The Lamb

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed
By the stream & o'er the mead;

-The Lamb from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake

He was a spoiled brat when he was small, albeit a lonely one. Being home educated (1) - which was normal considering his family background - he had not playmates of similar age. All of his twenty-nine sisters were created at one go (2), ten years before his birth, and from his young eyes they were but a blur of girls exchanging important secrets in a foreign language. At five, even Quatre's unusual intelligence could not understand that girls of fifteen generally talked about pimples and prom Kings with the utmost seriousness. On some rare occasions when his sisters were bored, they would actually let him into one of their rooms and put him in pretty dresses which they have outgrown. He laughed with his sisters, but had he not suspected that they were laughing at him? Nonetheless, when the games were over, he would find himself locked out of their rooms, and no matter how he scratched and clawed at their doors all he could do was to listen to the giggles inside - giggles of joy which he was not allowed to share - thus, when people walk pass the corridors they would sometimes find a little blonde boy of five in a fancy dress - sitting by and leaning on a locked door - looking quite vulnerable and pitiful with tears in his eyes.

Being the only child among a mansion of adults, his world was a strange and lonely one. The people around him were always busy, telling him to get out of the way - "Why don't you go play with your toys?" or "Go and do the next exercise in your mathematics workbook." After shooing him away, they continued about their gossips and businesses that were all fascinating but incomprehensible to a child. Quatre knew the sums, and were bored of the toys, so he had time to think about why he was the only one left out in the adult's part of the world - to be trapped in another dimension. He thought, he lacked something that all other people had, and maybe, it was him, it was Quatre Winner only, that was too inadequate for the world to accept?

Quatre lacked something indeed - simple experience - but nobody ever sat down to tell him that. He tried of course to bang on that invisible wall separating him and the world with his tiny fists, but all he managed were some random temper tantrums and flaccid threats of "I'll tell my father". The servants avoided him like the plague, whispering among themselves how it was all unavoidable - test-tube babies were devil spawns (3) - all the while unaware of their young charge's prouting empathy - and that their distaste and dislike were all crystal clear to that unhappy child.

His father was the only one who would actually talk to him and really listen to what he had to say. Yet their conversations were mostly serious, involving general enquiries about his mathematics standard or logical skills. His father had harsh expectations for him, but Quatre did not know the difference between harsh standards and leniency - there was nothing for him to compare - and without comparison every thing in one's life was "normal" - a cannibal would have thought that eating human flesh was a daily routine. Since his father was the only one who showed anything that remotely resembled love to him, he lived to please his father - since boyhood he had pushed himself to achieve the extraordinary - and thus had never known the carefree idleness of youth.

It was all contradicting. In some ways Quatre was a precocious child full of knowledge, yet he didn't even know how to ask for something properly and continue to throw temper tantrums even when he was eight. As he grew older his father deemed it more and more unnecessary to keep a constant watch over him, so Winner Senior spent more and more time in his family corporate, avoiding his child as much as he could (4). Quatre threw more and more tantrums in response, obviously begging for attention. One day, finally frustrated by the constant complaints from the servants, Quatre's father bought Quatre a chess set very much like a parent would a pacifier to a baby just to shut him up.

"When you think you are good enough to beat me in chess, come and find me. I'll spend a day at the amusement park with you if you win." - those were the exact words his father said.

The grateful servants sang their praises, for never again did Quatre throw a tantrum. The child would spend days and days in the house library - head buried in chess-strategy books - desperately wanting to improve. At the age of eight his tuitions already involved mathematical inductions and factorizations, and he was taught the basics of science and economics. Even if he was overwrought from the difficult lessons he could still be seen playing himself - his tiny hands often holding a white pawn - in between his lessons. A promise of time spent with his father gave him great fortitude to bear any labours. Such was the power of trust in an innocent child, still so pure, so untouched by simple experience in the world.

In the AC 180's, people generally had a mixed feeling of fear and despise for those born out of test-tubes - fear of their superiority from modified genes, and despise out of their unnatural being. Alan Rotmensen was one of these people. He also happened to be a lanky, long-limbed redhead barely out of his teens, whom was more than once on the receiving end of Quatre's terrible tantrums. He laughed outright at the blonde boy's reliance on chess theories, and offered himself as a real opponent in a chess practice and invited the other servants to watch. Quatre gladly took the offer, but found out quickly that Alan had more on his agenda than simply helping him.

"Check."

Quatre felt the heat rising in his cheeks - of shame, of defeat - for he realized that Alan would be able to declare a checkmate in five more moves. As he waited for the unpreventable attack from the redhead's Black Castle, he was completely surprised to find the Black Queen moved instead, to capture his Knight. Did the lanky teen missed the chance for checkmate out of sheer carelessness? No, of course not. He was playing cat and mouse with Quatre, slowly, cruelly stripping the boy of all his remaining pieces.

"Check. Again."

Quatre had never felt such helplessness before - watching his pieces die, yet unable to do anything except to move his King to safety - it was, it was...
Humiliation.
He understood that word now, as tears welled up in his eyes and he bit his lip to stop himself from crying. He felt he was drowning - he knew he would die -but that didn't make him give up and stop his useless struggling. He knew that defeat was inevitable, and it took all of his strength to not break down into tears right there and then as he felt the supreme glee radiating from one Alan Rotmensen and those eyes bearing down on him from the spectators present in every direction.

"Checkmate! Now that would teach you unnatural freak some manners, would it not? Looks like your carefully hand picked quality genes are no match for those born naturally, brat! Where's your arrogance now, where's your temper? Huh? HUH? You..."

He was quickly hushed by the middle-aged woman responsible for cleaning Quatre's room. The crowd of servants dispersed immediately, lest that spoiled brat decided to throw himself into another fit and start to claw at anything in sight.

But the boy sat there stunned, and did not move for a long time. Half and hour later he began to quietly pack away the chess set, and when he was done, he demanded to talk to his father. Anderson, the butler, obediently helped him to call his father's private line.

"What do you want this time? I'm very busy now."

"...Don't worry. Since you're too busy with your work, I'm only asking for a chess teacher."

"...Pass the phone to Mr. Anderson."

Later that night, Anderson told him that his teacher would arrive the next day.

tbc... Quatre gets his revenge in the next chapter!

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are collections of poems by William Blake. The poems in Experience contrast that of those in Innocence, taking two points of view on a common theme. I highly recommend them, for the contrast is ingenious.

1 - If I'm not wrong, it is stated in the article "View Wing Paradise" from the magazine "Animation V" 1997 June vol. that Quatre is home educated. I can sent you a link if you ask me, but it is in Japanese.

2 - From the Endless Waltz novel, Quatre's father created all his daughters "at one go" in an act of defiance to challenge the family tradition of not making genetically modified babies. All 29 of his daughters are genetically modified so that they can give birth naturally to children in countering the adverse conditions in space. (Remember that ten years later, Quatre's mother dies in childbirth due to she being not genetically modified to adapt to the conditions in outer space, so Quatre's father do feel very strongly on this subject.)

3 -When the technology for genetically modifying baby girls is developed and the complications in childbirth are solved, the first batch of natural borns begin to appear in space colonies, and they are proud of their natural-born status. Thus they began to despise those born out of test-tubes, even though their mothers are test-tube babies too. From Endless Waltz novel book 2, again.

4 - Quatre's father does seem cold to his son, doesn't him? This will hopefully be explained in future chapters.