Instead, I stupidly allowed children of my deformed and self-destructive genes to be created in vitro and now Volescu has planted them in foreign wombs and I must find them before he and people like him can exploit them and use them up and then watch them die of giantism, like me, before they turn twenty.
Volescu knows. He would never leave it to chance. Because he still imagined himself to be a scientist. He would want to gather data about the children. To him, it was all one big experiment, with the added inconvenience of being illegal and based on stolen embryos. To Volescu, those embryos belonged to him by right. To him, Bean was nothing but the experiment that got away. Anything he produced was part of Volescu's long-term study.
An old man sat at the table in the conference room. It took Bean a moment to decide whether his skin was naturally dark or merely weathered into a barnwood color and texture. Both, probably.
I know him, thought Bean. Mazer Rackham. The man who saved humanity in the Second Bugger Invasion. Who should have been dead many decades ago, but who surfaced long enough to train Ender himself for the last campaign.
"They send you to Earth?"
"I'm retired," said Rackham.
"So am I," said Bean. "So is Ender. When does he come to Earth?"
Rackham shook his head. "Too late to be bitter about that," he said. "If Ender had been here, do you think there's any chance he would be both alive and free?"
Rackham had a point. Back when Achilles was arranging for all of Ender's Jeesh to be kidnapped, the greatest prize of all would have been Ender himself. And even if Ender had evaded capture--as Bean had done--how long before someone else tried to control him or exploit him in order to achieve some imperial ambition? With Ender, being an American as he was, maybe the United States would have stirred from its torpor and now, instead of China and the Muslim world being the main players in the great game, America would be flexing its muscles again and then the world really would be in turmoil.
Ender would have hated that. Hated himself for being part of it. It really was better that Graff had arranged to send him off on the first colony ship to a former Bugger world. Right now, each second of Ender's life aboard the starship was a week to Bean. While Ender read a paragraph of a book, a million babies would be born on Earth, a million old people and soldiers and sick people and pedestrians and drivers would die and humanity would move forward another small step in its evolution into a starfaring species.
Starfaring species. That was Graff's program.
"You're not here for the fleet, then," said Bean. "You're here for Colonel Graff."
"For the Minister of Colonization?" Rackham nodded gravely. "Informally and unofficially, yes. To inform you of an offer."
"Graff has nothing that I want. Before any starship could arrive on a colony world, I'd be dead."
"You'd undoubtedly be an...interesting choice to head a colony," said Rackham. "But as you said, your term in office would be too brief to be effective. No, it's a different kind of offer."
"The only things I want, you don't have."
"Once upon a time, I believe, you wanted nothing more than survival."
"It's not within your power to offer me."
"Yes it is," said Rackham.
"Oh, from the vast medical research facilities of the International Fleet there comes a cure for a condition that is suffered by only one person on Earth?"
"Not at all," said Rackham. "The cure will have to come from others. What we offer you is the ability to wait until it's ready. We offer you a starship, and lightspeed, and an ansible so you can be told when to come home."
Precisely the "gift" they gave Rackham himself, when they thought they might need him to command all the fleets when they arrived at the various Bugger worlds. The chance of survival rang inside him like the tolling of a great bell. He couldn't help it. If there was anything that had ever driven him, it was that hunger to survive. But how could he trust them?
"And in return, what do you want from me?"
"Can't this be part of your retirement package from the fleet?"
Rackham was good at keeping a straight face, but Bean knew he couldn't be serious. "When I come back, there's going to be some poor young soldier I can train?"
"You're not a teacher," said Rackham.
"Neither were you."
Rackham shrugged. "So we become whatever we need to be. We're offering you life. We'll continue to fund research on your condition."
"What, using my children as your guinea pigs?"
"We'll try to find them, of course. We'll try to cure them."
"But they won't get their own starships?"
"Bean," said Rackham. "How many trillions of dollars do you think your genes are worth?"
"To me," said Bean, "They're worth more than all the money in the world."
"I don't think you could pay even the interest on that loan."
"So I don't have as high a credit rating as I hoped."
"Bean, take this offer seriously. While there's still time. Acceleration is hard on the heart. You have to go while you're still healthy enough to survive the voyage. As it is, we'll be cutting it rather fine, don't you think? A couple of years to accelerate, and at the end, a couple more to decelerate. Who gives you four years?"
"Nobody," said Bean. "And you're forgetting. I have to come home. That's four more years. It's already far too late."
Rackham smiled. "Don't you think we've taken that into account?"
"What, you've figured out a way to turn while traveling at lightspeed?"
"Even light bends."
"Light is a wave."
"So are you, when you're traveling that fast."
"Neither of us is a physicist."
"But the people who planned our new generation of messenger ship are," said Rackham.
"How can the I.F. afford to build new ships?" asked Bean. "Your funding comes from Earth and the emergency is over. The only reason the nations of Earth even pay your salaries and continue to supply you is because they're buying your neutrality."
Rackham smiled.
"Somebody's paying you to keep developing new ships," said Bean.
"Speculation is pointless."
"There's only one nation that could afford to do that, and it's the one nation that could never keep it secret."
"So it's not possible," said Rackham.
"Yet you're promising me a kind of ship that couldn't exist."
"You go through acceleration in a compensatory gravity field, so there's no additional strain on your heart. That lets us accelerate in a week instead of two years."
"And if the gravity fails?"
"Then you're torn to dust in an instant. But it doesn't fail. We've tested it."
"So messengers can go from world to world without losing more than a couple of weeks of their lives."
"Of their own lives," said Rackham. "But when we send someone out on such a voyage, thirty or fifty lightyears, everyone they ever knew is dead long before they come back. Volunteers are few."
Everyone they ever knew. If he got on this starship, he'd leave Petra behind and never see her again.
Was he heartless enough for that?
Not heartless at all. He could still feel the pain of losing Sister Carlotta, the woman who saved him from the streets of Rotterdam and watched over for him for years, until Achilles finally murdered her.
"Can I take Petra with me?"
"Would she go?"
"Not without our children," said Bean.
"Then I suggest you keep searching," said Rackham. "Because even though the new technology buys you a bit more time, it's not forever. Your body imposes a deadline that we can't put off."
"And you'll let me bring Petra, if we find our children."
"If she'll go," said Rackham.
"She will," said Bean. "We have no roots in this world, except our children."
"Already they're children in your imagination," said Rackham.
Bean only smiled. He knew how Catholic i
t made him sound, but that's how it felt to him and Petra both.
"We ask only one thing," said Rackham.
Bean laughed. "I knew it."
"As long as you're waiting around anyway, searching for your children," said Rackham. "We'd like you to help Peter unite the world under the office of the Hegemon."
Bean was so astonished he stopped laughing. "So the fleet intends to meddle in earthside affairs."
"We aren't meddling at all," said Rackham. "You are."
"Peter doesn't listen to me. If he did, he would have let me kill Achilles back in China when we first had the chance. Peter decided to 'rescue' him instead."
"Maybe he's learned from his mistake."
"He thinks he learned from it," said Bean, "but Peter is Peter. It wasn't a mistake, it's who he is. He can't listen to anyone else if he thinks he has a better plan. And he always thinks he has a better plan."
"Nevertheless."
"I can't help Peter because Peter won't be helped."
"He took Petra along on his visit to Alai."
"His top secret visit that the I.F. couldn't possibly know about."
"We keep track of our alumni."
"Is that how you pay for your new-model starships? Alumni donations?"
"Our best graduates are still too young to be at the really high salary levels."
"I don't know. You have two heads of state."
"Doesn't it intrigue you, Bean, to imagine what the history of the world would have been like if there had been two Alexanders at the same time?"
"Alai and Hot Soup?" asked Bean. "It'll all boil down to which of them has the most resources. Alai has most at the moment, but China has staying power."
"But then you add to the two Alexanders a Joan of Arc here and there, and a couple of Julius Caesars, maybe an Attila, and..."
"You see Petra as Joan of Arc?" asked Bean.
"She could be."
"And what am I?"
"Why, Genghis Khan of course, if you choose to be," said Rackham.
"He has such a bad reputation."
"He doesn't deserve it. His contemporaries knew he was a man of might who exercised his power lightly upon those who obeyed him."
"I don't want power. I'm not your Genghis."
"No," said Rackham. "That's the problem. It all depends on who has the disease of ambition. When Graff took you into Battle School, it was because your will to survive seemed to do the same job as ambition. But now it doesn't."
"Peter's your Genghis," said Bean. "That's why you want me to help him."
"He might be," said Rackham. "And you're the only one who can help him. Anybody else would make him feel threatened. But you..."
"Because I'm going to die."
"Or leave. Either way, he can have the use of you, as he thinks, and then be rid of you."
"It's not as he thinks. It's what you want. I'm a book in a lending library. You lend me to Peter for a while. He turns me in, then you send me out on another chase after some dream or other. You and Graff, you still think you're in charge of the human race, don't you?"
Rackham looked off into the distance. "It's a job that, once you take it on, it's hard to let go. One day out in space I saw something no one else could see, and I fired a missile and killed a Hive Queen and we won that war. From then on, the human race was my responsibility."
"Even if you're no longer the best qualified to lead it."
"I didn't say I was the leader. Only that I have the responsibility. To do whatever it takes. Whatever I can. And what I can do is this: I can try to persuade the most brilliant military mind on Earth to help unify the nations under the leadership of the only man who has the will and the wit to hold them all together."
"At what price? Peter's not a great fan of democracy."
"We're not asking for democracy," said Rackham. "Not at first. Not until the power of nations is broken. You have to tame the horse before you can let it have its head."
"And you say you're just the servant of humanity," said Bean. "Yet you want to put a bridle and saddle on the human race, and let Peter ride."
"Yes," said Rackham. "Because humanity isn't a horse. Humanity is a breeding ground for ambition, for territorial competitors, for nations that do battle, and if the nations break down, then tribes, clans, households. We were bred for war, it's in our genes, and the only way to stop the bloodshed is to give one man the power to subdue all the others. All we can hope for is that it be a decent enough man that the peace will be better than the wars, and last longer."
"And you think Peter's the man."
"He has the ambition you lack."
"And the humanity?"
Rackham shook his head. "Don't you know by now how human you are?"
Bean wasn't going to go down that road. "Why don't you and Graff just leave the human race alone? Let them go on building empires and tearing them down."
"Because the Hive Queens aren't the only aliens out there."
Bean sat up.
"No, no, we haven't seen any, we have no evidence. But think about it. As long as humans seemed to be unique, we could live out our species history as we always had. But now we know that it's possible for intelligent life to evolve twice, and in very different ways. If twice, then why not three times? Or four? There's nothing special about our corner of the galaxy. The Hive Queens were remarkably close to us. There could be thousands of intelligent species in our galaxy alone. And not all of them as nice as we are."
"So you're dispersing us."
"As far and wide as we can. Planting our seed in every soil."
"And for that you want Earth united."
"We want Earth to stop wasting its resources on war, and spend them on colonizing world after world, and then trading among them so that the whole species can profit from what each one learns and achieves and becomes. It's basic economics. And history. And evolution. And science. Disperse. Vary. Discover. Publish. Explore."
"Yeah, yeah, I get it," said Bean. "How noble of you. Who's paying for all this now?"
"Bean," said Rackham. "You don't expect me to tell you, and I don't expect you to have to ask."
Bean knew. It was America. Big sleepy do-nothing America. Burned out from trying to police the world back in the twenty-first century, disgusted at the way their efforts earned them nothing but hatred and resentment, they declared victory and went home. They kept the strongest military in the world and closed their doors to immigration.
And when the Buggers came, it was American military might that finally blew up those first exploratory ships that scoured the surface of some of the best agricultural land in China, killing millions. It was America that mostly funded and directed the construction of the inter-planetary warships that resisted the Second Invasion long enough for New Zealander Mazer Rackham to find the Hive Queen's vulnerability and destroy the enemy.
It was America that was secretly funding the I.F. now, developing new ships. Getting its hand into the business of interstellar trade at a time when no other nation on Earth could even attempt to compete.
"And how will it be in their interest for the world to be united, except under their leadership?"
Rackham smiled. "So now you know how deep our game has to be."
Bean smiled back. So Graff had sold his colony program to the Americans--probably on the basis of future trade and a probable American monopoly. And in the meantime, he was backing Peter in the hope that he could unite the world under one government. Which would mean, eventually, a showdown between America and the Hegemon.
"And when the day comes," said Bean, "when America expects the I.F., which it's been paying for and researching for, to come to its aid against a powerful Hegemon, what will the I.F. do?"
"What did Suriyawong do when Achilles ordered him to kill you?"
"Gave him a knife and told him to defend himself." Bean nodded. "But will the I.F. obey you? If you're counting on the reputation of Mazer Rackham, remember that hardly anybody knows you're alive."
; "I'm counting on the I.F. living up to the code of honor that every soldier has drummed into him from the start. No interference on Earth."
"Even as you break that code yourself."
"We're not interfering," said Rackham. "Not with troops or ships. Just a little information here and there. A dollop of money. And a little, tiny bit of recruitment. Help us, Bean. While you're still on Earth. The minute you're ready to go, we'll send you, no delays. But while you're here..."
"What if I don't believe Peter's as decent a man as you think he is?"
"He's better than Achilles."
"So was Augustus," said Bean. "But he laid the foundation for Nero and Caligula."
"He laid a foundation that survived Caligula and Nero and lasted for a millennium and a half, in one form or another."
"And you think that's Peter?"
"We do," said Rackham. "I do."
"As long as you understand that Peter won't do a thing I say, won't listen to me or anyone, and will go on making idiotic mistakes that I can't prevent, then...yes. I'll help him, as much as he'll let me."
"That's all we ask."
"But I'll still give my first priority to finding my children."
"How about this," said Rackham. "How about if we tell you where Volescu is?"
"You know?"
"He's in one of our safe houses," said Rackham.
"He accepted the protection of the I.F.?"
"He thinks it's part of Achilles's old network."
"Is it?"
"Somebody had to take over his assets."
"Somebody could only do that if they knew where his assets were."
"Who do you think maintains all the communications satellites?" asked Rackham.
"So the I.F. is spying on Earth."
"Just as a mother spies on her children at play in the yard."
"Good to know you're looking out for us, Mummy."
Rackham leaned foward. "Bean, we make our plans, but we know we might fail. Ultimately, it all comes down to this. We've seen human beings at their best, and we think our species is worth saving."