And then Dink did.
"He's not hungry," he said.
No one argued with him.
"Now, what could Dink possibly mean by that?" said Graff. "Any ideas?"
No one seemed to have any.
"You don't want to say it, but I will," said Graff. "It's well known that Bean scored higher on the Battle School tests than anyone else in history. No one else was close. Well, Ender, but 'close' is such a relative term. Let's say Ender scored closest. But we don't know how close because Bean was off the charts."
"How?" said Dink. "He answered questions you didn't ask?"
"Exactly," said Graff. "That's what Sister Carlotta showed me. He had time to spare in taking the tests. He commented on them and mentioned how the test could have been improved. He was unstoppable. Irresistible. That's what the world knows about Julian Delphiki. And yet when we put him in charge of all of you on Eros, in Command School, while we were waiting for Ender to make up his mind about whether to continue his...education--how did that go?"
Again silence.
"Oh, why must we pretend that things weren't as they were?" said Graff.
"We didn't like it," said Dink. "He was younger than all of us."
"So was Ender," said Graff.
"But we knew Ender," said Crazy Tom.
"We loved Ender," said Shen.
"Everybody loved Ender," said Fly.
"I can give you a list of people who hated him. But you loved him. And you didn't love Bean. Why is that?"
Bean barked out a laugh. The others looked at him. Except the ones who were embarrassed and looked away. "I never learned how to be cuddly," said Bean. "In an orphanage that would have got me adopted, but on the street, it would have got me killed."
"Nonsense," said Graff. "Cuddly wouldn't have cut it with this group anyway."
"And you actually were cuddly," said Carn. "No offense, but you were spunky."
"If that's your word for 'bratty little asshole,'" said Dink mildly.
"Now now," said Graff. "You didn't dislike Bean personally. Most of you. But you didn't like serving under him. And you can't say that it's because you were too independent to serve under anybody, because you gladly served under Ender. You gave Ender everything you had."
"More than we had," said Fly.
"But not Bean." Graff said it like it was proof of something.
"Is this a therapy group?" asked Dink.
Vlad spoke up. "Of course it is. He wants us to reach the same conclusion he's already reached."
"Do you know what it is?" asked Graff.
Vlad took a breath. "Hyrum thinks that the reason we didn't follow Bean the way we followed Ender was because we knew something about Bean that the rest of the world doesn't know. And because of that, we're likely to be willing to challenge him in battle, while the rest of the world would just give up and surrender to him because of his reputation. Isn't that about it?"
Graff smiled benignly.
"But that's stupid," said Dumper. "Bean really is a good commander. I've seen him. Commanding his Rwandans in our campaign in Peru. It's true that the Peruvian Army wasn't well led or well trained, but those Rwandans--they worshipped Bean. They would have marched off a cliff if he asked them to. When he twitched, they sprang into action."
"And your point is?" asked Dink.