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He was crying, and for a moment he let himself go, shedding tears for the dead women he had loved so much, and for his own death, so that he would never see his children grow up, so he would never see Petra grow old beside him, as women and men were meant to do.
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Then he got control of himself, and said what he had decided, not with his mind, but with his heart. “If there’s some way to be sure that they don’t have-that they won’t have Anton’s Key. Then I’ll have children. Then I’ll marry Petra.”
She felt her hand tighten in his. She understood. She had won.
“Easy,” said Anton. “Still just the tiniest bit illegal, but it can be done.”
Petra had won, but Bean understood that he had not lost. No, her victory was his as well.
“It will hurt,” said Petra. “But let’s make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.”
“You’re such a poet,” murmured Bean. But then he flung one arm over Anton’s shoulders, and another around Petra’s back, and held to both of them as his blurring eyes looked out over the sparkling sea.
Hours later, after dinner in a little Italian restaurant with an ancient garden, after a walk along the rambla in the noisy frolicking crowds of townspeople enjoying their membership in the human race and celebrating or searching for their mates, Bean and Petra sat in the parlor of Anton’s old-fashioned home, his fiancée shyly sifting beside him, her children asleep in the back bedrooms.
“You said it would he easy,” said Bean. “To be sure my children wouldn’t be like me.”
Anton looked at him thoughtfully. “Yes,” he finally said. “There is one man who not only knows the theory, but has done the work. Nondestructive tests in newly formed embryos. It would mean fertilization in vitro.”
“Oh good,” said Petra. “A virgin birth.”
“It would mean embryos that could be implanted even after the father is dead,” said Anton.
“You thought of everything, how sweet,” said Bean.
“I’m not sure you want to meet him,” said Anton.
“We do,” said Petra. “Soon.”
“You have a bit of history with him, Julian Delphiki.” said Anton.
“I do?” asked Bean.
“He kidnapped you once,” said Anton. “Along with nearly two dozen of your twins. He’s the one who turned that little genetic key they named for me. He’s the one who would have killed you if you hadn’t hid in a toilet.”
“Volescu,” said Petra, as if the name were a bullet to be pried out of her body.
Bean laughed grimly. “He’s still alive?”
“Just released from prison,” said Anton. “The laws have changed. Genetic alteration is no longer a crime against humanity.”
“Infanticide still is,” said Bean. “Isn’t it?”
“Technically,” said Anton, “under the law it can’t be murder when the victims had no legal right to exist. I believe the charge was ‘tampering with evidence.’ Because the bodies were burned.”
“Please tell me,” said Petra, “that it isn’t perfectly legal to murder Bean.”
“You helped save the world between then and now,” said Anton. “I think the politics of the situation would be a little different now.”
“What a relief,” said Bean.
“So this non-murderer, this tamperer with evidence,” said Petra. “I didn’t know you knew him.”
“I didn’t-I don’t,” said Anton. “I’ve never met him, but he’s written to me. Just a day before Petra did, as a matter of fact. I don’t know where he is. But I can put you in touch with him. You’ll have to take it from there.”
“So I finally get to meet the legendary Uncle Constantine,” said Bean. “Or, as Father calls him-when he wants to irritate Mother- ‘My bastard brother.’”
“How did he get out of jail, really?” asked Petra.
“I only know what he told me. But as Sister Carlotta said, the man’s a liar to the core. He believes his own lies. In which ease, Bean, he might think he’s your father. He told her that he cloned you and your brothers from himself.”
“And you think he should help us have children?” asked Petra.
“I think if you want to have children without Bean’s little problem, he’s the only one who can help you. Of course, many doctors can destroy the embryos and tell you whether they would have had your talents and your curse. But since my little key has never been turned by nature, there’s no nondestructive test for it. And in order to get anyone to develop a test, you would have to subject yourself to examination by doctors who would regard you as a career-making opportunity. Volescu’s biggest advantage is he already knows about you, and he’s in no position to brag about finding you.”
“Then give us his email,” said Bean. “We’ll go from there.”
TARGETS
From Betterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com FREE email! Sign up a friend!]
To: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com UESUS loves you! ChosenOnes.0rg]
Re: Thanks for your help
Dear Anonymous Benefactor,
I may have been in prison but I wasn’t biding under a rock. I know who you are, and I know what you’ve done. So when you offer to help me continue the research that was interrupted by my life sentence, and imply that you are responsible far having my charges reduced and my sentence commuted, I must suspect an ulterior motive.
I think you plan to use my supposed rendezvous with these supposed people as a means of killing them. Sort of like Herod asking the Wise Men to tell him where the newborn king was, so be could go and worship him also.
From: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com [Don’t go
home ALONEI LonelyHearts]
To: Befterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com [Your ADS get seen! Free E-ma il]
Re: You have misjudged me
Dear Doctor,
You hove misjudged me. I have no interest in anyone’s death. I want you to help them make babies that don’t have any of the father’s gifts or problems. Make a dozen for them.
But along the way, if you happen to get any nice little embryos that do hove the father’s gifts, don’t discard them, please. Keep them nice and safe. For me. For us. There are people who would very much like to raise a little garden full of beans.
John Paul Wiggin had noticed some years ago that the whole childrearing thing wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be. Supposedly somewhere there was such a thing as a normal child, but none of them had come anywhere near his house.
Not that he didn’t love his kids. He did. More than they would ever know; more, he suspected, than he knew himself. After all, you never know how much you love somebody until the real test comes. Would you die for this person? Would you throw yourself on the grenade, step in front of the speeding car, keep a secret under torture, to save his life? Most people never know the answer to that question. And even those who do know are still not sure whether it was love or duty or self-respect or cultural conditioning or any number of other possible explanations.
John Paul Wiggin loved his kids. But either he didn’t have enough of them, or he had too many. If he had more, then having two of them take off for some faraway colony from which they could never return in his lifetime, that might not have been so bad, because there’d still be several left at home for him to enjoy, to help, to admire as parents wanted to admire their children.
And if there had been one fewer If the government had not requisitioned a third child from them. If Andrew had never been born, had never been accepted into a program for which Peter was rejected, then perhaps Peter’s pathological ambition might have stayed within normal bounds. Perhaps his envy and resentment, his need to prove himself worthy after all, would not have tainted his life, darkening even his brightest moments.
Of course, if Andrew hadn’t been born, the world might now be honeycombed with Formic hives, and the human race nothing but a few ragged bands surviving in some hostile environment like Tierra del Fuego or Greenland or the Moon.
It wasn’t the government requisition, either. Little known fact:
Andrew had almost certainly been conceived before the requisition came. John Paul Wiggin wasn’t all that good a Catholic, until he realized that the population control laws forbade him to be. Then, because he was a stubborn Pole or a rebellious American or simply because he was that peculiar mix of genes and memory called John Paul Wiggin, there was nothing more important to him than being a good Catholic, particularly when it came to disobeying the population laws.
It was the basis of his marriage with Theresa. She wasn’t Catholic herself-which showed that John Paul wasn’t that strict about following all the rules-but she came from a big-family tradition and she agreed with him before they got married that they would have more than two children, no matter what it cost them.
In the end, it cost them nothing. No loss of job. No loss of prestige. In fact, they ended up greatly honored as the parents of the savior of the human race.
Only they would never get to see Valentine or Andrew get married, would never see their children. Would probably not live long enough to know when they arrived at their colony world.
And now they were mere fixtures attached to the life of the child they liked the least.
Though truth to tell, John Paul didn’t dislike Peter as much as his mother did. Peter didn’t get under his skin the way he irritated Theresa. Perhaps that was because John Paul was a good counterbalance to Peter-John Paul could be useful to him. Where Peter kept a hundred things going at once, juggling all his projects and doing none of them perfectly, John Paul was a man who had to dot every i, cross every t. So without exactly telling anyone what his job was, John Paul kept close watch on everything Peter was doing and followed through on things so they actually got done. Where Peter assumed that underlings would understand his purpose and adapt. John Paul knew that they would misunderstand everything, and spelled it out for them, followed through to make sure things happened just right.
Of course, in order to do this, John Paul had to pretend that he was acting as Peter’s eyes and ears. Fortunately, the people he straightened out had no reason to go to Peter and explain the dumb things they had been doing before John Paul showed up with his questions, his checklists, his cheerful chats that didn’t quite come right out and admit to being tutorials.
But what could John Paul do when the project Peter was advancing was so deeply dangerous and, yes, stupid that the last thing John Paul wanted to do was help him with it?
John Paul’s position in this little community of Hegemoniacs did not allow him to obstruct what Peter was doing. He was a facilitator, not a bureaucrat; he cut the red tape, he didn’t spin it out like a spider web.
In the past, the most obstructive thing John Paul could do was not to do anything at all. Without him there, nudging, correcting, things slowed down, and often a project died without his help.
But with Achilles, there was no chance of that. The Beast, as Theresa and John Paul called him, was as methodical as Peter wasn’t. He seemed to leave nothing to chance. So if John Paul simply left him alone, he would accomplish everything he wanted.
“Peter, you’re not in a position to see what the Beast is doing,” John Paul said to him.
“Father, I know what I’m doing.”
“He’s got time for everybody,” said John Paul. “He’s friends with every clerk, every janitor, every secretary, every bureaucrat. People you breeze past with a wave or with nothing at all, he sits and chats with them, makes them feel important.”
“Yes, he’s a charmer, all right.”
“Peter-”
“It’s not a popularity contest, Father.”
“No, it’s a loyalty contest. You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you’ll accomplish, and nothing more. They are your power, these public servants you employ, and he’s winning their loyalty away from you.
“Superficially, perhaps,” said Peter.
“For most people, the superficial is all there is. They act on the feelings of the moment. They like him better than you.”
“There’s always somebody that people like better,” said Peter with a vicious little smile.
John Paul restrained himself from making the obvious one-word retort, because it would devastate Peter. The single crushing word would have been “yes.”
“Peter,” said John Paul, “when the Beast leaves here, who knows how many people he’ll leave behind who like him well enough to slip him a bit of gossip now and then? Or a secret document?”
“Father, I appreciate your concern. And once again, I can only tell you that I have things under control.”
“You seem to think that anything you don’t know isn’t worth knowing,” said John Paul, not for the first time.
“And you seem to think that anything I’m doing is not being done well enough,” said Peter for at least the hundredth time.
That’s how these discussions always went. John Paul did not push it farther than that-he knew that if he became too annoying, if Peter felt too oppressed by having his parents around, they’d be moved out of any position of influence.
That would be unbearable. It would mean losing the last of their children.
“We really ought to have another child or two,” said Theresa one day. “I’m still young enough, and we always meant to have more than the three the government allotted us.”
“Not likely,” said John Paul.
“Why not? Aren’t you still a good Catholic, or did that last only as long as being a Catholic meant being a rebel?”
John Paul didn’t like the implications of that, particularly because it might have some truth in it. “No, Theresa, darling. We can’t have more children because they’d never let us keep them.”
“Who? The government doesn’t care how many children we have now. They’re all future taxpayers or baby makers or cannon fodder to them.”
“We’re the parents of Ender Wiggin, of Demosthenes, of Locke. Our having another child would be international news. I feared it even before Andrew’s battle companions were all kidnapped, but after that there was no doubt.”
“Do you seriously think people would assume that because our first three children were so- “Darling.” said John Paul-knowing that she hated it when he called her darling because he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of the term, “they’d have the babies out of the cradle, that’s how fast they’d strike. They’d be targets from the moment of conception, just waiting for somebody to come along and turn them into puppets of one regime or another. And even if we were able to protect them, every moment of their lives would be deformed by the press of public curiosity. If we thought Peter was messed up by being in Andrew’s shadow, think what it would be like for them.”
“It might be easier for them,” said Theresa. “They would never remember not being in the shadow of their brothers.”
“That only makes it worse,” said John Paul. “They’ll have no idea of who they are, apart from being somebody’s sib.”
“It was just a thought.”
“I wish we could do it,” said John Paul. It was easy to be generous after she had given in.
“I just.. . miss having children around.”
“So do I. And if I thought they could be children...
“None of our kids was ever really a child,” said Theresa sadly. “Never really carefree.”
John Paul laughed. “The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who’ve forgotten their own childhood.”
Theresa thought for a moment and then laughed. “You’re right. Everything is either heaven on earth or the end of the world.”
That conversation had been back in Greensboro, after Peter went public with his real identity and before he was given the nearly empty title of Hegemon. They rarely referred back to it.
But the idea was looking more attractive now. There were days when John Paul wanted to go home, sweep Theresa into his arms and say, “Darling”-and he wouldn’t be even the tiniest bit sarcastic-”I have our tickets to space. We’re joining a colony. We’re leaving this world and all its cares behind, and we’ll make new babies up in space where they can’t save the world or take it over, either”
Then Theresa did this business with trying to get into Achilles’s room and John Paul honestly wondered if the stress she was under had affected her mental processes.
Precisely because he was so concerned about what she did, he deliberately did not discuss it with her for a couple of days, waiting to see if she brought it up.
She did not. But he didn’t really expect her to.
When he judged that the first blush of embarrassment was over and she could discuss things without trying to protect herself, he broached the subject over dessert one night.
“So you want to be a housekeeper,” he said.
“I wondered how long it would take you to bring that up,” said Theresa with a grin.
“And I wondered how long before you would,” said John Paul- with a grin as laced with irony as her own.
“Now you’ll never know,” she said.
“I think,” said John Paul, “that you were planning to kill him.”
Theresa laughed. “Oh. definitely, I was under assignment from my controller”
“I assumed as much.”
“I was joking,” said Theresa at once.
“I’m not. Was it something Graff said? Or just a spy novel?”
“I don’t read spy novels.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t an assignment,” said Theresa. “But yes, he did put the thought into my mind. That the best thing for everybody would be for the Beast not to leave Brazil alive.”
“Actually, I don’t think that’s so,” said John Paul.
“Why not? Surely you don’t think he has any value to the world.”
“He brought everybody out of hiding, didn’t he’?” said John Paul. “Everybody showed their true colors.”
“Not everybody. Not yet.”
“Things are out in the open. The world is divided into camps. The ambitions are exposed. The traitors are revealed.”
“So the job is done,” said Theresa, “and there’s no more use for him.”
“I never really thought of you as a murderer”
“I’m not.”
“But you had a plan, right?”
“I was testing to see if any plan was possible-if I could get into his room. The answer was no.
“Ah. So the objective remains the same. Only the method has been changed.”
“I probably won’t do it,” said Theresa.
“I wonder how many assassins have told themselves that-right up to the moment when they fired the gun or plunged in the knife or served the poisoned dates?”
“You can stop teasing me now,” said Theresa. “I don’t care about politics or the repercussions. If killing the Beast cost Peter the Hegemony, I wouldn’t care. I’m just not going to sit back and watch the Beast devour my son.
“But there’s a better way,” said John Paul.
“Besides killing him?”
“To get him away from where he can kill Peter. That’s our real goal, isn’t it? Not to save the world from the Beast, but to save Peter. If we kill Achilles-”
“I don’t recall inviting you into my evil conspiracy.”
“Then yes, the Beast is dead, but so is Peter’s credibility as Hegemon. He’s forever after as tainted as Macbeth.”
“I know, I know.”
“What we need is to taint the Beast, not Peter.”
“Killing is more final.”
“Killing makes a martyr, a legend, a victim. Killing gives you St. Thomas a Becket. The Canterbury pilgrims.”
“So what’s your better plan?”
“We get the Beast to try to kill us.”
Theresa looked at him dumbfounded.
“We don’t let him succeed,” said John Paul.
“And I thought Peter was the one who loved brinksmanship. Good heavens. Johnny P, you’ve just explained where his madness comes from. How in the world can you arrange for someone to try to kill you in such a public way that it becomes discovered-and at the same time be absolutely sure that he won’t succeed.”
“We don’t actually let him fire a bullet,” said John Paul, a little impatiently. “All we do is gather evidence that he’s preparing the attempt. Peter will have no choice but to send him away-and then we can make sure people know why. I may be resented a bit here, but people really like you. They won’t like the Beast after he plotted to harm their Teresa.
“But nobody likes you,” said Theresa. “What if it’s you he goes for first?”
“Whichever,” said John Paul.
“And how will we know what he’s plotting?”
“Because I put keyboard-reading programs into all the computers on the system and software to analyze his actions and give me reports on everything he does. There’s no way for him to make a plan without emailing somebody about something.”
“I can think of a hundred ways, one of which is-he does it himself, without telling anybody.”
“He’ll have to look up our schedule then, won’t he? Or something. Something that will be suspicious. Something that I can show to Peter and force him to get rid of the boy.”
“So the way to shoot down the Beast is to paint big targets on our own foreheads.” said Theresa.
“Isn’t that a marvelous plan?” said John Paul, laughing at the absurdity of it. “But I can’t think of a better one. And it’s nowhere near as bad as yours. Do you actually believe you could kill somebody?”
“Mother bear protects the cub,” said Theresa.
“Are you with me? Promise not to slip a fatal laxative into his soup?”
“I’ll see what your plan is, when you actually come up with one that sounds like it might succeed.”
“We’ll get the beast thrown out of here,” said John Paul. “One way or another” That was the plan-which, John Paul knew, was no plan at all, since Theresa hadn’t actually promised him she’d give up on her plot to become a killer-by-stealth.
The trouble was that when he accessed the programs that were monitoring Achilles’s computer use, the report said, “No computer use.”
This was absurd. John Paul knew the boy had used a computer because he had received a few messages himself-innocent inquiries, but they bore the screen name that Peter had given to the Beast.
But he couldn’t ask anybody outright to help him figure out why his spy programs weren’t catching Achilles’s sign-ons and reading his keystrokes. The word would get around, and then John Paul wouldn’t seem quite such an innocent victim when Achilles’s plot-whatever it was-came to light.
Even when he actually saw Achilles with his own eyes, logging in and typing away on a message, the report that night-which affirmed that the keystroke monitor was at work on that very machine- still showed no activity from Achilles.
John Paul thought about this for a good long while, trying to imagine how Achilles could have circumvented his software without logging on at least once.
Until it finally dawned on him to ask his software a different question.
“List all log-ons from that computer today,” he typed into his desk.
After a few moments, the report came up: “No log-ons.”
No log-ons from any of the nearby computers. No log-ons from any of the faraway computers. No log-ons, apparently, in the entire Hegemony computer system.
And since people were logging on all the time, including John Paul himself, this result was impossible.
He found Peter in a meeting with Ferreira, the Brazilian computer expert who was in charge of system security. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but it’s even better to tell you this when both of you are together.”
Peter was irritated, but answered politely enough. “Go ahead.”
John Paul had tried to think of some benign explanation for his having tried to mount a spy operation throughout the Hegemony computer network, but he couldn’t. So he told the truth, that he was trying to spy on Achilles-but said nothing about what he intended to do with the information.
By the time he was done, Peter and Ferreira were laughing- bitterly, ironically, but laughing.
“What’s funny?”
“Father,” said Peter. “Didn’t it occur to you that we had software on the system doing exactly the same job?”
“Which software did you use?” asked Ferreira.
John Paul told him and Ferreira sighed. “Ordinarily my software would have detected his and wiped it out.” he said. “But your father has a very privileged access to the net. So privileged that my snoopware had to let it by.”
“But didn’t your software at least tell you?” asked Peter, annoyed.
“His is interrupt-driven, mine is native in the operating system,” said Ferreira. “Once his snoopware got past the initial barrier and was resident in the system, there was nothing to report. Both programs do the same job, just at different times in the machine’s cycle. They read the keypress and pass the information on to the operating system, which passes it on to the program. They also pass it on to their own keystroke log. But both programs clear the buffer so that the keystroke doesn’t get read twice.”
Peter and John Paul both made the same gesture-hands to the forehead, covering the eyes. They understood at once, of course.
Keystrokes came in and got processed by Ferreira’s snoopware or by John Paul’s-but never by both. So both keystroke logs would show nothing but random letters, none of which would amount to anything meaningful. None of which would ever look like a log-on- even though there were log-ons all over the system all the time.
“Can we combine the logs?” asked John Paul. “We have all the keystrokes, after all.”
“We have the alphabet, too,” said Ferreira, “and if we just find the right order to arrange them in, those letters will spell out everything that was ever written.”
“It’s not as bad as that,” said Peter. At least the letters are in order. It shouldn’t be that hard to meld them together in a way that makes sense.”
“But we have to meld all of them in order to find Achilles’s logons.
“Write a program,” said Peter “One that will find everything that might be a log-on by him, and then you can work on the material immediately following those possibles.”
“Write a program,” murmured Ferreira.
“Or I will,” said Peter. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
That sarcasm doesn’t make people love you, Peter, said John Paul silently.
Then again, there was no chance. Given Peter’s parents, that such sarcasm would not come readily to his lips.
“I’ll sort it out,” said Ferreira.
“I’m sorry,” said John Paul.
Ferreira only sighed. “Didn’t it at least cross your mind that we would have software already in place to do the same job?”
“You mean you had snoopware that would give me regular reports on what Achilles was writing?” asked John Paul. Oops. Peter’s not the only sarcastic one. But then, I’m not trying to unite the world.
“There’s no reason for you to know,” said Peter.
Time to bite the bullet. “I think Achilles is planning to kill your mother.”
“Father,” said Peter impatiently. “He doesn’t even know her.”
“Do you think there’s any chance that he didn’t hear that she tried to get into his room.”
“But ... kill her?” asked Ferreira.
“Achilles doesn’t do things by half-measures,” said John Paul. “And nobody is more loyal to Peter than she is.”
“Not even you, Father?” asked Peter sweetly.
“She doesn’t see your faults,” lied John Paul. “Her motherly instincts blind her.”
“But you have no such handicap.”
“Not being your mother,” said John Paul.
“My snoopware should have caught this anyway,” said Ferreira. “I blame only myself. The system shouldn’t have had that kind of back door”
“Systems always do,” said John Paul.
After Ferreira left, Peter said a few cold words. “I know how to keep Mother completely safe,” he said. “Take her away from here. Go to a colony world. Go somewhere and do something, but stop trying to protect me.
“Protect you?”
“Do you think I’m so stupid that I’ll believe this cockamamy story about Achilles wanting to kill Mother?”
“Ah. You’re the only person here worth killing.”
“I’m the only one whose death would remove a major obstacle from Achilles’s path.”
John Paul could only shake his head.
“Who else, then?” Peter demanded.
“Nobody else, Peter,” said John Paul. “Not a soul. Everybody’s safe, because, after all, Achilles has shown himself to be a perfectly rational boy who would never, ever kill somebody without a perfectly rational purpose in view.”
“Well, yes, of course, he’s psychotic,” said Peter “I didn’t mean he wasn’t psychotic.”
“So many psychotics, so few really effective drugs,” said John Paul as he left the room. That night when he told Theresa, she groaned. “So he’s been getting a free ride.”
“We’ll put it all together soon enough, I’m sure,” said John Paul.
“No, Johnny P. We aren’t sure that it will be soon enough. For all we know, it’s already too late.”
CONCEPTION
To: Stone%CoId?IComeAnon corn
From: Third%Party@MysteriousEast.org
Re: Definitely not vicbyssoise
I don’t know who you are, don’t know what this message
means, He is in China. I was a tourist there, walking along
a public sidewalk. He gave me a folded slip of paper and
asked me to post a message to this emailing site, with the
subject shown above. So here it is:
“He thinks I told him where Caligulo would be but I did not.”
I hope this means something to you and that you get it, because be seemed very intense about this. As for me, you don’t know who am, neither does he, and that’s the way I like it.
“It’s not the same city,” said Bean.
“Well, of course not,” said Petra. “You’re taller”
It was Bean’s first return to Rotterdam since he left as a very young child to go into space and learn to be a soldier. In all his wanderings with Sister Carlotta after the war, she never once suggested coming here, and he never thought of it himself.
But this was where Volescu was-he had had the chutzpah to reestablish himself in the city where he had been arrested. Now, of course, he was not calling his work research-even though it had been illegal for many years. other scientists had pursued it quietly and when, after the war, they were able to publish again, they left all of Volescu’s achievements in the dust.
So his offices, in an old but lovely building in the heart of the city, were modestly labeled, in Common, REPRODUCTIVE SAFETY SERVICE S.
“Safety,” said Petra. “An odd name, considering how many babies he killed.”
“Not babies,” said Bean mildly. “Illegal experiments were terminated, but no actual legal babies were ever involved.”
“That really stops your hogs, doesn’t it,” she said.
“You watch too many vids. You’re beginning to pick up American slang.”
“What else can I do, with you spending all your time online, saving the world?”
“I’m about to meet my maker,” said Bean. “And you’re complaining to me about my spending too much time on pure altruism.”
“He’s not your maker,” said Petra.
“Who is, then? My biological parents? They made Nikolai. I was leftovers in the fridge.”
“I was referring to God,” said Petra.
“1 know you were,” said Bean, smiling. “Me, I can’t help but think that I exist because God blinked. If he’d been paying attention, I could never have happened.”
“Don’t goad me about religion,” said Petra. “I won’t play.”
“You started it,” said Bean.
“I’m not Sister Carlotta.”
“I couldn’t have married you if you were. Was that your choice? Me or the nunnery?”
Petra laughed and gave him a little shove. But it wasn’t much of a shove. Mostly it was just an excuse to touch him. To prove to herself that he was hers, that she could touch him when she liked, and it was all right. Even with God, since they were legally married now. A necessity before in vitro fertilization, so that there could be no question about paternity or joint ownership of the embryos.
A necessity, but also what she wanted.
When had she started wanting this? In Battle School, if anyone had asked her whom she would eventually marry, she would have said, “A fool, since no one smarter would have me,” but if pressed, and if she trusted her inquisitor not to blab, she would have said, “Dink Meeker.” He was her closest friend in Battle School.
Dink was even Dutch. He wasn’t in the Netherlands these days, however The Netherlands had no military. Dink had been lent to England, rather like a prize football player, and he was cooperating in joint Anglo-American planning, which was such a waste of his talent, since on neither side of the Atlantic was there the slightest desire to get involved in the turmoil that was rocking the rest of the world.
She didn’t even regret his absence. She still cared about him, had fond memories of him-even, perhaps, loved him in a vaguely-more than-platonic way. But after Battle School, where he had been a brave rebel challenging the system, refusing to command an army in the battle room and joining her in helping Ender in his struggle against the teachers-after Battle School, they had worked together almost continuously, and perhaps came to know each other too well. The rebel pose was gone, and he stood revealed as a brilliant but cocky commander. And when she was shamed in front of Dink, when she was overcome by fatigue during a game that turned out to be real, it became a barrier between her and the others, but it was an unfaultable wall between her and Dink.
Even when Ender’s jeesh was kidnapped and confined together in Russia, she and Dink bantered with each other just like old times, but she felt no spark.
Through all that time, she would have laughed if anyone suggested that she would fall in love with Bean, and a scant three years later would be married to him. Because if Dink had been the most likely candidate for her heart in Battle School, Bean had to be the least likely. She had helped him a bit, yes, as she had helped Ender when he first started out, but it was a patronizing kind of help, giving a hand up to an underdog.
In Command School, she had come to respect Bean, to see something of his struggle, how he never did anything to win the approval of others, but always gave whatever it took to help his friends. She came to understand him as one of the most deeply altruistic and loyal people she had ever seen-even though he did not see either of these traits in himself, but always found some reason why everything he did was entirely for his own benefit.
When Bean was the only one not kidnapped, she knew at once that he would try anything to save them. The others talked about trying to contact him on the outside, but gave up at once when they heard that he had been killed. Petra never gave up on him. She knew that Achilles could not possibly have killed him so easily. She knew that he would find a way to set her free.
And he had done it.
She didn’t love him because he had saved her. She loved him because, during all her months in captivity, constantly having to bear Achilles’s looming presence with his leering threat of death entwined with his lust to own her, Bean was her dream of freedom. When she imagined life outside of captivity, she kept thinking of it as life with him. Not as man and wife, but simply: When I’m free, then we’ll find some way to fight Achilles. We. Will. And the “we” was always her and Bean.
Then she learned about his genetic difference. About the death that awaited him from overgrowing his body’s ability to nurture itself. And she knew at once that she wanted to bear his children. Not because she wanted to have children who suffered from some freakish affliction that made them brilliant ephemera, butterflies catching the sunlight only for a single day, but because she did not want Bean’s life to leave no child behind. She could not bear to lose him, and desperately wanted something of him to stay with her when he was gone.
She could never explain this to him. She could hardly explain it to herself.
But somehow things had come together better than she hoped. Her gambit of getting him to see Anton had persuaded him far more quickly than she had thought would be possible.
It led her to believe that he, too, without even realizing it, had come to love her in return. That just as she wanted him to live on in his children, he now wanted her to be the mother who cared for them after he died.
If that wasn’t love, it would do.
They married in Spain, with Anton and his new bride looking on. It had been dangerous to stay there as long as they did, though they tried to take the curse off it by leaving frequently with all their bags and then returning to stay in a different town each time. Their favorite city was Barcelona, which was a fairyland of buildings that looked as if they had all been designed by Gaudi-or, perhaps, had sprung from Gaudi’s dreams. They were married in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia. it was one of the few genuine Gaudis still standing, and the name made it the perfect place for a wedding. Of course the “sagrada familia” referred officially to the sacred family of Jesus. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t also apply to all families. Resides, weren’t her children going to be immaculately conceived?
The honeymoon, such as it was-a week together, island-hopping through the Balearics, enjoying the Mediterranean Sea and the African breezes-was still a week longer than she had hoped for. After knowing Bean’s character about as well as one person ever gets to know another person, Petra had been rather shy about getting to know his body, and letting him know hers. But here Darwin helped them, for the passions that made species survive helped them to forgive each other’s awkwardness and foolishness and ignorance and hunger.
She was already taking pills to regulate her ovulation and more pills to stimulate as many eggs as possible to come to maturity. There was no possibility of their conceiving a baby naturally before they began the in vitro fertilization process. But she wished for it all the same, and twice she woke from dreams in which a kindly doctor told them, “I’m sorry, I can’t implant embryos, because you’re already pregnant.”
But she refused to let it trouble her. She would have his baby soon enough.
Now they were here in Rotterdam, getting down to business. Looking, not for the kindly doctor of her dream, but for the mass murderer who only spared Bean’s life by accident to provide them with a child who would not die as a giant by the age of twenty.
“If we wait long enough,” said Bean, “they’ll close the office.”
“No,” said Petra. “Volescu will wait all night to see you. You’re his experiment that succeeded despite his cowardice.”
“I thought it was my success, not his.”
She pressed herself against his arm. “It was my success,” she said.
“Yours? How?”
“It must have been. I’m the one who ended up with all the prizes.”
“If you had ever said things like that in Battle School, you would have been the laughingstock of all the armies.”
“That’s because the armies were all composed of prepubescent children. Grownups don’t think such things are embarrassing.”
“Actually, they do,” said Bean. “There’s only this brief window of adolescence where extravagantly romantic remarks are taken for poetry.”
“Such is the power of hormones that we absolutely understand the biological causes of our feelings, and yet we still feel them.”
“Let’s not go inside,” said Bean. “Let’s go back to the inn and have some more feelings.”
She kissed him. “Let’s go inside and make a baby.”
“Try for a baby,” said Bean. “Because I won’t let you have one in which Anton’s Key is turned on.”
“I know,” she said.
“And I have your promise that embryos with Anton’s Key will all be discarded.”
“Of course,” she said. That satisfied him, though she was sure that he would notice that she had never actually said the words. Maybe he did, unconsciously, and that was why he kept asking.
It was hypocritical and dishonest of her, of course, and she almost felt bad about it sometimes, but what happened after he died would be none of his business.
“All right then,” he said.
“All right then,” she answered. “Time to go meet the baby killer,
“I don’t suppose we should call him that to his face, though, right?”
“Since when are you the one who worries about good manners?”
Volescu was a weasel, just as Petra knew he would be. He was all business, playing the role of Mr. Scientist, but Petra knew well what lay behind the mask. She could see the way he couldn’t keep his eyes off Bean, the mental measurements he was making. She wanted to make some snide remark about how prison seemed to have done him good, he was carrying some extra weight, needed to walk that off... but they were here to have the man choose them a baby, and it would serve no purpose to irritate him.
“I couldn’t believe I was going to meet you,” said Volescu. “I knew from that nun who visited me that one of you had lived, and I was glad. I was already in prison by then, the very thing that destroying the evidence had been designed to prevent. So I didn’t need to destroy it after all. I wished I hadn’t. Then here she comes and tells me the lost one lived. It was the one ray of hope in a long night of despair. And here you are.
Again he eyed Bean from head to toe.
“Yes,” said Bean, “here I am, and very tall for my age, too, as you seem to keep trying to verify.”
“I’m sorry,” said Volescu. “I know that other business has brought you here. Very important business.”
“You’re sure,” said Bean, “that your test for Anton’s Key is absolutely accurate and nondestructive?”
“You exist, don’t you? You are what you are, yes? We would not have kept any in which the gene did not take. We had a safe, reliable test.”
“Every one of the cloned embryos was brought to life.” said Bean. “It worked in every one of them?”
“I was very good with planter viruses in those days. A skill that even now isn’t much called for in procedures with humans, since alterations are still illegal.” He chuckled, because everyone knew that there was a lively business in tailored human babies in various places around the world, and that skill in gene alteration was in more demand than ever. That was almost certainly Volescu’s real business, and the Netherlands was one of the safest places to practice it.
But as Petra listened to him, she became more and more uneasy. Volescu was lying about something. The change in his manner had been slight, but after spending months observing every tiny nuance in Achilles’s demeanor, simply as a matter of survival, she had turned herself into a very precise observer of other people. The signs of deception were there. Energized speech, overly rhythmic, too jovial. Eyes that kept darting away from theirs. Hands that wouldn’t stop touching his coat, his pencil.
What would he be lying about?
It was obvious, once she thought about it.
There was no test. Back when he created Bean, Volescu had simply introduced the planter virus that was supposed to alter all the cells of the embryos, and then waited to see if any embryos lived, and which of the survivors had been successfully altered. It happened that they all survived. But not all of them necessarily had Anton’s Key.
Maybe that was why, of all the nearly two dozen babies, only Bean escaped.
Maybe Bean was the only one in whom the alteration was successful. The only one with Anton’s Key. The only one who was so preternaturally intelligent that he was able, at one year of age, to realize there was danger, climb out of his bassinet, get himself inside a toilet tank, and actually stay alive there until the danger passed.
That had to be Volescu’s lie. Maybe he had developed a test since then, but that was unlikely. Why would he imagine he’d need it? But he said that he had such a test so he could.., could do what?
Start his experiment again. Take their leftover embryos, and instead of discarding the ones with Anton’s Key, he’d keep them all and raise them and study them. This time it wouldn’t be just one out of two dozen who had the enhanced intelligence and the shortened lifespan. This time, the genetic odds suggested a fifty-fifty distribution of Anton’s Key among the embryos.
So now Petra had a decision to make. If she said out loud what she was so certain of in her mind, Bean would probably realize she was right and the entire deal would be off. lf Volescu had no way to test, it was certain nobody else did. Bean would refuse to have children at all.
So if she was to have Bean’s child, Volescu had to be the one to do it, not because he had a test for Anton’s Key, but because Bean believed he did.
But what about the other embryos? They would be her children, too, growing up as the slaves, the experimental subjects of a man like this, completely without morals.
“Of course you know,” said Petra, “that you won’t do the actual implantation.”
Since Bean had never heard this wrinkle in their plans, he was no doubt surprised-but, being Bean, he showed nothing, merely smiled a bit to show that she was speaking for both of them. Such trust. She didn’t even feel guilty that he trusted her so much at a moment when she was working so hard to deceive him. She may not be doing what he thought that he wanted, but she knew she was doing what he really desired, deep down in his genes.
Volescu showed surprise, however. “But. . . what do you mean?”
“Forgive me,” said Petra, “but we will stay with you through the entire fertilization process, and we will watch as every fertilized embryo is taken to the Women’s Hospital. Where they will be under hospital security until the implantation takes place.”
Volescu’s face reddened. “What do you accuse me of?”
“Of being the man you have already proven yourself to be.”
“Many years ago, and I paid my debt.”
Bean understood now-enough, at least, to join in, his tone of voice as light and cheerful as Petra’s. “We have no doubt of that, but of course we want to make sure we don’t have any of our little embryos with Anton’s Key waking up to some unpleasant surprises in a room full of children, as I did once.”
Volescu rose to his feet. “This interview is over.”
Petra’s heart sank. She shouldn’t have said anything at all. Now there would be no implantation and Bean would discover...
“So we proceed to extract the eggs?” asked Bean. “The time is right, I believe. That’s why we made the appointment for this day.”
Volescu looked at him sharply. “After you insulted me?”
“Come now, Doctor,” said Bean. “You take the eggs from her, and then I make my donation. That’s how salmon do it. It’s really quite natural. Though I’d like to skip the swim upstream, if I can.”
Volescu eyed him for a long moment, then smiled his tight little smile. “My little half-nephew Julian has such a sense of humor.”
Petra waited, hardly wanting to breathe, definitely not wishing to speak, though a thousand words raced through her head.
“All right, yes, of course you can protect the fertilized embryos however you want. I understand your… lack of trust. Even though I know it is misplaced.”
“Then while you and Petra do whatever it is you’re going to do,” said Bean, “I’ll call for a couple of couriers from the fertility center at Women’s Hospital to come and await the embryos and take them to be frozen.”
“It will be hours before we reach that stage,” said Volescu.
“We can afford to pay for their time,” said Petra. “And we don’t want any chance of slipups or delays.”
“I will have to have access to the embryos again for several hours, of course,” said Volescu. “In order to separate them and test them.”
“In our presence,” said Petra. “And the fertility specialist who is going to implant the first one.”
“Of course,” said Volescu with a tight smile. “I will sort them out for you, and discard the-”
“We will discard and destroy any that have Anton’s Key,” said Bean.
“That goes without saying,” said Volescu stiffly.
He hates these rules we’ve sprung on him, thought Petra. She could see it in his eyes, despite the calm demeanor. He’s furious. He’s even... embarrassed, yes. Well, since that’s probably as close as he’s ever come to feeling shame, it’s good for him.
While Petra was examined by the staff doctor who would do the implantation, Bean saw to hiring a security service. A guard would be on duty at the embryo “nursery,” as the hospital staff charmingly called it, all day, every day. “Since you’re the one who first started being paranoid,” Bean told Petra, “I have no choice but to outparanoid you.”
It was a relief actually. During the days before the embryos were ready for implantation, while Volescu was no doubt trying frantically to devise some nondestructive procedure that he could pretend was a genetic test, Petra was glad not to have to stay in the hospital personally watching over the embryos the whole time.
It gave her a chance to explore the city of Bean’s childhood. Bean, however, seemed determined to visit only the tourist sites and then get back to his computer. She knew that it made him nervous to stay in one city for so long, especially because for the first time, their whereabouts were known to another person whom they did not trust. It was doubtful Volescu knew any of their enemies. But Bean insisted on changing hotels every day, and walking blocks from their hotel in order to hail a taxi, so that no enemy could set an easy trap for them.
He was evading more than his enemies, though. He was also evading his past in this city. She scanned a city map and found the area that Bean was clearly avoiding. And the next morning, after Bean had chosen the first cab of the day, she leaned forward and gave the taxi driver directions.
It took Bean only a few moments to realize where the cab was going. She saw him tense up. But he did not refuse to go or even complain about her having compelled him. How could he? It would be an admission that he was avoiding the places he had known as a child. A confession of pain and fear.
She was not going to let him pass the day in silence, however “I remember the stories you’ve told me,” she said to him, gently. “There aren’t many of them, but still I wanted to see for myself. I hope it’s not too painful for you. But even if it is, I hope you’ll bear it. Because someday I’ll want to tell our children about their father. And how can I tell the stories if I don’t know where they took place?”
After the briefest pause, Bean nodded.
They left the cab and he took her through the streets of his childhood, which had been old and shabby even then. “It’s changed very little,” said Bean. “Really just the one difference. There aren’t thousands of abandoned children everywhere. Apparently somebody found the budget to deal with the orphans.”
She kept asking questions, paying close attention to the answers, and finally he understood how serious she was, how much it meant to her Bean began taking her off the main streets. “I lived in the alleys,” he explained. “In the shadows. Like a vulture, waiting for things to die. I had to watch for scraps that other children didn’t see. Things discarded at night. Spills from garbage bins. Anything that might have a few calories in it.”
He walked up to one dumpster and laid his hand against it. “This one,” he said. “This one saved my life. There was a restaurant then, where that music shop is. I think the restaurant employee who dumped their garbage knew I was lurking. He always took out most of the cooking garbage in the late afternoon, in daylight. The older kids took everything. And then the scraps from the night’s meals, those got dumped in the morning, in daylight again, and the other kids got that, too. But he usually came outside once in the darkness. To smoke right here by the garbage bin. And after his smoke, in the darkness, there’d be a scrap of something, right here.”
Bean put his hand on a narrow shelf formed by the frame that allowed the garbage truck to lift the bin.
“Such a tiny dinner table,” said Petra.
“I think he must have been a survivor of the street himself,” said Bean, “because it was never something so large as to attract attention. It was always something I could slip into my mouth all at once, so no one ever saw me holding food in my hand. I would have died without him. It was only a couple of months and then he stopped- probably lost his job or moved on to something else-and I have no idea who he was. But it kept me alive.”
“What a lovely thing, to think such a person could have come out of the streets,” said Petra.
“Well, yes, now I see that,” said Bean. “But at the time I didn’t think of that sort of thing at all. I was ... focused. I knew he was doing it deliberately, but I didn’t bother to imagine why, except to eliminate the possibility that it was a trap, or that he had drugged it or poisoned it somehow.”
“How did you eliminate that possibility?”
“I ate the first thing he put there and I didn’t die, and I didn’t keel over and then wake up in a child whorehouse somewhere.”
“They had such places?”
“There were rumors that that’s what happened to children who disappeared from the street. Along with the rumors that they were cooked into spicy stews in the immigrants’ section of town. Those I don’t believe.”
She wrapped her arms around his chest. “Oh, Bean, what a hellish place.”
“Achilles came from here, too,” he said.
“He was never as small as you were.”
“But he was crippled. That bad leg. He had to be smart to stay alive. He had to keep everyone else from crushing him for no better reason than because they could. Maybe his thing about having to eliminate anyone who sees his helplessness-maybe that was a survival mechanism for him, under these circumstances.”
“You’re such a Christian,” said Petra. “So full of charity.”
“Speaking of which,” said Bean. “I assume you’re going to raise our child Armenian Catholic, right?”
“It would make Sister Carlotta happy, don’t you think?”
“She was happy no matter what I did,” said Bean. “God made her happy. She’s happy now, if she’s anything at all. She was a happy person.
“You make her sound-what?-mentally deficient?”
“Yes. She was incapable of holding on to malice. A serious defect.”
“I wonder if there’s a genetic test for it,” said Petra. Then she regretted it immediately. The last thing she wanted was for Bean to think too much about genetic tests, and realize what seemed so obvious to her, that Volescu had no test.
They visited many other places, and more and more of them made him tell her little stories. Here’s where Poke used to hide a stash of food to reward kids who did well. Here’s where Sister Carlotta first sat down with us to teach us to read. This was our best sleeping place during the winter, until some bigger kids found us and drove us out.
“Here’s where Poke stood over Achilles with a cinderblock in her hands,” said Bean, “ready to dash his brains out.”
“If only she had,” said Petra.
“She was too good a person,” said Bean. “She couldn’t imagine the evil that might be in him. I didn’t, either, until I saw him lying there, what was in his eyes when he looked up at that cinderblock. I’ve never seen so much hate. That was all-no fear. I saw her death in his eyes right then. I told her she had to do it. Had to kill him. She couldn’t. But it happened just the way I warned her. If you let him live, he’ll kill you, I said, and he did.”
“Where was it?” asked Petra. “The place where Achilles killed her? Can you take me there?”
He thought about it for a few moments, then walked her to the waterfront among the docks. They found a clear place where they could see between the boats and ships and barges out to where the great Rhine swept past on its way to the North Sea.
“What a powerful place,” said Petra.
“What do you mean?”
“It just-the river, so strong. And yet human beings were able to build this along its banks. This harbor Nature is strong but the human mind is stronger”
“Except when it isn’t,” said Bean.
“He gave her body to the river, didn’t he?”
“He dumped her into the water, yes.”
“But the way Achilles saw what he did. Giving her to the water Maybe he romanticized it.”
“He strangled her,” said Bean. “I don’t care what he thought while he did it, or afterward. He kissed her and then he strangled her.”
“You didn’t see the murder, I hope!” said Petra. It would be too terrible if Bean bad been carrying such an image in his mind all these years.
“I saw the kiss,” said Bean. “I was too selfish and stupid to see what it meant.”
Petra remembered her own kiss from Achilles, and shuddered. “You thought what anyone would have thought,” said Petra. “You thought his kiss meant what mine does.” And she kissed him.
He kissed her back. Hungrily.
But when the kiss ended, his face grew wistful again. “I would undo everything, all that I’ve done with my life since then,” said Bean, “if I could only go back and undo that one moment.”
“What, you think you could have fought him? Have you forgotten how small you were then?”
“If I’d been there, if he’d known I was watching, he wouldn’t have done it. Achilles never risks discovery if he can help it.”
“Or he might have killed you, too.”
“He couldn’t kill us both at once. Not with that gimp leg. Whichever one he went for, the other would scream bloody murder and go for help.”
“Or hit him over the head with a cinderblock.”
“Yes, well, Poke could have done that, but I couldn’t have lifted it higher than his head. And I don’t think dropping a stone on his toe would have done the job.”
They stayed by the dock for a little longer, and then made the walk back to the hospital.
The security guard was on duty. All was right with the world.
Bean had gone back to his childhood range and he hadn’t cried much, hadn’t turned away, hadn’t fled back to some safe place.
Or so she thought, until they left the hospital, returned to their hotel, and he lay in the bed, gasping for breath until she realized that he was sobbing. Great dry wracking sobs that shook his whole body. She lay beside him and held him until he slept.
Volescu’s fakery was so good that for a few moments Petra wondered if he might really have the ability to test the embryos. But no, it was flimflam-he was simply smart enough, scientist enough, to find convincing flimflam that was realistic enough to fool extremely intelligent laypeople like them, and even the fertility doctor they brought with them. He must have made it look like the tests these doctors performed to test for a child’s sex or for major genetic defects.
Or else the doctor knew perfectly well it was a scam, but said nothing because all the baby-fixers played the same game, pretending to check for defects that couldn’t actually be checked for, knowing that by the time the fakery was discovered, the parents would already have bonded with the child-and even if they hadn’t, how could they sue for failing to perform an illegal procedure like sorting for athletic prowess or intellect? Maybe all these baby boutiques were fakers.
The only reason Petra wasn’t fooled is that she didn’t watch the procedure, she watched Volescu, and by the end of the procedure she knew that he was way too relaxed. He knew that nothing he was doing would make the slightest difference. There was nothing at stake. The test meant nothing.
There were nine embryos. He pretended to identify three of them as having Anton’s Key. He tried to hand the containers to one of his assistants to dispose of, but Bean insisted that he give them to their doctor for disposal.
“I don’t want any of these embryos to accidentally become a baby,” said Bean with a smile.
But to Petra, they already were babies, and it hurt her to watch as Bean supervised the pouring out of the three embryos into a sink, the scouring of the containers to make sure an embryo hadn’t managed to thrive in some remaining droplet.
I’m imagining this, thought Petra. For all she knew, the containers he flushed had never contained embryos at all. Why would Volescu sacrifice any of them, when all he had to do was lie and merely say that these three had contained embryos with Anton’s Key?
So, self persuaded that no actual harm to a child of hers was being done, she thanked Volescu for his help and they waited for him to leave before anything else was done. Volescu carried nothing from the room that he hadn’t come in with.
Then Bean and Petra both watched as the six remaining embryos were frozen, their containers tagged, and all of them secured against tampering.
The morning of the implantation, they both awoke almost at first light, too excited, too nervous to sleep. She lay in bed reading, trying to calm herself; he sat at the table in the hotel room, working on email, scanning the nets.
But his mind was obviously on the morning’s procedure. “It’s going to be expensive,” he said. “Keeping guard over the ones we don’t implant.”
She knew what he was driving at. “You know we’ve got to keep them frozen until we know if the first implant works. They don’t always take.”
Bean nodded. “But I’m not an idiot, you know. I’m perfectly aware that you intend to keep all the embryos and implant them one by one until you have as many of my children as possible.”
“Well of course,” said Petra. “What if our firstborn is as nasty as Peter Wiggin?”
“Impossible,” said Bean. “How could a child of mine have any but the sweetest disposition?”
“Unthinkable, I know,” said Petra. “And yet somehow I thought of it.”
“So this security, it has to continue for years.
“Why?” said Petra. “No one wants the babies that are left. We destroyed the ones with Anton’s Key.”
“We know that,” said Bean. “But they’re still the children of two members of Ender’s jeesh. Even without my particular curse, they’ll still be worth stealing.”
“But they won’t be old enough to be of any value for years and years,” said Petra.
“Not all that many years,” said Bean. “How old were we? How old are we even now? There are plenty of people willing to take the children and invest not that many years of training and then put them to work. Playing games and winning wars.”
“I’ll never let any of them anywhere near military training,” said Petra.
“You won’t be able to stop them,” said Bean.
“We have plenty of money, thanks to the pensions Graff got for us,” said Petra. “I’ll make sure the security is intense.”
“No, I mean you’ll never be able to stop the children. From seeking out military service.
He was right, of course. The testing for Battle School included a child’s predilection for military command, for the contest of battle. For war. Bean and Petra had proven how strong that passion was in them. It would be unlikely that any child of theirs would be happy without ever having a taste of the military life.
“At least,” said Petra, “they won’t have to destroy an alien invader before they turn fifteen.”
But Bean wasn’t listening. His body had suddenly grown alert as he scanned a message on his desk.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I think it’s from Hot Soup,” said Bean.
She got up and came over to look.
It was an email through one of the anonymous services, this one an Asian-based company called Mysterious East. The subject line was “definitely not vichyssoise.” Not cold soup, then. Hot Soup. The Battle school nickname of Han Thu. who had been in Ender’s jeesh and was now assumed to be deeply involved in the highest levels of strategy in China.
A message from him to Bean, until recently the military commander of the Hegemon’s forces, would be high treason. This message had been handed to a stranger on a street in China. Probably a European- or African-looking tourist. And the message wasn’t hard to understand:
He thinks I told him where Coligula would be but I did not.
“Caligula” could only refer to Achilles. “He” had to refer to Peter.
Han Thu was saying that Peter thought he was the source of the information about where the prison convoy would be on the day Suriyawong liberated Achilles.
No wonder Peter was sure his source was reliable-Han Tzu himself! Since Han Tzu had been one of the group Achilles kidnapped, he would have plenty of reason to hate him. Motive enough for Peter to believe that Han Tzu would tell him where Achilles would be.
But it wasn’t Han Tzu.
And if it wasn’t Han Tzu, then who else would send such a message, pretending that it came from him? A message that turned out to be correct?
“We should have known it wasn’t from Han Thu all along,” said Bean.
“We didn’t know Han Tzu was supposed to be the source,” said Petra reasonably.
“Han Tzu would never give information that would lead to innocent Chinese soldiers getting killed. Peter should have known that.”
“We would have known it,” said Petra, “but Peter doesn’t know Hot Soup. And he didn’t tell us Hot Soup was his source.”
“So of course we know who the source was,” said Bean.
“We’ve got to get word to him at once,” said Petra.
Bean was already typing.
“Only this has to mean that Achilles went in there completely prepared,” said Petra. “I’d be surprised if he hasn’t found a way to read Peter’s mail.”
“I’m not writing to Peter,” said Bean.
“Who, then?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Wiggin,” said Bean. “Two separate messages. Pieces of a puzzle. Chances are that Achilles won’t be watching their mail, or at least not closely enough to realize he should put these together.”
“No,” said Petra. “No puzzles. Whether he’s watching or not, there’s no time to lose. He’s been there for months now.
“If he sees an open message it might precipitate action on his part. It might be Peter’s death warrant.”
“Then notify Graff, send him in.”
“Achilles undoubtedly knows Graff already came once to get our parents out,” said Bean. “Again, his arrival might trigger things.”
“OK,” said Petra, thinking. “OK. Here’s what. Suriyawong.”
“No,” said Bean.
“He’ll get a coded message instantly. He thinks that way.”
“But I don’t know if he can be trusted,” said Bean.
“Of course he can,” said Petra. “He’s only pretending to be Achilles’s man.”
“Of course he is,” said Bean. “But what if he isn’t just pretending?”
“But he’s Suriyawong!”
“I know,” said Bean. “But I can’t be sure.
“All right,” said Petra. “Peter’s parents, then. Only don’t be too subtle.”
“They’re not stupid,” said Bean. “I don’t know Mr. Wiggin that well, but Mrs. Wiggin is-well, she’s very subtle. She knows more than she lets on.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s wary. That doesn’t mean she’ll get the code or talk it over with her husband right away so they can put the messages together.”
“Trust me,” said Bean.
“No, I’ll proofread before you send it,” said Petra. “First rule of survival, right? Just because you trust someone’s motives doesn’t mean you can trust them to do it right.”
