Tor Books by Orson Scott Card

  Note: Within series, books are best read in listed order.

  —–

  ENDER UNIVERSE

  Ender Series

  Ender Wiggin: The finest general the world could hope to find or breed.

  Ender’s Game

  Ender in Exile

  Speaker for the Dead

  Xenocide

  Children of the Mind

  Ender’s Shadow Series

  Parallel storylines to Ender’s Game from Bean: Ender’s right hand, his strategist, and his friend.

  Ender’s Shadow

  Shadow of the Hegemon

  Shadow Puppets

  Shadow of the Giant

  Shadows in Flight

  The First Formic War Series

  One hundred years before Ender’s Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death. These are the stories of the First Formic War.

  Earth Unaware

  Earth Afire

  Ender novellas

  A War of Gifts

  First Meetings

  The Authorized Ender Companion by Jake Black

  A complete and in-depth encyclopedia of all the persons, places, things, and events in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Universe.

  THE MITHER MAGES SERIES

  Danny North is different from his magical family. And when he discovers his gift, it is greater than he ever imagined—which could earn him a death sentence.

  The Lost Gate

  The Gate Thief

  THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER SERIES

  Visit the magical America that might have been, marvel as the tale of Alvin Maker unfolds.

  Seventh Son

  Red Prophet

  Prentice Alvin

  Alvin Journeyman

  Heartfire

  The Crystal City

  HOMECOMING SERIES

  Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. But it is still vital.

  The Memory of Earth

  The Call of Earth

  The Ships of Earth

  Earthfall

  Earthborn

  WOMEN OF GENESIS SERIES

  Fiction exploring the human side of Biblical women.

  Sarah

  Rebekah

  Rachel & Leah

  THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD

  Experience Card’s full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.

  Keeper of Dreams

  The Changed Man

  Cruel Miracles

  Flux

  Monkey Sonatas

  STAND-ALONE FICTION

  Hart’s Hope: dark and powerful fantasy.

  Lovelock (with Kathryn Kidd): a startling look at the ethics of bioengineering.

  Pastwatch: In this novel of time travel, can the past be changed?

  Saints: a novel of the early days of the Mormon Church.

  Songmaster: an SF classic and a haunting story of power and love.

  The Worthing Saga: the tale of a seed ship sent out to save the human race.

  Wyrms: the story of a young woman’s journey to confront her destiny, and her world’s.

  The Folk of the Fringe: when America is destroyed, it’s up to those on the fringes to rebuild.

  —–

  www.tor-forge.com

  Contents

  By Orson Scott Card from Tor Books

  ENDER’S SHADOW

  Foreword

  I. URCHIN

  1. Poke

  2. Kitchen

  3. Payback

  4. Memories

  II. LAUNCHY

  5. Ready or Not

  6. Ender’s Shadow

  7. Exploration

  8. Good Student

  III. SCHOLAR

  9. Garden of Sofia

  10. Sneaky

  11. Daddy

  12. Roster

  IV. SOLDIER

  13. Dragon Army

  14. Brothers

  15. Courage

  16. Companion

  V. LEADER

  17. Deadline

  18. Friend

  19. Rebel

  20. Trial and Error

  VI. VICTOR

  21. Guesswork

  22. Reunion

  23. Ender’s Game

  24. Homecoming

  Acknowledgments

  SHADOW OF THE HEGEMON

  I. VOLUNTEERS

  1. Petra

  2. Bean

  3. Message in a Bottle

  4. Custody

  5. Ambition

  II. ALLIANCES

  6. Code

  7. Going Public

  8. Bread Van

  9. Communing with the Dead

  10. Brothers in Arms

  III. MANEUVERS

  11. Bangkok

  12. Islamabad

  13. Warnings

  14. Hyderabad

  15. Murder

  IV. DECISIONS

  16. Treachery

  17. On a Bridge

  18. Satyagraha

  19. Rescue

  20. Hegemon

  Afterword

  SHADOW PUPPETS

  1. Grown

  2. Suriyawong’s Knife

  3. Mommies and Daddies

  4. Chopin

  5. Stones in the Road

  6. Hospitality

  7. The Human Race

  8. Targets

  9. Conception

  10. Left and Right

  11. Babies

  12. Putting Out Fires

  13. Caliph

  14. Space Station

  15. War Plans

  16. Traps

  17. Prophets

  18. The War on the Ground

  19. Farewells

  20. Home

  SHADOW OF THE GIANT

  1. Mandate of Heaven

  2. Mother

  3. Coup

  4. Bargain

  5. Shiva

  6. Evolution

  7. An Offer

  8. Ender

  9. Pension

  10. Grief

  11. African God

  12. Allahu Akbar

  13. Found

  14. Virlomi’s Visitors

  15. Ratification

  16. Jeesh

  17. Boats

  18. Yerevan

  19. Enemies

  20. Plans

  21. Papers

  22. Rumors of War

  23. Colonist

  24. Sacrifice

  25. Letters

  26. Speak for Me

  Acknowledgments

  SHADOWS IN FLIGHT

  Chapter 1: In the Giant’s Shadow

  Chapter 2: Seeing the Future

  Chapter 3: Watching the Sky

  Chapter 4: Strangers Are Enemies

  Chapter 5: What Can’t Be Done

  Chapter 6: Show and Tell

  Chapter 7: Into the Ark

  Chapter 8: At the Helm

  Chapter 9: Drones and Workers

  Chapter 10: The Giant Moves

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  ENDER’S SHADOW

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  ENDER’S SHADOW

  Copyright © 1999 by Orson Scott Card

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Beth Meacham

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  ISBN 978-1-429-96398-5

  First Edition: September 1999

  TO DICK AND HAZIE BROWN

  IN WHOSE HOME NO ONE IS HUNGRY

  AND IN WHOSE HEARTS

  NO ONE IS A STRANGER

  FOREWORD

  This book is, strictly speaking, not a sequel, because it begins about where Ender’s Game begins, and also ends, very nearly, at the same place. In fact, it is another telling of the same tale, with many of the same characters and settings, only from the perspective of another character. It’s hard to know what to call it. A companion novel? A parallel novel? Perhaps a “parallax,” if I can move that scientific term into literature.

  Ideally, this novel should work as well for readers who have never read Ender’s Game as for those who have read it several times. Because it is not a sequel, there is nothing you need to know from the novel Ender’s Game that is not contained here. And yet, if I have achieved my literary goal, these two books complement and fulfill each other. Whichever one you read first, the other novel should still work on its own merits.

  For many years, I have gratefully watched as Ender’s Game has grown in popularity, especially among school-age readers. Though it was never intended as a young-adult nov
el, it has been embraced by many in that age group and by many teachers who find ways to use the book in their classrooms.

  I have never found it surprising that the existing sequels—Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind—never appealed as strongly to those younger readers. The obvious reason is that Ender’s Game is centered around a child, while the sequels are about adults; perhaps more important, Ender’s Game is, at least on the surface, a heroic, adventurous novel, while the sequels are a completely different kind of fiction, slower paced, more contemplative and idea-centered, and dealing with themes of less immediate import to younger readers.

  Recently, however, I have come to realize that the 3,000-year gap between Ender’s Game and its sequels leaves plenty of room for other sequels that are more closely tied to the original. In fact, in one sense Ender’s Game has no sequels, for the other three books make one continuous story in themselves, while Ender’s Game stands alone.

  For a brief time I flirted seriously with the idea of opening up the Ender’s Game universe to other writers, and went so far as to invite a writer whose work I greatly admire, Neal Shusterman, to consider working with me to create novels about Ender Wiggin’s companions in Battle School. As we talked, it became clear that the most obvious character to begin with would be Bean, the child-soldier whom Ender treated as he had been treated by his adult teachers.

  And then something else happened. The more we talked, the more jealous I became that Neal might be the one to write such a book, and not me. It finally dawned on me that, far from being finished with writing about “kids in space,” as I cynically described the project, I actually had more to say, having actually learned something in the intervening dozen years since Ender’s Game first appeared in 1985. And so, while still hoping that Neal and I can work together on something, I deftly swiped the project back.

  I soon found that it’s harder than it looks, to tell the same story twice, but differently. I was hindered by the fact that even though the viewpoint characters were different, the author was the same, with the same core beliefs about the world. I was helped by the fact that in the intervening years, I have learned a few things, and was able to bring different concerns and a deeper understanding to the project. Both books come from the same mind, but not the same; they draw on the same memories of childhood, but from a different perspective. For the reader, the parallax is created by Ender and Bean, standing a little ways apart as they move through the same events. For the writer, the parallax was created by a dozen years in which my older children grew up, and younger ones were born, and the world changed around me, and I learned a few things about human nature and about art that I had not known before.

  Now you hold this book in your hands. Whether the literary experiment succeeds for you is entirely up to you to judge. For me it was worth dipping again into the same well, for the water was greatly changed this time, and if it has not been turned exactly into wine, at least it has a different flavor because of the different vessel that it was carried in, and I hope that you will enjoy it as much, or even more.

  —Greensboro, North Carolina, January 1999

  Part One

  URCHIN

  1

  POKE

  “You think you’ve found somebody, so suddenly my program gets the ax?”

  “It’s not about this kid that Graff found. It’s about the low quality of what you’ve been finding.”

  “We knew it was long odds. But the kids I’m working with are actually fighting a war just to stay alive.”

  “Your kids are so malnourished that they suffer serious mental degradation before you even begin testing them. Most of them haven’t formed any normal human bonds, they’re so messed up they can’t get through a day without finding something they can steal, break, or disrupt.”

  “They also represent possibility, as all children do.”

  “That’s just the kind of sentimentality that discredits your whole project in the eyes of the I.F.”

  Poke kept her eyes open all the time. The younger children were supposed to be on watch, too, and sometimes they could be quite observant, but they just didn’t notice all the things they needed to notice, and that meant that Poke could only depend on herself to see danger.

  There was plenty of danger to watch for. The cops, for instance. They didn’t show up often, but when they did, they seemed especially bent on clearing the streets of children. They would flail about them with their magnetic whips, landing cruel stinging blows on even the smallest children, haranguing them as vermin, thieves, pestilence, a plague on the fair city of Rotterdam. It was Poke’s job to notice when a disturbance in the distance suggested that the cops might be running a sweep. Then she would give the alarm whistle and the little ones would rush to their hiding places till the danger was past.

  But the cops didn’t come by that often. The real danger was much more immediate—big kids. Poke, at age nine, was the matriarch of her little crew (not that any of them knew for sure that she was a girl), but that cut no ice with the eleven- and twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys and girls who bullied their way around the streets. The adult-size beggars and thieves and whores of the street paid no attention to the little kids except to kick them out of the way. But the older children, who were among the kicked, turned around and preyed on the younger ones. Any time Poke’s crew found something to eat—especially if they located a dependable source of garbage or an easy mark for a coin or a bit of food—they had to watch jealously and hide their winnings, for the bullies liked nothing better than to take away whatever scraps of food the little ones might have. Stealing from younger children was much safer than stealing from shops or passersby. And they enjoyed it, Poke could see that. They liked how the little kids cowered and obeyed and whimpered and gave them whatever they demanded.

  So when the scrawny little two-year-old took up a perch on a garbage can across the street, Poke, being observant, saw him at once. The kid was on the edge of starvation. No, the kid was starving. Thin arms and legs, joints that looked ridiculously oversized, a distended belly. And if hunger didn’t kill him soon, the onset of autumn would, because his clothing was thin and there wasn’t much of it even at that.

  Normally she wouldn’t have paid him more than passing attention. But this one had eyes. He was still looking around with intelligence. None of that stupor of the walking dead, no longer searching for food or even caring to find a comfortable place to lie while breathing their last taste of the stinking air of Rotterdam. After all, death would not be such a change for them. Everyone knew that Rotterdam was, if not the capital, then the main seaport of Hell. The only difference between Rotterdam and death was that with Rotterdam, the damnation wasn’t eternal.

  This little boy—what was he doing? Not looking for food. He wasn’t eyeing the pedestrians. Which was just as well—there was no chance that anyone would leave anything for a child that small. Anything he might get would be taken away by any other child, so why should he bother? If he wanted to survive, he should be following older scavengers and licking food wrappers behind them, getting the last sheen of sugar or dusting of flour clinging to the packaging, whatever the first comer hadn’t licked off. There was nothing for this child out here on the street, not unless he got taken in by a crew, and Poke wouldn’t have him. He’d be nothing but a drain, and her kids were already having a hard enough time without adding another useless mouth.