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

by Orson Scott Card

  Once inside, they were indeed confronted by another dozen soldiers. Bean knew them all by name. But he said nothing to them, and none of them met his gaze or showed any sign that they knew him.

  What does Achilles want? thought Bean. His first plan was to send me out of the compound with a remote-controlled bomb, so it’s not as if he planned to keep me alive. Now he’s got me surrounded by soldiers, and doesn’t tell them to shoot.

  Achilles turned around and faced him. “Bean,” he said. “I can’t believe you didn’t make some kind of arrangement for me to get out of here.”

  “Is that why you tried to blow me up?” asked Bean.

  “That was when I believed you’d try to kill me as soon as you thought you had the embryos. Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I knew I didn’t have the embryos.”

  “Do you and Petra already think of them as your children? Have you named them yet?”

  “There’s no arrangement to get you out of here, Achilles, because there’s no place for you to go. The only people that still had any use for you are busy getting their butts kicked by a bunch of pissed-off Muslims. You saw to it that you couldn’t go anywhere in space when you shot down that shuttle.”

  “In all fairness, Bean, you have to remember that nobody was supposed to know it was me who did it. But someone really should tell me-why wasn’t Peter on that shuttle? I suppose somebody caught my informant.” He looked back and forth from Peter to Bean, looking for an answer.

  Bean did not confirm or deny. Peter, too, kept his silence. What if Achilles lived through this somehow? Why bring down Achilles’s wrath on a man who already had enough trouble in his life?

  “But if you caught my informant,” said Achilles, “why in the world would Chamrajnagar-or Graff, if it was him-launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they’d risk a shuttle and its crew just to catch me? I find that quite flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.”

  “I think,” said Bean, “that you don’t have the embryos at all. I think you dispersed them as soon as you got them. I think you already had them implanted in surrogates.”

  “Wrong,” said Achilles. He reached inside his pants pocket and took out a small container. Exactly like the ones in which the embryos had been frozen. “I brought one along, just to show you. Of course, he’s probably thawed quite a bit. My body heat and all that. What do you think? Do we still have time to get this little sucker implanted in somebody? Petra’s already pregnant. I hear, so you can’t use her. I know! Peter’s mother! She always likes to be so helpful, and she’s used to giving birth to geniuses. Here, Peter, catch!”

  He tossed the container toward Peter, but too hard, so it sailed over Peter’s up-stretched hands and hit the floor. It didn’t break, but instead rolled and rolled.

  “Aren’t you going to get it?” Achilles asked Bean.

  Bean shrugged. He walked over to where the container had come to rest. The liquid inside it sloshed. Fully thawed.

  He stepped on it, broke it, ground it under his foot.

  Achilles whistled. “Wow. You are some disciplinarian. Your kids can’t get away with anything with you.”

  Bean walked toward Achilles.

  “Now, Bean, I can see how you might be irritated at me, but I never claimed to be an athlete. When did I have a chance to play ball, will you tell me that? You grew up where I did. I can’t help it that I don’t know how to throw accurately.”

  He was still affecting his ironic tone of voice, but Bean could see that Achilles was afraid now. He had been expecting Bean to beg, or grieve-something that would keep him off balance and give control to Achilles. But Bean was seeing things through Achilles’s eyes now, and he understood: You do whatever your enemy can’t believe that you would even think of doing. You just do it.

  Bean reached into the butt holster that rode inside his pants, hanging from the waistband, and pulled out the flat .22-calibre pistol concealed there. He pointed it at Achilles’s right eye, then the left.

  Achilles took a couple of steps backward. “You can’t kill me,” he said. “You don’t know where the embryos are.”

  “I know you don’t have them,” said Bean, “and that I’m not going to get them without letting you go. And I’m not letting you go. So I guess that means the embryos are forever lost to me. Why should you go on living?”

  “Suri,” said Achilles. “Are you asleep?”

  Suriyawong pulled his long knife from its sheath.

  “That’s not what’s needed here,” said Achilles. “He has a gun.”

  “Hold still, Achilles,” said Bean. “Take it like a man. Besides, if I miss, you might live through it and spend the rest of your days as a brain-damaged shell of a man. We want this to be nice and clean and final, don’t we?”

  Achilles pulled another vial out of his pockets. “This is the real thing, Bean.” He reached out his hand, offering it. “You killed one, but there are still the other four.”

  Bean slapped it out of his hand. This one broke when it hit the floor.

  “Those are your children you’re killing!” cried Achilles.

  “I know you,” said Bean. “I know that you would never promise me something you could actually deliver.”

  “Suriyawong!” shouted Achilles. “Shoot him!”

  “Sir,” said Suriyawong.

  It was the first sound he’d made since Bean came through the east gate.

  Suriyawong knelt down, laid his knife on the smooth floor, and slid it toward Achilles until it rested at his feet.

  “What’s this supposed to be?” demanded Achilles.

  “The loan of a knife,” said Suriyawong.

  “But he has a gun!” cried Achilles.

  “I expect you to solve your own problems,” said Suriyawong, “without getting any of my men killed.”

  “Shoot him!” cried Achilles. “I thought you were my friend.”

  “I told you from the start,” said Suriyawong. “I serve the Hegemon.” And with that, Suriyawong turned his back on Achilles.

  So did all the other soldiers.

  Now Bean understood why Suriyawong had worked so hard to earn Achilles’s trust: so that at this moment of crisis, Suri was in a position to betray him.

  Achilles laughed nervously. “Come on now, Bean. We’ve known each other a long time.” He had backed up against a wall. He tried to lean against it. But his legs were a little wobbly and he started to slide down the wall. “I know you, Bean,” he said. “You can’t just kill a man in cold blood, no matter how much you hate him. It’s not in you to do that.”

  “Yes it is,” said Bean.

  He aimed the pistol down at Achilles’s right eye and pulled the trigger. The eye snapped shut from the wind of the bullet passing between the eyelids and from the obliteration of the eye itself. His head rocked just a little from the force of the little bullet entering, but not leaving.

  Then he slumped over and sprawled out on the floor. Dead.

  It didn’t bring back Poke, or Sister Carlotta, or any of the other people he had killed. It didn’t change the nations of the world back to the way they were before Achilles started making them his building blocks, to break apart and put together however he wanted. It didn’t end the wars Achilles had started. It didn’t make Bean feel any better. There was no joy in vengeance, and precious little in justice, either.

  But there was this: Achilles would never kill again.

  That was all Bean could ask of a little .22.

  CHAPTER 20 — HOME

  From: YourFresh%Vegetable@Freebie.net

  To: MyStone%Maiden@Freebie.net

  Re: Come home

  He’s dead.

  I’m not.

  He didn’t have them.

  We’ll find them, one way or another, before I die.

  Come home. There’s nobody trying to kill you any more.

  Petra flew on a commercial jet, in a reserved seat, under her own name, us
ing her own passport.

  Damascus was full of excitement, for it was now the capital of a Muslim world united for the first time in nearly two thousand years. Sunni and Shiite leaders alike had been declaring for the Caliph. And Damascus was the centre of it all.

  But her excitement was of a different kind. It was partly the baby that was maturing inside her, and the changes already happening to her body. It was partly the relief at being free of the death sentence Achilles had passed on her so long ago.

  Mostly, though, it was that giddy sense of having been on the edge of losing everything, and winning after all. It swept over her as she was walking down the aisle of the plane, and her knees went rubbery under her and she almost fell.

  The man behind her took her elbow and helped her regain her legs. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m just a little bit pregnant,” she said.

  “You must get over this business of falling down before the baby gets too big.”

  She laughed and thanked him, then put her own bag in the overhead-without needing help, thank you-and took her seat.

  On the one hand, it was sad flying without her husband beside her.

  On the other hand, it was wonderful to be flying home to him.

  He met her at the airport and gathered her into a huge hug. His arms were so long. Had they grown in the few days since he left her?

  She refused to think about that.

  “I hear you saved the world,” she said to him when the embrace finally ended.

  “Don’t believe those rumours.”

  “My hero,” she said.

  “I’d rather be your lover,” he whispered.

  “My giant,” she whispered back. In answer, he embraced her again, and then leaned back, lifting her off her feet. She laughed as he whirled her around like a child. The way her father had done when she was little. The way he would never do with their children.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked her.

  “It’s just tears in my eyes,” she said. “It’s not crying. You’ve seen crying, and this isn’t it. These are happy-to-see-you tears.”

  “You’re just happy to be in a place where trees grow without waiting around to be planted and irrigated.”

  They walked out of the airport a few minutes later and he was right, she was happy to be out of the desert. In the years they had lived in Ribeirdo she had discovered an affinity for lush places. She needed the Earth to be alive around her, everything green, all that photosynthesis going on in public, without a speck of modesty. Things that ate sunlight and drank rain. “It’s good to be home,” she said.

  “Now I’m home, too,” said Bean.

  “You were here already,” she said.

  “But you weren’t, till now.”

  She sighed and clung to him a little. They took the first cab.

  They went to the Hegemony compound, of course, but instead of going to their house-indeed, it was their house, since they had given it up when they resigned from the Hegemon’s service that day back in the Philippines-Bean took her right to the Hegemon’s office.

  Peter was waiting there for her, along with Graff and the Wiggins. There were hugs that became kisses and handshakes that became hugs.

  Peter told all about what happened up in space. Then they made Petra tell about Damascus, though she protested that it was nothing at all, just a city happy with victory.

  “The war’s not over yet,” said Peter.

  “They’re full of Muslim unity,” said Petra.

  “Next thing you know,” said Graff, “the Christians and Jews will get back together. The only thing standing between them, after all, is that business with Jesus.”

  “It’s a good thing,” said Theresa, “to have a little less division in the world.”

  “I think it’s going to take a lot of divisions,” said John Paul, “to bring about less division.”

  “I told you they were happy in Damascus, not that I thought they were right to be,” said Petra. “There are signs of trouble ahead. There’s an imam preaching that India and Pakistan should be reunited under a single government again.”

  “Let me guess,” said Peter. “A Muslim one.”

  “If they liked what Virlomi did to the Chinese,” said Bean, “they’ll love what she can get the Hindus to do to get free of the Pakistanis.”

  “And Peter will love this one,” said Petra. “An Iraqi politician made a speech in Baghdad in which he very pointedly said, ‘In a world where Allah has chosen a Caliph, why do we need a Hegemon?’”

  They laughed, but their faces were serious when the laughing stopped.

  “Maybe he’s right,” said Peter “Maybe when this war is over, the Caliph will be the Hegemon, in fact if not in name. Is that a bad thing? The goal was to unite the world in peace. I volunteered to do it, but if somebody else gets it done, I’m not going to get anybody killed just to take the job away from him.”

  Theresa took hold of his wrist, and Graff chuckled. “Keep talking like that, and I’ll understand why I’ve been supporting you all these years.”

  “The Caliph is not going to replace the Hegemon,” said Bean, “or erase the need for one.”

  “No?” asked Peter.

  “Because a leader can’t take his people to a place where they don’t want to go.”

  “But they want him to rule the world,” said Petra.

  “But to rule the world, he has to keep the whole world content with his rule,” said Bean. “And how can he keep non-Muslims content without making orthodox Muslims extremely discontented? It’s what the Chinese found in India. You can’t swallow a nation. It finds a way to get itself vomited out. Begging your pardon, Petra.”

  “So your friend Alai will realise this, and not try to rule over non-Muslim people?” asked Theresa.

  “Our friend Alai would have no problem with that idea,” said Petra. “The question is whether the Caliph will.”

  “I hope we won’t remember this day,” said Graff, “as the time when we first started fighting the next war.”

  Peter spoke up. “As I said before, this war’s not over yet.”

  “Both of the front-line Chinese armies in India have been surrounded and the noose is tightening,” said Graff. “I don’t think they have a Stalingrad-style defence in them, do you? The Turkic armies have reached the Hwang He and Tibet just declared its independence and is slaughtering the Chinese troops there. The Indonesians and Arabs are impossible to catch and they’re already making a serious dent in internal communications in China. It’s just a matter of time before they realise it’s pointless to keep killing people when the outcome is inevitable.”

  “It takes a lot of dead soldiers before governments ever catch on to that,” said Theresa.

  “Mother always takes the cheerful view,” said Peter, and they laughed.

  Finally, though, it was time for Petra to hear the story of what happened inside the compound. Peter ended up telling most of it, because Bean kept skipping all the details and rushing straight to the end.