"OK, what if I 'handle' you instead?" suggested John Paul, leering just a little.

      "If you weren't carrying my bag for me," said Theresa, "I'd..."

      "Tickle me?"

      "You aren't in on this any more than I am," said Theresa. "But you act as if you know everything." Gravity had quickly faded, and now she was holding onto the side rail as she hooked her feet under the floor rail.

      "I've guessed some things," said John Paul. "For the rest, all I can do is trust. He really is a very smart boy."

      "Not as smart as he thinks," said Theresa.

      "But a lot smarter than you think," said John Paul.

      "I suppose your evaluation of his intelligence is just right."

      "Such a Goldilocks line. Makes me feel so ... ursine."

      "Why can't you just say 'bearlike'?"

      "Because I know the word 'ursine,' and so do you, and it's fun to say."

      The elevator doors opened.

      "Carry your bag for you, Ma'am?" said John Paul.

      "If you want," she said, "but I'm not going to tip you."

      "Oh, you really are upset," he murmured.

      She pulled herself past him as he started tossing bags to the orderlies.

      Peter was waiting at the shuttle entrance. "Cut it rather fine, didn't we?" he said.

      "Is it eighteen hundred?" asked Theresa.

      "A minute before," said Peter.

      "Then we're early," said Theresa. She sailed past him, too, and on into the airlock.

      Behind her, she could hear Peter saying, "What's got into her?" and John Paul answering, "Later"

      It took a moment to reorient herselt once she was inside the shuttle. She couldn't shake the sensation that the floor was in the wrong place- down was left and in was out, or some such thing. But she pulled herself by the handholds on the seat backs until she had found a seat. An aisle seat, to invite other passengers to sit somewhere else. But there were no other passengers. Not even John Paul and Peter After waiting a good five minutes, she became too impatient to sit there any longer.

      She found them standing in midair near the airlock, laughing about something.

      "Are you laughing at me?" she asked, daring them to say yes.

      "No," said Peter at once.

      "Only a little," said John Paul. "We can talk now. The pilot has cut all the links to the station, and... Peter's wearing a damper, too."

      "How nice," said Theresa. "Too bad they didn't have one for me or your father to use."

      "They didn't," said Peter "I've got Graff's. It's not like they keep them in stock."

      "Why did you tell everybody you met here that we were leaving on this shuttle? Are you trying to get us killed?"

      "Ah, what tangled webs we weave, when we practice to deceive," said Peter.

      "So you're playing spider," said Theresa. "What are we, threads? Or flies?"

      "Passengers," said John Paul.

      And Peter laughed.

      "Let me in on the joke," said Theresa, "or I'll space you, I swear I will."

      "As soon as Graff knew he had an informer here at the station, he brought his own security team here. [?]Unbeknownst to anyone but him, no messages are actually going into or out of the station. But it looks to anyone on the station as if they are.

      "So you're hoping to catch someone sending a message about what shuttle we're on," said Theresa.

      "Actually, we expect that no one will send a message at all."

      "Then what is this for?" said Theresa.

      "What matters is, who doesn't send the message." And Peter grinned at her.

      "I won't ask anything more," said Theresa, "since you're so smug about how clever you are. I suppose whatever your clever plan is, my dear clever boy thought it up."

      "And people say Demosthenes has a sarcastic streak," said Peter

      A moment ago she didn't get it. And now she did. Something clicked, apparently. The right mental gear had shifted, the tight synapse had sizzled with electricity for a moment. "You wanted everybody to think they had accidentally discovered we were leaving. And gave them all a chance to send a message," said Theresa. "Except one person. So if he's the one..."

      John Paul finished her sentence. "Then the message won't get sent."

      "Unless he's really clever," said Theresa.

      "Smarter than us?" said Peter.

      He and John Paul looked at each other Then both of them shook their heads, said, "Naw," and then burst out laughing.

      "I'm glad you too are bonding so well," she said.

      "Oh, Mom, don't be a butt about this," said Peter "I couldn't tell you because if he knew it was a trap it wouldn't work, and he's the one person who might be listening to everything. And for your information I only just got the damper"

      "I understand all that," said Theresa. "It's the fact that your father guessed it and I didn't."

      "Mom," said Peter, "nobody thinks you're a lackwit, if that's what you're worried about."

      "Lackwit? In what musty drawer of some dead English professor's dust-covered desk did you find that word? I assure you that never in my worst nightmares did I ever suppose that I was a lackwit."

      "Good," said Peter "Because if you did, you'd be wrong."

      "Shouldn't we be strapping in for takeoff?" asked Theresa.

      "No," said Peter. "We're not going anywhere."

      "Why not?"

      "The station computers are busily running a simulation program saying that the shuttle is in its launch routine. Just to make it look right, we'll be cut loose and drift away from the station. As soon as the only people in the dock are Graff's team from outside, we'll come back and get out of this can."

      "This seems like a pretty elaborate shade to catch one informer"

      "You raised me with such a keen sense of style, Mom," said Peter "I can't overcome my childhood at your knee."

      Lankowski knocked at the door at nearly midnight. Petra had already been asleep for an hour. Bean logged off, disconnected his desk, and opened the door

      "Is there something wrong?" he asked Lankowski.

      "Our mutual friend wishes to see the two of you."

      "Petra's already asleep," said Bean. But he could see from the coldness of Lankowski's demeanor that something was very wrong. "Is Alai all right?"

      "He's very well, thank you," said Lankowski. "Please wake your wife and bring her along as quickly as possible."

      Fifteen minutes later, adrenaline making sure that neither he nor Petra was the least bit groggy, they stood before Alai, not in the garden, but in an office, and Alai was sitting behind a desk.

      He had a single sheet of paper on the desk and slid it across to Bean.

      Bean picked it up and read it.

      "You think I sent this," said Bean.

      "Or Petra did," said Alai. "I tried to tell myself that perhaps you hadn't impressed upon her the importance of keeping this information from the Hegemon. But then I realized that I was thinking like a very old-fashioned Muslim. She is responsible for her own actions. And she understood as well as you did that maintaining secrecy on this matter was vital."

      Bean sighed.

      "I didn't send it," said Bean. "Petra didn't send it. We not only understood your desire to keep this secret, we agreed with it. There is zero chance we would have sent information about what you're doing to anyone, period."

      "And yet here is this message, sent from our own netbase. From this building!"

      "Alai," said Bean, "we're three of the smartest people on Earth. We've been through a war together, and the two of you survived Achilles's kidnapping. And yet when something like this happens, you absolutely know that we're the ones who betrayed your trust."

      "Who else from outside our circle knew this?"

      "Well, let's see. All the men at that meeting have staffs. Their staffs are not made up of idiots. Even if no one explicitly told them, they'll see memos, they'll hear comments. Some of these men might even think it's not a breach of security to tell a deeply trusted aide. And a few of them might actually be only figureheads, so they have to tell the people who'll be doing the real work or nothing will get done."

      "I know all these men," said Alai.

      "Not as well as you know us," said Petra. "Just because they're good Muslims and loyal to you doesn't mean they're all equally careful."

      "Peter has been building up a network of informants and correspondents since he was ... well, since he was a kid. Long before any of them knew he was just a kid. It would be shocking if he didn't have an informant in your palace."

      Alai sat staring at the paper on the desk. "This is a very clumsy sort of disguise for the message," said Alai. "I suppose you would have done a better job of it."

      "I would have encrypted it," said Bean, "and Petra probably would have put it inside a graphic."

      "I think the very clumsiness of the message should tell you something," said Petra. "The person who wrote this is someone who thinks he only needs to hide this information from somebody outside the inner circle. He would have to know that if you saw it, you'd recognize instantly that 'Shaw' refers to the old rulers of Iran, and 'Pack' refers to Pakistan, while 'Kemal' is a transparent reference to the founder of post-Ottoman Turkey. How could you not get it?"

      Alai nodded. "So he's only coding it like this to keep outsiders from understanding it, in case it gets intercepted by an enemy."

      "He doesn't think anybody here would search his outgoing messages," said Petra. "Whereas Bean and I know for a fact that we've been bugged since we got here."

      "Not terribly successfully," said Alai with a tight little smile.

      "Well, you need better snoopware, to start with," said Bean.

      "And if we had sent a message to Peter," said Petra, "we would have told him explicitly to warn our Indian friend not to block the Chinese exit from India, only their return."

      "We would have had no other reason to tell Peter about this at all," said Bean. "We don't work for him. We don't really like him all that much."

      "He's not," said Petra firmly, "one of us."

      Alai nodded, sighed, leaned back in his chair. "Please, sit down," he said.

      "Thank you," said Petra.

      Bean walked to the window and looked out over lawns sprinkled by purified water from the Mediterranean. Where the favor of Allah was, the desert blossomed. "I don't think there'll be any harm from this," said Bean. "Aside from our losing a bit of sleep tonight."

      "You must see that it's hard for me to suspect my closest colleagues here."

      "You're the Caliph," said Petra, "but you're also still a very young man, and they see that. They know your plan is brilliant, they love you, they follow you in all the great things you plan for your people. But when you tell them, Keep this an absolute secret, they say yes, they even mean it, but they don't take it really quite seriously because, you see, you re..."

      "Still a boy," said Alai.

      "That will fade with time," said Petra. "You have many years ahead of you. Eventually all these older men will be replaced."

      "By younger men that I trust even less," said Alai ruefully.

      "Telling Peter is not the same thing as telling an enemy," said Bean. "He shouldn't have had this information in advance of the invasion. But you notice that the informer didn't tell him when the invasion would start."

      "Yes he did," said Alai.

      "Then I don't see it," said Bean.

      Petra got up again and looked at the printed-out email. "The message doesn't say anything about the date of the invasion."

      "It was sent," said Alai, "on the day of the invasion."

      Bean and Petra looked at each other. "Today?" said Bean.

      "The Turkic campaign has already begun," said Alai. "As soon as it was dark in Xinjiang. By now we have received confirmation via email messages that three airfields and a significant part of the power grid are in our hands. And so far, at least, there is no sign that the Chinese know anything is happening. It's going better than we could have hoped."

      "It's begun," said Bean. "So it was already too late to change the plans for the third front."

      "No, it wasn't," said Alai. "Our new orders have been sent. The Indonesian and Arab commanders are very proud to be entrusted with the mission that will take the war home to the enemy."

      Bean was appalled. "But the logistics of it... there's no time to plan."

      "Bean," said Alai with amusement. "We already had the plans for a complicated beach landing. That was a logistical nightmare. Putting three hundred separate forces ashore at different points on the Chinese coast, under cover of darkness, three days from today, and supporting them with air raids and air drops-my people can do that in their sleep. That was the best thing about your idea, Bean, my friend. It wasn't a plan at all, it was a situation, and the whole plan is for every individual commander to improvise ways to fulfil the mission objectives. I told them, in my orders, that as long as they keep moving inland, protect their men, and cause maximum annoyance to the Chinese government and military, they can't fail."

      "It's begun," said Petra.

      "Yes," said Bean. "It's begun, and Achilles is not in China."

      Petra looked at Bean and grinned. "Let's see what we can do about keeping him away."

      "More to the point," said Bean. "Since we have not given Peter the specific message he needs to convey to Virlomi in India, may we do so now, with your permission?"

      Alai squinted at him. "Tomorrow. After news of the fighting in Xinjiang has started to come out. I will tell you when."

      In Uphanad's office, Graff sat with his feet on the desk as Uphanad worked at the security console.

      "Well, sir, that's it," said Uphanad. "They're off."

      "And they'll arrive when?" said Graff.

      "I don't know," said Uphanad. "That's all about trajectories and very complicated equations balancing velocity, mass, speed-I wasn't the astrophysics teacher in Battle School, you recall."

      "You were small-force tactics, if I remember," said Graff. "And when you tried that experiment with military music- having the boys learn to sing together-"

      Graff groaned. "Please. Don't remind me. What a deeply stupid idea that was."

      "But you saw that at once and let us mercifully drop the whole thing."

      "Esprit de corps my ass,' said Graff.

      Uphanad hit a group of keys on the console keyboard and the screen showed that he had just logged off. "All done here. I'm glad you found out about the informer here in MinCol. Having the Wiggins leave was the only safe option."

      "Do you remember," said Graff, "the time I accused you of letting Bean see your log-on?"

      "Like yesterday," said Uphanad. "I don't think you were going to believe me until Dimak vouched for me and suggested Bean was crawling around the duct system and peeking through vents."

      "Yes. Dimak was sure that you were so methodical you could not possibly have broken your habits in a moment of carelessness. He was right, wasn't he?"

      "Yes," said Uphanad.

      "I learned my lesson," said Graff. "I trusted you ever since."

      "I hope I have earned that trust."

      "Many times over. I didn't keep all the faculty from Battle School. Of course, there were some who thought the Ministry of Colonization too tame for their talents. But it isn't really a matter of personal loyalty, is it?"

      "What isn't, sir?"

      "Our loyalty should be to something larger than a particular person, don't you think? To a cause, perhaps. I'm loyal to the human race-that's a pretentious one, don't you think?-but to a particular project, spreading the human genome throughout as many star systems as possible. So our very existence can never be threatened again. And for that, I'd sacrifice many personal loyalties. It makes me completely predictable, but also someone unreliable, if you get what I mean."

      "I think I do, sir.

      "So my question, my good friend, is this: What are you loyal to?"

      "To this cause, sir. And to you."

      "This informant who used your log-on. Did he peer at you through the vents again, do you think?"

      "Very unlikely, sir I think it much more probable that he penetrated the system and chose me at random, sir."

      "Yes, of course. But you must understand that because your name was on that email, we had to eliminate you as a possibility first."

      "That is only logical, sir."

      "So as we sent the Wiggins home on the shuttle, we made sure that every member of the permanent staff found out that they were leaving and had every opportunity to send a message. Except you.

      "Except me, sir?"

      "I have been with you continuously since they decided to go. That way, if a message was sent, even if it used your log-on, we would know it wasn't you who sent it. But if a message wasn't sent, well... it was you who didn't send it."

      "This is not likely to be foolproof, sir," said Uphanad. "Someone else might have not sent the message for reasons of his or her own, sir. It might be that their departure was not something for which a message was necessary."

      "True," said Graff. "But we would not convict you of a crime on the basis of a message not sent. Merely assign you to a less critical responsibility. Or give you the opportunity to resign with pension."

      "That is very kind of you, sir"

      "Please don't think of me as kind, I-"

      The door opened. Uphanad turned, obviously surprised. "You can't come in here," he said to the Vietnamese woman who stood in the doorway.

      "Oh, I invited her," said Graff. "I don't think you know Colonel Nguyen of the IF Digital Security Force."

      "No," said Uphanad, rising to offer his hand. "I didn't even know your office existed. Per se.

      She ignored his hand and gave a paper to Graff.

      "Oh," he said, not reading it yet. "So we're in the clear in this room."

      "The message did not use his log-on," she said.

      Graff read the message. It consisted of a single word: "Off." The log-on was that of one of the orderlies from the docks.

      The time in the message header showed it had been sent only a couple of minutes before. "So my friend is in the clear," said Graff.

      "No sir," said Nguyen.

      Uphanad, who had been looking relieved, now seemed baffled. "But I did not send it. How could I?"

      Nguyen did not answer him, but spoke only to Graff. "It was sent from this console."

      She walked over to the console and started to log back on.

      "Let me do that," said Uphanad.

      She turned around and there was a stun gun in her hand. "Stand against the wall," she said. "Hands in plain view.

      Graff got up and opened the door "Come on in," he said. Two more IF soldiers entered. "Please inspect Mr Uphanad for weapons or other lethal items. And under no circumstances is he to be allowed to touch a computer. We wouldn't want him to activate a program wiping out critical materials."

      "I don't know how this thing was done," said Uphanad. "but you're wrong about me."

      Graff pointed to the console. "Nguyen is never wrong," he said. "She's even more methodical than you."

      Uphanad watched. "She's signing on as me." And then, "She used my password. That's illegal!"

      Nguyen called Graff over to look at the screen. "Normally, to log off, you press these two keys, you see? But he also pressed this one. With his little finger, so you wouldn't actually notice it had been pressed. That key sequence activated a resident program that sent the email, using a random selection from among the staff identities. It also launched the ordinary log-off sequence, so to you, it looked like you had just watched somebody log off in a perfectly normal way."

      "So he had this ready to send at any time," said Graff.

      "But when he did send it, it was within five minutes of the actual launch."

      Graff and Nguyen turned around to look at Uphanad. Graff could see in his eyes that he saw he had been caught.

      "So," said Graff, "how did Achilles get to you? You've never met him, I don't think. Surely he didn't form some attachment with you when he was here for a few days as a student."

      "He has my family," said Uphanad, and he burst into tears.

      "No no," said Graff. "Control yourself act like a soldier, we have very little time here in which to correct your failure of judgment. Next time you'll know, if someone comes to you with a threat like this, you come to me.

      "They said they'd know if I told you."

      "Then you would tell me that, too," said Graff, "But, now you have told me. So let's make this thing work to our advantage. What happens when you send this second message'?"

      "I don't know," said Uphanad. "It doesn't matter anyway. She just sent it again. When they get the same message twice, they'll know something is wrong."

      "Oh, they didn't get the message either time," said Graff. "We cut this console off. We cut off the whole station from earthside contact. Just as the shuttle never actually left."

      The door opened yet again, and in came Peter, John Paul, and Theresa.

      Uphanad turned his face to the wall. The soldiers would have turned him back around, but Graff gave them a gesture: Let be. He knew how proud Uphanad was. This shame in front of the people he had tried to betray was unbearable. Give him time to compose himself.

      Only when the Wiggins were sitting did Graff invite Uphanad also to take a seat. He obeyed, hanging his head like a caricature of a whipped dog.

      "Sit up. Uphanad, and face this like a man. These are good people, they understand that you did what you thought you must for your family. You were unwise not to trust me more, but even that is understandable."

      From Theresa's face, Graff could see that she, at least, was not half so understanding as he seemed to assume. But he won her silence with a gesture.

      "I'll tell you what," said Graff. "Let's make this work to our advantage. I actually have a couple of shuttles at my disposal for this operation-compliments of Admiral Chamrajnagar. by the way-so the real quandary is deciding which of them to send when we actually allow your email to go out."

      "Two shuttles?" asked Peter.

      "We have to make a guess about what Achilles planned to do with this information. If he means to attack you upon landing, well, we have a very heavily armed shuttle that should be able to deal with anything he can throw against it from the ground or the air I think what he's planning is probably a missile as you're overflying some region where he can get a portable launch platform."

      "And your heavily armed shuttle can deal with that?" asked Peter

      "Easily. The trouble is, this shuttle is not supposed to exist. The IF charter specifically forbids any weaponization of atmospheric craft. It's designed to go along with colony ships, in case the extermination of the Formics was not complete and we run into resistance. But if such a shuttle enters Earth's atmosphere and proves its capabilities by shooting down a missile, we could never tell anyone about it without compromising the IF. So we could use this shuttle to get you safely to Earth, but could never tell anyone about the attempt on your life."

      "I could live with that," said Peter

      "Except that you don't actually have to get to Earth at this time."

      "No, I don't."

      "So we can send a different shuttle. Again, one whose existence is not known, but this time it is not illegal. Because it hasn't been weaponized at all. In fact, while it's quite expensive compared to, say, a bazooka, it's very, very cheap compared with a real shuttle. This one's a dummy. It is carefully designed to match the velocity and radar signature of a real shuttle, but it lacks a few things-like any place to put a human being, or any capability of a soft landing."

      "So you send this one down," said John Paul, "draw their fire, and then have a propaganda field day."

      "We'll have IF observers watching for the boost and we'll be on that launch platform before it can be dismantled, or at least before the perpetrators can get away. Whether it ends up pointing to Achilles or China, either way we can demonstrate that someone on Earth fired at an IF shuttle."

      "Puts them in a very bad position," said Peter. "Do we announce that I was the target?"

      "We can decide that based on their response, and on who is getting the blame. If it's China, I think we gain more by making it an attack on the International Fleet. If it's Achilles, we gain more by making him out to be an assassin."

      "You seem to have been quite free about discussing these things in front of us," said Theresa. "I suppose now you have to kill us."

      "just me," whispered Uphanad.

      "Well, I do have to fire you," said Graff. "And I do have to send you back to Earth, because it just wouldn't do to have you stay on here. You'd just depress everyone else, slinking around looking guilty and unworthy."

      Graff's tone was light enough to help keep Uphanad from bursting into tears again.

      "I've heard," Graff went on, "that the Indian people need to have loyal men who'll fight for their freedom. That's the loyalty that transcends your loyalty to the Ministry of Colonization, and I understand it. So you must go where your loyalty leads you.

      "This is unbelievable mercy, sir," said Uphanad.

      "It wasn't my idea," said Graff. "My plan was to have you tried in secret by the IF and executed. But Peter told me that, if you were guilty and it turned out you were protecting family members in Chinese custody, it would be wrong to punish you for the crime of imperfect loyalty."

      Uphanad turned to look at Peter "My betrayal might have killed you and your family."

      "But it didn't," said Peter.

      "I like to think," said Graff, "that God sometimes shows mercy to us by letting some accident prevent us from actually carrying out our worst plans."

      "I don't believe that," said Theresa coldly. "I believe if you point a gun at a man's head and the bullet was a dud, you're still a murderer in the eyes of God."

      "Well then," said Graff, "when we're all dead, if we find that we still exist in some form or other, we'll just have to ask God to tell us which of us is right."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PROPHETS

SecureSite.net

From: Locke%erasmus@polnet.gov

PASSWORD:   Suriyowong

Re:   girl on bridge

Reliable source begs: Do not interfere with Chinese egress from India. But when they need to return or supply, Block all possible routes.

      The Chinese thought at first that the incidents in Xinjiang province were the work of the insurgents who had been forming and reforming guerrilla groups for centuries. In the protocol-burdened Chinese army, it was not until late afternoon in Beijing that Han Tzu was finally able to get enough information together to prove this was a major offensive originating outside China.

      For the fiftieth time since taking a place in the high command in Beijing, Han Tzu despaired of getting anything done. It was always more important to show respect for one's superiors' high status than to tell them the truth and make things happen. Even now, holding in his hands evidence of a level of training, discipline, coordination, and supply that made it impossible for these incidents in Xinjiang to be the work of local rebels, Han Tzu had to wait hours for his request for a meeting to be processed through all the oh-so-important aides, flunkies, functionaries, and poobahs whose sole duty was to look as important and busy as possible while making sure that as little as possible actually got done.

      It was fully dark in Beijing when Han Tzu crossed the square separating the Strategy and Planning section from the Administrative section-another bit of mindlessly bad structure, to separate these two sections by a long walk in the open air. They should have been across a low divider from each other, constantly shouting back and forth. Instead, Strategy and Planning were constantly making plans that Administrative couldn't carry out, and Administrative was constantly misunderstanding the purpose of plans and fighting against the very ideas that would make them effective.

      How did we ever conquer India? thought Han Tzu.

      He kicked at the pigeons scurrying around his feet. They fluttered a few meters away, then came back for more, as if they thought his feet might have shed something edible with each step.

      The only reason this government stays in power is that the people of China are pigeons. You can kick them and kick them, and they come back for more. And the worst of them are the bureaucrats. China invented bureaucracy, and with a thousand-year head start on the rest of the world, they'd kept advancing the arts of obfuscation, kingdombuilding, and tempests-in-teapots to a level unknown anywhere else. Byzantine bureaucracy was, by comparison, a forthright system.

      How did Achilles do it? An outsider, a criminal, a madman-and all of this was well known to the Chinese government yet he was able to cut through the layers of fawning backstabbers and get straight to the decision-making level. Most people didn't even know where the decision-making level was, since it was certainly not the famous leaders at the top, who were too old to think of anything new and too frightened of losing their perks or getting caught out in their decades of criminal acts ever to do anything but say, "Do as you think wise," to their underlings.

      It was two levels down that decisions were made, by aides to the top generals. It had taken Han Tzu six months to realize that a meeting with the top man was useless, because he would confer with his aides and follow their recommendations every time. Now he never bothered to meet with anyone else. But to set up such a meeting, of course, required that an elaborate request be made to each general, acknowledging that while the subject of the meeting was so vital it must be held immediately, it was so trivial that each general only needed to send his aide to the meeting in his place.

      Han Tzu was never sure whether all this elaborate charade was merely to show proper respect for tradition and form, or whether the generals actually were fooled by all this and made the decision, each time, whether to attend in person or send their aide.

      Of course, it was also possible that the general never saw the messages, and the aides made the decision for him. Most likely, though, his memo went to each general with a commentary: "Noble and worthy general would be slighted if not in attendance," for instance, or "Tedious waste of heroic leader's time, unworthy aide will be glad to take notes and report if anything important is said."

      Han Tzu had no loyalty to any of these buffoons. Whenever they made decisions on their own, they were hopelessly wrong. The ones that weren't completely bound by tradition were just as controlled by their own egos.

      Yet Han Tzu was completely loyal to China. He had always acted in China's best interest, and always would.

      The trouble was, he often defined "China's best interest" in a way that might easily get him shot.

      Like that message he sent to Bean and Petra, hoping they'd realize the danger to the Hegemon if he really believed Han Tzu had been the source of his information. Sending such a bit of information was definitely treason, since Achilles's adventure had been approved at the highest levels and therefore represented official Chinese policy. And yet it would be a disaster for China's prestige in the world at large if it became known that China had sent an assassin to kill the Hegemon.

      Nobody seemed to understand that sort of thing, mostly because they refused to see China as anything other than the center of the universe, around which all other nations orbited. What did it matter if China was regarded as a nation of tyrants and assassins? If someone doesn't like what China does, then that someone can go home and cry in his beer.

      But no nation was invincible, not even China. Han Tzu understood that, even if the others did not.

      It didn't help that the conquest of India had been so easy. Han Tzu had insisted on devising all sorts of contingency plans when things went wrong with the surprise attack on the Indian, Thai, and Vietnamese armies. But Achilles's campaign of deception had been so successful, and the Thai strategy of defense had been so effective, that the Indians were fully committed, their supplies exhausted, and their morale at rock bottom when the Chinese armies began pouring across the borders, cutting the Indian army to pieces, and swallowing up each piece within days-sometimes within hours.

      All the glory went to Achilles, of course, though it had been Han Tzu's careful planning with his staff of nearly eighty Battle School graduates that put the Chinese armies exactly where they needed to be at exactly the time they needed to be there. No, even though Han Tzu's team had written up the orders, they had actually been issued by Administrative, and therefore it was Administrative that won the medals, while Strategy and Planning got a single group commendation that had about the same effect on morale as if some lieutenant colonel had come in and said, "Nice try, boys, we know you meant well."

      Well, Achilles was welcome to the glory, because in Han Tzu's opinion, invading India had been pointless and self-defeating-not to mention evil. China did not have the resources to take on India's problems. When Indians governed India, the suffering people could only blame their fellow Indians. But now when things went wrong- which they always did in India it would all be blamed on the Chinese.

      The Chinese administrators who were sent in to govern India stayed surprisingly free of corruption and they worked hard but the fact is that no nation is governable except by overwhelming force or complete cooperation. And since there was no way conquering Chinese officials would get complete cooperation, and there was no hope of being able to pay for overwhelming force, the only question was when the resistance would become a problem.

      It became a problem not long after Achilles left for the Hegemony, when the Indians started piling up stones. Han Tzu had to hand it to them, when it came to truly annoying but symbolically powerful civil disobedience, the Indians were truly the daughters and sons of Gandhi. Even then, the bureaucrats hadn't listened to Han Tzu's advice and ended up getting themselves into a steadily worsening cycle of reprisals.

      So ... it doesn't matter what the outside world thinks, right? We can do whatever we want because no one else has the power or the will to challenge us, is that the story?

      What I have in my hands is the answer to that theory.

      "What does it mean that they've done nothing to acknowledge our offensive?" said Alai.

      Bean and Petra sat with him, looking at the holomap that showed every single objective in Xinjiang taken on schedule, as if the Chinese had been handed a script and were doing their part exactly as the Crescent League had asked them to.

      "I think things are going very well," said Petra.

      "Ridiculously well," said Alai.

      "Don't be impatient," said Bean. "Things move slowly in China. And they don't like making public pronouncements about their problems. Maybe they still see this as a group of local insurgents. Maybe they're waiting to announce what's going on until they can tell about their devastating counterattack."

      "That's just it," said Alai. "Our satintel[?] says they're doing nothing. Even the nearest garrison troops are still in place."

      "The garrison commanders don't have the authority to send them into battle," said Bean. "Besides, they probably don't even know anything's wrong. Your forces have the land-based communications grid under control, right?"

      "That was a secondary objective. That's what they're doing now, just to keep busy."

      Petra began to laugh. "I get it," she said.

      "What's so funny?" asked Alai.

      "The public announcement," said Petra. "You can't announce that a Caliph has been named unanimously by all the Muslim nations."

      "We can announce it any time," said Alai, irritated.

      "But you're waiting. Until the Chinese make their announcement that some unknown nation has attacked them. Only when they've either admitted their ignorance or committed to some theory tat's completely false do you come out and tell what's really happening. That the Muslim world is fully united under a Caliph, and that you have taken responsibility for liberating the captive nations from the godless imperialist Chinese."

      "You have to admit the story plays better that way," said Alai.

      "Absolutely," said Petra. "I'm not laughing because you re wrong to do it that way, I'm simply laughing at the irony that you are so successful and the Chinese so completely unprepared that it's actually delaying your announcement! But... have patience, dear friend. Somebody in the Chinese high command knows what's happening, and eventually the rest of them will listen to him and they'll mobilize their forces and make some kind of announcement."

      "They have to," said Bean. "Or the Russians will deliberately misunderstand their troop movements."

      "All right," said Alai. "But unfortunately, all the vids of my announcement were shot during daylight hours. It never crossed our minds that they would take this long to respond."

      "You know what?" said Bean. "No one will mind a bit if the vids are clearly prerecorded. But even better would be for you to go on camera, live, to declare yourself and to announce what your armies are doing in Xinjiang."

      "The danger with doing it live is that I might let something slip, telling them that the Xinjiang invasion is not the main offensive,"

      "Alai, you could announce outright that this was not the main offensive, and half the Chinese would think that was disinformation designed to keep their troops in India pinned down along the Pakistani border. In fact, I advise you to do that. Because then you'll have a reputation as a truthteller. It will make your later lies that much more effective."

      Alai laughed. "You've eased my mind."

      "You're suffering," said Petra, "from the problem that plagues all the top commanders in this age of rapid communications. In the old days, Alexander and Caesar were right there on the field of battle. They could watch, issue orders, deal with things. They were needed. But you're stuck here in Damascus because here is where all the communications come together If you're needed, you'll be needed here. So instead of having a thousand things to keep your mind busy, you have all this adrenaline flowing and nowhere for it to go."

      "I recommend pacing," said Bean.

      "Do you play handball?" asked Petra.

      "I get the picture," said Alai. "Thank you. I'll be patient."

      "And think about my advice," said Bean. "To go on live and tell the truth. Your people will love you better if they see you as being so bold you can simply tell the enemy what you're going to do, and they can't stop you from doing it."

      "Go away now," said Alai. "You're repeating yourself."

      Laughing, Bean got up. So did Petra.

      "I won't have time for you after this, you know," said Alai.

      They paused, turned.

      "Once it's announced, once everybody knows, I'll have to start holding court. Meeting people. Judging disputes. Showing myself to be the true Caliph."

      "Thank you for the time you've spent with us till now," said Petra.

      "I hope we never have to oppose each other on the field of battle," said Bean. "The way we've had to oppose Han Tzu in this war."

      "Just remember," said Alai. "Han Tzu's loyalties are divided. Mine are not."

      "I'll remember that," said Bean.

      "Salaam," said Alai. "Peace be in you. "And in you," said Petra, "peace."

      When the meeting ended, Han Tzu did not know whether his warning had been believed. Well, even if they didn't believe him now, in a few more hours they'd have no choice. The major force in the Xinjiang invasion would undoubtedly start their assault just before dawn tomorrow. Satellite intelligence would confirm what he'd told them today. But at the cost of twelve more hours of inaction.

      The most frustrating moment, however, had come near the end of the meeting, when the senior aide to the senior general had asked, "So if this is the beginning of a major offensive, what do you recommend?"

      "Send all available troops in the north-I would recommend fifty percent of all the garrison troops on the Russian border Prepare them not only to deal with these horse-borne guerrillas but also with a major mechanized army that will probably invade tomorrow."

      "What about the concentration of troops in India?" asked the aide.

      "These are our best soldiers, the most highly trained, and the most mobile."

      "Leave them where they are," said Han Tzu.

      "But if we strip the garrisons along the Russian border, the Russians will attack."

      Another aide spoke up. "The Russians never fight well outside their own borders. Invade them and they'll destroy you, but if they invade you, their soldiers won't fight."

      Han Tzu tried not to show his contempt for such ludicrous judgments. "The Russians will do what they do, and if they attack, we'll do what we need to do in response. However, you don't keep your troops from defending against a present enemy because they might be needed for a hypothetical enemy."

      All well and good. Until the senior aide to the senior general said, "Very well. I will recommend the immediate removal of troops from India as quickly as possible to meet this current threat."

      "That's not what I meant," said Han Tzu.

      "But it is what I mean," said the aide.

      "I believe this is a Muslim offensive," said Han Tzu. "The enemy across the border in Pakistan is the same enemy attacking us in Xinjiang. They are certainly hoping we'll do exactly what you suggest, so their main offensive will have a better chance of success."

      The aide only laughed, and the others laughed with him. "You spent too many years out of China during your childhood, Han Tzu. India is a faraway place. What does it matter what happens there? We can take it again whenever we want. But these invaders in Xinjiang, they are inside China. The Russians are poised[?[ on the Chinese border. No matter what the enemy thinks, that is the real threat."

      "Why?" said Han Tzu, throwing caution to the winds as he directly challenged the senior aide. "Because foreign troops on Chinese soil would mean the present government has lost the mandate of heaven?"

      From around the table came the hiss of air suddenly gasped between clenched teeth. To refer to the old idea of the mandate of heaven was poisonously out of step with government policy.

      Well, as long as he was irritating people, why stop with that? "Everyone knows that Xinjiang and Tibet are not part of Han China," said Han Tzu. "They are no more important to us than India- conquests that have never become fully Chinese. We once owned Vietnam before, long ago, and lost it, and the loss meant nothing to us. But the Chinese army, that is precious. And if you take troops out of India, you run the grave risk of losing millions of our men to these Muslim fanatics. Then we won't have the mandate of heaven to worry about. We'll have foreign troops in Han China before we know it- and no way to defend against them."

      The silence around the table was deadly. They hated him now, because he had spoken to them of defeat-and told them, disrespectfully, that their ideas were wrong.

      "I hope none of you will forget this meeting," said Han Tzu.

      "You can be sure that we will not," said the senior aide.

      "If I am wrong, then I will bear the consequences of my mistake, and rejoice that your ideas were not stupid after all. What is good for China is good for me, even if I am punished for my mistakes. But if I am right, then we'll see what kind of men you are. Because if you're true Chinese, who love your country more than your careers, you'll remember that I was right and you'll bring me back and listen to me as you should have listened to me today. But if you're the disloyal selfish garden-pigs I think you are, you'll make sure that I'm killed, so that no one outside this room will ever know that you heard a true warning and didn't listen to it when there was still time to save China from the most dangerous enemy we have faced since Genghis Khan."

      What a glorious speech. And how refreshing actually to say it with his lips to the people who most needed to hear it, instead of playing the speech over and over in his mind, ever more frustrated because not a word of it had been said aloud.

      Of course he would be arrested tonight, and quite possibly shot before morning. Though the more likely pattern would be to arrest him and charge him with passing information to the enemy, blaming him for the defeat that only he actually tried to prevent. There was something about irony that had a special appeal to Chinese people who got a little power. There was a special pleasure in punishing a virtuous man for the powerful man's own crimes.

      But Han Tzu would not hide. It might be possible, at this moment, for him to leave China and go into exile. But he would not do it.

      Why not?

      He could not leave his country in its hour of need. Even though he might be killed for staying, there would be many other Chinese soldiers his age who would die in the next days and weeks. Why shouldn't he be one of them? And there was always the chance, however small and remote, that there were enough decent men among those at that meeting that Han Tzu would be kept alive until it was clear that he was right. Perhaps then-contrary to all expectation- they would bring him back and ask him how to save themselves from this disaster they had brought upon China.

      Meanwhile, Han Tzu was hungry, and there was a little restaurant he liked, where the manager and his wife treated him like one of the family. They did not care about his lofty rank or his status as one of the heroes of Ender's jeesh. They liked him for his company. They loved the way he devoured their food as if it were the finest cuisine in the world-which, to him, it was. If these were his last hours of freedom, or even of life, why not spend them with people he liked, eating food he enjoyed?

      As night fell in Damascus, Bean and Petra walked freely along the streets, looking into shop windows. Damascus still had the traditional markets, where most fresh food and local handwork were sold. But supermarkets, boutiques, and chain stores had reached Damascus, like almost every other place on earth. Only the wares for sale reflected local taste. There was no shortage of items of European and American design for sale, but what Bean and Petra enjoyed was the strangeness of items that would never find a market in the West, but which apparently were much in demand here.

      They traded guesses about what each item was for.

      They stopped at an outdoor restaurant with good music played softly enough that they could still converse. They had a strange combination of local food and international cuisine that had even the waiter shaking his head, but they were in the mood to please themselves.

      "I'll probably just throw it up tomorrow," said Petra.

      "Probably," said Bean. "But it'll be a better grade of-"

      "Please!" said Petra. "I'm trying to eat."

      "But you brought it up," said Bean.

      "I know it's unfair, but when I discuss it, it doesn't make me sick. It's like tickling. You can't really nauseate yourself."

      "I can," said Bean.

      "I have no doubt of it. Probably one of the attributes of Anton's Key."

      They continued talking about nothing much, until they heard some explosions, at first far away, then nearby.

      "There can't possibly be an attack on Damascus," said Petra under her voice.

      "No, I think it's fireworks," said Bean. "I think it's a celebration."

      One of the cooks ran into the restaurant and shouted out a stream of Arabic, which was of course completely unintelligible to Bean and Petra. All at once the local customers jumped up from the table. Some of them ran out of the restaurant-without paying, and nobody made to stop them. Others ran into the kitchen.

      The few non-Arabiphones in the restaurant were left to wonder what was going on.

      Until a merciful waiter came out and announced in Common Speech, "Food will be delay, I very sorry to tell you. But happy to say why. Caliph will speak in a minute."

      "The Caliph?" asked an Englishman. "isn't he in Baghdad?"

      "I thought Istanbul," said a Frenchwoman.

      "There has been no Caliph in many centuries," said a professoriallooking Japanese.

      "Apparently they have one now," said Petra reasonably. "I wonder if they'll let us into the kitchen to watch with them."

      "Oh, I don't know if I want to," said the Englishman. "If they've got themselves a new Caliph, they're going to be feeling quite chauvinistic for a while. What if they decide to start hanging foreigners to celebrate?"

      The Japanese scholar was outraged at this suggestion. While he and the Englishman politely went for each other's throats, Bean, Petra, the Frenchwoman, and several other westerners went through the swinging door into the kitchen, where the kitchen help barely noticed they were there. Someone had brought a nice-sized flat vid in from one of the offices and set it on a shelf, leaning it against the wall.

      Alai was already on the screen.

      Not that it did them any good to watch. They couldn't understand a word of it. They'd have to wait for the full translation on one of the newsnets later.

      But the map of western China was pretty self-explanatory. No doubt he was telling them that the Muslim people had united to liberate long-captive brothers in Xinjiang. The waiters and cooks punctuated almost every sentence with cheers-Alai seemed to know this would happen, because he left pauses after each declaration.

      Unable to understand his words, Bean and Petra concentrated on other things. Bean tried to determine whether this speech was going out live. The clock on the wall was no indicator-of course they would insert it digitally into a prerecorded vid during the broadcast so that no matter when it was first aired, the clock would show the current time. Finally he got his answer when Alai stood up and walked to the window. The camera followed him, and there spread out below him were the lights of Damascus, twinkling in the darkness. He was doing it live. And whatever he said while pointing to the city, it was apparently very effective, because at once the cheering cooks and waiters were weeping openly, without shame, their eyes still glued to the screen.

      Petra. meanwhile, was trying to guess how Alai must look to the Muslim people watching him. She knew his face so well, so that she had to try to separate the boy she had known from the man he now was. The compassion she had noticed before was more visible than ever. His eyes were full of love. But there was fire in him, too, and dignity. He did not smile-which was proper for the leader of nations which were now at war, and whose sons were dying in combat, and killing, too. Nor did he rant, whipping them up into some kind of dangerous enthusiasm.

      Will these people follow him into battle? Yes, of course, at first, when he has a tale of easy victories to tell them. But later, when times are hard and fortune does not favor them, will they still follow him?

      Perhaps yes. Because what Petra saw in him was not so much a great general-though yes, she could imagine Alexander might have looked like this, or Caesar-as a prophet-king. Saul or David, both young men when first called by prophecy to lead their people into war in God's name. Joan of Arc.

      Of course, Joan of Arc ended up dying at the stake, and Saul fell on his own sword-or no, that was Brutus or Cassius, Saul commanded one of his own soldiers to kill him, didn't he? A bad end for both of them. And David died in disgrace, forbidden by God to build the holy temple because he had murdered Uriah to get Bathsheba into a state of marriageable widowhood.

      Not a good list of precedents, that.

      But they had their glory, didn't they, before they fell.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE WAR ON THE GROUND

To:   Chamrajnagar%Jawaharlal@ifcom.gov

From: AncientFire%Embers@han.gov

Re:   Official statement coming

My esteemed friend and colleague,

It grieves me that you would even suppose that in this time of trouble, when China is assailed by unprovoked assaults from religious fanatics, we would have either the desire or the resources to provoke the International Fleet. We have nothing but the highest esteem for your institution, which so recently saved all humankind from the onslaught of the stardrogons.

Our official statement, which wih be released forthwith, does not include our speculations on who is in fact responsible for the tragic shooting down of the IF shuttle while it overflew Brazilian territory. While we do not admit to having any participation in or foreknowledge of the event, we have performed our own preliminary investigation and we believe you will find that the equipment in question may in fact have originated with the Chinese military.

This causes us excruciating embarrassment, and we beg you not to publicize this information. Instead, we provide you with the attached documentation showing that our one missile launcher which is not accounted for, and which therefore may have been used to commit this crime, was released into the control of a certain Achilles de Flandres, ostensibly for military operations in connection with our preemptive defensive action against the Indian aggressor as it ravaged Burma. We believed this materiel had been returned to us, but we discover upon investigation that it was not.

Achilles de Flandres at one time was under our protection, having rendered us a service in connection with forewarning us of the danger that India posed to peace in Southeast Asia. However, certain crimes be committed prior to this service came to our attention, and we arrested him (see documentation). As he was being conveyed to his place of reeducation, unknown forces raided the convoy and released Achilles de Flandres, killing all of the escorting soldiers.

Since Achilles de Flandres ended up almost immediately in the Hegemony compound in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil, and he has been in a position to do much mischief there since the hasty departure of Peter Wiggin, and since the missile was fired from Brazilian territory and the shuffle was shot down over Brazil, we suggest that the place to look for responsibility for this attack on the IF is in Brazil, specifically the Hegemony compound.

Ultimate responsibility for all of de Flandress actions after his abscondment from our custody must lie with those who took him, namely, Hegemon Peter Wiggin and his military forces, headed by julian Delphiki and, more recently, the Thai national, Suriyawong, who is regarded by the Chinese government as a terrorist.

I hope that this information, provided to you off the record, will prove useful to you in your investigation. If we can be of any other service that is not inconsistent with our desperate struggle for survival against the onslaught of the barbarian hordes from Asia, we will be glad to provide it.

Your humble and unworthy colleague,

Ancient Fire

From: Chamrajnagar%Jawaharlal@ifcom.gov

To:   Graff%pilgrimage@colmin.gov

Re:   Who will take the blame?

Dear Hyrum,

You see from the attached message from the esteemed bead of the Chinese government that they have decided to offer up Achilles as the sacrificial lamb. I think they'd be glad if we got rid of him for them. Our investigators will officially report that the launcher is of Chinese manufacture and has been traced back to Achilles de Flandres without mentioning that it was originally provided to him by the Chinese government. When asked, we will refuse to speculate. That's the best they can hope for from us.

Meanwhile, we now have the legal basis firmly established for an Earthside intervention-and from evidence provided by the nation most likely to complain about such an intervention. We will do nothing to affect the outcome or progress of the war in Asia. We will first seek the cooperation of the Brazilian government but will make it clear that such cooperation is not required, legally or militarily. We will ask them to isolate the Hegemony compound so that no one can get in or out, pending the arrival of our forces.

I ask that you inform the Hegemon and that you make your plans accordingly. Whether Mr. Wiggin should be present at the taking of the compound is a matter on which I have no opinion.

      Virlomi never went into town herself. Those days were over. When she had been free to wander, a pilgrim in a land where people either lived their whole lives in one village or cut themselves loose and spent their whole lives on the road, she had loved coming to villages, each one an adventure, filled with its own tapestry of gossip, tragedy, humor, romance, and irony.

      In the college she had briefly attended, between coming home from space and being brought into Indian military headquarters in Hyderabad, she had quickly realized that intellectuals seemed to think that their life-the life of the mind, the endless self-examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers-was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people.

      Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdrew from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.

      In the villages, life was about life, not about one-[?]upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasingly about them. Everywhere she went in India, she constantly heard herself thinking, I could live here. I could stay among these people and marry one of these gentle peasant men and work beside him all my life.

      And then another part of her answered, No you couldn't. Because like it or not, you are one of those university people after all. You can visit in the real world, but you don't belong there. You need to live in Plato's foolish dream, where ideas are real and reality is shadow. That is the place you were born for, and as you move from village to village, it is only to learn from them, to teach them, to manipulate them, to use them to achieve your own ends.

      But my own ends, she thought, are to give them gifts they need: wise government, or at least self-government.

      And then she laughed at herself, because the two were usually opposites. Even if an Indian ruled over Indians, it was not selfgovernment, for the ruler governed the people, and the people governed the ruler. It was mutual government. That's the best that could be aspired to.

      Now, though, her pilgrim days were over. She had returned to the bridge where the soldiers stationed to protect it and the nearby villagers had made a kind of god of her.

      She came back without fanfare, walking into the village that had taken her most to heart and falling into conversation with women at the well and in the market. She went to the washing stream and lent a hand with the washing of clothes; someone offered to share clothing with her so she could wash her dirty traveling rags, but she laughed and said that one more washing would rub them into dust, but she would like to earn some new clothing by helping a family that had a bit they could spare for her.

      "Mistress," said one shy woman, "did we not feed you at the bridge, for nothing?"

      So she was recognized.

      "But I wish to earn the kindness you showed me there."

      "You have blessed us many times, lady," said another.

      "And now you bless us by coming among us.

      "And washing clothes."

      So she was still a god.

      "I'm not what you think I am," she said. "I am more terrible than your worst fear."

      "To our enemies, we pray, lady," said a woman.

      "Terrible to them, indeed," said Virlomi. "But I will use your sons and husbands to fight them, and some of them will die."

      "Half our sons and husbands were already taken in the war against the Chinese."

      "Killed in battle."

      "Lost and could not find their way home."

      "Carried off into captivity by the Chinese devils."

      Virlomi raised a hand to still them. "I will not waste their lives, if they obey me."

      "You shouldn't go to war, lady," said one old crone. "There's no good in it. Look at you, young, beautiful. Lie down with one of our young men, or one of our old ones if you want, and make babies."

      "Someday," said Virlomi, "I'll choose a husband and make babies with him. But today my husband is India, and he has been swallowed by a tiger. I must make the tiger sick, so he will throw my husband up."

      They giggled, some of them, at this image. But others were very grave.

      "How will you do this?"

      "I will prepare the men so they don't die because of mistakes. I will assemble all the weapons we need, so no man is wasted because he is unarmed. I will bide my time, so we don't bring down the wrath of the tiger upon us, until we're ready to hurt them so badly that they never recover from the blow."

      "You didn't happen to bring a nuclear weapon with you, lady?" asked the crone. Clearly something of an unbeliever.

      "It's an offense against God to use such things," said Virlomi. "The Muslim God was burned out of his house and turned his face against them because they used such weapons against each other"

      "I was joking," said the crone, ashamed.

      "I am not," said Virlomi. "If you don't want me to use your men in the way I have described, tell me, and I'll go away and find another place that wants me. Perhaps your hatred of the Chinese is not so fierce as mine. Perhaps you are content with the way things are in this land."

      But they were not content, and their hatred was hot enough, it seemed.

      There wasn't much time for training, despite her promise, but then, she wasn't going to use these men for firefights. They were to be saboteurs, thieves, demolition experts. They conspired with construction workers to steal explosives; they learned how to use them; they built dry storage pits in the jungles that clung to the steep hills.

      And they went to nearby towns and recruited more men, and then went farther and farther afield, building a network of saboteurs near every key bridge that could be blown up to block the Chinese from the use of the roads they would need to bring troops and supplies back and forth, in and out of India.

      There could be no rehearsals. No dry runs. Nothing was done to arouse suspicion of any kind. She forbade her men to make any gestures of defiance, or do anything to interfere with the smooth running of the Chinese transportation network through their hills and mountains.

      Some of them chafed at this, but Virlomi said, "I gave my word to your wives and mothers that I would not waste your lives. There will be plenty of dying ahead, but only when your deaths will accomplish something, so that those who live can bear witness: We did this thing, it was not done for us."

      Now she never went to town, but lived where she had lived before, in a cave near the bridge that she would blow up herself, when the time came.

      But she could not afford to be cut off from the outside world. So three times a day, one of her people would sign on to the nets and check her dead drop sites, print out the messages there, and bring them to her. She made sure they knew how to wipe the information out of the computer's memory, so no one else could see what the computer had shown, and after she read the messages they brought, she burned them.

      She got Peter Wiggin's message in good time. So she was ready when her people started coming to her, running, out of breath, excited.

      "The war with the Turks is going badly for the Chinese," they said. "We have it on the nets, the Turks have taken so many airfields that they can put more planes in the sky in Xinjiang than the Chinese can. They have dropped bombs on Beijing itself, lady!"

      "Then you should weep for the children who are dying there," said Virlomi. "But the time for us to fight is not yet."

      And the next day, when the trucks began to rumble across the bridges, and line up bumper to bumper along the narrow mountain roads, they begged her, "Let us blow up just one bridge, to show them that India is not sleeping while the Turks fight our enemy for us!"

      She only answered them, "Why should we blow up bridges that our enemy is using to leave our land?"

      "But we could kill many if we timed the explosion just right!"

      "Even if we could kill five thousand by blowing up all the bridges at exactly the right moment, they have five million. We will wait. Not one of you will do anything to warn them that they have enemies in these mountains. The time is soon, but you must wait for my word."

      Again and again she said it, all day long, to everyone who came, and they obeyed. She sent them to telephone their comrades in faraway towns near other bridges, and they also obeyed.

      For three days. The Chinese-controlled news talked about how devastating armies were about to be brought to bear against the Turkic hordes, ready to punish them for their treachery. The traffic across the bridges and along the mountain roads was unrelenting. Then came the message she was waiting for.

      Now.

      No signature, but it was in a dead drop that she had given to Peter Wiggin. She knew that it meant that the main offensive had been launched in the west, and the Chinese would soon begin sending troops and equipment back from China into India.

      She did not burn the message. She handed it to the child who had brought it to her and said, "Keep this forever. It is the beginning of our war."

      "Is it from a god?" asked the child.

      "Perhaps the shadow of the nephew of a god," she answered with a smile. "Perhaps only a man in a dream of a sleeping god."

      Taking the child by the hand, she walked down into the village. The people swarmed around her. She smiled at them, patted the children's heads, hugged the women and kissed them.

      Then she led this parade of citizens to the office of the local Chinese administrator and walked inside the building. Only a few of the women came with her. She walked right past the desk of the protesting officer on duty and into the office of the Chinese official, who was on the telephone.

      He looked up at her and shouted, first in Chinese, then in Common. "What are you doing! Get out of here."

      But Virlomi paid no attention to his words. She walked up to him, smiling, reached out her arms as if to embrace him.

      He raised his hands in protest, to fend her off with a gesture.

      She took his arms, pulled him off balance, and while he staggered to regain his footing, she flung her arms around him, gripped his head, and twisted it sharply.

      He fell dead to the floor.

      She opened a drawer in his desk, took out his pistol, and shot both of the Chinese soldiers who were rushing into the office. They, too, fell dead to the floor

      She looked calmly at the women. "It is time. Please get on the telephones and call the others in every city. It is one hour till dark. At nightfall, they are to carry out their tasks. With a short fuse. And if anyone tries to stop them, even if it's an Indian, they should kill them as quietly and quickly as possible and proceed with their work."

      They repeated the message to her, then set to work at the telephones.

      Virlomi went outside with the pistol hidden in the folds of her skirt. When the other two Chinese soldiers in this village came running, having heard the shots, she started jabbering to them in her native dialect. They did not realize that it was not the local language at all, but a completely unrelated tongue from the Dravidian south. They stopped and demanded that she tell them in Common what had happened. She answered with a bullet into each man's belly before they even saw that she had a gun. Then she made sure of them with a bullet to each head as they lay on the ground.

      "Can you help me clean the street?" she asked the people who were gawking.

      At once they came out into the road and carried the bodies back inside the office.

      When the telephoning was done, she gathered them all together at the door of the office. "When the Chinese authorities come and demand that you tell them what happened, you must tell them the truth. A man came walking down the road, an Indian man but not from this village. He looked like a woman, and you thought he must be a god, because he walked right into this office and broke the neck of the magistrate. Then he took the magistrate's pistol and shot the two guards in the office, and then the two who came running up from the village. Not one of you had time to do anything but scream. Then this stranger made you carry the bodies of the dead soldiers into the office and then ordered you to leave while he made telephone calls."

      "They will ask us to describe this man."

      "Then describe me. Dark. From the south of India."

      "They will say, if he looked like a woman, how do you know she was not a woman?"

      "Because he killed a man with his bare hands. What woman could do that?"

      They laughed.

      "But you must not laugh," she said. "They will be very angry. And even if you do not give them any cause, they may punish you very harshly for what happened here. They may think you are lying and torture you to try to get you to tell the truth. And let me tell you right now, you are perfectly free to tell them that you think it may have been the same person who lived in that little cave near the bridge. You may lead them to that place."

      She turned to the child who had brought her Peter Wiggin's message. "Bury that paper in the ground until the war is over. It will still be there when you want it."

      She spoke to them all once more. "None of you did anything except carry the bodies of the dead to the places I told you to carry them. You would have told the authorities, but the only authorities you know are dead."

      She stretched out her arms. "Oh, my beloved people, I told you I would bring terrible days to you." She did not have to pretend to be sad, and her tears were real as she walked among them, touching hands, cheeks, shoulders one more time. Then she strode out along the road and out of the village. The men who were assigned to do it would blow up the nearby bridge an hour from now. She would not be there. She would be walking along paths in the woods, heading for the command post from which she would run this campaign of sabotage.

      For it would not be enough to blow up these bridges. They had to be ready to kill the engineers who would come to repair them, and kill the soldiers who would come to protect them, and then, when they brought enough soldiers and enough engineers that they could not be stopped from rebuilding the bridges, they would have to cause rockfalls and mudslides to block the narrow canyons.

      If they could seal this border for three days. the advancing Muslim armies would have time, if they were competently led, to break through and cut off the huge Chinese army that still faced them, so that the reinforcements, when they finally made it through, would be far, far too late. They, too, would be cut off in their turn.

      Ambul had asked for only one favor from Alai, after setting up the meeting between him and Bean and Petra. "Let me fight as if I were a Muslim, against the enemy of my people."

      Alai had assigned him, because of his race, to serve among the Indonesians, where he would not look so very different.

      So it was that Ambul went ashore on a stretch of marshy coast somewhere south of Shanghai. They went as near as they could on fishing boats, and then clambered into flatbottomed marsh skimmers, which they rowed among the reeds, searching for firm ground.

      In the end, though, as they knew they would, they had to leave the boats behind and trudge through miles of mud. They carried their boots in their backpacks, because the mud would have sucked them off if they had tried to wear them.

      By the time the sun came up, they were exhausted, filthy, insectbitten, and famished.

      So they rubbed the mud off their feet and ankles, pulled on their socks, put on their boots, and set off at a trot along a trace that soon became a trail, and then a path along the low dike between rice paddies. They jogged past Chinese peasants and said nothing to them.

      Let them think we're conscripts or volunteers from the newly conquered south, on a training mission. We don't want to kill civilians. Get in from the coast as far as you can. That's what their officers had said to them, over and over.

      Most of the peasants might have ignored them. Certainly they saw no one take off at a run to spread the alarm. But it was not yet noon when they spotted the dust plume of a fast-moving vehicle on a road not far off.

      "Down," said their commander in Common.

      Without hesitation they flopped down in the water and then frogged their way to the edge of the dike, where they remained hidden. Only their officer raised his head high enough to see what was happening, and his whispered commentary was passed quietly along the line so all fifty men would know.

      "Military truck," he said.

      Then, "Reservists. No discipline."

      Ambul thought: This is a dilemma. Reservists are probably local troops. Old men, unfit men, who treated their military service like a social club, until now, when somebody trotted them out because they were the only soldiers in the area. Killing them would be like killing peasants.

      But of course they were armed, so not killing them might be committing suicide.

      They could hear the Chinese commander yelling at his part-time soldiers. He was very angry-and very stupid, thought Ambul. What did he think was happening here? If it was a training exercise by some portion of the Chinese army, why would he bring along a contingent of reservists? But if he thought it was a genuine threat, why was he yelling? Why wasn't he trying to reconnoiter with stealth so he could assess the danger and make a report?

      Well, not every officer had been to Battle School. It wasn't second nature to them, to think like a true soldier. This fellow had undoubtedly spent most of his military service behind a desk.

      The whispered command came down the line. Do not shoot anybody, but take careful aim at somebody when you are ordered to stand up.

      The voice of the Chinese officer was coming nearer.

      "Maybe they won't notice us," whispered the soldier beside Ambul.

      "It's time to make them notice us," Ambul whispered back.

      The soldier had been a waiter in a fine restaurant in Jakarta before volunteering for the army after the Chinese conquest of Indochina. Like most of these men, he had never been under fire.

      For that matter, neither have I, thought Ambul. Unless you count combat in the battle room.

      Surely that did count. There was no blood, but the tension, the unbearable suspense of combat had been there. The adrenaline, the courage, the terrible disappointment when you knew you had been shot and your suit froze around you, locking you out of the battle. The sense of failure when you let down the buddy you were supposed to protect. The sense of triumph when you felt like you couldn't miss.

      I've been here before. Only instead of a dike, I was hiding behind a three-meter cube, waiting for the order to fling myself out, firing at whatever enemies might be there.

      The man next to him elbowed him. Like all the others, he obeyed the signal and watched their commander for the order to stand up.

      The commander gave the sign, and they all rose up out of the water.

      The Chinese reservists and their officer were nicely lined up along a dike that ran perpendicular to the one the Indonesian platoon had been hiding behind. Not one of them had his weapon at the ready.

      The Chinese officer had been interrupted in mid-yell. He stopped and turned stupidly to look at the line of forty soldiers, all pointing their weapons at him.

      Ambul's commander walked up to the officer and shot him in the head.

      At once the reservists threw down their weapons and surrendered.

      Every Indonesian platoon had at least one Chinese-speaker, and usually several. Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia had been eager to show their patriotism, and their best interpreter was very efficient in conveying their commander's orders. Of course it was impossible to take prisoners. But they did not want to kill these men.

      So they were told to remove all their clothing and carry it to the truck they had arrived in. While they were undressing, the order was passed along the line in Indonesian: Do not laugh at them or show any sign of ridicule. Treat them with great honor and respect.

      Ambul understood the wisdom of this order. The purpose of stripping them naked was to make them look ridiculous, of course. But the first people to ridicule them would be Chinese, not Indonesians. When people asked them, they would have to say that the Indonesians treated them with nothing but respect. The public relations campaign was already under way.

      Half an hour later, Ambul was with the sixteen men who rode into town in the captured Chinese truck, with one naked and terrified old reservist showing them the way. Just before reaching the small military headquarters, they slowed down and pushed him out of the truck.

      It was quick and bloodless. They drove right into the small compound and disarmed everyone there at the point of a gun. The Chinese soldiers were all herded naked into a room without a telephone, and they stayed there in utter silence while the sixteen Indonesians commandeered two more trucks, clean underwear and socks, and a couple of Chinese military radios.

      Then they piled all the remaining ammunition and explosives, weapons and radios in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded them with the remaining military vehicles, and set a small amount of plastique in the middle of the pile with a five-minute fuse.

      The Chinese interpreter ran to the door of the room where the prisoners were being held, shouted to them that they had five minutes to evacuate this place before everything blew up, and they should warn the townspeople to get away from here.

      Then he unlocked the door and ran out to one of the waiting trucks.

      Four minutes out of town, they heard the fireworks begin. It was like a war back there-bullets going off, explosions, and a plume of smoke.

      Ambul imagined the naked soldiers running from door to door, warning people. He hoped that no one would die because they stopped to laugh at the naked men instead of obeying them.

      Ambul was assigned to sit up front beside the driver of one of the captured trucks. He knew they would not have these vehicles for long-they would be too easy to spot-but they would carry them away from this place and give some of the soldiers a chance to catch a quick nap in the back of the truck.

      Of course, it was also possible that they would return to the rest of the platoon to find them slaughtered, with a large contingent of Chinese veterans waiting to blow them to bits.

      Well, if that happened, it would happen. Nothing he could do in this truck would affect such an outcome in any way. All he could do was keep his eyes open and help the driver stay awake.

      There was no ambush. When they got back to the other men, they found most of them asleep, but all the sentries awake and watchful.

      Everyone piled into the trucks. The men who had slept a little were assigned to the front seats to drive; the men who had not slept were put in the backs of the trucks to sleep as best they could while the truck jolted along on back roads.

      Ambul was one of those who discovered that if you're tired enough, you can indeed sleep sitting up on a hard bench in a truck with no springs on a rough road. You just can't sleep for very long at a time.

      He woke up once to find them moving smoothly along a wellpaved road. He stayed awake just long enough to think, Is our commander an idiot, using a highway like this? But he didn't care enough about it to stay awake.

      The trucks stopped after only three hours of driving. Everyone was still exhausted, but they had much to do before they could get a real meal, and genuine sleep. The commander had called a halt beside a bridge. He had the men unload everything from the trucks. Then they pushed them off the bridge into the stream.

      Ambul thought: That was a foolish mistake. They should have left them neatly parked, and not together, so that air surveillance would not recognize them.

      But no, speed was more important than concealment. Besides, the Chinese air force was otherwise engaged. Ambul doubted there'd be many planes available for surveillance any time soon.

      While the noncoms were distributing captured supplies among the men, they were told some of what their commander had learned from listening to the captured radios during the drive. The enemy kept speaking of them as paratroopers and assumed they were heading for a major military objective or some rendezvous point. "They don't know who we are or what we're doing, and they're looking for us in all the wrong places," said the commander. "That won't last long, but it's the reason we weren't blown while we were driving along. Plus, they think we're at least a thousand men."

      They had made good progress inland, those hours on the road. The terrain was almost hilly here, and despite the fact that every arable inch of China had been under cultivation for millennia, there was some fairly wild country here. They might actually get far enough from this road before night that they could get a decent sleep before taking off again.

      Of course, they would do most of their movement by night, most of their sleeping by day.

      If they lived through the night. If they survived another day.

      Carrying more now than they had when they first came ashore the previous night, they staggered off the road and into the woods alongside the stream. Heading west. Upstream. Inland.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FAREWELLS

To:   Porto%Aberto@BateRopo.org

From: Locke%erasmus@polnet.gov

Re:   Ripe

Encryption seed:[?]

Decryption key:

Is this Bean or Petra? Or both?

After all his subtle strategies and big surprises, it was a petty murder attempt that tagged him. I don't know if the news of the shooting down of an IF shuffle even penetrated the war coverage where you are, but he thought I was aboard. I wasn't, but the Chinese named him as the smoke, and suddenly the IF has legal basis for an Earthside operation. The Brazilian government is cooperating, has the compound on lockdown,

The only trouble is, the compound seems to be defended by your little army. We want to do this without loss of life, but you trained your soldiers very well, and Suri doesn't respond to my feeble attempts to contact him. Before left, he seemed to be in Achilles's pocket. That might have been protective coloration, but who knows what happened on that return trip from China?

Achilles has a way of getting to people. An Indian officer at MinCol who had known Graff for years was the one who fingered me for the shuttle, because the fact that his family was in a camp in China was used to control him, Does Achilles have a way to control Suri? If Suri commands the soldiers to protect Achilles, will they?

Would it make a difference if you were there? I will be there, but I'm afraid I never quite trusted your assurance that the soldiers would absolutely obey me. I have a feeling that I lost face when I fled the compound. But you know them, I don't.

Your advice would be appreciated. Your presence would be very helpful. I will understand if you choose to provide neither. You owe nothing to me-you were right when I was wrong, and I jeopardized everybody. But at this point, I'd like to do this without killing any of your soldiers, and especially without being killed myself-I wouldn't want to pretend my motives are entirely altruistic. I have no choice but to be there myself. If I'm not on the ground for the penetration of the compound, I can kiss my future as Hegemon good-bye.

Meanwhile, the Chinese don't seem to be doing so well, do they? My congratulations to the Caliph. I hope he will be more generous to his conquered foes than the Chinese were.

      Petra found it hard to concentrate on her search of the nets. It was too tempting to switch to the news stories about the war. It was the genetic disease that the doctors had found in her as a child, the disease that sent her into space to spend her formative years in Battle School. She just couldn't leave war alone. Appalling as it was, combat still held irresistible allure. The contest of two armies, each striving for mastery, with no rules except those forced on them by the limitations of their forces and their fear of reprisal in kind.

      Bean had insisted that they search for some signal from Achilles. It seemed absurd to her, but Bean was positive that Achilles wanted them to come to him.

      "He's on his last legs," said Bean. "Everything's turned against him. He thought he'd positioned himself to take my place. Then he reached too far in shooting down that shuttle, just at the moment that the Crescent League pulled China out from under him. He can't go back there, can't even leave Ribeirao. So he's going to make whatever plays he has left to make. We're loose ends. He doesn't want to leave us dangling. So... he's going to call us in."

      "Let's not go," Petra had said then, but Bean only laughed. "If I thought you meant that," he said, "I might consider it. But I know you don't. He has our babies. He knows we'll come."

      Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn't. What good would it do those embryos if their parents walked into a trap and died?

      And it would be a trap. Not a fair trade, not a bargain, my freedom for your babies. No, Achilles was not capable of that, not even to save his own life. Bean had trapped him once before, forced a confession out of him, which led to his being put in a mental institution. He'd never go back there again. Like Napoleon, he'd escaped from one captivity, but from the next there'd be no more escaping. So he wouldn't go. That much both Bean and Petra agreed on. He would only summon them to kill them.

      Yet still she searched, wondering how they'd even know when they found what they were looking for.

      And while she searched, the war kept drawing her The campaign in Xinjiang had already moved eastward into the fringes of Han China. The Persians and Pakistanis were on the verge of encircling both halves of the Chinese army in western India.

      The news about the Indonesians and Arabs operating inside China was a little more oblique. The Chinese were complaining loudly about Muslim paratroopers performing terrorist attacks inside China, and threatening that they would be treated as spies and war criminals when they were caught. The caliph responded immediately by declaring that these were regular troops, in uniform, and the only thing that bothered the Chinese was that the war they had been so willing to inflict on others had finally come home. "We will hold every level of the Chinese military and the Chinese government personally and individually responsible for each crime against our captured soldiers."

      That was the language that only the presumed victors could afford to use, but the Chinese clearly took it to heart, immediately announcing that they had been completely misunderstood, and any soldiers found to be in uniform would be treated as prisoners.

      To Petra, though, the most entertaining aspect of the Chinese posturing was that they kept referring to the Indonesian and Arab troops as paratroopers. They simply could not believe that troops landed on the coasts had got so far inland so quickly.

      And one other little bit of information. One of the American newsnets had a commentary by a retired general who almost certainly was being given briefings about what American spy satellites were showing. What caught Petra's attention was when he said, "What I can't understand is why the Chinese troops that were moved out of India a few days ago, to meet the threat in Xinjiang, are not being used in Xinjiang or being sent back into India. Fully a quarter of the Chinese military is just sitting there not being used."

      Petra showed this to Bean, who smiled. "Verlomi is very good. She's pinned them down for three days. How long before the Chinese army inside India simply runs out of ammunition?"

      "You can't really start a betting pool with just the two of us," said Petra.

      "Stop watching the war and get back to work."

      "Why wait for Achilles to send this signal that I still don't think he's going to send?" asked Petra. "Why not just accept Peter's invitation and join him for the storming of the compound?

      "Because if Achilles thinks he's luring us into a trap, he'll let us get inside without firing a shot. Nobody dies."

      "Except us."

      "First, Petra, there's no us. You're a pregnant woman, and I don't care how brilliant you are at military affairs, I can't possibly deal with Achilles if the woman who's carrying my baby is standing there in jeopardy."

      "So I'm supposed to sit outside watching, not knowing what's going on, whether you're alive or dead?"

      "Do we have to have the argument about how I'm going to die in a few years anyway, and you're not, and if I'm dead but we rescue the embryos you can still have babies, but if you're dead, we can't even have the baby you've already got inside you?"

      "No, we don't have to have that argument," said Petra angrily.

      "And second, you won't be sitting outside watching, because you'll be here in Damascus, following the war news and reading the Q'uran."

      "Or clawing my own eyes out in the agony of not knowing. You'd really leave me here?"

      "Achilles himself may be trapped inside the Hegemony compound, but he has people to run his errands everywhere. I doubt that many of them were lost when the China connection dried up. If it dried up. I don't want you leaving here because it would be just like Achilles to kill you long before you came anywhere near the compound."

      "So why don't you think he'll kill you?"

      "Because he wants me to watch the babies die."

      Petra couldn't help it. She burst into tears and bowed over her desk.

      "I'm sorry," said Bean. "I didn't mean to make you-"

      "Of course you didn't mean to make me cry," said Petra. "I didn't mean to cry, either Just ignore this."

      "I can't ignore it," said Bean. "I can barely understand what you're saying, and you're about to drip snot on your desk."

      "It's not snot!" Petra shouted at him, then touched her nose and discovered that it was. She sniffed and then laughed and ran into the bathroom and blew her nose and finished crying by herself.

      When she came out, Bean was lying on the bed, his eyes closed.

      "I'm sorry," said Petra.

      "I'm sorrier," said Bean softly.

      "I know you have to go alone. I know I have to stay here. I know all of that, but I hate it, that's all."

      Bean nodded.

      "So why aren't you searching the nets?"

      "Because the message just came."

      She walked over to his desk and looked into the display. Bean had connected to an auction site, and there it was:

      Wanted: A good womb. Five human embryos ready for implantation. Battle-Schoolgraduate parents, died in tragic accident. Estate needs to dispose of them immediately. Likely to be extraordinarily brilliant children. Trust fund will be set up for each child successfully implanted and brought to term. Applicants must prove they do not need the money. Top five bidders will have their funds held in escrow by certified accounting firm, pending evaluation.

      "Did you reply?" asked Petra. "Or bid?"

      "I sent an inquiry in which I suggested that I'd like to have all five, and I'll pick them up in person. I told him to reply to one of my dead drop sites."

      "And you're not checking your mail to see if your dead drop has forwarded anything yet?"

      "Petra, I'm scared."

      "That's a relief. It suggests you aren't insane."

      "He's the best survivor I've ever known. He'll have a way out of this..."

      "No," said Petra. "You're a survivor. He's a killer"

      "He's not dead," said Bean. "That makes him a survivor"

      "Nobody's been trying to kill him for half his life," said Petra. "His survival is no big deal. You've had a pathological killer on your trail for years, and yet here you are."

      "It's not so much that I'm afraid of him killing me," said Bean, "though I don't find it an appealing way to go. I still plan to die by growing so tall I'm hit by a low-flying plane."

      "I'm not playing your macabre little how-I'd-like-to-die game."

      "But if he does kill me, and then gets out of there alive somehow, what will happen to you?"

      "He won't get out of there alive."

      "So maybe not. But what if I'm dead, and all the babies are dead?"

      "I'll have this one."

      "You'll wish you hadn't loved me. I still haven't figured out why you do."

      "I'll never wish I hadn't loved you, and I'll always be glad that after I pestered you long enough, you finally decided you loved me too."

      "Don't let anybody call the kid by some stupid nickname based on how small she is."

      "No legume names?"

      The incoming-mail icon flashed on his desk. "You've got mail," said Petra.

      Bean sighed, sat up, slid over onto the chair, and opened the letter

My oldest friend. I have five little presents with your name written all over them, and not much time left in which to give them to you. I wish you trusted me more, because I've never meant you any harm, but I know you don't, and so you are free to bring an armed escort with you. Well meet in the open air, the east garden. The east gate will be open. You and the first five with you can come in; any more than that try to come in and you'll all be shot.

I don't know where you are, so I don't know how long it will take for you to get here. When you come, I'll have your property in a refrigerated container, good for six hours at the right temperature. If one of your escort is a specialist with a microscope, you are free to examine the specimens on the spot, and then have the specialist carry them out.

But I hope you and I can chat for a while about old times. Reminisce about the good old days, when we brought civilization to the streets of Rotterdam. We've been down a good long road since then. Changed the world, both of us. Me more than you, kid. Eat your heart out,

Of course, you married the only woman I ever loved, so maybe things balance out in the end.

Naturally, our conversation will be more pleasant if it ends with you taking me out of the compound and giving me safe passage to a place of my own choosing. But I realize that may not be within your power. We really are limited creatures, we geniuses. We know what's best for everybody, but we still don't get our way until we can persuade the lesser creatures to do our bidding. They just don't understand how much happier they'd be if they stopped thinking for themselves. They're so unequipped for it.

Relax, Bean. That was a joke. Or an indecorous truth. Often the same thing.

Give Petra a kiss for me. Let me know when to open the gate.

      "Does he really expect you to believe that he'll just let you take the babies?"

      "Well, he does imply a swap for his freedom," said Bean.

      "The only swap he implies is your life for theirs," said Petra.

      "Oh," said Bean. "Is that how you read it?"

      "That's what he's saying and you know it. He expects the two of you to die together, right there."

      "The real question," said Bean, "is whether he'll really have the embryos there."

      "For all we know," said Petra, "they're in a lab in Moscow or Johannesburg or already in the garbage somewhere in Ribeirao."

      "Now who's the grim one?"

      "It's obvious that he wasn't able to place them out for implantation. So to him they represent failure. They have no value now. Why should he give them to you?"

      "I didn't say I'd accept his terms," said Bean.

      "But you will."

      "The hardest thing about a kidnapping is always the swap, ransom for hostage. Somebody always has to trust somebody, and give up their piece before they've received what the other one has. But this case is really weird, because he's not really asking for anything from me."

      "Except your death."

      "But he knows I'm dying anyway. It all seems so pointless."

      "He's insane, Julian. Haven't you heard?"

      "Yes, but his thinking makes sense inside his own head. I mean, he's not schizophrenic, he sees the same reality as the rest of us. He's not delusional. He's just pathologically conscience-free. So how does he see this playing out? Will he just shoot me as I come in? Or will he let me win, maybe even let me kill him, only the joke's on me because the embryos he gives me aren't ours, they're from the tragic mating of two really dumb people. Perhaps two journalists."

      "You're joking about this, Bean, and I-"

      "I have to catch the next flight. If you think of anything else that I should know, email me, I'll check in at least once before I go in and see the lad."

      "He doesn't have them," said Petra. "He already gave them out to his cronies."

      "Quite possible."

      "Don't go."

      "Not possible."

      "Bean, you're smarter than he is, but his advantage is, he's more brutal than you are.

      "Don't count on it," said Bean.

      "Don't you realize that I know both of you better than anyone else in the world?"

      "And no matter how well we think we know people, the fact is we're all strangers in the end."

      "Oh, Bean, tell me you don't believe that."

      "It's self-evident truth."

      "I know you!" she insisted.

      "No. You don't. But that's all right, because I don't really know me either, let alone you. We never understand anybody, not even ourselves. But Petra, shh, listen. What we've done is, we've created something else. This marriage. It consists of the two of us, and we've become something else together. That's what we know. Not me, not you, but what we are, who we are together Sister Carlotta quoted somebody in the Bible about how a man and a woman marry and they become one flesh. Very mystical and borderline weird. But in a way it's true. And when I die, you won't have Bean, but you'll still have Petra-with-Bean, Bean-with-Petra, whatever we call this new creature that we've made."

      "So all those months I spent with Achilles, did we build some disgusting monstrous Petra-with-Achilles thing? Is that what you're saying?"

      "No," said Bean. "Achilles doesn't build things. He just finds them, admires them, and tears them apart. There is no Achilles-withanybody. He's just... empty."

      "So what happened to that theory of Ender's, that you have to know your enemy in order to beat him?"

      "Still true."

      "But if you can't know anybody..."

      "It's imaginary," said Bean. "Ender wasn't crazy, so he knew it was just imaginary. You try to see the world through your enemy's eyes, so you can see what it all means to him. The better you do at it, the more time you spend in the world as he sees it, the more you understand how he views things, how he explains to himself the things he does."

      "And you've done that with Achilles."

      "Yes."

      "So you think you know what he's going to do."

      "I have a short list of things I expect."

      "And what if you're wrong? Because that's the one certainty in all of this-that whatever you think Achilles is going to do, you're wrong."

      "That's his specialty."

      "So your short list..."

      "Well, see, the way I made my list, I thought of all the things I thought he might do, and then I didn't put any of those on my list, I only put on the things I didn't think he'd do."

      "That'll work," said Petra.

      "Might," said Bean.

      "Hold me before you go," she said.

      He did.

      "Petra, you think you aren't going to see me again. But I'm pretty sure you are."

      "Do you realize how it scares me that you're only pretty sure?"

      "I could die of appendicitis in the plane on the way to Ribeirao. I'm never more than pretty sure of anything."

      "Except that I love you."

      "Except that we love each other."

      Bean's flight was the normal misery of hours in a confined space. But at least he was flying west, so the jet lag wasn't as debilitating. He thought he might just go directly in as soon as he arrived, but thought better of it. He needed to think clearly. To be able to improvise and act quickly on impulse. He needed to sleep.

      Peter was waiting for him at the doorway of the airplane. Being Hegemon gives you a few privileges denied to other people in airports.

      Peter led him down the stairs instead of out the jetway, and they got in a car that drove them directly to the hotel that had been set up as the IF command post. IF soldiers were at every entrance, and Peter assured him there were sharpshooters in every surrounding building, and in this one, too.

      "So," said Peter, when they were alone in Bean's room, "what's the plan?"

      "You sound as if you think I have one," said Bean.

      "Not even a goal?"

      "Oh, I have two goals," said Bean. "I promised Petra right after he stole our embryos that I'd get them back for her, and that I'd kill Achilles in the process."

      "And you have no idea how you'll do that."

      "Some. But nothing I plan will work anyway, so I don't let myself get too attached to any of them."

      "Achilles really isn't that important now," said Peter "I mean, he's important because in essence everyone inside that compound is his hostage, but on the world stage-he's lost all his influence. Went up in smoke when he shot down that shuttle and the Chinese disavowed him."

      Bean shook his head. "Do you really think, if he gets out of this alive, he won't be back at his old games? You think he won't have any takers for his medicine show?"

      "I suppose there's no shortage of government people with dreams of power he can seduce them with, or fears that he can exploit."

      "Peter, I'm here so he can torment me and then kill me. That's why I'm here. His purpose. His goal."

      "Well, if this is the only plan, then..."

      "That's right, Peter. He's the one with the plan this time. And I'm the one who can surprise him by not doing what he expects."

      "All right," said Peter "I'm in."

      "What?"

      "You've convinced me. I'm in."

      "You're in what?"

      "I'm going in the gate with you."

      "No you're not."

      "I'm Hegemon. I'm not standing outside while you go in and save my people."

      "He'll be very happy to kill you along with me."

      "You first."

      "No, you first."

      "Whatever," said Peter. "You're not getting through that gate unless I'm one of your five."

      "Look, Peter," said Bean. "The reason we're in this predicament is that you think you're smarter than everybody else, so no matter what advice you get, you go off half-cocked and do something astonishingly dumb."

      "But I stay around to pick up the pieces."

      "I give you credit for that."

      "I won't do anything you don't tell me to," said Peter. "It's your show."

      "I need to have all five of my escort be highly trained soldiers."

      "No you don't," said Peter "Because if there's any shooting, five won't be enough anyway. So you have to count on there being no shooting. So I might as well be one of the five."

      "But I don't want to die with you beside me," said Bean.

      "Fine with me, I don't want to die beside you, either"

      "You have another seventy or eighty years ahead of you. You're going to gamble with that? Me, I'm just playing with house money."

      "You're the best, Bean," said Peter.

      "That was in school. What armies have I commanded since then? Other people are doing all the fighting now. I'm not the best, I'm retired."

      "You don't retire from your own mind."

      "People retire from their minds all the time. What won't let you alone is your reputation."

      "Well, I love arguing philosophy with you," said Peter abruptly, "but you need your sleep and I need mine. See you at the east gate in the morning."

      In a moment he was out the door

      So what was that sudden departure about?

      Bean had the sneaking suspicion that maybe Peter finally believed him that he didn't have a plan and had no guarantee of winning. Not even, in fact, a decent chance of winning, if by winning he meant an outcome in which Bean was alive, Achilles was dead, and Bean had the babies. No doubt Peter had to run and get a life insurance policy. Or drum up some last minute emergency that would absolutely prevent him from going through the gate with Bean after all. "So sorry, I wish I were going with you, but you'll do fine, I know it."

      Bean thought he'd have trouble getting to sleep, what with the catnaps he got on the plane and the tension of tomorrow's events preying on his mind.

      So naturally he fell asleep so fast he didn't even remember turning off the light.

      In the morning, Bean got up and posted a message to Achilles, naming a time about an hour later for their meeting. Then he wrote a brief note to Petra, just so she'd know he was thinking of her in case this was the last day of his life. Then another note to his parents, and one to Nikolai. At least if he managed to bring Achilles down with him, they'd be safe. That was something.

      He walked downstairs to find Peter already waiting beside the IF car that would take them to the perimeter that had been established around the compound. They rode in near silence, because there was really nothing more to say.

      At the perimeter, near the east gate, Bean found out very quickly that Peter hadn't lied-the IF was standing behind his determination to go in with Bean's group. Well, that was fine. Bean didn't really need his companions to do much.

      As he had requested before leaving Damascus, the IF had a uniformed doctor, two highly trained sharpshooters, and a fully equipped hazard squad, one of whom was to come in with Bean's party.

      "Achilles will have a container that purports to be a transport refrigerator for a half dozen frozen embryos," Bean said to the hazardist. "If I have you carry it outside, then that means I'm sure it's a bomb or contains some toxin, and I want it treated that way-even if I say something different inside there. If it turns out to have been embryos after all, well, that's my own mistake, and I'll explain it to my wife. If I have the doctor here carry it, that means I'm sure it's the embryos, and the package is to be treated that way."

      "And what if you're not sure?" asked Peter"

      "l'll be sure," said Bean, "or I won't give it to anybody."

      "Why don't you just carry it yourself?" asked the hazardist, "and tell us what to do when it gets outside?"

      Peter answered for him. "Mr. Delphiki doesn't expect to get back out alive."

      "My goal for all four of you," said Bean, "is for you to walk out of there uninjured. There's no chance of that if you start shooting, for any reason. That's why none of you is going to carry a loaded weapon."

      They looked at him as if he were insane.

      "I'm not going in there unarmed," said one of the other men.

      "Fine," said Bean. "Then there'll be one less. He didn't say I had to bring five."

      "Technically," said Peter to the other sharpshooter, "you won't be unarmed. Just unloaded. So they'll treat you as if did have bullets, because they won't know you don't."

      "I'm a soldier, not a sap," said the man, and he walked away.

      "Anybody else?" said Bean.

      In answer, the other sharpshooter took the full clip out of his weapon, popped out the bullets one by one, and then ejected the first bullet from the chamber

      "I don't carry a weapon anyway," said the doctor

      "Don't need a loaded pistol to carry a bomb," said the hazardist.

      With a slim plastic .22-caliber pistol already tucked into the back of his pants, Bean was now the only person in his party with a loaded gun.

      "I guess we re ready to go," said Bean.

      It was a dazzling tropical morning as they stepped through the gate into the east garden. Birds in all the trees ranted their calls as if they were trying to memonze something and just couldn't get it to stick. There was not a soul in sight.

      Bean wasn't going to wander around searching for Achilles. He definitely wasn't going to get far from the gate. So, about ten paces in, he stopped. So did the others.

      And they waited.

      It didn't take long. A soldier in the Hegemony uniform stepped out into the open. Then another, and another, until the fifth soldier appeared.

      Suriyawong.

      He gave no sign of recognition. Rather he looked right past both Bean and Peter as if they were nothing to him.

      Achilles stepped out behind them-but stayed close to the trees, so he wouldn't be too easy a target for sharpshooters. He was carrying, as promised, a small transport fridge.

      "Bean," he said with a smile. "My how you've grown.

      Bean said nothing.

      "Oh, we aren't in a jesting mood," he said. "I'm not either, really. It's almost a sentimental moment for me, to see you again. To see you as a man. Considering I knew you when you were this high."

      He held out the transport fridge. "Here they are, Bean."

      "You're just going to give them to me?"

      "I don't really have a use for them. There weren't any takers in the auction."

      "Volescu went to a lot of trouble to get these for you," said Bean.

      "What trouble? He bribed a guard. Using my money.

      "How did you get Volescu to help you, anyway?" asked Bean.

      "He owed me," said Achilles. "I'm the one who got him out of jail. I got our brilliant Hegemon here to give me authority to authorize the release of prisoners whose crimes had ceased to be crimes. He didn't make the connection that I'd be releasing your creator into the wild." Achilles grinned at Peter.

      Peter said nothing.

      "You trained these men well, Bean," said Achilles. "Being with them is like... well, it's like being with my family again. Like on the streets, you know?"

      Bean said nothing.

      "Well, all right, you don't want to chat, so take the embryos."

      Bean remembered one very important fact. Achilles didn't care about killing his victims with his own hands. It was enough for him that they die, whether he was present or not.

      Bean turned to the hazardist. "Would you do me a favor and take this just outside the gate? I want to stay and talk with Achilles for a couple of minutes."

      The hazardist walked up to Achilles and took the transport fridge from him. "Is it fragile?" he asked.

      Achilles answered, "It's very securely packed and padded, but don't play football with it."

      In only a few steps, he was out the gate.

      "So what did you want to talk about?" asked Achilles.

      "A couple of little questions I'm curious about."

      "I'll listen. Maybe I'll answer"

      "Back in Hyderabad. There was a Chinese officer who knocked you unconscious to break our stalemate."

      "Oh, is that who did it?"

      "Whatever happened to him?"

      "I'm not sure. I think his chopper was shot down in combat only a few days later"

      "Oh," said Bean. "Too bad. I wanted to ask him what it felt like to hit you."

      "Really, Bean, aren't we both too old for that sort of gibe?"

      Outside the gate there was a muffled explosion.

      Achilles looked around, startled. "What was that?"

      "I'm pretty sure," said Bean, "that it was an explosion."

      "Of what?"

      "Of the bomb you just tried to give me," said Bean. "Inside a containment chamber."

      Achilles tried, for a moment, to look innocent. "I don't know what you..."

      Then he apparently realized there was no point in feigning ignorance when the thing had just exploded. He pulled the remote detonator out of his pocket, pressed the button a couple of times. "Damn all this modern technology, nothing ever works right." He grinned at Bean. "Got to give me credit for trying."

      "So... do you have the embryos or not?" asked Bean.

      "They're inside, safe," said Achilles.

      Bean knew that was a lie. In fact, he had decided yesterday that it was most likely the embryos had never been brought here at all.

      But he'd get more mileage out of this by pretending to believe Achilles. And there was always the chance that it wasn't a lie.

      "Show me," Bean said.

      "You have to come inside, then," said Achilles.

      "OK."

      "That'll take us outside the range of the sharpshooters you no doubt have all around the compound, waiting to shoot me down."

      "And inside the range of whoever you have waiting for me there."

      "Bean. Be realistic. You're dead whenever I want you dead."

      "Well, that's not strictly true," said Bean. "You've wanted me dead a lot more often than I've died."

      Achilles grinned. "Do you know what Poke was saying just before she had that accident and fell into the Rhine?"

      Bean said nothing.

      "She was saying that I shouldn't hold a grudge against you for telling her to kill me when we first met. He's just a little kid, she said. He didn't know what he was saying."

      Still, Bean said nothing.

      "I wish I could tell you Sister Carlotta's last words, but... you know how collateral damage is in wartime. You just don't get any warning."

      "The embryos," said Bean. "You said you were going to show me where they are."

      "All right then," said Achilles. "Follow me.

      As soon as Achilles's back was turned, the doctor looked at Bean and frantically shook his head.

      "It's all right," Bean told the doctor and the other soldier "You can go on out. You won't be needed any more."

      Achilles turned back around. "You're letting your escort go?"

      "Except for Peter," said Bean. "He insists on staying with me.

      "I didn't hear him say that," said Achilles. "I mean, he seemed so eager to get away when he left this place, I thought for sure he didn't want to see it again."

      "I'm trying to figure out how you were able to fool so many people," said Peter.

      "But I'm not trying to fool you," said Achilles. "Though I can see how someone like you would long to find a really masterful liar to study with." Laughing, Achilles turned his back again, and led the way toward the main office building.

      Peter came closer to Bean as they followed him inside. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" he asked quietly.

      "I told you before, I have no idea."

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

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

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

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

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

      "Because I knew I didn't have the embryos."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      "Aren't you going to get it?" Achilles asked Bean.

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

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

      Achilles whistled. "Wow. You are some disciplinarian. Your kids can't get away with anything with you."

      Bean walked toward Achilles.

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

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

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

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

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

      "Suri," said Achilles. "Are you asleep?"

      Suriyawong pulled his long knife from its sheath.

      "That's not what's needed here," said Achilles. "He has a gun."

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

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

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

      "Those are your children you're killing!" cried Achilles.

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

      "Suriyawong!" shouted Achilles. "Shoot him!"

      "Sir," said Suriyawong.

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

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

      "What's this supposed to be?" demanded Achilles.

      "The loan of a knife," said Suriyawong.

      "But he has a gun!" cried Achilles.

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

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

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

      So did all the other soldiers.

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

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

      "Yes it is," said Bean.

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

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

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

      But there was this: Achilles would never kill again.

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

CHAPTER TWENTY

HOME

From: YourFresh%Vegetable@Freebie.net

To:   MyStone%Maiden@Freebie.net

Re:   Come home

He's dead.

I'm not.

He didn't have them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      "I'm just a little bit pregnant," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

      She refused to think about that.

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

      "Don't believe those rumors."

      "My hero," she said.

      "I'd rather be your lover," he whispered.

      "My giant," she whispered back.

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

      "Why are you crying?" he asked her

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

      "You're just happy to be in a place where trees grow without waiting around to be planted and irrigated."

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

      "Now I'm home, too," said Bean.

      "You were here already," she said. "But you weren't, till now."

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

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

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

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

      "The war's not over yet," said Peter.

      "They're full of Muslim unity," said Petra.

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

      "It's a good thing," said Theresa, "to have a little less division in the world."

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

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

      "Let me guess," said Peter. "A Muslim one."

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

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

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

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

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

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

      "No?" asked Peter.

      "Because a leader can't take his people to a place where they don't want to go."

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

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

      "So your friend Alai will realize this, and not try to rule over nonMuslim people?" asked Theresa.

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

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

      Peter spoke up. "As I said before, this war's not over yet."

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

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

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

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

      "Do you think Achilles believed Suriyawong would really kill Bean for him?" asked Petra.

      "I think," said Bean, "that Suriyawong told him that he would."

      "You mean he intended to do it, and changed his mind?"

      "I think," said Bean, "that Suri planned that moment from the start. He made himself indispensable to Achilles. He won his trust. The cost of it was losing the trust of everyone else."

      "Except you," said Petra.

      "Well, you see, I know Suri. Even though you can't ever really know anybody-don't throw my own words back up to me, Petra-"

      "I didn't! I wasn't!"

      "I walked into the compound without a plan, and with only one real advantage. I knew two things that Achilles didn't know. I knew that Suri would never give himself to the service of a man like Achilles, so if he seemed to be doing so, it was a lie. And I knew something about myself. I knew that I could, in fact, kill a man in cold blood if that's what it took to make my wife and children safe."

      "Yes," said Peter, "I think that's the one thing he just didn't believe, not even at the end."

      "It wasn't cold blood," said Theresa.

      "Yes it was," said Bean.

      "It was, Mother," said Peter. "It was the right thing to do, and he chose to do it, and it was done. Without having to work himself up into a frenzy to do it."

      "That's what heroes do," said Petra. "Whatever's necessary for the good of their people."

      "When we start saying words like 'hero,' " said Bean, "it's time to go home."

      "Already?" said Theresa. "I mean, Petra just got here. And I have to tell her all my horrible stories about how hard each of my deliveries was. It's my duty to terrify the mother-to-be. It's a tradition."

      "Don't worry, Mrs. Wiggin," said Bean. "I'll bring her back every few days, at least. It's not that far."

      "Bring me back?" said Petra.

      "We left the Hegemon's employ, remember?" said Bean. "We only worked for him so we'd have a legal pretext for fighting Achilles and the Chinese. so there'd be nothing for us to do. We have enough money from our Battle School pensions. So we aren't going to live in Ribeirao Preto."

      "But I like it here," said Petra.

      "Uh-oh, a fight, a fight," said John Paul.

      "Only because you haven't lived in Araraquara yet. It's a better place to raise children."

      "I know Araraquara," said Petra. "You lived there with Sister Carlotta, didn't you?"

      "I lived everywhere with Sister Carlotta," said Bean. "But it's a good place to raise children."

      "You're Greek and I'm Armenian. Of course we need to raise our children to speak Portuguese."

      The house Bean had rented was small, but it had a second bedroom for the baby, and a lovely little garden, and monkeys that lived in the tall trees on the property behind them. Petra imagined her little girl or boy coming out to play and hearing the chatter of the monkeys and delighting in the show they put on for all comers.

      "But there's no furniture," said Petra.

      "I knew I was taking my life in my hands picking out the house without you," said Bean. "The furniture is up to you."

      "Good," said Petra. "I'll make you sleep in a frilly pink room." "Will you be sleeping there with me?"

      "Of course."

      "Then frilly pink is fine with me, if that's what it takes."

      Peter, unsentimental as he was, saw no reason to hold a funeral for Achilles. But Bean insisted on at least a graveside service, and he paid for the carving of the monument. Under the name "Achilles de Flandres," the year of his birth, and the date of his death, the inscription said:

Born crippled in body and spirit,

He changed the face of the world.

Among all the hearts he broke

And lives he ended far too young

Were his own heart

And his own life.

May he find peace.

      It was a small group gathered there in the cemetery in Ribeirao Preto. Bean and Petra, the Wiggins, Peter Graff had gone back to space. Suriyawong had led his little army back to Thailand, to help their homeland drive out the conquerors and restore itself.

      No one had anything much to say over Achilles's grave. They could not pretend that they weren't all glad that he was dead. Bean read the inscription he had written, and everyone agreed that it wasn't just fair to Achilles, it was generous.

      In the end it was only Peter who had something he could say from the heart.

      "Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who's lying in this box?"

      No one had an answer for him, either yes or no.

      Three bloody weeks later, the war ended. If the Chinese had accepted the terms the Caliph had offered in the first place, they would have lost only their new conquests, plus Xinjiang and Tibet. Instead, they waited until Canton had fallen, Shanghai was besieged, and the Turkic troops were surrounding Beijing.

      So when the Caliph drew the new map, the province of Inner Mongolia was given to the nation of Mongolia, and Manchuria and Taiwan were given their independence. And China had to guarantee the safety of teachers of religion. The door had been opened to Muslim proselytizing.

      The Chinese government promptly fell. The new government repudiated the ceasefire terms, and the Caliph declared martial law until new elections could be held.

      And somewhere in the rugged terrain of easternmost India, the goddess of the bridge lived among her worshipers, biding her time, watching to see whether India was going to be free or had merely changed one tyranny for another. In the aftermath of war, while Indians, Thais, Burmese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians searched their onetime conquerors' land for family members who had been carried off. Bean and Petra also searched as best they could by computer, hoping to find some record of what Volescu and Achilles had done with their lost children.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      In writing this sequel to Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon, I faced two new problems. First, I was expanding the roles of several minor characters from earlier books, and ran the serious risk of inventing aspects of their appearance or their past that would contradict some long-forgotten detail in a previous volume. To avoid this as much as possible, I relied on two online communities.

      The Philotic Web (http://www.philoticweb.net) carries a timeline combining the story flows of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, which proved invaluable to me. It was created by Nathan M. Taylor with the help of Adam Spieckermann.

      On my own website, Hatrack River (http://www.hatrack.com), I posted the first five chapters of the manuscript of this novel, in the hope that readers who had read the other books in the series more recently than I might be able to catch inadvertent inconsistencies and other problems. The Hatrack River community did not disappoint me. Among the many who responded-and I thank them all-I found particular value in the suggestions of Keiko A. Haun ("accio"), .Justin Pollen, Chris Bridges, Josh Galvez ("Zevlag"), David Tayman ("Taalcon"), Alison Purnell ("Eaquae Legit"), Vicki Norris ("CKDexterHaven"), Michael Sloan ("Papa Moose"), and Oliver Withstandley.

      In addition, I had the help, chapter by chapter through the whole book, of my regular crew of first readers-Phillip and Em Absher, Kathryn H. Kidd, and my son Geoffrey. My wife, Kristine A. Card, as usual read each chapter while the pages were still warm from the LaserJet. Without them I could not have proceeded with this book.

      The second problem posed by this novel was that I wrote it during the war in Afghanistan between the U.S. and its allies and the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. Since in Shadow Puppets I had to show the future state of relations between the Muslim and Western worlds, and between Israel and its Muslim neighbors, I had to make a prediction about how the current hate-filled situation might someday be resolved. Since I take quite seriously my responsibility to the nations and peoples I write about, I was dependent for much of my understanding of the causes of the present situation on Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2001).

      This book is dedicated to my wife's parents. Besides the fact that much of the peace and joy in Kristine's and my lives comes from our close and harmonious relationship with both our extended families, I owe an additional debt to James B. Allen, for his excellent work as a historian, yes, but more personally for having taught me to approach history fearlessly, going wherever the evidence leads, assuming neither the best nor the worst about people of the past, and adapting my personal worldview wherever it needs adjustment, but never carelessly throwing out previous ideas that remain valid.

      To my assistants, Kathleen Bellamy and Scott Allen, I owe much more than I pay them. As for my children, Geoffrey, Emily. and Zina, and my wife, Kristine, they are the reason it's worth getting out of bed each day.