"You win."
"I want to see your fart collection," Alai said.
"I stored it in your locker. Didn"t you notice?"
"I thought it was my socks."
"We don"t wear socks anymore."
"Oh yeah." A reminder that they were both far from home. It took some of the fun out of having mastered a bit of navigation.
Ender took his pistol and demonstrated what he had learned about the two thumb b.u.t.tons.
"What does it do when you aim at a person?" asked Alai.
"I don"t know."
"Why don"t we find out?"
Ender shook his head. "We might hurt somebody."
"I meant why don"t we shoot each other in the foot or something. I"m not Bernard, I never tortured cats for fun."
"Oh."
"It can"t be too dangerous, or they wouldn"t give these guns to kids."
"We"re soldiers now."
"Shoot me in the foot."
"No, you shoot me."
"Let"s shoot each other."
They did. Immediately Ender felt the leg of the suit grow stiff, immobile at the knee and ankle joints.
"You frozen?" asked Alai.
"Stiff as a board."
"Let"s freeze a few," Alai said. "Let"s have our first war. Us against them."
They grinned. Then Ender said, "Better invite Bernard."
Alai c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"And Shen."
"That little slanty-eyed b.u.t.t-wiggler?"
Ender decided that Alai was joking. "Hey, we can"t all be n.i.g.g.e.rs."
Alai grinned. "My grandpa would"ve killed you for that."
"My great great grandpa would have sold him first,"
"Let"s go get Bernard and Shen and freeze these b.u.g.g.e.r-lovers."
In twenty minutes, everyone in the room was frozen except Ender, Bernard, Shen, and Alai. The four of them sat there whooping and laughing until Dap came in.
"I see you"ve learned how to use your equipment," he said. Then he did something to a control he held in his hand. Everybody drifted slowly toward the wall he was standing on. He went among the frozen boys, touching them and thawing their suits. There was a tumult of complaint that it wasn"t fair how Bernard and Alai had shot them all when they weren"t ready.
"Why weren"t you ready?" asked Dap. "You had your suits just as long as they did. You had just as many minutes flapping around like drunken ducks. Stop moaning and we"ll begin."
Ender noticed that it was a.s.sumed that Bernard and Alai were the leaders of the battle. Well, that was fine. Bernard knew that Ender and Alai had learned to use the guns together. And Ender and Alai were friends. Bernard might believe that Ender had joined his group, but it wasn"t so. Ender had joined a new group. Alai"s group. Bernard had joined it too.
It wasn"t obvious to everyone; Bernard still bl.u.s.tered and sent his cronies on errands. But Alai now moved freely through the whole room, and when Bernard was crazy, Alai could joke a little and calm him down. When it came time to choose their launch leader, Alai was the almost unanimous choice. Bernard sulked for a few days and then he was fine, and everyone settled into the new pattern. The launch was no longer divided into Bernard"s in-group and Ender"s outcasts. Alai was the bridge.
Ender sat on his bed with his desk on his knees. It was private study time, and Ender was doing Free Play. It was a shifting, crazy kind of game in which the school computer kept bringing up new things, building a maze that you could explore. You could go back to events that you liked, for a while; if you left them alone too long, they disappeared and something else took its place.
Sometimes funny things. Sometimes exciting, and he had to be quick to stay alive. He had lots of deaths, but that was OK, games were like that, you died a lot until you got the hang of it.
His figure on the screen had started out as a little boy. For a while it had changed into a bear. Now it was a large mouse, with long and delicate hands. He ran his figure under a lot of large items of furniture. He had played with the cat a lot, but now it was boring-- too easy to dodge, he knew all the furniture.
Not through the mousehole this time, he told himself. I"m sick of the Giant. It"s a dumb game and I can"t ever win. Whatever I choose is wrong.
But he went through the mousehole anyway, and over the small bridge in the garden. He avoided the ducks and the divebombing mosquitoes-- he had tried playing with them but they were too easy, and if he played with the ducks too long he turned into a fish, which he didn"t like. Being a fish reminded him too much of being frozen in the battleroom, his whole body rigid, waiting for the practice to end so Dap would thaw him. So, as usual, he found himself going up the rolling hills.
The landslides began. At first he had got caught again and again, crushed in an exaggerated blot of gore oozing out from under a rock pile. Now, though, he had mastered the skill of running up the slopes at an angle to avoid the crush, always seeking higher ground.
And, as always, the landslides finally stopped being jumbles of rock. The face of the hill broke open and instead of shale it was white bread, puffy, rising like dough as the crust broke away and fell. It was soft and spongy; his figure moved more slowly. And when he jumped down off the bread, he as standing on a table. Giant loaf of bread behind him; giant stick of b.u.t.ter beside him. And the Giant himself leaning his chin in his hands, looking at him. Ender"s figure was about as tall as the Giant"s head from chin to brow.
"I think I"ll bite your head off," said the Giant, as he always did.
This time, instead of running away or standing there, Ender walked his figure up to the Giant"s face and kicked him in the chin.
The Giant stuck out his tongue and Ender fell to the ground.
"How about a guessing game?" asked the Giant. So it didn"t make any difference-- the Giant only played the guessing game. Stupid computer. Millions of possible scenarios in its memory, and the Giant could only play one stupid game.
The Giant, as always, set two huge shot gla.s.ses, as tall as Ender"s knees, on the table in front of him. As always, the two were filled with different liquids. The computer was good enough that the liquids had never repeated, not that he could remember. This time the one had a thick, creamy looking liquid. The other hissed and foamed.
"One is poison and one is not," said the Giant. "Guess right and I"ll take you into Fairyland."
Guessing meant sticking his head into one of the gla.s.ses to drink. He never guessed right. Sometimes his head was dissolved. Sometimes he caught on fire. Sometimes he fell in and drowned. Sometimes he fell out, turned green, and rotted away. It was always ghastly, and the Giant always laughed.