“We don’t want a handout,” said Father furiously. “We aren’t looking for compensation.”

  “All I want,” said Graff, “is to converse with the boy.”

  “Not alone,” said Father.

  “With us here,” said Mother.

  “That’s fine with me,” said Graff. “But I think Magdalena is sitting in the boy’s place.”

  Magda, after a moment’s hesitation, got up and left the house. The door banged shut just a little louder than usual.

  Graff beckoned to John Paul.

  He came in and sat on the couch between his parents.

  Graff began to explain to him about Battle School. That he would go up into space in order to study how to be a soldier so he could help fight against the Buggers when they came back with the next invasion. “You might lead fleets into battle someday,” said Graff. “Or lead marines as they blast their way through an enemy ship.”

  “I can’t go,” said John Paul.

  “Why not?” asked Graff.

  “I’d miss my lessons,” he said. “My mother teaches us, here in this room.”

  Graff didn’t answer, just studied John Paul’s face. It made John Paul uncomfortable.

  The Fleet lady spoke up. “But you’ll have teachers there. In Battle School.”

  John Paul did not look at her. It was Graff he had to watch. Graff was the one with all the power today.

  Finally Graff spoke. “You think it would be unfair for you to be in Battle School while your family still struggles here.”

  John Paul had not thought of that. But now that Graff had suggested it . . .

  “Nine of us,” said John Paul. “It’s very hard for my mother to teach us all at once.”

  “What if the Fleet can persuade the government of Poland—”

  “Poland has no government,” said John Paul, and then he smiled up at his father, who beamed down at him.

  “The current rulers of Poland,” said Graff cheerfully enough. “What if we can persuade them to lift the sanctions on your brothers and sisters.”

  John Paul thought about this for a moment. He tried to imagine what it would be like, if they could all go to school. Easier for Mother. That would be good.

  He looked up at his father.

  Father blinked. John Paul knew that face. Father was trying to keep from showing that he was disappointed. So there was something wrong.

  Of course. There were sanctions on Father, too. Andrew had explained to him once that Father wasn’t allowed to work at his real job, which should have been teaching at a university. Instead Father had to do a clerical job all day, sitting at a computer, and then manual labor by night, odd jobs off the books in the Catholic underground. If they would lift the sanctions on the children, why not on the parents?

  “Why can’t they change all the stupid rules?” said John Paul.

  Graff looked at Capt. Rudolf, then at John Paul’s parents. “Even if we could,” he said to them, “should we?”

  Mother rubbed John Paul’s back a little. “John Paul means well, but of course we can’t. Not even the sanctions against the children’s schooling.”

  John Paul was instantly furious. What did she mean, “of course?” If they had only bothered to explain things to him then he wouldn’t be making mistakes, but no, even after these people from the Fleet came to prove that John Paul wasn’t just a stupid kid, they treated him like a stupid kid.

  But he did not show his anger. That never got good results from Father, and it made Mother anxious so she didn’t think well.

  The only answer he made was to say, with wide-eyed innocence, “Why not?”

  “You’ll understand when you’re older,” said Mother.

  He wanted to say, “And when will you understand anything about me? Even after you realized I could read, you still think I don’t know anything.”

  But then, he apparently didn’t know everything he needed to, or he’d see what was obvious to all these adults.

  If his parents wouldn’t tell him, maybe this captain would.

  John Paul looked expectantly at Graff.

  And Graff gave the explanation he needed.

  “All of your parents’ friends are noncompliant Catholics. If your brothers and sisters suddenly get to go to school, if your father suddenly gets to go back to the university, what will they think?”

  So this was about the neighborhood. John Paul could hardly believe that his parents would sacrifice their children, even themselves, just so the neighbors wouldn’t resent them.

  “We could move,” said John Paul.

  “Where?” asked Father. “There are noncompliants like us, and there are people who gave up their faith. There’s only the two groups, and I’d rather go on as we are than to cross that line. It’s not about the neighbors, John Paul. It’s about our own integrity. It’s about faith.”

  It wasn’t going to work, John Paul could see that now. He had thought that his Battle School idea could be turned to help his family. He would have gone into space for that, gone away and not come home for years, if it would have helped his family.

  “You can still come,” said Graff. “Even if your family doesn’t want to be free of these sanctions.”

  Father erupted then, not shouting, but his voice hot and intense. “We want to be free of the sanctions, you fool. We just don’t want to be the only ones free of them! We want the Hegemony to stop telling Catholics they have to commit mortal sin, to repudiate the Church. We want the Hegemony to stop forcing Poles to act like . . . like Germans.”

  But John Paul knew this rant, and knew that his father usually ended that sentence by saying, “forcing Poles to act like Jews and atheists and Germans.” The omission told him that Father did not want the results that would come from talking in front of these Fleet people the way he talked in front of other Poles. John Paul had read enough history to know why. And it occurred to him that even though Father suffered greatly under the sanctions, maybe in his anger and resentment he had become a man who no longer belonged at the university. Father knew another set of rules and chose not to live by them. But Father also did not want educated foreigners to know that he did not live by those rules. He did not want them to know that he blamed things on Jews and atheists. But to blame them on Germans, that was all right.

  Suddenly John Paul wanted nothing more than to leave home. To go to a school where he wouldn’t have to listen in on someone else’s lessons.

  The only problem was, John Paul had no interest in war. When he read history, he skimmed those parts. And yet it was called Battle School. He would have to study war a lot, he was sure of it. And in the end, if he didn’t fail, he would have to serve in the Fleet. Take orders from men and women like these Fleet officers. To do other people’s bidding all his life.

  He was only six, but he already knew that he hated it when he had to do what other people wanted, even when he knew that they were wrong. He didn’t want to be a soldier. He didn’t want to kill. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to obey stupid people.

  At the same time, he didn’t want to stay in this situation, either. Crowded into their apartment most of the day. Mother always so tired. None of them learning all they could. Never quite enough to eat, nothing but shabby threadbare clothing, never warm enough in winter, always sweltering in summer.

  They all think we’re being heroes, like St. John Paul II under the Nazis and the Communists. Standing up for the faith against the lies and evils of the world, the way St. John Paul II did as pope.

  But what if we’re just being stubborn and stupid? What if everybody else is right, and we shouldn’t have had more than two children in our family?

  Then I wouldn’t have been born.

  Am I really here because God wants me to be? Maybe God wanted all kinds of children to be born, and all the rest of the world was blocking them from coming by their sins, because of the Hegemon’s laws. Maybe it was like the story of Abraham and Sodom, where God would be willing to save the city from destructions if twenty righteous people could be found, or even ten. Maybe we’re the righteous people who save the world just by existing, just by serving God and refusing to bow to the Hegemon.

  But existing is not all I want, thought John Paul. I want to do something. I want to learn everything and know everything and do every good thing. To have choices. And I want my brothers and sisters to have those choices too. I will never have power like this again, to change the world around me. The moment these people from the Fleet decide they don’t want me anymore, I’ll never have another chance. I have to do something now.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” said John Paul.

  He could feel Father’s body stiffen on the couch next to him, and Mother gasped just the tiniest of gasps inside her throat.

  “But I don’t want to go into space,” said John Paul.

  Graff did not move. But he blinked.

  “I’ve never been to a school. I don’t know if I’ll like it,” said John Paul. “Everybody I know is Polish and Catholic. I don’t know what it’s like to be with people who aren’t.”

  “If you don’t go into the Battle School program,” said Graff, “there’s nothing we can do about the rest.”

  “Can’t we go somewhere and try it out?” asked John Paul. “Can’t we all go somewhere that we can go to school and nobody will care that we’re Catholics and there are nine of us children?”

  “There’s nowhere in the world like that,” said Father bitterly.

  John Paul looked at Graff questioningly.

  “Your father is partly right,” said Graff. “A family with nine children will always be resented, no matter where you go. And here, because there are so many other noncompliant families, you sustain each other. There’s solidarity. In some ways it would be worse if you left Poland.”

  “In every way,” said Father.

  “But we could set you up in a large city, and then send no more than two of your brothers and sisters to any one school. That way, if they are careful, no one will know that their family is noncompliant.”

  “If they become liars, you mean,” said Mother.

  “Oh,” said Graff, “forgive me. I didn’t know that your family never, ever told a lie to protect your family’s interests.”

  “You’re trying to seduce us,” said Mother. “To divide the family. To get our children into schools that will teach them to deny the faith, to despise the Church.”

  “Ma’am,” said Graff, “I’m trying to get a very promising boy to agree to come to Battle School because the world faces a terrible enemy.”

  “Does it?” said Mother. “I keep hearing about this terrible enemy, these Buggers, these monsters from space, but where are they?”

  “The reason you don’t see them,” said Graff patiently, “is because we defeated their first two invasions. And if you ever do see them, it will be because we lost the third time. And even then you won’t see them, because they will do such terrible things to the surface of the Earth that there will be no humans alive when the first of the Buggers sets foot here. We want your son to help us prevent that.”

  “If God sends these monsters to kill us, maybe it’s as it was in the days of Noah,” said Mother. “Maybe the world is so wicked it needs to be destroyed.”

  “Well, if that’s so,” said Graff, “then we’ll lose the war, no matter what we do, and that’s that. But what if God wants us to win, so we have more time to repent of our wickedness? Don’t you think we ought to leave that possibility open?”

  “Don’t argue theology with us,” said Father coldly, “as if you were a believer.”

  “You don’t know what I believe,” said Graff. “All you know is this: We will go to great lengths to get your son into Battle School, because we believe he is extraordinary, and we believe that in this house he has been and will continue to be frustrated. Wasted.”

  Mother lurched forward and Father bounded to his feet. “How dare you!” cried Father.

  Graff also stood, and in his anger he looked dangerous and terrible. “I thought you were the ones who didn’t like lying!”

  There was a momentary silence, Father and Graff facing each other across the room.

  “I said his life was being wasted and that’s the simple truth,” said Graff quietly. “You didn’t even know that he was really reading. Do you understand what this boy was doing? He was reading with excellent comprehension, books that your college students would have had trouble with, Professor Wieczorek. And you didn’t know it. He did it in front of you, he told you he was doing it, and you still refused to know it because it didn’t fit into your picture of reality. And this is the home where a mind like his is going to be educated? In your list of sins, doesn’t that count as perhaps a tiny little venial sin? To take this gift from God and waste it? Didn’t Jesus say something disparaging about casting pearls before swine?”

  At this, Father could not stand it. He lunged forward to strike a blow at Graff.

  But Graff was a soldier, and blocked the blow easily. He did not strike back, but used only as much force as was needed to stop Father until he could calm himself. Even so, Father ended up on the floor, in pain, with Mother kneeling over him, crying.

  John Paul knew, however, what Graff was doing. That Graff had deliberately chosen words that would cause Father to get angry and lose control of himself.

  But why? What was Graff trying to accomplish?

  Then he realized: Graff wanted to show John Paul this scene. Father humiliated, beaten down, and Mother reduced to weeping over him.

  Graff spoke, as he gazed intensely into John Paul’s eyes. “The war is a desperate struggle, John Paul. They nearly broke us. They nearly won. It was only because we had a genius, a commander named Mazer Rackham who was able to outguess them, to find their weaknesses, that we barely, barely won. Who will be that commander next time? Will he be there? Or will he still be somewhere in Poland, working two miserable jobs that are far beneath his intellectual ability, all because at the age of six he thought he didn’t want to go into space.”

  Ah. That was it. The captain wanted John Paul to see what defeat looked like.

  But I already know what defeat looks like. And I’m not going to let you defeat me.

  “There are still Catholics outside Poland?” asked John Paul. “Noncompliant ones, right?”

  “Yes,” said Graff.

  “But not every nation is ruled by the Hegemony the way Poland is.”

  “Compliant nations continue to be governed by their traditional system.”

  “So is there some nation where we could be with other noncompliant Catholics, and yet still not have such bad sanctions that we can’t even get enough food to eat, and Father can’t work?”

  “Compliant nations all have to have sanctions against overpopulators,” said Graff. “That’s what being compliant means.”

  “A nation,” said John Paul, “where we could be an exception, and nobody would have to know it?”

  “Canada,” said Graff. “New Zealand. Sweden. America. Noncompliants who don’t make speeches about it get along decently there. You wouldn’t be the only ones who had children going to different schools, with the authorities looking the other way, because they hate punishing children for the sins of the parents.”

  “Which is best?” asked John Paul. “Which has the most Catholics?”

  “America. The most Poles and the most Catholics. And Americans always think international laws are for other people anyway, so they don’t take Hegemony rules quite as seriously.”

  “Could we go there?” asked John Paul.

  “No,” said Father. He was sitting up now, his head still bowed in pain and humiliation.

  “John Paul,” said Graff, “we don’t want you to go to America. We want you to go to Battle School.”

  “I won’t go unless my family is in a place where we won’t be hungry and where my brothers and sisters can go to school. I’ll just stay here.”

  “He’s not going anyway,” said Father, “no matter what you say, no matter what you promise, no matter what John Paul decides.”

  “Oh, yes, you,” said Graff. “You just committed the felony of striking an officer of the International Fleet, for which the penalty is imprisonment for a term of not less than three years—but you know how the courts put much heavier penalties on noncompliants who are convicted of crime. My guess would be seven or eight years. It’s all recorded, of course, the entire thing.”

  “You came into our house as a spy,” said Mother. “You provoked him.”

  “I spoke the truth to you, and you didn’t like hearing it,” said Graff. “I did not raise a hand against Professor Wieczorek or anyone in your family.”

  “Please,” said Father. “Don’t send me to jail.”

  “Of course I won’t,” said Graff. “I don’t want you in jail. But I also don’t want you issuing foolish declarations of what will or will not happen, no matter what I say, no matter what I promise, no matter what John Paul decides.”

  This was why Graff had goaded Father, John Paul understood now. To make sure Father had no choice but to go along with whatever John Paul and Graff decided between them.

  “What are you going to do to me to make me do what you want,” said John Paul, “the way you did with Father?”

  “It won’t do me any good,” said Graff, “if you come with me unwillingly.”

  “I won’t come with you willingly unless my family is in a place where they can be happy.”

  “There is no such place in a world ruled by the Hegemony,” said Father.

  But now it was Mother who stopped Father from speaking more. With a gentle hand she touched his face. “We can be good Catholics in another place,” she said. “For us to leave here, that doesn’t take bread out of the mouths of our neighbors. It harms no one. Look what John Paul is trying to do for us.” She turned to John Paul. “I’m sorry I didn’t know the truth about you. I’m sorry I was such a bad teacher for you.” Then she burst into tears.

  Father put his arm around her, pulled her close, rocked her, the two of them sitting on the floor, comforting each other.