Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 7 - Shadow Puppets

by Orson Scott Card

  Theresa seethed for a while at what Graft and the International fleet and the Formics and fate and God had done to her and her family. And then she thought of Ender and Valentine and wept a few tears onto the papayas. And then she thought of herself and John Paul, waiting and watching, trying to protect Peter. Graff was right. They could never watch him perfectly.

  They would sleep. They would miss something. Achilles would have an opportunity-many opportunities-and just when they were most complacent he would strike and Peter would be dead and the world would be at Achilles's mercy because who else was clever and ruthless enough to fight him? Bean? Petra? Suriyawong? Nikolai? One of the other Battle School children scattered over the surface of Earth? If there was any who was ambitious enough to stop Achilles, he would have surfaced by now.

  She was carrying the heavy bag of papayas into the house-sidling through the door, trying not to bump and bruise the fruit when it dawned on her what Graft's errand had really been about.

  Peter needs a friend, he said. The issue between Peter and Achilles might be resolved by poison or sabotage, he said. But she and John Paul could not possibly watch over Peter well enough to protect him from assassination, he said. Therefore, in what way could she and John Paul possibly be the friends that Peter needed?

  The contest between Achilles and Peter would be just as easily resolved by Achilles's death as by Peter's.

  At once there flashed into her memory the stories of some of the great poisoners of history, by rumour if not by proof. Lucretia Borgia. Cleopatra. What's-her-name who poisoned everybody around the Emperor Claudius and probably got him in the end, as well.

  In olden days, there were no chemical tests to determine conclusively whether poison had been used. Poisoners gathered their own herbs, leaving no trail of purchases, no co-conspirators who might confess or accuse. If anything happened to Achilles before Peter had decided the monster boy had to go, Peter would launch an investigation... and when the trail led to his parents, as it inevitably would, how would Peter respond? Make an example of them, letting them go on trial? Or would he protect them, trying to cover up the result of the investigation, leaving his reign as Hegemon to be tainted by the rumours about Achilles's untimely death. No doubt every opponent of Peter's would resurrect Achilles as a martyr, a much-slandered boy who offered the brightest hope to mankind, slain in his youth by the crawlingly vile Peter Wiggin, or his mother the witch or his father the snake.

  It was not enough to kill Achilles. It had to be done properly, in a way that would not harm Peter in the long run.

  Though it would be better for Peter to endure the rumours and legends about Achilles's death than for Peter himself to be the slain one. She dare not wait too long.

  My assignment from Graff, thought Theresa, is to become an assassin in order to protect my son.

  And the truly horrifying thing is that I'm not questioning whether to do it, but how. And when.

  CHAPTER 4 — CHOPIN

  encrypt key

  decrypt key

  To: Pythian%Iegume@nowyouseeitnovtyou.com

  From: Graff%pilgrimage@colmin.gov

  Re: Aren't we cute

  I suppose you can be allowed to indulge your adolescent humour by using obvious pseudonyms like pythian%Iegume, and I know this is a use-once identity, but really, it smacks of a careless insouciance that worries me. We can't afford to lose you or your travelling companion because you had to make a joke.

  Enough of imagining I could possibly influence your decisions. The first few weeks since the Belgian arrived in RP have been eventless. Your and your companion's parents are in training and quarantine, preparatory to going up to one of the colony ships. I will not actually take them off planet without your approval unless some emergency comes up. However, the moment I keep them past their training group's embarkation date, they become unusual and rumours will start to travel, it's dangerous to keep them Earthside for too long. And yet once we get them off world, it will be even more difficult to get them back. I don't wish to pressure you, but your families' futures are at stake, and so far you haven't even consulted with them directly.

  As for the Belgian, PW has given him a job-Assistant to the Hegemon. He has his own letterhead and email identity, a sort of minister without portfolio, with no bureaucracy to command and no money to disburse. Yet he keeps busy all day long. I wonder what be does.

  I should have said that the Belgian has no official staff. Unofficially, Sun seems to be at his beck and call. I've heard from several observers that the change in him is quite astonishing. He never showed such exaggerated respect to you or PW as he does to the Belgian. They dine together often, and while the Belgian has never actually visited the barracks and training ground or gone on assignments or manoeuvres with your little army, the inference that the Belgian is cultivating some degree of influence or even control over the Hegemony’s small fighting force is inescapable. Are you in contact with Sun? When I tried to broach the subject with him, he never so much as answered.

  As far you, my brilliant young friend, I hope you realise that all of Sister Carlotta's false identities were provided by the Vatican, and your use of them blares like a trumpet within Vatican walls. They have asked me to assure you that Achilles has no support within their ranks, and never did have, even before he murdered Carlotta, but if they can track you so easily, perhaps someone else can as well. As they say, a word to the wise is sufficient. And here I've gone and written five paragraphs.

  -Graff

  Petra and Bean travelled together for a month before things came to a head. At first Petra was content to let Bean make all the decisions. After all, she had never gone underground like this, travelling with false identities. He seemed to have all sorts of papers, some of which had been with him in the Philippines, and the rest in various hiding places scattered throughout the world.

  The trouble was, all her identities were designed for a sixty-year old woman who spoke languages that Petra had never learned. "This is absurd," she told Bean when he handed her the fourth such identity. "No one will believe this for an instant."

  "And yet they do," said Bean.

  "And I'd like to know why," she retorted. "I think there's more to this than the paperwork. I think we're getting help every time we pass through an identity check."

  "Sometimes yes, sometimes no," said Bean.

  "But every time you use some connection of yours to get a security guard to ignore the fact that I do not look old enough to be this person- "Sometimes, when you haven't had enough sleep-" "You're too tall to be cute. So give it up."

  "Petra. I agree with you," said Bean at last. "These were all for Sister Carlotta, and you don't look like her, and we are leaving a trail of favours asked for and favours done. So we need to separate."

  "Two reasons why that won't happen," said Petra.

  "You mean besides the fact that travelling together was your idea from the beginning? Which you blackmailed me into because we both know you'd get killed without me?-which hasn't stopped you from criticising the way I go about keeping you alive, I notice."

  "The second reason," Petra said, ignoring his effort to pick a fight, "is that while we're on the run you can't do anything. And it drives you crazy not to do anything."

  "I'm doing a lot of things," said Bean.

  "Besides arranging for us to get past stupid security guards with bad ID?"

  "Already I've started two wars, cured three diseases, and written an epic poem. If you weren't so self-centred you would have noticed."

  "You're such a jack of all trades, Julian."

  "Staying alive isn't doing nothing."

  "But it isn't doing what you want to do with your life," said Petra.

  "Staying alive is all I've ever wanted to do with my life, dear child."

  "But in the end, you're going to fail at that," said Petra.

  "Most of us do. All of us, actually, unless Sister Carlotta and the Christians turn out to be right."

  "You want to acco
mplish something before you die."

  Bean sighed. "Because you want that, you think everyone does."

  "The human need to leave something of yourself behind is universal."

  "But I'm not human."

  "No, you're superhuman," she said in disgust. "There's no talking to you, Bean."

  "And yet you persist."

  But Petra knew perfectly well that Bean felt just as she did-that it wasn't enough to stay in hiding, going from place to place, taking a bus here, a train there, a plane to some far-off city, only to start over again in a few days.

  The only reason it mattered that they stay alive was so they could keep their independence long enough to work against Achilles. Except Bean kept denying that he had any such motive, and so they did nothing.

  Bean had been maddening ever since Petra first met him in Battle School. He was the most incredibly tiny little runt then, so precocious he seemed snotty even when he said good morning, and even after they had all worked with him for years and had got the true measure of him at Command School, Petra was still the only one of Ender's jeesh that actually liked Bean.

  She did like him, and not in the patronising way that older kids take younger ones under their wing. There was never any illusion that Bean needed protection anyway. He arrived at Battle School as a consummate survivor, and within days-perhaps within hours-he knew more about the inner workings of the school than anyone else. The same was true at Tactical School and Command School, and during those crucial weeks before Ender joined them on Eros, when Bean commanded the jeesh in their practice manoeuvres.

  The others resented Bean then, for the fact that the youngest of them had been chosen to lead in Ender's place and because they feared that he would be their commander always. They were so relieved when Ender arrived, and didn't try to hide it. It had to hurt Bean, but Petra seemed to be the only one who even thought about his feelings. Much good that it did him. The person who seemed to think about Bean's feelings least of them all was Bean himself.

  Yet he did value her friendship, though he only rarely showed it. And when she was overtaken by exhaustion during a battle, he was the one who covered for her, and he was the only one who showed that he still believed in her as firmly as ever. Even Ender never quite trusted her with the same level of assignment that she had had before. But Bean remained her friend, even as he obeyed Ender's orders and watched over her in all the remaining battles, ready to cover for her if she collapsed again.

  Bean was the one she counted on when the Russians kidnapped her, the one she knew would get the message she hid in an email graphic. And when she was in Achilles's power, it was Bean who was her only hope of rescue. And he got her message, and he saved her from the beast.

  Bean might pretend, even to himself, that all he cared about was his own survival, but in fact he was the most perfectly loyal of friends. Far from acting selfishly, he was reckless with his own life when he had a cause he believed in. But he didn't understand this about himself. Since he thought himself completely unworthy of love, it took him the longest time to know that someone loved him. He had finally caught on about Sister Carlotta, long before she died. But he gave little sign that he recognised Petra's feelings toward him. Indeed, now that he was taller than her, he acted as though he thought of her as an annoying little sister

  And that really pissed her off.

  Yet she was determined not to leave him-and not because she depended on him for her own survival, either. She feared that the moment he was completely on his own, he would embark on some reckless plan to sacrifice his own life to put an end to Achilles's, and that would be an unbearable outcome, at least to Petra.

  Because she had already decided that Bean was wrong in his belief that he should never have children, that the genetic alterations that had made him such a genius should die with him when his uncontrolled growth finally killed him.

  On the contrary, Petra had every intention of bearing his children herself.

  Being in a holding pattern like this, watching him drive himself crazy with his constant busyness that accomplished nothing important while making him irritable and irritating, Petra was not so self-controlled as not to snap back at him. They genuinely liked each other, and so far they had kept their sniping at a level that both could pretend was only joking, but something had to change, and soon, or they really would have a fight that made it impossible to stay together and what would happen to her plans for making Bean's babies then? What finally got Bean to make a change was when Petra brought up Ender Wiggin.

  "What did he save the human race for?" she said in exasperation one day in the airport at Darwin. "So he could stop playing the stupid game.

  "It wasn't so Achilles could rule."

  "Someday Achilles will die. Caligula did."

  "With help from his friends," Petra pointed out.

  "And when he dies, maybe somebody better will succeed him. After Stalin, there was Khrushchev. After Caligula, there was Marcus Aurelius."

  "Not right after. And thirty million died while Stalin ruled."

  "So that made thirty million he didn't rule over any more," said Bean.

  Sometimes he could say the most terrible things. But she knew him well enough by now to know that he spoke with such callousness only when he was feeling depressed. At times like that he brooded about how he was not a member of the human species and the difference was killing him. It was not how he truly felt. "You're not that cold," she said.

  He used to argue when she tried to reassure him about his humanity. She liked to think maybe she was accomplishing something, but she feared that he had stopped answering because he no longer cared what she thought.

  "If I settle into one place," he said, "my chance of staying alive is nil.”

  It irked her that he still spoke of "my chance" instead of "ours.”

  "You hate Achilles and you don't want him to rule the world and if you're going to have any chance of stopping him, you have to settle in one place and get to work."

  "All right, you're so smart, tell me where I'd be safe."

  "The Vatican," said Petra.

  "How many acres in that particular kingdom? How eager are all those cardinals to listen to an altar boy?"

  "All right then, somewhere within the borders of the Muslim League."

  "We're infidels," said Bean.

  "And they're people who are determined not to fall under the domination of the Chinese or the Hegemon or anybody else."

  "My point is that they won't want us.”

  "My point is that whether they want us or not, we're the enemy of their enemy."

  "We're two children, with no army and no information to sell, no leverage at all."

  That was so laughable that Petra didn't bother answering. Besides, she had finally won-he was finally talking about where, not whether, he'd settle down and get to work.

  They found themselves in Poland, and after taking the train from Katowice to Warsaw, they walked together through the Lazienki, one of the great parks of Europe, with centuries-old paths winding among giant trees and the saplings already planted to someday replace them.

  "Did you come here with Sister Carlotta?" Petra asked him.

  "Once," said Bean. "Ender is part Polish, did you know that?"

  "Must be on his mother's side," said Petra. "Wiggin isn't a Polish name.

  "It is when you change it from Wieczorek," said Bean. "Don't you think Mr. Wiggin looks Polish? Wouldn't he fit in here? Not that nationality means that much any more."

  Petra laughed at that. "Nationality? The thing people die for and kill for and have for centuries?"

  "No, I meant ancestry, I suppose. So many people are part this and part that. Supposedly I'm Greek, but my mother's mother was an Ibo diplomat, so... when I go to Africa I look quite Greek, and when I go to Greece I look rather African. In my heart I couldn't care less about either."