A Space Station in Orbit Around Earth, Saturday

[lockestheway]

Graff had stopped in for a brief visit on their first morning there, but then was off again - returned to Earth, in fact, on the shuttle that had brought them. He did not return for several weeks, by which time Peter had written nearly forty essays, all of which had been published in various places. Most of them were Locke’s essays. And, as usual,

Comments

[whenshewasnice]

Natalie just raised her eyebrows quietly.

And tried not to look down the ventilation shaft too much. It wasn't a time to feel dizzy. (It was never a time to feel dizzy.)

[to_geniuses]

"This," said Graff, "is where Bean and his friends tricked Achilles. Achilles thought he was going to be able to kill Bean here, but instead Bean got him in chains, hanging in the shaft. He could have killed Achilles. His friends recommended it."

"Who were the friends?" asked Theresa.

"He never told me, but that’s not surprising - I never asked. I thought it would be wiser if there were never any kind of record, even inside my head, of which other children were there to witness Achilles’s humiliation and helplessness."

"It wouldn’t have mattered, if he had simply killed Achilles. There would have been no murders."

"But, you see," said Graff, "if Achilles had died, then I would have had to ask those names, and Bean could not have been allowed to remain in Battle School. We might have lost the war because of that, because Ender relied on Bean quite heavily."

[lockestheway]

Peter shot Natalie a brief glance, mostly to make sure she wasn't going to faceplant into the shaft or chuck up or something.

"You let Ender stay after he killed a boy," he noted.

Okay, maybe it wasn't entirely the chucking up thing.

"The boy died accidentally," said Graff, "as Ender defended himself."

[whenshewasnice]

No, Natalie would've suspected it wasn't entirely for the benefit of her health. And she hadn't thrown up on this whole space trip so far, so she thought she'd do fine from here on out too.

She returned Peter's look - for reasons entirely unrelated to nausea - then turned her quietly questioning gaze back on Graff. Sometimes she had to wonder what the hell kind of canon she'd managed to get herself into.