Instead he sat still. He read books. He signed on to the nets using one of his many names and cruised around, looking for whatever dribbles of information oozed through the military security systems of every nation, hoping for something to tell him where Petra and Fly Molo and Vlad and Dumper were being held. Some country that was showing signs of a little more cockiness because they thought they had the winning hand now. Or a country that was acting more cautious and methodical because finally somebody with a brain was running their strategy.
But it was pointless, because he knew he wasn't going to find it this way. The real information never got onto the net until it was too late to do anything about it. Somebody knew. The facts he needed to find his way to his friends were available in a dozen sites--he knew that, knew it, because that's the way it always was, the historians would find it and wonder for a thousand pages at a time: Why didn't anybody notice? Why didn't anybody put it together? Because the people who had the information were too dim to know what they had, and the people who could have understood it were locked in an apartment in an abandoned resort that even tourists didn't want to come to anymore.
The worst thing was that even Mother and Father were getting on his nerves. After a childhood with no parents, the best thing that had ever happened to him was when Sister Carlotta's research found his biological parents. The war ended, and when all the other kids got to go home to their families, Bean wasn't left over. He got to go home to his family, too. He had no childhood memories of them, of course. But Nikolai had, and Nikolai let Bean borrow them as if they were his own.
They were good people, his mother and his father. They never made him feel as if he were an intruder, a stranger, even a visitor. It was as if he had always belonged with them. They liked him. They loved him. It was a strange, exhilarating feeling to be with people who didn't want anything from you except your happiness, who were glad just to have you around.
But when you're already going crazy from confinement, it doesn't matter how much you like somebody, how much you love them, how grateful you are for their kindness to you. They will make you nuts. Everything they do grates on you like a bad song that won't get out of your head. You just want to scream at them to shut. Up. But you don't, because you love them and you know that you're probably driving them crazy too and as long as there's no hope of release you've got to keep things calm . . .
And then finally there comes a knock on the door and you open it up and you realize that something different is finally going to happen.
It was Colonel Graff and Sister Carlotta at the door. Graff in a suit now, and Sister Carlotta in an extravagant auburn wig that made her look really stupid but also kind of pretty. The whole family recognized them at once, except that Nikolai had never met Sister Carlotta. But when Bean and his family got up to greet them, Graff held up a hand to stop them and Carlotta put her finger to her lips. They came inside and closed the door after them and beckoned the family to gather in the bathroom.
It was a tight fit, the six of them in there. Father and Mother ended up standing in the shower while Graff hung a tiny machine from the overhead light. Once it was in place and the red light began blinking, Graff spoke softly.
"Hi," he said. "We came to get you out of this place."
"Why all the precautions in here?" asked Father.
"Because part of the security system here is to listen in on everything said in this apartment."
"To protect us, they spy on us?" asked Mother.
"Of course they do," said Father.
"Since anything we say here might leak into the system," said Graff, "and would most certainly leak right back out of the system, I brought this little machine, which hears every sound we make and produces countersounds that nullify them so we pretty much can't be heard."
"Pretty much?" asked Bean.
"That's why we won't go into any details," said Graff. "I'll tell you only this much. I'm the Minister of Colonization, and we have a ship that leaves in a few months. Just time enough to get you off Earth, up to the ISL, and over to Eros for the launch."
But even as he said it, he was shaking his head, and Sister Carlotta was grinning and shaking her head, too, so that they would know that this was all a lie. A cover story.
"Bean and I have been in space before, Mother," said Nikolai, playing along. "It's not so bad."
"It's what we fought the war for," Bean chimed in. "The Formics wanted Earth because it was just like the worlds they already lived on. So now that they're gone, we get their worlds, which should be good for us. It's only fair, don't you think?"
Of course their parents both understood what was happening, but Bean knew Mother well enough by now that he wasn't surprised that she had to ask a completely useless and dangerous question just to be sure.
"But we're not really . . ." she began. Then Father's hand gently covered her mouth.
"It's the only way to keep us safe," Father said. "Once we're going at lightspeed, it'll seem like a couple of years to us, while decades pass on Earth. By the time we reach the other planet, everybody who wants us dead will be dead themselves."
"Like Joseph and Mary taking Jesus into Egypt," said Mother.
"Exactly," said Father.
"Except they got to go back to Nazareth."
"If Earth destroys itself in some stupid war," said Father, "it won't matter to us anymore, because we'll be part of a new world. Be happy about this, Elena. It means we can stay together." Then he kissed her.
"Time to go, Mr. and Mrs. Delphiki. Bring the boys, please." Graff reached up and yanked the damper from the ceiling light.
The soldiers who waited for them in the hall wore the uniform of the I.F. Not a Greek uniform was in sight. And these young men were armed to the teeth. As they walked briskly to the stairs--no elevators, no doors that might suddenly open to leave them trapped in a box for an enemy to toss in a grenade or a few thousand projectiles--Bean watched the way the soldier in the lead watched everything, checked every corner, the light under every door in the hall, so that nothing could surprise him. Bean also saw how the man's body moved inside his clothes, with a kind of contained strength that made his clothes seem like Kleenex, he could rip through the fabric just by tugging at it a little, because nothing could hold him in except his own self-control. It was like his sweat was pure testosterone. This was what a man was supposed to be. This was a soldier.
I was never a soldier, thought Bean. He tried to imagine himself the way he had been in Battle School, strapping on cut-down flash-suit pieces that never fit him right. He always looked like somebody's pet monkey dressed up as a human for the joke of it. Like a toddler who got clothes out of his big brother's dresser. The man in front of him, that's what Bean wanted to be when he grew up. But try as he might, he could never imagine himself actually being big. No, not even being full size. He would always be looking up at the world. He might be male, he might be human, or at least humanesque, but he would never be manly. No one would ever look at him and say, Now, that's a man.
Then again, this soldier had never given orders that changed the course of history. Looking great in a uniform wasn't the only way to earn your place in the world.
Down the stairs, three flights, and then a pause for just a moment well back from the emergency exit while two of the soldiers came out and watched for the signal from the men in the I.F. chopper waiting thirty meters away. The signal came. Graff and Sister Carlotta led the way, still at a brisk walk. They looked neither left nor right, just focused on the helicopter. They got in, sat down, buckled up, and the chopper tilted and rose from the grass and flew low out over the water.
Mother was all for demanding to know the real plan, but again Graff cut off all discussion with a cheerful bellow of "Let's wait to discuss this until we can do it without shouting!"
Mother didn't like it. None of them did. But there was Sister Carlotta smiling her best nun smile, like a sort of Virgin-in-training. How could they help but trust her?
Five m
inutes in the air and then they set down on the deck of a submarine. It was a big one, with the stars and stripes of the United States, and it occurred to Bean that since they didn't know what country had kidnapped the other kids, how could they be sure they weren't just walking into the hands of their enemies?
But once they got down inside the ship, they could see that while the crew was in U.S. uniforms, the only people carrying weapons were the I.F. soldiers who had brought them and a half-dozen more who had been waiting for them with the sub. Since power came from the barrel of a gun, and the only guns on the ship were under Graff's command, Bean's mind was eased a little.
"If you try to tell us that we can't talk here," Mother began--but to her consternation Graff again held up a hand, and Sister Carlotta again made a shushing gesture as Graff beckoned them to follow their lead soldier through the narrow corridors of the sub.
Finally the six of them were packed once more into a tiny space--this time the executive officer's cabin--and once again they waited while Graff hung his noise damper and turned it on. When the light started blinking, Mother was the first to speak.
"I'm trying to figure out how we can tell we aren't being kidnapped just like the others," she said dryly.
"You got it," said Graff. "They were all taken by a group of terrorist nuns, aided by fat old bureaucrats."
"He's joking," said Father, trying to soothe Mother's immediate wrath.
"I know he's joking. I just don't think it's funny. After all we've been through, and then we're supposed to go along without a word, without a question, just . . . trusting."
"Sorry," said Graff. "But you were already trusting the Greek government back where you were. You've got to trust somebody, so why not us?"
"At least the Greek Army explained things to us and pretended we had a right to make some decisions," said Mother.
They didn't explain things to me and Nikolai, Bean wanted to say.
"Come, children, no bickering," said Sister Carlotta. "The plan is very simple. The Greek Army continues to guard that apartment building as if you were still inside it, taking meals in and doing laundry. This fools no one, probably, but it makes the Greek government feel like they're part of the program. In the meantime, four passengers answering your description but flying under assumed names are taken to Eros, where they embark on the first colony ship, and only then, when the ship is launched, is an announcement made that for their protection, the Delphiki family have opted for permanent emigration and a new life in a new world."
"And where are we really?" asked Father.
"I don't know," said Graff very simply.
"And neither do I," said Sister Carlotta.
Bean's family looked at them in disbelief.
"I guess that means we won't be staying in the sub," said Nikolai, "because then you'd absolutely know where we are."
"It's a double blind," said Bean. "They're splitting us up. I'll go one way, you'll go another."
"Absolutely not," said Father.
"We've had enough of a divided family," said Mother.
"It's the only way," said Bean. "I knew it already. I . . . want it that way."
"You want to leave us?" said Mother.
"It's me they want to kill," said Bean.
"We don't know that!" said Mother.
"But we're pretty sure," said Bean. "If I'm not with you, then even if you're found, they'll probably leave you alone."
"And if we're divided," said Nikolai, "it changes the profile of what they're looking for. Not a mother and father and two boys. Now it's a mother and father and one boy. And a grandma and her grandchild." Nikolai grinned at Sister Carlotta.
"I was rather hoping to be taken for an aunt," she said.
"You talk as if you already know the plan!" said Mother.
"It was obvious," said Nikolai. "From the moment they told us the cover story in the bathroom. Why else would Colonel Graff bring Sister Carlotta?"
"It wasn't obvious to me," said Mother.
"Or to me," said Father. "But that's what happens when your sons are both brilliant military minds."
"How long?" Mother demanded. "When will it end? When do we get to have Bean back with us?"
"I don't know," said Graff.
"He can't know, Mother," said Bean. "Not until we know who did the kidnappings and why. When we know what the threat actually is, then we can judge when we've taken sufficient countermeasures to make it safe for us to come partway out of hiding."
Mother suddenly burst into tears. "And you want this, Julian?"
Bean put his arms around her. Not because he felt any personal need to do it, but because he knew she needed that gesture from him. Living with a family for a year had not given him the full complement of normal human emotional responses, but at least it had made him more aware of what they ought to be. And he did have one normal reaction--he felt a little guilty that he could only fake what Mother needed, instead of having it come from the heart. But such gestures never came from the heart, for Bean. It was a language he had learned too late for it to come naturally to him. He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.
The truth was that even though he loved his family, he was eager to get to a place where he could get to work making the contacts he needed to get the information that would let him find his friends. Except for Ender, he was the only one from Ender's jeesh who was outside and free. They needed him, and he'd wasted enough time already.
So he held his mother, and she clung to him, and she shed many tears. He also embraced his father, but more briefly; and he and Nikolai only punched each other's arms. All foreign gestures to Bean, but they knew he meant to mean them, and took them as if they were real.
The sub was fast. They weren't very long at sea before they reached a crowded port--Salonika, Bean assumed, though it could have been any other cargo port on the Aegean. The sub never actually entered the harbor. Instead, it surfaced between two ships moving in a parallel track toward the harbor. Mother, Father, Nikolai, and Graff were transferred to a freighter along with two of the soldiers, who were now in civilian clothes, as if that could conceal the soldierly way they acted. Bean and Carlotta stayed behind. Neither group would know where the other was. There would be no effort to contact each other. That had been another hard realization for Mother. "Why can't we write?"
"Nothing is easier to track than email," said Father. "Even if we use disguised online identities, if someone finds us, and we're writing regularly to Julian, then they'll see the pattern and track him down."
Mother understood it then. With her head, if not her heart.
Down inside the sub, Bean and Sister Carlotta sat down at a tiny table in the mess.
"Well?" said Bean.
"Well," said Sister Carlotta.
"Where are we going?" asked Bean.
"I have no idea," said Sister Carlotta. "They'll transfer us to another ship at another port, and we'll get off, and I have these false identities that we're supposed to use, but I really have no idea where we should go from there."
"We have to keep moving. No more than a few weeks in any one place," said Bean. "And I have to get on the nets with new identities every time we move, so no one can track the pattern."
"Do you seriously think someone will catalogue all the email in the entire world and follow up on all the ones that move around?" asked Sister Carlotta.
"Yes," said Bean. "They probably already do, so it's just a matter of running a search."
"But that's billions of emails a day."
"That's why it takes so many clerks to check all the email addresses on the file cards in the central switchboard," said Bean. He grinned at Sister Carlotta.
She did not grin back. "You really are a snotty and disrespectful little boy," she said.
"You're really leaving it up to me to decide where we go?"
"Not at all. I'm merely waiting to make a decision until we both agree."
"Oh, now, that's a cheap excuse to
stay down here in this sub with all these great-looking men."
"Your level of banter has become even more crude than it was when you lived on the streets of Rotterdam," she said, coolly analytical.
"It's the war," said Bean. "It. . . it changes a man."
She couldn't keep a straight face any longer. Even though her laugh was only a single bark, and her smile lasted only a moment longer, it was enough. She still liked him. And he, to his surprise, still liked her, even though it had been years since he lived with her while she educated him to a level where Battle School would take him. He was surprised because, at the time he lived with her, he had never let himself realize that he liked her. After Poke's death, he hadn't been willing to admit to himself that he liked anybody. But now he knew the truth. He liked Sister Carlotta just fine.
Of course, she would probably get on his nerves after a while, too, just like his parents had. But at least when that happened, they could pick up and move. There wouldn't be soldiers keeping them indoors and away from the windows.
And if it ever became truly annoying, Bean could leave and strike out on his own. He'd never say that to Sister Carlotta, because it would only worry her. Besides, she was bound to know it already. She had all the test data. And those tests had been designed to tell everything about a person. Why, she probably knew him better than he knew himself.
Of course, he knew that back when he took the tests, there was hardly an honest answer on any of the psychological tests. He had already read enough psychology by the time he took them that he knew exactly what answers were needed to show the profile that would probably get him into Battle School. So in fact she didn't know him from those tests at all.
But then, he didn't have any idea what his real answers would have been, then or now. So it isn't as if he knew himself any better.
And because she had observed him, and she was wise in her own way, she probably did know him better than he knew himself.
What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never knew why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even knew themselves. Nobody understands anybody.
Shadow of the Hegemon Page 5