The staff briefing room was not a big space, even on the International Fleet's flagship, and the furnishings – a metal table welded to the floor, lightweight plastic chairs, and walls covered in utilitarian viewscreens-were decidedly bare-bones. Mankind built their spacecraft under the bleak duress of wartime, and had no room, money or inspiration for anything but the bare essentials.
The viewscreens showed panoramic views of the shattered ruin of a planet, and a fleet of hundreds of warships in orbit around it, occasionally flickering with weapons-fire as the ships blasted floating debris out of their paths. Much of that debris had until yesterday been the Formic fleet. Most of the rest had been part of the Formic planet, the wreck of which they were orbiting.
Two admirals and a colonel, all with impressive rows of medals and other decorations ranked on their tunics next to name badges reading Chamrajnagar. Rakham, and Graff, sat on one side of the table opposite the hatch, flanked on one side by a young boy, about ten years old. The uniforms were crisp and fresh, though the men wearing them were anything but.
"It's late," the oldest man said—his name badge read Chamrajnagar. "If I wasn't so tired I'd take it as an insult. Diplomats should at least be punctual."
The other two officers grunted in assent. They had all been at least thirty hours without sleep, and that time had included the largest space battle in human history. Amph pills could keep you going, but only for so long before the mind became fogbound with fatigue toxins, and trying to reorder a badly-mauled battle fleet required endless labor on damage control and other tasks. There hadn't even been time yet for any celebration beyond a token rum ration shared out by miserly quartermasters, let alone any sleep.
"I don't trust this situation at all….. we win the battle and then not ten minutes later, our second first contact situation pops out of the blue, with a hail in perfect English. They've obviously been spying on us."
"A war in outer space can't really be inconspicuous, though, and the Buggers must have been in contact with other civilizations."
"That's also a tiny ship" the young boy observed, between bites of a tasteless ration bar. "It's much smaller than any of our warships, but too big to be a shuttle or fightercraft. Maybe some kind of diplomatic courier ship? And smooth. No weapon ports. No drive nozzles. Not even any visible hatches."
The colonel grunted "Goddamn thing looks like a ….."
"Not in front of the boy!" Snapped the other admiral. The boy shrugged. "I have an older sister. She's like thirty. I know what it looks like."
A metallic grinding noise interrupted the desultory conversation as the hatch at the opposite end of the room undogged and opened, and the Culture's ambassador entered. The ambassador was a standard-plan bipedal humanoid, whose most obvious distinctive feature was a mirror-like skin that while generally silvery, also gave faint flickers of green, yellow and blue.
"Good morning, gentlemen, I am the avatoid—think of me as a sort of remote presence of the Shipmind- of the Very Fast Picket Given to Much Prospective Naval Gazing, currently serving as a messenger from the Culture. We are here to discuss the Culture's response to the Terran-Formic conflict and how best to facilitate peace. You may call me Zoomy." The envoy spoke unaccented Fleet Common. Its voice was human, urbane but without the slightest pomposity, and rang with slight metallic overtones like dozens of distantly-echoing bells. Its manner gave Admiral Rackham the nagging feeling that the visitor was very slowly leading up to a joke it wasn't quite willing to share yet.
"Well I have to say it's about time!" Admiral Chamrajnagar barked. "We've been at war with the Buggers for most of a century and now that we finally have victory in sight, one of the so-called great galactic powers finally decides to intervene!"
"Damn right, where were you when Earth's skies were full of Bugger warships?" growled Colonel Graff.
"Messenger?" Queried Admiral Rakham, whose face was elaborately tattooed. "I had understood we were to be meeting an ambassador plenipotentiary, not just a messenger."
"The Culture doesn't use formal titles, but those formalities aside, I think you'll find me capable of just about anything necessary to accomplish my mission," the Culture emissary smoothly responded.
"So this…Shipmind….is your captain? Why aren't we meeting with them?"
"No admiral, I am the Shipmind. I am the ship, in fact, and I have a crew of seventeen Culture citizens, counting organic persons and the higher-level drones."
"You're a robot ship?" the boy asked.
"A Shipmind is to the kind of robot that you're probably familiar with, as you are to perhaps a flatworm."
"Then what do you have a crew for?" the boy persisted.
"Because I like having a crew," the visitor responded with a diffident shrug.
"Anyways, this is late days for anyone to take an interest, you have to admit—the Formics were a menace ever since the first one hatched, and the universe should thank us for exterminating them," Colonel Graff began in a mighty effort to steer the meeting back on course.
"This isn't just about what the Formics did…" The messenger demurred.
"Why the hell not?" Admiral Chamrajnagar bellowed, slamming his fist down on the steel tabletop. "The Scouring of China killed forty million people just for a start! They were hell-bent on annihilating the human race and terraforming Earth!"
The avatoid's jaw clenched briefly in a remarkably human gesture that would have signaled 'increasing frustration, tread carefully' to many similar species. "The Formics are a hive mind, and because humans are not, they didn't realize you were sentient. This is not an unusual blind spot for hive mind species…and given some of your species' particular history, we can forgive them the mistake." Had the roles been reversed, you could have made the same mistake. Such things happen. The diversity of life in the universe will come as a shock to those new to it."
"But…" Admiral Chamrajnagar started again, but found himself stopping as the silver alien figure politely raised a hand and ticked off three fingers.
"Their first invasion was a mistake, their second was self-defense, and the third—your first—was intended to be the xenocide of the Formic species. Did you even know the Formics were trying to negotiate, to apologize, to beg forgiveness? After how many decades of blasting its own information into space, did humanity even stop to think that somebody might be messaging them?"
"If that's your position, why didn't you intervene to save the Formics?" snarled Colonel Graff.
"Simple. We didn't expect you to actually win. My original mission was to try to save some Terran leaders from a defeated Terran fleet so we could talk them into making a start on peace negotiations before the Formics set fire to Earth's atmosphere or something, but instead you go and do something unexpected. If we'd anticipated a Terran victory we would have intervened before you launched the invasion fleet. And believe me, the Culture is going to carry the shame of that mistake for …well, probably forever. "
"You said 'are' a hivemind, not 'were'—is there something you should be telling us?" added Admiral Rakham with a concerned expression on his face.
"Gentlemen, I will tell you everything you need to know, I assure you," the avatoid responded with no discernible expression at all. "But as I said, this is not about the Formics. It's about humanity."
"I don't trust you," the young boy suddenly interrupted. "You're very good at saying once thing but actually meaning something else."
"I am a diplomat, Andrew," the avatoid responded with a wry grin. "That's part of the job description. Also, I know who you are, Andrew-" at this, the three officers gritted their teeth and glared— and "what you've done, and how and why you did it."
"So what IS your point?" the boy snapped. "The war's over. We won. We're safe." Something in the boy's speech and attitude signaled a lack of faith in what he had just said.
"I have two points," replied the Shipmind. "The first is, if the galaxy is your homeworld's ocean, you and the Formics were a couple of crabs tussling on a coral reef in the sunny shallows, and maybe you're a bigger crab than most of the ones around you and you can push some of the other crabs around….but in the deep, cold, dark waters beyond, there are squid, and sharks, and whales greater than anything you can imagine, any of which would snap you up as a snack or crush you flat without even noticing you, and in the depths below them, swarms of horrible little scuttling bottom-feeders that would strip your carcass bare while you're still alive. We're pretty certain your admirals already know at least some of this. They've seen the reports from your deep space passive receiver program."
Two admirals each reluctantly nodded in affirmation. Colonel Graff apparently hadn't known, and looked slightly seasick. Rank hath both privileges and burdens.
"You have a pretty impressive fleet out here for a one-planet civilization that bootstrapped itself up to space travel and the start of interstellar settlement with no outside help, while fighting a war of survival, and the Culture respects that tremendously. You're the plucky newcomers we're disposed to like. The reality is, though, that out there"—the avatoid swung an arm in a broad arc toward the viewscreens, to suggest deep space—"what you have might be enough to start a war but not enough to win it. As it is, and as bad as it was, you're lucky your first contact was the Formics and not the Affront."
"What's an Affront?" Asked the boy.
"They're an answer to what your civilization calls the Drake Equation, with tentacles and a culture based entirely on sadism," replied the envoy. "They make a desert and call it boring because there's nothing left to torture. They're the things that instead of going bump in the night, commit all their atrocities in broad daylight because when the light's better everyone can see their latest monstrosity."
"If we're alone, will we always be at war?" The boy was just full of questions.
Simply being strong or victorious on its own aren't sufficient, because there's always someone out there who's just destroyed someone more powerful than you. That's as true for the Culture as it is for you, by the way. As powerful as we are, there are still things we worry about."
"This doesn't leave this room," Admiral Rakham sighed, pointedly making eye contact with his fellow officers and the boy, "but we know our limits. This almost wasn't a win, and the main reason it was, is because of Andrew here. You could almost as easily be sitting across the table from some Formics as the wreckage of a human fleet burned around you."
The ambassador nodded. "That matches our own evaluation of events. To go backwards for a second, however, my second point is that although you survived destruction by the Formics, you now have to avoid destroying yourselves, which you've narrowly avoided on many occasions."
The colonel muttered something to Rackham, prompting a focused stare from the ambassador. Chastened, the colonel repeated himself louder: "Wouldn't it be wonderful for the peace of the galaxy if we wiped out the Formics only to wipe ourselves out next and, ah, save someone else the effort?"
"You could do it!" The Shipmind proclaimed, flamboyantly throwing its arms wide. Colonel Graff suddenly realized it had four arms. Had it had four when it came in? His exhausted brain couldn't remember.
"You have the capacity!" it continued. "Your whole civilization has been focused around fighting this war for nearly a century and you've forgotten how to do anything but fight, and that comes on top of your entire previous history of slaughtering each other. The Formic homeworld has been a ruin for less than one Earth day, your victory parties have barely started and you're already taking sides against each other, just because you have nobody else to fight at the moment."
"We know," Admiral Rackham sighed, closing his eyes and pinching the sides of his nose. "And there's worse coming. Earth has never been willingly unified, only at best held together by either force or mutual interest, and now that the Formics are done with, the Hegemony and the Second Warsaw Pact are each going to try to take control of this fleet and use it to crush the other side. The fleet is caught in the middle." He paused. "And that's assuming we're lucky enough that the fleet doesn't divide against itself."
The avatoid leaned forward in its chair, braced its elbows – four of them- on the tabletop, and spoke in a low, clear tone.
"To put it most simply, you need to stop. Dismantle the war machine, make some babies, make some art, train some xenologists—a lot of xenologists- build a peace dividend for yourselves and your children and their children, and give humanity a reason for being that isn't just to win a war. Be a civilization again, not just an army camp and an ordnance factory. There are a lot of empty worlds in what used to be Formic space now—thanks to you—so build colony ships and spread mankind to the stars peacefully."
The avatoid tapped a fingertip on the tabletop, once, hard, making a bell-like sound. "If you don't do that, you're eventually going to either pick a fight with another civilization and most likely bite off more than you can chew, or you're going to bomb yourselves into extinction."
"Consider this a diplomatic question….Zoomy." Admiral Chamrajnagar spoke slowly, obviously thinking hard. "What kind of assistance could we hope for from….. some of our neighbors in the galaxy, as we start this peaceful expansion process? Trade?"
"Yes, but to be frank, you don't really have anything we want, except possibly as a tourist attraction. We already have your best movies, music and television programs…. Kurosawa, Attenborough, Shakespeare, King Crimson, Cheap Trick, The Wire. We particularly like Daft Punk."
"Then possibly some sort of protective agreement, access to technology, interstellar mapping? Chamrajnagar 's tired brain fumbled for more. "Cultural…. exchange, perhaps?"
The emissary nodded, smiling. "Well, there is a sort of sponsorship process, where established civilizations provide what you might call mentoring of civilizations such as yourselves," it responded. "Not all of the Involved civilizations—the Culture and our general equals—do things the same way, and even then we don't always handle all of our sponsored civilizations the same way. Sometimes this is for their own good, because otherwise they still might bite off more than they can chew, or turn against themselves and the whole civilization commits suicide. I repeat myself deliberately on that point for emphasis. Humanity is at just that kind of an inflection point."
"But who, or what, might…."
"Gentlemen, Andrew, I'll be most undiplomatically blunt. You have some work to do on yourselves first. Terran humanity has turned its society into the equivalent of a hand grenade rolling around on a dance floor with the pin pulled. None of the Involved" -the four humans could hear the weight the ambassador put on that word—"civilizations are going to want anything to do with you until you are a great deal more stable than you are now. Anyone who will offer a partnership in your current situation will likely do so on terms you will very soon regret."
"My God. We've gone through all this and we're still alone? A pariah?" Groaned Colonel Graff, as he closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of his chair.
The avatoid nodded. "This, gentlemen, is what you get when you intentionally breed sociopaths for a century and allow or deliberately put them into positions of authority."
"I'm not a sociopath!" Ender protested. "I'm only ten years old!"
"Not yet," the ambassador riposted. "But we were actually thinking of your brother Peter, or Achilles de Flandres."
Admiral Chamrajnagar was nonplussed. "Who the hell are they? They're not in the fleet command."
"There are more villains in heaven and Earth, admiral, than are listed in your fleet roster," the avatoid replied in a gently mocking tone. "The fact that these two individuals—plus Andrew's sister, who I'm very pleased to say is not a sociopath- are located completely outside your chain of command and even outside your civil governments, but still wield immense influence—in some respects, greater than yours, Admiral- with essentially no restraints, tells the Culture a great deal about the current state of humanity's sociopolitical order. I should also mention a young man nicknamed Bean, who Andrew here knows, who you may want to know was the product of genetic experiments that were illegal even under your own end-justifies-the-means wartime rules."
"But how do you know about them?" Rasped Colonel Graff, whose last dose of amph pills was rapidly wearing off.
"Did you miss the part where I mentioned humanity blasting information into space?" the ambassador grinned. Its teeth were the same metallic material as its skin. "Where do you think we got Live at Budokan?"
"Meanwhile, your entire society currently has as its' linchpin three siblings, two of whom are anonymous demagogues and the third is Ender, here, a child essentially bred for military aptitude, trained for four years to do nothing but kill, and now a species-destroying xenocidal butcher… at ten years old. That's a hell of a precedent."
Ender lurched to his feet and screamed "I didn't know! I thought it was all a game!"
The avatoid sighed—or pretended to- and looked at the ceiling. "Even if it really was a game thattime, you were being trained to do it for real eventually, and if not against the Formics, then against the next species you bump into, or maybe even other humans. And not just you, but a whole assembly line of you. You're part of a machine, Andrew. A war machine. Until you decide not to be."
Andrew protested, "But you must have fought your own wars, and defended yourself! You're no better… if you're alive, you can't be!"
The avatoid spoke diffidently, while gazing at the viewscreens and arrhythmically tapping its fingers on the table: "Oh indeed we did. And the Culture has had a lot of practice at war, and we're very good at it. Proverbially good. Better than you, for certain- you killed one planet, and we kill stars when we need to. When you have a chance, and get far enough from home, ask your new neighbors about a species called the Idirans. It'll take you a very long time to find any. And they might be in very small pieces, very far apart."
"But our point is that we don't do this for fun and we don't enjoy it, and we try very hard to not do it at all, and although the Idirans attacked us, what caused the war to end as it did wasn't our decision—it was theirs, because they wouldn't accept peace as an option. All they had to do was stop fighting and accept coexistence, and they wouldn't. Well, couldn't, really. The concept was psychologically alien to them. We didn't wipe them out for revenge, we did it because that was the only way to get them to stop."
"Which should sound familiar and…" the avatoid turned to look pointedly first at Colonel Graff, then the two admirals, and lastly at Ender .. "is how we got where we are today. The Culture follows a general policy of 'live and let live,' but what we can't tolerate is intolerance. Species that disrupt the rules-based interstellar order – especially ones that militarize their entire societies and start annihilating other starfaring species as soon as they achieve interstellar transport- have to be handled as troublemakers, not just to protect others from them, but to protect them from themselves."
"So to return to your initial comment, Admiral, yes, in fact, we are intervening. Just…. not on your side." The avatoid tapped once more on the table, grinned, waved, and vanished.
On the wall-mounted viewscreens, bright lights suddenly began to flare among the assembled International Fleet ships, as if the drive systems on every ship was suffering catastrophic burnouts. Ships began moving by ones, twos, and soon by entire squadrons, but not in an orderly manner—some were moving sideways or even backwards, as if being pulled against their will by an unseen force, dragged off course in directions generally perpendicular to the system's orbital plane.
Admiral Rackham suddenly spun round, his tattooed face a mask of wide-eyed panic. "Where's the boy? Where's Ender?"
…
"And that's what sometimes has to be done," the Culture ambassador said to the human child standing next to him in what passed for the bridge compartment of the Given to Much Prospective Naval Gazing, watching the International Fleet's unscheduled and nonconsensual departure from the Formic system in the gentle but inexorable care of a fleet of Culture superlifters, small ships with massively-powerful engines and even more powerful tractor beams, often used as tugs for much larger craft.
"When youngsters misbehave, sometimes mature minds have to step in and take their toys away until they can display some responsibility. In this case, if all goes as planned there should be no further loss of life."
Ender thought for a long moment. "I never really had toys. I was just…. Little. And it was during the war, so nobody had any time or money for anything that didn't have a purpose in the war effort. And then it was just Battle School and nothing else. And now, whatever this is. Not war still, but not peace yet."
"It is what you want it to be, Andrew. You can be what you want to be now, too."
"But I don't know what I want to be," Ender sighed. "I only really know how to do one thing, and now that I know what it is, I don't want to do it anymore."
"I suspect you already at least partly understand this, Andrew, but people can be weapons too, just like anything else. An asteroid, an aircraft, a fork, even a chair…. They can all be weapons in hands willing and able to use them as such, and the uses are not always obvious. A superlifter like my friend the Fearsome Engine over there" -the avatoid pointed towards one of the Culture ships, although at this distance it was little more than a tiny elongated football—"is basically a tugboat or courier most of the time, but ships and Shipminds like them held the front line in the first part of the Idiran war. Or it could tow an asteroid the size of a small continent onto a course that would collide with the Earth within your lifetime and wipe out most of the life on the planet. And that's why when we took the fleet, we took you too."
"So I'm a weapon that doesn't want to be a weapon anymore, but doesn't know what it wants to be," the boy sighed.
"At the moment, yes. And there are many like you. And take some joy in knowing that you don't know what you want to be, rather than wanting to be a weapon and nothing else. Hopefully those three men we just had a rather awkward conversation with can keep humanity from destroying itself. Your species is lucky to have three people like that in influential positions at an inflection point like this. They're strong-minded, yes, but also pragmatic, and flexible, but more importantly they share a moral guiding principle. We're leaving them the flagship and a small escort" –the avatoid paused and looked slightly perplexed for a brief second—"but one of our ships seems to have etched 'all your ships are belong to us' into the flagship's hull for some reason that I don't understand."
In the middle distance, an immense thing that Ender perceived as a ship only because entire three-dimensional cities didn't suddenly appear in interplanetary space, had suddenly appearing out past the wrecked Formic homeworld and was majestically decelerating amid a three-dimensional peacock's tail of iridescent fields, like a whale suddenly appearing amid a scattering of minnows.
"Is that your flagship?" the boy asked.
"No, that's what we call a General Systems Vehicle, a type of ship. This one is the Mathematician in Stark Contrast, a one-off older model, slightly eccentric, with oh I'd probably guess about thirty million beings aboard. Not crew, really—inhabitants. It's a delightful place, and an old friend, and our ride to our next stop."
"Do all your ships have weird names?"
"You get to enjoy it. Some of us think it lends some gravitas. Others…. Don't."
"What protects it?" The boy asked again.
"Mostly it protects itself. A GSV like that could have obliterated your fleet and the Formics' together in less time than it takes to scream "Help, help, our ship's being destroyed" and then cracked that planet like you'd crack an egg." The metallic humanoid paused, then resumed in a wry, almost sad voice, as if to finish a slightly distasteful thought. "Nobody fucks with the Culture. At least, not twice."
The boy shivered, and then returned to watching the viewscreen, lost in thought, for several minutes. Eventually the avatoid made –or at least simulated- a polite throat-clearing noise, and spoke.
"At this point not knowing what you want to be is only a good thing, but seeing a bit of the galaxy may help you make up your mind. Where would you like to go first?"
The boy pondered for a moment. "Someone told me about a planet called Shakespeare….. I think I'd like to go there."
"Excellent idea. We'll change ships a few times en route but we'll get there soon enough. In the meantime, though, speaking of toys"—the avatoid held out a box—"have you ever heard of Lego? They're from Denmark on your homeworld."
"What do you do with them?"
"Whatever you want, Andrew. Just… Don't leave them where someone could step on them. That hurts."