First Meetings by Orson Scott Card

Human Community.”
    “Then come to class. And next time bring the treats there , to share.”
    “The treats,” said the Wiggin boy, “aren’t for sharing. They’re for you.”
    “Why? What do you want from me?”
    “I want to be the one who, when I telephone you, I never make you cry.”
    “At the moment,” she said, “you’re only making me want to scream.”
    “That will pass,” said the Wiggin boy. “Oh, and another lie is my age. I’m really two years older than the records say. They started me in American schools late, because I had tolearn English and…there were certain complications about a contract that they asserted I had no intention of fulfilling. But after they gave up, they changed my age so nobody would see how chronologically misplaced I was.
    “They?”
    “The Hegemony,” said the Wiggin boy.
    Only he wasn’t a mere boy, she supposed. A man. John Paul Wiggin. It was wrenching to start thinking of him with a name. Unprofessional. Perilous. “You actually got the Hegemony to give up?”
    “I don’t know that they gave up completely. I think they merely changed goals.”
    “All right, now I’m actually curious.”
    “Instead of being irritated and hungry?”
    “In addition to those.”
    “Curious about what?”
    “What was your quarrel with the Hegemony?”
    “The I.F., actually. They thought I ought to go to Battle School.”
    “They can’t force you to do that.”
    “I know. But as a condition of going to Battle School I got them to move my whole family out of Poland first and set things up so that the sanctions against oversized families didn’t apply to us.”
    “Those sanctions are enforced in America, too.”
    “Yes, if you make a big deal about it,” said John Paul. “Like your father. Like your whole church.”
    “Not my church.”
    “Right, of course, you’re the only person in history who is completely immune to her religious upbringing.”
    She wanted to argue with him, but she knew the sciencehis assertion was based on that showed the impossibility of escaping from the core worldview instilled in children by their parents. Even though she had long since repudiated it, it was still inside her, so that there was a constant argument, her parents’ voices sniping at her, her own inner voice arguing with them. “Even people who just quietly have lots of children get zapped by the law,” she said.
    “My older sibs were set up with relatives. Enough of us were boarded out that there were never more than two children home. We were called nieces and nephews when we ‘visited.’ ”
    “And they still maintained all this for you, even after you refused to go to Battle School?”
    “Sort of,” said John Paul. “They actually made me go to ground school for a while, but I went on strike. And then they talked about sending us all back to Poland or getting sanctions against us here in America.”
    “So why didn’t they?”
    “I had the deal in writing.”
    “Since when has that ever stopped a determined government?”
    “Oh, it wasn’t because the contract was particularly enforceable. It was the fact that it existed at all. I merely threatened to make it public. And they couldn’t deny that they had fiddled with the population laws because here we were, physical evidence that they had made an exception.”
    “Government can make all kinds of inconvenient evidence disappear.”
    “I know,” said John Paul. “Which is why I think they still have an agenda. They couldn’t get me into Battle School, but they let me stay here in America and my whole family,too. Like the devil in all the old sell-your-soul stories, they’re going to collect sometime.”
    “And that doesn’t bother you?”
    “I’ll deal with it when their plan emerges. So what about you? Their plan for you is already quite clear.”
    “Not really,” she said. “On the surface, it looks like typical Hegemony behavior—punish the daughter to get the highly visible father to cease his