"That would be Ender Wiggin, sir."
"And don't think we haven't picked up on the way you obsess about Wiggin."
"Obsess?" Bean hadn't asked about him after that first day. Never joined in discussions about the standings. Never visited the battleroom during Ender's practice sessions.
Oh. What an obvious mistake. Stupid.
"You're the only launchy who has completely avoided so much as seeing Ender Wiggin. You track his schedule so thoroughly that you are never in the same room with him. That takes real effort."
"I'm a launchy, sir. He's in an army."
"Don't pla
y dumb, Bean. It's not convincing and it wastes my time."
Tell a useless and obvious truth, that was the rule. "Everyone compares me to Ender all the time 'cause I came here so young and small. I wanted to make my own way."
"I'll accept that for now because there's a limit to how deeply I want to wade into your bullshit," said Dimak.
But in saying what he'd said about Ender, Bean wondered if it might not be true. Why shouldn't I have such a normal emotion as jealousy? I'm not a machine. So he was a little offended that Dimak seemed to assume that something more subtle had to be going on. That Bean was lying no matter what he said.
"Tell me," said Dimak, "why you refuse to play the fantasy game."
"It looks boring and stupid," said Bean. That was certainly true.
"Not good enough," said Dimak. "For one thing, it isn't boring and stupid to any other kid in Battle School. In fact, the game adapts itself to your interests."
I have no doubt of that, thought Bean. "It's all pretending," said Bean. "None of it's real."
"Stop hiding for one second, can't you?" snapped Dimak. "You know perfectly well that we use the game to analyze personality, and that's why you refuse to play."
"Sounds like you've analyzed my personality anyway," said Bean.
"You just don't let up, do you?"
Bean said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"I've been looking at your reading list," said Dimak. "Vauban?"
"Yes?"
"Fortification engineering from the time of Louis the Fourteenth?"
Bean nodded. He thought back to Vauban and how his strategies had adapted to fit Louis's ever-more-straitened finances. Defense in depth had given way to a thin line of defenses; building new fortresses had largely been abandoned, while razing redundant or poorly placed ones continued. Poverty triumphing over strategy. He started to talk about this, but Dimak cut him off.
"Come on, Bean. Why are you studying a subject that has nothing to do with war in space?"
Bean didn't really have an answer. He had been working through the history of strategy from Xenophon and Alexander to Caesar and Machiavelli. Vauban came in sequence. There was no plan--mostly his readings were a cover for his clandestine computer work. But now that Dimak was asking him, what did seventeenth-century fortifications have to do with war in space?
"I'm not the one who put Vauban in the library."
"We have the full set of military writings that are found in every library in the fleet. Nothing more significant than that."
Bean shrugged.
"You spent two hours on Vauban."
"So what? I spent as long on Frederick the Great, and I don't think we're doing field drills, either, or bayoneting anyone who breaks ranks during a march into fire."