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Ender's questions had still not been answered. "Why do they outnumber us?"
Mazer laughed. "Because it took a hundred years for our ships to get there. They've had a hundred years to prepare for us. They'd be fools, don't you think, boy, if they waited in old tugboats to defend their harbors. They have new ships, great ships, hundreds of ships. All we have is the ansible, that and the fact that they have to put a commander with every fleet, and when they lose--and they will lose--they lose one of their best minds every time."
Ender started to ask another question.
"No more, Ender Wiggin. I've told you more than you ought to know as it is."
Ender stood angrily and turned away. "I have a right to know. Do you think this can go on forever, pushing me through one school and another and never telling me what my life is for? You use me and the others as a tool, someday we'll command your ships, someday maybe we'll save your lives, but I'm not a computer, and I have to know!"
"Ask me a question, then, boy," Mazer said, "and if I can answer, I will."
"If you use your best minds to command the fleets, and you never lose any, then what do you need me for? Who am I replacing, if
they're all still there?"
Mazer shook his head. "I can't tell you the answer to that, Ender. Be content that we will need you, soon. It's late. Go to bed. You have a battle in the morning."
Ender walked out of the simulator room. But when Mazer left by the same door a few moments later, the boy was waiting in the hall.
"All right, boy," Mazer said impatiently, "what is it? I don't have all night and you need to sleep."
Ender wasn't sure what his question was, but Mazer waited. Finally Ender asked softly, "Do they live?"
"Do who live?"
"The other commanders. The ones now. And before me."
Mazer snorted. "Live. Of course they live. He wonders if they live." Still chuckling, the old man walked off down the hall. Ender stood in the corridor for a while, but at last he was tired and he went off to bed. They live, he thought. They live, but he can't tell me what happens to them.
That night Ender didn't wake up crying. But he did wake up with blood on his hands.
Months wore on with battles every day, until at last Ender settled into the routine of the destruction of himself. He slept less every night, dreamed more, and he began to have terrible pains in his stomach. They put him on a very bland diet, but soon he didn't even have an appetite for that. "Eat," Mazer said, and Ender would mechanically put food in his mouth. But if nobody told him to eat he didn't eat.
One day as he was drilling his toon leaders the room went black and he woke up on the floor with his face bloody where he had hit the controls.
They put him to bed then, and for three days he was very ill. He remembered seeing faces in his dreams, but they weren't real faces, and he knew it even while he thought he saw them. He thought he saw Bean sometimes, and sometimes he thought he saw Lieutenant Anderson and Captain Graff. And then he woke up and it was only his enemy, Mazer Rackham.
"I'm awake," he said to Mazer Rackham.
"So I see," Mazer answered. "Took you long enough. You have a battle today."
So Ender got up and fought the battle and he won it. But there was no second battle that day, and they let him go to bed earlier. His hands were shaking as he undressed.
During the night he thought he felt hands touching him gently, and he dreamed he heard voices saying, "How long can he go on?"
"Long enough."
"So soon?"
"In a few days, then he's through."
"How will he do?"
"Fine. Even today, he was better than ever."
Ender recognized the last voice as Mazer Rackham's. He resented Rackham's intruding even in his sleep.
He woke up and fought another battle and won.
