When I sat across from Bell today in the library, thought Peter, I offered to help her. I was being nice.

  But it was an act. I was pretending to be nice. She saw through me. She knew what I really was. A predator.

  Peter leaned against a tree. Felt the bark pressing against his back through the shirt.

  They are right about me. They should hate me and fear me. They should reject me and exclude me. I don’t belong among humans.

  He slid very slowly down the trunk. The bark grabbed at his shirt and pulled it up as he slid down, and the bare skin of his back scraped against the tree and it hurt and he kept doing it because he wanted to hurt. He deserved to hurt.

  I didn’t want to hurt anybody, he told himself. As soon as I realized how much pain the squirrel felt, I stopped. And I never did it again. Whatever I am, that’s not who I want to be. That must count for something.

  What was I doing, if I didn’t enjoy causing pain? Was it all just so I could show Valentine? Scare her? Sicken her?

  It wasn’t about Valentine. That had been an afterthought. No, it was something I wanted to do with the squirrel. To the squirrel. Get from the squirrel.

  He had read a lot of psychology, more for the amusement value than anything else. Once you stepped outside the area of drug therapy for defective brains, psychology seemed indistinguishable from religion to him, and he had no use for either.

  But now he tried to imagine: What would a talk therapist say about why I took the skin off living squirrels and opened their thoraces so I could see their beating hearts?

  Symbolic: Because I had no heart, I needed to see one. No, because I was unloved I doubted that people had hearts and . . .

  That was too silly even for this game.

  It wasn’t about the beating heart. It was about taking control of it. That’s what a good therapist would say. I was seeking control because I feel powerless.

  And sitting there on the ground, his back stinging from having scraped against bark, he knew he was on to something. It was about power. It was always about power.

  It’s not that they loved Ender, it’s that their love gave him so much power over them. He was oblivious to it. He couldn’t see how they shaped their lives around him, always oriented to him—and away from me. I didn’t want their love, I wanted the power that Ender had, the ability to shape things the way he wanted them. I could never do it. I could never get a soul to act the way I wanted.

  He found himself getting so excited he wanted to cavort like a madman. Instead he stayed on the leafy forest floor and traced designs with his finger on the bare ground of the squirrel’s grave. A circle—himself—all by himself. No connections. Power comes from getting other people to do things your way. Power comes from obedience.

  And how do you get obedience? Peter had always tried to get it by pushing, by demanding, by grabbing. He had let his hunger for power show.

  And it’s not as if that couldn’t work. There had been plenty of coercive dictators in the history of the world. They got their way by creating fear in the hearts of others. They were willing to kill anyone that got in their way. And so the others complied. Did what they were told.

  But nothing those men created outlasted them. As soon as they died or fell from power, or their dynasty ended, their statues and pictures were torn down or flung onto the fire.

  It was the ones who were loved who were the most successful. Hitler terrorized people, yes, but there was more to him than that. He was also worshiped—not by everybody, but by many. How did he do that? Those eyes, always so sad, looking like he was on the verge of weeping. Or was it the sternness of his face? Was he a father figure, the judge, and they looked to him for approval and he gave it to them: You are the great ones, you Germans, you deserve better, I judge you and find you worthy!

  But Hitler’s empire didn’t last, either. It was too destructive, what he did with his power. He tore things down, he built nothing.

  Augustus, thought Peter. He’s the one. Started out as the frail, conniving, brilliant, ambitious, and very young Octavian. Caesar’s heir—even if he had to destroy Caesar’s friends to climb into the martyred hero’s chair. Octavian was careful that he cast himself, not as a brutally ambitious warrior, but as the man who would end wars and save the Roman world. He allowed them to call him by the old-fashioned honorific “Augustus,” but he preferred the title “first citizen.” Princeps. Prince.

  It didn’t matter what they called him. Whatever word they used would come to mean what they knew he was: the rightful ruler.

  It was possible for most Romans to believe that the Republic still existed, while Augustus was alive. He understood how civilization worked. He tried to imbue Roman society with the stern virtues that had created their greatness in the first place.

  He gave them peace. And it lasted.

  But how did he do it? When the war began he was nothing. Nobody tagged him as a great general—and he wasn’t one, not really. His power came from convincing people that he truly had their best interests at heart—that all he cared about was restoring Rome to peace and prosperity.

  That’s what I haven’t been able to do, thought Peter. I haven’t been able to convince a living soul that I care about anybody but me. That there’s any ideal that I would sacrifice to serve. Octavian became Augustus because he convinced people that his ambition was never for himself.

  And then, when he got power, he continued to act out that script. He really did use his power for the general good of the empire. Not perfectly, certainly—I could do better than he did—but in the main he succeeded. Things were better for almost everyone because of his victory, and he governed well.

  I cannot get power and control with my stone and my scalpel. No matter what I did to the squirrels, they ended up dead, and from that moment on I had no power over them.

  Power flows to the one who convinces everyone that by obeying him, their own lives will be better.

  And in that moment he set aside the religion of talk therapy and took on the religion of his parents. “Whoever would be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” This was not niceness, what Jesus was saying. It was almost Machiavellian in its forthright deviousness. If you want to be the greatest, to have real power, then you must convince everyone that you serve them. And here’s the clincher: For it to last, you really have to do it. So even if you’re pretending to care about people, you can never stop pretending, and you have to deliver on the promise. So, in the end, you really are the “servant of all.”

  I finally get it, Jesus, said Peter silently. What you said to that other Peter, Simon Peter: If you love me, feed my sheep. If you want my power, then convince the sheep that you care about them more than you care about yourself.

  But I don’t care about them.

  But if I act as if I care, and devote my whole life to doing what really will make them happy and give them peace and prosperity, then what does it matter that my deepest motive was to make myself master of the world? If the world I rule is happier and better off because I rule it, and my hand sits lightly on the reins of power and few directly feel the tug of my power, then I can build something that will outlast me.

  He had the perfect people to practice on.

  The next day, the last day before Christmas, he redid all his Christmas gifts.

  So on Christmas morning, while he still gave Father and Mother and Valentine the gifts he had bought for them, he accompanied them with something else.

  He wrote them each a letter. To Father, he wrote of how much it meant to him that he had stood by Peter when the teachers were failing him in school. “I thought I was alone,” he said, “but then you stood with me. That was worth more than any grade. You could have rebuked me and forced me to comply with them; instead you gave my work respect and stood beside me against the world. That’s the man I want to become: That’s the man you are.”

  Father’s eyes got all teary when he read it. He refused to read the letter aloud or show it to anyone else. “It’s between Peter and me,” he said gruffly.

  To Valentine, Peter wrote about how well she had cared for Ender. How she had protected him. “It made me angry at the time, because I was so childish I thought that you had chosen sides in a war, and I was the one you rejected. But I see now that I was completely wrong. Instead, you stood for peace and against war; all I had to do was stop fighting for your love, and I would have had it. It was the fighting that built the wall between us. I should have seen that the love was in your nature. It was who you are, and if I had only let you, the same kindness you showed Ender could have been mine.”

  She looked up from the letter with suspicious eyes. But of course he couldn’t win her over with a single letter. She had seen most of his lies; he had told her the truth behind too many of them for her to take anything he said or wrote at face value. It would take time, with Valentine. But at least she didn’t jeer at the letter. That was a step.

  To Mother, Peter wrote nothing. He had made a collage of pictures of Ender from the computer archive, and framed the resulting art with a single nickel in the middle. Not a modern five-dollar piece, but one of the old nickels—it was the one purchase he had had to make on the day of Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t even expensive, the coin dealer had only charged him fifteen bucks for it. The frame was more expensive.

  With the framed picture, he had included only the briefest note: A slip of paper on which he had written, “I miss him, too.”

  Mother wept as she had wept over Ender’s stocking. But in the midst of it, she came to Peter and hugged him and he knew that he was on the right track. He could do this thing.

  After New Year’s, school began again, and Peter made a point of seeking out Bell at lunchtime. She was sitting at her regular table, with her regular friends, and when Peter came up and slid in between two of them and leaned on the table and looked searchingly in Bell’s eyes, she was poised to wither him with her scorn.

  But he never took his eyes off her face and somehow that silenced her long enough for him to say, “I wanted to thank you, Bell. I understand now how offensive I was, as if I were placing myself above you.”

  He ignored the other girls saying things like, “Bell’s got herself a boyfriend” and “Robbing the cradle, Bell?” He kept his eyes on hers.

  “But you were wrong about what I wanted from you,” said Peter. “I’ve seen who you are here at school. The way you’re kind to other people, the way you create a haven for the people around you. You know how to be a friend. I wanted to have the gift you give to all of these.” He indicated Bell’s friends. “I went about it all wrong. I offended you when I never meant to. I just want you to know that what I felt for you was pure respect and admiration. You’re a good person, Bell. And even when you were pushing me away, you still taught me some important things. Thank you for that.”

  Without waiting for the slightest reply, he got up and walked away. Of course, nothing that he said was true. He hadn’t noticed much about her except that she was pretty and actually tried to do well in school and if she was an unusually good friend to her friends, Peter would have had no way of knowing it. But he knew that what he said was the kind of thing people liked to think about themselves, and that none of her friends was likely to contradict him. Whether she deserved his admiration or not, she would now believe she had it—the smartest kid in school admired her!—and he had done it in a way that showed him to be humble. His guess was that she wouldn’t be able to keep her mind off him now, that she would seek him out, that they would become friends, and that through her he would get the chance to play the same game with everyone she knew.

  Served her right, the priggish little bitch. Getting her to adore him and serve his interests completely—that would be the best revenge for the way she scorned him in the library two days before Christmas.

  A War of Gifts

  To Tom Ruby,

  who has kept the faith

  in and out of Battle School

  1

  SAINT NICK

  Zeck Morgan sat attentively on the front row of the little sanctuary of the Church of the Pure Christ in Eden, North Carolina. He did not fidget, though he had two itches, one on his foot and one on his eyebrow. He knew the eyebrow itch was from a fly that had landed there. The foot itch, too, probably, though he did not look down to see whether anything was crawling there.

  He did not look out the windows at the falling snow. He did not glance to left or right, not even to glare at the parents of the crying baby in the row behind him—it was for others to judge whether it was more important for the parents to stay and hear the sermon, or leave and preserve the stillness of the meeting.

  Zeck was the minister’s son, and he knew his duty.

  Reverend Habit Morgan stood at the small pulpit—really an old dictionary stand picked up at a library sale. No doubt the dictionary that had once rested on it had been replaced by a computer, just one more sign of the degradation of the human race, to worship the False God of Tamed Lightning. “They think because they have pulled the lightning from the sky and contained it in their machines they are gods now, or the friends of gods. Do they not know that the only thing written by lightning is fire? Yea, I say unto you, it is the fire of hell, and the gods they have befriended are devils!”

  It had been one of Father’s best sermons. He gave it when Zeck was three, but Zeck had not forgotten a word of it. Zeck did not forget a word of anything. As soon as he knew what words were, he remembered them.

  But he did not tell Father that he remembered. Because when Mother realized that he could repeat whole sermons word for word, she told him, very quietly but very intensely, “This is a great gift that God has given you, Zeck. But you must not show it to anyone, because some might think it comes from Satan.”

  “Does it?” Zeck had asked. “Come from Satan?”

  “Satan does not give good gifts,” said Mother. “So it comes from God.”

  “Then why would anyone think it comes from Satan?”

  Her forehead frowned, though her lips kept their smile. Her lips always smiled when she knew anyone was looking. It was her duty as the minister’s wife to show that the pure Christian life made one happy.

  “Some people are looking so hard to find Satan,” she finally said, “that they see him even where he isn’t.”

  Naturally, Zeck remembered this conversation word for word. So it was there in his mind when he was four, and Father said, “There are those who will tell you that a thing is from God, when it’s really from the devil.”

  “Why, Father?”

  “They are deceived,” said Father, “by their own desire. They wish the world were a better place, so they pretend that polluted things are pure, so they don’t have to fear them.”

  Ever since then, Zeck had balanced these two conversations, for he knew that Mother was warning him about Father, and Father was warning him about Mother.

  It was impossible to choose between them. He did not want to choose.

  Still . . . he never let Father see his perfect memory. It was not a lie, however. If Father ever asked him to repeat a conversation or a sermon or anything at all, Zeck would do it, and honestly, showing that he knew it word for word. But Father did not ask anybody anything, except when he asked God.

  Which he had just done. Standing there at the pulpit, glaring out at the congregation, Father said, “What about Santa Claus! Saint Nick! Is he the same thing as ‘Old Nick’? Does he have anything to do with Christ? Is our worship pure, when we have this ‘Old Saint Nick’ in our hearts? Is he really jolly? Does he laugh because he knows he is leading our children down to hell?”

  He glared around the congregation as if waiting for an answer. And finally someone gave the only answer that was appropriate for this point in the sermon:

  “Brother Habit, we don’t know. Would you ask God and tell us what he says?”

  Whereupon Father roared out, “God in heaven! Thou knowest our question! Tell us thine answer! We thy children ask thee for bread, O Father! Do not give us a stone!”

  Then he gripped the pulpit—the dictionary stand, which trembled under his hands—and continued glaring upward. Zeck knew that when Father looked upward like that, he did not see the roof beams or the ceiling above them. He was staring into heaven, demanding that all those hurrying angels get out of his way so his gaze could penetrate all the way to God and demand his attention, because it was his right. Ask and it shall be given, God had promised. Knock and it shall be opened! Well, Habit Morgan was knocking and asking, and it was time for God to open and give. God could not break his word—at least not when Habit Morgan was holding him to it.

  But God took his own sweet time. Which was why Zeck was sitting there on the front row, with Mother and his three younger siblings beside him, all perched on chairs so wobbly they showed the slightest trace of movement. The other children were young, and their fidgets were forgiven. Zeck was determined to be pure, and his wobbly chair might have been made of stone for all the movement it made.

  When Father stared into heaven this long it was a test. Maybe it was a test given by God, or maybe Father had already received his answer—received it perhaps the night before when he was writing this sermon—and so the test was from him. Either way, Zeck would pass this test as he passed all the tests laid before him.

  The long minutes dragged. One itch would fade, only to be replaced by another. Father still stared into heaven. Zeck ignored the sweat trickling down his neck.

  And behind him, somewhere among the seventy-three members of the congregation who had come today (Zeck hadn’t counted them, he had only glanced, but as usual he immediately knew how many there were), someone shifted in his seat. Someone coughed. It was the moment Father—or God—had been waiting for.

  Father’s voice was only a whisper, but it carried through the room. “How can I hear the voice of the Holy Spirit when I am surrounded by impurity?”