Counted them, but was angry at them all the same. He knew it was irrational, but the whole way up to MinCol, he kept coming back to the same seething memory of the way his parents had always judged him as a child and found him wanting, while Ender and Valentine could do no wrong. Being a fundamentally reasonable person, he took due notice of the fact that since Val and Ender left in a colony ship, his parents had been completely supportive of him. Had saved him more than once. He could not have asked any more from them even if they had actually loved him. They did their duty as parents, and more than their duty.

  But it didn’t erase the pain of those earlier years when everything he did seemed to be wrong, every natural instinct an offense against one of their versions of God or the other. Well, in all your judging, remember this—it was Ender who turned out to be Cain, wasn’t it! And you always thought it was going to be me.

  Stupid stupid stupid, Peter told himself. Ender didn’t kill his brother, Ender defended himself against his enemies. As I have done.

  I have to get over this, he told himself again and again during the voyage.

  I wish there were something to look at besides the stupid vids. Or Dad snoring. Or Mother looking at me now and then, sizing me up, and then winking. Does she have any idea how awful that is? How demeaning? To wink at me! What about smiling? What about looking at me with that dreamy fond expression she used to have for Val and Ender? Of course she liked them.

  Stop it. Think about what you have to do, fool.

  Think about what you have to write and publish, as Locke and as Demosthenes, to rouse the people in the free countries, to goad the governments of the nations ruled from above. There could be no business as usual, he couldn’t allow that. But it was hard to keep the people’s attention on a war in which no shots were being fired. A war that took place in a faraway land. What did they care, in Argentina, that the people of India had a government not of their choosing? Why should it matter to a light farmer tending his photovoltaic screens in the Kalahari Desert whether the people of Thailand were having dirt kicked in their faces?

  China had no designs on Namibia or Argentina. The war was over. Why wouldn’t people just shut up about it and go back to making money?

  That was Peter’s enemy. Not Achilles, ultimately. Not even China. It was the apathy of the rest of the world that played into their hands.

  And here I am in space, no longer free to move about, far more dependent than I’ve ever been before. Because if Graff decides not to send me back to Earth, then I can’t go. There’s no alternative transport. He seems to be entirely on my side. But it’s his former Battle School brats that have his true loyalty. He thinks he can use me as I thought I could use Achilles. I was wrong. But probably he is right.

  After all the voyaging, it was so frustrating to be there and still have to wait while the shuttle did its little dance of lining up with the station dock. There was nothing to watch. They blanked the “windows” because it was too nauseating in zero-G to watch the Earth spin madly as the shuttle matched the rotation of the great wheel.

  My career might already be over. I might already have earned whatever mention I’ll have in history. I might already be nothing but a footnote in other people’s biographies, a paragraph in the history books.

  Really, at this point my best strategy for beefing up my reputation is probably to be assassinated in some colorful way.

  But the way things are going, I’ll probably die in some tragic airlock accident while doing a routine docking at the MinCol space station.

  “Stop wallowing,” said Mother.

  He looked at her sharply. “I’m not,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Be angry at me. That’s better than feeling sorry for yourself.”

  He wanted to snap back angrily, but he realized the futility of denying what they all knew was true. He was depressed, definitely, and yet he still had to work. Like the day of his press conference when they dragged him out of bed. He didn’t want a repeat of that humiliation. He’d do his work without having to have his parents prod him like some adolescent. And he wouldn’t get snippy at them when they merely told him the truth.

  So he smiled at her. “Come on, Mother, you know that if I were on fire, nobody would so much as pee on me to put it out.”

  “Be honest, son,” said his father. “There are hundreds of thousands of people back on Earth who have only to be asked. And some dozens who would do it without waiting for an invitation, if they saw an opportunity.”

  “There are some good points about fame,” Peter observed. “And those with empty bladders would probably chip in with a little spit.”

  “This is getting quite disgusting,” said Mother.

  “You say that because it’s your job to say it,” said Peter.

  “I’m underpaid, then,” said Mother. “Because it’s nearly a fulltime position.”

  “Your role in life. So womanly. Men need civilizing, and you’re just the one to do it.”

  “I’m obviously not very good at it.”

  At that moment the IF sergeant who was their flight steward came into the main cabin and told them it was time to go.

  Because they docked at the center of the station, there was no gravity. They floated along, gripping handrails as the steward flipped their bags so they sailed through the airlock just under them. They were caught by a couple of orderlies who had obviously done this a hundred times, and were not the least bit impressed by having the Hegemon himself come to MinCol.

  Though in all probability nobody knew who they were. They were traveling under false papers, of course, but Graff had undoubtedly let someone in the station know who they really were.

  Probably not the orderlies, though.

  Not until they were down one spoke of the wheel to a level where there was a definite floor to walk on did they meet anyone of real status in the station. A man in the grey suit that served MinCol as a uniform waited at the foot of the elevator, his hand outstretched. “Mr. and Mrs. Raymond,” he said. “I’m Underminister Dimak. And this must be your son, Dick.”

  Peter smiled wanly at the faint humor in the pseudonym Graff had arbitrarily assigned to him.

  “Please tell me that you know who we really are so we don’t have to keep up this charade,” said Peter.

  “I know,” said Dimak softly, “but nobody else on this station does, and I’d like to keep it that way for now.”

  “Graff isn’t here?”

  “The Minister of Colonization is returning from his inspection of the outfitting of the newest colony ship. We’re two weeks away from first leg on that one, and starting next week you won’t believe the traffic that’ll come through here, sixteen shuttles a day, and that’s just for the colonists. The freighters go directly to the dry dock.”

  “Is there,” said Father innocently, “a wet dock?”

  Dimak grinned. “Nautical terminology dies hard.”

  Dimak led them along a corridor to a down tube. They slid down the pole after him. The gravity wasn’t so intense yet as to make this a problem, even for Peter’s parents, who were, after all, in their forties. He helped them step out of the shaft into a lower—and therefore “heavier”—corridor.

  There were old-fashioned directional stripes along the walls. “Your palm prints have already been keyed,” said Dimak. “Just touch here, and it will lead you to your room.”

  “This is left over from the old days, isn’t it?” said Father. “Though I don’t imagine you were here when this was still—”

  “But I was here,” said Dimak. “I was mother to groups of new kids. Not your son, I’m afraid. But an acquaintance of yours, I believe.”

  Peter did not want to put himself in the pathetic position of naming off Battle School graduates he knew. Mother had no such qualms.

  “Petra?” she said. “Suriyawong?”

  Dimak leaned in close, so his voice would not have to be pitched loud enough that it might be overheard. “Bean,” he said.

  “He must have been a remarkable boy,” said Mother.

  “Looked like a three-year-old when he got here,” said Dimak. “Nobody could believe he was old enough for this place.”

  “He doesn’t look like that now,” said Peter dryly.

  “No, I…I know about his condition. It’s not public knowledge, but Colonel Graff—the minister, I mean—he knows that I still care what happens to—well, to all my kids, of course—but this one was…I imagine your son’s first trainer felt much the same way about him.”

  “I hope so,” said Mother.

  The sentimentality was getting so sweet Peter wanted to brush his teeth. He palmed the pad by the entrance and three strips lit up. “Green green brown,” said Dimak. “But soon you won’t be needing this. It’s not as if there’s miles of open country here to get lost in. The stripe system always assumes that you want to go back to your room, except when you touch the pad just outside the door of your room, and then it thinks you want to go to the bathroom—none inside the rooms, I’m afraid, it wasn’t built that way. But if you want to go to the mess hall, just slap the pad twice and it’ll know.”

  He showed them to their quarters, which consisted of a single long room with bunks in rows along both sides of a narrow aisle. “I’m afraid you’ll have company for the week we’re loading up the ship, but nobody’ll be here very long, and then you’ll have the place to yourself for three more weeks.”

  “You’re doing a launch a month?” said Peter. “How, exactly, are you funding a pace like that?”

  Dimak looked at him blankly. “I don’t actually know,” he said.

  Peter leaned in close and imitated the voice Dimak used for secrets. “I’m the Hegemon,” he said. “Officially, your boss works for me.”

  Dimak whispered back, “You save the world, we’ll finance the colony program.”

  “I could have used a little more money for my operations, I can tell you,” said Peter.

  “Every Hegemon feels that way,” said Dimak. “Which is why our funding doesn’t come through you.”

  Peter laughed. “Smart move. If you think the colonization program is very very important.”

  “It’s the future of the human race,” said Dimak simply. “The Buggers—pardon me, the Formics—had the right idea. Spread out as far as you can, so you can’t be wiped out in a single disastrous war. Not that it saved them, but…we aren’t hive creatures.”

  “Aren’t we?” said Father.

  “Well, if we are, then who’s the queen?” asked Dimak.

  “In this place,” said Father, “I suspect it’s Graff.”

  “And we’re all just his little arms and legs?”

  “And mouths and…well, yes, of course. A little more independent and a little less obedient than the individual Formics, of course, but that’s how a species comes to dominate a world the way we did, and they did. Because you know how to get a large number of individuals to give up their personal will and subject themselves to a group mind.”

  “So this is philosophy we’re doing here,” said Dimak.

  “Or very cutting-edge science,” said Father. “The behavior of humans in groups. Degrees of allegiance. I think about it a lot.”

  “How interesting.”

  “I see that you’re not interested at all,” said Father. “And that I’m now in your book as an eccentric who brings up his theories. But I never do, actually. I don’t know why I did just now. I just…it’s the first time I’ve been in Graff’s house, so to speak. And meeting you was very much like visiting with him.”

  “I’m…flattered,” said Dimak.

  “John Paul,” said Mother, “I do believe you’re making Mr. Dimak uncomfortable.”

  “When people feel great allegiance to their community, they start to take on the mannerisms as well as the morals of their leader,” said Father, refusing to give up.

  “If their leader has a personality,” said Peter.

  “How do you get to be a leader without one?” asked Father.

  “Ask Achilles,” said Peter. “He’s the opposite. He takes on the mannerisms of the people he wants to have follow him.”

  “I don’t remember that one,” said Dimak. “He was only here a few days before he—before we discovered he had a track record of murder back on Earth.”

  “Someday you have to tell me how Bean got him to confess. He won’t tell.”

  “If he won’t tell, neither will I,” said Dimak.

  “How loyal,” said Father.

  “Not really,” said Dimak. “I just don’t know myself. I know it had something to do with a ventilation shaft.”

  “That confession,” said Peter. “The recordings wouldn’t still be here, would they?”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” said Dimak. “And even if they were, they’re part of a sealed juvenile record.”

  “Of a mass murderer.”

  “We only notice laws when they act against our interest,” said Dimak.

  “See?” said Father. “We’ve traded philosophies.”

  “Like tribesmen swapping at a potlatch,” said Dimak. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to have you talk with Security Chief Uphanad before dinner.”

  “What about?”

  “The colonists aren’t a problem—they have a one-way flow and they can’t easily communicate planetside. But you’re probably going to be recognized here. And even if you’re not, it’s hard to maintain a false story for long.”

  “Then let’s not have a false story,” said Peter.

  “No, let’s have a really good one,” said Mother.

  “Let’s just not talk to anybody,” said Father.

  “Those are precisely the issues that Major Uphanad wants to discuss with you.”

  Once Dimak had left, they chose bunks at the back of the long room. Peter took a top bunk, of course, but while he was unloading his bags into the locker in the wall behind the bunk, Father discovered that each set of six bunks—three on each side—could be separated from the others by a privacy curtain.

  “It has to be a retrofit,” said Father. “I can’t believe they would let the kids seal themselves off from each other.”

  “How soundproof is this material?” asked Mother.

  Father pulled it around in a circular motion, so it irised shut with him on the other side. They heard nothing from him. Then he dilated it open.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Pretty effective sound barrier,” said Mother.

  “You did try to talk to us, didn’t you?” asked Peter.

  “No, I was listening for you,” said Father.

  “Well we were listening for you, John Paul,” said Mother.

  “No, I spoke. I didn’t shout, but you couldn’t hear me, right?”

  “Peter,” said Mother, “you just got moved to the next compartment over.”

  “That won’t work when the colonists come through.”

  “You can come back and sleep in Mommy’s and Daddy’s room when the visitors come,” said Mother.

  “You’ll have to walk through my room in order to get to the bathroom,” said Peter.

  “That’s right,” said Father. “I know you’re Hegemon and should have the best room, but then, we’re not likely to walk in on you making love.”

  “Don’t count on it,” said Peter sourly.

  “We’ll open the door just a little and say ‘knock knock’ before we come through,” said Mother. “It’ll give you time to smuggle your best pal out of sight.”

  It made him faintly nauseated to be having this discussion with his parents. “You two are so cute. I’m really glad to change rooms here, believe me.”

  It was good to have solitude, once the door was closed, even if the price of it was moving all his stuff out of the locker he had just loaded and putting it in a locker in the next section. Now he got a lower bunk, for one thing. And for another thing, he didn’t have to put up with listening to his parents try to cheer him up.

  He had to have thinking time.

  So of course he promptly fell asleep.

  Dimak woke him by speaking to him over the intercom. “Mr. Raymond, are you there?”

  It took Peter a split second to remember that he was supposed to be Dick Raymond. “Yes. Unless you want my father.”

  “Already spoke to him,” said Dimak. “I’ve keyed the guidebars to lead you to the security department.”

  It was on the top level, with the lowest gravity—which made sense, because if security action were required, officers dispersing from the main office would have a downhill trip to wherever they were going.

  When they stepped inside the office, Major Uphanad was there to greet them. He offered his hand to all of them.

  “Are you from India?” asked Mother, “or Pakistan?”

  “India,” said Uphanad, not breaking his smile at all.

  “I’m so sorry for your country,” said Mother.

  “I haven’t been back there since—in a long time.”

  “I hope your family is faring well under the Chinese occupation.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” said Uphanad, in a tone of voice that made it clear this topic was finished.

  He offered them chairs and sat down himself—behind his desk, taking full advantage of his official position. Peter resented it a little, since he had spent a good while now as the man who was always in the dominant place. He might not have had much actual power, as Hegemon, but protocol always gave him the highest place.

  But he was not supposed to be known here. So he could hardly be treated differently from any civilian visitor.

  “I know that you are particular guests of the Minister,” said Uphanad, “and that you wish your privacy to be undisturbed. What we need to discuss is the boundary of your privacy. Are your faces likely to be recognized?”

  “Possibly,” said Peter. “Especially his.” He pointed to his father. This was a lie, of course, and probably futile, but…

  “Ah,” said Uphanad. “And I assume your real names would be recognized.”

  “Likely,” said Father.

  “Certainly,” said Mother, as if she were proud of the fact and rather miffed that he had cast any doubt on it at all.

 

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