A Garden in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Enderverse, 2168 (Three Years Ago, Fandom Time)
Things had been looking up for Peter the past few years. It had taken him a while to understand how he functioned, to figure out himself and find a way to calm his aggressive urges. That was why they had turned him down, why they had chosen adorable, gentle little Enderpoo over him, and why mother and father had moved out of the city. Peter was aggressive, he wanted to move on impulse, he just wanted to tear things apart--
But he didn't. What he wanted most was power, was control. And he could not have that if he let his aggression triumph over all reason. So he had watched. Learned. He had figured out how to release his frustrations and his impulses on the animals of the land, rather than the humans. It had worked well.
His teachers now thought of him as a 'promising student'. He didn't fight with anyone. He flattered the adults around him and got along well with everybody. Even his parents thought he'd turned over a new leaf.
Suckers.
He'd been working on his plan, and he couldn't do that if he was going to make people hate him, or lash out at an inopportunate moment. Like now, when he was about to start, walking down into the garden to find Valentine sitting by one of the trees.
"I've been deciding," said Peter, "whether to kill you or what."
Valentine leaned against the trunk of the pine tree, her little fire a few smoldering ashes. She burned one each year for Ender's birthday, the little sap. "I love you, too, Peter."
"It would be so easy. You always make these stupid little fires. It's. just a matter of knocking you out and burning you up. You're such a firebug."
"I've been thinking of castrating you in your sleep."
"No you haven't. You only think of things like that when I'm with you. I bring out the best in you. No, Valentine, I've decided not to kill you. I've decided that you're going to help me." He smiled. He knew that she would not be able to resist his offer, no matter how annoyed she looked.
"I am?"
"Valentine, things are coming to a head. I've been tracking troop movements in Russia."
"What are we talking about?"
"The world, Val. You know Russia? Big empire? Warsaw Pact? Rulers of Eurasia from the Netherlands to Pakistan?"
"They don't publish their troop movements, Peter."
"Of course not. But they do publish their passenger and freight-train schedules. I've had my desk analyzing those schedules and figuring out when the secret troop trains are moving over the same tracks. Done it backward over the past three years. In the last six months, they've stepped up, they're getting ready for war. Land war." Really, it wasn't that hard, Val. She should know better.
"But what about the League? What about the buggers?" Valentine didn't know what Peter was getting at, but he often launched discussions like this, practical discussions of world events. He used her to test his ideas, to refine them.
"The Polemarch is Russian, isn't he? And he knows what's happening with the fleet. Either they've found out the buggers aren't a threat after all, or we're about to have a big battle. One way or another, the bugger war is about to be over. They're getting ready for after the war."
"If they're moving troops, it must be under the direction of the Strategos."
"It's all internal, within the Warsaw Pact." That was the rub of it, and he could see she realised that too. The world order that had seemed so staid and unmovable for a hundred years was starting to crumble at the very base. And that's exactly what was making it so interesting.
"So it's back to the way it was before."
"A few changes. The shields make it so nobody bothers with nuclear weapons anymore. We have to kill each other thousands at a time instead of millions." Peter grinned. "Val, it was bound to happen. Right now there's a vast international fleet and army in existence, with American hegemony. When the bugger wars are over, all that power will vanish, because it's all built on fear of the buggers. And suddenly we'll look around and discover that all the old alliances are gone, dead and gone, except one, the Warsaw Pact. And it'll be the dollar against five million lasers. We'll have the asteroid belt, but they'll have Earth, and you run out of raisins and celery kind of fast out there, without Earth."
It was such a beautiful opening.
"Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?"
"For both of us, Val."
"Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice."
"But we don't think like other children, do we, Val? We don't talk like other children. And above all, we don't write like other children."
"For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we've strayed from the topic, I think." But he could tell she was getting excited, that the prospect of doing something - of really mattering - appealed to her. Of course it did. She might play the role of the nice sibling, the sweet little girl, but he knew better.
"I've been studying history," Peter said. "I've been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world. Think what Pericles did in Athens, and Demosthenes--"
"Yes, they managed to wreck Athens twice."
"Pericles, yes, but Demosthenes was right about Philip--"
"Or provoked him--"
"See? This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismarck. Lenin."
"Not exactly parallel cases, Peter." Now she was disagreeing with him out of habit. She saw the possibilities, too. He could see it in her eyes.
"I didn't expect you to understand. You still believe that teachers know something worth learning."
"So you see yourself as Bismarck?"
"I see myself as knowing how to insert ideas into the public mind. Haven't you ever thought of a phrase, Val, a clever thing to say, and said it, and then two weeks or a month later you hear some adult saying it to another adult, both of them strangers? Or you see it on a video or pick it up on a net?"
"I always figured I heard it before and only thought I was making it up."
"You were wrong. There are maybe two or three thousand people in the world as smart as us, little sister. Most of them are making a living somewhere. Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research. Precious few of them are actually in positions of power."
"I guess we're the lucky few."
"Funny as a one-legged rabbit, Val."
"Of which there are no doubt several in these woods."
"Hopping in neat little circles."
Valentine laughed out loud. Their family did always have a terribly morbid sense of humor.
"Val, we can say the words that everyone else will be saying two weeks later. We can do that. We don't have to wait until we're grown up and safely put away in some career."
"Peter, you're twelve."
"Not on the nets I'm not. On the nets I can name myself anything I want, and so can you."
"On the nets we are clearly identified as students, and we can't even get into the real discussions except in audience mode, which means we can't say anything anyway.""
"I have a plan."
"You always do." She was pretending nonchalance, but he could see she listened eagerly.
"We can get on the nets as full-fledged adults, with whatever net names we want to adopt, if Father gets us onto his citizen's access."
"And why would he do that? We already have student access. What do you tell him, I need citizen's access so I can take over the world?"
"No, Val. I won't tell him anything. You'll tell him how you're worried about me. How I'm-trying so very hard to do well at school, but you know it's driving me crazy because I can never talk to anybody intelligent, everybody always talks down to me because I'm young, I never get to converse with my peers. You can prove that the stress is getting to me."
He had thought this one through. First her finding the corpses of his experiments in the woods had been a problem, something he feared might be a threat, but this way, he could turn it around. Make it something he could use.
"So you get him to authorize us to share his citizen's access. To adopt our own identities there, to conceal who we are so people will give us the intellectual respect we deserve."
Yes, yes, now she was starting to see it his way, even if she cushioned it in sarcasm. Because they were better at this than most of those stupid schmucks out there.
She was listening. She was interested. She was starting to understand. Now all he needed to do was appeal to her vanity, to her wish to be some kind of angel. She had applied it well to Ender, and now he would turn it around on her.
"Val," Peter said. "I know what you think of me. I'm not a nice person, you think."
Valentine threw a pine needle at him. "An arrow through your heart."
"I've been planning to come talk to you for a long time. But I kept being afraid."
She put a pine needle in her mouth and blew it at him. It dropped almost straight down. "Another failed launch." There was some confusion in her expression now.
"Val, I was afraid you wouldn't believe me. That you wouldn't believe I could do it."
"Peter, I believe you could do anything, and probably will."
"But I was even more afraid that you'd believe me and try to stop me." He glanced down at the ground. It was calculated weakness, but it worked.
"Come on, threaten to kill me again, Peter."
"So I've got a sick sense of humor. I'm sorry. You know I was teasing. I need your help."
"You're just what the world needs. A twelve-year-old to solve all our problems."
"It's not my fault I'm twelve right now. And it's not my fault that right now is when the opportunity is open. Right now is the time when I can shape events. The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that's partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time."
"I was just thinking of comparing you to him."
"I don't hate Jews, Val. I don't want to destroy anybody. And I don't want war, either. I want the world to hold together. Is that so bad? I don't want us to go back to the old way. Have you read about the world wars?"
"Yes."
"We can go back to that again. Or worse. We could find ourselves locked into the Warsaw Pact. Now, there's a cheerful thought."
"Peter, we're children, don't you understand that? We're going to school, we're growing up-"
Oh, come on, Val, he thought. I know you want this. And if you don't already, I will give you one little nudge more, and I'll make you want it.
"If I believe that, if I accept that, then I've got to sit back and watch while all the opportunities vanish, and then when I'm old enough it's too late. Val, listen to me. I know how you feel about me, you always have. I was a vicious, nasty brother. I was cruel to you and crueler to Ender before they took him. But I didn't hate you. I loved you both, I just had to be-had to have control, do you understand that? It's the most important thing to me, it's my greatest gift, I can see where the weak points are, I can see how to get in and use them, I just see those things without even trying."
He took a deep breath. "I could become a businessman and run some big corporation, I'd scramble and maneuver until I was at the top of everything and what would I have? Nothing. I'm going to rule, Val, I'm going to have control of something. But I want it to be something worth ruling. I want to accomplish something worthwhile. A Pax Americana through the whole world. So that when somebody else comes, after we beat the buggers, when somebody else comes here to defeat us, they'll find we've already spread over a thousand worlds, we're at peace with ourselves and impossible to destroy." He dropped his eyes again, but this time to hers, imploring. "Do you understand? I want to save mankind from self-destruction."
This went beyond calculated weakness. It was calculated truthfulness, and part of him was galled by the idea of exposing himself like this to anyone, but the rest of him knew it would work. That it would bind her to him. And so he did it.
Val's eyes searched his face. He wasn't sure for what. "So a twelve-year-old boy and his kid sister are going to save the world?" she asked, trying for dry, but not quite hitting it.
"How old was Alexander?" Peter asked, "I'm not going to do it overnight. I'm just going to start now. If you'll help me."
"I don't believe what you did to those squirrels was part of an act. I think you did it because you love to do it."
Feeling too-exposed, thinking about his aggression, about his fear that he might be doing things just to assuage it, Peter wept into his hands. His cheeks were wet when he took his hands away, his eyes rimmed in red. "I know," he said. "It's what I'm most afraid of. That I really am a monster. I don't want to be a killer but I just can't help it."
"Val, if you don't help me, I don't know what I'll become. But if you're there, my partner in everything, you can keep me from becoming-- like that. Like the bad ones."
His eyes were still wet when he looked up and caught hers. Her head gave a little bob, a nod, and then she spoke the words he had been trying to coax out of her desperately, even to the point of exposure.
"I will. I'll help you."
And that's how it began.
[[ NFB and NFI, obviously! Taken and sparsely adapted from Ender's Game, and continued sometime next week. Warning: Mention of animal abuse. ]]
But he didn't. What he wanted most was power, was control. And he could not have that if he let his aggression triumph over all reason. So he had watched. Learned. He had figured out how to release his frustrations and his impulses on the animals of the land, rather than the humans. It had worked well.
His teachers now thought of him as a 'promising student'. He didn't fight with anyone. He flattered the adults around him and got along well with everybody. Even his parents thought he'd turned over a new leaf.
Suckers.
He'd been working on his plan, and he couldn't do that if he was going to make people hate him, or lash out at an inopportunate moment. Like now, when he was about to start, walking down into the garden to find Valentine sitting by one of the trees.
"I've been deciding," said Peter, "whether to kill you or what."
Valentine leaned against the trunk of the pine tree, her little fire a few smoldering ashes. She burned one each year for Ender's birthday, the little sap. "I love you, too, Peter."
"It would be so easy. You always make these stupid little fires. It's. just a matter of knocking you out and burning you up. You're such a firebug."
"I've been thinking of castrating you in your sleep."
"No you haven't. You only think of things like that when I'm with you. I bring out the best in you. No, Valentine, I've decided not to kill you. I've decided that you're going to help me." He smiled. He knew that she would not be able to resist his offer, no matter how annoyed she looked.
"I am?"
"Valentine, things are coming to a head. I've been tracking troop movements in Russia."
"What are we talking about?"
"The world, Val. You know Russia? Big empire? Warsaw Pact? Rulers of Eurasia from the Netherlands to Pakistan?"
"They don't publish their troop movements, Peter."
"Of course not. But they do publish their passenger and freight-train schedules. I've had my desk analyzing those schedules and figuring out when the secret troop trains are moving over the same tracks. Done it backward over the past three years. In the last six months, they've stepped up, they're getting ready for war. Land war." Really, it wasn't that hard, Val. She should know better.
"But what about the League? What about the buggers?" Valentine didn't know what Peter was getting at, but he often launched discussions like this, practical discussions of world events. He used her to test his ideas, to refine them.
"The Polemarch is Russian, isn't he? And he knows what's happening with the fleet. Either they've found out the buggers aren't a threat after all, or we're about to have a big battle. One way or another, the bugger war is about to be over. They're getting ready for after the war."
"If they're moving troops, it must be under the direction of the Strategos."
"It's all internal, within the Warsaw Pact." That was the rub of it, and he could see she realised that too. The world order that had seemed so staid and unmovable for a hundred years was starting to crumble at the very base. And that's exactly what was making it so interesting.
"So it's back to the way it was before."
"A few changes. The shields make it so nobody bothers with nuclear weapons anymore. We have to kill each other thousands at a time instead of millions." Peter grinned. "Val, it was bound to happen. Right now there's a vast international fleet and army in existence, with American hegemony. When the bugger wars are over, all that power will vanish, because it's all built on fear of the buggers. And suddenly we'll look around and discover that all the old alliances are gone, dead and gone, except one, the Warsaw Pact. And it'll be the dollar against five million lasers. We'll have the asteroid belt, but they'll have Earth, and you run out of raisins and celery kind of fast out there, without Earth."
It was such a beautiful opening.
"Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?"
"For both of us, Val."
"Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice."
"But we don't think like other children, do we, Val? We don't talk like other children. And above all, we don't write like other children."
"For a discussion that began with death threats, Peter, we've strayed from the topic, I think." But he could tell she was getting excited, that the prospect of doing something - of really mattering - appealed to her. Of course it did. She might play the role of the nice sibling, the sweet little girl, but he knew better.
"I've been studying history," Peter said. "I've been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world. Think what Pericles did in Athens, and Demosthenes--"
"Yes, they managed to wreck Athens twice."
"Pericles, yes, but Demosthenes was right about Philip--"
"Or provoked him--"
"See? This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismarck. Lenin."
"Not exactly parallel cases, Peter." Now she was disagreeing with him out of habit. She saw the possibilities, too. He could see it in her eyes.
"I didn't expect you to understand. You still believe that teachers know something worth learning."
"So you see yourself as Bismarck?"
"I see myself as knowing how to insert ideas into the public mind. Haven't you ever thought of a phrase, Val, a clever thing to say, and said it, and then two weeks or a month later you hear some adult saying it to another adult, both of them strangers? Or you see it on a video or pick it up on a net?"
"I always figured I heard it before and only thought I was making it up."
"You were wrong. There are maybe two or three thousand people in the world as smart as us, little sister. Most of them are making a living somewhere. Teaching, the poor bastards, or doing research. Precious few of them are actually in positions of power."
"I guess we're the lucky few."
"Funny as a one-legged rabbit, Val."
"Of which there are no doubt several in these woods."
"Hopping in neat little circles."
Valentine laughed out loud. Their family did always have a terribly morbid sense of humor.
"Val, we can say the words that everyone else will be saying two weeks later. We can do that. We don't have to wait until we're grown up and safely put away in some career."
"Peter, you're twelve."
"Not on the nets I'm not. On the nets I can name myself anything I want, and so can you."
"On the nets we are clearly identified as students, and we can't even get into the real discussions except in audience mode, which means we can't say anything anyway.""
"I have a plan."
"You always do." She was pretending nonchalance, but he could see she listened eagerly.
"We can get on the nets as full-fledged adults, with whatever net names we want to adopt, if Father gets us onto his citizen's access."
"And why would he do that? We already have student access. What do you tell him, I need citizen's access so I can take over the world?"
"No, Val. I won't tell him anything. You'll tell him how you're worried about me. How I'm-trying so very hard to do well at school, but you know it's driving me crazy because I can never talk to anybody intelligent, everybody always talks down to me because I'm young, I never get to converse with my peers. You can prove that the stress is getting to me."
He had thought this one through. First her finding the corpses of his experiments in the woods had been a problem, something he feared might be a threat, but this way, he could turn it around. Make it something he could use.
"So you get him to authorize us to share his citizen's access. To adopt our own identities there, to conceal who we are so people will give us the intellectual respect we deserve."
Yes, yes, now she was starting to see it his way, even if she cushioned it in sarcasm. Because they were better at this than most of those stupid schmucks out there.
She was listening. She was interested. She was starting to understand. Now all he needed to do was appeal to her vanity, to her wish to be some kind of angel. She had applied it well to Ender, and now he would turn it around on her.
"Val," Peter said. "I know what you think of me. I'm not a nice person, you think."
Valentine threw a pine needle at him. "An arrow through your heart."
"I've been planning to come talk to you for a long time. But I kept being afraid."
She put a pine needle in her mouth and blew it at him. It dropped almost straight down. "Another failed launch." There was some confusion in her expression now.
"Val, I was afraid you wouldn't believe me. That you wouldn't believe I could do it."
"Peter, I believe you could do anything, and probably will."
"But I was even more afraid that you'd believe me and try to stop me." He glanced down at the ground. It was calculated weakness, but it worked.
"Come on, threaten to kill me again, Peter."
"So I've got a sick sense of humor. I'm sorry. You know I was teasing. I need your help."
"You're just what the world needs. A twelve-year-old to solve all our problems."
"It's not my fault I'm twelve right now. And it's not my fault that right now is when the opportunity is open. Right now is the time when I can shape events. The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that's partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time."
"I was just thinking of comparing you to him."
"I don't hate Jews, Val. I don't want to destroy anybody. And I don't want war, either. I want the world to hold together. Is that so bad? I don't want us to go back to the old way. Have you read about the world wars?"
"Yes."
"We can go back to that again. Or worse. We could find ourselves locked into the Warsaw Pact. Now, there's a cheerful thought."
"Peter, we're children, don't you understand that? We're going to school, we're growing up-"
Oh, come on, Val, he thought. I know you want this. And if you don't already, I will give you one little nudge more, and I'll make you want it.
"If I believe that, if I accept that, then I've got to sit back and watch while all the opportunities vanish, and then when I'm old enough it's too late. Val, listen to me. I know how you feel about me, you always have. I was a vicious, nasty brother. I was cruel to you and crueler to Ender before they took him. But I didn't hate you. I loved you both, I just had to be-had to have control, do you understand that? It's the most important thing to me, it's my greatest gift, I can see where the weak points are, I can see how to get in and use them, I just see those things without even trying."
He took a deep breath. "I could become a businessman and run some big corporation, I'd scramble and maneuver until I was at the top of everything and what would I have? Nothing. I'm going to rule, Val, I'm going to have control of something. But I want it to be something worth ruling. I want to accomplish something worthwhile. A Pax Americana through the whole world. So that when somebody else comes, after we beat the buggers, when somebody else comes here to defeat us, they'll find we've already spread over a thousand worlds, we're at peace with ourselves and impossible to destroy." He dropped his eyes again, but this time to hers, imploring. "Do you understand? I want to save mankind from self-destruction."
This went beyond calculated weakness. It was calculated truthfulness, and part of him was galled by the idea of exposing himself like this to anyone, but the rest of him knew it would work. That it would bind her to him. And so he did it.
Val's eyes searched his face. He wasn't sure for what. "So a twelve-year-old boy and his kid sister are going to save the world?" she asked, trying for dry, but not quite hitting it.
"How old was Alexander?" Peter asked, "I'm not going to do it overnight. I'm just going to start now. If you'll help me."
"I don't believe what you did to those squirrels was part of an act. I think you did it because you love to do it."
Feeling too-exposed, thinking about his aggression, about his fear that he might be doing things just to assuage it, Peter wept into his hands. His cheeks were wet when he took his hands away, his eyes rimmed in red. "I know," he said. "It's what I'm most afraid of. That I really am a monster. I don't want to be a killer but I just can't help it."
"Val, if you don't help me, I don't know what I'll become. But if you're there, my partner in everything, you can keep me from becoming-- like that. Like the bad ones."
His eyes were still wet when he looked up and caught hers. Her head gave a little bob, a nod, and then she spoke the words he had been trying to coax out of her desperately, even to the point of exposure.
"I will. I'll help you."
And that's how it began.
[[ NFB and NFI, obviously! Taken and sparsely adapted from Ender's Game, and continued sometime next week. Warning: Mention of animal abuse. ]]