Shadow Puppets (10 page)

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

“So the job is done,” said Theresa, “and there’s no more use for him.”

“I never really thought of you as a murderer.”

“I’m not.”

“But you had a plan, right?”

“I was testing to see if any plan was possible—if I
could
get into his room. The answer was no.”

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

“I probably won’t do it,” said Theresa.

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

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

“But there’s a better way,” said John Paul.

“Besides killing him?”

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

“I don’t recall inviting you into my evil conspiracy.”

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

“I know, I know.”

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

“Killing is more final.”

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

“So what’s your better plan?”

“We get the Beast to try to kill
us
.”

Theresa looked at him dumbfounded.

“We don’t let him
succeed
,” said John Paul.

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

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

“But nobody likes
you
,” said Theresa. “What if it’s you he goes for first?”

“Whichever,” said John Paul.

“And how will we know what he’s plotting?”

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

“I can think of a hundred ways, one of which is—he does it himself, without telling anybody.”

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

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

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

“Mother bear protects the cub,” said Theresa.

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

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

“We’ll get the beast thrown out of here,” said John Paul. “One way or another.”

That was the plan—which, John Paul knew, was no plan at all, since Theresa hadn’t actually promised him she’d give up on her plot to become a killer-by-stealth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter was irritated, but answered politely enough. “Go ahead.”

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

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

“What’s funny?”

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

“Which software did you use?” asked Ferreira.

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

“But didn’t your software at least
tell
you?” asked Peter, annoyed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But we have to meld
all
of them in order to find Achilles’s log-ons.”

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

“Write a program,” murmured Ferreira.

“Or I will,” said Peter. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

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

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

“I’ll sort it out,” said Ferreira.

“I’m sorry,” said John Paul.

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

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

“There’s no reason for you to know,” said Peter.

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

“Father,” said Peter impatiently. “He doesn’t even know her.”

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

“But…
kill
her?” asked Ferreira.

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

“Not even you, Father?” asked Peter sweetly.

“She doesn’t see your faults,” lied John Paul. “Her motherly instincts blind her.”

“But you have no such handicap.”

“Not being your mother,” said John Paul.

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

“Systems always do,” said John Paul.

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

“Protect you?”

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

“Ah. You’re the only person here worth killing.”

“I’m the only one whose death would remove a major obstacle from Achilles’s path.”

John Paul could only shake his head.

“Who else, then?” Peter demanded.

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

“Well, yes, of course, he’s psychotic,” said Peter. “I didn’t mean he wasn’t psychotic.”

“So many psychotics, so few really effective drugs,” said John Paul as he left the room.

That night when he told Theresa, she groaned. “So he’s been getting a free ride.”

“We’ll put it all together soon enough, I’m sure,” said John Paul.

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

“It’s not the same city,” said Bean.

“Well, of course not,” said Petra. “You’re taller.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That really slops your hogs, doesn’t it,” she said.

“You watch too many vids. You’re beginning to pick up American slang.”

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

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

“He’s not your maker,” said Petra.

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

“I was referring to God,” said Petra.

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

“Don’t goad me about religion,” said Petra. “I won’t play.”

“You started it,” said Bean.

“I’m not Sister Carlotta.”

“I couldn’t have married you if you were. Was that your choice? Me or the nunnery?”

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

A necessity, but also what she wanted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he had done it.

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

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

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

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

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

If that wasn’t love, it would do.

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

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

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

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

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

“If we wait long enough,” said Bean, “they’ll close the office.”

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

“I thought it was
my
success, not his.”

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

“Yours? How?”

“It must have been. I’m the one who ended up with all the prizes.”

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

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

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

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

“Let’s not go inside,” said Bean. “Let’s go back to the inn and have some more feelings.”

She kissed him. “Let’s go inside and make a baby.”

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

“I know,” she said.

“And I have your promise that embryos with Anton’s Key will all be discarded.”

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

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

“All right then,” he said.

“All right then,” she answered. “Time to go meet the baby killer, né?”

“I don’t suppose we should call him that to his face, though, right?”

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

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

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

Again he eyed Bean from head to toe.

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

“I’m sorry,” said Volescu. “I know that other business has brought you here. Very important business.”

“You’re sure,” said Bean, “that your test for Anton’s Key is absolutely accurate and nondestructive?”

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

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

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