Shadow Puppets (8 page)

She was acting.

And acting quite well, since the housekeeper and empregada believed the performance, and Peter had believed it, too, on the first viewing.

It had never occurred to him that Mother might be good at acting.

So good that the only way he knew that it
was
an act was because she had never shown him the slightest sign of being impressed by his power, or of enjoying it in any way. She had always been irritated by the things that his position required her and Father to do.

What if the Theresa Wiggin on this vid was the real Theresa Wiggin, and the one he had seen at home for all these years was the act—the performance, literally, of a lifetime?

Was it possible that Mother was somehow involved with Achilles? Had he corrupted her somehow? It might have happened a year ago, or even earlier. It certainly wouldn’t have been a bribe. But perhaps it was extortion that turned her. A threat from Achilles: I can kill your son at any time, so you’d better cooperate with me.

But that was absurd, too. Now that Achilles was in Peter’s power, why would she continue to fear such a threat? It was something else.

Or nothing else. It was unthinkable that Mother could be betraying him for any reason. She would have told him. Mother was like a child that way, showing everything—excitement, dismay, anger, disappointment, surprise—the moment she felt it, saying whatever came to mind. She could never sustain a secret like that. Peter and Valentine used to laugh about how obvious Mother was in everything she did—they had never yet been surprised by their birthday and Christmas gifts, not by the main gift, anyway, because Mother just couldn’t keep a secret, she kept letting hints slip out.

Or was that, too, an act?

No, no, that would be madness, that would imply that Mother had
been acting his whole life, and why would she do that?

It made no sense, and he had to make sense of it. So he invited his father to his office.

“What did you want to see me about, Peter?” asked Father, standing near the door.

“Sit down, Dad, for heaven’s sake, you’re standing there like a junior employee expecting to be sacked.”

“Laid off, anyway,” said Father with a thin smile. “Your budget shrinks month by month.”

“I thought we’d solve that by printing our own money,” said Peter.

“Good idea,” said Father. “A sort of international money that could be equally worthless in every country, so that it becomes the benchmark against which all other currencies are weighed. The dollar is worth a hundred billion ‘hedges’—that’s a good name for it, don’t you think? The ‘hedge’?—and the yen is worth twenty trillion, and so on.”

“That’s assuming that we could keep the value just above zero,” said Peter. “The computers would all crash if it ever became truly worthless.”

“But here’s the danger,” said Father. “What if it accidentally became worth something? It might cause a depression as other currencies actually
fell
against the hedge.”

Peter laughed.

“We’re both busy,” said Father. “What did you want to see me about?”

Peter showed him the vid.

Father shook his head through most of it. “Theresa, Theresa,” he murmured at the end.

“What is she trying to do?” asked Peter.

“Well, obviously, she’s figured out a way to kill Achilles and it requires getting into his room. Now she’ll have to think of another way.”

Peter was astounded. “Kill Achilles? You can’t be serious.”

“Well, I can’t think of any other reason for her to be doing this. You don’t think she actually cares if his room is clean, do you? More likely she’d carry a basketful of roaches and disease-carrying lice into the room.”

“She hates him? She never said anything about that.”

“To you,” said Father.

“So she’s told you she wants to kill him?”

“Of course not. If she had, I wouldn’t have mentioned it to you. I don’t betray her confidences. But since she hasn’t seen fit to tell me what’s going on, I’m perfectly free to give you my best guess, and my best guess is that Theresa has decided that Achilles poses a danger to you—not to mention the whole human race—and so she’s decided to kill him. It really makes sense, once you know how your mother thinks.”

“Mother doesn’t even kill spiders.”

“Oh, she kills them just fine when you and I aren’t there. You don’t think she stands in the middle of the room and goes eek-eek-eek until we come home, do you?”

“You’re telling me that my mother is capable of murder?”

“Preemptive assassination,” said Father. “And no, I don’t think she’s capable of it. But I think
she
thinks she’s capable of it.” He thought for a moment. “And she might be right. The female of the species is more deadly than the male, as they say.”

“That makes no sense,” said Peter.

“Well, then, I guess you wasted your time and mine bringing me down here. I’m probably wrong anyway. There’s probably a much more rational explanation. Like…she really cares how well the maids do their work. Or…she’s hoping to have a love affair with a serial killer who wants to rule the world.”

“Thanks, Father,” said Peter. “You’ve been very helpful. Now I know that I was raised by an insane woman and I never knew it.”

“Peter, my boy, you don’t know either of us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You study everybody else, but your mother and I are like air to you: you just breathe us without noticing we’re there. But that’s all right, that’s how parents are supposed to be in their children’s lives. Unconditional love, right? Don’t you suppose that’s the difference between Achilles and you? That you had parents who loved you, and he didn’t?”

“You loved Ender and Valentine,” said Peter. It slipped out before he realized what he was saying.

“And not you?” said Father. “Oh. My mistake. I guess there
is
no difference between your upbringing and Achilles’s. Too bad, really. Have a nice day, son!”

Peter tried to call him back, but Father pretended not to have heard him and went on his way, whistling the Marseillaise, of all things.

All right, so his suspicions of Mother
were
absurd, though Father had a twisted way of saying so. What a clever family he had, everybody always making a puzzle or a drama out of everything. Or a comedy. That’s what he’d just played out with his father, wasn’t it? A farce. An absurdity.

If Achilles had a collaborator here, it was probably not Peter’s parents. Who else, then? Should he make something of the way Achilles and Suriyawong consulted? But he’d watched the vids of their occasional lunches and they said nothing beyond ordinary chat about the things they were working on. If there was a code it was a very subtle one. It’s not even like they were friends—the conversation was always rather stiff and formal, and if anything bothered Peter about them, it was the way Suriyawong always seemed to phrase things in a subservient way.

He certainly never acted subservient to Bean or to Peter.

That was something to think about, too. What had really passed between Suri and Achilles during the rescue and the return to Brazil?

What silliness, Peter told himself. If Achilles has a confederate, they doubtless communicate through dead drops and coded messages in emails or something like that. Spy stuff.

Not dumb attempts to break into Achilles’s room—Achilles surely would not stake his life on confederates as dumb as that. And Suriyawong—how could Achilles possibly hope to corrupt
him
? It’s not as if Achilles had influence in the Chinese empire now, so he could use Suri’s family as hostages.

No, Peter would have to keep looking, keep the electronic surveillance going, until he found out what Achilles was doing to subvert Peter’s work—or take it over.

What was not possible was that Achilles had simply given up on his ambitions and was now trying to make a place for himself in the bright future of a world united under the rule of Peter Wiggin.

But wouldn’t it be nice if he had.

Maybe it was time to give up on learning anything from Achilles, and start setting him up for destruction.

Professor Anton had no laboratory and no library. There was no professional journal in his house, nothing to show he had ever been a scientist. Bean was not surprised. Back when the IDL was hunting down anyone doing research into altering the human genome, Anton was considered the most dangerous of men. He had been served with an order of inhibition, which meant that for many years he bore within his brain a device that, when he tried to concentrate on his area of study, he would have a panic attack. He had the strength, once, to hint to Sister Carlotta more than he should have about Bean’s condition. But otherwise, he had been shut down in the prime of his career.

Now the order of inhibition had been lifted, but too late. His brain had been trained to avoid thinking deeply about his area of specialization. There was no going back for him.

“Not a problem,” said Anton. “Science goes on without me. For instance, there’s a new bacterium in my lung that undoes my cancer,
bit by bit. I can’t smoke any more, or the cancer grows faster than the bacteria can undo it. But I’m getting better, and they didn’t have to take out my lungs to do it. Walk with me—I actually enjoy walking now.”

They followed him through the garden to the front gate. In Brazil, the gardens were in the front of the house, so passersby could see over the front wall and the greenery and flowers could decorate the street. In Catalunya, as in Italy, the gardens were hidden away in a central courtyard, and the street got no gift but plaster walls and heavy wooden doors. Bean had not realized how much he had come to regard Ribeirão Preto as his home, but he missed it now, walking down the charming yet unrelentingly lifeless street.

Soon they reached the rambla, the broad central avenue that in all the coastal towns led down the slope of the city toward the sea. It was nearing noon, and the rambla was busy with people on errands. Anton pointed out shops and other buildings, telling them about the people who owned them or who worked there or lived there.

“I see you’ve become quite involved in the life of this city,” said Petra.

“Superficially,” said Anton. “An old Russian, long exiled in Romania, I’m a curiosity. They talk to me, but not about things that matter in their soul.”

“So why not go back to Russia?” asked Bean.

“Ah, Russia. So many things about Russia. Just to remember them brings back the glorious days of my career, when I was gamboling about inside the nucleus of the human cell like a happy little lamb. But you see, those thoughts make me start to panic a little. So…I don’t go where I get reminded.”

“You’re thinking about it now,” said Bean.

“No, I’m saying words about it,” said Anton. “And besides, if I didn’t intend to think about it, I wouldn’t have consented to see you.”

“And yet,” said Bean, “you seem unwilling to look at me.”

“Ah, well,” said Anton. “If I keep you in my peripheral vision, if I don’t think about thinking about you…you are the one fruit that my tree of theory bore.”

“There were more than a score of us,” said Bean. “But the others were murdered.”

“You survived,” said Anton. “The others didn’t. Why was that, do you think?”

“I hid in a toilet tank.”

“Yes, yes,” said Anton, “so I gleaned from Sister Carlotta, God rest her soul. But why did you, and you alone, sneak out of your bed and go into the bathroom and hide in such a dangerous and difficult place? Scarcely a year old, too. So precocious. So desperate to survive. Yet genetically identical to all your brothers, da?”

“Cloned,” said Bean, “so…yes.”

“It is not all genetics, is it?” said Anton. “It is not all
anything
. So much left to learn. And you are the only teacher.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I’m a soldier.”

“It is your body that would teach us. And every cell inside it.”

“Sorry, but I’m still using them,” said Bean.

“As I’m still using my mind,” said Anton, “even though it won’t go where I most want it to take me.”

Bean turned to Petra. “Is that why you brought me here? So Professor Anton could see what a big boy I’ve become?”

“No,” said Petra.

“She brought you here,” said Anton, “so I can persuade you that you are human.”

Bean sighed, though what he wanted to do was walk away, get a cab to the airport, fly to another country, and be alone. Be away from Petra and her demands on him.

“Professor Anton,” said Bean, “I’m quite aware that the genetic alteration that produced my talents and my defects is well within the range of normal variation of the human species. I know that there is
no reason to suppose that I could not produce viable offspring if I mated with a human woman. Nor is my trait necessarily dominant—I might have children with it, I might have children without. Now can we simply enjoy our walk down to the sea?”

“Ignorance is not a tragedy,” said Anton, “merely an opportunity. But to know and refuse to know what you know, that is foolishness.”

Bean looked at Petra. She was not meeting his gaze. Yes, she certainly knew how annoyed he was, and yet she refused to cooperate with him in exiting the situation.

I must love her, thought Bean. Otherwise I would have nothing to do with her, the way she thinks she knows better than I do what’s good for me. We have it on record—I’m the smartest person in the world. So why are so many other people eager to give me advice?

“Your life is going to be short,” said Anton. “And at the end, there will be pain, physical and emotional. You will grow too large for this world, too large for your heart. But you have always been too large of mind for an ordinary life, da? You have always been apart. A stranger. Human by name, but not truly a member of the species, excluded from all clubs.”

Till now, Anton’s words had been mere irritants, floating past him like falling leaves. Now they struck him hard, with a sudden rush of grief and regret that left him almost gasping. He could not help the hesitation, the change of stride that showed the others that these words had suddenly begun to affect him. What line had Anton crossed? Yet he
had
crossed it.

“You are lonely,” said Anton. “And humans are not designed to be alone. It’s in our genes. We’re social beings. Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association. You are no exception, Bean.”

There were tears in his eyes, but Bean refused to acknowledge them. He hated emotions. They took control of him, weakened him.

“Let me tell you what I know,” said Anton. “Not as a scientist—
that road may not be utterly closed to me, but it’s mostly washed out, and full of ruts, and I don’t use it. But my life as a man, that door is still open.”

“I’m listening,” said Bean.

“I have always been as lonely as you,” he said. “Never as intelligent, but not a fool, either. I followed my mind into my work, and let it be my life. I was content with that, partly because I was so successful that my work brought great satisfaction, and partly because I was of a disposition not to look upon women with desire.” He smiled wanly. “In that era, of my youth, the governments of most countries were actively encouraging those of us whose mating instinct had been short-circuited to indulge those desires and take no mate, have no children. Part of the effort to funnel all of human endeavor into the great struggle with the alien enemy. So it was almost patriotic of me to indulge myself in fleeting affairs that meant nothing, that led nowhere. Where could they lead?”

This is more than I want to know about you, thought Bean. It has nothing to do with me.

“I tell you this,” said Anton, “so you understand that I know something of loneliness, too. Because all of a sudden my work was taken away from me. From my
mind
, not just from my daily activities. I could not even think about it. And I quickly discovered that my friendships were not…transcendent. They were all tied to my work, and when my work went away, so did these friends. They were not unkind, they still inquired after me, they made overtures, but there was nothing to say, our minds and hearts did not really touch at any point. I discovered that I did not know anybody, and nobody knew me.”

Again, that stab of anguish in Bean’s heart. This time, though, he was not unprepared, and he breathed a little more deeply and took it in stride.

“I was angry, of course, as who would not be?” said Anton. “And do you know what I wanted?”

Bean did not want to say what he immediately thought of: death.

“Not suicide, never that. My life wish is too strong, and I was not depressed, I was furious. Well, no, I
was
depressed, but I knew that killing myself would only help my enemies—the government—accomplish their real purpose without having had to dirty their hands. No, I did not wish to die. What I wanted, with all my heart, was…to begin to live.”

“Why do I feel a song coming on?” said Bean. The sarcastic words slipped out of him unbidden.

To his surprise, Anton laughed. “Yes, yes, it’s such a cliché that it should be followed by a love song, shouldn’t it? A sentimental tune that tells of how I was not alive until I met my beloved, and now the moon is new, the sea is blue, the month is June, our love is true.”

Petra burst out laughing. “You missed your calling. The Russian Cole Porter.”

“But my point was serious,” said Anton. “When a man’s life is bent so that his desire is not toward women, it does not change his longing for meaning in his life. A man searches for something that will outlast his life. For immortality of a kind. For a way to change the world, to have his life matter. But it is all in vain. I was swept away until I existed only in footnotes in other men’s articles. It all came down to this, as it always does. You can change the world—as
you
have, Bean, Julian Delphiki—you and Petra Arkanian, both of you, all those children who fought, and the ones who did not fight, all of you—you changed the world. You
saved
the world. All of humanity is your progeny. And yet…it is empty, isn’t it? They didn’t take it away from you the way they took my work from me. But time has taken it away. It’s in the past, and yet you are still alive, so what is your life for?”

They were at the stone steps leading down into the water. Bean wanted simply to keep going, to walk into the Mediterranean, down and down, until he found old Poseidon at the bottom of the sea, and deeper, to the throne of Hades. What is my life for?

“You found purpose in Thailand,” said Anton. “And then saving Petra, that was a purpose. But what did you save her for? You have gone to the lair of the dragon and carried off the dragon’s daughter—for that is what the myth always means, when it doesn’t mean the dragon’s wife—and now you have her, and…you refuse to see what you must do, not
to
her, but
with
her.”

Bean turned to Petra with weary resignation. “Petra, how many letters did it take to make clear to Anton precisely what you wanted him to say to me?”

“Don’t leap to conclusions, foolish boy,” said Anton. “She only wanted to find out if there was any way to correct your genetic problem. She did not speak to me of your personal dilemma. Some of it I learned from my old friend Hyrum Graff. Some of it I knew from Sister Carlotta. And some of it I saw simply by looking at the two of you together. You both give off enough pheromones to fertilize the eggs of passing birds.”

“I really don’t tell our business to others,” said Petra.

“Listen to me, both of you. Here is the meaning of life: for a man to find a woman, for a woman to find a man, the creature most unlike you, and then to make babies with her, with him, or to find them some other way, but then to raise them up, and watch them do the same thing, generation after generation, so that when you die you know you are permanently a part of the great web of life. That you are not a loose thread, snipped off.”

“That’s not the only meaning of life,” said Petra, sounding a little annoyed. Well, thought Bean, you brought us here, so take
your
medicine, too.

“Yes it is,” said Anton. “Do you think I haven’t had time to think about this? I am the same man, with the same mind, I am the man who found Anton’s Key. I have found many other keys as well, but they took away my work, and I had to find another. Well, here it is. I give it to you, the result of all my…study. Shallow as it had to be, it is still the truest thing I ever found. Even men who do not desire
women, even women who do not desire men, this does not exempt them from the deepest desire of all, the desire to be an inextricable part of the human race.”

“We’re all part of it no matter what we do,” said Bean. “Even those of us who aren’t actually human.”

“It’s hardwired into all of us. Not just sexual desire—that can be twisted any which way, and it often is. And not just a desire to have children, because many people never get that, and yet they can still be woven into the fabric. No, it’s a deep hunger to find a person from that strange, terrifyingly other sex and make a life together. Even old people beyond mating, even people who know they can’t have children, there’s still a hunger for
this
. For actual marriage, two unlike creatures becoming, as best they can, one.”