First meetings in the Enderverse

against anything besides ships?”
    Mazer moved in close to Ender and said firmly, “We only use them against ships. Never anything else. If we used them against anything else, the enemy would use them against us. Got it?”
    Mazer walked away, and was nearly out the door when Ender called to him.
    “I don’t know your name yet,” Ender said blandly.
    “Mazer Rackham.”
    “Mazer Rackham,” Ender said, “I defeated you.”
    Mazer laughed.
    “Ender, you weren’t fighting me today,” he said. “You were fighting the stupidest computer in the Command School, set on a ten-year-old program. You don’t think I’d use a sphere, do you?” He shook his head. “Ender, my dear little fellow, when you fight me you’ll know it. Because you’ll lose.” And Mazer left the room.

    Ender still practiced ten hours a day with his toon leaders. He never saw them, though, only heard their voices on the radio. Battles came every two or three days. The enemy had something new every time, something harder-but Ender coped with it. And won every time. And after every battle Mazer would point out mistakes and show Ender that he had really lost. Mazer only let Ender finish so that he would learn to handle the end of the game.
    Until finally Mazer came in and solemnly shook Ender’s hand and said, “That, boy, was a good battle.”
    Because the praise was so long in coming, it pleased Ender more than praise had ever pleased him before. And because it was so condescending, he resented it.
    “So from now on,” Mazer said, “we can give you hard ones.”
    From then on Ender’s life was a slow nervous breakdown.
    He began fighting two battles a day, with problems that steadily grew more difficult. He had been trained in nothing but the game all his life, but now the game began to consume him. He woke in the morning with new strategies for the simulator and went fitfully to sleep at night with the mistakes of the day preying on him. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night crying for a reason he didn’t remember. Sometimes he woke with his knuckles bloody from biting them. But every day he went impassively to the simulator and drilled his toon leaders until the battles, and drilled his toon leaders after the battles, and endured and studied the harsh criticism that Mazer Rackham piled on him. He noted that Rackham perversely criticized him more after his hardest battles. He noted that every time he thought of a new strategy the enemy was using it within a few days. And he noted that while his fleet always stayed the same size, the enemy increased in numbers every day.
    He asked his teacher.
    “We are showing you what it will be like when you really command. The ratios of enemy to us.”
    “Why does the enemy always outnumber us?”
    Mazer bowed his gray head for a moment, as if deciding whether to answer. Finally he looked up and reached out his hand and touched Ender on the shoulder. “I will tell you, even though the information is secret. You see, the enemy attacked us first. He had good reason to attack us, but that is a matter for politicians, and whether the fault was ours or his, we could not let him win. So when the enemy came to our worlds, we fought back, hard, and spent the finest of our young men in the fleets. But we won, and the enemy retreated.”
    Mazer smiled ruefully. “But the enemy was not through, boy. The enemy would never be through. They came again, with more numbers, and it was harder to beat them. And another generation of young men was spent. Only a few survived. So we came up with a plan-the big men came up with the plan. We knew that we had to destroy the enemy once and for all, totally, eliminate his ability to make war against us. To do that we had to go to his home worlds-his home world, really, since the enemy’s empire is all tied to his capital world.”
    “And so?” Ender asked.
    “And so we made a fleet. We made more ships than the enemy ever had. We made a hundred ships for every ship he had sent against us. And we launched them against his twenty-eight worlds. They started leaving a hundred years ago. And they carried on them the ansible, and only a few men. So that someday a commander could sit on a planet somewhere far from the battle and command the fleet. So that our best minds would not be destroyed by the enemy.”
    Ender’s question had still not been answered. “Why do they outnumber us?”
    Mazer laughed. “Because it took a hundred years for our ships