The shadow quintet, p.81
The Shadow Quintet, page 81
If there is anything that can be called my “life study,” it is precisely this subject area: great leaders and great forces shaping the interplay of nations and peoples throughout history. As a child, I would put myself to sleep at night imagining a map of the world as it existed in the late fifties, just as the great colonial empires were beginning to grant independence, one by one, to the colonies that had once made up those great swathes of British pink and French blue across Africa and southern Asia. I imagined all those colonies as free countries, and, choosing one of them or some other relatively small nation, I would imagine alliance, unifications, invasions, conquests, until all the world was united under one magnanimous, democratic government. Cincinnatus and George Washington, not Caesar or Napoleon, were my models. I read Machiavelli’s The Prince and Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but I also read Mormon scripture (most notably the Book of Mormon stories of the generals Gideon, Moroni, Helaman, and Gidgiddoni, and Doctrine and Covenants section 121) and the Old and New Testaments, all the while trying to imagine how one might govern well when law gives way to exigency, and the circumstances under which war becomes righteous.
I don’t pretend that the imaginings and studies of my life have brought me to great answers, and you will find no such answers in Shadow of the Hegemon. But I do believe I understand something of the workings of the world of government, politics, and war, both at their best and at their worst. I have sought the borderline between strength and ruthlessness, between ruthlessness and cruelty, and at the other extreme, between goodness and weakness, between weakness and betrayal. I have pondered how it is that some societies are able to get young men to kill and die with fervor trumping fear, and yet others seem to lose their will to survive or at least their will to do the things that make survival possible. And Shadow of the Hegemon and the two remaining books in this long tale of Bean, Petra, and Peter are my best attempt to use what I have learned in a tale in which great forces, large populations, and individuals of heroic if not always virtuous character combine to give shape to an imaginary, but I hope believable, history.
I am crippled in this effort by the factor that real life is rarely plausible—we believe that people would or could do these things only because we have documentation. Fiction, lacking that documentation, dares not be half so implausible. On the other hand, we can do what history never can—we can assign motive to human behavior, which cannot be refuted by any witness or evidence. So, despite doing my utmost to be truthful about how history happens, in the end I must depend on the novelist’s tools. Do you care about this person, or that one? Do you believe such a person would do the things I say they do, for the reasons I assign?
History, when told as epic, often has the thrilling grandeur of Dvorak or Smetana, Borodin or Mussorgsky, but historical fiction must also find the intimacies and dissonances of the delicate little piano pieces of Satie and Debussy. For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events. Tchaikowsky can carry me away, but I tire quickly of the large effect, which feels so hollow and false on the second hearing. Of Satie I never tire, for his music is endlessly surprising and yet perfectly satisfying. If I can bring off this novel in Tchaikowsky’s terms, that is well and good; but if I can also give you moments of Satie, I am far happier, for that is the harder and, ultimately, more rewarding task.
Besides my lifelong study of history in general, two books particularly influenced me during the writing of Shadow of the Hegemon. When I saw Anna and the King, I became impatient with my own ignorance of real Thai history, and so found David K. Wyatt’s Thailand: A Short History (Yale, 1982, 1984). Wyatt writes clearly and convincingly, making the history of the Thai people both intelligible and fascinating. It is hard to imagine a nation that has been more lucky in the quality of its leaders as Thailand and its predecessor kingdoms, which managed to survive invasions from every direction and European and Japanese ambitions in Southeast Asia, all the while maintaining its own national character and remaining, more than many kingdoms and oligarchies, responsive to the needs of the Thai people. (I followed Wyatt’s lead in calling the pre-Siamese language and the people who spoke it, in lands from Laos to upper Burma and southern China, “Tai,” reserving “Thai” for the modern language and kingdom that bear that name.)
My own country once had leaders comparable to Siam’s Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, and public servants as gifted and selfless as many of Chulalongkorn’s brothers and nephews, but unlike Thailand, America is now a nation in decline, and my people have little will to be well led. America’s past and its resources make it a major player for the nonce, but nations of small resources but strong will can change the course of world history, as the Huns, the Mongols, and the Arabs have shown, sometimes to devastating effect, and as the people of the Ganges have shown far more pacifically.
Which brings me to the second book, Lawrence James’s Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (Little, Brown, 1997). Modern Indian history reads like one long tragedy of good, or at least bold, intentions leading to disaster, and in Shadow of the Hegemon I consciously echoed some of the themes I found in James’s book.
As always, I relied on others to help me with this book by reading the first draft of each chapter to give me some idea whether I had wrought what I intended. My wife, Kristine; my son Geoffrey; and Kathy H. Kidd and Erin and Phillip Absher were my most immediate readers, and I thank them for helping prevent many a moment of inclarity or ineffectiveness.
The person most influential in giving this book the shape it has, however, is the aforementioned Phillip Absher, for when he read the first version of a chapter in which Petra was rescued from Russian captivity and united with Bean, he commented that I had built up her kidnapping so much that it was rather disappointing how easily the problem turned out to be resolved. I had not realized how high I had raised expectations, but I could see that he was right—that her easy release was not only a breaking of an implied promise with the reader, but also implausible under the circumstances. So instead of her kidnapping being an early event in a very involved story, I realized that it could and should provide the overarching structure of the entire novel, thus splitting what was to be one novel into two. As the story of Han Qing-jao took over Xenocide and caused it to become two books, so also the story of Petra took over this, Bean’s second book, and caused there to be a third, Shadow of Death (which I may extend to the longer phrase from the Twenty-third Psalm, The Valley of the Shadow of Death; it would never do to become tied to a title too early). The book originally planned to be third will now be the fourth, Shadow of the Giant. All because Phillip felt a bit disappointed and, just as importantly, said so, causing me to think again about the structure I had unconsciously created in subversion of my conscious plans.
I rarely write two novels at once, but I did this time, going back and forth between Shadow of the Hegemon and Sarah, my historical novel about the wife of Abraham (Shadow Mountain, 2000). The novels sustained each other in odd ways, each of them dealing with history during times of chaos and transformation—like the one the world is embarking upon at the time of this writing. In both stories, personal loyalties, ambitions, and passions sometimes shape the course of the history and sometimes surf upon history’s wave, trying merely to stay just ahead of the breaking crest. May all who read these books find their own ways to do the same. It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.
As always, I have relied upon Kathleen Bellamy and Scott Allen to help keep communications open between me and my readers, and many who visited and’ took part in my online communities at http://www.hatrack.com, http://www.frescopix.com, and http://www.nauvoo.com* helped me, often in ways they did not realize.
Many writers produce their art from a maelstrom of domestic chaos and tragedy. I am fortunate enough to write from within an island of peace and love, created by my wife, Kristine, my children, Geoffrey, Emily, Charlie Ben, and Zina, and good and dear friends and family who surround us and enrich our lives with their good will, kind help, and happy company. Perhaps I would write better were my life more miserable, but I have no interest in performing the experiment.
In particular, though, I write this book for my second son, Charlie Ben, who wordlessly has given great gifts to all who know him. Within the small community of his family, of school friends at Gateway Education Center, and of church friends in the Greensboro Summit Ward, Charlie Ben has given and received much friendship and love without uttering a word, as he patiently endures his pain and limitations, gladly receives the kindness of others, and generously shares his love and joy with all who care to receive it. Twisted by cerebral palsy, his body movements may look strange and disturbing to strangers, but to those willing to look more closely, a young man of beauty, humor, kindness, and joy can be found. May we all learn to see past such outward signs, and show our true selves through all barriers, however opaque they seem. And Charlie, who will never hold this book in his own hands or read it with his own eyes, will nevertheless hear it read to him by loving friends and family members. So to you, Charlie, I say: I am proud of all you do with your life, and glad to be your father; though you deserved a better one, you have been generous enough to love the one you have.
SHADOW PUPPETS
ORSON SCOTT CARD
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
SHADOW PUPPETS
Copyright © 2002 by Orson Scott Card
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form.
Edited by Beth Meacham
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5674-1
TO JAMES AND RENÉE ALLEN,
ENTWINED WITH US ALWAYS
IN THE GREAT WEB OF LIFE
1
GROWN
From: NoAddress@Untraceable.com#14h9cc0/SIGN UP NOW AND STAY ANONYMOUS!
To: Trireme%Salamis@Attica-vs-Sparta.hst
Re: Final decision
Wiggin:
Subj not to be killed. Subj will be transported according to plan 2, route 1. Dep Tue. 0400, checkpoint #3 @ 0600, which is first light. Please be smart enough to remember the international dateline. He is yours if you want him.
If your intelligence outweighs your ambition you will kill him. If vice versa, you will try to use him. You did not ask my advice, but I have seen him in action: Kill him.
True, without an antagonist to frighten the world you will never retrieve the power the office of Hegemon once had. It would be the end of your career.
Let him live, and it is the end of your life, and you will leave the world in his power when you die. Who is the monster? Or at least monster #2?
And I have told you how to get him. Am I monster #3? Or merely fool #1?
Your faithful servant in motley.
Bean kind of liked being tall, even though it was going to kill him.
And at the rate he was growing, it would be sooner rather than later. How long did he have? A year? Three? Five? The ends of his bones were still like a child’s, blossoming, lengthening; even his head was growing, so that like a baby he had a soft patch of cartilage and new bone along the crest of his skull.
It meant constant adjustment, as week by week his arms reached farther when he flung them out, his feet were longer and caught on stairs and sills, his legs were longer so that as he walked he covered ground more quickly, and companions had to hurry to keep up. When he trained with his soldiers, the elite company of men that constituted the entire military force of the Hegemony, he could now run ahead of them, his stride longer than theirs.
He had long since earned the respect of his men. But now, thanks to his height, they finally, literally, looked up to him.
Bean stood on the grass where two assault choppers were waiting for his men to board. Today the mission was a dangerous one—to penetrate Chinese air space and intercept a small convoy transporting a prisoner from Beijing toward the interior. Everything depended on secrecy, surprise, and the extraordinarily accurate information the Hegemon, Peter Wiggin, had been receiving from inside China in the past few months.
Bean wished he knew the source of the intelligence, because his life and the lives of his men depended on it. The accuracy up to now could easily have been a setup. Even though “Hegemon” was essentially an empty title now, since most of the world’s population resided in countries that had withdrawn their recognition of the authority of the office, Peter Wiggin had been using Bean’s soldiers well. They were a constant irritant to the newly expansionist China, inserting themselves here and there at exactly the moment most calculated to disrupt the confidence of the Chinese leadership.
The patrol boat that suddenly disappears, the helicopter that goes down, the spy operation that is abruptly rolled up, blinding the Chinese intelligence service in yet another country—officially the Chinese hadn’t even accused the Hegemon of any involvement in such incidents, but that only meant that they didn’t want to give any publicity to the Hegemon, didn’t want to boost his reputation or prestige among those who feared China in these years since the conquest of India and Indochina. They almost certainly knew who was the source of their woes.
Indeed, they probably gave Bean’s little force the credit for problems that were actually the ordinary accidents of life. The death of the foreign minister of a heart attack in Washington, D.C. only minutes before meeting with the U.S. president—they might really think Peter Wiggin’s reach was that long, or that he thought the Chinese foreign minister, a party hack, was worth assassinating.
And the fact that a devastating drought was in its second year in India, forcing the Chinese either to buy food on the open market or allow relief workers from Europe and the Americas into the newly captured and still rebellious subcontinent—maybe they even imagined that Peter Wiggin could control the monsoon rains.
Bean had no such illusions. Peter Wiggin had all kinds of contacts throughout the world, a collection of informants that was gradually turning into a serious network of spies, but as far as Bean could tell, Peter was still just playing a game. Oh, Peter thought it was real enough, but he had never seen what happened in the real world. He had never seen people die as a result of his orders.
Bean had, and it was not a game.
He heard his men approaching. He knew without looking that they were very close, for even here, in supposedly safe territory—an advance staging area in the mountains of Mindanao in the Philippines—they moved as silently as possible. But he also knew that he had heard them before they expected him to, for his senses had always been unusually keen. Not the physical sense organs—his ears were quite ordinary—but the ability of his brain to recognize even the slightest variation from the ambient sound. That’s why he raised a hand in greeting to men who were only just emerging from the forest behind him.
He could hear the changes in their breathing—sighs, almost-silent chuckles—that told him they recognized that he had caught them again. As if it were a grown-up game of Mother-May-I, and Bean always seemed to have eyes in the back of his head.
Suriyawong came up beside him as the men filed by in two columns to board the choppers, heavily laden for the mission ahead.
“Sir,” said Suriyawong.
That made Bean turn. Suriyawong never called him “sir.”
His second-in-command, a Thai only a few years older than Bean, was now half a head shorter. He saluted Bean, and then turned toward the forest he had just come from.
When Bean turned to face the same direction, he saw Peter Wiggin, the Hegemon of Earth, the brother of Ender Wiggin who saved the world from the Formic invasion only a few years before—Peter Wiggin, the conniver and gamesman. What was he playing at now?
“I hope you aren’t insane enough to be coming along on this mission,” said Bean.
“What a cheery greeting,” said Peter. “That is a gun in your pocket, so I guess you aren’t happy to see me.”
Bean hated Peter most when Peter tried to banter. So he said nothing. Waited.
“Julian Delphiki, there’s been a change of plans,” said Peter.
Calling him by his full name, as if he were Bean’s father. Well, Bean had a father—even if he didn’t know he had one until after the war was over, and they told him that Nikolai Delphiki wasn’t just his friend, he was his brother. But having a father and mother show up when you’re eleven isn’t the same as growing up with them. No one had called Bean “Julian Delphiki” when he was little. No one had called him anything at all, until they tauntingly called him Bean on the streets of Rotterdam.
Peter never seemed to see the absurdity of it, talking down to Bean. I fought in the war against the Buggers, Bean wanted to say. I fought beside your brother Ender, while you were playing your little games with rabble-rousing on the nets. And while you’ve been filling your empty little role as Hegemon, I’ve been leading these men into combat that actually made a difference in the world. And you tell me there’s been a change of plans?
“Let’s scrub the mission,” said Bean. “Last-minute changes in plan lead to unnecessary losses in battle.”
“Actually, this one won’t,” said Peter. “Because the only change is that you’re not going.”
“And you’re going in my place?” Bean did not have to show scorn in his voice or on his face. Peter was bright enough to know that the idea was a joke. Peter was trained for nothing except writing essays, shmoozing with politicians, playing at geopolitics.
