Shadow Puppets (20 page)

“Did you meet Alai?” asked Petra.

“Yes, but we’ll talk of that later,” said Bean.

“You know he’s Caliph,” she insisted.

“Later,” he said. He pulled his shoes off.

“I think they’re planning a war, but pretending that they’re not,” said Petra.

“They can plan what they like,” said Bean. “You’re safe here, that’s what I care about.”

Still in his traveling clothes, Bean lay down on the bed beside her, snaking one arm under her, drawing her close to him. He stroked her back, kissed her forehead.

“They told me about the other embryos,” she said. “How Achilles stole them.”

He kissed her again and said, “Shhhh.”

“I don’t know if I’m pregnant yet,” said Petra.

“You will be,” said Bean.

“I knew that he hadn’t checked for Anton’s Key,” said Petra. “I knew he was lying about that.”

“All right,” said Bean.

“I knew but I didn’t tell you,” said Petra.

“Now you’ve told me.”

“I want your child, no matter what.”

“Well,” said Bean, “in that case we can start the next one the regular way.”

She kissed him. “I love you,” she said.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“We have to get the others back,” said Petra. “They’re our children and I don’t want somebody else to raise them.”

“We’ll get them back,” said Bean. “That’s one thing I know.”

“He’ll destroy them before he lets us have them.”

“Not so,” said Bean. “He wants them alive more than he wants us dead.”

“How can you possibly know what the Beast is thinking?”

Bean rolled onto his back and lay there facing the ceiling. “On the plane I did a lot of thinking. About something Ender said. How he thought. You have to know your enemy, he said. That’s why he studied the Formics constantly. All the footage of the First War, the anatomies of the corpses of the dead Bugger soldiers, and what he couldn’t find in the books and vids, he imagined. Extrapolated. Tried to think of who they were.”

“You’re nothing like Achilles,” said Petra. “You’re the opposite of him. If you want to know him, think of whatever you’re not, and that’ll be him.”

“Not true,” said Bean. “In his sad, twisted way, he loves you, and so, in my own sad twisted way, do I.”

“Not the same twists, and that makes all the difference.”

“Ender said that you can’t defeat a powerful enemy unless you understand him completely, and you can’t understand him unless you know the desires of his heart, and you can’t know the desires of his heart until you truly love him.”

“Please don’t tell me that you’ve decided to love the Beast,” said Petra.

“I think,” said Bean, “that I always have.”

“No, no, no,” said Petra in revulsion and she rolled away from him, turned her back on him.

“Ever since I saw him limping up to us, the one bully we thought we could overpower, we little children. His twisted foot, the dangerous hate he felt toward anyone who saw his weakness. The genuine kindness and love he showed to everyone but me and Poke—Petra, that’s what nobody understands about Achilles, they see him as a murderer, and a monster—”

“Because he is one.”

“A monster who keeps winning the love and trust of people who
should know better. I know that man, the one whose eyes look into your soul and judge you and find you
worthy
. I saw how the other children loved him, turned their loyalty from Poke to Achilles, made him their father, truly, in their hearts. And even though he always kept me at a distance, the fact is…I loved him too.”

“I didn’t,” said Petra. The memory of Achilles’s arms around her as he kissed her—it was unbearable to her, and she wept.

She felt Bean’s hand on her shoulder, then stroking her side, gently soothing her. “I’m going to destroy him, Petra,” said Bean. “But I’ll never do it the way I’ve been going about it up till now. I’ve been avoiding him, reacting to him. Peter had the right idea after all. He was dumb about it, but the idea was right, to get close to him. You can’t treat him as something faraway and unintelligible. A force of nature, like a storm or earthquake, where you have no hope but to run for shelter. You have to understand him. Get inside his head.”

“I’ve been there,” said Petra. “It’s a filthy place.”

“Yes, I know,” said Bean. “A place of fear and fire. But remember—he lives there all the time.”

“Don’t tell me I’m supposed to pity him because he has to live with himself!”

“Petra, I spent the whole flight trying to be Achilles, trying to think of what he yearns for, what he hopes for, to think of how he thinks.”

“And you threw up? Because I did, twice on my flight, and I didn’t have to get inside the Beast to do it.”

“Maybe because you have a little beast inside
you
.”

She shuddered. “Don’t call him that. Her. It. I’m not even pregnant yet, probably. It was only this morning. My baby is not a beast.”

“Bad joke, I’m sorry,” said Bean. “But listen, Petra, on the flight I realized something. Achilles is not a mysterious force. I know exactly what he wants.”

“What does he want? Besides us, dead?”

“He wants us to know that the babies are alive. He won’t even
implant them yet. He’ll leave little clues for us to follow—nothing too obvious, because he wants us to think we discovered something he’s trying to keep hidden. But we’ll find out where they are because he wants us to. They’ll all be in one place. Because he wants us to come for them.”

“Bait,” she said.

“No, not just bait,” said Bean. “He could send us a note right now if he wanted that. No, it’s more than that. He wants us to think we’re very smart to have found out where they are. He wants us to be full of hope that we might rescue them. To be excited, so we’ll hurtle into a situation completely unprepared for the fact that he’s waiting for us. That way he can see us fall from triumphant hope to utter despair. Before he kills us.”

Bean was right, she knew it. “But how can you even pretend to love someone so evil?”

“No, you still don’t understand,” said Bean. “It’s not our despair he wants. It’s our hope. He has none. He doesn’t understand it.”

“Oh, please,” said Petra. “An ambitious person
lives
on hope.”

“He has no hope. No dream. He tries everything to find one. He goes through the motions of love and kindness, or anything else that might work, and still nothing means anything. Each new conquest only leaves him hungry for another. He’s hungry to find something that really matters in life. He knows we have it. Both of us, before we even found each other, we had it.”

“I thought you were famous for having no faith,” said Petra.

“But you see,” said Bean, “Achilles knew me better than I knew myself.
He
saw it in me. The same thing Sister Carlotta saw.”

“Intelligence?” asked Petra.

“Hope,” said Bean. “Relentless hope. It never crosses my mind that there’s no solution, no chance of survival. Oh, I can conceive of that intellectually, but never are my actions based on despair, because I never really believe it. Achilles knows that I have a reason to live. That’s why he wants me so badly. And you, Petra. You more than me.
And our babies—they
are
our hope. A completely insane kind of hope, yes, but we made them, didn’t we?”

“So,” said Petra, grasping the picture now, “he doesn’t just want us to die, the way he was perfectly content to let Sister Carlotta die in an airplane, when he was far away. He wants us to see him with our babies.”

“And when we realize we can’t have them back, that we’re going to die after all, the hope that drains out of us, he thinks it’ll become his own. He thinks that because he has our babies, he has our hope.”

“And he does,” said Petra.

“But the hope can never be his. He’s incapable of it.”

“This is all very interesting,” said Petra, “but completely useless.”

“But don’t you see?” said Bean. “This is how we can destroy him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s going to fall into the pit he dug for us.”

“We don’t have
his
babies.”

“He
hopes
we’ll come and give him what he wants. But instead, we’ll come prepared to destroy him.”

“He’s going to be laying an ambush for us. If we come in force, he’ll either slip away or—as soon as it’s clear he’s doomed—he’ll kill our babies.”

“No, no, we’ll let him spring his trap. We’ll walk right into it. So that when we face him, we see
him
in
his
moment of triumph. Which is always the moment when somebody is at their stupidest.”

“You don’t have to be smart when you have all the guns.”

“Relax, Petra,” said Bean. “I’m going to get our babies back. And kill Achilles while I’m at it. And I’ll do it soon, my love. Before I die.”

“That’s good,” said Petra. “It will be so much harder for you to do it afterward.”

And then she wept, because, contrary to what Bean had just said, she had no hope. She was going to lose her husband, her children
were going to lose their father. No victory over Achilles could change the fact that in the end, she was going to lose him.

He reached out for her again, held her close, kissed her brow, her cheek. “Have our baby,” he said. “I’ll bring home its brothers and sisters before it’s born.”

Peter found spaceflight boring, just as he’d suspected he would. Like air travel, only longer and with less scenery.

Thank heaven Mother and Father had the good sense not to get all sentimental about the shuttle flight to the Ministry of Colonization. After all, it was the same space station that had been Battle School. They were going to set foot at last where precious little Ender had had his first triumphs—and, oh yes, killed a boy.

But there were no footprints here. Nothing to tell them what it was like for Ender to ride a shuttle to this place. They were not small
children taken away from their homes. They were adults, and the fate of the world just might rest in their hands.

Come to think of it, that
was
like Ender, wasn’t it.

The whole human race was united when Ender came here. The enemy was clear, the danger real, and Ender didn’t even have to know what he was doing to win the war.

By comparison, Peter’s task was much more difficult. It might seem simpler—find a really good assassin and kill Achilles.

But it wasn’t that simple. First, Achilles, being an assassin and a user of assassins, would be ready for such a plot. Second, it wasn’t enough to kill Achilles. He was not the army that conquered India and Indochina. He was not the government that ruled more than half the people of the world. Destroy Achilles, and you still have to roll back all the things he did.

It was like Hitler back in World War II. Without Hitler, Germany would never have had the nerve to conquer France and sweep to the gates of Moscow. But if Hitler had been assassinated just before the invasion of Russia, then in all likelihood the common language of the International Fleet would have been German. Because it was Hitler’s mistakes, his weaknesses, his fears, his hatreds, that lost the back half of the war, just as it was his drive, his decisions, that won the front half.

Killing Achilles might do nothing more than guarantee a world governed by China.

Still, with him out of the way, Peter would face a rational enemy. And his own assets would not be so superstitiously terrified. The way Bean and Petra and Virlomi fled at the mere thought of Achilles coming to Ribeirão Preto…though of course in the long run they weren’t wrong, still, it complicated things enormously that he kept having to work alone, unless you counted Mother and Father.

And since they were the only assets he had that he could rely on to serve his interests, he definitely counted them.

Counted them, but was angry at them all the same. He knew it
was irrational, but the whole way up to MinCol, he kept coming back to the same seething memory of the way his parents had always judged him as a child and found him wanting, while Ender and Valentine could do no wrong. Being a fundamentally reasonable person, he took due notice of the fact that since Val and Ender left in a colony ship, his parents had been completely supportive of him. Had saved him more than once. He could not have asked any more from them even if they had actually loved him. They did their duty as parents, and more than their duty.

But it didn’t erase the pain of those earlier years when everything he did seemed to be wrong, every natural instinct an offense against one of their versions of God or the other. Well, in all your judging, remember this—it was Ender who turned out to be Cain, wasn’t it! And you always thought it was going to be me.

Stupid stupid stupid, Peter told himself. Ender didn’t kill his brother, Ender defended himself against his enemies. As I have done.

I have to get over this, he told himself again and again during the voyage.

I wish there were something to look at besides the stupid vids. Or Dad snoring. Or Mother looking at me now and then, sizing me up, and then winking. Does she have any idea how awful that is? How demeaning? To wink at me! What about smiling? What about looking at me with that dreamy fond expression she used to have for Val and Ender? Of course she
liked
them.

Stop it. Think about what you have to do, fool.

Think about what you have to write and publish, as Locke and as Demosthenes, to rouse the people in the free countries, to goad the governments of the nations ruled from above. There could be no business as usual, he couldn’t allow that. But it was hard to keep the people’s attention on a war in which no shots were being fired. A war that took place in a faraway land. What did they care, in Argentina, that the people of India had a government not of their choosing? Why should it matter to a light farmer tending his photovoltaic screens in
the Kalahari Desert whether the people of Thailand were having dirt kicked in their faces?

China had no designs on Namibia or Argentina. The war was over. Why wouldn’t people just shut up about it and go back to making money?

That was Peter’s enemy. Not Achilles, ultimately. Not even China. It was the apathy of the rest of the world that played into their hands.

And here I am in space, no longer free to move about, far more dependent than I’ve ever been before. Because if Graff decides not to send me back to Earth, then I can’t go. There’s no alternative transport. He
seems
to be entirely on my side. But it’s his former Battle School brats that have his true loyalty. He thinks he can use me as I thought I could use Achilles. I was wrong. But probably he is right.

After all the voyaging, it was so frustrating to
be
there and still have to wait while the shuttle did its little dance of lining up with the station dock. There was nothing to watch. They blanked the “windows” because it was too nauseating in zero-G to watch the Earth spin madly as the shuttle matched the rotation of the great wheel.

My career might already be over. I might already have earned whatever mention I’ll have in history. I might already be nothing but a footnote in other people’s biographies, a paragraph in the history books.

Really, at this point my best strategy for beefing up my reputation is probably to be assassinated in some colorful way.

But the way things are going, I’ll probably die in some tragic airlock accident while doing a routine docking at the MinCol space station.

“Stop wallowing,” said Mother.

He looked at her sharply. “I’m not,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Be angry at me. That’s better than feeling sorry for yourself.”

He wanted to snap back angrily, but he realized the futility of denying what they all knew was true. He was depressed, definitely,
and yet he still had to work. Like the day of his press conference when they dragged him out of bed. He didn’t want a repeat of that humiliation. He’d do his work without having to have his parents prod him like some adolescent. And he wouldn’t get snippy at them when they merely told him the truth.

So he smiled at her. “Come on, Mother, you know that if I were on fire, nobody would so much as pee on me to put it out.”

“Be honest, son,” said his father. “There are hundreds of thousands of people back on Earth who have only to be asked. And some dozens who would do it without waiting for an invitation, if they saw an opportunity.”

“There
are
some good points about fame,” Peter observed. “And those with empty bladders would probably chip in with a little spit.”

“This is getting quite disgusting,” said Mother.

“You say that because it’s your job to say it,” said Peter.

“I’m underpaid, then,” said Mother. “Because it’s nearly a fulltime position.”

“Your role in life. So womanly. Men need civilizing, and you’re just the one to do it.”

“I’m obviously not very good at it.”

At that moment the IF sergeant who was their flight steward came into the main cabin and told them it was time to go.

Because they docked at the center of the station, there was no gravity. They floated along, gripping handrails as the steward flipped their bags so they sailed through the airlock just under them. They were caught by a couple of orderlies who had obviously done this a hundred times, and were not the least bit impressed by having the Hegemon himself come to MinCol.

Though in all probability nobody knew who they were. They were traveling under false papers, of course, but Graff had undoubtedly let someone in the station know who they really were.

Probably not the orderlies, though.

Not until they were down one spoke of the wheel to a level where
there was a definite floor to walk on did they meet anyone of real status in the station. A man in the grey suit that served MinCol as a uniform waited at the foot of the elevator, his hand outstretched. “Mr. and Mrs. Raymond,” he said. “I’m Underminister Dimak. And this must be your son, Dick.”

Peter smiled wanly at the faint humor in the pseudonym Graff had arbitrarily assigned to him.

“Please tell me that you know who we really are so we don’t have to keep up this charade,” said Peter.

“
I
know,” said Dimak softly, “but nobody else on this station does, and I’d like to keep it that way for now.”

“Graff isn’t here?”

“The Minister of Colonization is returning from his inspection of the outfitting of the newest colony ship. We’re two weeks away from first leg on that one, and starting next week you won’t believe the traffic that’ll come through here, sixteen shuttles a day, and that’s just for the colonists. The freighters go directly to the dry dock.”

“Is there,” said Father innocently, “a wet dock?”

Dimak grinned. “Nautical terminology dies hard.”

Dimak led them along a corridor to a down tube. They slid down the pole after him. The gravity wasn’t so intense yet as to make this a problem, even for Peter’s parents, who were, after all, in their forties. He helped them step out of the shaft into a lower—and therefore “heavier”—corridor.

There were old-fashioned directional stripes along the walls. “Your palm prints have already been keyed,” said Dimak. “Just touch here, and it will lead you to your room.”

“This is left over from the old days, isn’t it?” said Father. “Though I don’t imagine you were here when this was still—”

“But I
was
here,” said Dimak. “I was mother to groups of new kids. Not your son, I’m afraid. But an acquaintance of yours, I believe.”

Peter did not want to put himself in the pathetic position of naming off Battle School graduates he knew. Mother had no such qualms.

“Petra?” she said. “Suriyawong?”

Dimak leaned in close, so his voice would not have to be pitched loud enough that it might be overheard. “Bean,” he said.

“He must have been a remarkable boy,” said Mother.

“Looked like a three-year-old when he got here,” said Dimak. “Nobody could believe he was old enough for this place.”

“He doesn’t look like that now,” said Peter dryly.

“No, I…I know about his condition. It’s not public knowledge, but Colonel Graff—the minister, I mean—he knows that I still care what happens to—well, to all my kids, of course—but this one was…I imagine your son’s first trainer felt much the same way about him.”

“I hope so,” said Mother.

The sentimentality was getting so sweet Peter wanted to brush his teeth. He palmed the pad by the entrance and three strips lit up. “Green green brown,” said Dimak. “But soon you won’t be needing this. It’s not as if there’s miles of open country here to get lost in. The stripe system always assumes that you want to go back to your room, except when you touch the pad just outside the door of your room, and then it thinks you want to go to the bathroom—none inside the rooms, I’m afraid, it wasn’t built that way. But if you want to go to the mess hall, just slap the pad twice and it’ll know.”

He showed them to their quarters, which consisted of a single long room with bunks in rows along both sides of a narrow aisle. “I’m afraid you’ll have company for the week we’re loading up the ship, but nobody’ll be here very long, and then you’ll have the place to yourself for three more weeks.”

“You’re doing a launch a month?” said Peter. “How, exactly, are you funding a pace like that?”

Dimak looked at him blankly. “I don’t actually know,” he said.

Peter leaned in close and imitated the voice Dimak used for secrets. “I’m the Hegemon,” he said. “Officially, your boss works for me.”

Dimak whispered back, “You save the world, we’ll finance the colony program.”

“I could have used a little more money for my operations, I can tell you,” said Peter.

“Every Hegemon feels that way,” said Dimak. “Which is why our funding doesn’t come through you.”

Peter laughed. “Smart move. If you think the colonization program is very very important.”

“It’s the future of the human race,” said Dimak simply. “The Buggers—pardon me, the Formics—had the right idea. Spread out as far as you can, so you can’t be wiped out in a single disastrous war. Not that it saved them, but…we aren’t hive creatures.”

“Aren’t we?” said Father.

“Well, if we are, then who’s the queen?” asked Dimak.

“In this place,” said Father, “I suspect it’s Graff.”

“And we’re all just his little arms and legs?”

“And mouths and…well, yes, of course. A little more independent and a little less obedient than the individual Formics, of course, but that’s how a species comes to dominate a world the way we did, and they did. Because you know how to get a large number of individuals to give up their personal will and subject themselves to a group mind.”

“So this is philosophy we’re doing here,” said Dimak.

“Or very cutting-edge science,” said Father. “The behavior of humans in groups. Degrees of allegiance. I think about it a lot.”

“How interesting.”

“I see that you’re not interested at all,” said Father. “And that I’m now in your book as an eccentric who brings up his theories. But I never do, actually. I don’t know why I did just now. I just…it’s the
first time I’ve been in Graff’s house, so to speak. And meeting you was very much like visiting with him.”