"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 light-speed?"
"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 it 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."