The shadow quintet, p.51
The Shadow Quintet, page 51
The only member of Ender’s jeesh who had been with Bean that day was Crazy Tom. Bean had never talked about it, and no one asked. It made Bean a figure of mystery, that he had come from a life so dark and frightening that it was peopled with monsters like Achilles. What none of them had ever expected was to find Achilles, not in a mental institution or a prison, but here in Russia with soldiers under his command and themselves as his prisoners.
When Achilles studied the vids, it was possible that Crazy Tom would show recognition. And when he told his story, he would no doubt see recognition on all their faces. She had no idea what this meant, but she knew it couldn’t be good. One thing was certain—she wasn’t going to let Crazy Tom face the consequences alone.
“We all know who you are,” said Petra. “You’re Achilles. And nobody left you for dead, the way Bean told it. They left you for the teachers. To arrest and send you back to Earth. To a mental institution, no doubt. Bean even showed us your picture. If anybody recognized you, it was from that.”
Achilles turned to her and smiled. “Bean would never tell that story. He would never show my picture.”
“Then you don’t know Bean,” said Petra. She hoped the others would realize that admitting they heard it from Crazy Tom would be dangerous to him. Probably fatal, with this oomay in charge of the triggers. Bean wasn’t here, so naming him as the source made sense.
“Oh, yes, you’re quite the team,” said Achilles. “Passing signals to each other, sabotaging the plans you submit, thinking we’ll be too stupid to notice. Did you really think we’d set you to work on real plans before we turned you?”
As usual, Petra couldn’t shut up. But she didn’t really want to, either. “Trying to see which of us felt like outsiders, so you could turn them?” she said. “What a joke—there were no outsiders in Ender’s jeesh. The only outsider here is you.”
In fact, though, she knew perfectly well that Carn Carby, Shen, Vlad, and Fly Molo felt like outsiders, for various reasons. She felt like one herself. Her words were designed only to urge them all to maintain solidarity.
“So now you divide us up and start working on us,” said Petra. “Achilles, we know your moves before you make them.”
“You really can’t hurt my pride,” said Achilles. “Because I don’t have any. All I care about is uniting humanity under one government. Russia is the only nation, the only people who have the will to greatness and the power to back it up. You’re here because some of you might be useful in that effort. If we think you have what it takes, we’ll invite you to join us. The rest of you, we’ll just keep on ice till the war is over. The real losers, well, we’ll send you home and hope your home government uses you against us.” He grinned. “Come on, don’t look so grim. You know you were going crazy back home. You didn’t even know those people. You left them when you were so little you still got shit on your fingers when you wiped your ass. What did they know about you? What did you know about them? That they let you go. Me, I didn’t have any families, Battle School just meant three meals a day. But you, they took away everything from you. You don’t owe them anything. What you’ve got is your mind. Your talent. You’ve been tagged for greatness. You won their war with the Buggers for them. And they sent you home so your parents could go back to raising you?”
Nobody said anything. Petra was sure they all had as much contempt for his spiel as she did. He knew nothing about them. He’d never be able to divide them. He’d never win their loyalty. They knew too much about him. And they didn’t like being held against their will.
He knew it, too. Petra saw it in his eyes, the rage dancing there as he realized that they had nothing but contempt for him.
At least he could see her contempt, because he zeroed in on her, took a few steps closer, smiling ever more kindly.
“Petra, it’s so nice to meet you,” he said. “The girl who tested so aggressive they had to check your DNA to make sure you weren’t really a boy.”
Petra felt the blood drain from her face. Nobody was supposed to know about that. It was a test the psychiatrists in Ground School had ordered when they decided her contempt for them was a symptom of dysfunction instead of what they deserved for asking her such stupid questions. It wasn’t even supposed to be in her file. But apparently a record existed somewhere. Which was, of course, the message Achilles intended to get across to them: He knew everything. And, as a side benefit, it would start the others wondering just how piffed up she was.
“Ten of you. Only two missing from the glorious victory. Ender, the great one, the genius, the keeper of the holy grail—he’s off founding a colony somewhere. We’ll all be in our fifties by the time he gets there, and he’ll still be a little kid. We’re going to make history. He is history.” Achilles smirked at his pun.
But Petra knew that mocking Ender wasn’t going to play with this group. Achilles no doubt assumed that the ten of them were also-rans, runners-up, the ones who wanted to have Ender’s job and had to sit there and watch him do it. He assumed that they were all burning with envy—because he would have been eaten alive with it. But he was wrong. He didn’t understand them at all. They missed Ender. They were Ender’s jeesh. And this yelda actually thought that he could forge them into a team the way Ender had.
“And then there’s Bean,” Achilles went on. “The youngest of you, the one whose test scores made you all look like halfwits. He could teach the rest of you classes in how to lead armies—except you probably wouldn’t understand him, he’s such a genius. Where could he be? Anybody miss him?”
Nobody answered. This time, though, Petra knew that the silence hid a different set of feelings. There had been some resentment of Bean. Not because of his brilliance, or at least no one admitted resenting him for that. What annoyed them was the way he just assumed he knew better than anyone. And that awkward time before Ender arrived on Eros, when Bean was the acting commander of the jeesh, that was hard on some of them, taking orders from the youngest of them. So maybe Achilles had guessed right about that.
Except that nobody was proud of those feelings, and bringing them out in the open didn’t exactly make them love Achilles. Of course, it might be shame he was trying to provoke. Achilles might be smarter than they thought.
Probably not. He was so out of his league in trying to scope this group of military prodigies that he might as well be wearing a clown suit and throwing water balloons for all the respect he was going to get.
“Ah, yes, Bean,” said Achilles. “I’m sorry to inform you that he’s dead.”
This was apparently too much for Crazy Tom, who yawned and said, “No he’s not.”
Achilles looked amused. “You think you know more about it than I do?”
“We’ve been on the nets,” said Shen. “We’d know.”
“You’ve been away from your desks since 2200. How do you know what’s been happening while you slept?” Achilles glanced at his watch. “Oops, you’re right. Bean is still alive right now. And for another fifteen minutes or so. Then . . . whoosh! A nice little rocket straight to his little bedroom to blow him up right on his little bed. We didn’t even have to buy his location from the Greek military. Our friends there gave us the information for free.”
Petra’s heart sank. If Achilles could arrange for them to be kidnapped, he could certainly arrange for Bean to be killed. Killing was always easier than taking someone alive.
Did Bean already notice the message in the dragon, decode it, and pass along the information? Because if he’s dead, there’s no one else who’ll be able to do it.
Immediately she was ashamed that the news of Bean’s death made her think first of herself. But it didn’t mean she didn’t care about the kid. It meant that she trusted him so much that she had pinned all her hopes on him. If he died, those hopes died with him. It was not indecent of her to think of that.
To say it out loud, that would be indecent. But you can’t help the thoughts that come to mind.
Maybe Achilles was lying. Or maybe Bean would survive, or get away. And if he died, maybe he’d already decoded the message. Maybe he hadn’t. There was nothing Petra could do to change the outcome.
“What, no tears?” said Achilles. “And here I thought you were such close friends. I guess that was all hero-hype.” He chuckled. “Well, I’m done with you for now.” He turned to a soldier by the door. “Travel time.”
The soldier left. They heard a few words of Russian and at once sixteen soldiers came in and divided up, one pair to each of the kids.
“You’re being separated now,” said Achilles. “Wouldn’t want anyone to start thinking of a rescue operation. You can still email each other. We want your creative synergy to continue. After all, you’re the finest little military minds that humanity was able to squeeze out in its hour of need. We’re all really proud of you, and we look forward to seeing your finest work in the near future.”
One of the kids farted loudly.
Achilles only grinned, winked at Petra, and left.
Ten minutes later they were all in separate vehicles, being driven away to points unknown, somewhere in the vast reaches of the largest country on the face of the Earth.
Part Two
ALLIANCES
6
CODE
To: Graff%pilgrimage@colmin.gov
From: Konstan%Briseis@helstrat.gov
Re: Leak
Your Excellency, I write to you myself because I was most vociferously opposing to your plan to take young Julian Delphiki from our protection. I was wrong as we learnt from the missile assault on former apartment today leaving two soldiers dead. We are follow your previous advice by public release that Julian was killed in attack. His room was target in late night and he would die instead of soldiers sleeping there. Penetration of our system very deep, obviously. We trust no one now. You were just in time and I regret my making of delay. My pride in Hellene military made me blind. You see I speak Common a little after all, no more bluffing between me and true friend to Greece. Because of you and not me a great national resource is not destroy.
If Bean had to be in hiding, there were worse places he could be than Araraquara. The town, named for a species of parrot, had been kept as something of a museum piece, with cobbled streets and old buildings. They weren’t particularly beautiful old buildings or picturesque houses—even the cathedral was rather dull, and not particularly ancient, having been finished in the twentieth century. Still, there was the sense of a quieter way of life that had once been common in Brasil. The growth that had turned nearby Ribeirão Preto into a sprawling metropolis had pretty much passed Araraquara by. And even though the people were modern enough—you heard as much Common on the streets as Portuguese these days—Bean felt at home here in a way that he had never felt in Greece, where the desire to be fully European and fully Greek at the same time distorted public life and public spaces.
“It won’t do to feel too much at home,” said Sister Carlotta. “We can’t stay anywhere for long.”
“Achilles is the devil,” said Bean. “Not God. He can’t reach everywhere. He can’t find us without some kind of evidence.”
“He doesn’t have to reach everywhere,” said Sister Carlotta. “Only where we are.”
“His hate for us makes him blind,” said Bean.
“His fear makes him unnaturally alert.”
Bean grinned—it was an old game between them. “It might not be Achilles who took the other kids.”
“It might not be gravity that holds us to Earth,” said Sister Carlotta, “but rather an unknown force with identical properties.”
Then she grinned, too.
Sister Carlotta was a good traveling companion. She had a sense of humor. She understood his jokes and he enjoyed hers. But most of all, she liked to spend hours and hours without saying a thing, doing her work while he did his own. When they did talk, they were evolving a kind of oblique language where they both already knew everything that mattered so they only had to refer to it and the other would understand. Not that this implied they were kindred spirits or deeply attuned. It’s just that their lives only touched at a few key points—they were in hiding, they were cut off from friends and family, and the same enemy wanted them dead. There was no one to gossip about because they knew no one. There was no chat because they had no interests beyond the projects at hand: trying to figure out where the other kids were being held, trying to determine what nation Achilles was serving (which would no doubt soon be serving him), and trying to understand the shape the world was taking so they could interfere with it, perhaps bending the course of history to a better end.
That was Sister Carlotta’s goal, at least, and Bean was willing to take part in it, given that the same research required for the first two projects was identical to the research required for the last. He wasn’t sure that he cared about the shape of history in the future.
He said that to Sister Carlotta once, and she only smiled. “Is it the world outside yourself you don’t care about,” she said, “or the future as a whole, including your own?”
“Why should I care about narrowing down which things in particular I don’t care about?”
“Because if you didn’t care about your own future, you wouldn’t care whether you were alive to see it, and you wouldn’t be going through all this nonsense to stay alive.”
“I’m a mammal,” said Bean. “I try to live forever whether I actually want to or not.”
“You’re a child of God, so you care what happens to his children whether you admit it to yourself or not.”
It was not her glib response that bothered him, because he expected it—he had provoked it, really, no doubt (he told himself) because he liked the reassurance that if there was a God, then Bean mattered to him. No, what bothered him was the momentary darkness that passed across her face. A fleeting expression, barely revealed, which he would not have noticed had he not known her face so well, and had darkness so rarely been expressed on it.
Something that I said made her feel sad. And yet it was a sadness that she wants to conceal from me. What did I say? That I’m a mammal? She’s used to my gibes about her religion. That I might not want to live forever? Perhaps she worries that I’m depressed. That I try to live forever, despite my desires? Perhaps she fears that I’ll die young. Well, that was why they were in Araraquara—to prevent his early death. And hers, too, for that matter. He had no doubt, though, that if a gun were pointed at him, she would leap in front of him to take the bullet. He did not understand why. He would not do the same for her, or for anyone. He would try to warn her, or pull her out of the way, or interfere with the shooter, whatever he could do that left them both a reasonable chance of survival. But he would not deliberately die to save her.
Maybe it was a thing that women did. Or maybe that grown-ups did for children. To give your life to save someone else. To weigh your own survival and decide that it mattered less to you than the survival of another. Bean could not fathom how anyone could feel that way. Shouldn’t the irrational mammal take over, and force them to act for their own survival? Bean had never tried to suppress his own survival instinct, but he doubted that he could even if he tried. But then, maybe older people were more willing to part with their lives, having already spent the bulk of their starting capital. Of course, it made sense for parents to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children, particularly parents too old to make more babies. But Sister Carlotta had never had children. And Bean was not the only one that she would die for. She would leap out to take a bullet for a stranger. She valued her own life less than anyone’s. And that made her utterly alien to him.
Survival, not of the fittest, but of myself—that is the purpose at the core of my being. That is the reason, ultimately, that I do all the things that I’ve done. There have been moments when I felt compassion—when, alone of Ender’s jeesh, I knowingly sent men to their certain deaths, I felt a deep sorrow for them. But I sent them, and they went. Would I, in their place, have gone as they did, obeying an order? Dying to save unknown future generations who would never know their names?
Bean doubted it.
He would gladly serve humanity if it happened also to serve himself. Fighting the Formics alongside Ender and the other kids, that made sense because saving humanity included saving Bean. And if by managing to stay alive somewhere in the world, he was also a thorn in the side of Achilles, making him less cautious, less wise, and therefore easier to defeat—well, it was a pleasant bonus that Bean’s pursuit of his own survival happened also to give the human race a chance to defeat the monster. And since the best way to survive would be to find Achilles and kill him first, he might turn out to be one of the great benefactors of human history. Though now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember a single assassin who was remembered as a hero. Brutus, perhaps. His reputation had had its ups and downs. Most assassins, though, were despised by history. Probably because successful assassins tended to be those whose target was not particularly dangerous to anyone. By the time everyone agreed that a particular monster was well worth assassinating, the monster had far too much power and paranoia to leave any possibility of an assassination actually being carried out.
He got nowhere when he tried to discuss it with Sister Carlotta.
“I can’t argue with you so I don’t know why you bother. I only know that I won’t help you plot his assassination.”
“You don’t consider it self-defense?” said Bean. “What is this, one of those stupid vids where the hero can never actually kill a bad guy who isn’t actually pointing a gun at him right that very moment?”
“It’s my faith in Christ,” said Carlotta. “Love your enemy, do good to those who hate you.”
