Then the old man let Ender's legs fall. Because he still held Ender's head to the floor, the boy couldn't use his arms to compensate, and his legs hit the surface with a loud crack and a sickening pain. Then the old man stood and let Ender rise.
Slowly Ender pulled his legs under him, with a faint groan of pain. He knelt on all fours for a moment, recovering. Then his right arm flashed out, reaching for his enemy. The old man quickly danced back and Ender's hand closed on air as his teacher's foot shot forward to catch Ender on the chin.
Ender's chin wasn't there. He was lying flat on his back, spinning on the floor, and during the moment that his teacher was off balance from his kick, Ender's feet smashed into the old man's other leg. He fell in a heap--but close enough to strike out and hit Ender in the face. Ender couldn't find an arm or a leg that held still long enough to be grabbed, and in the meantime blows were landing on his back and arms. Ender was smaller--he couldn't reach past the old man's flailing limbs. Finally he managed to pull away and scramble back near the door.
The old man was sitting cross-legged again, but now the apathy was gone. He was smiling. "Better, this time, boy. But slow. You will have to be better with a fleet than you are with your body or no one will be safe with you in command. Lesson learned?"
Ender nodded slowly. He ached in a hundred places.
"Good," said the old man. "Then we'll never have to have such a battle again. All the rest with the simulator. / will program your battles now, not the computer; I will devised the strategy of your enemy, and you will learn to be quick and discover what tricks the enemy has for you. Remember, boy. From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose."
The old man's face grew serious again. "You will be about to lose, Ender, but you will win. You will learn to defeat the enemy. He will teach you how."
The teacher got up. "In this school, it h
as always been the practice for a young student to be chosen by an older student. The two become companions, and the older boy teaches the younger one everything he knows. Al-ways they fight, always they compete, always they are together. I have chosen you."
Ender spoke as the old man walked to the door. "You're too old to be a student."
"One is never too old to be a student of the enemy. I have learned from the buggers. You will learn from me."
As the old man palmed the door open, Ender leaped into the air and kicked him in the small of the back with both feet. He hit hard enough that he re-bounded onto his feet, as the old man cried out and collapsed on the floor.
The old man got up slowly, holding onto the door handle, his face contorted with pain. He seemed disabled, but Ender didn't trust him. Yet in spite of his suspicion he was caught off guard by the old man's speed. In a moment he found himself on the floor near the opposite wall, his nose and lip bleeding where his face had hit the bed. He was able to turn enough to see the old man standing in the doorway, wincing and holding his back. The old man grinned.
Ender grinned back. "Teacher," he said. "Do you have a name?"
"Mazer Rackham," said the old man. Then he was gone.
From then on, Ender was either with Mazer Rackham or alone. The old man rarely spoke, but he was there; at meals, at tutorials, at the simulator, in his room at night. Sometimes Mazer would leave, but always, when Mazer wasn't there, the door was locked, and no one came until Mazer returned. Ender went through a week in which he called him Jailor Rackman. Mazer answered to the name as readily as to his own, and showed no sign that it bothered him at all. Ender soon gave it up.
There were compensations. Mazer took Ender through the videos of the old battles from the First Invasion and the disastrous defeats of the I.F. in the Second Invasion. These were not pieced together from the censored public videos, but whole and continuous. Since many videos were working in the major battles, they studied bugger tactics and strategies from many angles. For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.
"Why aren't you dead?" Ender asked him. "You fought your battle seventy years ago. I don't think you're even sixty years old."
"The miracle of relativity," said Mazer. "They kept me here for twenty years after the battle, even though I begged them to let me command one of the starships they launched against the bugger home planet and the bugger colonies. Then they--came to understand some things about the way soldiers behave in the stress of battle."
"What things?"
"You've never been taught enough psychology to understand. Enough to say that they realized that even though I would never be able to command the fleet--I'd be dead before the fleet even arrived--I was still the only person able to understand the things I understood about the buggers. I was, they realized, the only person who had ever defeated the buggers by intelligence rather than luck. They needed me here to--teach the person who would command the fleet."
"So they sent you out in a starship, got you up to a relativistic speed--"
"And then I turned around and came home. A very dull voyage, Ender. Fifty years in space. Officially, only eight years passed for me, but it felt like five hundred. All so I could teach the next commander everything I knew."
"Am I to be the commander, then?"
"Let's say that you're our best bet at present."
"There are others being prepared, too?"
"No."
"That makes me the only choice, then, doesn't it?"
Mazer shrugged.
"Except you. You're still alive, aren't you? Why not you?" Mazer shook his head.