Shadow Puppets (33 page)

Peter, unsentimental as he was, saw no reason to hold a funeral for Achilles. But Bean insisted on at least a graveside service, and he paid for the carving of the monument. Under the name “Achilles de Flan
dres,” the year of his birth, and the date of his death, the inscription said:

Born crippled in body and spirit,

He changed the face of the world.

Among all the hearts he broke

And lives he ended far too young

Were his own heart

And his own life.

May he find peace.

It was a small group gathered there in the cemetery in Ribeirão Preto. Bean and Petra, the Wiggins, Peter. Graff had gone back to space. Suriyawong had led his little army back to Thailand, to help their homeland drive out the conquerors and restore itself.

No one had anything much to say over Achilles’s grave. They could not pretend that they weren’t all glad that he was dead. Bean read the inscription he had written, and everyone agreed that it wasn’t just fair to Achilles, it was generous.

In the end it was only Peter who had something he could say from the heart.

“Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who’s lying in this box?”

No one had an answer for him, either yes or no.

Three bloody weeks later, the war ended. If the Chinese had accepted the terms the Caliph had offered in the first place, they would have lost only their new conquests, plus Xinjiang and Tibet. Instead, they waited until Canton had fallen, Shanghai was besieged, and the Turkic troops were surrounding Beijing.

So when the Caliph drew the new map, the province of Inner Mongolia was given to the nation of Mongolia, and Manchuria and
Taiwan were given their independence. And China had to guarantee the safety of teachers of religion. The door had been opened to Muslim proselytizing.

The Chinese government promptly fell. The new government repudiated the ceasefire terms, and the Caliph declared martial law until new elections could be held.

And somewhere in the rugged terrain of easternmost India, the goddess of the bridge lived among her worshipers, biding her time, watching to see whether India was going to be free or had merely changed one tyranny for another.

In the aftermath of war, while Indians, Thais, Burmese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians searched their onetime conquerors’ land for family members who had been carried off, Bean and Petra also searched as best they could by computer, hoping to find some record of what Volescu and Achilles had done with their lost children.

In writing this sequel to
Ender’s Shadow
and
Shadow of the Hegemon
, I faced two new problems. First, I was expanding the roles of several minor characters from earlier books, and ran the serious risk of inventing aspects of their appearance or their past that would contradict some long-forgotten detail in a previous volume. To avoid this as much as possible, I relied on two online communities.

The Philotic Web (
www.­philoticweb.­net
) carries a timeline combining the story flows of
Ender’s Game
and
Ender’s Shadow
, which proved invaluable to me. It was created by Nathan M. Taylor with the help of Adam Spieckermann.

On my own website, Hatrack River (
www.­hatrack.­com
), I posted the first five chapters of the manuscript of this novel, in the hope that readers who had read the other books in the series more recently than I might be able to catch inadvertent inconsistencies and other problems. The Hatrack River community did not disappoint me. Among the many who responded—and I thank them all—I found particular value in the suggestions of Keiko A. Haun (“accio”), Justin Pullen, Chris Bridges, Josh Galvez (“Zevlag”), David Tayman (“Taalcon”), Alison Purnell (“Eaquae Legit”), Vicki Norris (“CKDexter-Haven”), Michael Sloan (“Papa Moose”), and Oliver Withstandley.

In addition, I had the help, chapter by chapter through the whole book, of my regular crew of first readers—Phillip and Erin Absher, Kathryn H. Kidd, and my son Geoffrey. My wife, Kristine A. Card, as usual read each chapter while the pages were still warm from the LaserJet. Without them I could not have proceeded with this book.

The second problem posed by this novel was that I wrote it during the war in Afghanistan between the U.S. and its allies and the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. Since in
Shadow Puppets
I had to show the
future state of relations between the Muslim and Western worlds, and between Israel and its Muslim neighbors, I had to make a prediction about how the current hate-filled situation might someday be resolved. Since I take quite seriously my responsibility to the nations and peoples I write about, I was dependent for much of my understanding of the causes of the present situation on Bernard Lewis’s
What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
(Oxford University Press, 2001).

This book is dedicated to my wife’s parents. Besides the fact that much of the peace and joy in Kristine’s and my lives comes from our close and harmonious relationship with both our extended families, I owe an additional debt to James B. Allen, for his excellent work as a historian, yes, but more personally for having taught me to approach history fearlessly, going wherever the evidence leads, assuming neither the best nor the worst about people of the past, and adapting my personal worldview wherever it needs adjustment, but never carelessly throwing out previous ideas that remain valid.

To my assistants, Kathleen Bellamy and Scott Allen, I owe much more than I pay them. As for my children, Geoffrey, Emily, and Zina, and my wife, Kristine, they are the reason it’s worth getting out of bed each day.