"I'm trying to decide whether to throw in with Peter," said Bean. "And I have no way of knowing what to make of him. How much to trust him."
"I wish I could help you," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Peter marches to a different drummer. I've never really caught the rhythm."
"Don't you like him?" asked Bean, knowing he was too blunt, but knowing also that he wasn't going to get many chances like this, to talk to the mother of a potential ally--or rival.
"I love him," said Mrs. Wiggin. "He doesn't show us much of himself. But that's only fair--we never showed our children much of ourselves, either."
"Why not?" asked Bean. He was thinking of the openness of his mother and father, the way they knew Nikolai, and Nikolai knew them. It had left him almost gasping, the unguardedness of their conversations with each other. Clearly the Wiggin household did not have that custom.
"It's very complicated," said Mrs. Wiggin.
"Meaning that you think it's none of my business."
"On the contrary, I know it's very much your business." She sighed and sat back down. "Come on, let's not pretend this is only a doorstep conversation. You came here to find out about Peter. The easy answer is simply to tell you that we don't know a thing. He never tells anyone anything they want to know, unless it would be useful to him for them to know it."
"But the hard answer?"
"We've been hiding from our children, almost from the start," said Mrs. Wiggin. "We can hardly be surprised or resentful when they learned at a very early age to be secretive."
"What were you hiding?"
"We don't tell our children, and I should tell you?" But she answered her own question at once. "If Valentine and Ender were here, I think we would talk to them. I even tried to explain some of this to Valentine before she left to join Ender in . . . space. I did a very bad job, because I had never put it in words before. Let me just . . . let me start by saying . . . we were going to have a third child anyway, even if the I.F. hadn't asked us to."
Where Bean had grown up, the population laws hadn't meant much--the street children of Rotterdam were all extra people and knew perfectly well that by law not one of them should have been born, but when you're starving, it's hard to care much about whether you're going to get into the finest schools. Still, when the laws were repealed, he read about them and knew the significance of their decision to have a third child. "Why would you do that?" asked Bean. "It would hurt all your children. It would end your careers."
"We were very careful not to have careers," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Not careers that we'd hate to give up. What we had was only jobs. You see, we're religious people."
"There are lots of religious
people in the world."
"But not in America," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Not the kind of fanatic that does something so selfish and antisocial as to have more than two children, just because of some misguided religious ideas. And when Peter tested so high as a toddler, and they started monitoring him--well, that was a disaster for us. We had hoped to be . . . unobtrusive. To disappear. We're very bright people, you know."
"I wondered why the parents of such geniuses didn't have noted careers of their own," said Bean. "Or at least some kind of standing in the intellectual community."
"Intellectual community," said Mrs. Wiggin scornfully. "America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold on truth."
She sounded bitter.
"I sound bitter," she said.
"You've lived your life," said Bean. "So you think you're smarter than the smart people."
She recoiled a bit. "Well, that's the kind of comment that explains why we never discuss our faith with anyone."
"I didn't mean it as an attack," said Bean. "I think I'm smarter than anybody I've ever met, because I am. I'd have to be dumber than I am not to know it. You really believe in your religion, and you resent the fact that you had to hide it from others. That's all I was saying."
"Not religion, religions," she said. "My husband and I don't even share the same doctrine. Having a large family in obedience to God, that was about the only thing we agreed on. And even at that, we both had elaborate intellectual justifications for our decision to defy the law. For one thing, we didn't think it would hurt our children at all. We meant to raise them in faith, as believers."
"So why didn't you?"
"Because we're cowards after all," said Mrs. Wiggin. "With the I.F. watching, we would have had constant interference. They would have intervened to make sure we didn't teach our children anything that would prevent them from fulfilling the role that Ender and you ended up fulfilling. That's when we started hiding our faith. Not really from our children, just from the Battle School people. We were so relieved when Peter's monitor was taken away. And then Valentine's. We thought we were done. We were going to move to a place where we wouldn't be so badly treated, and have a third child, and a fourth, as many as we could have before they arrested us. But then they came to us and requisitioned a third child. So we didn't have to move. You see? We were lazy and frightened. If the Battle School was going to give us a cover to allow us to have one more child, then why not?"
"But then they took Ender."
"And by the time they took him, it was too late. To raise Peter and Valentine in our faith. If you don't teach children when they're little, it's never really inside them. You have to hope they'll come to it later, on their own. It can't come from the parents, if you don't begin when they're little."
"Indoctrinating them."