"How much can we tell him?"
"Don't waste his time on the physics of interstellar travel."
"What about the ansible?"
"I already told him about that, and the fleets. I said they would arrive at their destination within five years."
"It seems there's very little left for us to tell him."
"You can tell him about the weapons systems. He has to know enough to make intelligent decisions."
"Ah. We can be useful after all, how very kind. We've devoted one of the five simulators to his exclusive use."
"What about the others?"
"The other simulators?"
"The other children."
"You were brought here to take care of Ender Wiggin."
"Just curious. Remember, they were all my students at one time or another."
"And now they are all mine. They are entering into the mysteries of the fleet, Colonel Graff, to which you, as a soldier, have never been introduced."
"You make it sound like a priesthood."
"And a god. And a religion. Even those of us who command by ansible know the majesty of flight among the stars. I can see you find my mysticism distasteful. I assure you that your distaste only reveals your ignorance. Soon enough Ender Wiggin will also know what I know; he will dance the graceful ghost dance through the stars, and whatever greatness there is within him will be unlocked, revealed, set forth before the universe for all to see. You have the soul of a stone, Colonel Graff, but I sing to a stone as easily as to another singer. You may go to your quarters and establish yourself."
"I have nothing to establish except the clothing I'm wearing."
"You own nothing?"
"They keep my salary in an account somewhere on Earth. I've never
. needed it. Except to buy civilian clothes on my--vacation."
"A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction."
"When I'm tense, I eat. Whereas when you're tense, you spout solid waste."
"I like you, Colonel Graff. I think we shall get along."
"I don't much care, Admiral Chamrajnagar. I came here for Ender. And neither of us came here for you."
Ender hated Eros from the moment he shuttled down from the tug. He had been uncomfortable enough on Earth, where floors were flat; Eros was hopeless. It was a roughly spindle-shaped rock only six and a half kilometers thick at its narrowest point. Since the surface of the planetoid was entirely devoted to absorbing sunlight and converting it to energy, everyone lived in the smooth-walled rooms linked by tunnels that laced the interior of the asteroid. The closed-in space was no problem for Ender--what bothered him was that all the tunnel floors noticeably sloped downward. From the start, Ender was plagued by vertigo as he walked through the tunnels, especially the ones that girdled Eros's narrow circumference. It did not help that gravity was only half of Earth-normal--the illusion of being on the verge of falling was almost complete.
There was also something disturbing about the proportions of the rooms--the ceilings were too low for the width, the tunnels too narrow. It was not a comfortable place.
Worst of all, though, was the number of people. Ender had no important memories of the scale of the cities of Earth. His idea of a comfortable number of people was the Battle School, where he had known by sight every person who dwelt there. Here, though, ten thousand people lived within the rock. There was no crowding, despite the amount of space devoted to life support and other machinery. What bothered Ender was that he was constantly surrounded by strangers.
They never let him come to know anyone. He saw the other Command School students often, but since he never attended any class regularly, they remained only faces. He would attend a lecture here or there, but usually he was tutored by one teacher after another, or occasionally helped to learn a process by another student, whom he met once and never saw again. He ate alone or with Colonel Graff. His recreation was in a gym, but he rarely saw the same people in it twice.
He recognized that they were isolating him again, this time not by setting the other students to hating him, but rather by giving them no opportunity to become friends. He could hardly have been close to most of them anyway--except for Ender, the other students were all well into adolescence.
So Ender withdrew into his studies and learned quickly and well. Astrogation and military history he absorbed like water; abstract mathematics was more difficult, but whenever he was given a problem that involved patterns in space and time, he found that his intuition was more reliable than his calculation--he often saw at once a solution that he could only prove after minutes or hours of manipulating numbers.
And for pleasure, there was the simulator, the most perfect videogame he had ever played. Teachers and students trained him, step by step, in its use. At first, not knowing the awesome power of the game, he had played only at the tactical level, controlling a single fighter in continuous maneuvers to find and destroy an enemy. The computer-controlled enemy was devious and powerful, and whenever Ender tried a tactic he found the computer using it against him within minutes.