Damn those short-sighted Israelis for training the Arab air forces to be among the most formidable in the world.
Why was Bean so confident?
Was it only because he knew that he'd soon leave Earth and wouldn't have to be here to face the consequences?
That was unfair. Bean had said he'd stay until Peter was Hegemon in fact as well as name. Bean did not break his word.
What if they never find a cure? What if we sail on through space forever? What if Bean dies out there with me and the babies?
She heard footsteps behind her. She assumed it would be Bean, but it was her mother.
"Awake without the babies waking you?"
Petra smiled. "I have plenty to keep me from sleeping."
"But you need your sleep."
"Eventually, my body takes it whether I like it or not."
Mother looked out over the city. "Did you miss us?"
She knew her mother wanted her to say, every day. But the truth would have to do. "When I have time to think about anything at all, yes. But it's not that I miss you. It's that... I'm glad you're in my life. Glad you're in this world." She turned to face her mother. "I'm not a little girl anymore. I know I'm still very young and I'm sure I don't know anything yet, but I'm part of the cycle of life now. I'm no longer the youngest generation. So I don't cling to my parents as I once would have liked to. I missed a lot up there in Battle School. Children need families."
"And," said Mother sadly, "they make families out of whatever they have at hand."
"That will never happen to my children," said Petra. "The world isn't being invaded by aliens. I can stay with them."
Then she remembered that some people would claim that some of her children were the alien invasion.
She couldn't think that way.
"You carry so much weight in your heart," said Mother, stroking her hair.
"Not as much as Bean. Far less than Peter."
"Is this Peter Wiggin a good man?"
Petra shrugged. "Are great men ever really good? I know they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them, whatever they were to start with. It's like war—does any war ever settle anything? But we can't judge that way. The test of a war isn't whether it solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting it? And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men."
"If Peter Wiggin is great."
"Mother, he was Locke, remember? He stopped a war. Already he was great before I came home from Battle School. And he was still in his teens. Younger than I am now."
"Then I asked the wrong question," said Mother. "Is a world that he rules over going to be a good place to live?"
Petra shrugged again. "I believe he means it to be. I haven't seen him being vindictive. Or corrupt. He's making sure that any nation that joins the FPE does it through the vote of the people, so nothing is being forced on them. That's promising, isn't it?"
"Armenia spent so many centuries yearning to have our own nation. Now we have it, but it seems the price of keeping it is to give it up."
"Armenia will still be Armenia, Mother."
"No, it won't," she said. "If Peter Wiggin wins everything he's trying to win, then Armenia will be ... Kansas."
"Hardly!"
"We'll all speak Common and if you go from Yerevan to Rostov or Ankara or Sofia, you won't even know you've gone anywhere."
"We all speak Common now. And there'll never be a time you can't tell Ankara from Yerevan."
"You're so sure."
"I'm sure of a lot of things. And about half the time, I'm right." She grinned at her mother, but her mother's return smile wasn't real.
"How did you do it?" asked Petra. "How did you give up your child?"
"You weren't 'given up,' " said Mother. "You were taken. Most of the time I managed to believe it was all for a good cause. The other times I cried. It wasn't death because you were still alive. I was proud of you. I missed you. You were good company almost from your first word. But so ambitious!"
Petra smiled a little at that.
"You're married now," said Mother. "Ambition for yourself is over. It's now ambition for your children."
"I just want them to be happy."
"That is something you can't do for them. So don't set that as your goal."
"I don't have a goal, Mother."
"That's nice. Then your heart will never break."
Mother looked at her with a deadpan expression.
Petra laughed a little. "You know, when I've been away for a while, I forget that you know everything."
Mother smiled. "Petra, I can't save you from anything. But I want to. I would if I could. Does that help? To know that somebody wants you to be happy?"
"More than you know, Mother."
She nodded. Tears slipped down her cheeks. "Going off into space. It feels like closing yourself in your own coffin. I know! But that's how it feels to me. I just know that I'm going to lose you, as sure as death. You know it too. That's why you're out here saying good-bye to Yerevan?"
"To Earth, Mother. Yerevan's the least of it."
"Well, Yerevan won't miss you. Cities never do. They go on and we don't make any difference to them at all. That's what I hate about cities."
And that's true of the human race, too, thought Petra. "I think it's a good thing, that life goes on. Like water in a pail. Take some out, the rest fills in."
"When it's my child that's gone, nothing fills in," said Mother.
Petra knew that Mother was referring to the years that she spent without Petra, but what flashed into Petra's mind was the six babies they still hadn't found. The two ideas put together made the loss of those babies—if they even existed—too painful to contain. Petra began to cry. She hated crying.
Her mother put her arms around her. "I'm sorry, Pet," she said. "I wasn't even thinking. I was missing one child, and you have so many and you don't even know whether they're alive or dead."
"But they aren't even real to me," said Petra. "I don't know why I'm crying. I've never even met them."
"We're hungry for our children," said Mother. "We need to take care of them, once we bring them into existence."
"I didn't even get to do that," said Petra. "Other women got to bear all but the one. And I'm going to lose him." And suddenly her life felt so terrible it could not be borne. She sobbed as her mother held her.
"Oh, my poor girl," her mother kept murmuring. "Your life breaks my heart."
"How can I complain like this?" said Petra, her voice high with crying. "I've been part of some of the greatest events in history."
"When your babies need you, history doesn't bring much comfort."
And as if on cue, there was a faint sound of a baby crying inside the flat. Mother made as if to go, but Petra stopped her. "Bean will get her." She used the hem of her shirt to dab at her eyes.
"You can tell from the crying which baby it is?"
"Couldn't you?"
"I never had two infants at the same time, let alone three. There aren't many multiple births in our family."
"Well, I've found the perfect way to have nonuplets. Get eight other women to help." She managed a feeble laugh at her own black humor.
The baby cried again.
"It's definitely Bella, she's always more insistent. Bean will change her, and then he'll bring her to me."