. You served us all very well.”
Ender rolled over and faced the wall, and even though they tried to talk to him, he didn't answer them. Finally they left.
Ender lay in his bed for a long time before anyone disturbed him again. The door opened softly. Ender didn't turn to see who it was. Then a hand touched him softly.
“Ender, it's me, Bean.”
Ender turned over and looked at the little boy who was standing by his bed.
“Sit down,” Ender said.
Bean sat. “That last battle, Ender. I didn't know how you'd get us out of it.”
Ender smiled. “I didn't. I cheated. I thought they'd kick me out.”
“Can you believe it! We won the war. The whole war's over, and we thought we'd have to wait till we grew up to fight in it, and it was us fighting it all the time. I mean, Ender, we're little kids. I'm a little kid, anyway.” Bean laughed and Ender smiled. Then they were silent for a little while, Bean sitting on the edge of the bed, Ender watching him out of half-closed eyes.
Finally Bean thought of something else to say.
“What will we do now that the war's over?” he said.
Ender closed his eyes and said, “I need some sleep, Bean.”
Bean got up and left and Ender slept.
Graff and Anderson walked through the gates into the park. There was a breeze, but the sun was hot on their shoulders.
“Abba Technics? In the capital?” Graff asked.
“No, in Biggock County. Training division,” Anderson replied. “They think my work with children is good preparation. And you?”
Graff smiled and shook his head. “No plans. I'll be here for a few more months. Reports, winding down. I've had offers. Personnel development for DCIA, executive vice-president for U and P, but I said no. Publisher wants me to do memoirs of the war. I don't know.”
They sat on a bench and watched leaves shivering in the breeze. Children on the monkey bars were laughing and yelling, but the wind and the distance swallowed their words. “Look,” Graff said, pointing. A little boy jumped from the bars and ran near the bench where the two men sat. Another boy followed him, and holding his hands like a gun he made an explosive sound. The child he was shooting at didn't stop. He fired again.
“I got you! Come back here!”
The other little boy ran on out of sight.
“Don't you know when you're dead?” The boy shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked a rock back to the monkey bars. Anderson smiled and shook his head. “Kids,” he said. Then he and Graff stood up and walked on out of the park.
The doorknob turned. That would be dinner. Ansset rolled over on the hard bed, his muscles aching. As always, he tried to ignore the burning feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach. But it was not Husk with food on a tray. This time it was the man called Master, though Ansset believed that was not his name. Master was always angry and fearsomely strong, one of the few men who could make Ansset feel and act like the eleven-year-old child his body said he was.
“Get up, Songbird.”
Ansset slowly stood. They kept him naked in his prison, and only his pride kept him from turning away from the harsh eyes that looked him up and down. Ansset's cheeks burned with shame that took the place of the guilt he had wakened to.
“It's a good-bye feast we're having for you, Chirp, and ye're going to twitter for us.”
Ansset shook his head.
“If ye can sing for the bastarrd Mikal, ye can sing for honest freemen.”
Ansset's eyes blazed. “Watch how you speak of him, you barbarian traitor! He's your emperor!”
Master advanced a step, raising his hand angrily. “My orders was not to mark you, Chirp, but I can give you pain that doesn't leave a scar if ye don't mind how you talk to a freeman. Now ye'll sing.”
Ansset, afraid of the man's brutality as only someone who has never known physical punishment can be afraid, nodded—but still hung back. “Can you please give me my clothing?”
“It ain't cold where we're going,” Master retorted.
“I've never sung like this,” Ansset said, embarrassed. “I've never performed without clothing.”
Master leered. “What is it then that you do without clothing? Mikal's catamite has naw secrets we can't see.”
Ansset didn't understand the word, but he understood the leer, and he followed Master out the door and down a dark corridor with his heart even more darkly filled with shame. He wondered why they were having a “good-bye feast” for him. Was he to be set free? (Had someone paid some unknown ransom for him?) Or was he to be killed?
The floor rocked gently as they walked down the wooden corridor. Ansset had long since decided he was imprisoned on a ship. The amount of real wood used in it would have seemed gaudy and pretentious in a rich man's home. Here it seemed only shabby.
Far above he could hear the distant cry of a bird, and a steady singing sound that he imagined to be wind whipping through ropes and cables. He had sung the melody himself sometimes, and often harmonized.
And then Master opened the door and with a mocking bow indicated that Ansset should enter first. The boy stopped in the doorframe. Gathered around a long table were twenty or so men, some of whom he had seen before, all of them dressed in the strange costumes of Earth barbarians. Ansset couldn't help remembering Mikal's raucous laughter whenever they came to court, pretending to be heirs of great civilizations that to minds accustomed to thinking on a galactic scale were petty and insignificant indeed. And yet as he stood looking at their rough faces and unsmiling eyes, he felt that it was he, with the soft skin of the imperial court, that was petty and insignificant, a mere naked child, while these men held the strength of worlds in their rough, gnarled hands.
They looked at him with the same curious, knowing, lustful look that Master had given him. Ansset relaxed his stomach and firmed his back and ribs to conquer emotion, as he had been taught in the Songhouse before he turned three. He stepped into the room.
“Up on the table!” roared Master behind him, and hands lifted him onto the wood smeared with spilled wine and rough with crumbs and fragments of food. “Now sing, ye little bastarrd.”
The eyes looked his naked body over, and Ansset almost cried. But he was a Songbird, and many called him the best who had ever lived. Hadn't Mikal brought him from one end of the galaxy to his new Capital on old Earth? And when he sang, no matter who the audience, he would sing well.
And so he closed his eyes and shaped the ribs around his lungs, and let a low tone pass through his throat. At first he sang without words, soft and low, knowing the sound would be hard to hear. “Louder,” someone said, but he ignored the instructions. Gradually the jokes and laughter died down as the men strained to hear.
The melody was a wandering one, passing through tones and quarter tones easily, gracefully, still low in pitch, but rising and falling rhythmically. Unconsciously Ansset moved his hands in strange gestures to accompany his song. He was never aware of those gestures, except that once he had read in a newsheet, “To hear Mikal's Songbird is heavenly, but to watch his hands dance as he sings is nirvana.” That was a prudent thing to write about Mikal's favorite—when the writer lived in Capital. Nevertheless, no one had even privately disputed the comment.
And now Ansset began to sing words. They were words of his own captivity, and the melody became high, in the soft upper notes that opened his throat and tightened the muscles at the back of his head and tensed the muscles along the front of his thighs. The notes pierced, and as he slid up and down through haunting third tones (a technique that few Songbirds could master) his words spoke of dark, shameful evenings in a dirty cell, a longing for the kind looks of Father Mikal (not by name, never by name in front of these barbarians), of dreams of the broad lawns that stretched from the palace to the Susquehanna River, and of lost, forgetten days that ended in wakeful evenings in a tiny cell of splintered wood.
And he sang of his guilt.
At last he became tired, and the song drifted off into a whispered dorian scale that ended on the wrong note, on a dissonant note that faded into silence that sounded like part of the song.
Finally Ansset opened his eyes. All the men who were not weeping were watching him. None seemed willing to break the mood, until a youngish man down the table said in the thick accent, “Ah, but thet was better than hame and Mitherma.” His comment was greeted by sighs and chuckles of agreement, and the looks that met Ansset's eyes were no longer leering and lustful, but rather soft and kind. Ansset had never thought to see such looks in those rough faces.
“Will ye have some wine, boy?” asked Master's voice behind him, and Husk poured. Ansset sipped the wine, and dipped a finger in it to cast a drop into the air in the graceful gesture of court. “Thank you,” he said, handing back the metal cup with the same grace he would have used with a goblet at court. He lowered his head, though it hurt him to use that gesture of respect to such men, and asked, “May I leave now?”
“Do you have to? Can't you sing again?” the men around the table murmured, as if they had forgotten he was their prisoner. And Ansset refused as if he were free to choose. “I can't do it twice. I can never do it twice.”
They lifted him off the table, then, and Master's strong arms carried him back to his room. Ansset lay on the bed after the door locked shut, trembling. The last time he had sung was for Mikal, and the song had been light and happy. Then Mikal had smiled the soft smile that only touched his old face when he was alone with his Songbird, had touched the back of Ansset's hand, and Ansset had kissed the old hand and gone out to walk along the river. It was then that they had taken him—rough hands from behind, the sharp slap of the needle, and then waking in the cell where now he lay looking at the walls.
He always woke in the evening, aching from some unknown effort of the day, and wracked by guilt. He strained to remember, but always in the effort drifted off to sleep, only to wake again the next evening suffering from the lost day behind him. But tonight he did not try to puzzle out what lay behind the blocks in his mind. Instead he drifted off to sleep thinking of the songs in Mikal's kind gray eyes, humming of the firm hands that ruled an empire a galaxy wide and could still stroke the forehead of a sweet-singing child and weep at a sorrowful song. Ah, sang Ansset in his mind, ah, the weeping of Mikal's sorrowful hands.
Ansset woke walking down a street.
“Out of the way, ya chark!” shouted a harsh accent behind him, and Ansset dodged to the left as an eletrecart zipped past his right arm. “Sausages,” shouted a sign on the trunk behind the driver.
Then Ansset was seized by a terrible vertigo as he realized that he was not in the cell of his captivity, that he was fully dressed (in native Earth costume, but clothing for all that), was alive, was free. The quick joy that realization brought was immediately soured by a rush of the old guilt, and the conflicting emotions and the suddenness of his liberation were too much for him, and for a moment too long he forgot to breathe, and the darkening ground slid sideways, tipped up, hit him—
“Hey, boy, are you all right?”
“Did the chark slam you, boy?”
“Ya got the license number? Ya got the number?”
“Four-eight-seven something, who can tell.”
“He's comin' around and to.”
Ansset opened his eyes. “Where is this place?” he asked softly.
Why, this is Northet, they said.
“How far is the palace?” Ansset asked, vaguely remembering that Northet was a town not far to the north and east of Capital.
“The palace? What palace?”
“Mikal's palace—I must go to Mikal—” Ansett tried to get up, but his head spun and he staggered. Hands held him up.
“The kit's kinky, that's what.”
“Mikal's palace.”
“It's only eighteen kilometer, boy, ya plan to fly?”
The joke brought a burst of laughter, but Ansset impatiently regained control of his body and stood. Whatever drug had kept him unconscious was now nearly worked out of his system. “Find me a policeman,” Ansset said. “Mikal will want to see me immediately.”
Some still laughed, a man's voice said, “We'll be sure to tell him you're here when he comes to my house for supper!” but some others looked carefully at Ansset, realizing he spoke without American accent, and that his bearing was not that of a streetchild, despite his clothing. “Who are you, boy?”
“I'm Ansset. Mikal's Songbird.”
Then there was silence, and half the crowd rushed off to find the policeman, and the other half stayed to look at him and realize how beautiful his eyes were, to touch him with their own eyes and hold the moment to tell about it to children and grandchildren. Ansset, Mikal's Songbird, more valuable than all the treasure Mikal owned.
“I touched him myself, helping him up, I held him up.”
“You would've fallen, but for me, sir,” said a large strong man bowing ridiculously low.
“Can I shake your hand, sir?”
Ansset smiled at them, not in amusement but in gratitude for their respect for him. “Thank you. You've all helped me. Thank you.”
The policeman came, and after apologizing for the dirtiness of his armored eletrecart he lifted Ansset onto the seat and took him to the headquarters, where a flyer from the palace was already settling down on the pad. The Chamberlain leaped from the flyer, along with half a dozen servants, who gingerly touched Ansset and helped him to the flyer. The door slid shut, and Ansset closed his eyes to hide the tears as he felt the ground rush away as the palace came to meet him.
But for two days they kept him away from Mikal. “Quarantine,” they said at first, until Ansset stamped his foot and said, “Nonsense,” and refused to answer any more of the hundreds of questions they kept firing at him from dawn to dark and long after dark. The Chamberlain came.
“What's this I hear about you not wanting to answer questions, my boy?” asked the Chamberlain with the false joviality that Ansset had long since learned to recognize as a mask for anger or fear.
“I'm not your boy,” Ansset retorted, determined to frighten some cooperation out of the Chamberlain. Now and then it had worked in the past. “I'm Mikal's and he wants to see me. Why am I being kept like a prisoner?”
“Quaran—”
“Chamberlain, I'm healthier than I've ever been before, and these questions don't have a thing to do with my health.”
“All right,” the Chamberlain said, fluttering his hands with impatience and nervousness. Ansset had once sung to Mikal of the Chamberlain's hands, and Mikal had laughed for hours at some of the words. “I'll explain. But don't get angry at me, because it's Mikal's orders.”
“That I be kept away from him?”
“Until you answer the questions! You've been in court long enough, Songbird, and you're surely bright enough to know that Mikal has enemies in this world.”
“I know that. Are you one of them?” Ansset was deliberately goading the Chamberlain, using his voice like a whip in all the ways that made the Chamberlain angry and fretful and so forgetful.
“Hold your tongue, boy!” the Chamberlain said. Ansset inwardly smiled. Victory. “You're also bright enough to know that you weren't kidnapped five months ago by any friends of the emperor's. We have to know everything about your captivity.”
“I've told you everything a hundred times over.”
“You haven't told us how you spent your days.”
Again Ansset felt a stab of emotion. “I don't remember my days.”
“And that's why you can't see Mikal!” the Chamberlain snapped. “Do you think we don't know what happened? We've used the probes and the tasters and no matter how skillfully we question, we can't get past the blocks. Either the person who worked on your mind laid the blocks very skillfully, or you yourself are holding them locked, and either way we can't get in.”
“I can't help it,” Ansset said, realizing now what the questioning meant. “How can you think I mean any danger to Father Mikal.”
The Chamberlain smiled beatifically, in the pose he reserved for polite triumph. “Behind the block, someone may have very carefully planted a command for you to—”
“I'm not an assassin!” Ansset shouted.
“How would you know,” the Chamberlain snarled back. “It's my duty to protect the person of the emperor. Do you know how many assassination attempts we stop? Dozens, every week. The poison, the treason, the weapons, the traps, that's what half the people who work here do, is watch everyone who comes in and watch each other too. Most of the assassination attempts are stopped immediately. Some get closer. Yours may be the closest of all.”
“Mikal must want to see me!”
“Of course he does, Ansset! And that's exactly why you can't—because whoever worked on your mind must know that you're the only person that Mikal would allow near him after something like this—Ansset! Ansset, you little fool! Call the Captain of the Guard. Ansset, slow down!”
But the Chamberlain was slowing down with age, and he steadily lost ground to Ansset as the boy darted down the corridors of the palace. Ansset knew all the quickest ways, since exploring the palace was one of the most pleasant of his pastimes, and in five years in Mikal's service no one knew the labyrinth better than Ansset.
He was stopped routinely at the doors to the Great Hall, and he quickly made his way through the detectors (Poison? No. Metal? No. Energy? No. Identification? Clear.) and he was just about to step through the vast doors when the Captain of the Guard arrived.
“Stop the boy.”
Ansset was stopped.
“Come back here, Songbird,” the Captain barked. But Ansset could see, at the far end of the huge platinum room, the small chair and the whitehaired man who sat on it. Surely Mikal could see him! Surely he'd call!
“Bring the boy back here before he embarrasses everyone by calling out.” Ansset was dragged back. “If you must know, Ansset, Mikal gave me orders to bring you within the hour, even before you made your ridiculous escape from the Chamberlain. But you'll be searched first. My way.”
Ansset was taken off into one of the search rooms. He was stripped and his clothing was replaced with fresh clothes (that didn't fit! Ansset thought angrily), and then the searchers' fingers probed, painfully and deep, every aperture of his body that might hold a weapon. (“No weapon, and your prostate gland's all right, too,” one of them joked. Ansset didn't laugh.) Then the needles, probing far under the skin to sample for hidden poisons. A layer of skin was bloodlessly peeled off his palms and the soles of his feet, to be sampled for poisons or flexible plastic needles. The pain was irritating. The delay was excruciating.
But Ansset bore what had to be borne. He only showed anger or impatience when he thought that doing so might gain some good effect. No one, not even Mikal's Songbird, survived long at court unless he remained in control of his temper, however he had to hide it.
At last Ansset was pronounced clean.
“Wait,” the Captain of the Guard said. “I don't trust you yet.”
Ansset gave him a long, cold look. But the Captain of the Guard—like the Chamberlain—was one of the few people at court who knew Mikal well enough to know they had nothing to fear from Ansset unless they really treated him unjustly, for Mikal never did favors, not even for the boy, who was the only human being Mikal had ever shown a personal need for. And they knew Ansset well enough to know that he would never ask Mikal to punish someone unfairly, either.
The Captain took a nylon cord and bound Ansset's hands together behind him, first at the wrists, and then just below the elbows. The constriction was painful.
“You're hurting me,” Ansset said.
“I may be saving my emperor's life,” the Captain answered blandly. And then Ansset passed through the huge doors to the Great Hall, his arms bound, surrounded by guards with lasers drawn, preceded by the Captain of the Guard.
Ansset still walked proudly, but he felt a hearty fury toward the guards, toward the courtiers and supplicants and guards and officials lining the walls of the unfurnished room, and especially toward the Captain. Only toward Mikal did he feel no anger.
They let him stop.
Mikal raised his hand in the ritual of recognition. Ansset knew that Mikal laughed at the rituals when they were alone together—but in front of the court, the ritual had to be followed strictly.
Ansset dropped to his knees on the cold and shining platinum floor.
“My Lord,” he said in clear, bell-like tones that he knew would reverberate from the metal ceiling, “I am Ansset, and I have come to ask for my life.” In the old days, Mikal had once explained, that ritual had real meaning, and many a rebel lord or soldier had died on the spot. Even now, the pro forma surrender of life was taken seriously, as Mikal maintained constant vigilance over his empire.
“Why should I spare you?” Mikal asked, his voice old but firm. Ansset thought he heard a quaver of eagerness in the voice. More likely a quaver of age, he told himself. Mikal would never allow himself to reveal emotion in front of the court.
“You should not,” Ansset said. This was leaving the ritual, and going down the dark road that met danger head-on. Mikal must have been told of the Chamberlain's fears. Therefore, if Ansset made any attempt to hide the danger, his life would be forfeited by law.
“Why not?” Mikal said, impassively.
“Because, my Lord Mikal Imperator, I was kidnapped and held for five months, and during those months things were done to me that are now locked behind blocks in my mind. I may, unwittingly, be an assassin. I must not be allowed to live.”
“Nevertheless,” Mikal answered, “I grant you your life.”
Ansset, his muscles strong enough even after his captivity to allow him to bow despite his bound arms, touched his lips to the floor.
“Why are you bound?”
“For your safety, my Lord.”
“Unbind him,” said Mikal. The Captain of the Guard untied the nylon cord.
His arms free, Ansset stood. He went beyond form, and he turned his voice into a song, with an edge to his voice that snapped every head in the hall toward him. “My Lord, Father Mikal,” he sang, “there is a place in my mind where even I cannot go. In that place my captors may have taught me to want to kill you.” The words were a warning, but the song said safety, the song said love, and Mikal arose from his throne. He understood what Ansset was asking and he would grant it.
“I would rather, my Son Ansset, I would rather meet death in your hands than any other's. Your life is more valuable to me than my own.” Then Mikal turned and went back into the door that led to his private chambers. Ansset and the Captain of the Guard followed, and as they left the whispers rose to a roar. Mikal had gone much farther than Ansset had even hoped. The entire Capital—and in a few weeks, the entire empire—would hear how Mikal had called his Songbird Son Ansset, and the words, “Your life is more valuable to me than my own,” would become the stuff of legends.
Ansset sighed a song as he entered the familiar rooms where Father Mikal lived.
Mikal turned abruptly and glared at the Captain of the Guard. “What did you mean by that little trick, you bastard?”
“I tied his hands as a precaution. I was within my duties as a warden of the gate.”
“I know you were within your duties, but you might use some common decency. What harm can an eleven-year-old boy do when you've probably already skinned him alive searching for weapons and you have a hundred lasers trained on him at every moment!”
“I wanted to be sure.”
“Well, you're too damned thorough. Get out. And don't let me ever catch you being any less thorough, even when it makes me angry. Get out!” The Captain of the Guard left, Mikal's roar following him. As soon as the door closed, Mikal started to laugh. “What an ass! What a colossal donkey!” Then he threw himself to the floor with all the vigor of a young man, though Ansset knew his age to be one hundred and twenty-three, which was old, in a civilization where death normally came at a hundred and fifteen. Under him the floor that had been rigid when his weight pressed down on the two small spaces touched by his feet now softened, gave gently to fit the contours of his body. Ansset also went to the floor, and lay there laughing.
“Are you glad to be home, Ansset?” Mikal asked tenderly.
“Now I am. Until this moment I wasn't home.”
“Ansset, my Son, you never can speak without singing.” Mikal laughed softly.
Ansset took the sound of the laugh and turned it into a song. It was a soft song, and it was short, but at the end of it Mikal was lying on his back looking at the ceiling, tears streaming down from his eyes.
“I didn't mean the song to be sad, Father Mikal.”
“How was I to know that now, in my dotage, I'd do the foolish thing I avoided all my life? Oh, I've loved like I've done every other passionate thing, but when they took you I discovered, my Son, that I need you.” Mikal rolled over and looked at the beautiful face of the boy who lay looking at him adoringly. “Don't worship me, boy, I'm an old bastard who'd kill his mother if one of my enemies hadn't already done it.”
“You'd never harm me.”
“I harm everything I love,” Mikal said bitterly. Then he let his face show concern. “We were afraid for you. Since you were gone there was an outbreak of insane crime. People were kidnapped for no reason on the street, some in broad daylight, and a few days later their bodies would be found, broken and torn by someone or something. No ransom notes. Nothing. We thought you had been taken like that, and that somewhere we'd find your body. Are you whole? Are you well?”
“I'm stronger than I've ever been before.” Ansset laughed. “I tested my strength against the hook of my hammock, and I'm afraid I ripped it out of the wall.”
Mikal reached out and touched Ansset's hand. “I'm afraid,” Mikal said, and Ansset listened, humming softly, as Mikal talked. The emperor never spoke in names and dates and facts and plans, for then if Ansset were taken by an enemy the enemy would know too much. He spoke to the Songbird in emotions instead, and Ansset sang solace to him. Other Songbirds had pretty voices, others could impress the crowds, and, indeed, Mikal used Ansset for just that purpose on certain state occasions. But of all Songbirds, only Ansset could sing his soul; and he loved Mikal from his soul.
Late in the night Mikal shouted in fury about his empire: “Did I build it to fall? Did I burn over a dozen worlds and rape a hundred others just to have the whole thing fall in chaos when I die?” He leaned down and whispered to Ansset, their eyes a few inches apart, “They call me Mikal the Terrible, but I built it so it would stand like an umbrella over the galaxy. They have it now: peace and prosperity and as much freedom as their little minds can cope with. But when I die they'll throw it all away.” Mikal whirled and shouted at the walls of his soundproofed chamber, “In the name of nationalities and religions and races and family inheritances the fools will rip the umbrella down and then wonder why, all of a sudden, it's raining.”
Ansset sang to him of hope.
“There's no hope. I have fifty sons, three of them legitimate, all of them fools who try to flatter me. They couldn't keep the empire for a week, not all of them, not any of them. There's not a man I've met in all my life who could control what I've built in my lifetime. When I die, it all dies with me.” And Mikal sank to the floor wearily.
For once Ansset did not sing. Instead he jumped to his feet, the floor turning firm under him. He raised an arm above his head, and said, “For you, Father Mikal, I'll grow up to be strong! Your empire shall not fall!” He spoke with such grandeur in his childish speaking voice that both he and Mikal had to laugh.
“It's true, though,” Mikal said, tousling the child's hair. “For you I'd do it, I'd give you the empire, except they'd kill you. And even if I lived long enough to train you to be a ruler of men, I wouldn't do it. The man who will be my heir must be cruel and vicious and sly and wise, completely selfish and ambitious, contemptuous of all other people, brilliant in battle, able to outguess and outmaneuver every enemy, and strong enough inside himself to live utterly alone all his life.” Mikal smiled. “Even 7 don't fit my list of qualifications, because now I'm not utterly alone.”
And then, as Mikal drifted off to sleep, Ansset sang to him of his captivity, the songs and words of his time of loneliness in captivity, and as the men on the ship had wept, so Mikal wept, only more. Then they both slept.
A few days later Mikal, Ansset, the Chamberlain, and the Captain of the Guard met in Mikal's small receiving room, where a solid block of clear glass as perfect as a lens stretched as a meters-long table from one end of the room to the other. They gathered at one end. The Chamberlain was adamant.
“Ansset is a danger to you, my Lord.”
The Captain of the Guard was equally adamant. “We found the conspirators and killed them all.”
The Chamberlain rolled his eyes heavenward in disgust.
The Captain of the Guard became angry, though he kept the fact hidden behind heavy-lidded eyes. “It all fit—the accent that Ansset told us they had, the wooden ship, calling each other freemen, their emotionalism—they could have been no one else but the Freemen of Eire. Just another nationalist group, but they have a lot of sympathizers here in America—damn these 'nations,' where but on old Earth would people subdivide their planet and think the subdivisions meant anything.”
“So you went in and wiped them all out,” the Chamberlain sneered, “and not one of them had any knowledge of the plot.”
“Anyone who could block out the Songbird's mind as well as he did can hide a conspiracy like that!” the Captain of the Guard snapped back.
“Our enemy is subtle,” the Chamberlain said. “He kept everything else from Ansset's knowledge—so why did he let him have all these clues that steered us to Eire? I think we were given bait and you bit. Well, I haven't bitten yet, and I'm still looking.”
“In the meantime,” Mikal said, “try to avoid harassing Ansset too much.”
“I don't mind,” Ansset hurriedly said, though he minded very much: the constant searches, the frequent interrogations, the hypnotherapy, the guards who followed him constantly to keep him from meeting with anyone.
“I mind,” Mikal said. “It's good for you to keep watch, because we still don't know what they've done to Ansset's mind. But in the meantime, let Ansset's life be worth living.” Mikal glared pointedly at the Captain of the Guard, who got up and left. Then Mikal turned to the Chamberlain and said, “I don't like how easily the Captain was fooled by such an obvious ploy. Keep up your investigation. And tell me anything your spies within the Captain's forces might have to say.”
The Chamberlain tried for a moment to protest that he had no such spies—but Mikal laughed until the Chamberlain gave up and promised to complete a report.
“My days are numbered,” Mikal said to Ansset. “Sing to me of numbered days.” And so Ansset sang him a playful song about a man who decided to live for two hundred years and so counted his age backward, by the number of years he had left. “And he died when he was only eighty-three,” Ansset sang, and Mikal laughed and tossed another log on the fire. Only an emperor or a peasant in the protected forests of Siberia could afford to burn wood.
Then one day Ansset, as he wandered through the palace, noticed a different direction and a quickened pace to the hustling and bustling of servants down the halls. He went to the Chamberlain.
“Try to keep quiet about it,” the Chamberlain said. “You're coming with us, anyway.”
And within an hour Ansset rode beside Mikal in an armored car as a convoy swept out of Capital. The roads were kept clear, and in an hour and fifteen minutes the armored car stopped. Ansset bounded out of the hatchway. He was startled to see that the entire convoy was missing, and only the single armored car remained. He immediately suspected treachery, and looked down at Mikal in fright.
“Don't worry,” Mikal said. “We sent the convoy on.”
They got out of the car and with a dozen picked guards (not from the palace guard, Ansset noticed) they made their way through a sparse wood, along a stream, and finally to the banks of a huge river.
“The Delaware,” whispered the Chamberlain to Ansset, who had already guessed as much.
“Keep your esoterica to yourself,” Mikal said, sounding irritable, which meant he was enjoying himself immensely. He hadn't been a part of any kind of planetside military operation in forty years, ever since he became an emperor and had to control fleets and planets instead of a few ships and a thousand men. There was a spring to his step that belied his century and a quarter.
Finally the Chamberlain stopped. “That's the house, and that's the boat.”
A flatboat was moored on the river by a shambling wooden house that looked like it had been built during the American colonial revival over a hundred years before.
They crept up on the house, but it was empty, and when they rushed the flatboat the only man on board aimed a laser at his own face and blasted it to a cinder. Not before Ansset had recognized him, though.
“That was Husk,” Ansset said, feeling sick as he looked at the ruined corpse. Inexplicably, he felt a nagging guilt. “He's the man who fed me.”
Then Mikal and Chamberlain followed Ansset through the boat. “It's not the same,” Ansset said.
“Of course not,” said the Chamberlain. “The paint is fresh. And there's a smell of new wood. They've been remodeling. But is there anything familiar?”
There was. Ansset found a tiny room that could have been his cell, though now it was painted bright yellow and a new window let sunlight flood into the room. Mikal examined the windowframe. “New,” the emperor pronounced. And by trying to imagine the interior of the flatboat as it might have been unpainted, Ansset was able to find the large room where he had sung his last evening in captivity. There was no table. But the room seemed the same size, and Ansset agreed that this could very well have been the place he was held.
Down in the ship they heard the laughter of children and a passing eletrecart that clattered along the bumpy old asphalt road. The Chamberlain laughed. “Sorry I took you the long way. It's really quite a populated area. I just wanted to be sure they didn't have time to be warned.”
Mikal curled his lip. “If it's a populated area we should have arrived in a bus. A group of armed men walking along a river are much more conspicuous.”
“I'm not a tactician,” said the Chamberlain.
“Tactician enough,” said Mikal. “We'll go back to the palace now. Do you have anyone you can trust to make the arrest? I don't want him harmed.”
But it didn't do any good to give orders to that effect. When the Captain of the Guard was arrested, he raged and stormed and then a half-hour later, before there was time to examine him with the probe and taster, one of the guards slipped him some poison and he drifted off into death. The Chamberlain rashly had the offending guard impaled with nails until he bled to death.
Ansset was confused as he watched Mikal rage at the Chamberlain. It was obviously a sham, or half a sham, and Ansset was certain that the Chamberlain knew it. “Only a fool would have killed that soldier! How did the poison get into the palace past the detectors? How did the soldier get it to the Captain? None of the questions will ever be answered now!”
The Chamberlain made the mandatory ritual resignation. “My Lord Imperator, I was a fool. I deserve to die. I resign my position and ask for you to have me killed.”
Following the ritual, but obviously annoyed by having it thrust at him before he was through raging, Mikal lifted his hand and said, “Damn right you're a fool.” Then, in proper form, he said, “I grant you your life because of your infinitely valuable services to me in apprehending the traitor in the first place.” Mikal cocked his head to one side. “So, Chamberlain, who do you think I should make the next Captain of the Guard?”
Ansset almost laughed out loud. It was an impossible question to answer. The safest answer (and the Chamberlain liked to do safe things) would be to say he had never given the matter any thought at all, and wouldn't presume to advise the emperor on such a vital matter. But even so, the moment would be tense for the Chamberlain.
And Ansset was shocked to hear the Chamberlain answer, “Riktors Ashen, of course, my Lord.”
The “of course” was insolent. The naming of the man was ridiculous. At first Ansset looked at Mikal to see fury there. But instead Mikal was smiling. “Why of course,” he said blandly. “Riktors Ashen is the obvious choice. Tell him in my name that he's appointed.”
Even the Chamberlain, who had mastered the art of blandness at will, looked surprised for a moment. Again Ansset almost laughed. He saw Mikal's victory: the Chamberlain had probably named the one man in the palace guard that the Chamberlain had no control over, assuming that Mikal would never pick the man the Chamberlain recommended. And so Mikal had picked him: Riktors Ashen, the victor of the battle of Mantrynn, a planet that had revolted only three years before. He was known to be incorruptible, brilliant, and reliable. Well, now he'd have a chance to prove his reputation, Ansset thought.
Then he was startled out of his reverie by Mikal's voice. “Do you know what his last words were to me?”
By the instant understanding that needed no referents for Mikal's pronouns Ansset knew he was talking about the now-dead Captain of the Guard.
“He said, Tell Mikal that my death frees more plotters than it kills.' And then he said that he loved me. Imagine, that cagey old bastard saying he loved me. I remembered him twenty years ago when he killed his closest friend in a squabble over a promotion. The bloodiest men get most sentimental in their old age, I suppose.”
Ansset asked a question—it seemed a safe time. “My Lord, why was the Captain arrested?”
“Hmmm?” Mikal looked surprised. “Oh, I suppose no one told you, then. He visited that house regularly throughout your captivity. He said he visited a woman there. But the neighbors all testified under the probe that a woman never lived there. And the Captain was a master at establishing mental blocks.”
“Then the conspiracy is broken!” Ansset said, joyfully assuming that the guards would stop harassing him and the questions would finally end.
“The conspiracy is barely dented. Someone was able to get poison to the Captain. Therefore plotters still exist within the palace. And therefore Riktors Ashen will be instructed to keep a close watch on you.”
Ansset tried to keep the smile on his face. He failed.
“I know, I know,” Mikal said wearily. “But it's still locked in your mind.”
It was unlocked the next day. The court was gathered in the Great Hall, and Ansset resigned himself to a morning of wandering through the halls—or else standing near Mikal as he received the boring procession of dignitaries paying their respects to the emperor (and then going home to report how soon they thought Mikal the Terrible would die, and who might succeed him, and what the chances were for grabbing a piece of the empire). Because the palace bored him and he wanted to be near Mikal, and because the Chamberlain smiled at him and asked, “Are you coming to court?” Ansset decided to attend.
The order of dignitaries had been carefully worked out to honor loyal friends and humiliate upstarts whose dignity needed deflating. A minor official from a distant star cluster was officially honored, the first business of the day, and then the rituals began: princes and presidents and satraps and governors, depending on what title survived the conquest a decade or a score or fourscore years ago, all proceeding forward with their retinue, bowing (how low they bowed showed how afraid they were of Mikal, or how much they wanted to flatter him), uttering a few words, asking for private audience, being put off or being invited, in an endless array.
Ansset was startled to see a group of Black Kinshasans attired in their bizarre old Earth costumes. Kinshasa insisted it was an independent nation, a pathetic nose-thumbing claim when empires of planets had been swallowed up by Mikal Conqueror. Why were they being allowed to wear their native regalia and have an audience? Ansset raised an eyebrow at the Chamberlain, who also stood near the throne.
“It was Mikal's idea,” the Chamberlain said voicelessly. “He's letting them come and present a petition right before the president of Stuss. Those toads from Stuss'll be madder than hell.”
At that moment Mikal raised his hand for some wine. Obviously he was as bored as anyone else.
The Chamberlain poured the wine, tasted it, as was the routine, and then took a step toward Mikal's throne. Then he stopped, and beckoned to Ansset, who was already moving back to Mikal's side. Surprised at the summons, Ansset came over.
“Why don't you take the wine to Mikal, Sweet Songbird?” the Chamberlain said. The surprise fell away from Ansset's eyes, and he took the wine and headed purposefully back to Mikal's throne.
At that moment, however, pandemonium broke loose. The Kinshasan envoys reached into their elaborate curly-haired headdresses and withdrew wooden knives— which could pass every test given by machines at the doors of the palace. They rushed toward the throne. The guards fired quickly, their lasers dropping five of the Kinshasans, but all had aimed at the foremost assassins, and three continued unharmed. They rushed toward the throne, arms extended so the knives were already aimed directly at Mikal's heart.
Mikal, old and unarmed, rose to meet them. A guard managed to shift his aim and get off a shot, but it was wild, and the others were hurriedly recharging their lasers— which only took a moment, but that was a moment too long.
Mikal looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed.
But at that moment Ansset threw the wine goblet at one of the attackers and then leaped out in front of the emperor. He jumped easily into the air, and kicked the jaw of the first of the attackers. The angle of the kick was perfect, the force sharp and incredibly hard, and the Kinshasan's head flew fifty feet away into the crowd, as his body slid forward until the wooden knife touched Mikal's foot. Ansset came down from the jump in time to bring his hand upward into the abdomen of another attacker so sharply that his arm was buried to the elbow in bowels, and his fingers crushed the man's heart.
The other attacker paused just a moment, thrown from his relentless charge by the sudden onslaught from the child who stood so harmlessly by the emperor's throne. That pause was long enough for recharged lasers to be aimed, to flash, and the last Kinshasan assassin fell, dropping ashes as he collapsed, flaming slightly.
The whole thing, from the appearance of the wooden knives to the fall of the last attacker, had taken five seconds.
Ansset stood still in the middle of the hall, gore on his arm, blood splashed all over his body. He looked at the gory hand, at the body he had pulled it out of. A rush of long-blocked memories came back, and he remembered other such bodies, other heads kicked from torsos, other men who had died as Ansset learned the skill of killing with his hands. The guilt that had troubled him before swept through him with new force now that he knew the why of it.
The searches had all been in vain. Ansset himself was the weapon that was to have been used against Father Mikal.
The smell of blood and broken intestines combined with the emotions sweeping his body, and he doubled over, shuddering as he vomited.
The guards gingerly approached him, unsure what they should do.
But the Chamberlain was sure. Ansset heard the voice, trembling with fear at how close the assassination had come, and how easily a different assassination could have come, saying, “Keep him under guard. Wash him. Never let him be out of a laser's aim for a moment. Then bring him to Mikal's chambers in an hour.”
The guards looked toward Mikal, who nodded.
Ansset was still white and weak when he came into Mikal's chambers. The guards still had lasers trained on him. The Chamberlain and the new Captain of the Guard, Riktors Ashen, stood between Mikal and the boy.
“Songbird,” Riktors said, “it seems that someone taught you new songs.”
Ansset lowered his head.
“You must have studied under a master.”
“I n-never,” Ansset stuttered. He had never stuttered in his life.
“Don't torture the boy, Captain,” Mikal said.
The Chamberlain launched into his pro forma resignation. “I should have examined the boy's muscle structure and realized what new skills he had been given. I submit my resignation. I beg you to take my life.”
The Chamberlain must be even more worried than usual, Ansset thought with that part of his mind that was still capable of thinking. The old man had prostrated himself in front of the emperor.
“Shut up and get up,” Mikal said rudely. The Chamberlain arose with his face gray. Mikal had not followed the ritual. The Chamberlain's life was still on the line.
“We will now be certain,” Mikal said to Riktors. “Show him the pictures.”
Ansset stood watching as Riktors took a packet off a table and began removing newsheet clippings from it. Ansset looked at the first one and was merely sickened a little. The second one he recognized, and he gasped. With the third one he wept and threw the pictures away from him.
“Those are the pictures,” Mikal said, “of the people who were kidnapped and murdered during your captivity.”
“I k-killed them,” Ansset said, dimly aware that there was no trace of song in his voice, just the frightened stammering of an eleven-year-old boy caught up in something too monstrous for him to comprehend. “They had me practice on them.”
“Who had you practice!” Riktors demanded.
“They! The voices—from the box.” Ansset struggled to hold onto memories that had been hidden from him by the block. He also longed to let the block in his mind slide back into place, forget again, shut it out.
“What box?” Riktors would not let up.
“The box. A wooden box. Maybe a receiver, maybe a recording, I don't know.”
“Did you know the voice?”
“Voices. Never the same. Not even for the same sentence, the voices changed for every word.”
Ansset kept seeing the faces of the bound men he was told to maim and then kill. He remembered that though he cried out against it, he was still forced to do it.
“How did they force you to do it!”
Was Riktors reading his mind? “I don't know. I don't know. There were words, and then I had to.”
“What words?”
“I don't know! I never knew!” And Ansset was crying again.
Mikal spoke softly. “Who taught you how to kill that way?”
“A man. I never knew his name. On the last day, he was tied where the others had been. The voices made me kill him.” Ansset struggled with the words, the struggle made harder by the realization that this time, when he had killed his teacher, he had not had to be forced. He had killed because he hated the man. “I murdered him.”
“Nonsense,” the Chamberlain said. “You were a tool.”
“I said to shut up,” Mikal said curtly. “Can you remember anything else, my Son?”
“I killed the crew of the ship, too. All except Husk. The voices told me to. And then there were footsteps, above me, on the deck.”
“Did you see who it was?”
Ansset forced himself to remember. “No. He told me to lie down. He must have known the—code, whatever it is, I didn't want to obey him, but I did.”
“And?”
“Footsteps, and a needle in my arm, and I woke up on the street.”
Everyone was silent then, for a few moments, all of them thinking quickly. The Chamberlain broke first. “My Lord, the great threat to you and the strength of the Songbird's love for you must have impelled him despite the mental block—”
“Chamberlain,” Mikal said, “your life is over if you speak again before I address you. Captain. I want to know how those Kinshasan's got past your guard?”
“They were dignitaries. By your order, my Lord, no dignitaries are given the body search. Their wooden knives passed all the detectors. I'm surprised this hadn't been tried before.”
Ansset noticed that Riktors spoke confidently, not coweringly as another Captain might have done after assassins got through his guard. And, better in control of himself, Ansset listened for the melodies of Riktors's voice. They were strong. They were dissonant. Ansset wondered if he would be able to detect Riktors in a lie. To a strong, selfish man all things that he chose to say became truth, and the songs of his voice said nothing.
“Riktors, you will prepare orders for the utter destruction of Kinshasa.”
Riktors saluted.
“Before Kinshasa is destroyed—and that means destroyed, not a blade of grass, Riktors—before Kinshasa is destroyed, I want to know what connection there is between the assassination attempt this morning and the manipulation of my Songbird.”
Riktors saluted again. Mikal spoke to the Chamberlain. “Chamberlain, what would you recommend I do with my Songbird?”
As usual, the Chamberlain took the safe way. “My Lord, it is not a matter to which I have given thought. The disposition of your Songbird is not a matter on which I feel it proper to advise you.”
“Very carefully said, my dear Chamberlain.” Ansset tried to be calm as he listened to them discuss how he should be disposed of. Mikal raised his hand in the gesture that, by ritual, spared the Chamberlain's life. Ansset would have laughed at the Chamberlain's struggle not to show his relief, but this was not a time for laughter, because Ansset knew his relief would not come so easily.
“My Lord,” Ansset said, “I beg you to put me to death.”
“Dammit, Ansset, I'm sick of the rituals,” Mikal said.
“This is no ritual,” Ansset said, his voice tired and husky from misuse. “And this is no song, Father Mikal. I'm a danger to you.”
“I know it.” Mikal looked back and forth between Riktors and the Chamberlain.
“Chamberlain, have Ansset's possessions put together and readied for shipment to Alwiss. The prefect there is Timmis Hortmang, prepare a letter of explanation and a letter of mark. Ansset will arrive there wealthier than anyone else in the prefecture. Those are my orders. See to it.” He turned his head downward and to the right. Both Riktors and the Chamberlain moved to leave. Ansset—and therefore the guards who had lasers trained on him—did not.
“Father Mikal,” Ansset said softly, and he realized that the words had been a song.
But Mikal made no answer. He only got up from the chair and left the chamber.
Ansset had several hours before nightfall, and he spent them wandering through the palace and the palace grounds. The guards dogged his steps. At first he let the tears flow. Then, as the horror of the morning hid again behind the only partly broken block in his mind, he remembered what the Songmaster had taught him, again and again, “When you want to weep, let the tears come through your throat. Let pain come from the pressure in your thighs. Let sorrow rise and resonate through your head.”
Walking by the Susquehanna on the cold lawns of autumn afternoon shade, Ansset sang his grief. He sang softly, but the guards heard his song, and could not help but weep for him, too.
He stopped at a place where the water looked cold and clear, and began to strip off his tunic, preparing to swim. A guard reached out and stopped him. Ansset noticed the laser pointed at his foot. “I can't let you do that. Mikal gave orders you were not to be allowed to take your own life.”
“I only want to swim,” Ansset answered, his voice low with persuasion.
“I would be killed if any harm came to you,” the guard said.
“I give you my oath that I will only swim, and not try to break free.”
The guard considered. The other guards seemed content to leave the decision up to him. Ansset hummed a sweet melody that he knew oozed confidence. The guard gave in.
Ansset stripped and dove into the water. It was icy cold, and stung him. He swam in broad strokes upstream, knowing that to the guards on the bank he would already seem like only a speck on the surface of the river. Then he dove and swam under the water, holding his breath as only a singer or a pearldiver could, and swam across the current toward the near shore, where the guards were waiting. He could hear, though muffled by the water, the cries of the guards. He surfaced, laughing.
Two of the guards had already thrown off their boots and were up to their waists in water, preparing to try to catch Ansset's body as it swept by. But Ansset kept laughing at them, and they turned at him angrily.
“Why did you worry?” Ansset said. “I gave my word.”
Then the guards relaxed, and Ansset swam for an hour under the afternoon sun. The motion of the water, and constant exertion to keep place against the current took his mind off his troubles, to some extent. Only one guard watched him now, while the others played polys, casting fourteen-sided dice in a mad gambling game that soon engrossed them.
Ansset swam underwater from time to time, listening to the different sound the guards' quarreling and laughing made when water covered his ears. The sun was nearly down, now, and Ansset dove underwater again to swim to shore on one breath. He was halfway to shore when he heard the sharp call of a bird overhead, muffled as it was by the river.
Ansset made a sudden connection in his mind, and came up immediately, coughing and sputtering. He dog-paddled in to shore, shook himself, and put on his tunic, wet as he was.
“We've got to get back to the palace,” he said, filling his voice with urgency, putting the pitch high to penetrate the guards' sluggishness after an hour of gaming. The guards quickly followed him, overtook him.
“Where are you going?” one of them asked.
“To see Mikal.”
“We're not to do that—we were ordered! You can't go to Mikal.”
But Ansset walked on, fairly sure that until he actually got close to the emperor the guards would not try to restrain him. Even if they had not been present for the demonstration of Ansset's skill in the Great Hall that morning, the story would surely have reached their ears that Mikal's Songbird could kill two men in two seconds.
He had heard the call of a bird as he swam underwater. He remembered that on his last night of captivity in the ship, he had heard the cry of another bird high above him. But never, never had he heard another sound from outside.
And yet where the flatboat was the city noise had come loudly, could be heard clearly below decks. Therefore even if the boat was his prison, it had not been moored by that house. And if that were so, the evidence against the former Captain of the Guard was a fraud. And Ansset knew now who in the court had taken Ansset to use as an assassin.
They were met in a corridor by a messenger. “There you are. The Lord Mikal commands the presence of the Songbird, as quickly as possible. Here,” he said, handing the orders to the guard who made decisions, who took out his verifier and passed it over the seal on the orders. A sharp buzz testified that the orders were genuine.
“All right then, Songbird,” said the guard. “We'll go there after all.” Ansset started to run. The guards kept up easily, following him through the labyrinth. To them it was almost a game, and one of them said, between breaths, “I never knew this way led where we're going!” to which one of the other guards replied, “And you'll never find it again, either.”
And then they were in Mikal's chambers. Ansset's hair was still wet, and his tunic still clung to his small body where it had not yet had time to dry from the river water.
Mikal was smiling. “Ansset, my Son, it's fine now.” Mikal waved an arm, dismissing the guards. “We were so foolish to think we needed to send you away,” he said. “The Captain was the only one in the plot close enough to give the signal. Now that he's dead, no one knows it! You're safe now—and so am I!”
Mikal's speech was jovial, delighted, but Ansset, who knew the songs of his voice as well as he knew his own, read in the words a warning, a lie, a declaration of danger. Ansset did not run to him. He waited.
“In fact,” Mikal said, “you're my best possible bodyguard. You look small and weak, you're always by my side, and you can kill faster than a guard with a laser.” Mikal laughed. Ansset was not fooled. There was no mirth in the laugh.
But the Chamberlain and Captain Riktors Ashen were fooled, and they laughed along with Mikal. Ansset forced himself to laugh, too. He listened to the sounds the others were making. Riktors sounded sincere enough, but the Chamberlain—
“It's a cause for celebration. Here's wine,” said the Chamberlain. “I brought us wine. Ansset, why don't you pour it?”
Ansset shuddered with memories. “I?” he asked, surprised, and then not surprised at all. The Chamberlain held out the full bottle and the empty goblet. “For the Lord Mikal,” the Chamberlain said.
Ansset shouted and dashed the bottle to the floor. “Make him keep silent!”
The suddenness of Ansset's violent action brought Riktors's laser out of his belt and into his hand.
“Don't let the Chamberlain speak!”
“Why not?” asked Mikal innocently, but Ansset knew there was no innocence behind the words. For some reason Mikal was pretending not to understand.
The Chamberlain believed it, believed he had a moment. He said quickly, almost urgently, “Why did you do that? I have another bottle. Sweet Songbird, let Mikal drink deeply!”
The words hammered into Ansset's brain, and by reflex he whirled and faced Mikal. He knew what was happening, knew and screamed against it in his mind. But his hands came up against his will, his legs bent, he compressed to spring, all so quickly that he couldn't stop himself. He knew that in less than a second his hand would be buried in Mikal's face, Mikal's beloved face, Mikal's smiling face—
Mikal was smiling at him, kindly and without fear. Ansset stopped in midspring, forced himself to turn aside, despite the tearing in his brain. He could be forced to kill, but he couldn't be forced to kill that face. He shoved his hand into the floor, bursting the tense surface, releasing the gel to flow out across the room.
Ansset hardly noticed the pain in his arm where the impact had broken the skin and the gel was agonizing the wound. All he felt was the pain in his mind as he still struggled against the compulsion he had only just barely deflected, that still drove him to try to kill Mikal, that still he fought against, fought down, tried to block.
His body heaved upward, his hand flew through the air, and shattered the back of the chair where Mikal still sat. Blood spurted and splashed, and Ansset was relieved to see that it was his own blood, and not Mikal's.
In the distance he heard Mikal's voice saying, “Don't shoot him.” And, as suddenly as it had come, the compulsion ceased. His mind spun as he heard the Chamberlain's words fading away: “Songbird, what have you done!”
Those were the words that had set him free.
Exhausted and bleeding, Ansset lay on the floor, his right arm covered with blood.
The pain reached him now, and he groaned, though his groan was as much a song of ecstasy as of pain. Somehow Ansset had withstood it long enough, and he had not killed Father Mikal.
Finally he rolled over and sat up, nursing his arm. The bleeding had settled to a slow trickle.
Mikal was still sitting in the chair, despite its shattered back where Ansset's hand had struck. The Chamberlain stood where he had stood ten seconds before, at the beginning of Ansset's ordeal, the goblet looking ridiculous in his hand. Riktors's laser was aimed at the Chamberlain.
“Call the guards, Captain,” Mikal said.
“I already have,” Riktors said. The button on his belt was glowing. Guards came quickly into the room. “Take the Chamberlain to a cell,” he ordered them. “If any harm comes to him, all of you will die and your families, too. Do you understand?” The guards understood.
Ansset held his arm. Mikal and Riktors Ashen waited while a doctor treated it. The pain subsided.
The doctor left.
Riktors spoke first. “Of course you knew it was the Chamberlain, my Lord.”
Mikal smiled faintly.
“That was why you let him persuade you to call Ansset back here.”
Mikal's smile grew broader.
“But, my Lord, only you could have known that the Songbird would be strong enough to resist a compulsion that was five months in the making.”
Mikal laughed. And this time Ansset heard mirth in the laughter.
“Riktors Ashen. Will they call you Riktors the Usurper? Or Riktors the Great?”
It took the Captain of the Guard a moment to realize what had been said. Only a moment. But before his hand could reach his laser, which was back in his belt, Mikal's hand held a laser that was pointed at Riktors's heart.
“Ansset my Son, will you take the Captain's laser from him?”
Ansset got up and took the Captain's laser from him. He could hear the song of triumph in Mikal's voice. But Ansset's head was still spinning, and he didn't understand why lasers had been drawn between the emperor and his incorruptible Captain.
“Only one mistake, Riktors. Otherwise brilliantly done. And I really don't see how you could have avoided the mistake, either.”
“You mean Ansset's strength?”
“Not even I counted on that. I was prepared to kill him, if I needed to,” Mikal said, and Ansset, listening, knew it was true. He wondered why that knowledge didn't hurt him. He had always known that, eventually, not even he would be indispensable to Mikal, if somehow his death served some vital purpose.
“Then I made no mistakes,” Riktors said. “How did you know?”
“Because my Chamberlain, unless he were under some sort of compulsion, would never have had the courage to suggest your name as the Captain's successor. And without that, you wouldn't have been in a position to take over after you exposed the Chamberlain as the engineer of my assassination, would you? It was good. The guard would have followed you loyally. No taint of assassination would have touched you. Of course, the entire empire would have rebelled immediately. But you're a good tactician and a better strategist, and your men would have followed you well. I'd have given you one chance in four of making it—and that's better odds than any other man in the empire.”
“I gave myself even odds,” Riktors said, but Ansset heard the fear singing through the back of his brave words. Well, why not? Death was certain now, and Ansset knew of no one, except perhaps an old man like Mikal, who could look at death, especially death that also meant failure, without some fear.
But Mikal did not push the button on the laser.
“Kill me now and finish it,” Riktors Ashen said.
Mikal tossed the laser away. “With this? It has no charge. The Chamberlain installed a charge detector at every door in my chambers over fifteen years ago. He would have known if I was armed.”
Immediately Riktors took a step forward, the beginning of a rush toward the emperor. Just as quickly Ansset was on his feet, despite the bandaged arm ready to kill with the other hand, with his feet, with his head. Riktors stopped cold.
“Ah,” Mikal said. “No one knows like you do what my bodyguard can accomplish in so short a time.”
And Ansset realized that if Mikal's laser was not loaded, he couldn't have stopped Ansset if Ansset had not had strength enough to stop himself. Mikal had trusted him.
And Mikal spoke again. “Riktors, your mistakes were very slight. I hope you have learned from them. So that when an assassin as bright as you are tries to take your life, you know all the enemies you have and all the allies you can call on and exactly what you can expect from each.”
Ansset's hands trembled. “Let me kill him now,” he said.
Mikal sighed. “Don't kill for pleasure, my Son. If you ever kill for pleasure you'll come to hate yourself. Besides, weren't you listening? I'm going to adopt Riktors Ashen as my heir.”
“I don't believe you,” Riktors said. But Ansset heard hope in his voice.
“I'll call in my sons—they stay around court, hoping to be closest to the palace when I die,” Mikal said. “I'll make them sign an oath to respect you as my heir. Of course they'll all sign it, and of course you'll have them all killed the moment you take the throne. And, let's see, that moment will be three weeks from tomorrow, that should give us time. I'll abdicate in your favor, sign all the papers, it'll make the headlines on the newsheets for days. I can just see all the potential rebels tearing their hair with rage. It's a pleasant picture to retire on.”
Ansset didn't understand. “Why?” he asked. “He tried to kill you.”
Mikal only laughed. It was Riktors who answered. “He thinks I can hold his empire together. But I want to know the price.”
Mikal leaned forward on his chair. “A small price. A house for myself and my Songbird until I die. And then he is to be free for the rest of his life, with an income that doesn't make him dependent on anybody's favors. Simple enough?”
“I agree.”
“How prudent.” And Mikal laughed again.
The vows were made, the abdication and coronation took a great deal of pomp and the Capital's caterers became wealthy. All the contenders were slaughtered, and Riktors spent a year going from system to system to quell (brutally) all the rebellions.
After the first few planets were burned over, the other rebellions mostly quelled themselves.
It was only the day after the newsheets announced the quelling of the most threatening rebellion that the soldiers appeared at the door of the little house in Brazil where Mikal and Ansset lived.
“How can he!” Ansset cried out in anguish when he saw the soldiers at the door. “He gave his word.”
“Open the door for them, Son,” Mikal said.
“They're here to kill you!”
“A year was all that I hoped for. I've had that year. Did you really expect Riktors to keep his word? There isn't room in the galaxy for two heads that know the feel of the imperial crown.”
“I can kill most of them before they could come near. If you hide, perhaps—”
“Don't kill anyone, Ansset. That's not your song. The dance of your hands is nothing without the dance of your voice, Songbird.”
The soldiers began to beat on the door, which, because it was steel, did not give way easily. “They'll blow it open in a moment,” Mikal said. “Promise me you won't kill anyone. No matter who. Please. Don't avenge me.”
“I will.”
“Don't avenge me. Promise. On your life. On your love for me.”
Ansset promised. The door blew open. The soldiers killed Mikal with a flash of lasers that turned his body to ashes. They kept firing until nothing but ashes was left. Then they gathered them up. Ansset watched, keeping his promise but wishing with all his heart that somewhere in his mind there was a wall he could hide behind. Unfortunately, he was too sane.
They took the ashes of the emperor and twelve-year-old Ansset to Capital. The ashes were placed in a huge urn, and displayed with state honors. Ansset they brought to the funeral feast under heavy guard, for fear of what his hands might do.
After the meal, at which everyone pretended to be somber, Riktors called Ansset to him. The guards followed, but Riktors waved them away. The crown rested on his hair.
“I know I'm safe from you,” Riktors said.
“You're a lying bastard,” Ansset said, “and if I hadn't given my word I'd tear you end to end.”
It might have seemed ludicrous that a twelve-year-old should speak that way to an emperor, but Riktors didn't laugh. “If I weren't a lying bastard, Mikal would never have given the empire to me.”
Then Riktors stood. “My friends,” he said, and the sycophants gave a cheer. “From now on I am not to be known as Riktors Ashen, but as Riktors Mikal, The name Mikal shall pass to all my successors on the throne, in honor of the man who built this empire and brought peace to all mankind.” Riktors sat amid the applause and cheers, which sounded like some of the people might have been sincere. It was a nice speech, as impromptu speeches went.
Then Riktors commanded Ansset to sing.
“I'd rather die,” Ansset said.
“You will, when the time comes,” Riktors answered.
Ansset sang then, standing on the table so that everyone could see him, just as he had stood to sing to an audience he hated on his last night of captivity in the ship. His song was wordless, for all the words he might have said were treason. Instead he sang melody, flying unaccompanied from mode to mode, each note torn from his throat in pain, each note bringing pain to the ears that heard it. The song broke up the banquet as the grief they had all pretended to feel now burned within them. Many went home weeping; all felt the great loss of the man whose ashes dusted the bottom of the urn.
Only Riktors stayed at the table after Ansset's song was over.
“Now,” Ansset said, “they'll never forget Father Mikal.”
“Or Mikal's Songbird,” Riktors said. “But I am Mikal now, as much of him as could survive. A name and an empire.”
“There's nothing of Father Mikal in you,” Ansset said coldly.
“Is there not?” Riktors said softly. “Were you fooled by Mikal's public cruelty? No, Songbird.” And in his voice Ansset heard the hints of pain that lay behind the harsh and haughty emperor.
“Stay and sing for me, Songbird,” Riktors said. Pleading played around the edges of his voice.
Ansset reached out his hand and touched the urn of ashes that rested on the table. “I'll never love you,” he said, meaning the words to hurt.
“Nor I you,” Riktors answered. “But we may, nonetheless, feed each other something that we hunger for. Did Mikal sleep with you?”
“He never wanted to. I never offered.”
“Neither will I,” Riktors said. “I only want to hear your songs.”
There was no voice in Ansset for the word he decided to say. He nodded. Riktors had the grace not to smile. He just nodded in return, and left the table. Before he reached the doors, Ansset spoke: “What will you do with this?”
Riktors looked at where Ansset rested his hand. “The relics are yours. Do what you want.” Then Riktors Mikal was gone.
Ansset took the urn of ashes into the chamber where he and Father Mikal had sung so many songs to each other. Ansset stood for a long time before the fire, humming the memories to himself. He gave the songs back to Father Mikal, and then reached out and emptied the urn on the blazing fire.
The ashes put the fire out.
“The transition is complete,” Songmaster Onn said to Songmaster Esste as soon as the door was closed.
“I was afraid,” Songmaster Esste confided in a low melody that trembled. “Riktors Ashen is not unwise. But Ansset's songs are stronger than wisdom.”
They sat together in the cold sunlight that filtered through the windows of the High Room of the Songhouse. “Ah,” sang Songmaster Onn, and the melody was of love for Songmaster Esste.
“Don't praise me. The gift and power were Ansset's.”
“But the teacher was Esste. In other hands Ansset might have been used as a tool for power, for wealth, for control. In your hands—”
“No, Brother Onn. Ansset himself is too much made of love and loyalty. He makes other men desire what he himself already is. He is a tool that cannot be used for evil.”
“Will he ever know?”
“Perhaps; I do not think he yet suspects the power of his gift. It would be better if he never found out how little like the other Songbirds he is. And as for the last block in his mind—we laid that well. He will never know it is there, and so he will never search for the truth about who controlled the transfer of the crown.”
Songmaster Onn sang tremulously of the delicate plots woven in the mind of a child of five, plots that could have unwoven at any point. “But the weaver was wise, and the cloth has held.”
“Mikal Conqueror,” said Songmaster Esste, “learned to love peace more than he loved himself, and so will Riktors Mikal. That is enough. We have done our duty for mankind. Now we must teach other little Songbirds.”
“Only the old songs,” sighed Songmaster Onn.
“No,” answered Songmaster Esste with a smile. “We will teach them to sing of Mikal's Songbird.”
“Ansset has already sung that.”
They walked slowly out of the High Room as Songmaster Esste whispered, “Then we will harmonize!” Their laughter was music down the stairs.
Alvin, he was a blacksmith's prentice boy,
He pumped the bellows and he ground the knives,
He chipped the nails, he het the charcoal fire,
Nothing remarkable about the lad
Except for this: He saw the world askew,
He saw the edge of light, the frozen liar
There in the trees with a black smile shinin cold,
Shiverin the corners of his eyes.
Oh, he was wise.
The blacksmith didn't know what Alvin saw.
He only knew the boy was quick and slow:
Quick with a laugh and a good or clever word,
Slow at the bellows with his brain a-busy,
Quick with his eyes like a bright and sneaky bird,
Slow at the forge when the smith was in a hurry.
Times the smith, he liked him fine. And times
He'd bellow, "Hell and damnation, hammer and tong,
You done it wrong!"
One day when the work was slow, the smith was easy.
"Off to the woods with you, Lad, the berries are ripe."
And Alvin gratefully let the bellows sag
And thundered off in the dust of the summer road.
Ran? He ran like a colt, he leaped like a calf,
Then his feet were deep in the leafmeal forest floor,
He was moss on the branches, swingin low and lean,
His fingers were part of the bark, his glance was green—
And he was seen.
He was seen by the birds that anyone can see,
Seen by the porcupines that hid in the bushes,
Seen by the light that slipped among the trees,
Seen by the dark that only he could see.
And the dark reached out and stumbled Alvin down,
Laid him laughin and pantin on the ground,
And the dark snuck up on every edge of him,
Frost a-comin on from everywhere,
Ice in his hair.
Ice in the summertime, and Alvin shook,
Crackin ice aloud in the miller's pond,
A mist of winter flowin through the wood,
Fingerin his face, and where it touched
He was numb, he was stricken dumb, his chin all chattery.
Where are the birds? he wondered. When did they go?
Get back to the edge, you Dark, you Cold, you Snow!
Get north, you Wind, it's not your time to blow!
I tell you, No!
No! he cried, but the snow was blank and deep
And didn't answer, and the fog was thick
And didn't answer, and his flimsy clothes
Were wet, and his breath was sharp as ice in his lung
Splittin him like a rail. It made him mad.
He yelled, though the sound froze solid at his teeth
And the words dropped out and broke as they were said
And his tongue went thick, and his lips were even number:
"Dammit, it's summer!"
With the snow like stars of death in your eyes? "It's summer!"
The wind a-ticklin at your thighs? "It's summer!"
Your breath a fog of ice? "Let it be spring!
Let it be autumn, let it be anything!"
But the edge of the world had found him, and he knew
That the fire of the forges would be through,
That the air would be thick and harsh at the end of the earth
And all the flames a-dancin in his hearth,
What were they worth?
"Oh, you can cheat the trees, so dumb and slow,
And you can jolly the birds that summer's through,
But you can't fool me! I'll freeze to death before
I let you get away with a lie so bold!"
And he laughed as he was swallowed by the cold,
He sang as the ice a-split him to the core,
He whispered in his pain that it wasn't true.
"You can bury me deep as hell in your humbug snow,
But I know what I know."
And look at that! A red-winged bird a-singin!
Look at that! The leaves all thick and green!
He touched the bark so warm in the summer sun,
He buried his hands in the soil and said, "I'm jiggered."
"Oh, blacksmith's prentice boy," said the red-winged bird.
"Took you long enough," said Prentice Alvin.
"Came now, didn't I? So don't get snippety."
"Just see to it you don't go off again.
Where you been?"
"I been," said the red-winged bird, "to visit the sun.
I been to sing to the deaf old man in the moon.
And now I'm here to make a maker of you,
Oh yes, I'll make you something before I'm through."
"I'm something now," said the lad, "and I like it fine."
"You're a smithy boy," said the bird, "and it ain't enough.
Bendin horseshoes! Bangin on the black!
Why, there be things to make that can't be told,
So bright and gold!"
A thousand things, that bird was full of talk,
And on he sang and Alvin listened tight.
Till home he came at dark, his eyes so bright,
His smile so ready but his mood like rock,
He was full of birdsong, full of dreams of gold,
Dreams of what he'd draw from the smithy fire.
"How old is old?" he asked the smith. "How tall
Do I have to be for hammer and tong?
It's been so long."
The smith, he spied him keen, he saw his eyes,
He saw how flames were leapin in the green.
"A redbreast bird been talkin," said the smith,
His voice as low as memory. "So young,
But not so young, so little but so tall.
Hammer and tong, my lazy prentice boy,
Let's see if they fit your hand, let's see if the heft
Is right for your arm, the right side or the left,
See how you lift."
Out they went to the forge beside the road,
Out and stoked the fire till it was hot.
The tongs fit snug in Alvin's dexter hand,
And the hammer hefted easy in his left,
And the smith had a face like grief, although he laughed.
"Go on," says he. "I'm watchin right behind."
The flames leaped up, and Alvin shied the heat,
But deep in the fire he held the iron rod
Till it was red.
"Now bend it," cried the smith, "now make a shoe!"
Alvin raised the hammer over his head,
Ready for the swing. But it wouldn't fall.
"Strike," the blacksmith whispered, "bend and shape."
But the red of the black was the red of a certain bird;
Behind his eyes he saw the iron true:
It was already what it ought to be.
"I can't," he said, and the blacksmith took the tool
And whispered, "Fool."
The hammer clattered against the stone of the wall,
But Alvin, he took heed where the hammer fell.
"There's some can lift the hammer," said the smith,
"And some can strike," and then he spoke an oath
So terrible that Alvin winced to hear.
"I'm shut of you," said the smith. "What's iron for?
To be hot and soft for a man of strength to beat,
To turn the fat of your empty flesh to meat
For the years to eat."
When the smith was gone, poor Alvin like to died,
For what was a smith that couldn't strike the black?
A maker, that's what the redbreast said he'd be,
And now unmade before he'd fair begun.
"I know," he whispered, "I know what must be done."
He took the hammer from the wallside heap
And blew the fire till flames came leapin back
And gathered every scrap at the fire's side
And loud he cried:
"Here is the makin that you said to make!
Here in my hand are the tools you said to take!
Here is the crucible, and here's the fire,
And here are my hands with all they know of shape."
Into the crucible he cast the scrap
And set the pot in the flames a-leapin higher.
"Melt!" he shouted. "Melt so I can make!"
For the redbreast bird had told him how.
A livin plow.
The black went soft in the clay, the black went red,
The black went white and poured when he tipped the pot.
Into the mold he poured, and the iron sang
With the heat and the cold, with the soft and the hard and the form
He forced. When he broke the mold it rang,
And the shape of the plow was curved and sharp where it ought.
But the iron, it was black, oh, it was dead,
No power in it but the iron's own,
As mute as stone.
He sat among the shards of the broken clay
And wondered what the redbird hadn't said.
Or had he talked to the bird at all today?
And now he thought of it, was it really red?
And maybe he ought to change the mold somehow,
Or pour it cool, or hotten up the forge.
But the more he studied it the less he knew,
For the plow was shaped aright, though cold and dark:
He knew his work.
So what was wrong with black? It was good enough
For all the hundred thousand smiths before,
And good enough for all the plows they made,
So why not good enough for Prentice Alvin?
Who ever heard of a bird so full of stuff,
So full of songs to make you feel so poor,
So full of promises of gold and jade?
"Ah, Redbird!" Alvin cried, "my heart is riven!
What have you given?"
He shouted at the black and silent plow.
He beat it, ground it at the wheel, and rubbed
Till the blade was a blackish mirror, till the edge
Was sharp as a trapper's skinnin knife, and still
It was iron, black and stubborn, growin cold.
All broke of hope, he cast it in the fire
And held it with his naked hands in the flame
And wept in agony till it was over.
Here was the taste of pain—he knew the savor:
The plow was silver.
All silver was the plow, and his hands were whole.
He knew what it was the redbird hadn't said.
He couldn't put the iron in alone
And expect the plow by itself to come to life.
He took the plow again—it's gleamin bright—
And this time when he put it into the fire
He clomb right in and sat among the flames
And cried in pain until the fire went cold.
The age of agony—he knew how old:
The plow was gold.
The smith, he come all white-eyed to the forge
"The buffalo are ruttin in the wood,
A hundred wolves are singin out a dirge,
And a doe, she's lickin while her fawn is fed.
What you be doin while I'm in my bed?
The trees are wide awake and bendin low,
And the stars are all a-cluster overhead.
What will a prentice do when his master go?
I want to know!"
In answer, Alvin only lifts his plow,
And in the firelight it shines all yellow.
"Lord," the smith declares, and "damn my eyes,
My boy, you got the gift, I didn't reelize."
The smith, he reaches out. "Now give it here,
That's worth ten thousand sure, I shouldn't wonder,
All we got to do is melt her down
And we'll be rich afore another sundown,
Move to town."
But Alvin, he's not like to let it go.
"It's a plow I meant to make, and a plow I got,
And I mean for it to do what a plow should do."
The smith was mad, the smith, he scald and swore.
"Cuttin dirt ain't what that gold is for!"
And he reached his hand to take the plow by force,
But when he touched his prentice's arm, he hissed,
And kissed his fingers, gaspin. "Boy, you're hot
As the sunlight's source.
"Hot and bright as sunlight," says the smith,
"And the gold is yours to do whatever you like with,
But whatever you do, I humble-as-dust beseech you,
Do it away from me, I've nothin to teach you."
Says Alvin, "Does that mean I'm a journeyman?
I've a right to bend the black wherever I can?"
And the smith says, "Prentice, journeyman, or master,
For what you done a smith would sell his sister,
Been Satan kissed her."
What was Alvin totin when he left?
I tell you this—it wasn't hard to heft:
A burlap bag with a knot of leaden bread,
A hunk of crumbly cheese, and a golden plow.
A map of the world was growin in his head,
For a fellow knows the edge can guess the whole,
And Alvin meant to find the certain soil
Where his plow could cut and make the clover grow,
The honey flow.
He left a hundred village tongues a-wag
With tales of a million bucks in a burlap bag;
The smith, he swore the gold was devil's make
And therefore free for a godly man to take;
His wife, she told how Alvin used to shirk
And owed them all the gold for his lack of work;
And others said the golden plow was a fake
That sneaky Alvin made so he could gull
Some trustin fool.
The tales of Alvin flew so far and fast
They reached him on the road and went right past,
And many a fellow in many a country inn
Would spy his bag and start in speculatin.
"Kind of a heavy tote you got, I reckon."
And Alvin nods. "The burlap's kinda thin—
Do I see something big and smooth and yellow?"
And Alvin nods, but then he tells the fellow,
"It's just my pillow,"
True enough, if the truth ain't buttoned tight,
For he put it under his head most every night;
But country folk are pretty hard to trick,
And many a fellow thought that he could get
A plowshare's worth of gold for the price of a stick
Applied with vigor to the side of Alvin's head;
And many a night young Alvin had to run
From the bowie knife or buckshot-loaded
gun Of some mother's son.
While Alvin beat through woods and country tracks,
Comes Verily Cooper, a handiworkin man,
Who boards wherever there's barrels to make or mend,
And never did he find so fine a place,
So nice a folk nor never so pretty a face
That he'd put away his walkin boots and stay.
It happened that he come to the smith one day
And heard that Alvin had made his golden plow,
And wondered how.
So off he set with boots so sad and worn
And socks so holey, the skin of his feet was torn
And he left a little track of blood sometimes—
Off set Verily Cooper, hopin to find
What tales were envy, and if some tales were true,
What the journeyman blacksmith did or didn't do.
He asked in every inn, "Did a boy with a bag
Come here, a brown-haired boy so long of leg,
About this big?"
Well, it came about that the findin all was done
On a day without a single speck of sun.
Young Alvin, he come down to the bottom lands,
Where the air was cold and the fog was thick and white.
"In a fog this deep you'd better count your hands,"
Said an unseen man a-waitin by the track.
"What could I see if a man had any sight?"
And the unseen speaker said, "That the sun is bright
And the soil is black."
Now Alvin knelt and touched the dirt of the road,
But the ground was packed and he couldn't feel it deep,
And though he fairly pressed his nose to the dirt,
Still the white of the fog was all he could see.
"The soil, it doesn't look so black to me."
And the unseen speaker said, "The earth is hurt
And hides in the fog and heals while it's asleep.
For the tree, she screamed and wept when the beaver gnawed
And no one knowed."
"I'm lookin," Alvin says, "for a soil that's fit
To spring up golden grain, make cattle fat."
And the unseen speaker says, "What soil is that?"
"I'm lookin," Alvin says again, "for loam
That a plow can whittle till it comes to life."
And the unseen speaker says, "A plow's a knife,
And where it cuts the earth is broke and lame."
Says Alvin, "Mar to mend, from the moldrin leaf
Will grow the limb."
"Then go, if you mean to make from the broken ground,
Go till you hear the rushin river's sound,
For there in the river's bight is a dirt so rich
You can harrow with your hand and plow with a flitch."
"Thank you, stranger," Alvin says, and then:
"I've heard your voice before, I can't think when."
"In such a fog as this, so cold and wet,
Your sight's so dim your memory's in debt
And you forget,
For the fog, it goes afore and it goes behind,
Hides what you're lookin for and what you've found,
And the deeper you go, the dimmer it makes your past.
And yet in all the world, this soil is best."
With that, though Alvin tried to learn his name,
The unseen speaker never spoke again,
And at last the journeyman smith went on to find
In the fog, by listenin tight for the river's sound,
That perfect ground.
Near done was the day when Alvin came to the shore
Of the mighty River Mizeray, all deep
And brown and slow and lookin half asleep.
Said Mizeray, "Jes step a little more,
Young feller, and I'll carry you across."
And Alvin, blind as a bat in the fog, he said,
quot;Don't I hear the rush of a river in its bed?"
But Mizeray, he gave a little toss
And whispered, "Cross."
So again that day young Alvin Maker jedges.
How can he know what's true in a fog so white?
How can he trust what a hidden voice alleges?
He kneels, he touches the soil, he lifts it light,
He crushes it in his hand and it's loose and smooth,
But still old Mizeray's voice can tickle and sooth,
And says, "Come on, step on, I'll carry you
To the only soil in the world that'll ever do,
I tell you true."
Old Mizeray has a voice you must believe.
Old Mizeray has a voice that could not lie.
Old Mizeray, he whispers to deceive,
To draw the trustin step to the edge, to die;
But the voice, the voice is full and sweet with love.
So Alvin, with his fingers deep in the loam,
He wonders if this soil is good enough,
And again he hears the river's whisperin hum:
"I'll take you home."
And now he doesn't know his north from south,
And his fingers search but cannot find his mouth,
And he can't remember what he came here for,
Or if it even matters anymore.
Only the sound of the river callin him,
Only the whine of his fear, so high and thin,
Only the taste of the sweat when he licks his lips,
Only the tremblin of his fingertips,
Their weakish grips.
He stands, but he doesn't step, he daresn't walk,
He puzzles for the key to this hidden lock,
And he knows the key isn't in that hissin voice,
He knows there's another way to make his choice.
The soil he's lookin for, it's not for himself,
It's meant for the plow he carried all so stealthy;
He opens his burlap bag and lifts the plow
And sets it on the earth real soft and slow,
And sees it glow.
He sees it shine, that plow, it shines all gold,
All yellow, and it gets too hot to hold,
And around the plow the fog begins to clear,
And the wind, it blows till the fog is gone from here,
And he sees the soil is humusy and black
Just as the unseen voice in the fog had said;
And he sees the river lap the shore and smack
And if he'd taken that step, now he'd be dead
In the devil's sack.
For Mizeray, down deep, don't flow with water:
The bottom slime is made of the stuff of night,
The darkness reachin in at the edge of light,
Awaitin for the step of a man unwary
To suck him down and slither him out to bury,
Numb and soundless, pressed in the dark of the sea,
Where the driftin dead look up through the night and see
Forever out of reach the earth in her dance,
0 heaven's daughter.
And in the tree young Alvin sees a bird
All red of feather, mouth all wide and singin,
And Alvin, he calls out, "I know your voice!"
But the wind-awaker answers not a word.
Enough for him that his breezy song is heard,
And he darts from tree to tree, so coy he's wingin,
And Alvin sighs at the come-out of his choice,
Not altogether sure how the thing occurred,
For the choice was hard.
And while he lies a-restin in the grove,
Up comes young Verily Cooper, shy and smilin.
"Are you the one that they call by the name of Alvin?"
"There's many who's called that name. And who are you?"
"I'm a man who wants to learn what you know of makin.
They call me Verily Cooper, I work in staves,
I join them watertight, each edge so true,
But never a keg I made that was proof from leakin
Or safe from breakin."
Alvin answers, "What do I know of barrels?"
Verily says, "And what did you know of plows?"
And Alvin laughs, and he says, "Ain't you a marvel,"
And up he hops and gives his hand a shake.
"Verily Cooper, there's things in a man that shows,
And here at the river's edge we'll plow the earth
And together make whatever we fix to make
And be the midwives at the barley's birth
And weigh our worth."
So they cut an oak and together hewed the wood
To make the plowframe strong and slow of flex,
And they set the plow in place and bound it good
And never mind a halter for an ox,
For this was a livin plow, of tremblin gold.
And when the work was done, they marked their field,
And side by side they reached and took ahold,
And the plow, it leaped, it plunged, it played like a child
So free and wild.
Verily and Alvin, they hung on;
There wasn't a hope of guidin the plow along.
It was all they could do to keep it to the land;
Other than that they couldn't do a thing.
And at last, with bleedin blisters on their hands,
With arms gone weak and legs too beat to run,
They tripped and fell together on the dirt.
Aside from the blisters, the only thing much hurt
Was Alvin's shirt.
They look, and there's the plow, still as you please,
Gleamin in the sunlight. "How'd it stop?"
Asks Alvin. Verily, he thinks he sees
The truth. He touches the plow, it gives a hop;
He takes his hand away, and it sets right down.
"It's us that makes it go," he says, and he grins.
Now Alvin laughs, a-settin on the ground:
"Maybe it goes a little widdershins,
But it gets around!"
And as they sat there, hollerin and whoopin,
Out come the farmer folk who lived nearby,
To find out what had caused the fog to fly—
And at the same time do a little snoopin.
They saw that the furrow went all anyhow,
And they said, "If you think that's plowin, boys, you're daft!
Straight as an arrow, that's how a plow should go!"
And the farmers mocked—oh, how the farmers laughed
At that no-good plow.
That sobered Alvin up, and Verily frowned.
"Don't you see that the plow, it cut the earth alone?
We got no ox, we got no horse around!
The plow's alive, and we'll tell you how it's done!"
But the farmers went their way, still mirthful merry,
For they had nothin to learn from any fellow
As young and ignorant as Al or Verry.
And the plow just sat at the head of its crooked furrow,
Hot and yellow.
The rest of the tale—how they looked for the crystal city,
How they crept to the dangerous heart of the holy hill,
How they broke the cage of the girl who sang for rain,
How they built the city of light from water and blood—
Others have told that tale, and told it good.
And besides, the girl you're with is cruel and pretty,
And the boy you're settin by has a mischievous will.
There's better things to do than hear me again,
So go on home.
Went to Doc today for checkup and got the ole kickinthepants routine about losing weight but theres more. My chest was flabby like normal but he found a scar where there shouldnt be one. I couldnt remember having anything done there. Only operation in last six months was in Tulsa, Okl, where I was supposed to have my arm set. (Broke it riding a stupid horse, never get me on one of those things again.) So Doc made me lie down and go to sleep, did an exploratory on the spot (miracles of modern medicine) and he asked me when I came out of it why the hell did I have a heart transplant?
So who had a heart transplant?
Somebodys been mucking around in my body and when I find out who hes going to eat that horse that crammed me into the tree and hes going to eat everything that horse has produced in the last six years. Doc says its obviously somebody elses tissue and even though the operation was neat it looked hurried, some of the laser sutures look as bad as if theyd been done with catgut like a few hundred years ago. Nothing wrong, he says, but pretty ragged. As if it mattered how ragged it is with somebody elses stupid heart pumping my blood.
Consolation prize: Doc says its an OK heart, except for a murmur, which he says wont cause me any trouble but if it stops murmuring and starts yelling I should drink nitroglycerin or something.
Why would somebody stick a different heart in me? My old one may have skipped a beat now and then (Ah, Marilyn!) but it ticked OK and it was mine and I was kind of attached to it (Ha ho).
So I thought back to when since my last checkup I had been out anywhere near a loose scalpel and the only time I've been gassed that I know of was in Tulsa with my arm. I asked Doc, he said maybe it could have been done then but the guy wouldve had to be pretty fast. And the spare pieces wouldve had to be pretty handy.
So tomorrow Im flying to Tulsa and Im madder than hades (once every third profanity I use a euphemism to keep in practice for the Daily Noose, which is “a family paper”) the hospital there had better be on there toes since I plan to do some onthespot transplants of heads and arms and other appendages when I find out what and who did what was done and why. Goodnight, dear diary.
As long as Im writing this thing might as well be accurate and put in the good old 5Ws. Im in a plane and Tulsa is sliding forward to meet me and I thought Id fill in some details.
I read yesterday's stuff and it sure looks like a rough draft. But thats what it is. For the Noose they pay a guy who can spell to fix my stuff and they pay him half what they pay me, for the very good reason that he may know how to spell but I know how to write, which is worth more.
Name: (love those little colons) Frank Mabey as in perhaps but the ys at the end.
Ocction: Journalist which means I can write better than the president but not as good as Van Clapper which is fine because what the hell would I do with all that excess money the old man's got.
Temperament: Mad as heck.
Reason for writing this stupid diary: Every boy should keep a journal. I somehow dont feel like telling anybody that Ive got the wrong pump. Might suspect something else is transplanted, too, and Id just as soon avoid speculation. Id tell my sweet loving X only X doesnt give a damn which is fine, because I dont want any of her lousy used damns anyway. Darns. Got to keep up those euphs.
August 3 cont. (tune in next week, same time, ect.)
Went to Tulsa Center for Medical Treatment (everythings a center, someday Im going to build a building and call it the Indianapolis Edge for Journalistic Somethin-gorother) the guy who did my arm has retired. In fact, the day he did my arm was the last day he worked at the hospital, which is lucky on the next days patients but pretty tough on me. He put in a hard day that last day. Got a list of 12 opers the guy did (his name is Hyman Maier—he must be a Baptist. Ha ho).
:(love those colons)
Amos N. Ditweiler
Ronald Smith
Joann Capel
Morris Major
Scott Peterson
Valery Van Vleet (geez, the things some parents do to there kids)
R. R. Trane (I hope to hell his name isnt Rail Road)
Bartholomew (Ha ho) Biscuit (actually Bascom, but the name biscuit occurred to me and Im compulsive)
Wanda Bath (Im not making this up, folks)
John Jorgenson (back to the relms of the ordinary)
William E. Jagger
Mark Muse
The reason for this list, dear diary, is that I dont want the names left around on any scraps of paper and you, dear diary, never leave my side. These people who were operated on were all in for relatively minor operations but for some reason which the hospital people do not pretend to fathom he used total anaesthetic on everybody. The guy I talked to looked at the records and said, (I quote) “Why did he put you under total for an arm?” Im supposed to know this? Im the doctor? What do I tell him, he put me under total because he had a spare heart he wanted to find a home for. And I looked warm and loving and not the romantic type—heart unlikely to get broken. So much for you, X.
So heres my whole sweet lead on the guy. Hes a doctor, pretty good, only he retired (he wasnt all that old) and left no address, didnt even pick up his last check and his lawyer paid his bills. Ordinary guy, no wife (died, I should have been so lucky, widowers dont pay alimony) one kid, works in an ad agency in NY nobody knows where nobody knows his name. And Maier (the doctor who retreaded my radial) was a GD. Which I think is appropriate.
GD, dear stupid diary (must assume diary is stupid for the sake of clarity) stands for Gods Deliverance, the church that believes god is reincarnated every twenty years or something, there prophet got zapped in Denver by a pervert with a laser meatcleaver (some tight security there, folks, those things weight thirty pounds and you just dont stick em under your jacket), and the girls all wear long hair or short hair or something so they look alike. This is Frank Mabey, journalist, speaking. You can tell by the preceision of my data.
In other words, I have a choice to find Maier. I can look through the whole GD church.
Oh, theres another choice. I can forget it and just take my pulse a lot.
Whee. Its back to the whole world. The GD church keeps no membership records, on purpose because then somebody might try to do them harm. Not a bad idea, because the guy looked like he was going to be helpful till I said Hyman Maiers name and then suddenly Im a communist and he gets slanty eyes just looking at me. My heart feels funny. Not the murmur, its kind of a pleasant lullaby at night. I just feel it, thats all, and Ive never felt my heart before. Come to think of it, Im not feeling my heart now!
I mustve decided to forget it because I havent done anything for a few days now, only Doc called today and theres something more and now Ive gotta find that bastard Maier and find out what the hells going on. Found thee, dear diary, because we are back on the trail. The boss asked me what I was investigating today. Told him “heart throbs” (ha ho, laughaminute).
News from Doc—pictures show something funny about the heart, he wants to open me up again. Good thing my insurance covers everything. I think Im becoming Docs hobby.
My heart is growing. Good news, huh? The ragged edges were not all sloppy surgery, they were heart tissue overgrowing the sutures, which means that the new heart is taking over (welcome to Latin America, heart, time for a coup). My aorta is two inches new tissue, with a whole new genetic pattern. And the veins to my lungs are completely new tissue. What scares Doc most, besides the fact that hes never seen this happen before, is that the new tissue is moving into the lungs. Why would heart tissue take over the lungs? Only its changing from heart tissue into lung tissue, and Doc says it seems to be progressing faster.
Whatever kind of heart this Maier stuck into me, it thinks that it got a body transplant. I wish to persuade it otherwise, but Doc says what is he supposed to do, give me a third heart? Generally frowned on, and the new thingamajobby (more than a heart now) isn't doing any harm. Replacing it would be cosmetic surgery. Which my wonderful policy dont cover, mine friend.
Why oh why did I ride that horse? Why did I go to the Tulsa Center for Medical Treatment? Why was I born? (This last, dear diary, is mock despair, lest you think Im becoming desperate. I am, but think it not.)