Shadow of the Hegemon

by Orson Scott Card

  "I didn't want to critique the ice cream in a language they'd understand."

  "Doesn't the memory of starvation make you more patient?"

  "Does everything have to be a moral question?"

  "I wrote my dissertation on Aquinas and Tillich," said Sister Carlotta. "All questions are philosophical."

  "In which case, all answers are unintelligible."

  "And you're not even in grad school yet."

  A tall young man slid onto the bench beside Bean. "Sorry I'm late," he said. "You got my keys?"

  "I feel so foolish," said Sister Carlotta. "I came all the way here and then I realized I left them back home. Let me buy you some ice cream and then you can walk home with me and get them."

  Bean looked up at Peter's face in profile. The resemblance to Ender was plain, but not close enough that anyone could ever mistake one for the other.

  So this is the kid who brokered the ceasefire that ended the League War. The kid who wants to be Hegemon. Good looking, but not movie-star handsome--people would like him, but still trust him. Bean had studied the vids of Hitler and Stalin. The difference was palpable--Stalin never had to get elected; Hitler did. Even with that stupid mustache, you could see it in Hitler's eyes, that ability to see into you, that sense that whatever he said, wherever he looked, he was speaking to you, looking at you, that he cared about you. But Stalin, he looked like the liar that he was. Peter was definitely in the charismatic category. Like Hitler.

  Perhaps an unfair comparison, but those who coveted power invited such thoughts. And the worst was seeing the way Sister Carlotta played to him. True, she was acting a part, but when she spoke to him, when that gaze was fixed on her, she preened a little, she warmed to him. Not so much that she'd behave foolishly, but she was aware of him with a heightened intensity that Bean didn't like. Peter had the seducer's gift. Dangerous.

  "I'll walk home with you," said Peter. "I'm not hungry. Have you already paid?"

  "Of course," said Sister Carlotta. "This is my grandson, by the way. Delfino."

  Peter turned to notice Bean for the first time--though Bean was quite sure Peter had sized him up thoroughly before he sat down. "Cute kid," he said. "How old is he? Does he go to school yet?"

  "I'm little," said Bean cheerfully, "but at least I'm not a yelda."

  "All those vids of Battle School life," said Peter. "Even little kids are picking up that stupid polyglot slang."

  "Now, children, you must get along, I insist on it." Sister Carlotta led the way to the door. "My grandson is visiting this country for the first time, young man, so he doesn't understand American banter."

  "Yes I do," said Bean, trying to sound like a petulant child and finding it quite easy, since he really was annoyed.

  "He speaks English pretty well. But you better hold his hand crossing this street, the campus trams zoom through here like Daytona."

  Bean rolled his eyes and submitted to having Carlotta hold his hand across the street. Peter was obviously trying to provoke him, but why? Surely he wasn't so shallow as to think humiliating Bean would give him some advantage. Maybe he took pleasure in making other people feel small.

  Finally, though, they were away from campus and had taken enough twists and turns to make sure they weren't being followed.

  "So you're the great Julian Delphiki," said Peter.

  "And you're Locke. They're touting you for Hegemon when Sakata's term is over. Too bad you're only virtual."

  "I'm thinking of going public soon," said Peter.

  "Ah, that's why you got the plastic surgery to make you so pretty," said Bean.

  "This old face?" said Peter. "I only wear it when I don't care how I look."

  "Boys," said Sister Carlotta. "Must you display like baby chimps?"

  Peter laughed easily. "Come on, Mom, we was just playin'. Can't we still go to the movies?"

  "Off to bed without supper, the lot of you," said Sister Carlotta.

  Bean had had enough of this. "Where's Petra?" he demanded.

  Peter looked at him as if he were insane. "I don't have her."

  "You have sources," said Bean. "You know more than you're telling me."

  "You know more than you're telling me, too," said Peter. "I thought we were working on trusting each other, and then we open the floodgates of wisdom."

  "Is she dead?" said Bean, not willing to be deflected.

  Peter looked at his watch. "At this moment. I don't know."

  Bean stopped walking. Disgusted, he turned to Sister Carlotta. "We wasted a trip," he said. "And risked our lives for nothing."

  "Are you sure?" said Sister Carlotta.

  Bean looked back at Peter, who seemed genuinely bemused. "He wants to be Hegemon," said Bean, "but he's nothing." Bean walked away. He had memorized the route, of course, and knew how to get to the bus station without Sister Carlotta's help. Ender had ridden these buses as a child younger than Bean. It was the only consolation for the bitter disappointment of finding out that Peter was a game-playing fool.

  No one called after him, and he did not look back.

  Bean took, not the bus to the hotel, but the one that passed nearest the school Ender had attended just before being taken into Battle School. The whole story of Ender's life had come out in the inquiry into Graff's conduct: Ender's first killing had taken place here, a boy named Stilson who had set on Ender with his gang. Bean had been there for Ender's second killing, which was pretty much the same situation as the first. Ender--alone, outnumbered, surrounded--talked his way into single combat and then fought to destroy his enemy so no will to fight would remain. But he had known it here, at the age of six.

  I knew things at that age, thought Bean. And younger, too. Not how to kill--that was beyond me, I was too small. But how to live, that was hard.

  For me it was hard, but not for Ender. Bean walked through the neighborhoods of modest old houses and even more modest new ones--but to him they were all miracles. Not that he hadn't had plenty of chances, living with his family in Greece after the war, to see how most children grew up. But this was different. This was the place that had spawned Ender Wiggin.

  I had more native talent for war than Ender had. But he was still the better commander. Was this the difference? He grew up where he never worried about finding another meal, where people praised him and protected him. I grew up where if I found a scrap of food I had to worry that another street kid might kill me for it. Shouldn't that have made me the one who fought desperately, and Ender the one who held back?

  It wasn't the place. Two people in identical situations would never make exactly the same choices. Ender is who he is, and I am who I am. It was in him to destroy the Formics. It was in me to stay alive.

  So what's in me now? I'm a commander without an army. I have a mission to perform, but no knowledge of how to perform it. Petra, if she's still alive, is in desperate peril, and she counts on me to free her. The others are all free. She alone remains hidden. What has Achilles done to her? I will not have Petra end like Poke.

  There it was. The difference between Ender and Bean. Ender came out of his bitterest battle of childhood undefeated. He had done what was required. But Bean had not even realized the danger his friend Poke was in until too late. If he had seen in time how immediate her peril was, he could have warned her, helped her. Saved her. Instead, her body was tossed into the Rhine, to be found bobbing like so much garbage among the wharves.

  And it was happening again.

  Bean stood in front of the Wiggin house. Ender had never spoken of it, nor had pictures of it been shown at the court of inquiry. But it was exactly what Bean had expected. A tree in the front yard, with wooden slats nailed into the trunk to form a ladder to the platform in a high crotch of the tree. A tidy, well-tended garden. A place of peace and refuge. What did Ender ever know of fear?

  Where is Petra's garden? For that matter, where is mine?

  Bean knew he was being unreasonable. If Ender had come back to Earth, he too would no doubt be in hi
ding, if Achilles hadn't simply killed him straight off. And even as things stood, he couldn't help but wonder if Ender might not prefer to be living as Bean was, on Earth, in hiding, than where he was now, in space, bound for another world and a life of permanent exile from the world of his birth.

  A woman came out of the front door of the house. Mrs. Wiggin?

  "Are you lost?" she asked.

  Bean realized that in his disappointment--no, call it despair--he had forgotten his vigilance. This house might be watched. Even if it was not, Mrs. Wiggin herself might remember him, this young boy who appeared in front of her house during school hours.

  "Is this where Ender Wiggin grew up?"

  A cloud passed across her face, just momentarily, but Bean saw how her expression saddened before her smile could be put back. "Yes, it is," she said. "But we don't give tours."

  For reasons Bean could not understand, on impulse he said, "I was with him. In the last battle. I fought under him."

  Her smile changed again, away from mere courtesy and kindness, toward something like warmth and pain. "Ah," she said. "A veteran." And then the warmth faded and was replaced by worry. "I know all the faces of Ender's companions in that last battle. You're the one who's dead. Julian Delphiki."

  Just like that, his cover was blown--and he had done it to himself, by telling her that he was in Ender's jeesh. What was he thinking? There were only eleven of them. "Obviously, there's someone who wants to kill me," he said. "If you tell anyone I came here, it will help him do it."

  "I won't tell. But it was careless of you to come here."

  "I had to see," said Bean, wondering if that was anything like a true explanation.

  She didn't wonder. "That's absurd," she said. "You wouldn't risk your life to come here without a reason." And then it came together in her mind. "Peter's not home right now."

  "I know," Bean said. "I was just with him at the university." And then he realized--there was no reason for her to think he was coming to see Peter, unless she had some idea of what Peter was doing. "You know," he said.

  She closed her eyes, realizing now what she had confessed. "Either we are both very great fools," she said, "or we must have trusted each other at once, to let our guard down so readily."

  "We're only fools if the other can't be trusted," said Bean.

  "We'll find out, won't we?" Then she smiled. "No use leaving you standing out here on the street, for people to wonder why a child your size is not in school."

  He followed her up the walkway to the front door. When Ender left home, did he walk down this path? Bean tried to imagine the scene. Ender never came home. Like Bonzo, the other casualty of the war. Bonzo, killed; Ender, missing in action; and now Bean coming up the walk to Ender's home. Only this was no sentimental visit with a grieving family. It was a different war now, but war it was, and she had another son at risk these days.

  She was not supposed to know what he was doing. Wasn't that the whole point of Peter's having to camouflage his activities by pretending to be a student?

  She made him a sandwich without even asking, as if she simply assumed that a child would be hungry. It was, of all things, that plain American cliche, peanut butter on white bread. Had she made such sandwiches for Ender?

  "I miss him," said Bean, because he knew that would make her like him.

  "If he had been here," said Mrs. Wiggin, "he probably would have been killed. When I read what . . . Locke . . . wrote about that boy from Rotterdam, I couldn't imagine he would have let Ender live. You knew him, too, didn't you. What's his name?"

  "Achilles," said Bean.

  "You're in hiding," she said. "But you seem so young."

  "I travel with a nun named Sister Carlotta," said Bean. "We claim we're grandmother and grandson."

  "I'm glad you're not alone."

  "Neither is Ender."

  Tears came to her eyes. "I suppose he needed Valentine more than we did."

  On impulse--again, an impulsive act instead of a calculated decision--Bean reached out and set his hand in hers. She smiled at him.

  The moment passed. Bean realized again how dangerous it was to be here. What if this house was under surveillance? The I.F. knew about Peter--what if they were observing the house?

  "I should go," said Bean.

  "I'm glad you came by," she said. "I must have wanted very much to talk to someone who knew Ender without being envious of him."

  "We were all envious," said Bean. "But we also knew he was the best of us."

  "Why else would you envy him, if you didn't think he was better?"

  Bean laughed. "Well, when you envy somebody, you tell yourself he isn't really better after all."

  "So . . . did the other children envy his abilities?" asked Mrs. Wiggin. "Or only the recognition he received?"

  Bean didn't like the question, but then remembered who it was that was asking. "I should turn that question back on you. Did Peter envy his abilities? Or only the recognition?"

  She stood there, considering whether to answer or not. Bean knew that family loyalty worked against her saying anything. "I'm not just idly asking," Bean said. "I don't know how much you know about what Peter's doing . . ."

  "We read everything he publishes," said Mrs. Wiggin. "And then we're very careful to act as if we hadn't a clue what's going on in the world."

  "I'm trying to decide whether to throw in with Peter," said Bean. "And I have no way of knowing what to make of him. How much to trust him."

  "I wish I could help you," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Peter marches to a different drummer. I've never really caught the rhythm."

  "Don't you like him?" asked Bean, knowing he was too blunt, but knowing also that he wasn't going to get many chances like this, to talk to the mother of a potential ally--or rival.

  "I love him," said Mrs. Wiggin. "He doesn't show us much of himself. But that's only fair--we never showed our children much of ourselves, either."

  "Why not?" asked Bean. He was thinking of the openness of his mother and father, the way they knew Nikolai, and Nikolai knew them. It had left him almost gasping, the unguardedness of their conversations with each other. Clearly the Wiggin household did not have that custom.

  "It's very complicated," said Mrs. Wiggin.

  "Meaning that you think it's none of my business."

  "On the contrary, I know it's very much your business." She sighed and sat back down. "Come on, let's not pretend this is only a doorstep conversation. You came here to find out about Peter. The easy answer is simply to tell you that we don't know a thing. He never tells anyone anything they want to know, unless it would be useful to him for them to know it."

  "But the hard answer?"

  "We've been hiding from our children, almost from the start," said Mrs. Wiggin. "We can hardly be surprised or resentful when they learned at a very early age to be secretive."

  "What were you hiding?"

  "We don't tell our children, and I should tell you?" But she answered her own question at once. "If Valentine and Ender were here, I think we would talk to them. I even tried to explain some of this to Valentine before she left to join Ender in . . . space. I did a very bad job, because I had never put it in words before. Let me just . . . let me start by saying . . . we were going to have a third child anyway, even if the I.F. hadn't asked us to."

  Where Bean had grown up, the population laws hadn't meant much--the street children of Rotterdam were all extra people and knew perfectly well that by law not one of them should have been born, but when you're starving, it's hard to care much about whether you're going to get into the finest schools. Still, when the laws were repealed, he read about them and knew the significance of their decision to have a third child. "Why would you do that?" asked Bean. "It would hurt all your children. It would end your careers."

  "We were very careful not to have careers," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Not careers that we'd hate to give up. What we had was only jobs. You see, we're religious people."

  "There are lots of religious
people in the world."

  "But not in America," said Mrs. Wiggin. "Not the kind of fanatic that does something so selfish and antisocial as to have more than two children, just because of some misguided religious ideas. And when Peter tested so high as a toddler, and they started monitoring him--well, that was a disaster for us. We had hoped to be . . . unobtrusive. To disappear. We're very bright people, you know."

  "I wondered why the parents of such geniuses didn't have noted careers of their own," said Bean. "Or at least some kind of standing in the intellectual community."

  "Intellectual community," said Mrs. Wiggin scornfully. "America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold on truth."

  She sounded bitter.

  "I sound bitter," she said.

  "You've lived your life," said Bean. "So you think you're smarter than the smart people."

  She recoiled a bit. "Well, that's the kind of comment that explains why we never discuss our faith with anyone."

  "I didn't mean it as an attack," said Bean. "I think I'm smarter than anybody I've ever met, because I am. I'd have to be dumber than I am not to know it. You really believe in your religion, and you resent the fact that you had to hide it from others. That's all I was saying."

  "Not religion, religions," she said. "My husband and I don't even share the same doctrine. Having a large family in obedience to God, that was about the only thing we agreed on. And even at that, we both had elaborate intellectual justifications for our decision to defy the law. For one thing, we didn't think it would hurt our children at all. We meant to raise them in faith, as believers."

  "So why didn't you?"

  "Because we're cowards after all," said Mrs. Wiggin. "With the I.F. watching, we would have had constant interference. They would have intervened to make sure we didn't teach our children anything that would prevent them from fulfilling the role that Ender and you ended up fulfilling. That's when we started hiding our faith. Not really from our children, just from the Battle School people. We were so relieved when Peter's monitor was taken away. And then Valentine's. We thought we were done. We were going to move to a place where we wouldn't be so badly treated, and have a third child, and a fourth, as many as we could have before they arrested us. But then they came to us and requisitioned a third child. So we didn't have to move. You see? We were lazy and frightened. If the Battle School was going to give us a cover to allow us to have one more child, then why not?"