"I don't love anybody," said Bean.

      "You keep breaking your heart with the people you love," said Petra. "You just can't ever admit it until they're dead."

      Bean thought of Poke. Of Sister Carlotta,

      He thought of the children he never meant to have. The children that he would make with Petra, this girl who had been such a wise and loyal friend to him, this woman whom, when he thought he might lose her to Achilles, he realized that he loved more than anyone else on Earth. The children he kept denying, refusing to let them exist because ...

      Because he loved them too much, even now, when they did not exist, he loved them too much to cause them the pain of losing their father, to risk them suffering the pain of dying young when there was no one who could save them.

      The pain he could bear himselt he refused to let them bear, he loved them so much.

      And now he had to stare the truth in the face: What good would it do to love his children as much as he already did, if he never had those children?

      He was crying, and for a moment he let himself go, shedding tears for the dead women he had loved so much, and for his own death, so that he would never see his children grow up, so he would never see Petra grow old beside him, as women and men were meant to do.

      Then he got control of himself, and said what he had decided, not with his mind, but with his heart. "If there's some way to be sure that they don't have-that they won't have Anton's Key." Then I'll have children. Then I'll marry Petra.

      She felt her hand tighten in his. She understood. She had won.

      "Easy," said Anton. "Still just the tiniest bit illegal, but it can be done."

      Petra had won, but Bean understood that he had not lost. No, her victory was his as well.

      "It will hurt," said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness."

      "You're such a poet," murmured Bean. But then he flung one arm over Anton's shoulders, and another around Petra's back, and held to both of them as his blurring eyes looked out over the sparkling sea.

      Hours later, after dinner in a little Italian restaurant with an ancient garden, after a walk along the rambla in the noisy frolicking crowds of townspeople enjoying their membership in the human race and celebrating or searching for their mates, Bean and Petra sat in the parlor of Anton's old-fashioned home, his fiancée shyly sifting beside him, her children asleep in the back bedrooms.

      "You said it would he easy," said Bean. "To be sure my children wouldn't be like me."

      Anton looked at him thoughtfully. "Yes," he finally said. "There is one man who not only knows the theory, but has done the work. Nondestructive tests in newly formed embryos. It would mean fertilization in vitro."

      "Oh good," said Petra. "A virgin birth."

      "It would mean embryos that could be implanted even after the father is dead," said Anton.

      "You thought of everything, how sweet," said Bean.

      "I'm not sure you want to meet him," said Anton.

      "We do," said Petra. "Soon."

      "You have a bit of history with him, Julian Delphiki." said Anton.

      "I do?" asked Bean.

      "He kidnapped you once," said Anton. "Along with nearly two dozen of your twins. He's the one who turned that little genetic key they named for me. He's the one who would have killed you if you hadn't hid in a toilet."

      "Volescu," said Petra, as if the name were a bullet to be pried out of her body.

      Bean laughed grimly. "He's still alive?"

      "Just released from prison," said Anton. "The laws have changed. Genetic alteration is no longer a crime against humanity."

      "Infanticide still is," said Bean. "Isn't it?"

      "Technically," said Anton, "under the law it can't be murder when the victims had no legal right to exist. I believe the charge was 'tampering with evidence.' Because the bodies were burned."

      "Please tell me," said Petra, "that it isn't perfectly legal to murder Bean."

      "You helped save the world between then and now," said Anton. "I think the politics of the situation would be a little different now.

      "What a relief," said Bean.

      "So this non-murderer, this tamperer with evidence," said Petra. "I didn't know you knew him.

      "I didn't-I don't," said Anton. "I've never met him, but he's written to me. Just a day before Petra did, as a matter of fact. I don't know where he is. But I can put you in touch with him. You'll have to take it from there."

      "So I finally get to meet the legendary Uncle Constantine," said Bean. "Or, as Father calls him-when he wants to irritate Mother- 'My bastard brother.'"

      "How did he get out of jail, really?" asked Petra.

      "I only know what he told me. But as Sister Carlotta said, the man's a liar to the core. He believes his own lies. In which case, Bean, he might think he's your father. He told her that he cloned you and your brothers from himself."

      "And you think he should help us have children?" asked Petra.

      "I think if you want to have children without Bean's little problem, he's the only one who can help you. Of course, many doctors can destroy the embryos and tell you whether they would have had your talents and your curse. But since my little key has never been turned by nature, there's no nondestructive test for it. And in order to get anyone to develop a test, you would have to subject yourself to examination by doctors who would regard you as a career-making opportunity. Volescu's biggest advantage is he already knows about you, and he's in no position to brag about finding you."

      "Then give us his email," said Bean. "We'll go from there."

CHAPTER EIGHT

TARGETS

From Betterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com FREE email! Sign up a friend!]

To:   Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com JESUS loves you! ChosenOnes.0rg]

Re:   Thanks for your help

Dear Anonymous Benefactor,

I may have been in prison but I wasn't biding under a rock. I know who you are, and I know what you've done. So when you offer to help me continue the research that was interrupted by my life sentence, and imply that you are responsible far having my charges reduced and my sentence commuted, I must suspect an ulterior motive.

I think you plan to use my supposed rendezvous with these supposed people as a means of killing them. Sort of like Herod asking the Wise Men to tell him where the newborn king was, so be could go and worship him also.

From: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com [Don't go home ALONE! LonelyHearts]

To:   Befterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com [Your ADS get seen! Free Email]

Re:   You have misjudged me

Dear Doctor,

You have misjudged me. I have no interest in anyone's death. I want you to help them make babies that don't have any of the father's gifts or problems. Make a dozen for them.

But along the way, if you happen to get any nice little embryos that do have the father's gifts, don't discard them, please. Keep them nice and safe. For me. For us. There are people who would very much like to raise a liftle garden full of beans.

      John Paul Wiggin had noticed some years ago that the whole childrearing thing wasn't really all it was cracked up to be. Supposedly somewhere there was such a thing as a normal child, but none of them had come anywhere near his house.

      Not that he didn't love his kids. He did. More than they would ever know; more, he suspected, than he knew himself. After all, you never know how much you love somebody until the real test comes. Would you die for this person? Would you throw yourself on the grenade, step in front of the speeding car, keep a secret under torture, to save his life? Most people never know the answer to that question. And even those who do know are still not sure whether it was love or duty or self-respect or cultural conditioning or any number of other possible explanations.

      John Paul Wiggin loved his kids. But either he didn't have enough of them, or he had too many. If he had more, then having two of them take off for some faraway colony from which they could never return in his lifetime, that might not have been so bad, because there'd still be several left at home for him to enjoy, to help, to admire as parents wanted to admire their children.

      And if there had been one fewer If the government had not requisitioned a third child from them. If Andrew had never been born, had never been accepted into a program for which Peter was rejected, then perhaps Peter's pathological ambition might have stayed within normal bounds. Perhaps his envy and resentment, his need to prove himself worthy after all, would not have tainted his life, darkening even his brightest moments.

      Of course, if Andrew hadn't been born, the world might now be honeycombed with Formic hives, and the human race nothing but a few ragged bands surviving in some hostile environment like Tierra del Fuego or Greenland or the Moon.

      It wasn't the government requisition, either. Little known fact: Andrew had almost certainly been conceived before the requisition came. John Paul Wiggin wasn't all that good a Catholic, until he realized that the population control laws forbade him to be. Then, because he was a stubborn Pole or a rebellious American or simply because he was that peculiar mix of genes and memory called John Paul Wiggin, there was nothing more important to him than being a good Catholic, particularly when it came to disobeying the population laws.

      It was the basis of his marriage with Theresa. She wasn't Catholic herself-which showed that John Paul wasn't that strict about following all the rules-but she came from a big-family tradition and she agreed with him before they got married that they would have more than two children, no matter what it cost them.

      In the end, it cost them nothing. No loss of job. No loss of prestige. In fact, they ended up greatly honored as the parents of the savior of the human race.

      Only they would never get to see Valentine or Andrew get married, would never see their children. Would probably not live long enough to know when they arrived at their colony world.

      And now they were mere fixtures attached to the life of the child they liked the least.

      Though truth to tell, John Paul didn't dislike Peter as much as his mother did. Peter didn't get under his skin the way he irritated Theresa. Perhaps that was because John Paul was a good counterbalance to Peter-John Paul could be useful to him. Where Peter kept a hundred things going at once, juggling all his projects and doing none of them perfectly, John Paul was a man who had to dot every I, cross every t. So without exactly telling anyone what his job was, John Paul kept close watch on everything Peter was doing and followed through on things so they actually got done. Where Peter assumed that underlings would understand his purpose and adapt. John Paul knew that they would misunderstand everything, and spelled it out for them, followed through to make sure things happened just right.

      Of course, in order to do this, John Paul had to pretend that he was acting as Peter's eyes and ears. Fortunately, the people he straightened out had no reason to go to Peter and explain the dumb things they had been doing before John Paul showed up with his questions, his checklists, his cheerful chats that didn't quite come right out and admit to being tutorials.

      But what could John Paul do when the project Peter was advancing was so deeply dangerous and, yes, stupid that the last thing John Paul wanted to do was help him with it?

      John Paul's position in this little community of Hegemoniacs did not allow him to obstruct what Peter was doing. He was a facilitator, not a bureaucrat; he cut the red tape, he didn't spin it out like a spider web.

      In the past, the most obstructive thing John Paul could do was not to do anything at all. Without him there, nudging, correcting, things slowed down, and often a project died without his help.

      But with Achilles, there was no chance of that. The Beast, as Theresa and John Paul called him, was as methodical as Peter wasn't. He seemed to leave nothing to chance. So if John Paul simply left him alone, he would accomplish everything he wanted.

      "Peter, you're not in a position to see what the Beast is doing," John Paul said to him.

      "Father, I know what I'm doing."

      "He's got time for everybody," said John Paul. "He's friends with every clerk, every janitor, every secretary, every bureaucrat. People you breeze past with a wave or with nothing at all, he sits and chats with them, makes them feel important."

      "Yes, he's a charmer, all right."

      "Peter-"

      "It's not a popularity contest, Father."

      "No, it's a loyalty contest. You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish, and nothing more. They are your power, these public servants you employ, and he's winning their loyalty away from you.

      "Superficially, perhaps," said Peter.

      "For most people, the superficial is all there is. They act on the feelings of the moment. They like him better than you."

      "There's always somebody that people like better," said Peter with a vicious little smile.

      John Paul restrained himself from making the obvious one-word retort, because it would devastate Peter The single crushing word would have been "yes."

      "Peter," said John Paul, "when the Beast leaves here, who knows how many people he'll leave behind who like him well enough to slip him a bit of gossip now and then? Or a secret document?"

      "Father, I appreciate your concern. And once again, I can only tell you that I have things under control."

      "You seem to think that anything you don't know isn't worth knowing," said John Paul, not for the first time.

      "And you seem to think that anything I'm doing is not being done well enough," said Peter for at least the hundredth time.

      That's how these discussions always went. John Paul did not push it farther than that-he knew that if he became too annoying, if Peter felt too oppressed by having his parents around, they'd be moved out of any position of influence.

      That would be unbearable. It would mean losing the last of their children.

      "We really ought to have another child or two," said Theresa one day. "I'm still young enough, and we always meant to have more than the three the government allotted us."

      "Not likely," said John Paul.

      "Why not? Aren't you still a good Catholic, or did that last only as long as being a Catholic meant being a rebel?"

      John Paul didn't like the implications of that, particularly because it might have some truth in it. "No, Theresa, darling. We can't have more children because they'd never let us keep them."

      "Who? The government doesn't care how many children we have now. They're all future taxpayers or baby makers or cannon fodder to them."

      "We're the parents of Ender Wiggin, of Demosthenes, of Locke. Our having another child would be international news. I feared it even before Andrew's battle companions were all kidnapped, but after that there was no doubt."

      "Do you seriously think people would assume that because our first three children were so-" "Darling." said John Paul-knowing that she hated it when he called her darling because he couldn't keep the sarcasm out of the term, "they'd have the babies out of the cradle, that's how fast they'd strike. They'd be targets from the moment of conception, just waiting for somebody to come along and turn them into puppets of one regime or another. And even if we were able to protect them, every moment of their lives would be deformed by the press of public curiosity. If we thought Peter was messed up by being in Andrew's shadow, think what it would be like for them."

      "It might be easier for them," said Theresa. "They would never remember not being in the shadow of their brothers."

      "That only makes it worse," said John Paul. "They'll have no idea of who they are, apart from being somebody's sib."[?]

      "It was just a thought."

      "I wish we could do it," said John Paul. It was easy to be generous after she had given in.

      "I just... miss having children around."

      "So do I. And if I thought they could be children...

      "None of our kids was ever really a child," said Theresa sadly. "Never really carefree."

      John Paul laughed. "The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood."

      Theresa thought for a moment and then laughed. "You're right. Everything is either heaven on earth or the end of the world."

      That conversation had been back in Greensboro, after Peter went public with his real identity and before he was given the nearly empty title of Hegemon. They rarely referred back to it.

      But the idea was looking more attractive now. There were days when John Paul wanted to go home, sweep Theresa into his arms and say, "Darling"-and he wouldn't be even the tiniest bit sarcastic-"I have our tickets to space. We're joining a colony. We're leaving this world and all its cares behind, and we'll make new babies up in space where they can't save the world or take it over, either"

      Then Theresa did this business with trying to get into Achilles's room and John Paul honestly wondered if the stress she was under had affected her mental processes.

      Precisely because he was so concerned about what she did, he deliberately did not discuss it with her for a couple of days, waiting to see if she brought it up.

      She did not. But he didn't really expect her to.

      When he judged that the first blush of embarrassment was over and she could discuss things without trying to protect herself, he broached the subject over dessert one night.

      "So you want to be a housekeeper," he said.

      "I wondered how long it would take you to bring that up," said Theresa with a grin.

      "And I wondered how long before you would," said John Paul- with a grin as laced with irony as her own.

      "Now you'll never know," she said.

      "I think," said John Paul, "that you were planning to kill him."

      Theresa laughed. "Oh. definitely, I was under assignment from my controller"

      "I assumed as much."

      "I was joking," said Theresa at once.

      "I'm not. Was it something Graff said? Or just a spy novel?"

      "I don't read spy novels."

      "I know."

      "It wasn't an assignment," said Theresa. "But yes, he did put the thought into my mind. That the best thing for everybody would be for the Beast not to leave Brazil alive."

      "Actually, I don't think that's so," said John Paul.

      "Why not? Surely you don't think he has any value to the world."

      "He brought everybody out of hiding, didn't he'?" said John Paul. "Everybody showed their true colors."

      "Not everybody. Not yet."

      "Things are out in the open. The world is divided into camps. The ambitions are exposed. The traitors are revealed."

      "So the job is done," said Theresa, "and there's no more use for him."

      "I never really thought of you as a murderer"

      "I'm not."

      "But you had a plan, right?"

      "I was testing to see if any plan was possible-if I could get into his room. The answer was no."

      "Ah. So the objective remains the same. Only the method has been changed."

      "I probably won't do it," said Theresa.

      "I wonder how many assassins have told themselves that-right up to the moment when they fired the gun or plunged in the knife or served the poisoned dates?"

      "You can stop teasing me now," said Theresa. "I don't care about politics or the repercussions. If killing the Beast cost Peter the Hegemony, I wouldn't care. I'm just not going to sit back and watch the Beast devour my son.

      "But there's a better way," said John Paul.

      "Besides killing him?"

      "To get him away from where he can kill Peter That's our real goal, isn't it? Not to save the world from the Beast, but to save Peter. If we kill Achilles-"

      "I don't recall inviting you into my evil conspiracy."

      "Then yes. the Beast is dead, but so is Peter's credibility as Hegemon. He's forever after as tainted as Macbeth."

      "I know, I know."

      "What we need is to taint the Beast, not Peter."

      "Killing is more final."

      "Killing makes a martyr, a legend, a victim. Killing gives you St. Thomas a Becket. The Canterbury pilgrims."

      "So what's your better plan?"

      "We get the Beast to try to kill us."

      Theresa looked at him dumbfounded.

      "We don't let him succeed," said John Paul.

      "And I thought Peter was the one who loved brinksmanship. Good heavens. Johnny P, you've just explained where his madness comes from. How in the world can you arrange for someone to try to kill you in such a public way that it becomes discovered-and at the same time be absolutely sure that he won't succeed."

      "We don't actually let him fire a bullet," said John Paul, a little impatiently. "All we do is gather evidence that he's preparing the attempt. Peter will have no choice but to send him away-and then we can make sure people know why. I may be resented a bit here, but people really like you. They won't like the Beast after he plotted to harm their 'Doce Teresa."

      "But nobody likes you," said Theresa. "What if it's you he goes for first?"

      "Whichever," said John Paul.

      "And how will we know what he's plotting?"

      "Because I put keyboard-reading programs into all the computers on the system and software to analyze his actions and give me reports on everything he does. There's no way for him to make a plan without emailing somebody about something."

      "I can think of a hundred ways, one of which is-he does it himself, without telling anybody."

      "He'll have to look up our schedule then, won't he? Or something. Something that will be suspicious. Something that I can show to Peter and force him to get rid of the boy."

      "So the way to shoot down the Beast is to paint big targets on our own foreheads." said Theresa.

      "Isn't that a marvelous plan?" said John Paul, laughing at the absurdity of it. "But I can't think of a better one. And it's nowhere near as bad as yours. Do you actually believe you could kill somebody?"

      "Mother bear protects the cub," said Theresa.

      "Are you with me? Promise not to slip a fatal laxative into his soup?"

      "I'll see what your plan is, when you actually come up with one that sounds like it might succeed."

      "We'll get the beast thrown out of here," said John Paul. "One way or another" That was the plan-which, John Paul knew, was no plan at all, since Theresa hadn't actually promised him she'd give up on her plot to become a killer-by-stealth.

      The trouble was that when he accessed the programs that were monitoring Achilles's computer use, the report said, "No computer use."

      This was absurd. John Paul knew the boy had used a computer because he had received a few messages himself-innocent inquiries, but they bore the screen name that Peter had given to the Beast.

      But he couldn't ask anybody outright to help him figure out why his spy programs weren't catching Achilles's sign-ons and reading his keystrokes. The word would get around, and then John Paul wouldn't seem quite such an innocent victim when Achilles's plot-whatever it was-came to light.

      Even when he actually saw Achilles with his own eyes, logging in and typing away on a message, the report that night-which affirmed that the keystroke monitor was at work on that very machine- still showed no activity from Achilles.

      John Paul thought about this for a good long white, trying to imagine how Achilles could have circumvented his software without logging on at least once.

      Until it finally dawned on him to ask his software a different question.

      "List all log-ons from that computer today," he typed into his desk.

      After a few moments, the report came up: "No log-ons."

      No log-ons from any of the nearby computers. No log-ons from any of the faraway computers. No log-ons, apparently, in the entire Hegemony computer system.

      And since people were logging on all the time, including John Paul himself, this result was impossible.

      He found Peter in a meeting with Ferreira, the Brazilian computer expert who was in charge of system security. "I'm sorry to interrupt," he said, "but it's even better to tell you this when both of you are together."

      Peter was irritated, but answered politely enough. "Go ahead."

      John Paul had tried to think of some benign explanation for his having tried to mount a spy operation throughout the Hegemony computer network, but he couldn't. So he told the truth, that he was trying to spy on Achilles-but said nothing about what he intended to do with the information.

      By the time he was done, Peter and Ferreira were laughing- bitterly, ironically, but laughing.

      "What's funny?"

      "Father," said Peter. "Didn't it occur to you that we had software on the system doing exactly the same job?"

      "Which software did you use?" asked Ferreira.

      John Paul told him and Ferreira sighed. "Ordinarily my software would have detected his and wiped it out." he said. "But your father has a very privileged access to the net. So privileged that my snoopware had to let it by."

      "But didn't your software at least tell you?" asked Peter, annoyed.

      "His is interrupt-driven, mine is native in the operating system," said Ferreira. "Once his snoopware got past the initial barrier and was resident in the system, there was nothing to report. Both programs do the same job, just at different times in the machine's cycle. They read the keypress and pass the information on to the operating system, which passes it on to the program. They also pass it on to their own keystroke log. But both programs clear the buffer so that the keystroke doesn't get read twice."

      Peter and John Paul both made the same gesture-hands to the forehead, covering the eyes. They understood at once, of course.

      Keystrokes came in and got processed by Ferreira's snoopware or by John Paul's-but never by both. So both keystroke logs would show nothing but random letters, none of which would amount to anything meaningful. None of which would ever look like a log-on- even though there were log-ons all over the system all the time.

      "Can we combine the logs?" asked John Paul. "We have all the keystrokes, after all."

      "We have the alphabet, too," said Ferreira, "and if we just find the right order to arrange them in, those letters will spell out everything that was ever written."

      "It's not as bad as that," said Peter At least the letters are in order. It shouldn't be that hard to meld them together in a way that makes sense."

      "But we have to meld all of them in order to find Achilles's logons.

      "Write a program," said Peter "One that will find everything that might be a log-on by him, and then you can work on the material immediately following those possibles."

      "Write a program," murmured Ferreira.

      "Or I will," said Peter. "I don't have anything else to do."

      That sarcasm doesn't make people love you, Peter, said John Paul silently.

      Then again, there was no chancc. given Peter's parents, that such sarcasm would not come readily to his lips.

      "I'll sort it out," said Ferreira.

      "I'm sorry," said John Paul.

      Ferreira only sighed. "Didn't it at least cross your mind that we would have software already in place to do the same job?"

      "You mean you had snoopware that would give me regular reports on what Achilles was writing?" asked John Paul. Oops. Peter's not the only sarcastic one. But then, I'm not trying to unite the world.

      "There's no reason for you to know," said Peter.

      Time to bite the bullet. "I think Achilles is planning to kill your mother."

      "Father," said Peter impatiently. "He doesn't even know her."

      "Do you think there's any chance that he didn't hear that she tried to get into his room?"

      "But ... kill her?" asked Ferreira.

      "Achilles doesn't do things by half-measures," said John Paul. "And nobody is more loyal to Peter than she is."

      "Not even you, Father?" asked Peter sweetly.

      "She doesn't see your faults," lied John Paul. "Her motherly instincts blind her."

      "But you have no such handicap."

      "Not being your mother," said John Paul.

      "My snoopware should have caught this anyway," said Ferreira. "I blame only myself. The system shouldn't have had that kind of back door"

      "Systems always do," said John Paul.

      After Ferreira left, Peter said a few cold words. "I know how to keep Mother completely safe," he said. "Take her away from here. Go to a colony world. Go somewhere and do something, but stop trying to protect me.

      "Protect you?"

      "Do you think I'm so stupid that I'll believe this cockamamy story about Achilles wanting to kill Mother?"

      "Ah. You're the only person here worth killing."

      "I'm the only one whose death would remove a major obstacle from Achilles's path."

      John Paul could only shake his head.

      "Who else, then?" Peter demanded.

      "Nobody else, Peter," said John Paul. "Not a soul. Everybody's safe, because, after all, Achilles has shown himself to be a perfectly rational boy who would never, ever kill somebody without a perfectly rational purpose in view."

      "Well, yes, of course, he's psychotic," said Peter "I didn't mean he wasn't psychotic."

      "So many psychotics, so few really effective drugs," said John Paul as he left the room. That night when he told Theresa, she groaned.

      "So he's been getting a free ride."

      "We'll put it all together soon enough, I'm sure," said John Paul.

      "No, Johnny P. We aren't sure that it will be soon enough. For all we know, it's already too late."

CHAPTER NINE

CONCEPTION

To:   Stone%Cold@IComeAnon.org

From: Third%Party@MysteriousEast.org

Re:   Definitely not vichyssoise

I don't know who you are, don't know what this message means, He is in China. I was a tourist there, walking along

a public sidewalk. He gave me a folded slip of paper and asked me to post a message to this remailing site, with the subject shown above. So here it is:

"He thinks I told him where Caligulo would be but I did not."

I hope this means something to you and that you get it, because be seemed very intense about this. As for me, you don't know who am, neither does he, and that's the way I like it.

      "It's not the same city," said Bean.

      "Well, of course not," said Petra. "You're taller"

      It was Bean's first return to Rotterdam since he left as a very young child to go into space and learn to be a soldier. In all his wanderings with Sister Carlotta after the war, she never once suggested coming here, and he never thought of it himself.

      But this was where Volescu was-he had had the chutzpah[?] to reestablish himself in the city where he had been arrested. Now, of course, he was not calling his work research-even though it had been illegal for many years. other scientists had pursued it quietly and when, after the war, they were able to publish again, they left all of Volescu's achievements in the dust.

      So his offices, in an old but lovely building in the heart of the city, were modestly labeled, in Common, REPRODUCTIVE SAFETY SERVICE S.

      "Safety," said Petra. "An odd name, considering how many babies he killed."

      "Not babies," said Bean mildly. "Illegal experiments were terminated, but no actual legal babies were ever involved."

      "That really stops your hogs, doesn't it," she said.

      "You watch too many vids. You're beginning to pick up American slang."

      "What else can I do, with you spending all your time online, saving the world?"

      "I'm about to meet my maker," said Bean. "And you're complaining to me about my spending too much time on pure altruism."

      "He's not your maker," said Petra.

      "Who is, then? My biological parents? They made Nikolai. I was leftovers in the fridge."

      "I was referring to God," said Petra.

      "I know you were," said Bean, smiling. "Me, I can't help but think that I exist because God blinked. If he'd been paying attention, I could never have happened."

      "Don't goad me about religion," said Petra. "I won't play."

      "You started it," said Bean.

      "I'm not Sister Carlotta."

      "I couldn't have married you if you were. Was that your choice? Me or the nunnery?"

      Petra laughed and gave him a little shove. But it wasn't much of a shove. Mostly it was just an excuse to touch him. To prove to herself that he was hers, that she could touch him when she liked, and it was all right. Even with God, since they were legally married now. A necessity before in vitro fertilization, so that there could be no question about paternity or joint ownership of the embryos.

      A necessity, but also what she wanted.

      When had she started wanting this? In Battle School, if anyone had asked her whom she would eventually marry, she would have said, "A fool, since no one smarter would have me," but if pressed, and if she trusted her inquisitor not to blab, she would have said, "Dink Meeker." He was her closest friend in Battle School.

      Dink was even Dutch. He wasn't in the Netherlands these days, however The Netherlands had no military. Dink had been lent to England, rather like a prize football player, and he was cooperating in joint Anglo-American planning, which was such a waste of his talent, since on neither side of the Atlantic was there the slightest desire to get involved in the turmoil that was rocking the rest of the world.

      She didn't even regret his absence. She still cared about him, had fond memories of him-even, perhaps, loved him in a vaguely-morethan-platonic way. But after Battle School, where he had been a brave rebel challenging the system, refusing to command an army in the battle room and joining her in helping Ender in his struggle against the teachers-after Battle School, they had worked together almost continuously, and perhaps came to know each other too well. The rebel pose was gone, and he stood revealed as a brilliant but cocky commander. And when she was shamed in front of Dink, when she was overcome by fatigue during a game that turned out to be real, it became a barrier between her and the others, but it was an unvaultable wall between her and fink.

      Even when Ender's jeesh was kidnapped and confined together in Russia, she and fink bantered with each other just like old times, but she felt no spark.

      Through all that time, she would have laughed if anyone suggested that she would fall in love with Bean, and a scant three years later would be married to him. Because if Dink had been the most likely candidate for her heart in Battle School, Bean had to be the least likely. She had helped him a bit, yes, as she had helped Ender when he first started out, but it was a patronizing kind of help, giving a hand up to an underdog.

      In Command School, she had come to respect Bean, to see something of his struggle, how he never did anything to win the approval of others, but always gave whatever it took to help his friends. She came to understand him as one of the most deeply altruistic and loyal people she had ever seen-even though he did not see either of these traits in himself, but always found some reason why everything he did was entirely for his own benefit.

      When Bean was the only one not kidnapped, she knew at once that he would try anything to save them. The others talked about trying to contact him on the outside, but gave up at once when they heard that he had been killed. Petra never gave up on him. She knew that Achilles could not possibly have killed him so easily. She knew that he would find a way to set her free.

      And he had done it.

      She didn't love him because he had saved her She loved him because, during all her months in captivity, constantly having to bear Achilles's looming presence with his leering threat of death entwined with his lust to own her, Bean was her dream of freedom. When she imagined life outside of captivity, she kept thinking of it as life with him. Not as man and wife, but simply: When I'm free, then we'll find some way to fight Achilles. We. We'll. And the "we" was always her and Bean.

      Then she learned about his genetic difference. About the death that awaited him from overgrowing his body's ability to nurture itself. And she knew at once that she wanted to bear his children. Not because she wanted to have children who suffered from some freakish affliction that made them brilliant ephemera, butterflies catching the sunlight only for a single day, but because she did not want Bean's life to leave no child behind. She could not bear to lose him, and desperately wanted something of him to stay with her when he was gone.

      She could never explain this to him. She could hardly explain it to herself.

      But somehow things had come together better than she hoped. Her gambit of getting him to see Anton had persuaded him far more quickly than she had thought would be possible.

      It led her to believe that he, too, without even realizing it, had come to love her in return. That just as she wanted him to live on in his children, he now wanted her to be the mother who cared for them after he died.

      If that wasn't love, it would do.

      They married in Spain, with Anton and his new bride looking on. It had been dangerous to stay there as long as they did, though they tried to take the curse off it by leaving frequently with all their bags and then returning to stay in a different town each time. Their favorite city was Barcelona, which was a fairyland of buildings that looked as if they had all been designed by Gaudi-or, perhaps, had sprung from Gaudi's dreams. They were married in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia. it was one of the few genuine Gaudis still standing, and the name made it the perfect place for a wedding. Of course the "sagrada familia" referred officially to the sacred family of Jesus. But that didn't mean it couldn't also apply to all families. Besides, weren't her children going to be immaculately conceived?

      The honeymoon, such as it was-a week together, island-hopping through the Balearics, enjoying the Mediterranean Sea and the African breezes-was still a week longer than she had hoped for. After knowing Bean's character about as well as one person ever gets to know another person, Petra had been rather shy about getting to know his body, and letting him know hers. But here Darwin helped them, for the passions that made species survive helped them to forgive each other's awkwardness and foolishness and ignorance and hunger.

      She was already taking pills to regulate her ovulation and more pills to stimulate as many eggs as possible to come to maturity. There was no possibility of their conceiving a baby naturally before they began the in vitro fertilization process. But she wished for it all the same, and twice she woke from dreams in which a kindly doctor told them, "I'm sorry, I can't implant embryos, because you're already pregnant."

      But she reffised to let it trouble her. She would have his baby soon enough.

      Now they were here in Rotterdam, getting down to business. Looking, not for the kindly doctor of her dream, but for the mass murderer who only spared Bean's life by accident to provide them with a child who would not die as a giant by the age of twenty.

      "If we wait long enough," said Bean, "they'll close the office."

      "No," said Petra. "Volescu will wait all night to see you. You're his experiment that succeeded despite his cowardice."

      "I thought it was my success, not his."

      She pressed herself against his arm. "It was my success," she said.

      "Yours? How?"

      "It must have been. I'm the one who ended up with all the prizes."

      "If you had ever said things like that in Battle School, you would have been the laughingstock of all the armies."

      "That's because the armies were all composed of prepubescent children. Grownups don't think such things are embarrassing."

      "Actually, they do," said Bean. "There's only this brief window of adolescence where extravagantly romantic remarks are taken for poetry."

      "Such is the power of hormones that we absolutely understand the biological causes of our feelings, and yet we still feel them."

      "Let's not go inside," said Bean. "Let's go back to the inn and have some more feelings."

      She kissed him. "Let's go inside and make a baby."

      "Try for a baby," said Bean. "Because I won't let you have one in which Anton's Key is turned."

      "I know," she said.

      "And I have your promise that embryos with Anton's Key will all be discarded."

      "Of course," she said. That satisfied him, though she was sure that he would notice that she had never actually said the words. Maybe he did, unconsciously, and that was why he kept asking.

      It was hypocritical and dishonest of her, of course, and she almost felt bad about it sometimes, but what happened after he died would be none of his business.

      "All right then," he said.

      "All right then," she answered. "Time to go meet the baby killer,

      "I don't suppose we should call him that to his face, though, right?"

      "Since when are you the one who worries about good manners?"

      Volescu was a weasel, just as Petra knew he would be. He was all business, playing the role of Mr. Scientist, but Petra knew well what lay behind the mask. She could see the way he couldn't keep his eyes off Bean, the mental measurements he was making. She wanted to make some snide remark about how prison seemed to have done him good, he was carrying some extra weight, needed to walk that off... but they were here to have the man choose them a baby, and it would serve no purpose to irritate him.

      "I couldn't believe I was going to meet you," said Volescu. "I knew from that nun who visited me that one of you had lived, and I was glad. I was already in prison by then, the very thing that destroying the evidence had been designed to prevent. So I didn't need to destroy it after all. I wished I hadn't. Then here she comes and tells me the lost one lived. It was the one ray of hope in a long night of despair. And here you are."

      Again he eyed Bean from head to toe.

      "Yes," said Bean, "here I am, and very tall for my age, too, as you seem to keep trying to verify."

      "I'm sorry," said Volescu. "I know that other business has brought you here. Very important business."

      "You're sure," said Bean, "that your test for Anton's Key is absolutely accurate and nondestructive?"

      "You exist, don't you? You are what you are, yes? We would not have kept any in which the gene did not take. We had a safe, reliable test."

      "Every one of the cloned embryos was brought to life." said Bean. "It worked in every one of them?"

      "I was very good with planter viruses in those days. A skill that even now isn't much called for in procedures with humans, since alterations are still illegal." He chuckled, because everyone knew that there was a lively business in tailored human babies in various places around the world, and that skill in gene alteration was in more demand than ever. That was almost certainly Volescu's real business, and the Netherlands was one of the safest places to practice it.

      But as Petra listened to him, she became more and more uneasy. Volescu was lying about something. The change in his manner had been slight, but after spending months observing every tiny nuance in Achilles's demeanor, simply as a matter of survival, she had turned herself into a very precise observer of other people. The signs of deception were there. Energized speech, overly rhythmic, too jovial. Eyes that kept darting away from theirs. Hands that wouldn't stop touching his coat, his pencil.

      What would he be lying about?

      It was obvious, once she thought about it.

      There was no test. Back when he created Bean, Volescu had simply introduced the planter virus that was supposed to alter all the cells of the embryos, and then waited to see if any embryos lived, and which of the survivors had been successfully altered. It happened that they all survived. But not all of them necessarily had Anton's Key.

      Maybe that was why, of all the nearly two dozen babies, only Bean escaped.

      Maybe Bean was the only one in whom the alteration was successful. The only one with Anton's Key. The only one who was so preternaturally intelligent that he was able, at one year of age, to realize there was danger, climb out of his bassinet, get himself inside a toilet tank, and actually stay alive there until the danger passed.

      That had to be Volescu's lie. Maybe he had developed a test since then, but that was unlikely. Why would he imagine he'd need it? But he said that he had such a test so he could... could do what?

      Start his experiment again. Take their leftover embryos, and instead of discarding the ones with Anton's Key, he'd keep them all and raise them and study them. This time it wouldn't be just one out of two dozen who had the enhanced intelligence and the shortened lifespan. This time, the genetic odds suggested a fifty-fifty distribution of Anton's Key among the embryos.

      So now Petra had a decision to make. If she said out loud what she was so certain of in her mind, Bean would probably realize she was right and the entire deal would be off. If Volescu had no way to test, it was certain nobody else did. Bean would refuse to have children at all.

      So if she was to have Bean's child, Volescu had to be the one to do it, not because he had a test for Anton's Key, but because Bean believed he did.

      But what about the other embryos? They would be her children, too, growing up as the slaves, the experimental subjects of a man like this, completely without morals.

      "Of course you know," said Petra, "that you won't do the actual implantation."

      Since Bean had never heard this wrinlde in their plans, he was no doubt surprised-but, being Bean, he showed nothing, merely smiled a bit to show that she was speaking for both of them. Such trust. She didn't even feel guilty that he trusted her so much at a moment when she was working so hard to deceive him. She may not be doing what he thought that he wanted, but she knew she was doing what he really desired, deep down in his genes.

      Volescu showed surprise, however. "But... what do you mean?"

      "Forgive me," said Petra, "but we will stay with you through the entire fertilization process, and we will watch as every fertilized embryo is taken to the Women's Hospital. where they will be under hospital security until the implantation takes place."

      Volescu's face reddened. "What do you accuse me of?"

      "Of being the man you have already proven yourself to be."

      "Many years ago, and I paid my debt."

      Bean understood now-enough, at least, to join in, his tone of voice as light and cheerful as Petra's. "We have no doubt of that, but of course we want to make sure we don't have any of our little embryos with Anton's Key waking up to some unpleasant surprises in a room full of children, as I did once."

      Volescu rose to his feet. "This interview is over."

      Petra's heart sank. She shouldn't have said anything at all. Now there would be no implantation and Bean would discover...

      "So we proceed to extract the eggs?" asked Bean. "The time is right, I believe. That's why we made the appointment for this day."

      Volescu looked at him sharply. "After you insulted me?"

      "Come now, Doctor," said Bean. "You take the eggs from her, and then I make my donation. That's how salmon do it. It's really quite natural. Though I'd like to skip the swim upstream, if I can."

      Volescu eyed him for a long moment, then smiled his tight little smile. "My little half-nephew Julian has such a sense of humor."

      Petra waited, hardly wanting to breathe, definitely not wishing to speak, though a thousand words raced through her head.

      "All right, yes, of course you can protect the fertilized embryos however you want. I understand your... lack of trust. Even though I know it is misplaced."

      "Then while you and Petra do whatever it is you're going to do," said Bean, "I'll call for a couple of couriers from the fertility center at Women's Hospital to come and await the embryos and take them to be frozen."

      "It will be hours before we reach that stage," said Volescu.

      "We can afford to pay for their time," said Petra. "And we don't want any chance of slipups or delays."

      "I will have to have access to the embryos again for several hours, of course," said Volescu. "In order to separate them and test them."

      "In our presence," said Petra. "And the fertility specialist who is going to implant the first one."

      "Of course," said Volescu with a tight smile. "I will sort them out for you, and discard the-"

      "We will discard and destroy any that have Anton's Key," said Bean.

      "That goes without saying," said Volescu stiffly.

      He hates these rules we've sprung on him, thought Petra. She could see it in his eyes, despite the calm demeanor. He's furious. He's even... embarrassed, yes. Well, since that's probably as close as he's ever come to feeling shame, it's good for him.

      While Petra was examined by the staff doctor who would do the implantation, Bean saw to hiring a security service. A guard would be on duty at the embryo "nursery," as the hospital staff charmingly called it, all day, every day. "Since you're the one who first started being paranoid," Bean told Petra, "I have no choice but to outparanoid you."

      It was a reliet actually. During the days before the embryos were ready for implantation, while Volescu was no doubt trying frantically to devise some nondestructive procedure that he could pretend was a genetic test, Petra was glad not to have to stay in the hospital personally watching over the embryos the whole time.

      It gave her a chance to explore the city of Bean's childhood. Bean, however, seemed determined to visit only the tourist sites and then get back to his computer She knew that it made him nervous to stay in one city for so long, especially because for the first time, their whereabouts were known to another person whom they did not trust. It was doubtful Volescu knew any of their enemies. But Bean insisted on changing hotels every day, and walking blocks from their hotel in order to hail a taxi, so that no enemy could set an easy trap for them.

      He was evading more than his enemies, though. He was also evading his past in this city. She scanned a city map and found the area that Bean was clearly avoiding. And the next morning, after Bean had chosen the first cab of the day, she leaned forward and gave the taxi driver directions.

      It took Bean only a few moments to realize where the cab was going. She saw him tense up. But he did not refuse to go or even complain about her having compelled him. How could he? It would be an admission that he was avoiding the places he had known as a child. A confession of pain and fear.

      She was not going to let him pass the day in silence, however "I remember the stories you've told me," she said to him, gently. "There aren't many of them, but still I wanted to see for myself. I hope it's not too painful for you. But even if it is, I hope you'll bear it. Because someday I'll want to tell our children about their father. And how can I tell the stories if I don't know where they took place?"

      After the briefest pause, Bean nodded.

      They left the cab and he took her through the streets of his childhood, which had been old and shabby even then. "It's changed very little," said Bean. "Really just the one difference. There aren't thousands of abandoned children everywhere. Apparently somebody found the budget to deal with the orphans."

      She kept asking questions, paying close attention to the answers, and finally he understood how serious she was, how much it meant to her Bean began taking her off the main streets. "I lived in the alleys," he explained. "In the shadows. Like a vulture, waiting for things to die. I had to watch for scraps that other children didn't see. Things discarded at night. Spills from garbage bins. Anything that might have a few calories in it."

      He walked up to one dumpster and laid his hand against it. "This one," he said. "This one saved my life. There was a restaurant then, where that music shop is. I think the restaurant employee who dumped their garbage knew I was lurking. He always took out most of the cooking garbage in the late afternoon, in daylight. The older kids took everything. And then the scraps from the night's meals, those got dumped in the morning, in daylight again, and the other kids got that, too. But he usually came outside once in the darkness. To smoke right here by the garbage bin. And after his smoke, in the darkness, there'd be a scrap of something, right here."

      Bean put his hand on a narrow shelf formed by the frame that allowed the garbage truck to lift the bin.

      "Such a tiny dinner table," said Petra.

      "I think he must have been a survivor of the street himself," said Bean, "because it was never something so large as to attract attention. It was always something I could slip into my mouth all at once, so no one ever saw me holding food in my hand. I would have died without him. It was only a couple of months and then he stopped- probably lost his job or moved on to something else-and I have no idea who he was. But it kept me alive."

      "What a lovely thing, to think such a person could have come out of the streets," said Petra.

      "Well, yes, now I see that," said Bean. "But at the time I didn't think of that sort of thing at all. I was ... focused. I knew he was doing it deliberately, but I didn't bother to imagine why, except to eliminate the possibility that it was a trap, or that he had drugged it or poisoned it somehow."

      "How did you eliminate that possibility?"

      "I ate the first thing he put there and I didn't die, and I didn't keel over and then wake up in a child whorehouse somewhere."

      "They had such places?"

      "There were rumors that that's what happened to children who disappeared from the street. Along with the rumors that they were cooked into spicy stews in the immigrants' section of town. Those I don't believe."

      She wrapped her arms around his chest. "Oh, Bean, what a hellish place."

      "Achilles came from here, too," he said.

      "He was never as small as you were."

      "But he was crippled. That bad leg. He had to be smart to stay alive. He had to keep everyone else from crushing him for no better reason than because they could. Maybe his thing about having to eliminate anyone who sees his helplessness-maybe that was a survival mechanism for him, under these circumstances."

      "You're such a Christian," said Petra. "So full of charity."

      "Speaking of which," said Bean. "I assume you're going to raise our child Armenian Catholic, right?"

      "It would make Sister Carlotta happy, don't you think?"

      "She was happy no matter what I did," said Bean. "God made her happy. She's happy now, if she's anything at all. She was a happy person.

      "You make her sound-what?-mentally deficient?"

      "Yes. She was incapable of holding on to malice. A serious defect."

      "I wonder if there's a genetic test for it," said Petra. Then she regretted it immediately. The last thing she wanted was for Bean to think too much about genetic tests, and realize what seemed so obvious to her, that Volescu had no test.

      They visited many other places, and more and more of them made him tell her little stories. Here's where Poke used to hide a stash of food to reward kids who did well. Here's where Sister Carlotta first sat down with us to teach us to read. This was our best sleeping place during the winter, until some bigger kids found us and drove us out.

      "Here's where Poke stood over Achilles with a cinderblock in her hands," said Bean, "ready to dash his brains out."

      "If only she had," said Petra.

      "She was too good a person," said Bean. "She couldn't imagine the evil that might be in him. I didn't, either, until I saw him lying there, what was in his eyes when he looked up at that cinderblock. I've never seen so much hate. That was all-no fear. I saw her death in his eyes right then. I told her she had to do it. Had to kill him. She couldn't. But it happened just the way I warned her. If you let him live, he'll kill you, I said, and he did."

      "Where was it?" asked Petra. "The place where Achilles killed her? Can you take me there?"

      He thought about it for a few moments, then walked her to the waterfront among the docks. They found a clear place where they could see between the boats and ships and barges out to where the great Rhine swept past on its way to the North Sea.

      "What a powerful place," said Petra.

      "What do you mean?"

      "It just-the river, so strong. And yet human beings were able to build this along its banks. This harbor Nature is strong but the human mind is stronger"

      "Except when it isn't," said Bean.

      "He gave her body to the river, didn't he?"

      "He dumped her into the water, yes.

      "But the way Achilles saw what he did. Giving her to the water Maybe he romanticized it."

      "He strangled her," said Bean. "I don't care what he thought while he did it, or afterward. He kissed her and then he strangled her."

      "You didn't see the murder, I hope!" said Petra. It would be too terrible if Bean bad been carrying such an image in his mind all these years.

      "I saw the kiss," said Bean. "I was too selfish and stupid to see what it meant."

      Petra remembered her own kiss from Achilles, and shuddered. "You thought what anyone would have thought," said Petra. "You thought his kiss meant what mine does." And she kissed him.

      He kissed her back. Hungrily.

      But when the kiss ended, his face grew wistful again. "I would undo everything, all that I've done with my life since then," said Bean, "if I could only go back and undo that one moment."

      "What, you think you could have fought him? Have you forgotten how small you were then?"

      "If I'd been there, if he'd known I was watching, he wouldn't have done it. Achilles never risks discovery if he can help it."

      "Or he might have killed you, too."

      "He couldn't kill us both at once. Not with that limp leg. Whichever one he went for, the other would scream bloody murder and go for help."

      "Or hit him over the head with a cinderblock."

      "Yes, well, Poke could have done that, but I couldn't have lifted it higher than his head. And I don't think dropping a stone on his toe would have done the job."

      They stayed by the dock for a little longer, and then made the walk back to the hospital.

      The security guard was on duty. All was right with the world.

      Bean had gone back to his childhood range and he hadn't cried much, hadn't turned away, hadn't fled back to some safe place.

      Or so she thought, until they left the hospital, returned to their hotel, and he lay in the bed, gasping for breath until she realized that he was sobbing. Great dry wracking sobs that shook his whole body. She lay beside him and held him until he slept.

      Volescu's fakery was so good that for a few moments Petra wondered if he might really have the ability to test the embryos. But no, it was flimflam-he was simply smart enough, scientist enough, to find convincing flimflam that was realistic enough to fool extremely intelligent laypeople like them, and even the fertility doctor they brought with them. He must have made it look like the tests these doctors performed to test for a child's sex or for major genetic defects.

      Or else the doctor knew perfectly well it was a scam, but said nothing because all the baby-fixers played the same game, pretending to check for defects that couldn't actually be checked for, knowing that by the time the fakery was discovered, the parents would already have bonded with the child-and even if they hadn't, how could they sue for failing to perform an illegal procedure like sorting for athletic prowess or intellect? Maybe all these baby boutiques were fakers.

      The only reason Petra wasn't fooled is that she didn't watch the procedure, she watched Volescu, and by the end of the procedure she knew that he was way too relaxed. He knew that nothing he was doing would make the slightest difference. There was nothing at stake. The test meant nothing.

      There were nine embryos. He pretended to identify three of them as having Anton's Key. He tried to hand the containers to one of his assistants to dispose of, but Bean insisted that he give them to their doctor for disposal.

      "I don't want any of these embryos to accidentally become a baby," said Bean with a smile.

      But to Petra, they already were babies, and it hurt her to watch as Bean supervised the pouring out of the three embryos into a sink, the scouring of the containers to make sure an embryo hadn't managed to thrive in some remaining droplet.

      I'm imagining this, thought Petra. For all she knew, the containers he flushed had never contained embryos at all. Why would Volescu sacrifice any of them, when all he had to do was lie and merely say that these three had contained embryos with Anton's Key?

      So, self persuaded that no actual harm to a child of hers was being done, she thanked Volescu for his help and they waited for him to leave before anything else was done. Volescu carried nothing from the room that he hadn't come in with.

      Then Bean and Petra both watched as the six remaining embryos were frozen, their containers tagged, and all of them secured against tampering.

      The morning of the implantation, they both awoke almost at first light, too excited, too nervous to sleep. She lay in bed reading, trying to calm herself; he sat at the table in the hotel room, working on email, scanning the nets.

      But his mind was obviously on the morning's procedure. "It's going to be expensive," he said. "Keeping guard over the ones we don't implant."

      She knew what he was driving at. "You know we've got to keep them frozen until we know if the first implant works. They don't always take."

      Bean nodded. "But I'm not an idiot, you know. I'm perfectly aware that you intend to keep all the embryos and implant them one by one until you have as many of my children as possible."

      "Well of course," said Petra. "What if our firstborn is as nasty as Peter Wiggin?"

      "Impossible," said Bean. "How could a child of mine have any but the sweetest disposition?"

      "Unthinkable, I know," said Petra. "And yet somehow I thought of it."

      "So this security, it has to continue for years."

      "Why?" said Petra. "No one wants the babies that are left. We destroyed the ones with Anton's Key."

      "We know that," said Bean. "But they're still the children of two members of Ender's jeesh. Even without my particular curse, they'll still be worth stealing."

      "But they won't be old enough to be of any value for years and years," said Petra.

      "Not all that many years," said Bean. "How old were we? How old are we even now? There are plenty of people willing to take the children and invest not that many years of training and then put them to work. Playing games and winning wars."

      "I'll never let any of them anywhere near military training," said Petra.

      "You won't be able to stop them," said Bean.

      "We have plenty of money, thanks to the pensions Graff got for us," said Petra. "I'll make sure the security is intense."

      "No, I mean you'll never be able to stop the children. From seeking out military service."

      He was right, of course. The testing for Battle School included a child's predilection for military command, for the contest of battle. For war. Bean and Petra had proven how strong that passion was in them. It would be unlikely that any child of theirs would be happy without ever having a taste of the military life.

      "At least," said Petra, "they won't have to destroy an alien invader before they turn fifteen."

      But Bean wasn't listening. His body had suddenly grown alert as he scanned a message on his desk.

      "What is it?" she asked.

      "I think it's from Hot Soup," said Bean.

      She got up and came over to look.

      It was an email through one of the anonymous services, this one an Asian-based company called Mysterious East. The subject line was "definitely not vichyssoise." Not cold soup, then. Hot Soup. The Battle school nickname of Han Tzu. who had been in Ender's jeesh and was now assumed to be deeply involved in the highest levels of strategy in China.

      A message from him to Bean, until recently the military commander of the Hegemon's forces, would be high treason. This message had been handed to a stranger on a street in China. Probably a European- or African-looking tourist. And the message wasn't hard to understand:

      He thinks told him where Caligula would be but I did not.

      "Caligula" could only refer to Achilles. "He" had to refer to Peter.

      Han Tzu was saying that Peter thought he was the source of the information about where the prison convoy would be on the day Suriyawong liberated Achilles.

      No wonder Peter was sure his source was reliable-Han Tzu himself! Since Han Tzu had been one of the group Achilles kidnapped, he would have plenty of reason to hate him. Motive enough for Peter to believe that Han Tzu would tell him where Achilles would be.

      But it wasn't Han Tzu.

      And if it wasn't Han Tzu, then who else would send such a message, pretending that it came from him? A message that turned out to be correct?

      "We should have known it wasn't from Han Tzu all along," said Bean.

      "We didn't know Han Tzu was supposed to be the source," said Petra reasonably.

      "Han Tzu would never give information that would lead to innocent Chinese soldiers getting killed. Peter should have known that."

      "We would have known it," said Petra, "but Peter doesn't know Hot Soup. And he didn't tell us Hot Soup was his source."

      "So of course we know who the source was," said Bean.

      "We've got to get word to him at once," said Petra.

      Bean was already typing.

      "Only this has to mean that Achilles went in there completely prepared," said Petra. "I'd be surprised if he hasn't found a way to read Peter's mail."

      "I'm not writing to Peter," said Bean.

      "Who, then?"

      "Mr. and Mrs. Wiggin," said Bean. "Two separate messages. Pieces of a puzzle. Chances are that Achilles won't be watching their mail, or at least not closely enough to realize he should put these together."

      "No," said Petra. "No puzzles. Whether he's watching or not, there's no time to lose. He's been there for months now.

      "If he sees an open message it might precipitate action on his part. It might be Peter's death warrant."

      "Then notify Graff, send him in."

      "Achilles undoubtedly knows Graff already came once to get our parents out," said Bean. "Again, his arrival might trigger things."

      "OK," said Petra, thinking. "OK. Here's what. Suriyawong."

      "No," said Bean.

      "He'll get a coded message instantly. He thinks that way."

      "But I don't know if he can be trusted," said Bean.

      "Of course he can," said Petra. "He's only pretending to be Achilles's man."

      "Of course he is," said Bean. "But what if he isn't just pretending?"

      "But he's Suriyawong!"

      "I know," said Bean. "But I can't be sure.

      "All right," said Petra. "Peter's parents, then. Only don't be too subtle."

      "They're not stupid," said Bean. "I don't know Mr. Wiggin that well, but Mrs. Wiggin is-well, she's very subtle. She knows more than she lets on."

      "That doesn't mean she's wary. That doesn't mean she'll get the code or talk it over with her husband right away so they can put the messages together."

      "Trust me," said Bean.

      "No, I'll proofread before you send it," said Petra. "First rule of survival, right? Just because you trust someone's motives doesn't mean you can trust them to do it right."

      "You're a cold, cold woman," said Bean.

      "It's one of my best features."

      A half hour later, they both agreed that the messages should work. Bean sent them. It was a few hours earlier in Ribeirao Preto. Nothing would happen till the Wiggins woke up.

      "We'll have to be ready to leave immediately after the implantation," said Petra. If Achilles had been in control of things from the start, then chances were good that his whole network was still in place and he knew exactly where they were and what they were doing.

      "I won't be with you," said Bean. "I'll be getting our tickets. Have the guards right in the room with you."

      "No," said Petra. "But just outside."

      Petra showered first, and she was completely packed when Bean came out of the bathroom. "One thing," said Petra.

      "What?" asked Bean as he put his few belongings into the one bag he carried.

      "Our tickets-should be to separate destinations."

      He stopped packing and looked at her. "I see," he said. "You get what you want from me, and then you walk away."

      She laughed nervously. "Well, yes," she said. "You've been telling me this whole time that it's more dangerous for us to travel together."

      "And now that you'll have my baby in you, you don't need to be with me any more," said Bean. He was still smiling, but she knew that beneath the jest there was true suspicion.

      "Whatever the Wiggins do, all hell is going to break loose," said Petra. "I've memorized all your dead drops and you've memorized all of mine."

      "I gave you all of yours," said Bean.

      "Let's get back together in a week or so," said Petra. "If I'm like my mother, I'll be puking my guts out by then."

      "If the implantation is successful."

      "I'll miss you every moment," said Petra.

      "God help me, but I'll miss you too."

      She knew what a painful, frightening thing that was for Bean. To allow himself to love someone so much that he would actually miss her, that was no small matter for him. And the two other women he had allowed himself to love with all his heart had been murdered.

      "I won't let anybody hurt our baby," she said.

      He thought for a moment, and then his face softened. "That baby is probably the best protection you could have."

      She understood and smiled. "No, they won't kill me till they see what our baby turns out like," she said. "But that's no protection from being kidnapped and held until the child is born."

      "As long as you and the baby are alive, I'll come and get you."

      "That's the thing that frightens me," said Petra. "That we might be the bait they use to set a trap for you."

      "We're looking too far ahead," said Bean. "They aren't going to catch us. You or me. And if they do, well, we'll deal with that."

      They were packed. They both went over the room one more time to make sure they were leaving nothing behind, no sign they had ever been there. Then they left for Women's Hospital and the child who waited for them there, a bundle of genes wrapped in a few undifferentiated cells, eager to implant themselves in a womb, to start to draw nutrients from a mother's blood, to begin to divide and distinguish themselves into heart and bowel, hands and feet, eyes and ears, mouth and brain.

CHAPTER TEN

LEFT AND RIGHT

From: PW

To:   TW, JPW

Re:   Reconciliation of keyboard [?]cogs

You'll be happy to learn that we were able to sort out oil the [?]cogs. We have tracked every computer entry by the person in question. All his entries dealt with official business and assignments he was carrying out for me. Nothing that was in any way improper was done.

Personally, I find this disturbing. Either he found a way to fool both our programs (not likely), or he is actually doing nothing but what he should (even less likely), or he is playing a very deep game about which we have no idea (extremely likely).

Let's talk tomorrow.

      Theresa woke up when John Paul got out of bed to pee at four AM. It worried her that he couldn't make it through the night anymore. He was still a little young to be having prostate problems.

      But it wasn't her husband's slackening bladder capacity that kept her awake. It was the memo from Peter informing them that Achilles had done absolutely nothing but what he was supposed to do.

      This was impossible. Nobody does exactly what they're supposed to and nothing else. Achilles should have had some friend, some ally, some contact whom he needed to notify that he was out of China and safe. He had a network of informants and agents, and as he showed when he hopped from Russia to India to China, he was always one step ahead of everybody. The Chinese finally wised up to his pattern and short-circuited it, but that didn't mean Achilles didn't have his next move planned. So why hadn't he done anything to set it in motion?

      There were more possibilities than the ones Peter listed, of course. Maybe Achilles had a means of bypassing the electromagnetic shield that surrounded the Ribeirao Preto compound. Of course, he couldn't have brought such a device with him when he was rescued, or it would have shown up in the search that was conducted during his first bath in Ribeirao. So someone would have to have brought it to him. And Peter was convinced that no such device could exist. Maybe he was right.

      Maybe Achilles's next move was something he planned to do entirely alone.

      Maybe there was something he had that he was able to smuggle into Brazil inside his body. Did the surveillance cameras show him, perhaps, combing through his bowel movements? Peter must surely have checked for that.

      While she lay there thinking. John Paul had come back from the bathroom. But now she noticed that he had not resumed snoring.

      "You're awake?" she asked.

      "Sorry I woke you."

      "I can't sleep anyway," she said.

      "The Beast?"

      "We're missing something," said Theresa. "He hasn't suddenly become a loyal servant of the Hegemony."

      "I'm not going to get back to sleep either," said John Paul. He got up and padded in bare feet to his computer She heard him typing and knew that he was checking his mail first.

      Busy work, but it was better than lying here staring at the dark ceiling. She got up also, took her desk from the table, and brought it back to bed, where she began checking her own email.

      One of the benefits of being the mother of the Hegemon was that she didn't actually have to answer the tedious mail-she could forward it on to one of Peter's secretaries to deal with, since it consisted mostly of tedious attempts of people trying to get her to use her supposed influence with Peter to get him to do something that was not within his power to do, was illegal even if he could do it, and which he would certainly not do even if it were legal.

      It left her with very few pieces of mail that she needed to deal with personally.

      Most of it could be answered with a few sentences and she dealt with it quickly, if a bit sleepily.

      She was about to shut down her desk and try again to get back to sleep when a new piece of mail came in.

To:   T%Hegmom@Hegemony.gov

From: Rock%HardPlace@IComeAnon.com

Re:   And when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.

      What was this? Some religious fanatic? But the address was her most private one, used only by John Paul, Peter, and a handful of people she actually liked and knew well.

      So who sent it?

      She skipped to the bottom. No signature. The message was short. You'll never guess. There I was at a party-the boring but dangerous kind, with fine china that you know you're going to break, and a tablecloth you're bound to spill India ink on-and do you know what happens? Along comes the very man with whom I wanted to tie the knot. He thinks he's rescuing me from the party. But in fact, he was the very reason I came to the party in the first place. Not that I'll ever tell him. He would BLOW UP if he knew. And then, of course, I'm so nervous I bump into the tureen and hot soup spills all aver everything. But . - - you know met just a big oaf.

      That was the complete text of the message. It was really annoying, because it didn't sound like anyone she knew. She didn't have friends who sent letters as empty and pointless as this one. Gossip about a party. Somebody hoping to marry somebody else.

      But before she could make any progress on figuring it out, another piece of mail came in.

To:   T%Hegmom@Hegemony.gov

From: Sheep%NotGoats@IComeAnon.com

Re:   Even as ye have done it unto the least of these - . -

      Another biblical quote. Same person? Bound to be.

      But the message was not chatty at all. In fact, it continued the scriptural motif from the subject line. It had nothing to do with the previous message.

Ye took me in, but I was not naked. I took you in, because you were foolish. Ye never knew me, but I knew you.

      When does the judgment day come? Like a thief in the night. In an hour when ye look not for me. The fool says, He is not coming. Let us eat drink and be merry for he is not coming. Behold I stand at the door and knock In sorrow shall ye bear children, will have the power to crush your head but ye will have the power to bite my heel.

A time to sow, and a time to reap. A time to gather stones together, a time to run like hell.

She who has ears to hear. How beautiful upon the mountains

are the feet. I come to bring not peace but a sword.

      Theresa got out of bed. John Paul had to see these letters. They meant something, she knew that, especially arriving together like this. The number of people who knew this address was very, very small. And not one of them would write either of these letters.

      Therefore either this address had been compromised-but who would bother? She was only the mother of the Hegemon-or these letters were meant to convey a message. And it was from someone who thought that even at this address, her mail might be intercepted by someone else.

      Who was that paranoid, but Bean?

      Big oaf, that's who he said he was. Bean, definitely.

      "John Paul," she said as she padded up behind him.

      "This is so strange," he said.

      She assumed he was going to tell her about a similar pair of messages, so she waited.

      "The Chinese have imposed a completely absurd law in India. About rocks! People aren't allowed to carry rocks without a permit! Anyone caught with rocks is subject to arrest-and they're actually enforcing it. Have they lost their minds?"

      She found it impossible to be interested in the idiocies of China's policies in India. "John Paul, I have to show you something."

      "Sure," he said, turning to look at the desk she set down on the table next to his computer

      "Read these letters," she said.

      He glanced at one, and before she could imagine he had actually read the whole thing, he flipped to the next one. "Yeah, I got them too," he said. "A dullbob and a crenchee. You shouldn't let these things get to you."

      "No," she said. "Look at them closer They came to my private address. I think they're from Bean."

      He looked up at her, then turned to his own computer and called up his own copies of the letters. "Me too," he said. "I didn't notice that. Just looked like junk mail, but nobody uses this address."

      "The subject lines-"

      "Yes," said John Paul. "Both scriptures, even though the first one-"

      "Yes, and the first one is about left and right hands, and the second one is from the parable or whatever it is when Jesus speaks to the people on his right hand and the people on his left hand."

      "So they both have left and right hands." said John Paul.

      "Two parts to the same message.

      "Could be," he said.

      "The scriptures are all twisted." said Theresa.

      "You Mormons learn your scriptures," said John Paul. "We Catholics regard that as a really Protestant thing to do."

      "The real scripture says, I was naked, and you clothed me, I was homeless or something like that and you took me in."

      "I was a stranger and you took me in," said John Paul.

      "So you did read scripture."

      "I woke up once during the homily."

      "It's word games." said Theresa. "I think the second 'took you in' means 'fooled you.' not 'provided shelter for you.'"

      By now John Paul was studying the other letter "This one's geopolitical. Fine China. India ink. And it ends with 'blow up' in all caps.

      'Tie the knot,' " said Theresa, looking at the first letter "The 'tie' could mean somebody from Thailand.'"

      "That's stretching it a little," said John Paul, chuckling.

      "It's all word games." said Theresa. " 'Power to bite my heel'- that has to refer to the Beast, don't you think? Achilles, who could only be hurt in the heel."

      "And Achilles was rescued by a Thai-Suriyawong."

      "So now you think 'tie' might be 'Thai'?"

      "Yes, you told me so."

      "The Thai thinks he's rescuing this person from a party. Suri rescues Achilles, but Achilles is keeping a secret. He would blow up if he knew."

      Now John Paul was looking at the second letter "A time to run like hell. Is this a warning?"

      "That's what the last line has to be. She who has ears, let her hear. Use your feet. Because he comes to bring not peace but the sword."

      "Mine says 'He who has ears to hear'

      "You're right, they weren't identical."

      "Who's the 'I' in these scriptures?"

      "Jesus."

      "No, no, I mean, what does the message mean by 'I'? I think it's Achilles. I think it's written as if Achilles were talking. I took you in because you were foolish. Thief in the night, when we aren't looking for him. We're stupid because we think he's not coming but he's here at the door"

      "A time to run like hell," said Theresa.

      John Paul leaned back and closed his eyes. "A warning from Bean, maybe. Suri thought he was rescuing Achilles but it was exactly what Achilles wanted him to do. And the other letter-that reference to stones, that has to be Petra. They sent us a pair of messages that fit together."

      And now it all fell into place. "This is what's been bothering me, said Theresa. "This is why I couldn't sleep."

      "You didn't get these letters till just now," said John Paul.

      "No, the thing that was keeping me awake, it was how Achilles has done nothing since he got here except his official duties. I was thinking that even though he was short-circuited by the Chinese arresting him, it made no sense for him not to make contact with his network. But what if the Chinese didn't arrest him at all? What if that was a setup? 'You took me in but I was not naked.'"

      John Paul nodded. "And I took you in, because you were foolish." "So the whole point of this was to get Achilles inside the compound."

      "But so what?" said John Paul. "We've been suspicious of him anyway."

      "But this is more than suspicion," said Theresa. "Or they wouldn't have sent it."

      "There's no evidence here. Nothing that would persuade Peter"

      "Yes there is," said Theresa. "Hot soup." He looked at her blankly.

      "From Ender's jeesh. Han Tzu. Inside China. He would know. He's the authority. He 'spilled everything.' Definitely a setup."

      "OK," said John Paul, "so we have the evidence. We know Achilles wasn't really a prisoner, he wanted to be taken."

      "Don't you see? This means he really understands Peter. He knew that Peter couldn't resist rescuing him. Maybe he even knew that Bean and Petra would leave. Think about it-we all knew how dangerous Achilles could be, so maybe he was counting on that."

      "Everybody closest to Peter left, except us-"

      "And Peter tried to get us to go.

      "And Suriyawong."

      "And Achilles has coopted him."

      "Or Suri has Achilles convinced he has."

      They'd been back and forth on that one before. "Whatever," said Theresa. "Simply by arriving here, Achilles has succeeded in isolating Peter Then he's spent his whole time being Mr Nice Guy, doing everything right-and making friends with everybody while he's at it. Everything's going smoothly. Except-"

      "Except that he's in a position to kill Peter"

      "If he can do it in a way that doesn't implicate him."

      "Ready to step in, as Peter's assistant, and say, 'Everything's going smoothly at the Hegemony, we'll just keep things going till a new Hegemon is chosen,' and long before they can choose one, he's compromised all the codes, he's neutralized the army, and China is completely rid of the Hegemony once and for all. They'll get advance word of one of Suri's missions and they wipe out our brave little army and-"

      "Why wipe it out, if it already obeys you?" said Theresa.

      "We don't know that Suri-"

      "What do you think would happen if Peter tried to leave?" she asked.

      John Paul thought about that. "Achilles would take over while he was gone. There's a long tradition of that maneuver."

      "And just as long a tradition of declaring him sick and keeping anyone from having access to him."

      "Well, he can't restrict access to Peter as long as we're here," said John Paul.

      They looked at each other for a long moment.

      "Get your passport," said Theresa.

      "We can't pack anything."

      "Wipe the computers."

      "What do you think he'll use? Poison? Some bio-agent?"

      "Bio-agent is likeliest. He could have smuggled that in."

      "Does it matter?"

      "Peter's not going to believe us.

      "He's stubborn and self-willed and he thinks we're idiots," said John Paul. "But that doesn't mean he's stupid."

      "But he might think he can handle it."

      John Paul nodded. "You're right. He is exactly that stupid."

      "Wipe all your files on the system and-"

      "It doesn't matter," said John Paul. "There are backups."

      "Not of these letters, at least."

      John Paul printed them out and then destroyed them in the computer's memory, while Theresa wiped them from her desk.

      Carrying the paper copies of the letters, they headed for Peter's room.

      Peter was sleepy, surly, and impatient with them. He kept dismissing their concerns and insisting they wait till morning until finally John Paul lost his temper and dragged Peter out of bed like a teenager He was so shocked at being treated in such a way that he actually fell silent.

      "Stop thinking this is between you and your parents," John Paul said. "These letters are from Bean and Petra, and they're relaying a message from Han-Tzu in China. These are three of the smartest military minds alive, and all three of them have been proven to be smarter than you."

      Peter's face reddened with anger.

      "Have I got your attention now?" said John Paul. "Will you actually listen?"

      "What does it matter if I listen?" said Peter. "Let one of them be Hegemon, they're so much smarter than me.

      Theresa bent down and got right in his face. "You're acting like a rebellious teenager while we're trying to tell you the house is on fire."

      "Process this information," said John Paul, "as if we were a couple of your informants. Pretend that you think we actually know something. And while you're at it, take a quick poll and see how effectively Achilles has driven away everybody around you who was completely trustworthy-except us."

      "I know you mean well," said Peter, but his voice betrayed his anger.

      "Shut up," said Theresa. "Just shut up with your patronizing tone. You saw the letters. We didn't make that up. Hot Soup found a way to tell Bean and Petra that the whole rescue was a setup. You were had, smart boy. Achilles has this whole place sussed by now. Every move you make, somebody tells him."

      "For all we know," said John Paul, "the Chinese have an operation ready to roll."

      "Or you're going to be arrested by Suri's soldiers," said Theresa.

      "In other words, you have no idea what I'm even supposed to be afraid of."

      "That's right," said Theresa. "That's exactly right. Because you played into his hands as if he handed you a script and you read your lines like a robot."

      "You're the puppet right now, Peter," said John Paul. "You thought you held the strings, but you're the puppet."

      "And you have to leave now," said Theresa.

      "What's the emergency?" said Peter impatiently. "You don't know what he's going to do or when."

      "Sooner or later you're going to have to go," said Theresa. "Or do you plan to wait until he kills you? Or us? And when you do go, it has to be sudden, unexpected, unplanned. There's no better opportunity than now. While the three of us are still alive. Can you guarantee that will still be true tomorrow? This afternoon? I didn't think so."

      "Before dawn," said John Paul. "Out of the compound, into the city, onto a plane, out of Brazil."

      Peter just sat there, looking from one to the other But the irritated look was gone from his face. Was it possible? Could he have actually heard something that they said?

      "If I leave," said Peter, "they'll say I abdicated."

      "You can say that you didn't."

      "I'll look like a fool. I'll be completely discredited."

      "You were a fool," said Theresa. "If you say it first, nobody else gets any points for saying it. Cover up nothing. Get a press release out while you're in the air You're Locke. You're Demosthenes. You can spin anything."

      Peter stood up. started pulling clothes out of his dresser drawers. "I think you're right," he said. "I think your analysis is absolutely right."

      Theresa looked at John Paul.

      John Paul looked at Theresa.

      Was this Peter talking?

      "Thank you for not giving up on me," he said. "But this Hegemon thing is done. I've lost any chance of making it work. I had my chance, and I blew it. Everybody told me not to bring Achilles here. I had all these plans on how to lead him into a trap. But I was already caught in his."

      "I've already told you to shut up once this morning," said Theresa. "Don't make me do it again."

      Peter didn't bother buttoning his shirt. "Let's go," he said.

      Theresa was glad to see that he didn't try to take anything with him. He only stopped at his computer and typed in a single command.

      Then he headed for the door

      "Aren't you going to wipe out your files?" asked John Paul. "Alert your head of security?"

      "I just did," said Peter

      So he had been prepared for such a day as this. He already had the program in place that would automatically destroy everything that needed destroying. And it would alert those who needed to be alerted.

      "We have ten minutes before the people I used to trust get warned to evacuate," said Peter. "Since we don't know which of them we can still trust, we have to be out of here by then."

      His plan included looking after those who were still loyal to him, whose lives would be in danger when Achilles took over. Theresa had not imagined Peter would think of such a thing. It was a good thing to know about him.

      They didn't skulk or run, just walked through the grounds toward the nearest gate, engaged in animated conversation. It might be early in the morning, but who would imagine that the Hegemon and his parents were making a getaway? No luggage, no hurry, no stealth. Arguing. A perfectly normal scene.

      And the argument was real enough. They spoke softly, because in the stillness of dawn they might be overheard even at a distance. But there was plenty of intensity in their hushed voices.

      "Skip the melodrama," said John Paul. "Your life isn't over. You made a huge mistake, and there are people who are going to say that running out like this is an even bigger one. But your mother and I know that it isn't. As long as you're alive, there's hope."

      "The hope is Bean," said Peter "He hasn't shot himself in the foot. I'll throw my support behind Bean. Or maybe I shouldn't. Maybe my support would just be the kiss of death."

      "Peter," said John Paul, "you're the Hegemon. You were elected. You, not this compound. In fact, you're the one who moved the Hegemony offices here. Now you're going to move them somewhere else. Wherever you are, that's the Hegemony. Don't you ever say one thing to imply otherwise. Even if your entire power in the world consists of you and me and your mother, that's not nothing. Because you are Peter Wiggin, and dammit, we're John Paul Wiggin and Theresa Wiggin and underneath our charming and civilized exteriors, we're some pretty tough bunducks."

      Peter said nothing.

      "Well, actually," said Theresa to John Paul, "we're the bunducks. Peter's the big sabeek."

      Peter shook his head.

      "You are," Theresa insisted. "And do you know how I know you are? Because you were smart enough to listen to us and get out in time."

      "I was just thinking," said Peter quietly.

      "What?" prompted Theresa, before John Paul could give his standard joking reply: It's about time. It would be the wrong joke for this moment, but John Paul was never very good about knowing when it was the wrong time for his standard jokes. They came out by reflex, without being processed through his brain first.

      "I've underestimated you two," he said.

      "Well, yes," said Theresa.

      "In fact, I've been a little shit to you for a long time."

      "Not so little," said John Paul.

      Theresa cocked a warning eyebrow at him.

      "But I still never did anything as dumb as flying to get into his bedroom to kill him," said Peter.

      Theresa looked at him sharply. He was grinning at her.

      John Paul laughed. She couldn't blame him. He couldn't help retaliating. After all, she had just given him the dreaded eyebrow.

      "OK, well, you're right," said Theresa. "That was pretty stupid. But I didn't know what else to do to save you."

      "Maybe saving me isn't such a great idea."

      "You're the only copy of our DNA left on Earth," said John Paul. "We really don't want to have to start all over, making babies. That's for younger people now.

      "Besides," said Theresa. "Saving you means saving the world."

      "Right," said Peter derisively.

      "You're the only hope," said Theresa.

      "Then good luck, world."

      "I do believe," said John Paul, "that that was almost a prayer. Don't you think so, Theresa? I think Peter said a prayer.

      Peter chuckled. "Yeah, why not. Good luck, world. Amen."

      They got to the gate well before the ten minutes were up. There was a cab driver asleep at a cab stand in front of the biggest hotel outside the compound. John Paul woke him and handed him a very large sum of money.

      "Take us to the airport," said Theresa.

      "But not this one," said John Paul. "I think we want to fly out of Araraquara."

      "That's an hour away," said Theresa.

      "And we have an hour till the earliest flight anywhere," said John Paul. "Do you want to spend that hour just sitting in an airport that's fifteen minutes away from the compound?"

      Peter laughed. "That is so paranoid," he said. "just like Bean."

      "Bean's alive," said John Paul.

      "I'm OK with that," said Peter. "Being alive is good."

      Peter had his press release out from one of the computers in the Araraquara airport. But Achilles didn't waste any time, either.

      Peter's story was all flue, though he left a few things out. He admitted that he had been fooled into thinking that he was rescuing Achilles when in fact he was bringing the Trojan Horse inside the walls of Troy. It was a terrible mistake because Achilles was serving the Chinese Empire all along, and Hegemony headquarters was completely compromised. Peter declared that he was moving Hegemony headquarters to another location and urged all Hegemony employees who were still loyal to him to wait for word about where to reassemble.

      Achilles's press release declared that he, General Suriyawong, and Ferreira, the head of Hegemony computer security, had discovered that Peter was embezzling Hegemony funds and hiding them in secret accounts-money that should have gone to paying Hegemony debts and feeding the poor and trying to achieve world peace. He declared that the office of the Hegemon would continue to function under the control of Suriyawong as the ranking military leader of Hegemony forces, and that he would help Suriyawong only if he was asked. Meanwhile, a warrant had been issued for Peter Wiggin's arrest to answer charges of embezzlement, malfeasance in office, and high treason against the International Defense League.

      In a press release later that day he announced that Hyrum Graff had been removed as Minister of Colonization and was to be arrested for complicity with Peter Wiggin in the conspiracy to defraud the Hegemony.

      "The son of a bitch," said John Paul.

      "Graff won't obey him," said Theresa. "He'll simply declare that you're still Hegemon and that he answers only to you and Admiral Chamrajnagar."

      "But it'll dry up a lot of his funds," said Peter. "He'll have a lot less freedom of movement. Because now there's a price on his head, and in some countries they'd just love to arrest him and turn him over to the Chinese."

      "Do you really think Achilles is serving the Chinese interest?" asked Theresa.

      "Every bit as loyally as he served mine," said Peter.

      Before the plane landed in Miami, Peter had his safe haven. In, of all places, the USA.

      "I thought America was determined not to get involved," said John Paul.

      "It's just temporary," said Peter

      "But it puts them clearly on our team," said Theresa.

      "'Them'?" said Peter. "You're Americans. So am I. The U.S. isn't 'them,' it's us."

      "Wrong," said Theresa. "You're the Hegemon. You're above nationality. And so, I might add, are we."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BABIES

From: Chamrajnagar%sacredriver@ifcom.gov

To:   Flandres%A-Heg@idl.gov

Re:   MinCol

Mr. Flandres:

The position of Hegemon is not and never was vacant. Peter

Wiggin continues to hold that office. Therefore your dismissal

of the Han. Hyrum Graff as Minister of Colonization is void.

Graff continues to exercise all previous authority in regard to

MinCol affairs off the surface of Earth.

Furthermore, IFCom will regard any interference with his operations on Earth, or with his person as he carries out his duties, as obstruction of a vital operation of the International Meet, and we will take all appropriate steps.

From: Flandres%A-Heg@idl.gov

To:   Chamrajnagar%sacredriver@ifcom.gov

Re:   MinCol

Admiral Chamrajnagar, sir:

I cannot imagine why you would write to me about this matter.

I am not acting Hegemon, I am Assistant Hegemon. I have

forwarded your letter to General Suriyawong, and I hope all

future correspondence about such matters will be directed to

him.

Your humble servant,

Achilles Flandres

From: Chamrajnagar%sacredriver@ifcom.gov

To:   Flandres%A-Heg@idl.gov

Re:   MinCol

Forward my letters wherever you like. I know the game you are playing. I am playing a different one. In my game. I hold all the cards. Your game, on the other hand, will only last until people notice that you have no actual cards at all.

      The events in Brazil were already all over the nets and the vids when the implantation procedure was complete and Petra was wheeled out into the waiting room of the fertility clinic at Women's Hospital. Bean was waiting for her With balloons.

      They wheeled her out into the reception area. At first she didn't notice him, because she was busy talking with the doctor. Which was fine with him. He wanted to look at her, this woman who might be carrying his child now.

      She looked so small.

      He remembered looking up at her when they first met in Battle School. This girl-rare in a place that tested for aggressiveness and a certain degree of ruthlessness. To him, a newcomer, the youngest child ever admitted to the school, she seemed so cool, so tough, like the quintessential bullyboy, smart-mouthed and belligerent. It was all an act, but a necessary one.

      Bean had seen at once that she noticed things. Noticed him, for starters, not with amusement or amazement like the other kids, who could only see how small he was. No, she clearly gave him some thought, found him intriguing. Realized, perhaps, that his presence at Battle School when he was clearly underage implied something interesting about him.

      It was partly that trait of hers that led Bean to turn to her-that and the fact that as a girl she was almost as much of a misfit as he was bound to be.

      She had grown since those days, of course, but Bean had grown far more, and was now quite a bit taller than her. It wasn't just height, either He had felt her rib cage under his hands, so small and brittle, or so it seemed. He felt as though he always had to be gentle with her, or he might inadvertently break her between his hands.

      Did all men feel this way? Probably not. For one thing, most women were not as light-bodied as Petra, and for another thing, most men stopped growing when they reached a certain point. But Bean's hands and feet were still misproportioned to his body, like an adolescent's, so that even though he was a tallish man, it was clear his body meant to grow taller still. His hands felt like paws. Hers seemed as lost within his as a baby's.

      How, then, will the baby she carries inside her now seem to me when it is born? Will I be able to cradle the child in one hand? Will there be a genuine danger of my hurting the baby? I'm not so good with my hands these days.

      And by the time the baby is big enough, robust enough for me to handle safely, I'll be dead.

      Why did I consent to do this?

      Oh, yes. Because I love Petra. Because she wants my child so badly. Because Anton had some cock-and-bull story about how all men crave marriage and family even if they don't care about sex.

      Now she noticed him, and noticed the balloons, and laughed.

      He laughed back and went to her, handed her the balloons.

      "Husbands don't usually give their wives balloons," she said.

      "I thought having a baby implanted was a special occasion."

      "I suppose so," she said, "when it's professionally done. Most babies are implanted at home by amateurs, and the wives don't get balloons."

      "I'll remember that and try always to have a few on hand."

      He walked beside her as an attendant pushed her wheelchair down the hallway toward the entrance.

      "So where is my ticket to?" she asked.

      "I got you two," said Bean. "Different airlines, different destinations. Plus this train ticket. If either of the flights gives you a bad feeling, even if you can't decide why you have misgivings, don't get on it. Just go to the other airline. Or leave the airport and take the train. The train ticket is an EU pass so you can go anywhere."

      "You spoil me," said Petra.

      "What do you think?" asked Bean. "Did the baby hook itself onto the uterine wall?"

      "I'm not equipped with an internal camera," said Petra, "and I lack the pertinent nerves to be able to feel microscopically small fetuses implant and start to grow a placenta."

      "That's a very poor design," said Bean. "When I'm dead, I'll have a few words with God about that."

      Petra winced. "Please don't joke about death."

      "Please don't ask me to be somber about it."

      "I'm pregnant. Or might be. I'm supposed to get my way about everything."

      The attendant pushing Petra's wheelchair started to take her toward the front cab in a line of three. Bean stopped him.

      "The driver's smoking," said Bean.

      "He'll put it out," said the attendant.

      "My wife will not get into a car with a driver whose clothing is giving off cigarette smoke residue."

      Petra looked at him oddly. He raised an eyebrow, hoping she'd realize that this was not about tobacco.

      "He's the first taxi in line," said the attendant, as if it were an incontrovertible law of physics that the first cab in line had to be the one to get the next passengers.

      Bean looked at the other two cabs. The second driver looked at him impassively. The third driver smiled. He looked Indonesian or Malay, and Bean knew that in their culture, a smile was pure reflex when facing someone bigger or richer than you.

      Yet for some reason he did not feel the mistrust about the Indonesian driver that he felt about the two Dutch drivers ahead of him.

      So he pushed her wheelchair toward the third cab. Bean asked, and the driver said yes, he was from Jakarta. The attendant, truly irritated at this breach of protocol, insisted on helping Petra into the cab. Bean had her bag and put it in the back seat beside her-he never put anything in the trunks of cabs, in case he had to run for it.

      Then he had to stand there as she drove off. No time for elaborate good-byes. He had just put everything that mattered in his life into a cab driven by a smiling stranger, and he had to let it drive away.

      Then he went to the first cab in line. The driver was showing his outrage at the way Bean had violated the line. The Netherlands was back to being a civilized place, now that it was self-governing again, and lines were respected. Apparently the Dutch now prided themselves on being better at queues than the English, which was absurd, because standing cheerfully in line was the English national sport.

      Bean handed the driver a twenty-five-dollar coin, which he looked at with disdain. "It's stronger than the Euro right now," said Bean. "And I'm paying you a fare, so you didn't lose anything because I put my wife in another cab."

      "What is your destination?" said the driver curtly, his English laced with a prim BBC accent. The Dutch really needed to have better programming in their own language so their citizens didn't have to watch English vids and listen to English radio all the time.

      Bean did not answer him until he was inside the cab, the door closed.

      "Drive me to Amsterdam," said Bean.

      "What?"

      "You heard me," said Bean.

      "That's eight hundred dollars," said the driver.

      Bean peeled a thousand-dollar bill off his roll and gave it to him. "Does the video unit in this car actually work?" he asked.

      The driver made a show of scanning the bill to see if it was counterfeit. Bean wish he had used a Hegemony note. You don't like dollars? Well see how you like this! But it was unlikely that anybody would take Hegemony money for any purpose these days. What with Achilles's and Peter's faces on every vid in the city and all the talk about how Peter had embezzled Hegemony funds.

      Their faces were on the video in the cab, too, when the driver finally got it working. Poor Peter, thought Bean. Now he knows how the popes and anti-popes felt when there were two with a claim to St. Peter's throne. What a lovely taste of history for him. What a mess for the world.

      And to Bean's surprise, he found that he didn't actually care that much whether the world was in a mess-not when the messiness wasn't going to affect his own little family.

      I'm actually a civilian now, he realized. All I care about is how these world events will affect my family.

      Then he remembered: I used to care about world events only insofar as they affected me. I used to laugh at Sister Carlotta because she was so concerned.

      But he did care. He kept track. He paid attention. He told himself it was so he'd know where he'd be safe. Now, though, with far more reason to worry about safety, he found the whole business of Peter and Achilles fundamentally boring. Peter was a fool to think he could control Achilles, a fool to trust a Chinese source on such a matter. How well Achilles must understand Peter, to know that he would rescue Achilles instead of killing him. But why shouldn't Achilles understand Peter? All he had to do was think of what he would do, if he were in Peter's position, but dumber.

      Still, even though he was bored, the story from the newspeople began to make sense, when combined with the things Bean knew. The embezzling story was ludicrous, of course, obviously disinformation from Achilles, though all the predictable nations were in an uproar about it, demanding inquiries: China, Russia, France. What seemed to be true was that Peter and his parents slipped out of the Hegemon's compound in Ribeirao Preto just before dawn this morning, drove to Araraquara, then flew to Montevideo, where they got official permission to fly to the United States as guests of the U.S. government.

      It was possible, of course, that their sudden flight was precipitated by something Achilles did or some information they learned about Achilles's immediate plans. But Bean was reasonably sure that these events were triggered by the emails he and Petra had sent early this morning when they got Han Tzu's message.

      Apparently the Wiggins had been up either very late or very early, because they must have got the letters almost as soon as they were sent. Got them, deciphered the message, realized the implication of Han Tzu's tip, and then, incredibly enough, persuaded Peter to pay attention and get out without a moment's delay.

      Bean had assumed it would take days before Peter would realize the significance of what he had been told. Part of the problem would be his relationship with his parents. Bean and Petra knew how smart the Wiggins were, but most people in the Hegemony didn't have a clue, least of all Peter Bean tried to imagine the scene when they explained to him that he had been fooled by Achilles. Peter, believing his parents when they told him he had made a mistake? Unthinkable.

      And yet he must have believed them right away.

      Or they drugged him.

      Bean laughed a little at the thought, and then looked up from the vid because the cab was turning sharply.

      They were pulling off the main road into a side street. They shouldn't be.

      By reflex Bean had the door open and was flinging himself out the door by the time the cab driver could get his gun up from the seat and aim it at him. The bullet zipped over his head as Bean hit the ground and rolled. The cab came to a stop and the driver leapt out to finish the job. Abandoning his bag. Bean scrambled to get around the corner. But he'd never get far enough down the street-which had no pedestrians on it, here in the warehouse district-to get out of the range of a bullet once the cabbie followed him onto the main street.

      Another shot came just as he made it past the edge of the building. He thought of pressing himself against the side of the building, in the hopes that the gunman was really stupid and would barrel around the corner without looking.

      But that wouldn't work, because the cab that had been second in line was pulling to the curb right in front of him, and the driver was raising his own gun to point it at Bean.

      He dived for the ground and two bullets hit the wall where he had been standing. By sheer chance, his leap took him directly in front of the first driver, who was indeed stupid enough to be running around the corner at top speed. He fell over Bean and when he hit the ground, his gun flew out of his hand.

      Bean might have gone for the gun, but the second driver was already partly out of his door and would be able to shoot Bean before he could get to it. So Bean scrambled back to the first cab, which was idling in the side street. Could he get the cab between him and either of the gunmen before they could shoot at him again?

      He knew he couldn't. But there was nothing to do but try, and hope that, like bad guys in the vids, these two would be terrible shots and miss him every time. And when he got in the cab to drive it away, it would be very nice if the upholstery of the driver's seat were made of that miracle fabric that stops bullets fired through the back window.

      Pop. Pop-pop. And then... the ratatat of an automatic weapon.

      The two cab drivers didn't have automatic weapons.

      Bean was around the front of the cab now, keeping low. To his surprise, neither driver was standing at the corner, pointing a gun at him. Perhaps they had been, a moment ago, but now they were lying there on the ground, filled with bullets and seeping copious amounts of blood all over the pavement.

      And around the corner charged two Indonesian-looking men, one with a pistol and the other with a small plastic automatic weapon. Bean recognized the Israeli design, because that was the weapon his own little army had used on missions where they had to be able to conceal their weapons as long as possible.

      "Come with us!" shouted one of the Indonesians.

      Bean thought this was probably a good idea. Since the assassination attempt had included one backup, it might include more, and the sooner he got out of there the better.

      Of course, he didn't know anything about these Indonesians, or why they would have been there at this moment to save his life, but the fact that they had guns and weren't firing them at him implied that for the moment, at least, they were his dearest friends.

      He grabbed his suitcase and ran. The front right door of a nondescript German car was open, waiting for him. The moment he dived in, he said, "My wife-she's in another cab."

      "She safe," said the man in the back seat, the one with the automatic weapon. "Her driver one of us. Very good choice of cab for her. Very bad choice for you."

      "Who are you?"

      "Indonesian immigrant," said the driver with a grin.

      "Muslim," said Bean. "Alai sent you?"

      "No, not a lie. True," said the man.

      Bean didn't bother correcting him. If the name Alai meant nothing to him, what was the point in pursuing the matter? "Where's Petra? My wife?"

      "Going to airport. She not using ticket you giving her." The man in the back seat handed him an airline ticket. "She going here."

      Bean looked at his ticket. Damascus.

      Apparently Ambul's mission had gone well. Damascus was, for all intents and purposes, the capital of the Muslim world. Even though Alai had dropped out of sight, it was unlikely that he was anywhere else.

      "Are we going there as guests?" asked Bean.

      "Tourists," said the man in the back.

      "Good," said Bean. "Because we left something in the hospital here that we might have to come back for." Though it was obvious that Achilles's people-or whoever it was-knew everything about what they were doing at Women's Hospital. In fact... there was almost no chance that anything of theirs remained in Women's Hospital.

      He looked back at the man in the back seat. He was shaking his head. "Sorry, they telling me when we stop here and shoot guys for you, security guard in hospital stealing what you left there."

      Of course. You don't fight your way past a security guard. You just hire him.

      And now it was all clear to him. If Petra had gotten in the first cab, it wouldn't have been an assassination, it would have been a kidnapping. This wasn't about killing Bean-that was just a bonus. It was about getting Bean's babies.

      Bean knew they hadn't been followed here. They had been betrayed since arriving. Volescu. And if Volescu was in on it, then the embryos that were stolen probably had Anton's Key after all. There was no particular reason for anyone to want his babies if there wasn't at least a chance that they would be prodigies of the kind Bean was.

      Volescu's screening test was probably a fraud. Volescu probably had no idea which of the embryos had Anton's Key and which didn't. They'd implant them in surrogates and then see what happened when they were born.

      Bean had been taken in by Volescu as surely as Peter had been by Achilles. But it wasn't as if they had trusted Volescu. They had simply trusted him not to be in league with Achilles.

      Though it didn't have to be him. Just because he had kidnapped Ender's jeesh didn't mean that he was the only would-be kidnapper in the world. Bean's children, if they had his gifts, would be coveted by any ambitious nation or would-be military leader. Raise them up knowing nothing about their real parents, train them here on Earth as intensely as Bean and the other kids had been trained in Battle School, and by the age of nine or ten you can put them in command of strategy and tactics.

      It might even be an entrepreneurial scheme. Maybe Volescu did this alone, hiring gunmen, bribing the security guard, so that he could sell the babies later to the highest bidder.

      "Bad news, sorry," said the man in the back seat. "But you still got one baby, yes? In wife, yes?"

      "Still the one," said Bean. If they had the ordinary amount of good luck.

      Which didn't seem to be the trend at the moment.

      Still, going to Damascus. If Alai was really taking them into his protection, Petra would be safe there. Petra and perhaps one child-who might have Anton's Key after all, might be doomed to die without ever seeing the age of twenty. At least those two would be safe.

      But the others were out there, children of Bean's and Petra's who would be raised by strangers, as tools, as slaves.

      There had been nine embryos. One had been implanted, and three were discarded. That would leave five in the possession of Volescu or Achilles or whoever it was who took them.

      Unless Volescu had actually found a way to switch the three that were supposedly discarded, switching containers somehow. There might be eight embryos unaccounted for but probably not, probably only the five they knew about. Bean and Petra had both been watching Volescu too carefully for him to get away with the first three, hadn't they?

      By force of will, Bean turned his thoughts away from worries he could do nothing about at this moment, and took stock of his situation.

      "Thank you," said Bean to the men in the car. "I was careless. Without you, I'd be dead."

      "Not careless," said the man in the back. "Young man in love. Wife has baby in her Time of hope."

      Followed immediately, Bean realized, by a time of near despair He should never have agreed to father children, no matter how much Petra wanted to, no matter how much he loved Petra, no matter how much he too yearned for offspring, for a family. He should have stood firm, because then this would not have been possible. There would have been nothing for his enemies to steal from him. He and Petra would still have been in hiding, undetected, because they would never have had to go to a snake like Volescu.

      "Babies good," said the man in the back. "Make you scared, make you crazy. Somebody take away babies, somebody hurt babies, make you crazy. But good anyway. Babies good."

      Yeah. Well. Maybe Bean would live long enough to know about that, and maybe he wouldn't.

      Because now he knew his life's work, for whatever time he had left before he died of giantism.

      He had to get his babies back. Whether they should ever have existed or not, they existed now, each with its own separate genetic identity, each very much alive. Until they were taken, they had been nothing to him but cells in a solution-all that mattered was the one that would be implanted in Petra, the one that would grow and become part of their family. But now they all mattered. Now they were all alive to him, because someone else had them, meant to use them.

      He even regretted the ones that had been disposed of. Even if the test had been real, even if they had had Anton's Key, what right did he have to snuff out their genetic identity, just because he oh-so altruistically wanted to spare them the sorrow of a life as short as his?

      Suddenly he realized what he was thinking. What it meant.

      Sister Carlotta, you always wanted me to turn Christian-and not just Christian, Catholic. Well, here I am, thinking that as soon as sperm and egg combine, they're a human life, and it's wrong to harm them.

      Well, I'm not Catholic, and it wasn't wrong to want children to grow up to have a full life instead of this fifth-of-a-life that I'm headed for.

      But how was I different, flushing three of those embryos, from Volescu? He flushed twenty-two of them, I flushed three. He waited till they were nearly two years further along in development-gestation plus a year-but in the end, is it really all that different?

      Would Sister Carlotta condemn him for that? Had he committed a mortal sin? Was he only getting what he deserved now, losing five because he willingly threw away three?

      No, he could not imagine her saying that to him. Or even thinking it to herself. She would rejoice that he had decided to have a child at all. She would be glad if Petra really was pregnant.

      But she would also agree with him that the five that were now in someone else's hands, the five that might be implanted in someone else and turned into babies, he couldn't just let them go. He had to find them and save them and bring them home.

CHAPTER TWELVE

PUTTING OUT FIRES

From: Han Tzu

      To:   Snow Tiger

      Re:   stones

I am pleased and honored to have the chance once again to offer my poor counsel to your bright magnificence. My previous advice to ignore the piles of stones in the road was obviously foolish, and you saw that a much wiser course was to declare stone-carrying to be illegal.

Now I once again have the glorious privilege of giving bad advice to him who does not need counsel.

Here is the problem as I see it:

      1.    Having declared a law against stone-carrying, you cannot back down and repeal the law without showing weakness.

      2.    The law against stone-carrying puts you in the position of arresting and punishing women and small children, which is filmed and smuggled out of India to the great embarrassment of the Universal Peoples State.

      3.    The coastline of India being so extensive and our navy so small, we cannot stop the smuggling of these vids.

      4.    The stones block the roads, making transportation of troops and supplies unpredictable and dangerous, disrupting schedules.

      5.    The stone piles are being called "The Great Wall of India" and other names which make them a symbol of revolutionary defiance of the Universal People's State.

You tested me by suggesting that there were only two possibilities, which in your wisdom you knew would lead to disastrous consequences. Repealing the law or ceasing to enforce it would encourage further lawlessness. Stricter enforcement will only make martyrs, inflame the opposition, shame us among the ignorant barbarian nations, and encourage further lawlessness.

Through unbelievable luck, I have not failed your clever test. I have found the third alternative that you already saw:

I see now that your plan is to fill trucks with fine gravel and huge stones. Your soldiers will go to villages which have built these new, higher barricades. They will back the trucks up to the barricades and dump the gravel and the boulders in front of their pile, but not on top of it.

      1 .   The rebellious, ungrateful Indian people will reflect upon the difference in size between the Great Wall of India and the Gravel and Boulders of China.

      2.    Because you will have blocked all roads into and out of each village, they will not get any trucks or buses into or out of their village until they have moved not only the Great Wall of India but also the Gravel and Boulders of China.

      3.    They will find that the gravel is too small and the boulders are too large to be moved easily. The great exertion that they must use to clear the roads will be a sufficient teacher without any further punishment of any person.

      4.    Any vids smuggled out of India will show that we have only done to their roads what they voluntarily did themselves, only more. And the only punishment foreigners will see is Indians picking up rocks and moving them, which is the very thing they chose to do themselves in the first place.

      5.    Because there are not enough trucks in India to pile gravel and boulders in more than a small fraction of the villages which have built a Great Wall of India, the villages which receive this treatment should be chosen with care to make sure that the maximum number of roads are blocked, disrupting trade and food supplies throughout India.

      6.    You will also make sure sufficient roads are kept open for our supplies, but checkpoints will be set up far from villages and in places that cannot be filmed from a distance. No civilian trucks will be allowed to pass.

      7.    Certain villages that are starving will be supplied with small amounts of food airlifted by the Chinese military, who will come as saviors bringing food to those who innocently suffer because of the actions of the rebellious and disobedient blockers of roads. We will provide film of these humanitarian operations by our military to all foreign news media.

I applaud your wisdom in thinking of this plan, and thank you for allowing one so foolish as myself to have this chance to examine your way of thinking and see how you will turn embarrassment to a great lesson for the ungrateful Indian people. Unless, like last time, you have a plan that is even more subtle and wise, which I have been unable to anticipate.

From this child who prostrates himself at your feet to learn wisdom,

Han Tzu

      Peter did not want to get out of bed. This had never happened to him before in his life.

      No, not strictly true. He had often wanted not to get out of bed, but he had always gone ahead and gotten out of bed anyway. What was different today was that he was still in bed at nine-thirty in the morning, even though he had a press conference scheduled for less than half an hour from now in a conference room in the 0. Henry Hotel in his home town of Greensboro, North Carolina.

      He could not plead jet lag. There was only an hour's time difference between Ribeirao Preto and Greensboro. It would be a great embarrassment if he did not get up. So he would get up. Very soon now.

      Not that it would make any difference. He might, for the moment, still have the title of Hegemon, but there were people in many countries with tides like "king" and "duke" and "marquis," who nevertheless cooked or took pictures or fixed automobiles for a living. Perhaps he could go back to college under another name and train himself for a career like his father's, a quiet one working for a company somewhere.

      Or he could go into the bathroom and fill the tub with water and lie down in it and breathe the water in. A few moments of panic and flailing around, and then the whole problem would go away. In fact, if he hit himself very hard in various places on his body, it might look as though he struggled with an assailant and was murdered. He might even be considered a martyr At least people might think that he was important enough to have an enemy who thought he was worth killing.

      Any minute now, thought Peter, I will get up and shower so I don't look so bedraggled to the media.

      I ought to prepare a statement, he thought. Something to the effect of, "Why I am not as pathetic and stupid as my recent actions prove me to be." Or perhaps the direct approach: "Why I am even more pathetic and stupid than my recent actions might indicate."

      Given his recent track record, he would probably be saved from the bathtub, given CPR, and then someone would notice the bruises on his body and the lack of an assailant and the story would get out about his pathetic effort to make his suicide attempt look like a brutal murder, thus making his life even more worthless than it already was.

      Another knock on the door Couldn't the maid read the do-not-disturb sign? It was written in four languages. Could she possibly be illiterate in all four of them? No doubt she was also illiterate in a fifth.

      Twenty-five minutes until the press conference. Did I doze off? That would be nice. Just... doze... off. Sorry, I overslept. I've been so very busy. It's exhausting work to turn over-to a megalomaniac killer-everything I built up through my entire life.

      Knock knock knock. It's a good thing I didn't kill myself all this knocking would have ruined my concentration and entirely spoiled my death scene. I should die like Seneca, with fine last speeches. Or Socrates, though that would be harder, since I don't have hemlock but I do have a bathtub. No razor blades, though. I don't grow enough of a beard to need any. Just another sign that I'm only a stupid kid who should never have been permitted to take a role in the grownup world.

      The door to his room opened and jammed against the locking bar.

      How outrageous! Who dare to use a passkey on his room?

      And not just a passkey! Someone had the tool that opened the locking bar and now his door was wide open.

      Assassins! Well, let them kill me here in the bed, facing them, not cowering in a corner begging them not to shoot.

      "Poor baby," said Mother

      "He's depressed," said Father "Don't make fun of him."

      "I can't help but think of what Ender went through, fighting the Formics almost every day for weeks, completely exhausted, and yet he always got up and fought again."

      Peter wanted to scream at her How dare she compare what he had just gone through with Ender's legendary "suffering." Ender never lost a battle, did she think of that? And he had just lost the war! He was entitled to sleep

      "Ready? One, two, three."

      Peter felt the whole mattress slide down the bed until he was awkwardly dumped onto the floor, banging his head against the frame of the bedsprings.

      "Ow!" he cried.

      Wouldn't that make a noble last word to be recorded by posterity?

      How did the great Peter Wiggin, Hegemon of Earth (and, of course, brother of Ender Wiggin, sainted savior), meet his end?

      He sustained a terrible head injury when his parents dragged him out of a hotel bed the morning after his ignominious escape from his own compound where not one person had threatened him in any way and he had no evidence of any impending threat against his person.

      And what were his last words?

      A one-word sentence, fit to be engraved on his monument. Ow.

      "I don't think we can get him into the shower without actually touching his sacred person," said Mother

      "I think you're right," said Father

      "And if we touch him," said Mother, "there's a real possibility that we will be struck dead on the spot."

      Other people had mothers who were compassionate, tender, comforting, understanding. His mother was a sarcastic hag who clearly hated him and always had.

      "Ice bucket," said Father.

      "No ice."

      "But it holds water."

      This was too stupid. The old throw-water-on-the-sleeping-teenager trick.

      "Just go away, I'm getting up in a couple of minutes."

      "No," said Mother. "You're getting up now. Your father is filling the ice bucket. You can hear the water running."

      "OK, OK, leave the room so I can take my clothes off and get in the shower. Or is this just a subterfuge so you can see me naked again? You've never let me forget how you used to change my diapers, so apparently that was a very important stage in your life."

      He was answered by having water dashed in his face. Not a whole bucketful, but enough to soak his head and shoulders.

      "Sorry I didn't have time to fill it," said Father. "But when you started making crude sexual innuendos to my wife, I had to use whatever amount of water was at hand to shut you up before you said enough that I would have to beat your bratty little face in."

      Peter got up from the mattress on the floor and pulled off the shorts he slept in. "Is this what you came in to see?"

      "Absolutely," said Father. "You were wrong, Theresa: he does have balls."

      "Not enough of them, apparently."

      Peter stalked between them and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

      Half an hour later, after keeping the press waiting only ten minutes past the appointed time, Peter walked alone onto the platform at one end of a packed conference room. All the reporters were holding up their little steadycams, the lenses peering out between the fingers of their clenched fists. It was the best turnout he had ever had at a press conference-though to be fair he had never actually held one in the United States. Maybe here they would all have been like this.

      "I'm as surprised as you are to find myself here today," said Peter with a smile. "But I must say I'm grateful to the source that provided me with information that allowed me to make my exit, along with my family, from a place that had once been a safe haven, but which had become the most dangerous place in the world to me.

      "I am also grateful to the government of the United States, which not only invited me to bring the office of Hegemon here, on a temporary basis, of course, but also provided me with a generous contingent of the Secret Service to secure the area. I don't believe they're necessary, at least not in such numbers, but then, until recently I didn't think I needed any protection inside the Hegemony compound in Ribeirao Preto."

      His smile invited a laugh, and he got one. More of a release of tension than real amusement, but it would do. Father had stressed that-make them laugh now and then, so everybody feels relaxed. That will make them think you're relaxed and confident, too.

      "My information suggests that the many loyal employees of the Office of Hegemon are in no danger whatsoever, and when a new permanent headquarters is established, I invite all those who want to, to resume their jobs. The disloyal employees, of course, already have other employment."

      Another laugh-but a couple of audible groans, too. The press smelled blood, and it didn't help that Peter looked-and was-so very young. Humor, yes, but don't look like a wise-cracking kid. Especially don't look like a wise-cracking kid whose parents had to drag him out of bed this morning.

      "I will not give you any information that would compromise my recent benefactor. What I can tell you is this: My inconveniently sudden journey-this disruption in the Office of Hegemon-is entirely my fault."