Read Online First meetings in the Enderverse by Orson Scott Card - Free Book Online

crusade. Everything she did was interpreted by everyone as if her father were speaking through her, as if he somehow controlled her mind and heart. Why shouldn’t they think so? He did.
    But she refused to think about him. She was a scientist, even if she was a bit on the theoretical side. She was not a child anymore. More to the point, she was not a soldier in his army, a fact that he had never recognized and never would-especially now that his “army” was so small and weak. Then she got beeped for a meeting with the dean.
    Grad students didn’t get called in for meetings with the dean. And the fact that the secretary claimed to have no idea what the meeting was about or who else would be there filled her with foreboding. The late summer weather was quite warm, even this far north, but since Theresa lived an indoor life she rarely noticed it. Certainly she hadn’t dressed for the afternoon temperature. She was dripping with sweat by the time she got to the graduate school offices, and instead of having a few minutes in the air-conditioning to cool down, the secretary rushed her right into the dean’s office. Worse and worse.
    There was the dean and her entire dissertation committee. And Dr. Howell, who had apparently returned from retirement just for this occasion. Whatever this occasion was. They barely took time for the basic courtesies before they broke the news to her. “The foundation has decided to withdraw funding unless we remove you from the project.”
    “On what grounds?” she asked.
    “Your age, mostly,” said the dean. “You are extraordinarily young to be running a research project of this scope.”
    “But it’s my project. It only exists because I thought of it.”
    “I know it seems unfair,” said the dean. “But we won’t let this interfere with your progress toward your doctorate.”
    “Won’t let it interfere?” She laughed in consternation. “It took a year to get this grant, even though it’s one with obvious value for the current world situation. Even if I had a new research project on the back burner, you can’t pretend that this won’t postpone my degree by years.”
    “We recognize the problem this is causing you, but we’re prepared to grant you your degree with a project of… less… scope.”
    “Help me understand this,” she said. “You trust me so much that you’d grant me a degree without caring about my dissertation. Yet you don’t trust me enough to let me even take part in a vital project that I designed. Who’s going to run it?”
    She looked at her committee chairman. He blushed.
    “This isn’t even your area,” she said to him. “It’s nobody’s area but mine.”
    “As you said,” her chairman answered, “you designed the project. We’ll follow your plan exactly. Whatever data emerges, it will have the same value regardless of who heads it up.”
    She stood up. “Of course I’m leaving,” she said. “You can’t do this to me.”
    “Theresa,” said Dr. Howell.
    “Oh,” said Theresa, “is it your job to get me to go along with this?”
    “Theresa,” repeated the old woman. “You know perfectly well what this is about.”
    “No, I don’t,” said Theresa.
    “Nobody here at this table will admit it, but… it’s only ‘mostly’ about how young you are.”
    “So what’s the ‘partly’ that’s left over?” asked Theresa.
    “I think,” said Dr. Howell, “that if your father came out of retirement, suddenly there’d be no objection to one so young running an important research project.”
    Theresa looked around at the others. “You can’t be serious.”
    “Nobody has come out and said it,” said the dean, “but they have pointed out that the impetus for this came from the foundation’s main customer.”
    “The Hegemony,” said her chairman.
    “So I’m a hostage to my father’s politics.”
    “Or his religion,” said the dean. “Or whatever it is that’s driving him.”
    “And you’ll let your academic