“I think there will be no assassination attempt here,” said Uphanad, “because there are very few weapons on board, all are kept under lock and key, and everybody coming up here is scanned for weaponry. So I suggest you not attempt to carry side-arms. You are trained in hand-to-hand combat?”
“No,” said Peter.
“There is a gym on the bottom level, very well equipped. And not just with child size devices, either. The adults also need to stay fit. You should use the facility to maintain your bone mass, and so forth, but also we can arrange martial arts classes for you, if you’re interested.”
“I’m not interested,” said Peter. “But it sounds like a good idea.”
“Anyone they send against us, though,” said Mother, “will be very much better trained in it than we will.”
“Perhaps so, perhaps not,” said Uphanad. “If your enemies attempt to get to you here, they will have to rely on someone they can get through our screening. People who seem particularly athletic are subjected to special scrutiny. We are, you see, paranoid about one of the anti-colonisation groups getting someone up here just to perform an act of sabotage or terrorism.”
“Or assassination.”
“You see?” said Uphanad. “But I assure you I and my staff are very thorough. We never leave anything unchecked.”
“In other words, you knew who we were before we walked in the door.”
“Before your shuttle took off, actually,” said Uphanad. “Or at least I had a fairly good guess.”
They said their good-byes, then settled into the routine of life in a space station.
Day and night were kept on Greenwich time, for no particular reason but that it was at zero longitude and they had to pick some time. Peter found that his parents were not so awfully intrusive as he had feared, and he was relieved that he could not hear their lovemaking or their conversations about him through the divider
What he did, mostly, was go to the library and write.
Essays, of course, on everything, for every conceivable forum. There were plenty of publications that were happy to have pieces from Locke or Demosthenes, especially now that everyone knew these identities belonged to the Hegemon. With most serious work appearing first on the nets, there was no way to target particular audiences. But he still talked about subjects that would have particular interest in various regions.
The aim of everything he wrote was to fan the flames of suspicion of China and Chinese ambitions. As Demosthenes, he wrote quite directly about the danger of allowing the conquest of India and Indochina to stand, with a lot of who’s-next rhetoric. Of course he couldn’t stoop to any serious rabble-rousing, because every word he said would be held against the Hegemon.
Life was so much easier when he was anonymous on the nets.
As Locke, however, he wrote statesmanlike, impartial essays about problems that different nations and regions were facing. “Locke” almost never wrote against China directly, but rather took it for granted that there would be another invasion, and that long-term investments in probable target countries might be unwise, that sort of thing.
It was hard work, because every essay had to be made interesting, original, important, or no one would pay attention to it. He had to make sure he never sounded like someone riding a hobby horse- rather the way Father had sounded when he started spouting off about his theories of group loyalty and character to Dimak. Though, to be fair, he’d never heard Father do that before, it still gave him pause and made him realise how easily Locke and Demosthenes-and therefore Peter Wiggin himself-could become at first an irritant, at last a laughingstock.
Father called this process stassenisation and made various suggestions for essay topics, some of which Peter used. As to what Father and Mother did with their days, when they weren’t reading his essays and commenting on them, catching errors, that sort of thing-well, Peter had no idea.
Maybe Mother had found somebody’s room to clean.
Graft stopped in for a brief visit on their first morning there, but then was off again-returned to Earth, in fact, on the shuttle that had brought them. He did not return for three weeks, by which time Peter had written nearly forty essays, all of which had been published in various places. Most of them were Locke’s essays. And, as usual, most of the attention went to Demosthenes.
When Graff returned, he invited them to dine with him in the Minister’s quarters, and they had a convivial dinner during which nothing important was discussed. Whenever the subject seemed to be turning to a matter of real moment, Graff would interrupt with the pouring of water or a joke of some kind-only rarely the funny kind.
This puzzled Peter, because surely Graff could count on his own quarters being secure. But apparently not, because after dinner he invited them on a walk, leading them quickly out of the regular corridors and into some of the service passages. They were lost almost at once, and when Graff finally opened a door and took them onto a wide ledge overlooking a ventilation shaft, they had lost all sense of direction except, of course, where “down” was.
The ventilation shaft led “down”... a very long way.
“This is a place of some historical importance,” said Graff. “Though few of us know it.”
“Ah,” said Father knowingly.
And because he had guessed it, Peter realised it should be guessable, and so he guessed. “Achilles was here,” he said.
‘This,” said Graft, “is where Bean and his friends tricked Achilles. Achilles thought he was going to be able to kill Bean here, but instead Bean got him in chains, hanging in the shaft. He could have killed Achilles. His friends recommended it.”
“Who were the friends?” asked Mother.
“He never told me, but that’s not surprising-I never asked. I thought it would be wiser if there were never any kind of record, even inside my head, of which other children were there to witness Achilles’s humiliation and helplessness.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered, if he had simply killed Achilles. There would have been no murders.”
“But, you see,” said Graff, “if Achilles had died, then I would have had to ask those names, and Bean could not have been allowed to remain in Battle School. We might have lost the war because of that, because Ender relied on Bean quite heavily.”
“You let Ender stay after he killed a boy,” said Peter.
“The boy died accidentally,” said Graff, “as Ender defended himself.”
“Defended himself because you left him alone,” said Mother
“I’ve already faced trial on those charges, and I was acquitted.”
“But you were asked to resign your commission,” said Mother.
“But I was then given this much higher position as Minister of Colonisation. Let’s not quibble over the past. Bean got Achilles here, not to kill him, but to induce him to confess. He did confess, very convincingly, and because I heard him do it, I’m on his death list, too.”
“Then why are you still alive?” asked Peter.
“Because, contrary to widespread belief, Achilles is not a genius and he makes mistakes. His reach is not infinite and his power can be blocked. He doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t have everything planned. I think half the time he’s winging it, putting himself in the way of opportunity and seizing it when he sees it.”
“If he’s not a genius, then why does he keep beating geniuses?” asked Peter.
“Because he does the unexpected,” said Graft. “He doesn’t actually do things remarkably well, he simply does things that no one thought he would do. He stays a jump ahead. And our finest minds were not even thinking about him when he brought off his most spectacular successes. They thought they were civilians again when he had them kidnapped. Bean wasn’t trying to oppose Achilles’s plans during the war, he was trying to find and rescue Petra. You see? I have Achilles’s test scores. He’s a champion suck up, and he’s very smart or he wouldn’t have got here. He knew how to ace a psych test, for instance, so that his violent tendencies remained
hidden from us when we chose him to come in the last group we brought to Battle School. He’s dangerous, in other words. But he’s never had to face an opponent, not really. What the Formics faced, he’s never had to face.”
“So you’re confident,” said Peter.
“Not at all,” said Graft. “But I’m hopeful.”
“You brought us here just to show us this place?” said Father.
“Actually, no. I brought you here because I came up earlier in the day and swept it personally for eavesdropping devices. Plus, I installed a sound damper here, so that our voices are not carrying down the ventilation shaft.”
“You think MinCol has been penetrated,” said Peter
“I know it has,” said Graft “Uphanad was doing his routine scan of the logs of outgoing messages, and he found an odd one that was sent within hours of your arrival here. The entire message consisted of the single word on. Uphanad’s routine scan, of course, is more thorough than most people’s desperate search. He found this one simply by looking for anomalies in message length, language patterns, etc. To find codes, you see.
“And this was in code?” asked Father.
“Not a cipher, no. And impossible to decode for that reason. It could simply mean ‘affirmative,’ as in ‘the mission is on.’ It might be a foreign word-there are several dozen common languages in which ‘on’ has meaning by itself. It might be ‘no’ backward. You see the problem? What alerted Uphanad, besides its brevity, was the fact that it was sent within hours of your arrival-after your arrival-and both the sender and the receiver of the message were anonymous.”
“How could the sender be anonymous from a secure military0-designed facility?” asked Peter.
“Oh, it’s quite simple, really,” said Graff. “The sender used someone else’s sign-on.”
“Whose?”
“Uphanad was quite embarrassed when he showed me the printout of the message. Because as far as the computer was concerned, it was sent by Uphanad himself.”
“Someone got the log-on of the head of security?” said Father.
“Humiliating, you may be sure,” said Graft.
“You’ve fired him?” asked Mother
“That would not make us more secure, to lose the man who is our best defence against whatever operation that message triggered.”
“So you think it is the English word ‘on’ and it means somebody is preparing to move against us.”
“I think that’s not unlikely. I think the message was sent in the clear. It’s only undecipherable because we don’t know what is ‘on.’”
“And you’ve taken into account,” said Mother, “the possibility that Uphanad actually sent this message himself, and is using the fact that he told you about it as cover for the fact that he’s the perpetrator”
Graft looked at her a long time, blinked, and then smiled. “I was telling myself, ‘suspect everybody,’ but now I know what a truly suspicious person is.”
Peter hadn’t thought of it either. But now it made perfect sense.
“Still, let’s not leap to conclusions, either,” said Graff. “The real sender of the message might have used Major Uphanad’s sign-on precisely so that the chief of security would be our prime suspect.”
“How long ago did he find this message?” asked Father
“A couple of days,” said Graff. “I was already scheduled to come, so I stuck to my schedule.”
“No warnings?”
“No,” said Graff. “Any departure from routine would let the sender know his signal was discovered and perhaps interpreted. It would lead him to change his plans.”
“So what do we do?” asked Peter.
“First,” said Graff, “I apologise for thinking you’d be perfectly safe here. Apparently Achilles’s reach-or perhaps China’s-is longer than we thought.”
“So do we go home?” asked Father
“Second,” said Graff, “we can’t do anything that would play into their hands. Going home right now, before the threat can be identified and neutralised, would expose you to greater danger Our betrayer could give another signal that would tell them when and where you were going to arrive on Earth. What your trajectory of descent is going to be. That sort of thing.”
“Who would risk killing the Hegemon by downing a shuttle?” said Peter. “The world would be outraged, even the people who’d be happy to see me dead.”
“Anything we do that changes our pattern would let the traitor know his signal was intercepted. It might rush the project, whatever it is, before we’re ready. No, I’m sorry to say this, but... our best course of action is to wait.”
“And what if we disagree?” said Peter.
“Then I’ll send you home on the shuttle of your choosing, and pray for you all the way down.”
“You’d let us go?”
“You’re my guest,” said Graff. “Not my prisoner.”
“Then let’s test it,” said Peter “We’re leaving on the next shuttle. The one that brought you-when it goes back, we’ll be on it.”
“Too soon,” said Graff. “We have no time to prepare.”
“And neither does he. I suggest,” said Peter, “that you go to Uphanad and make sure he knows that he has to put a complete blanket of secrecy on our imminent departure. He’s not even to tell Dimak.”
“But if he’s the one,” said Mother, “then-”
“Then he can’t send a signal,” said Peter “Unless he can find a way to let the information slip out and become public knowledge on the station. That’s why it’s vital, Minister Graft, that you remain with him at all times after you tell him. So if it’s him, he can’t send the signal.”
“But it’s probably not him,” said Graff, “and now you’ve let everybody know.”
“But now we’ll be watching for the outgoing message.”
“Unless they simply kill you as you’re boarding the shuttle.”
“Then our worries will be over,” said Peter. “But I think they won’t kill us here, because this agent of theirs is too useful to them- or to Achilles, depending on whose man he is-for them to use him up completely on this operation.”
Graff pondered this. “So we watch to see who might be sending the message-”
“And you have agents stationed at the landing point on Earth to see if they can spot a would-be assassin.
“I can do that,” said Graff. “One tiny problem, though.”
“What’s that?” said Peter.
“You can’t go.”
“Why can’t I?” said Peter
“Because your one-man propaganda campaign is working. The people who read your stuff have drifted more strongly into the anti-China camp. It’s still a fairly slight movement, but it’s real.”
“I can write my essays there,” said Peter.
“In danger of being killed at any moment,” said Graff.
“That could happen here, too,” said Peter.
“Well-but you yourself said it was unlikely.”
“Let’s catch the mole who’s working your station,” said Peter, “and send him home. Meanwhile, we’re heading for Earth. It’s been great being here, Minister Graft. But we’ve got to go.”
He looked at his mother and father.
Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 7 - Shadow Puppets Page 25