"Don't try to lie to me," said Bean. "You were crying."
"I'm so happy," she said.
"You were thinking about how old little Ender will be when he dies."
"That's silly," she said. "We're going off in a starship until they find a cure. He's going to live to be a hundred."
"Petra " said Bean.
"What. I'm not lying."
"You're crying because in your mind's eye you can already see the death of your baby."
She sat up and lifted the now-sleeping baby to her shoulder. "Bean, you really are bad at guessing things like this. I was crying because I thought of you as a little baby, and how you didn't have a father to go and get you when you cried in the night, and you didn't have a mother to hold you and feed you from her own body, and you had no experience of love."
"But when I finally found out what it was, I got more of it than any man could hope for."
"Damn right," said Petra. "And don't you forget it."
She got up and took the baby back to the bassinet.
And tears came to Bean's eyes. Not pity for himself as a baby. But remembering Sister Carlotta, who had become his mother and stayed with him long before he learned what love was and was able to give any back to her. And some of his tears were also for Poke, the friend who took him in when he was in the last stages of death by malnutrition in Rotterdam.
Petra, don't you know how short life is, even when you don't have some disease like Anton's Key? So many people prematurely in their graves, and some of them I put there. Don't cry for me. Cry for my brothers who were disposed of by Volescu as he destroyed evidence of his crimes. Cry for all the children that no one ever loved.
Bean thought he was being subtle, turning his head so Petra couldn't see his tears when she came back to bed. Whether she saw or not, she snuggled close to him and held him.
How could he tell this woman who had always been so good to him and loved him more than he knew how to return—how could he tell her that he had lied to her? He didn't believe that there would ever be a cure for Anton's Key.
When he got on that starship with the babies that had his same disease, he expected to take off and head outward into the stars. He would live long enough to teach the children how to run the starship. They would explore. They would send reports back by ansible. They would map habitable planets farther away than any other humans would want to travel. In fifteen or twenty years of subjective time they would live a thousand years or more in real time, and the data they collected would be a treasure trove. They would be the pioneers of a hundred colonies or more.
And then they would die, having no memory of setting foot on a planet, and having no children to carry on their disease for another generation.
And it would all be bearable, for them and for Bean, because they would know that back on Earth, their mother and their healthy siblings were living normal lives, and marrying and having children of their own, so that by the time their thousand-year voyage was over, every living human being would be related to them one way or another.
That's how we'll be part of everything.
So no matter what I promised, Petra, you're not coming with me, and neither are our healthy children. And someday you'll understand and forgive me for breaking my word to you.
PENSION
From: PeterWiggin%personal@hegemon.gov
To: Champi%T'it'u@QuechuaNation.Freenet.ne.com
Re: The best hope of the Quechua and Aymara peoples
Dear Champi T'it'u,
Thank you for consenting to visit with me. Considering that I tried to call you "Dumper" as if you were still a child in Battle School and a friend of my brother, I'm surprised you didn't toss me out on the spot.
As I promised, I am sending you the current draft of the Constitution of the Free People of Earth. You are the first person outside the innermost circle of Hegemony officials to look at it, and please remember that it is only a draft. I would be grateful for your suggestions.
My goal is to have a Constitution that would be as attractive to nations that are recognized as states as to peoples that are still stateless. The Constitution will fail if the language is not identical for both. Therefore there are aspirations you would have to give up and claims you would have to relinquish. But I think you will see that the same will be true for the states that now occupy territory you claim for the Quechua and Aymara peoples.
The principles of majority, viability, contiguity, and compactness would guarantee you a self-governing territory, albeit one much smaller than your present claim
But your present claim, while historically justifiable, is also unattainable without a bloody war. Your military abilities are sufficient to guarantee that the contest would be far more evenly matched than the governments of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia would anticipate. But even if you won a complete victory, who would be your successor?
I speak candidly, because I believe that you are not following a delusion but embarking on a specific, attainable enterprise. The route of war might succeed for a time—and the operative word is "might," since nothing is certain in war—but the cost in blood, economic losses, and ill will for generations to come will be steep.
Ratifying the Hegemony Constitution, on the other hand, will guarantee you a homeland, to which those who insist on being governed only by Quechua and Aymara leaders and raising their children to be Quechua and Aymara speakers may migrate freely, without needing anyone's permission.
But take note of the irrevocability clause. I can promise you that this will be taken very seriously. Do not ratify this Constitution if you and your people do not intend to abide by it.
As for the personal question you asked me:
I don't believe it matters whether I'm the one who unites the world under one government. No individual is irreplaceable. However, I am quite certain that it will need to be a person exactly like me. And at present, the only person who meets that requirement is me:
Committed to a liberal government with the highest degree of personal freedom. Equally committed to tolerating no breach of the peace or oppression of one people by another. And strong enough to make it happen and make it stick.
Join with me, Champi T'it'u, and you will not be an insurrectionary hiding out in the Andes. You'll be a head of a state within the Hegemony Constitution. And if you are patient, and wait until I have won the ratification of at least two of the nations at issue, then you and all the world can see how peacefully and equitably the rights of native peoples can be handled.
It only works if every party is determined to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure the peace and freedom of all other parties. If even one party is determined on a course of war or oppression, then someday that party will find itself bearing the full weight of the pressure the Free Nations can bring to bear. Right now that isn't much. But how long do you think it will take me to make it a considerable force indeed?
If you are with me, Champi T'it'u, you will need no other ally.
Sincerely,
Peter
Something was bothering Bean, nagging at the back of his mind. He thought at first that it was a feeling caused by his fatigue, getting so little uninterrupted sleep at night. Then he chalked it up to anxiety because his friends—well, Ender's and Petra's friends—were involved in a life-or-death struggle in India, which they couldn't possibly all win.
And then, in the middle of changing Ender's diaper, it came to him. Perhaps because of his baby's name. Perhaps, he thought bitterly, because of what he had his hands in.
He finished diapering the baby and left him in the bassinet, where Petra, dozing, would hear him if he cried.
Then he went in search of Peter.
Naturally, it wasn't easy to get in to see him. Not that there was so huge a bureaucracy in Ribeirão Preto. But it was large enough now that Peter could afford to pay for a few layers of protection. Nobody who just stood there being a guard. But a secretary here, a clerk there, and Bean found he had explained himself three times—at five-thirty in the morning—before he even got to see Theresa Wiggin.
And, now that he thought about it, he wanted to see her.
"He's on the phone with some European bigwig," she told him. "Either sucking up or getting sucked up to, depending on how big and powerful the country is."
"So that's why everybody's up early."
"He tries to get up early enough to catch a significant part of the working day in Europe. Which is hard, because it's usually only a few hours in the morning. Their morning."
"So I'll talk to you."
"Well, that's a puzzler," said Theresa. "Business so important that you'd get up at five-thirty to see Peter, and yet so unimportant that when you find out he's on a phone call, you can actually talk to me about it."
She said it with such verve that Bean might have missed the bitter complaint behind her words. "So he still treats you like a ceremonial mother?" asked Bean.
"Does the butterfly consult with the cocoon?"
"So... how do your other children treat you?" asked Bean.
Her face darkened. "This is your business?"
He wasn't sure if the question was pointed irony—as in, that's none of your business—or a simple question—this is what you came for? He took it the first way.
"Ender's my friend," said Bean. "More than anybody else except Petra. I miss him. I know there's an ansible on his ship. I just wondered."
"I'm forty-six years old," said Theresa. "When Val and Andrew get to their destination, I'll be... old. Why should they write to me?"
"So they haven't."
"If they have, the I.F. hasn't seen fit to inform me."
"They're bad at mail delivery, as I recall. They seem to think that the best family therapy method is 'out of sight, out of mind.' "
"Or Andrew and Valentine can't be bothered." Theresa typed something. "There. Another letter I'll never send."
"Who are you writing to?"
"Whom. You foreigners are wrecking the English language."
"I'm not speaking English. I'm speaking Common. There's no 'whom' in Common."
"I'm writing to Virlomi and telling her to wise up to the fact that Suriyawong is still in love with her and she has no business trying to play god in India when she could do it for real by marrying and having babies."
"She doesn't love Suri," said Bean.
"Someone else, then?"
"India. It's way past patriotism with her."
"Matriotism. Nobody thinks of India as the fatherland."
"And you're the matriarch. Dispensing maternal advice to Battle School grads."
"Just the ones from Ender's Jeesh who happen now to be heads of state or insurrectionary leaders or, in this case, fledgling deities."
"Just one question for you," said Bean.
"Ah. Back to the subject."
"Is Ender getting a pension?"
"Pension? Yes, I think so. Yes. Of course."
"And what is his pension doing while he's puttering along at lightspeed?"
"Gathering interest, I imagine."
"So you're not administering it?"
"Me? I don't think so."
"Your husband?"
"I'm the one who handles the money," said Theresa. "Such as it is. We don't get a pension. Come to think of it, we don't get a salary, either. We're just hangers-on. Camp followers. We're both on leave of absence at the University because it was too dangerous for potential hostages to be out where enemies could kidnap us. Of course, the main kidnapper is dead, but... here we stay."
"So the I.F. is holding on to Ender's money."
"What are you getting at?" asked Theresa.
"I don't know," said Bean. "I was wiping my little Ender's butt, and I thought, there's an awful lot of shit here."
"They drink and drink. The breast doesn't seem to get smaller. And they poop more than they could possibly get from the breast without shriveling it into a raisin."
"And then I thought, I know how much I'm getting in my pension, and it's kind of a lot. I don't actually have to work at anything as long as I live. Petra, too. Most of it we simply invest. Roll it back into investments. It's adding up fast. Pretty soon our income from invested pension is going to be greater than the original pension we invested. Of course, that's partly because we have so much inside information. You know, about which wars are about to start and which will fizzle, that sort of thing."
"You're saying that somebody ought to be watching over Andrew's money."
"I'll tell you what," said Bean. "I'll find out from Graff who's taking care of it."
"You want to invest it?" asked Theresa. "Going into brokering or financial management when Peter has finally achieved world peace?"
"I won't be here when Peter—"
"Oh, Bean, for heaven's sake, don't take me seriously and make me feel bad for acting as if you weren't going to die. I prefer not to think of you dying."
"I was only saying that I'm not a good person to manage Ender's... portfolio."
"So... who?"
"Wouldn't that be whom?"
She grimaced. "No it would not. Not even if you spoke English."
"I don't know. I've got no candidate."
"And so you wanted to confer with Peter."
Bean shrugged.
"But that would make no sense at all. Peter doesn't know anything about investing and... no, no, no. I see what you're getting at."
"How, when I'm not sure myself?"
"Oh, you're sure. You think Peter is financing some of this from Andrew's pension. You think he's embezzling from his brother."
"I doubt Peter would call it embezzling."
"What would he call it, then?"
"In Peter's mind, Ender's probably buying government bonds issued by the Hegemony. So when the Hegemon rules the world, Ender will get four percent per year, tax free."
"Even I know that would be a lousy investment."
"From a financial point of view. Mrs. Wiggin, Peter has the use of more money than the scant dues the few dues-paying nations still pay to the Hegemony."
"The dues go up and down," said Theresa.
"He tells you?"
"John Paul is closer to these things. When the world is worried about war, money flows into the Hegemony. Not a lot, just a little extra."
"When I first got here there were Peter, you two, and the soldiers I brought with me. A couple of secretaries. And a lot of debt. Yet Peter always had enough money to send us out in the choppers we brought with us. Money for fuel, money for ammunition."
"Bean, what will be gained if you accuse Peter of embezzling Ender's pension? You know Peter isn't making himself rich with it."
"No, but he is making himself Hegemon. Ender might need that money someday."
"Ender will never come back to Earth, Bean. How valuable will money be on the new world he's going to colonize? What harm is it causing?"
"So you're all right with Peter cheating his brother."
"If he's doing that. Which I doubt." Theresa's smile was tight and her eyes flashed just a little. Mother bear, guarding cub.
"Protect the son who's here, even if he's cheating the son who's gone."
"Why don't you go back to your place and take care of your own child instead of meddling with mine?"
"And the pioneers circle the wagons to protect from the arrows of the Native Americans."
"I like you, Bean. I'm also worried about you. I'll miss you when you die. I'll do my best to help Petra get through the hard times ahead. But keep your hippo-sized hands off my son. He has the weight of the world on his shoulders, in case you didn't notice."
"I think maybe I won't have that interview with Peter this morning after all."
"Delighted to be of service," said Theresa.
"Do avoid telling him I stopped by, will you?"
"With pleasure. In fact, I've already forgotten that you're here." She turned back to the computer and typed again. Bean rather hoped she was typing meaningless words and strings of letters because she was too angry to be writing anything intelligible. He even thought of peeking, just to see. But Theresa was a good friend who happened to be protective of her son. No reason to turn her into an enemy.
He sauntered away, his long legs carrying him much farther, much faster than a man walking so slowly should have gone. And even though he wasn't moving quickly, he still felt his heart pump faster. Just to walk down a corridor, it's as if he were jogging a little.
How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.
Theresa watched him go and thought: I love that boy for being so loyal to Ender. And he's absolutely right to suspect Peter. It's just the sort of thing he'd do. For all I know, Peter got us back onto full salary at the University, too, only he didn't tell us and he's cashing our checks.
Then again, maybe he's secretly getting paid by China or America or some other country that values his services as Hegemon.
Unless they value his services as Lincoln. Or... as Martel. If he was really writing the Martel essays. Such a thing smacked of Peter's propaganda methods, but the writing sounded nothing like him, and it could hardly be Valentine this time. Had he found another surrogate writer?
Maybe somebody was contributing in a big way to "Martel's" cause and Peter was pocketing the money to advance his own.
But no. Word of such contributions would get out. Peter would never be so foolish as to accept money that might compromise him if it were found out.
I'll check with Graff, see whether the I.F. is paying out the pension to Peter. And if it is, I'll have to kill the boy. Or at least make my disappointed-in-you face and then curse about him to John Paul when we're alone.
Bean told Petra he was going to train with Suri and the boys. And he did—go where they were training, that is. But he spent his time in one of the choppers, making a scrambled and encrypted call to the old Battle School space station, where Graff was assembling his fleet of colony ships.
"Going to come visit me?" said Graff. "Want to take a trip into space?"
"Not yet," said Bean. "Not till I've found my lost kids."
"So you have other business to discuss?"
"Yes. But you'll immediately realize that the business I want to talk about is none of my business."
"Can't wait. No, got to wait. Call I can't turn down. Wait just a minute please."
The hiss of atmosphere and magnetic fields and radiation between the surface of the Earth and the space station. Bean thought of breaking off the connection and waiting for another time. Or maybe dropping the whole stupid line of inquiry.
Just as Bean was going to terminate the call, Graff came back on. "Sorry, I'm in the middle of tricky negotiations with China to let breeding couples emigrate. They want to send us some of their surplus males. I told him we were forming a colony, not fighting a war. But... negotiating with the Chinese. You think you hear yes, but the next day you find out they said no very delicately and then tittered behind their hands."
"All those years controlling the size of their population, and now they won't let go of a measly few thousand," said Bean.
"So you called me. What is it that's none of your business?"
"I get my pension. Petra gets hers. Who get's Ender's?"
"My, but you're to the point."
"Is it going to Peter?"
"What an excellent question."
"May I make a suggestion?"
"Please. As I recall, you have a history of making interesting suggestions."
"Stop sending the pension to anybody."
"I'm the Minister of Colonization now," said Graff. "I take my orders from the Hegemon."
"You're in bed so deep with the I.F. that Chamrajnagar thinks you're a hemorrhoid and wakes up scratching at you."
"You have a vast untapped potential as a poet," said Graff.
"My suggestion," said Bean, "is to get the I.F. to turn Ender's money over to a neutral party."
"When it comes to money, there are no neutral parties. The I.F. and the colony program both spend money as fast as it comes in. We have no idea where to begin an investment program. And if you think I'm trusting some earthside mutual fund with the entire savings of a war hero who won't even be able to inquire about the money for another thirty years, you're insane."
"I was thinking that you could turn it over to a computer program."
"You think we didn't think of that? The best investment programs are only two percent better at predicting markets and bringing a positive return on investment than closing your eyes and stabbing the stock listings with a pin."
"You mean with all the computer expertise and all the computer facilities of the Fleet, you can't devise a neutral program to handle Ender's money?"
"Why are you so set on software doing it?"
"Because software doesn't get greedy and try to steal. Even for a noble purpose."
"So what if Peter is using Ender's money—that's what you're worried about, right?—if we suddenly cut it off, won't he notice? Won't that set back his efforts?"
"Ender saved the world. He's entitled to have his full pension, when and if he ever wants it. There are laws to protect child actors. Why not war heroes traveling at lightspeed?"
"Ah," said Graff. "So you are thinking about what will happen when you take off in the scoutship we offered you."
"I don't need you to manage my money. Petra will do it just fine. I want her to have the use of the money."
"Meaning you think you'll never come back."
"You're changing the subject. Software. Managing Ender's investments."
"A semi-autonomous program that—"
"Not semi. Autonomous."
"There are no autonomous programs. Besides which, the stock market is impossible to model. Nothing that depends on crowd behavior can be accurate over time. What computer could possibly deal with it?"
"I don't know," said Bean. "Didn't that mind game you had us play predict human behavior?"
"It's very specialized educational software."
"Come on," said Bean. "It was your shrink. You analyzed the behavior of the kids and—"
"That's right. Listen to yourself. We analyzed."
"But the game also analyzed. It anticipated our moves. When Ender was playing, it took him places the rest of us never saw. But the game was always ahead of him. That was one cool piece of software. Can't you teach it to play Investment Manager?"
Graff looked impatient. "I don't know. What does an ancient piece of software have to do with... Bean, do you realize how much effort you're asking me to go to in order to protect Ender's pension? I don't even know that it needs protecting."
"But you should know that it doesn't."
"Guilt. You, the conscienceless wonder, are actually using guilt on me."
"I spent a lot of time with Sister Carlotta. And Petra's no slouch, either."
"I'll look at the program. I'll look at Ender's money."
"Just out of curiosity, what is the program being used for now that you don't have any kids up there?"
Graff snorted. "We have nothing but kids here. The adults are playing it now. The Mind Game. Only I promised them never to let the program do analyses on their gameplay."
"So the program does analyze."
"It does pre-analysis. Looking for anomalies. Surprises."
"Wait a minute," said Bean.
"You don't want me to have it run Ender's finances?"
"I haven't changed my mind about that. I'm just wondering— maybe it could look at a really massive database we've got here and analyze... well, find some patterns that we're not seeing."
"The game was created for a very specific purpose. Pattern finding in databases wasn't—"
"Oh, come on," said Bean. "That's all it did. Patterns in our behavior. Just because it assembled the database of our actions on the fly doesn't change the nature of what it was doing. Checking our behavior against the behavior of earlier children. Against our own normal behavior. Seeing just how crazy your educational program was making us."
Graff sighed. "Have your computer people contact my computer people."
"With your blessing. Not some foot-dragging fob-them-off-with-smoke-and-mirrors 'effort' that deliberately leads nowhere."
"You really care about what we do with Ender's money?"
"I care about Ender. Someday he may need that money. I once made a promise that I'd keep Peter from hurting Ender. Instead, I did nothing while Peter sent Ender away."
"For Ender's own good."
"Ender should have had a vote."
"He did," said Graff. "If he had insisted on going home to Earth, I would have let him. But once Valentine came up to join him, he was content."
"Fine," said Bean. "Has he given consent to have his pension pillaged?"
"I'll see about turning the mind game into a financial manager. The program is a complex one. It does a lot of self-programming and self-alteration. So maybe if we ask it to, it can rewrite its own code in order to become whatever you want it to be. It is magic, after all. This computer stuff."
"That's what I always thought," said Bean. "Like Santa Claus. You adults pretend he doesn't exist, but we know that he really does."
When he ended the conversation with Graff, Bean immediately called Ferreira. It was full daylight now, so Ferreira was actually awake. Bean told him about the plan to have the Mind Game program analyze the impossibly large database of vague and mostly useless information about the movements of pregnant women with low-birth-weight babies and Ferreira said he'd get right on it. He said it without enthusiasm, but Bean knew that Ferreira wasn't the kind of man to say he'd do something and not do it, just because he didn't believe in it. He'd keep his word.
How do I know that? Bean wondered. How do I know that I can trust Ferreira to go off on wild goose chases, once he gives his word to do it? While I know without even knowing that I know it, that Peter is partly financing his operations by stealing from Ender. That was bothering me for days before I understood it.
Damn, but I'm smart. Smarter than any computer program, even the Mind Game.
If only I could control it.
I may not have the capacity to consciously deal with a vast database and find patterns in it. But I could deal with the database of stuff I observe in the Hegemony and what I know about Peter and without my even asking the question, out pops an answer.
Could I always do that? Or is my growing brain giving me ever-stronger mental powers?
I really should look at some of the mathematical conundrums and see if I can find proofs of... whatever it is they can't prove but want to.
Maybe Volescu isn't so wrong after all. Maybe a whole world full of minds like mine...
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