A War of Gifts: An Ender Story

Spain, with Black Peter carrying his bag of presents, and listen through the chimneys of the houses throughout Holland, checking to see if children were quarreling or disobedient. If the children were good, then they would knock on the door and, when it was opened, fling candy into the house. Children would rush out the door and find presents left in baskets-or in their shoes, left by the front door. And Flip had set his shoes out on Sinterklaas Eve.
    For some reason, Dink found his eyes clouding with tears. This was stupid. Yes, he missed homemissed his father’s house near the strand. But Sinterklaas was for little children, not for him. Not for a child in Battle School.
    But Battle School is nothing, right? I should be home. And if I were home, I’d be helping to make Sinterklaas Day for the younger children. If there had been any younger children in our house. Without really deciding to do it, Dink took out his desk and started to write.

    His shoes will sit and gather moss
    Without a gift from Sinterklaas
    For when a soldier cannot cross
    The battle room without a loss
    Then why should Sinterklaas equip
    A kid who cannot fly with zip
    But crawls instead just like a drip
    Of rain on glass, not like a ship
    That flies through space: I speak of Flip.

    It wasn’t a great poem, of course, but the whole idea of Sinterklaas poems was that they made fun of the recipient of the gift without giving offense. The lamer the poem, the more it made fun of the giver of the gift rather than the target of the rhyme. Flip still got teased about the fact that when he first was assigned to Rat Army, a couple of times he had bad launches from the wall of Battle Room and ended up floating like a feather across the room, a perfect target for the enemy. Dink would have written the verse in Dutch, but it was a dying language, and Dink didn’t know if he spoke it well enough to actually use it for poem-writing. Nor was he sure Flip could read a Dutch poem, not if there were any unusual words in it. Netherlands was just too close to Britain. The BBC had made the Dutch bilingual; the European Community had made them mostly anglophone. The poem was done, but there was no way to extrude printed paper from a desk. Ah well, the night was young. Dink put it in the print queue and got up from bed to wander the corridors, desk tucked under his arm. He’d pick up the poem before the printer room closed, and he’d also search for something that might serve as a gift.
    In the end he found no gift, but he did add two lines to the poem:

    If Piet gives you a gift today,
    You’ll find it on your breakfast tray.

    It’s not as if there were a lot of things available to the kids in Battle School. Their only games were in their desks or in the game room; their only sport was in the Battle Room. Desks and uniforms; what else did they need to own?
    This bit of paper, thought Dink. That’s what he’ll have in the morning. It was dark in the barracks, and most kids were asleep, though a few still worked on their desks, or played some stupid game. Didn’t they know the teachers did psychological analysis on them based on the games they played? Maybe they just didn’t care. Dink sometimes didn’t care either, and played. But not tonight. Tonight he was seriously pissed off. And he didn’t even know why. Yes he did. Flip was getting something from Sinterklaas-and Dink wasn’t. He should have. Dad would have made sure he got something from Black Piet’s bag. Dink would have hunted all over the house for it on Sinterklaas morning until he finally found it in some perverse hiding place. I’m homesick. That’s all. Isn’t that what the stupid counselor told him? You’re homesick-get over it. The other kids do, said the counselor.
    But they don’t, thought Dink. They just hide it. From each other, from themselves. The remarkable thing about Flip was that tonight he didn’t hide it. Flip was already asleep. Dink folded the paper and slipped it into one of the shoes. Stupid greedy kid. Leaving out both shoes.
    But of course that wasn’t it at all. If he had left only one shoe, that would have been proof positive of what he was doing. Someone might have guessed and then Flip would have been mocked mercilessly for being so homesick and childish. So… both shoes. Deniability. Not Sinterklaas Day at all-I just left my shoes by the side of my bed.
    Dink crawled into his own bed and lay there for a little while, filled with a deep and unaccountable