Volescu looked tired when Bean went to see him. Old. Confinement wasn't good for him. He was not suffering physically, but he seemed to be growing wan as a plant kept in a closet without sun.
"Promise me something," said Volescu.
"What?" asked Bean.
"Something. Anything. Bargain with me."
"The one thing you want," said Bean, "you will never have again."
"Only because you're vindictive," said Volescu. "Ungrateful—you exist because I made you, and you keep me in this box."
"It's a good-sized room. It's air-conditioned. Compared to the way you treated my brothers...."
"They were not legally—"
"And now you have my babies hidden away. And a virus with the potential to destroy the human race—"
"Improve it—"
"Erase it. How can you be given your freedom again? You combine grandiosity with amorality."
"Rather like Peter Wiggin, whom you serve so faithfully. His little toad."
"The word is 'toady,' " said Bean.
"Yet here you are, visiting me. Could it be that Julian Delphiki, my dear half-nephew, has a problem I could help him with?"
"Same questions as before," said Bean.
"Same answer," said Volescu. "I have no idea what happened to your missing embryos."
Bean sighed. "I thought you might want a chance to square things with me and Petra before you leave this Earth."
"Oh, come on," said Volescu. "You're threatening me with the death penalty?"
"No," said Bean. "You're simply ... leaving Earth. Peter is turning you over to the I.F. On the theory that your virus is an alien invasion."
"Only if you're an alien invasion," said Volescu.
"But I am," said Bean. "I'm the first of a race of short-lived giant geniuses. Think how much larger a population the Earth can sustain when the average age at death is eighteen."
"You know, Bean, there's no reason for you to die young."
"Really? You have the antidote?"
"Nobody needs an antidote to destiny. Death from giantism comes from the strain on your heart, trying to pump so much blood through so many kilometers of arteries and veins. If you get away from gravity, your heart won't be overtaxed and you won't die."
"You think I haven't thought of that?" said Bean. "I'll still continue to grow."
"So you get large. The I.F. can build you a really big ship. A colony ship. You can gradually fill it up with your protoplasm and bones. You'd live for years, tied to the walls of the ship like a balloon. An enormous Gulliver. Your wife could come visit you. And if you get too big, well, there's always amputation. You could become a being of pure mind. Fed intravenously, what need would you have of belly and bowels? Eventually, all you really need is your brain and spine, and they need never die. A mind eternally growing."
Bean stood up. "Is that what you created me for, Volescu? To be a limbless crippled monster out in space?"
"Silly boy," said Volescu, "to ordinary humans you already are a monster. Their worst nightmare. The species that will replace them. But to me, you're beautiful. Even tethered to an artificial habitat, even limbless, trunkless, voiceless, you'd be the most beautiful creature alive."
"And yet you came within one toilet-tank lid of killing me and burning my body."
"I didn't want to go to jail."
"Yet here you are," said Bean. "And your next prison is out in space."
"I can live like Prospero, refining my arts in solitude."
"Prospero had Ariel and Caliban," said Bean.
"Don't you understand?" said Volescu. "You're my Caliban. And all your little children—they're my Ariels. I've spread them over the earth. You'll never find them. Their mothers have been taught well. They'll mate, they'll reproduce before their giantism becomes obvious. Whether my virus works or not, your children are my virus."
"So that's what Achilles plotted?"
"Achilles?" Volescu laughed. "That bloody-handed little moron? I told him your babies were dead. That's all he wanted. Fool."
"So they're not dead."
"All alive. All implanted. By now, perhaps, some of them born, since those with your abilities will be born two months premature."
"You knew that and didn't tell us?"
"Why should I? The delivery was safe, wasn't it? The baby was mature enough to breathe and function on its own?"
"What else do you know?"
"I know that everything will work out. Julian, look at yourself, man! You escaped at the age of one. Which means that seventeen months after conception, you were able to survive without parents. I don't have even the tiniest worry about the health of your babies, and neither should you. They don't need you, because you didn't need anybody. Let them go. Let them replace the old species, bit by bit, over the generations to come."
"No," said Bean, "I love the old species. And I hate what you did to me."
"Without 'what I did to you,' all you'd be is Nikolai."
"My brother is a wonderful person. Kind. And very smart."
"Very smart, but not as smart as you. Would you really trade with him? Would you really like to be as dull-witted as he is, compared to you?"
Whereupon Bean left, having no answer to Volescu's last question.
12
ALLAHU AKBAR
From: Graff%pilgrimage@colmin.gov
To: Borommakot%pinto@IComeAnon.com
Forwarded and Posted by IcomeAnon
Encrypted using code ********
Decrypted using code ***********
Re: Investment Counselor
Your idea of converting the Fantasy Game software into an investment counselor is going surprisingly well. We haven't had time to do more than short-term testing, but so far it has outpicked all the experts. We are paying Ender's pension funds to it. As you suggested, we are making sure that all investments are under false identities; we are also making sure the software is hooked widely over the nets in endlessly self-varying forms. It will be effectively untraceable and unkillable unless someone is making a systematic international effort to wipe it out, which is unlikely to happen as long as no one suspects it's there.
Ender will have no need of this money on his colony, and he'll do a better job if he's not aware that it's there. The first time he enters the nets after his subjective twenty-first birthday, the software will reveal itself to him along with the extent of his investments. Given the amount of time in travel alone, Ender will come of age with a noticeable fortune. Considerably more, I might add, than even the most optimistic projections of the value of Hegemony bonds,
But Ender's finances are not an emergency, and your children are.
A different team is tweaking the database your Ferreira sent us so it yields us more useful information. It involves a lot of additional research, not by raw data-seeks, but by individual operators trawling various medical, voting, tax, real estate, moving company, transportation and other databases, some of them not legally available. Instead of getting thousands of positives, of which none is likely to be useful, we are now getting hundreds of positives of which some might actually go somewhere.
Sorry it takes time, but once we get a decent positive, we have to check it out, often with landside personnel. And for obvious reasons, we don't have many of those to work with.
Meanwhile, I suggest you keep in mind that our deal depends on your making Peter Hegemon in fact as well as name before you go. You asked me what my standard of success would be. You can go when: Peter has firm control over more than 50% of the world's population, or Peter has sufficient military force that he is assured of victory whether or not any potential opponent is led by Battle School graduates.