Graff looked at John Paul, eyebrows raised, as if to say, I’ve removed all the obstacles, so . . . do what I want.

  But things weren’t yet the way John Paul wanted them.

  “You’ll cheat me,” said John Paul. “You’ll take us to America but then if I still decide not to go, you’ll threaten to send everybody back here, worse off than before, and that’s how you’ll force me to go.”

  Graff did not answer for a moment.

  “So I won’t go,” said John Paul.

  “You’ll cheat me,” said Graff. “You’ll get me to move your family to America and set you up in a better life, and then you’ll refuse to go anyway, and you’ll expect the International Fleet to allow your family to continue to enjoy the benefits of our bargain without your living up to your end of it.”

  John Paul did not answer, because there was no answer. That was exactly what John Paul was planning to do. Graff knew it, and John Paul didn’t bother to deny it. Because knowing John Paul planned to cheat him did not change anything.

  “I don’t think he’ll do that,” said the woman.

  But John Paul knew she was lying. She was quite concerned that he might do that. But she was even more concerned that Graff would walk away from the bargain John Paul was asking for. This was the confirmation John Paul needed. It really was very important to these people to get John Paul into Battle School. Therefore they would agree to a very bad bargain as long as it gave them some hope that he might go.

  Or else they knew that no matter what they agreed to now, they could go back on their word whenever they wanted. After all, they were the International Fleet, and the Wieczoreks were just a noncompliant family in a noncompliant country.

  “What you don’t know about me,” said Graff, “is that I think very far ahead.”

  That reminded John Paul of what Andrew had said when he was teaching him to play chess. “You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it’s all going to lead.” John Paul understood the principle as soon as Andrew explained it. But he stopped playing chess anyway, because he didn’t care what happened to little plastic figures on a board of sixty-four squares.

  Graff was playing chess, but not with little plastic figures. His game board was the world. And even though Graff was only a captain, he obviously came here with more authority—and more intelligence—than the colonel who had come before. When Graff said, “I think very far ahead,” he was saying—this had to be his meaning—that he was willing to sacrifice a piece now and then in order to win the game, just like chess.

  Maybe that meant he was willing to lie to John Paul now, and cheat him later. But no, there would be no reason to say anything at all. The only reason to say that was because Graff did not intend to cheat him. Graff was willing to be cheated, to knowingly enter into a bargain where the other person could win, and win completely—as long as he could see a way, farther down the road, for even such a defeat to turn to his advantage.

  “You have to make us a promise that you’ll never break,” said John Paul. “Even if I don’t go into space after all.”

  “I have the authority to make that promise,” said Graff.

  The woman clearly did not think so, though she said nothing.

  “Is America a good place?” asked John Paul.

  “There are an awful lot of Poles living there who think so,” said Graff. “But it’s not Poland.”

  “I want to see the whole world before I die,” said John Paul. He had never told this to anyone before.

  “Before you die,” murmured Mother. “Why are you thinking about dying?”

  As usual, she simply didn’t understand. He wasn’t thinking about dying. He was thinking about learning everything, and it was a simple fact that he had only a limited time in which to do it. Why did people get so upset when somebody mentioned dying? Did they think that if they didn’t mention it, it would skip a few people and leave them alive forever? And how much faith in Christ did Mother really have, if she feared death so much she couldn’t bear even to mention it, or hear her six-year-old child speak of it?

  “Going to America is a start,” said Graff. “And American passports aren’t restricted the way Polish passports are.”

  “We’ll talk about it,” said John Paul. “Come back later.”

  “Are you insane?” asked Helena as soon as they were out of earshot. “Isn’t it obvious what the boy is planning?”

  “No to the insanity, yes to the obviousness.”

  “These vids are going to be even more embarrassing for you than the earlier ones were for Sillain.”

  “Not really,” said Graff.

  “Why, because you intend to cheat the boy after all?”

  “If I did that, then I truly would be insane.” He stopped on the curb, apparently meaning to finish this conversation before getting back into the van with the others. Had he forgotten that what he was saying now was still being recorded?

  No, he knew it. He wasn’t speaking to her alone.

  “Captain Rudolf,” he said, “you saw, and everyone will see, that there was no way we could get that boy willingly into space. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t care about the war. That’s what we’ve accomplished with this stupid repressive policy in the noncompliant nations. We have the best we’ve ever seen, and we can’t use him because we’ve spent years creating a culture that hates the Hegemony and therefore the Fleet. We pissed on millions and millions of people in the name of some stupid population control laws, in defiance of their core beliefs and their community identity, and because the universe is statistically more likely to be ironic than not, of course our best chance at another commander like Mazer Rackham popped up among the ones we pissed on. I didn’t do that, and only fools would blame me for it.”

  “So what was that all about? This agreement you promised? What’s the point?”

  “To get John Paul Wieczorek out of Poland, of course.”

  “But what difference does that make, if he won’t go up to Battle School?”

  “He’s still . . . he still has a mind that processes human behavior the way some autistic savants process numbers or words. Don’t you think it’s a good thing to get him to a place where he can get a real education? And out of a place where he’ll be constantly indoctrinated with hatred for the Hegemony and the I.F.?”

  “I think that’s beyond the scope of your authority,” said Helena. “We’re with the Battle School, not some Committee to Shape a Better Future by Moving Children Around.”

  “I’m thinking of Battle School,” said Graff.

  “To which John Paul Wieczorek will never go, as you just admitted.”

  “You’re forgetting the research we’ve been conducting. It may not be final in some technical scientific sense, but it’s already conclusive. People reach their peak ability as military commanders much earlier than we thought. Most of them in their late teens. The same age when poets do their most passionate and revolutionary work. And mathematicians. They peak, and then it falls off. They coast on what they learned back when they were still young enough to learn. We know within a window of about five years when we have to have our commander. John Paul Wieczorek will already be too old when that window opens. Past his peak.”

  “Obviously you’ve been given information I don’t have,” said Helena.

  “Or figured it out,” said Graff. “Once it was obvious John Paul was never going to Battle School, my mission changed. Now all that matters is we get John Paul out of Poland and into a compliant country, and we keep our word to him, absolutely, to the letter, so he knows our promises will be kept even when we know we’ve been cheated.”

  “What’s the point of that?” asked Helena.

  “Captain Rudolf, you’re speaking without thinking.”

  He was right. So she thought.

  “If we have more time before we need our commander,” she said, “then do we have time for him to marry and have children and then the children grow up enough to be the right age?”

  “Just barely, yes. We have just barely enough time. If he marries young. If he marries somebody who is very, very brilliant so the gene mix is good.”

  “But you aren’t going to try to control that, are you?”

  “There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.”

  “You really do think in the long term, don’t you?”

  “Think of me as Rumpelstiltskin.”

  She laughed. “All right, now I get it. You’re giving him the wish of his heart, today. And then, long after he’s forgotten, you’re going to pop up and ask for his firstborn child.”

  Graff clapped an arm across her shoulder and walked with her toward the waiting van. “Only I don’t have some stupid loophole that will let him get out of it if he can guess my name.”

  2003

  In the Dragon’s House

  Mix one oddly endearing family with one oddly unsettling old house and add something unspoken with wings, and you have the elements of this, our initial story, by Hugo and Nebula winner Orson Scott Card, gifted author of the award-winning novels Ender’s Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead. A native of Washington State, Scott, as he prefers to be called, has written novels of fantasy, revisionist fable, and science fiction. His numerous short stories have appeared in Amazing Stories, Analog, Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Omni. His tale “Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory” is a classic of twentieth-century horror. “In the Dragon’s House,” though complete unto itself, contains the germ of a story that Scott intends to expand into a novel.

  In a fit of romantic excess, the builder of the house at 22 Adams gave this lovely street of grand Victorian mansions its one mark of distinction—a gothic cathedral of a house, complete with turrets, crenellated battlements, steep-pitched roofs, and even gargoyles at the downspouts.

  One of the gargoyles—the one most easily visible to those who approached the front door—was a fierce dragon’s head. In a thunderstorm the beast spewed great gouts of water, for it collected from the largest expanse of roofs. But this wet wyrm was no less to be avoided than its mythical fire-breathing forebears.

  Inside the house, however, there was no attempt to be archaic or fey. Electricity was in the house from the beginning. In fact, it was the first house in Mayfield to be fully wired during construction, and the owner spared no expense. Knobs and wires were concealed behind the laths, and every room of any size had, not just one electric outlet, but four—one in each wall. A shameless extravagance. What would anyone ever need so many outlets for?

  As the house was going up, passersby were known to tut-tut that the house was doomed to burn, having so much fire running up and down inside the walls. But the house did not burn, while others, less well-wired, sometimes did, as their owners overloaded circuits with multipliers and extension cords to make up for the electrical deficiency.

  Between the gargoyle and the rumors of future fire, it was inevitable that the neighbors would call it “the dragon house.” During the 1920s, the moniker changed a little, becoming “the Old Dragon’s house,” for during that time the owner was an old widower—the son of the original builder—who valued his privacy and had no concern for what the neighbors thought. He let the small garden surrounding the house go utterly to seed, so it was soon a jungle of tall weeds that offended the eye and endlessly seeded the neighbors’ gardens.

  When helpful or impatient neighbors from time to time came over and mowed the garden, the old man met them with hostility. As he grew older and more isolated, he threatened violence, first with a broom, then with a rake, and finally with a cane that might have been pathetic in the hands of such an old man. But he was so fiery in his wrath that even the boldest man quailed before him, and he soon became known among the neighbors as the Old Dragon. It was from him as much as the gargoyle that the house seemed to derive its name.

  Finally, the neighbors went to court and got an injunction compelling the man to control the weeds on his property. The Old Dragon responded by hiring workmen to come and pave the entire garden, front and back, with bricks and cobblestones so that the only living things in the yard were the insects that wandered across it in search of likelier foraging grounds.

  The old man lived out his days and when he died, the house went to a great niece who called it, not “the Old Dragon’s House” but “the Albatross,” and put it on the market the moment it was certified as hers.

  That was when Michael’s great-grandparents bought the place and turned it into the home he grew up in.

  Normal Schwarzhelm had owned a chain of vaudeville theaters and had married his favorite headliner, Lolly Poppins. Just before vaudeville’s collapse, Normal sold his theaters to a developer who was turning them all into movie houses, then invested the money and retired to Mayfield, the smallest and most charming of the towns on his little circuit.

  Buying the Old Dragon’s House was not Normal’s idea, it was Lolly’s. To her, it carried all the magic and romance of the legitimate stage, to which she had always aspired; her twenty years of doing slightly naughty comic songs followed by one tragic tear-jerking ballad had never been more than a stopgap until she got her “break.”

  Her break had turned out to be Normal, who adored her and indulged her and had a wagonload of money. Of course he hadn’t the power to get her into legitimate theatre now—he was out of the business, and she was too old and too well known for her shtick, which was looking surprised and confused at the double entendres in her own songs, followed by a whooping laugh when she finally got her own joke. Nobody in legitimate theatre would give her the roles she coveted.

  But the Dragon’s House had a copious cellar and, with a little excavation and remodeling and an additional dose of heavy-duty wiring for the lights, she fitted out a little underground theater where she could mount amateur productions to her heart’s content. Which she did. She became the producer, the director, and a beloved character actress in a lively community theatre company that did everything from Trojan Women to Macbeth, from The Importance of Being Earnest to The Women. It should not be hard to guess which parts she played.

  She also brought in old friends from vaudeville to take part in her shows, putting them up in her house and feeding them generously while they were there—a way to help out those in need without it looking like charity. “You’re doing me a favor,” she would insist. “These local amateurs need to see what a professional looks like!” To fit all her guests, she had workmen divide most of the bedrooms into small but cozy chambers, and as she did, she had the plumbing and wiring brought up to code, so that despite its age and ancient look, the Dragon’s House had all the modern amenities.

  While Lolly rehearsed and performed in the cellar, Normal climbed the stairs to the attic, where he, too, had a plethora of new wiring installed to support his passion—electric trains. The walls of the windowless room were lined with tables, and from the south wall a huge table projected into the middle, leaving only a narrow corridor. All the tables were covered with train tracks, trestles, bridges, hills, villages, and cities, with the walls expertly painted as mountains and farmland and, on one side, a river flowing into the sea.

  Lolly invited all comers to the basement to watch her plays, but no one ever saw Normal’s trains except the family, and then only a glimpse now and then, when calling him down to meals or to meet with his lawyer or broker. His hobby was not for display. It was a world where he alone could live. And over the years his fantasy life in the attic became quite an eccentricity, for now and then he would come downstairs and remark, “The dragon was lively today,” or, “We had quite a thunderstorm in the attic,” as if the train layout had its own weather and the occasional mythical beast to liven things up.

  “Next thing you’ll tell us,” Lolly would say, “the little tiny people will start packing their little tiny clothes in little tiny suitcases and buy teensy-weensy tickets so they can ride the train.”

  He would look at her like she was crazy and say, “They’re not real, Lolly.” And she would roll her eyes heavenward as if to ask God to judge which of them was mad.

  Lolly’s first three children, fathered by her first three husbands, had been born during her vaudeville days and therefore loathed the theatre, absolutely refusing to take part in her plays. But her two children by Normal, their son Herrick and their daughter Bernhardt—Herry and Harty—had no bad memories of backstage life, and so they happily threw themselves into every play. They were the princes murdered in the tower, they were Hansel and Gretel, they were young Ebenezer Scrooge and his beloved sister. When they weren’t in rehearsal they were romping among the costumes and props and old set pieces stored on the north side of the cellar.

  When Normal and Lolly died, no one minded that they left the house and all its contents to Herry and Harty. After all, they were Normal’s only children, and it was generous of him to leave a bit over a hundred thousand dollars to each of Lolly’s other three children—a lot of money in those days. Most of the money, though, went to Herry and Harty, who kept up the tradition of theatricals in the basement until the city inspectors told them that the public safety laws had changed and there was no way to bring the cellar theater up to code without demolishing the building.

  It was a sad day in the Old Dragon’s House when the public performances ended, and while they still had guests over and put on shows from time to time, the regular community theater company moved to the local high school auditorium and Herry and Harty were no longer the heart and soul of it as they had been. They still contributed financially from time to time, but by the 1970s they had turned inward—not recluses, but focused on the life of their house.

  With all those bedrooms, and no more retired vaudevillians to sleep in them and few plays to occupy their time, Herry and Harty cast about for something useful to do. The idea they hit upon was to take in strays.

  Stray children, that is. Runaways. Beaten children. Orphans. They didn’t take all—no, by no means, they were quite selective. For they knew that only a few children would respond to what they had to offer, and why waste time and effort with those they could not help? So they’d take a child in for a day or two, and if things weren’t working, they’d pass him or her along—bathed, fed, with new clothes on their back—to the social workers who would find them the ordinary sort of foster care.