"I'm trying to figure out how we can tell we aren't being kidnaped just like the others," she said dryly.
"You got it," said Graff. "They were all taken by a group of terrorist nuns, aided by fat old bureaucrats."
"He's joking," said Father, trying to soothe Mother's immediate wrath.
"I know he's joking. I just don't think it's funny. After all we've been through, and then we're supposed to go along without a word, without a question, just ... trusting."
"Sorry," said Graff. "But you were already trusting the Greek government back where you were. You've got to trust somebody, so why not us?"
"At least the Greek Army explained things to us and pretended we had a right to make some decisions," said Mother.
They didn't explain things to me and Nikolai, Bean wanted to say.
"Come, children, no bickering," said Sister Carlotta. "The plan is very simple. The Greek Army continues to guard that apartment building as if you were still inside it, taking meals in and doing laundry. This fools no one, probably, but it makes the Greek government feel like they're part of the program. In the meantime, four passengers answering your description but flying under assumed names are taken to Eros where they embark on the first colony ship and only then, when the ship is launched, is an announcement made that for their protection, the Delphiki family have opted for permanent emigration and a new life in a new world."
"And where are we really?" asked Father.
"I don't know," said Graff very simply.
"And neither do I," said Sister Carlotta.
Bean's family looked at them in disbelief.
"I guess that means we won't be staying in the sub," said Nikolai, "because then you'd absolutely know where we are."
"It's a double blind," said Bean. "They're splitting us up. I'll go one way, you'll go another."
"Absolutely not," said Father.
"We've had enough of a divided family," said Mother.
"It's the only way," said Bean. "I knew it already. I ... want it that way."
"You want to leave us?" said Mother.
"It's me they want to kill," said Bean.
"We don't know that!" said Mother.
"But we're pretty sure," said Bean. "If I'm not with you, then even if you're found, they'll probably leave you alone."
"And if we're divided," said Nikolai, "it changes the profile of what they're looking for. Not a mother and father and two boys. Now it's a mother and father and one boy. And a grandma and her grandchild." Nikolai grinned at Sister Carlotta.
"I was rather hoping to be taken for an aunt," she said.
"You talk as if you already know the plan!" said Mother.
"It was obvious," said Nikolai. "From the moment they told us the cover story in the bathroom. Why else would Colonel Graff bring Sister Carlotta?"
"It wasn't obvious to me," said Mother.
"Or to me," said Father. "But that's what happens when your sons are both brilliant military minds."
"How long?" Mother demanded. "When will it end? When do we get to have Bean back with us?"
"I don't know," said Graff.
"He can't know, Mother," said Bean. "Not until we know who did the kidnappings and why. When we know what the threat actually is, then we can judge when we've taken sufficient countermeasures to make it safe for us to come partway out of hiding."
Mother suddenly burst into tears. "And you want this, Julian?"
Bean put his arms around her. Not because he felt any personal need to do it, but because he knew she needed that gesture from him. Living with a family for a year had not given him the full complement of normal human emotional responses, but at least it had made him more aware of what they ought to be. And he did have one normal reaction -- he felt a little guilty that he could only fake what Mother needed, instead of having it come from the heart. But such gestures never came from the heart, for Bean. It was a language he had learned too late for it to come naturally to him. He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.
The truth was that even though he loved his family, he was eager to get to a place where he could get to work making the contacts he needed to get the information that would let him find his friends. Except for Ender, he was the only one from Ender's Jeesh that was outside and free. They needed him, and he'd wasted enough time already.
So he held his mother, and she clung to him, and she shed many tears. He also embraced his father, but more briefly; and he and Nikolai only punched each other's arms. All foreign gestures to Bean, but they knew he meant to mean them, and took them as if they were real.
The sub was fast. They weren't very long at sea before they reached a crowded port -- Salonika, Bean assumed, though it could have been any other cargo port on the Aegean. The sub never actually entered the harbor. Instead, it surfaced between two ships moving in a parallel track toward the harbor. Mother, Father, Nikolai, and Graff were transferred to a freighter along with two of the soldiers, who were now in civilian clothes, as if that could conceal the soldierly way they acted. Bean and Carlotta stayed behind. Neither group would know where the other was. There would be no effort to contact each other. That had been another hard realization for Mother. "Why can't we write?"
"Nothing is easier to track than email," said Father. "Even if we use disguised online identities, if someone finds us, and we're writing regularly to Julian, then they'll see the pattern and track him down."
Mother understood it then. With her head, if not her heart.
Down inside the sub, Bean and Sister Carlotta sat down at a tiny table in the mess.
"Well?" said Bean.
"Well," said Sister Carlotta.
"Where are we going?" asked Bean.
"I have no idea," said Sister Carlotta. "They'll transfer us to another ship at another port, and we'll get off, and I have these false identities that we're supposed to use, but I really have no idea where we should go from there."
"We have to keep moving. No more than a few weeks in any one place," said Bean. "And I have to get on the nets with new identities every time we move, so no one can track the pattern."
"Do you seriously think someone will catalogue all the email in the entire world and follow up on all the ones that move around?" asked Sister Carlotta.
"Yes," said Bean. "They probably already do, so it's just a matter of running a search."
"But that's billions of emails a day."
"That's why it takes so many clerks to check all the email addresses on the file cards in the central switchboard," said Bean. He grinned at Sister Carlotta.
She did not grin back. "You really are a snotty and disrespectful little boy," she said.
"You're really leaving it up to me to decide where we go?"
"Not at all. I'm merely waiting to make a decision until we both agree."
"Oh, now, that's a cheap excuse to stay down here in this sub with all these great-looking men."
"Your level of banter has become even more crude than it was when you lived on the streets of Rotterdam," she said, coolly analytical.
"It's the war," said Bean. "It ... it changes a man."
She couldn't keep a straight face any longer. Even though her laugh was only a single bark, and her smile lasted only a moment longer, it was enough. She still liked him. And he, to his surprise, still liked her, even though it had been years since he lived with her while she educated him to a level where Battle School would take him. He was surprised because, at the time he lived with her, he had never let himself realize that he liked her. After Poke's death, he hadn't been willing to admit to himself that he liked anybody. But now he knew the truth. He liked Sister Carlotta just fine.